Both men say a tragedy that befell their family when they were very young had a big influence on who they have become. When Randy was eight years old, he was taking laundry off the clothes line for their mother when he heard suspicious sounds coming from the swimming pool. He went to investigate and found their three-year-old brother Jay laying face down and his little friend Elaine laying on her back struggling to get out of the water.
He waded into the mucky water and grabbed both children. He struggled to scale the slippery, slimy incline from the deep end and couldn’t get them out, he started screaming for help. Jay couldn’t be saved.
“I’ve never forgotten what it’s like to cry out for help and help not coming,” the judge said, noting it took him 21 years to deal with the repressed memory. “But it’s one of the reasons I’ve become active in things like drug courts and the alcohol and drug docket that I’m doing now. Because I’ve seen that and heard that from families.”
The brothers have a lot of funny stories of their childhood as well, like the time, Randy was in first grade and T.C. in fourth, when the school bus dropped them off at their Fairfield home only to find the movers had already visited their house and everything was gone.
“We came home from school one day and there was a picture window right there on the porch as you go in, and the door was locked and it was empty,” T.C. said. “The first thing that came to my mind was Rodney Dangerfield saying my parents moved and left no forwarding address. So we go out by the road assuming well, I guess they’ll come and get us, and we’re just sitting on our lunch boxes looking from side to side.”
The brothers don’t consider this a traumatic event, they love to tell the story. Their mom Edna said it wasn’t long before she collected her boys, and “it wasn’t on purpose.”
Edna Rogers said she couldn’t be more proud of her boys for their public service, and she said they are wonderful fathers — T.C. has two sons and Randy has two daughters and a son — to her grandchildren.
“They’ve just always been very obedient children, and their daddy was strict,” she said. “But his daddy was strict with him, so that’s all they knew.”
The brothers turned their heads in unison describing how they had to gasp for clean air while dutifully scrubbing the pool for their father, with muriatic acid and chlorine. Both find the recollection hysterical.
“Forget about OSHA, we could have gotten brain damage,” T.C. said and Randy added “Maybe we did, he paid us 50 cents an hour though.”
But the best story by far was when their dad Clayton, who died five years ago, used them as ballast to clear a property. Again the brothers find their past quite comical.
“My dad is on this tractor pulling a chain link fence to smooth the dirt down so they could seed and needed some ballast to hold the chain down,” T.C. recalled. “So he decided to put Randy and I on concrete blocks sitting on the chain link. It was a dry day and there’s dirt, we’re just covered in dirt, and at one point he was going too fast and Randy fell off. He turned around and said ‘where’s your brother?’ Back there.”
The fact that they were expected to work on chores from eight to noon on Saturday mornings — while their friends played in their pool — is part of the reason they’re hard work ethic is so ingrained, and they are grateful. The judge has been held out as “a beacon” in the state, from the Ohio Supreme Court justices on down, for everything from his guardianship program to legal interpretation that is helping parents get treatment for their opiate addicted children. He never dreamed his life would travel down this path, he always expected he would enter the federal legal system.
“For 20 years I’ve developed a therapeutic function of the probate court which I believe is a historic function and it fits within my skill set,” he said. “I never thought it would be that way. I’m a graduate of the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, the top business school in the country. I never would have thought that I would have gotten involved in drug courts and guardianship’s and drug and alcohol cases, but it is something I’ve put my heart into it, that’s why I do it.”
They said they were raised to work hard and public service is in their blood, on both sides of the family. Their uncle Clarence “Babe” Rogers was a state committeeman and eventually became a United States attorney general. They said he wasn’t a “high-roller, he was a servant.”
With his business and finance background, T.C. said he wanted to lend his expertise to the county, first on the task force that was formed to pull the county back from the financial abyss and then onto commissioner. He went up against Republican Party heavy hitters Chuck Furmon and Courtney Combs and won, by a hair — a vote recount had him atop Combs by just 11 votes — and in the general he won by a landslide 42,526 votes.
Both the brothers and their mom said public service was strong on her side of the family as well.
“My family was very community minded, we were very poor but everything that was free we were a part of,” she said. “The school and the church and for my dad it was the American Legion. From the very beginning, for them (her sons) it showed up when they were very young.”
Commissioner Don Dixon, who has worked with both men for a very long time, likened the brothers to Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in TV show from the ’70s or Saturday Night Live, because their friendly sibling rivalry is ever-present. But in seriousness, he said sang their praises.
“They’ve earned everything they’ve got and they are just home-grown, honest to goodness good people,” he said. “They’re always there when somebody needs something. They’re never wanting what’s best for them, they’re wanting what’s best for the people around them. I’ve known them a long time and as public servants go, you won’t find anyone better in ethics and attitude than those guys.”
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