Charles Larrowe was a faculty member in the Department from 1956 until his retirement in 1989. Larrowe was born in Portland, Oregon in 1916. After high school during the Great Depression, he worked at the Tacoma Shipyard from 1934 to 1942. Having adopted a view as a student pacifist but wanting to aid the effort during World War II, Larrowe joined the American Field Service and served as an ambulance driver in North Africa in 1942-43. That experience changed his perspective and thus subsequently he joined the U.S. Army and served from 1943-1945 in the 10th Army in the Pacific Theater, where he received the Silver Star and Purple Heart with Oak Leaf clusters.
After the war, Larrowe received a B.A. from the University of Washington in 1946 and a M.A. in 1947. After working as instructor at Washington for several years, he moved to graduate school at Yale University and received his Ph.D. in 1952. He then was Associate Professor at the University of Utah from 1952-1956 before joining MSU in 1956, where he had a joint appointment in the Labor and Industrial Relations Center and the Department of Economics, eventually transferring fully to Economics.
Charles Patrick Larrowe got the nickname “Lash” from the real-life Lash LaRue, an actor who became known as a cowboy hero in a series of westerns. The character seemed to fit Larrowe.
Larrowe’s professional interest concerned labor markets, and especially the behavior and effect of labor unions, which derived from his early work on the docks in Washington. Two projects led to major books, including Shape-Up and Hiring Hall: A Comparison of Hiring Methods on the New York and Seattle Waterfronts (University of California Press, 1955, reprinted by Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1976) and Harry Bridges: the Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States (New York, Lawrence Hill and Company, 1973).
With his background and interest in worker representation, it was fitting that the MSU President appointed Larrowe as Faculty Grievance Officer, a position he served from 1976–1980.
From 1971-1989, Larrowe wrote a column in the State News. Because MSU had a rule that one had to be a student to write in the State News, Larrowe enrolled for a typing class. Larrowe used the column for commentary on political and campus events and criticism of the MSU administration. Written in a satiric and ironic manner using a casual language style, he was often misunderstood, as Larrowe’s character in the column was expressing the opposite viewpoint from his own personal viewpoint. A collection of his columns was published in the book Lashing Out (19XX).
Larrowe lived in East Lansing and died in 2006.