Back in 1945, Matheny was born near the current Moraine Payne Recreation Center. Unlike his siblings, he wasn’t born at a hospital.
“I would assume — I never had the whole story of everything — my Dad worked at Inland and he was at work,” Herb said.
“Mom was probably alone.”
A doctor was called and assisted with the birth.
Everything’s pretty usual up to this point. But then the doctor died, and the doctor had never recorded Matheny’s birth certificate.
In fact, Matheny’s not sure about the doctor himself. “I always heard that he was a veterinarian. They said he was a horse doctor, a quack,” Matheny said.
In the early years, the lack of a birth certificate didn’t matter.
Matheny and Moraine go hand in hand. He left only briefly in 1959, when flood waters drove him to Dayton.
The house? “It burnt down a few years back,” he said. His uncle bought the lot, razed the burnt home and then a cousin built another house on the site.
In 1962, his parents divorced and the family went their separate ways. All the while, Matheny kept thinking about his missing birth certificate.
Once, while working at General Motors, fellow employees went on a cruise. “I knew I was going to need a visa, and I didn’t have a birth certificate,” he said.
He didn’t go on the cruise. “I didn’t tell them the reason.”
Back when he was 18 and signed up for the draft, a birth certificate wasn’t required. Getting a job didn’t require one, either. But the document is necessary when applying for retirement.
In 1992, his mother died and his father died the following year. “I was going to do it before he died, but I never got down there (to the court),” he said.
Now what?
“I checked with Columbus and all the places you check for a birth certificate,” he said. None of them had any record of his birth. “So I went down to the probate court and I had to get somebody that had to know me for 10 years or more,” he said. His sister-in-law fit the bill.
In 1994, Matheny finally had proof of his birth. He said he keeps the document safely tucked away in a fire-safe box.
Herb and his wife, Jean, a former mayor of Moraine, have three children. Roger Matheny, another former Moraine mayor, is his cousin. “I never had an interest (in politics),” Herb said.
Those years at GM, first as a punch press operator and later in the warehouse, are behind him. He retired — with birth certificate duly presented — in 2006.
Contact this writer at (937) 696-2080 or williamgschmidt@ frontier.com.