About the Author
Charles S. Weinblatt, who retired in 2004 at the age of 51 from a rewarding career as a university administrator because of a spinal disability, is a prolific book reviewer for The New York Journal of Books, the author of several books, and a former contributing journalist for The Examiner. Weinblatt’s biography appears in the Marquis Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in American Education. In January 2021, Weinblatt was selected by the Marquis Board to receive the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.
Weinblatt joined the University of Toledo in 1987 as Director of Computer Learning Centers. He became a program manager in the Human Resource Development Center and a Program Coordinator in the Division of Continuing Education. Weinblatt created the Division of Organization Development in 1995, providing management consulting, customized training, and organizational and employee assessments. He served as director until his retirement. Under his leadership, this division improved the performance of dozens of organizations throughout the United States and Canada while generating significant revenue for the University of Toledo.
Earlier in his career, Weinblatt counseled in psychotherapy, education, training, and vocational rehabilitation, serving thousands of individuals. He also managed a private employment consulting career for 20 years, providing job seeking skills training and counseling for many organizations and innumerable individuals.
Weinblatt has been a frequent television news guest as an expert on economic, management, and labor force issues, appearing more than 40 times on Toledo television news stations. The rich diversity of his career enables Weinblatt to produce books and novels that draw upon a wide range of sources and contain unforgettable, well-developed characters. Weinblatt continues to write novels, short stories, and articles in retirement. He lives with his wife in Ohio.
Books by Charles S. Weinblatt include:
Jacob’s Courage: A Holocaust Love Story – Texas Tech University 2015, Amsterdam Publishers 2023
Lost & Found: An Alien Adventure – Gen Z Publishers 2023
Runaway Ducks – Smashwords – Amazon 2011
Book Marketing 101 – Smashwords – Amazon 2009
Job Seeking Skills for Students – Kendall-Hunt Publishers – 1985 (out of print)
Publishing and Marketing 
Ben Weldons original Nutcorn is still being made by the same family that made it for Ben, though under a slightly different name. It is still sold to a few die hard customers, mainly at Christmas time, some of whom have been with us for generations.
if I had an address for you I would send you a free tin. I would also like to know details of the history of Nutcorn if you know them. Bens’ original partner is still alive but he does not respond to letters and even his sons never get to talk to him.
Mike Flynn
Hi Mike. Thanks for writing. I wish that could provide some detail over the early days of Nutcorn. Living here in Ohio all of my life has deprived me somewhat of being closer with Uncle Ben. That being said, I was his favorite nephew. I have his collection of Hollywood memorabilia. And although he came to Toledo once or twice a year and my parents and I went to LA every few years, the origins of Nutcorn are beyond obscure. I was only told that Uncle Ben had pretty much run his course as a Hollywood gangster and needed some steady income. His “friend” had a terrific candy recipe and Uncle Ben had some cash to start a business. You know the rest.
God that stuff was way too good! Ten times better than popcorn, 100 times better than peanuts and 1,000 times better than caramel corn, Nutcorn was incredible. Thankfully, I was a very skinny adolescent when I gorged myself on the incredible tin can from heaven.
If you discover the name and/or address of the company now producing Nutcorn, I would be most appreciative if you could let me know. I never thought I could taste that again. Can you give me any information about Uncle Ben’s partner?
Thanks again. I wish that could be more helpful. It fun to correspond with someone who remembers Nutcorn and who recalls the semi-famous Hollywood gangster, Ben Welden.
Best,
Chuck
Hi Mike. I know it’s been a long time, but I was wondering if you ever discovered where Nutcorn is being sold. Do you know? I dearly loved my Uncle Ben and I was proud of his Hollywood accomplishments. But… I must admit that I also liked Nutcorn. Maybe too much. At any rate, please let me know if you have discovered its current location.
Best,
Chuck
Hi Mike. Thought I’d touch base once more. I hope that you are well. Can you tell me any more about Nutcorn, like who is producing it now, where it can be ordered or the family still producing iSomehow, the topic arose in a recent conversation with members of my family here in Ohio. We all agreed that it was magnificent and likely filled with more calories than we should consume in a week.
Chuck
Hello, Mr. Weinblatt,
Are you interested in publishing your books in Chinese?
Allen
Thanks for your interest. In terms of translation rights, I leave such subjects to my agent and publishers. Why do you ask?
The author (Cheryl) only asked that I add two links to the post, not “remove it.” She seems satisfied. You are free to copy and post anything from this site, including my own personal interviews with authors, agents and publishers.
Hi Charles!
My name is Jason and I run a website called The Bogie Film Blog at bogiefilmblog.wordpress.com. I’m blogging through all of Bogart’s films, and as I’ve been doing so, I’ve begun to notice multiple great character actors who appear over and over again. One of the first I found was your Uncle, Ben Welden! (If I’ve got the wrong Charles Weinblatt, feel free to disregard the rest of this message!)
I love Ben’s work just based on the Bogart films alone, although I now realize I’ve seen him elsewhere. I found the article you wrote at jimnolt.com, and LOVED getting to read about some of his life and career.
I’m currently working on a new page for my blog called The Usual Suspects where I highlight different character actors that Bogart worked with – men and women who perhaps don’t get recognized for their work as much – and I’d really like to do a post on your uncle. He and Joe Sawyer were really the inspirations for the new posts on my blog.
Would it be possible to use some of the info from your article at jimnolt.com? What I do is talk a little bit about the actor, and then break down their roles with Bogart, film by film. From what I can tell, it looks like your uncle Ben worked with Bogart five times – Marked Woman, Kid Galahad, The Roaring Twenties, All Through the Night, and The Big Sleep. If there were more that I missed, please let me know! Any chance he had any good Bogart stories to tell? Their chemistry together was fantastic!
I hope this email finds you well! Thanks so much for your post about your uncle! He has a lot of fans who loved his work!
Jason
Thanks for the article about my “Hollywood” uncle, Ben Welden. Your web site on “Bogie” is terrific. Keep up the great work!
Chuck
Dear Mr. Weinblatt,
I write in the hope of interesting you in reviewing my book, “Rasputin and The Jews: A Reversal of History”. As summarized on Amazon, “This book is a well-documented account of Rasputin as a healer, equal rights activist and man of God, and why he was so vilified by the aristocracy that their vicious rumors became accepted as history. For nearly a century, Grigory Rasputin, spiritual advisor to Russia’s last Tsar and Tsarina, has been unjustly maligned simply because history is written by the politically powerful and not by the common man. A wealth of evidence shows that Rasputin was discredited by a fanatically anti-Semitic Russian society, for advocating equal rights for the severely oppressed Jewish population, as well as for promoting peace in a pro-war era. Testimony by his friends and enemies, from all social strata, provides a picture of a spiritual man who hated bigotry, inequity and violence. The author is the great-great niece of Aron Simanovitch, Rasputin’s Jewish secretary.”
I’ve spent 12 years of substantiating research on the assertion that Rasputin was poorly depicted because of his humanitarian efforts. The book also includes chapters on The Pale of Settlement and the laws restricting the lives of Russian Jews.
The link to my Amazon page shows a number of good reviews, as well as those in The Baltimore Jewish Times, The Jewish Literary Review, The Los Angeles Jewish Journal and the Jewish Russian Telegraph. The book is also included in the libraries of The Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Thank you for your time.
Most Sincerely,
Delin Colón
“Rasputin and The Jews: A Reversal of History”
Hi Delin. Thanks for writing. I replied to you by e-mail, as well as posting it here.
Your book, Rasputin and The Jews: A Reversal of History sounds very interesting. I would be happy to review it. However, please understand that I review books for The New York Journal of Books and I’m currently stacked up. I could probably get to your book in about two months. If that time frame is OK, please either mail me a review copy (postal address is in the e-mail), or send it to me as an e-book. I could also accept a PDF file or a Word document, assuming those files have been edited as appears in the final print version.
Thanks again for contacting me. I look forward to reading your book. Good luck with it.
Best,
Chuck
Hello, Mr. Weinblatt,
I hope this note finds you and yours hale and hearty. I am writing again to seek permission to publish one of your essays in TheBluegrassSpecial.com. In this case, it’s “Why We Exist,” for our upcoming June issue.
This past week I lost a friend, who happened to have affected many lives in a positive way. If you watch sports at all you may have heard of his passing–Wayman Tisdale, the former pro basketball star, Olympic gold medalist, three-time All-American at my alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, and a superb jazz bassist with a dozen albums to his credit. I profiled him in our July 2008 issue on the occasion of the release of his latest album, but we are linked both by music, basketball and a shared hometown, Tulsa, where we were both high school basketball stars, both went on to play at OU (alas, my collegiate career ended halfway through my freshman season, when I came down with tendinitis in both knees, but Wayman more than made up for his fellow Tulsan’s truncated service to the team) and both gravitated to music early, he as a musician, yours truly as a journalist/author. I don’t want to make his obituary in the next issue too personal, because I’m not sure that would serve our readers, but in contemplating Wayman’s fruitful life I kept returning to the kind of questions you pose in “Why We Exist.” I’ve listed for you many of Wayman’s professional achievements, but the real story of Wayman Tisdale is his life-affirming presence in the lives of everyone whose path he crossed, his generosity, his warmth, his unswerving moral center and the values he stood for and embodied. He more than fulfills the mandates of your final paragraph in “Why We Exist.” So it was in reading your essay that I found the key to understanding the loss of my friend and to answering the larger questions left by the snuffing out of a young life. I would like to share this with our readers, and I will again provide a link to your website and to Amazon for the purchase of “Jacob’s Courage.” I’ve been remiss in not adding your site to our Links page, too, but I will do that with this issue.
I look forward to your response and thank you again for your comforting words in a dark hour.
Best regards,
David McGee
Dear Mr. Weinblatt,
I would like permission to reprint your essay, “The Meaning of Passover,” in the April issue of TheBluegrassSpecial.com. This may, on the surface, sound like an odd place for your writing to appear, but we have a section called The Gospel Set that is designed to explore matters of faith and belief as expressed in music. In April, the month of Easter, we are publishing an excerpt from one of our Contributing Editor’s books, “Holiday and Holy Nights: Celebrating Twelve Seasonal Festival Of the Christian Year,” specifically about the Easter celebration in the Christian world (more historical in nature, this passage), and I found in your essay exactly what I was looking for to honor the month of Passover as well–something philosophical in nature that connects the occasion to a greater purpose, as you so eloquently summarize in your final paragraph. In this case, it was even more than I had expected, in that you also connect both Easter and Passover in the greater purpose of your appeal.
However, time is of the essence: we launch the April issue tomorrow night. Assuming you receive this in time, please let me know if you will permit this reprint. If I don’t hear from you, I will publish it, and hope for the best. If you object, well, this being Internet publishing, we can take it down immediately. But I think you’ll see that in the context of our content, it will be treated with dignity. Further, I’ll provide a link to your book, Jacob’s Courage: A Holocaust Love Story, so that our readers can go to Amazon and purchase it if they’re so inspired. I will also provide a link to your website.
Thank you for your consideration in this matter. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
David McGee
Founder/Publisher/Editor
TheBluegrassSpecial.com
P.S. Here’s a link to a story we did in The Gospel Set this past July, concerning Jeremiah Lockwood and the Sway Machinery. A gifted young man, Jeremiah is the grandson of a noted early 20th Century rabbi in New York, and in his musical pursuits with the Sway Machinery, he is fusing cantorial music to a bruising rock ‘n’ roll beat, and good things are happening for him. Here’s a link; you might find this interesting.
http://thebluegrassspecial.com/archive/june08/gospelsetjune08.php
Permission granted. Please drop me a line showing when and where it will appear at csw1@sev.org.
Chuck