In Search of a Boy Named Chester

A gift to my father for his 100th birthday

BY FORD S. WORTHY

Shortly after the end of World War II, a 21-year-old Navy officer – just back after a year at war in the Pacific – was eager to return to his small hometown in eastern North Carolina.

At the San Francisco airport, a mother travelling to Omaha offered him her seat – a patriotic gesture of gratitude, he believed. There was one condition: the sailor would need to accompany her 10-year-old son and see him safely to his grandmother in Omaha.

The boy’s name was Chester. The sailor never forgot him.

Nearly 80 years later, the sailor’s son sets out to give his father a special 100th birthday gift: to discover what became of that precocious boy. Part historical detective tale, part exploration of the ties that bind a father and son, In Search of a Boy Named Chester is a story about memory, family, and how even the most fleeting encounters can reveal who we were and who we may become.

About the Project

  • "Now, the next leg of my trip home was in two hours. I had two hours to figure out what to do with Chester.

    I can still remember debating in my mind, What should I do? Should I leave the boy with a policeman? Should I leave him with the airline? Should I take him with me? If I had had a cell phone I would have called my own mother and asked her what to do. The one thing I knew for certain was that when my plane took off, I was going to be on it. I was going to leave when that plane took off. The question was: would Chester be on it with me?”

  • After posting the original story, I had a hunch: perhaps there might be clues buried deep within a voluminous trove of letters between my father and his parents and friends – correspondence sent and received between 1941 and 1946.

    Dad kept all the letters he received during these years, and his mother and father kept his letters to them; in all, there are more than 600 letters, or about one letter for every three days over a five-year period. As in so many other ways, the world back then was a very different place when it came to communicating with one another.

  • Every Monday night I have dinner with my father at his home in Raleigh.

    Mondays are my nights and my three sisters each have their nights. When my father tells others about his dinner schedule, he says he wishes he had had three more children to cover the full week. I see him at other times, of course, but over the past few years these five or six hours have become more special than I could ever have imagined. It’s a time for me to tell him not only about what’s going on in my life, but how I’m feeling about what’s going on. It’s a time for him to tell me the same about whatever’s on his mind. No interruptions, no distractions. Just him and me, one on one – together at a time in our lives when neither of us is rushed; we can savor even the smallest moments. It’s frequently a time for him to tell – or re-tell – stories about his life. Sometimes these are stories that he hopes will be remembered, but mainly he tells his stories simply because he enjoys telling them. On a recent Monday night, he told me a story that revealed how I fit into the story about Chester.

  • Whimsically, but meaningfully, my father had traced over the photo of the ship, adding a smokestack, a signal bridge, and a chain locker to transform the silhouette of that ship into his own, the USS Lackawanna.

    It gives me goosebumps to imagine Dad’s oiler entering San Francisco Bay, with its crew of more than 200 singing “San Francisco, open your golden gate” and the Homeward Bound pennant – one white star against a blue field for every officer, and a foot-long red-and-white stripe for every enlisted man – fluttering above them. The card was postmarked the very next day: San Francisco, California, 1130 AM, October 25, 1945. There would be no forgetting that day or date.

  • My father has always had an exceptional memory – especially the type that neuroscientists call “episodic” memory, which is defined as “the collection of past personal experiences that occurred at particular times and places.”

    At 99 years and 11 months, Dad’s so-called “semantic” memory – the “network of associated facts and concepts that make up our general knowledge of the world” is pretty good, too. But his ability to accurately recall particular experiences that he has lived through is off the charts. I’m biased, but I think he may be a “superager,” a term for a tiny slice of the elderly population whose memory is equal to or better than people 30 years younger.

  • By my calculation, the probability that any person would check all the right boxes was less than one out of 140 million, the population of the U.S. in 1945.

    ChatGPT, assessing the same odds, told me that my quest was like picking up a specific grain of sand from an entire beach – a probability of around 0.00000073%.