A Father, a Son, and a Gift from the Past

I was looking for a unique gift. 

More like a project, really—something my 99-year-old father and I could plunge into with joy and curiosity, just as we had undertaken other activities in recent years. A project that would engage us, but mostly amuse us. However, this one needed to rise above the others, as it would be my gift to him for his 100th birthday, which was in three months.

That was when Dad relayed a story he had never told me before, a story about his brief encounter, in November 1945, with a precocious young boy whose familiarity with ailerons and other parts of an airplane’s anatomy was, to my father, a Navy ensign just back from the Pacific, astounding. 

My father met the boy, whose name was Chester, after the boy’s mother placed him in my father’s care at the San Francisco airport for a flight to Omaha, Nebraska. For my dad, it was the first leg of a home leave to eastern North Carolina. My father had celebrated his 21st birthday seven weeks earlier in Tokyo Bay, shortly after Japan’s surrender, and Dad hadn’t seen his parents and girlfriend in nearly a year. But there were no seats available on the Omaha flight. 

In my father’s telling, Chester’s mother gave Dad her seat to thank him for his service. As Dad remembered, her gesture was one of patriotic appreciation. My father, dapperly outfitted in his Navy dress uniform but a complete stranger to Chester and his mother, told me they were scarcely in the air before Chester began calling him “Daddy.” When they landed just before midnight in Omaha, no one was there to claim the boy.

I had heard Dad’s stories before—some many times over, including the war stories he had regaled me and my sisters with over the years. But I had never heard this one. 

Dad told me he had agonized over what to do with the boy. Turn him over to the airline, to the police? But he had given his word. He had promised the boy’s mother he would be responsible for delivering Chester safely to his grandmother.

In the wee hours of the morning, just as my father, with Chester in tow, was boarding a military plane bound eastward, the boy’s grandmother finally showed up. They exchanged brief goodbyes, and my father never heard from Chester or his mother again. 

For the next 79 years, my father told me, he often wondered what had become of the boy named Chester.

That’s how my gift began. 

When Dad finished telling me this story, just a few days before Father’s Day in June 2024, I vowed that, somehow, I was going to track down that boy and learn his entire life story. 

Stern But Supportive

I was born in 1956, the third Ford Stedman Worthy in the family line. By the time I came along, my father, Ford S. Worthy Jr., had moved on from a failed partnership in the construction business with his brother-in-law and an unfruitful stint with a local car dealer in his hometown, Washington, North Carolina, and was just getting started on what turned out to be a long and prosperous career as a commercial real estate broker, appraiser, and developer in Raleigh. I was the first of four children—the only boy, but the second little boy, I realized while searching for Chester, to call him “Daddy.”

Dad was a stern disciplinarian of a father—loving, though the word “love” was not his style. He was fiercely supportive, but with a vision for my future frequently at odds with my own aspirations. Throughout my late teens, I dreamed of getting out of Raleigh and becoming my own Ford. I knew my future byline as a journalist would not include the Roman numeral III.

The time I spent with my father in my 20s and through my mid-30s was shoehorned into infrequent visits home, from postings in New York, Chicago, and Hong Kong, where I was preoccupied with building a writing career for Fortune magazine. 

By my early 40s, I had moved back to North Carolina after becoming a lawyer and then reinventing myself again as a venture capital investor in biotech startups. I was living in Chapel Hill, much closer, geographically, to my parents, but my life still felt all-consumed: by my young family, my church, and the demands of my new job, which required regular travel to San Diego, San Francisco, and other hotbeds of the biotech industry. 

Once or twice a year, my father and I would spend uninterrupted weekends on hunting trips or walking property he owned in eastern North Carolina, but the overlap in our lives occurred mainly at busy family gatherings—holidays, birthdays, graduations—where the competition for his attention eventually included nine grandchildren.

We were close, but in the way you can be close to someone without spending much time with them. Not until my mother began showing signs of decline, when she was in her late 80s and Dad was in his early 90s, did I stop taking our time together for granted.

By the time my mother died in 2021, I was 65; my wife had retired; our son and daughter were out on their own; and my business responsibilities were tapering down. In my book In Search of a Boy Named Chester, which was self-published last year, here’s how I described the routine Dad and I developed during his final years: 

Every Monday night I have dinner with my father at his home in Raleigh, North Carolina. Monday is my night, 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 usually show up around 4:30 or 5, prepare a simple dinner for the two of us, and then, around 10 or often later, head back to my home 30 miles away. 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 retell—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.

A License to Explore

My first instinct was to see if the “crowd” could help me find Chester. Though I was a Facebook novice, I posted Dad’s story with an appeal for help. To my complete surprise, leads started coming in from all over. At the same time, I began digging through my father’s meticulous files—he was a well-organized pack rat who wrote everything down—where I unearthed additional clues.

Throughout the summer, I spent evenings and most weekends sifting through census data, newspaper archives, military records, studies on divorce and child-bearing rates, Social Security Administration statistics on the number of Chesters born in the mid-1930s, airline policies on travel by unaccompanied minors, professional directories—anything that might help situate a particular boy and his mother in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time. 

I sounded out journalists, prosecutors, and others experienced in finding people. I researched Americans’ tendency in that era to live in the same state of their birth. I even consulted linguistics experts to help me unpack the awkward syntax of a contemporaneous letter my father had written describing his encounter with Chester, to discern what it implied about relationships, about familiarity, about who knew whom.

The project became an invitation to ask my father questions and, also, a license to explore his vast archive of correspondence—letters and memos that further opened windows into his inner life. For instance, just seven days after Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender, my father sent long, uncensored letters home. He wrote about staring transfixed, boy-like, at the phosphorescent waters off the Japanese coast while he manned the overnight watch on his ship as Mount Fuji came into first view on a clear September night.

My father wanted to know the odds that a random person in 1945 would satisfy each of the clues I was working with: a boy named Chester, about 10 years old; a mother, around 30 and divorced; a maternal grandmother who lived in Nebraska or at least within a plausible distance from the Omaha airport. I also knew my father’s trip with Chester had begun at the San Francisco airport between late October and early December 1945 and had ended in Omaha eight or nine hours later, following a United Airlines flight. Statistically speaking, I concluded, only one person out of the entire U.S. population at that time—a single person out of 140 million people—might check all those boxes.

Obsessed With Chester

When I gathered enough new material to fill a decent-sized post, I would write it up and read it to Dad during our Monday visits. Hearing the story told back to him, he would often make corrections and sometimes remember new details. It was, through and through, a collaboration.

How had I become so obsessed? Why did I want so badly to tell the story behind what, on the surface, was such a mundane, inconsequential moment? 

In the beginning, I was merely entertaining my father, and he me. It was nothing more than a fun, summertime amusement: a detective tale.

My interaction with the daughter of one of the first Chesters whom I genuinely thought, for a day or two, just might be my father’s Chester, changed the way I understood the story I was telling. She saw it as much more than a forensic investigation. It was a story about memory, connection, and family; colored by very different motifs like data and privacy. On a different level, it was a story about trust; and on yet another, still deeper level, it was a story about the relationship between a father and a son.

Early on, I didn’t understand the full arc of the story; I was posting on a weekly basis without knowing what—or if—I would post next. But I made a conscious decision: As these other strands came into view, I would weave them into the narrative, while continuing to search for Chester. 

I began to take the story more seriously. Eventually, I realized it would become a small, but personally meaningful part of my father’s legacy. Traveling this adventure with him was also revealing things about myself—to me. And as my two adult children watched me so earnestly pursue this project, I knew what I was doing would become a part of how they understood their own father.

‘You Were Lucky’

It’s been two years, almost to the day, since I first asked the Facebook crowd to help me find Chester. Thousands of people have engaged with the story through social media, by reading the book, by tuning in to WUNC for a Veterans Day interview with me, and by attending talks I’ve given to retirement communities, civic groups, and book clubs around the state.

I’ve been struck by how my father’s story, and my story, so often serve to trigger other people’s stories. “Let me tell you my story,” people who’ve read ours tell me. 

A 35-year-old woman in Hillsborough, Catherine Montezuma, met with me recently over coffee to show me an artifact from her own family’s past: the flight log kept by her grandfather, who enlisted in the Air Force at age 17 and ultimately piloted 34 missions over Europe during WWII. Her grandfather’s description of his twelfth mission contained just four words: “Heavy flak–Chuck killed.” 

Chuck, Catherine later discovered, was her grandfather’s co-pilot, and that entry eventually inspired her to track down Chuck’s obituary, which revealed the part of the story that her family had never heard before: When Chuck died on November 7, 1944 over Nazi-controlled Maribor (now part of Slovenia)—seated inches from her grandfather in the cockpit of their B-17 Flying Fortress—he was married with a two-month old son. Catherine has since exchanged letters and mementos with Chuck’s son, who is now in his 80s and lives in Michigan.

Another story, another connection.

Just as often, I hear: “You were lucky.” Susan Ross, 70, of Durham, wrote me: “My Dad was a Marine in the Pacific and he too sailed back to California. I wish he had lived long enough to have those weekly unrushed dinners you got with your father. Sadly, his memory went years before his death, and I was still dealing with young kids, a busy job, and a second marriage while trying to be a good daughter. So I will have to enjoy your stories instead of his.”

Those who tell me I am lucky are right: I lucked out in having a father who lived long enough for me to take the time to hear, and really listen to, his stories. Dad died in late 2024, seven weeks after turning 100.

Hindsight makes me wish I hadn’t depended on such luck. The priorities I chose earlier in my life—my wife and kids, my community, my ambition—strike a balance that still feels about right. But even so, if I had understood how much the one-on-one time I spent with my father in his final years would matter, to him but especially to me, I could have found the time. I would have found the time.

In his last years, we talked about everything. He loved analyzing business deals, and envisioning family trajectories, and debating politics (spiritedly, always). This was not new: He and I had always shared what was going on in our lives; what changed was that we both began sharing how we were feeling about what was going on. We shared what was going on in our hearts.

Not until near the end of my summerlong pursuit did Dad come to believe that the Chester I eventually landed on—Chester Pratt, who was born in Omaha on May 15, 1934, and died in Kerr County, Texas, on March 6, 2009—was the same Chester whom he had taken that plane ride with back in 1945. 

As my story unfolded between Father’s Day 2024 and my father’s 100th birthday on September 22, 2024, I heard through the grapevine that Dad was retelling the story every chance he got to his many friends. But deep inside, he was skeptical, and I knew it. Dad acknowledged that my Chester, the Chester of my systematic reasoning and dogged sleuthing, checked every single box among the clues we had to go on. But Dad also was pretty sure, though not absolutely certain, that the boy he had befriended, the Chester of his memory, was named Chester Park. 

What eventually won over my father was not the checked boxes, not the quantifiable results achieved in the face of such daunting odds. Nor was Dad persuaded, completely, by what I had learned, near the end of my odyssey, after finally connecting with my Chester’s son, a former Navy pilot, and several of his family members. My Chester’s son and his cousins told me all about their Chester’s lifelong fascination with airplanes. 

What I learned from them about their Chester was impossible to search for in digital databases and other impersonal records. The little boy I found, the boy who had dazzled my father with his knowledge of how ailerons added to the stability and maneuverability of airplanes, turned out to become a father and grandfather himself whose early attachment to airplanes was not simply a youthful infatuation but a genuine passion that coursed through his entire life.

That was how I saw it.

And I think my father saw it that way, too.

But I know that what won him over—what truly convinced him that my Chester was his Chester—was that his son believed.

And I did, and do, believe.

I believe that I delivered on the 100th birthday gift I had promised him.

And if his son believed, my father would believe.

The day after Dad turned 100, the Raleigh News & Observer ran a long front-page article about the search for the boy named Chester. Later that evening, on my weekly visit, I read the article to him. 

After I finished, he smiled and gave me his final verdict: “I never bothered to tell you the story,” he said, “because it never seemed to be that interesting. But you took a good story and made it into a great story.”