Two weeks ago I enlisted your help in tracking down Chester Park, a young boy who, in November 1945, was placed in the care of my father, a complete stranger newly returned from Navy service in the Pacific, on a flight from San Francisco to Omaha.

For almost 79 years, my dad has wondered whatever became of that boy, who knew about ailerons and other parts of an airplane like the back of his hand and who, even before they landed in Omaha, was calling my father “Daddy.”

Since that first post, I’ve heard from hundreds of you – many of you sending early birthday wishes to Dad, who will turn 100 on September 22 – but I haven’t yet found Chester.

And that’s my goal: as a birthday gift to my father, to satisfy his decades-long curiosity about how Chester turned out.

So … I’m sharing this update, with some new details that may help the Internet sleuths among you solve this challenge.

After posting the original story, I had a hunch: Perhaps there might be clues buried 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 those 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.

What I was hoping to find was the name of Dad’s shipmate’s fiancée, who worked for an airline and, as Dad recalled, was the person who offered to pull some strings to help him get on a flight out of San Francisco. I not only came up with her name, I discovered a letter written to her by my father (but, curiously, never mailed). Dated December 10, 1945, it was addressed to: Miss Sarah M. Liggett, 291 Geary Street, San Francisco, California. Dad wrote the letter from the Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia, where he had been temporarily assigned after his home leave in North Carolina. “Dear Sarah,” it began, “I just wanted to drop you a line to tell you that I really appreciate what you did for me in San Francisco. … I think you and [Dudley, her soon-to-be husband] would be interested in the story of my trip back, so I will start it.”

As I was reading this yellowed, old letter, the distinctive slant of my father’s penmanship so familiar to me, something that Tennessee Williams once wrote came to mind – something about memory taking poetic license. Did Chester’s mother really give up her seat to honor a dashing young sailor so he could get back home for an all-too-brief home leave right after the end of the long war? Or did my father do her a favor by volunteering to chaperone her young son for a sudden trip to see her mother in Omaha?

Here’s how Dad described the situation in his letter to Sarah:

“So [the baggage lady] got me on the 5:30 plane. When she put me on she asked if I would do a favor for a friend of hers & an employee of United Airlines. I said sure so she introduced me to a lady about 30 who told me she was going to the hospital & she was divorced & had to send her little son to visit her mother in Omaha” 

The letter ends there. Full stop. Not even a perfunctory period after the word “Omaha”. Why it was never finished and apparently never sent, my father cannot remember.

These new details, though, should help us find out what became of Chester.

Dad is certain that the boy’s first name was Chester, a bit less certain that his last name was Park. We now know, however, that in November 1945, my father was asked by a woman to deliver her young son to her mother in Omaha, Nebraska; her mother (Chester’s grandmother) would be waiting for them at the airport there. To my father’s eyes, the woman appeared to be “about 30” and her son, Chester, seemed to be around 10 or 11. Chester’s mother was divorced. And for unknown reasons, she was planning to go to the hospital after placing Chester in my father’s care and seeing him off to Omaha.

The response to my original post has been heartwarming. Hundreds of people have “Liked,” or commented on, or shared it on Facebook, and it inspired a lot of you to send early birthday wishes to my father. Many of you have taken the time to scour sources like the U.S. Census and other online records, including Ancestry, to help me zero in on Chester. 

For a day or two last week, I thought I might have located Chester. This Chester Park was born in 1933 and would have been 11 in 1945 – a match with my father’s recollection. In November of that same year, his mother would have been 33. According to this Chester’s daughter, with whom I exchanged several email messages, this boy’s grandparents lived in Omaha – another match. When he grew up, this Chester Park became a Marine who served in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and his later hobby as a ham radio operator who could fix most anything synced up nicely with the whip-smart kid who could identify ailerons and other features of an airplane. “We lost him in 2007,” his daughter wrote me, “otherwise he would be the first to raise a glass to a fellow veteran on this milestone birthday.”

Alas, the new information I uncovered after the original Facebook post rules out this Chester. Unlike the boy in my father’s story, this Chester’s parents never divorced.

I’ve also been able to eliminate several other Chester Parks.

Meanwhile, some intriguing Internet crumbs are now leading my father and me down a path that could conceivably end not with a Chester Park, but with a Chester by a different last name.

So, please keep searching – and sharing.