My father has wondered endlessly all these years whatever became of that precocious boy. As a gift to my father, who will celebrate his 100th birthday in two months, I promised to try to answer that question. Over the past month, I’ve written about my search in three Facebook posts, which I’m now calling chapters.

I may have found him.

Dad agrees, sort of – but I can tell he still harbors a little doubt – mostly because he was so sure the boy’s name was Chester Park.

I’m not ready to make any definitive declarations. Not yet anyway. And the reason is: the ghost of a woman named Mary E. Johnston, who I’m quite sure is looking over my shoulder even now, some 37 years after her retirement as chief of reporters for Fortune magazine. Mary, one of the most important people in my entire life, passed away in 1989.

Here, it’s necessary to take a quick detour from my father’s story and shift over to my story for a moment. Mary Johnston was a legendary figure at Time Inc. For decades she was responsible for hiring and training researchers and reporters for Fortune, which was part of Time Inc. and used to be a big deal in the world of journalism. I was introduced to Mary in 1979, in New York, shortly after graduating from college. My purpose for being in New York was to interview with several Big Eight accounting firms, with the hope that one might hire me for a job in Paris. I wasn’t really interested in accounting, but I thought it could be helpful for eventually landing the job I first began dreaming about as a young teenager: writing for Fortune. In the meantime, it might be fun, I thought, to learn some French and experience the City of Light.

I told Mary Johnston I planned to come back two years later – fluent in French and with a CPA certificate in hand – and that I hoped to persuade her that I was worthy of a position at Fortune. To my surprise, she called me two weeks later to offer me a job – and she changed the trajectory of my life. I started off clipping newspapers and magazines and delivering the clippings to my new colleagues, and later I moved into the researcher ranks and I eventually became a writer for Fortune. (It’s also where I met my future wife.) From Mary I learned what it meant to be able to say, definitively, that something was true – or not. When Fortune published something, it had to be exhaustively evaluated and documented. And if we didn’t have the necessary sourcing, we didn’t publish it.

Which brings me back to Chester. I think I’ve found my father’s Chester, but certainly not by Mary Johnston’s standards. While I continue trying to document the case for one particular Chester – with help, by the way, from people throughout the country – let me tell you how I got to this point.

When I put up the first post asking for your help in locating Chester Park (or more likely, his presumed descendants), I assumed that I would hear from a few real-life friends who might tap into Ancestry and point me towards some possible prospects. My plan was to follow up later with a second post basically reporting that it was unrealistic to expect that I could find the young boy who was entrusted by his mother to my father in November 1945. Their unlikely encounter happened a long time ago, and there were simply too many possibilities to run down. My father might profess disappointment, but he would know that I had tried – and he would have enjoyed the hunt. That was how I saw the story ending.

After the original post there was a burst of suggestions and leads from friends and from a lot of people I didn’t know, urging me to scrutinize Chester Y. Park in Hustontown, Pennsylvania, and Leonard Chester Park in Kern County, California, and Chester E. Park in Bruning, Nebraska, among others by that name. I carefully assessed the case for each and every one of these Chester Parks, even as Internet search engines tried, doggedly, to steer me to Chester Park – not the person, but the leafy kind of park – in Duluth, Minnesota, or Anchorage, Alaska, or to eponymous centers of learning like P.S. 62 Chester Park in Queens, New York.

One Chester Park intrigued me for a while. He was born in 1933, and his grandparents lived in a small town in Kansas called Greenleaf, close enough to Omaha to imagine that they might have driven 150 miles north to pick up their grandson from the airport. It was only after several back-and-forth interactions with this Chester’s daughter, who lives in California, that she and I both realized, to our disappointment, that her father was not my father’s Chester. She wrote me a lovely note that captured the spirit of what a journey like this can be all about: The connections one makes along the way can be reward enough. This daughter of that Chester Park understood the essence of why my father’s story and my search appear to be striking such a chord for so many people.

After several weeks of searching intensely – reaching out to scores of other people and scouring U.S. Census records and a multitude of other sources – I decided that in order to have a real chance of finding Chester, I needed to narrow the field.

But before I narrowed the field, I needed to expand it.

I wasn’t making much progress in searching for Chester Park, the name that has been preserved in my father’s memory for 79 years. Perhaps I needed to consider the possibility that the boy’s name was not Chester Park after all.