I decided to assume that my father’s memory may have been only half right: that I should be looking for a Chester or a Park, but not necessarily a Chester Park.

If my father could be only half right, it’s impossible for me to believe he would forget the name Chester, a name that once was fairly popular but which, to my ear at least, has become more unique, even more unforgettable, as its usage has declined. In 2023 Chester was the 1,739th most popular name for baby boys born in the United States. By comparison, the name Park seems far less memorable. So I decided to assume that the boy’s first name was Chester, but that his last name may have been something other than Park.

My search quickly picked up steam. Whereas before there had been just a few Chester Parks to investigate, I suddenly had thousands of Chesters to analyze. A search of the 1940 U.S. Census, for example, yielded 7,419 Chesters who were born in either 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936 or 1937, meaning they would have been between 8 and 12 in 1945, the age range I was using as a proxy for my father’s recollection that his Chester was around 10 years old in 1945.

At first glance this result seemed insurmountable. But for me, it offered a welcome new angle.

In the telling and retelling of my father’s story about Chester, one constant has always been that Chester’s grandmother – his mother’s mother – picked him up at the airport in Omaha. As I considered this huge batch of Chesters, I learned something about geographic mobility among Americans: While mobility has risen over the years, in 1940 more than three-fourths of U.S.-born Americans lived in the same state in which they were born. Given the tendency of folks not to move around so much, it would be unsurprising if Chester’s mother had been born in Nebraska, the same state where her mother presumably lived; and if Chester’s mother was born in Nebraska (and perhaps in Omaha, Nebraska) there was a decent chance, it seemed to me, that Chester may have been born there, too.

A similar conjecture could be made about the only other location with which we know Chester was definitely connected: California. It was in San Francisco, at the airport there, where Chester’s mother asked my father to be responsible for delivering her young son to her mother in Omaha. Whether mother and son lived in San Francisco, or somewhere in the region, we do not know; but certain other details and inferences point in that direction. For example, when Chester’s mother turned her son over to my father, she appears to have been on her way, for completely unknown reasons, to a hospital – an indication, perhaps, that she may have lived within reasonable proximity of the airport. And then there is that fuzzy, potential connection between Chester’s mother and United Airlines, which had a major presence in California.

It seemed obvious, therefore, that I should focus first on boys in Chester’s age group who were born either in California or Nebraska. When I applied this criteria against the 1940 Census, those 7,419 Chesters I mentioned a few paragraphs ago became just 221 Chesters – 45 born in Nebraska and 176 born in California. These numbers revealed something else: The name Chester was far more common in certain parts of the country than others. In the mid-1930s boy babies in both Nebraska and California accounted for a lower share of all Chesters compared with their respective proportion of the total U.S. population. By comparison, the proportion of all Chesters born in Kentucky, say, was triple that of Kentucky’s share of the U.S. population.

As I began to drill down on each of the Chesters in this new, more manageable, group, the mobility data on Americans’ tendency, at that time, to stay close to home suggested I would find that the vast majority of all Chesters still lived in the same state in which they were born. In our case, given the two locations with which our Chester was definitely associated, that would be either California or Nebraska. It seemed unlikely that many would have easily observable connections to both California and Nebraska. That also meant, though, that any outliers – Chesters born in Nebraska, say, who by 1945 lived in California, or vice versa – might be easy to spot!

This was exactly what I found – and more.

In Chapter 5 this inspiration will lead me to a boy named Chester, who was 11-and-a-half-years old in November 1945; this Chester’s mother, then 34 years old, was divorced and living (with Chester) on the Oakland side of San Francisco Bay; and her mother (Chester’s grandmother) lived in Omaha, about six miles from what was then called the American Legion Municipal Airport.