Welcome to the Story

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.

On a recent Monday night, he told me a story that revealed how I fit into the story about Chester.

Those of you who’ve followed these posts, or “chapters,” as I’m now calling them, have probably noted all the references to November 1945. That was the point in time that my father placed his encounter with Chester, who was a young boy around 10 years old when his mother entrusted him to a total stranger (my father) for a flight from San Francisco to Omaha.

The November 1945 date fit with what I thought I knew: Years ago I had come across a faded picture postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge (it’s shown below) [FW1] with a ship passing beneath the center span. It was addressed to Dad’s sister (my aunt). The only message was written, in his handwriting, on the front of the card:

“AO-40”

“0943”

“24 October 1945”

AO-40 was the Navy’s designation for “Auxiliary Oiler,” the class of oil tanker Dad served on in the Pacific.

0943 was the exact time of day his ship steamed into San Francisco Bay; and

24 October 1945 – that was the day of his return home to his country, safe and sound, after the end of World War II.

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 fluttering above them – one white star against a blue field for every officer, followed by one linear foot of red over white for every enlisted man. The card was postmarked the very next day: San Francisco, California, 1130 AM, October 25th, 1945. There would be no forgetting that day or date.

Dad’s trip with Chester, therefore, occurred no earlier than October 24, and I knew from a different letter that it occurred no later than December 10, 1945.

On more than a few Monday nights since I began this quest, Dad and I have gone over every memory he can summon up about this story. But as we talked over dinner last week, it occurred to me that I had never asked him, point blank, if he remembered the exact date of the flight from San Francisco to Omaha. Knowing the exact date could be valuable, I felt, in triangulating other information I’ve discovered about the family that includes the person who may very well be my father’s Chester.

So, I asked. And he remembered: He remembered – vividly, he said – being back in his hometown in eastern North Carolina and riding in a parade to celebrate the first peacetime Armistice Day since 1941. When I searched his local newspaper, I quickly found a news item, in the November 8 edition of the Washington Daily News, reporting that “Ensign Ford S. Worthy, Jr. arrived in the city yesterday to spend a 14-day leave with his parents.”  That blurb, in the section of the newspaper devoted to the comings and goings of regular folks in town, answered my question: When, exactly, had Dad’s encounter with Chester taken place? This item in his hometown newspaper seemed to confirm that it was either November 6 or November 7, 1945.

But remember – this particular story is a story within a story. My pursuit of Chester had now taken me to Washington, North Carolina – the original Washington, as my grandmother liked to call it, because it was the first town named for Gen. George Washington, in 1776. Dad has not lived there for 70 years, but Little Washington, as it is also known, shaped him and is never out of mind. It was a small town in 1945 (pop: 9,000) and is not much bigger now. As a child visiting my grandparents there, it was a place where everyone seemed to be related and everyone seemed to know about everyone else’s business. When Dad told me he remembered being in Washington for the Armistice Day parade, I knew I would be able to verify that detail. And as I combed through the local newspaper, via an online database, I half expected to come across the first telling of the story about Chester Park. Surely my father had told someone that story!

The parade took place three months after the long, grueling war ended with the announcement that Japan had surrendered. The occasion of the parade would be the “first opportunity,” wrote the newspaper editor, “that the city has had to give anything like a welcome to the returning veterans of World War II.” The editor added: “The whole county should turn out and pay respect to the boys who have done such a noble job.” On Monday, November 12 (since the customary date for celebrating Armistice Day, November 11, fell on a Sunday that year), thousands lined the streets of Little Washington to welcome home hundreds of veterans and servicemen.

My father remembered the details: the route from the high school down Main Street, the marching bands, the convertible he rode in with his friends Harry Walker and Gray Hodges, the three of them sitting on the boot cover in their military uniforms. As Dad recalled the celebratory scene, one that played out that day all across America in small towns like his, midsized cities like Omaha, and larger cities like San Francisco, I realized that this memory had become permanently encoded in his DNA.

There was one other detail he remembered. And here’s where this story merges, in an unexpected way, with my and my sisters’ stories. You see, another thing my father recalls about that parade on Armistice Day 1945 is that, years later, our mother had told him it was on that day, as he passed by in that parade, resplendent in his full dress Navy uniform, that she first spotted him. She had celebrated her 15th birthday just two days before. He had turned 21 just seven weeks before, on an oil tanker anchored in Tokyo Bay, waiting for orders to return home. Nine years later they got married. She was thinking about him that day, but he was not yet thinking about her. She had not yet become part of his story. Knowing my father, he was probably still wondering what had become of the young boy he had dropped off a few days earlier in Omaha.

I still can’t answer that question for sure, but in the next chapter I’m going to delve into the U.S. Census records for 1940 and 1950, and tell you why those and other records point pretty strongly towards one particular boy named Chester.