This story begins in 1945, when a young Navy officer found himself in San Francisco at the end of World War II, just one of thousands of uniformed men trying to get home.
His name was Ford S. Worthy Jr., and he came from “Little Washington” in the eastern part of North Carolina. Like every man in town, he was desperate for a plane ticket — hungry for some hugs and home-cooked meals on his one-week leave pass.
Something happened that day Worthy would carry for the rest of his life.
While he waited in the airport, attired in his crisp dress uniform, a stranger offered him her seat on an upcoming flight. In the few moments they conversed, she gave Worthy a single condition: Take my son Chester to Omaha, where his grandparents will meet him at the airport.
So without hesitating, Worthy boarded the flight with a boy he had never met, who looked about 10 years old, and who jabbered precociously.
But before I tell anymore, I’ll let you know how this story ends.
It ends in Raleigh, where that old Navy officer turned 100 on Sunday, and his son Ford delivered him a gift he had sought ever since that day in 1945:
Whatever became of Chester?
‘What Should I Do?’
Ford Worthy (who dropped the III from his name), never heard his father talk about Chester Park until June, despite his lifelong reputation as a storyteller with a stellar memory for detail.
He’d talked about serving on the USS Lackawanna, about refueling the Pacific fleet on its way into Okinawa. But never a peep about a 10-year-old boy in San Francisco until his 100th birthday drew near.
“Chester was a young fellow — probably around 10,” the elder Worthy recalled. “He could have been 9, he might have been 11. It was clear he knew a lot about planes. I’m not sure what kind of plane we were on — it could have been a C-54. Chester started right away identifying things like the ailerons and other parts of the plane. I was shocked by how much he knew.”
They flew to Las Vegas for the first leg of the trip, and Worthy told his young companion to stay on the plane while he went for a drink at the airport bar. By the time he got back, Chester was squabbling with the flight attendant, telling her to watch out because his daddy was coming back soon.
Already unsettled, Worthy would grow even more uneasy when they landed in Omaha and found nobody waiting. It was almost midnight, and the terminal cleared out without a sign of Chester’s grandparents.
It is hard to understand, in this Smartphone generation, the panic this situation could create. Prior to roughly 2000, people simply got stranded in airports late at night, forced to wait alone with the faint hope somebody would fetch them. Friends forgot to pick you up, and you sat for hours on a plastic bench watching the cleaning crew.
Now saddled with a child he’d met that day, Worthy had only a few hours before his connecting flight took off. He wondered if he’d been duped. Maybe Chester’s mother had abandoned him.
“What should I do?” he remembered thinking. “Should I leave the boy with a policeman? Should I leave him with the airline? Should I take him with me? If I had had a cell phone, I would have called my own mother and asked her what to do.”
In the empty terminal, Worthy briefly considered adopting Chester and asking his mother to raise him. And then, at 2 o’clock in the morning, the grandparents arrived just as Worthy’s plane was boarding.
He never saw them again.
‘It just sort of clicked’
Fathers are notoriously hard birthday customers.
My own dad preferred nobody mention the anniversary of his birth. He never ate cake. He disliked ceremony of any kid. Anything he wanted, he bought for himself — usually in bulk.
But for Ford Worthy, a lawyer in Chapel Hill, tracking down a 10-year-old travel companion from his father’s distant memory seemed like an adventure as much as a good idea.
“What do you get a father who’s turning 100 as a birthday gift?” he asked. “It just sort of clicked. I honestly thought I was going to find the guy real quick or run into a complete dead end. But I thought I would enjoy the effort.”
Worthy decided to document the search in a series of Facebook posts, taking readers on a safari through census records, city directories, voter registrations and old yearbooks — working with a handful of clues.
His 10 installments tunnel into deep statistical rabbit holes, in which he discovered:
▪ The name Chester has seen decades of decline. In 1919, it ranked no. 53 on the nation’s most popular names for baby boys. In 2023, it had fallen to no. 1,739.
▪ In 1935, this particular boy’s likely birth year, the government counted 1,432 newborn Chesters seeking a Social Security card.
▪ Your likelihood of being named Chester was far higher if you were born in Kentucky than either Nebraska or California.
He found candidates so likely that he called up their children — only to find a disqualifying detail. He sorted through Chester Y. Park in Pennsylvania, then Leonard Chester Park in California, then Chester E. Park in Nebraska.
He tried to match the available Chesters with what little he knew of Chester’s mother: she had been divorced, and she may have worked for United Airlines.
No dice.
So in a breakthrough, Worthy decided to widen his search rather than narrow it, accounting for what he guessed might be a few misremembered details.
“I decided to assume that my father’s memory may have been only half right,” he wrote in Facebook post number four, “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.”
This led him straight to Chester Pratt.
A match
Worthy and his father meet for dinner every Monday. Just the two of them. His sisters take other nights, Monday night is theirs.
As the Chester search unfolded over the summer months, Worthy learned his father — a successful Raleigh developer — had sometimes thumbed through telephone books while on trips through San Francisco or Omaha, looking for his old companion.
But decades later, his son had accomplished it thanks to the millions of birth, death, marriage and military records available online.
And thanks to weeks of checking and cross-checking, he discovered the boy from the San Francisco airport, along with the clues to flesh out his character.
Chester Allen Pratt was born in 1934, making him 11 at the end of World War II.
Both his parents came from affluent families in Omaha, explaining how his mother Dorothy could not only travel by plane in an era when few could afford to, but casually give up her seat to a handsome young sailor.
His father Douglas spent a lifetime as a transportation mogul, presiding over the nation’s shift from streetcars to buses and heading a company that posted on the New York Stock Exchange. A boy in such a household would likely know about planes.
And most importantly, Chester’s parents had divorced, split between California and Nebraska, and then remarried. The society pages in Omaha described their comings and goings.
And when Worthy called up a niece in Tennessee, relaying the airport story from 1945, she told him, “That sounds exactly like something my grandmother would have done.”
Chester
In the telling, Worthy discovered what all good storytellers learn along the way. His story meant more than a brief encounter and the fate of a pair of people.
It revolved around a dozen larger points: memory, aging, technology, patriotism, history, loss.
In his dreams, he imagines his father and Chester reunited in an Omaha living room, sharing an extra-deep sofa, sipping tea and maybe something stronger. Lester Holt of NBC is there to capture their thoughts on camera.
But it’s hard to remember that Chester remains an 11-year-boy until the end of this story.
And in that time, almost 80 years have passed.
Chester Pratt died in 2009. He was 74.
“It would be presumptuous of me to try to distinguish the ordinary moments of his life from the extraordinary,” Worthy wrote in Facebook post number 10, “because only he, and perhaps those closest to him, could do that.”
He grew up in Oakland, Calif., and served as a quartermaster in the Navy after high school.
He followed his father into the transportation business, working for bus companies — a door Worthy notes that his father no doubt opened.
He married and had three children.
He married again when his first wife died young.
They lived in Pennsylvania, then Texas, where Chester started a company that sprayed concrete into pools, then gravitated into real estate. As a Texan, he became an enthusiast for a military museum near his home in Kerrville, which featured an exhibit on the very oil tankers where Ford S. Worthy Jr. served.
There is nothing to suggest Chester kept the same memory of his flight to Omaha, nor is there anything to suggest it every strayed far from his mind.
Either way, the elder Worthy stayed riveted by the story as it moved from chapter to chapter, and celebrated his 100th birthday very happy to hear an old question answered.
This story has a very long middle. Some might call it life.
Uniquely NC is a News & Observer subscriber collection of moments, landmarks and personalities that define the uniqueness (and pride) of why we live in the Triangle and North Carolina.
