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Chuck Standard – That Guy With All The Luck And The Right Stuff

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By Anne Semmes
Sentinel Features

Chuck Standard BCharles “Chuck” Standard is our most visible symbol of a veteran, sitting on the back of a vintage Malcolm Pray automobile in the annual Old Greenwich Veterans’ Parade. His “extraordinary heroism” as a Navy pilot in the Pacific in WWII that won him a Navy Cross has made him a legend in our town.

But equally legendary is his ebullient spirit and derring do at age 96 – parachuting jumping on his birthday – his uncanny ability to survive, be successful, and cheerful throughout his life. But looking across his life, the markers are there, the right stuff was there from the beginning.

Son of a railroad switchman, Standard started work a year later than he wanted – age nine. “I was a golf caddy,” he says. He tried age eight to get a caddy job but was told by his parents he was “too small, too young.” After a year of “nagging,” he was hired, but by the 14th hole he was lagging behind, not quite up to the job. “The golfer ended up carrying me,” he says. But young Chuck persevered and displays his proof – his first dollar made caddying 18 holes, framed and documented in a child’s hand.

“I was bound and determined to be a success,” he says. “I was an old man as a kid.” He was also respectful of people, “dedicated and had good judgement,” he says. And he aimed to be independent. At 12 going on 13 he was babysitting overnight for three kids down the street not much younger than he was. “I bought my first tennis racket, my golf clubs, my bicycle, and my first long pants.” This is when that Standard refrain starts, “Things came to me so easy.”

His father paid homage to his early desire to fly. “My dad paid for a pilot to take me up – I always wanted to be a Navy pilot.” But first he would pay his own way through college – Purdue, with a variety of effective marketing schemes. “I came out of college with more money than what I went into it with,” he says. Drafted during college, he finagled a way to be deferred to finish college while getting flight training nearby. He graduated into the Navy and into WWII.

The Malcolm Pray Friends of Eagles Award - Greenwich Council 2013.
The Malcolm Pray Friends of Eagles Award – Greenwich Council 2013.

“Whatever I’ve wanted I’ve gotten,” he says, but he underscores, “All my life I’ve been responsible.”  Standard’s military responsibility led to that  “extraordinary heroism” while flying his Helldiver SB2C off the carrier USS Yorktown across the Philippine Sea in search of Japanese ships to sink.

Early on in Hawaii a training incident showed that right stuff. An aviator buddy had challenged him to some copycat aerial spinning exercises. Things were going swell when suddenly his buddy’s spins became nonstop, and Standard knew enough not to follow on and make the mistake that took his buddy’s life.

Standard found surcease in a canine companion named “Dauntless” who would accompany him for a few merry months in his scout bomber. He’d come across the puppy in a box full of puppies.

“I took one and brought it back to the BOQ, gave it food and water and it bonded with me.” Soon Dauntless was airborne with his master, and with others in Standard’s squadron, until that night Standard had a date leaving Dauntless behind. “He went in search of me and was hit by a car.”

Standard might have fittingly named his Helldiver “Dauntless” with the reputation he would display in the Pacific Unlike other veterans hesitant to relive their war experiences Standard is ever ready to recount his adventures. ‘I had a ball in the war,” he says.

The event that brought Standard his greatest fear in the war happened on June 20, 1944 when the illusive Japanese fleet was spotted in the vicinity of Guam – at a considerable distance away. The mission would test his squadron’s fuel limits to an excruciating degree, and bring them back to their carrier in darkness.

Standard with his gunner aboard dive bombs a Japanese cruiser through the flak making a direct hit, then heads back in a blackening sky. ”There is blackness above and a blackness below.” Flying blind, his fuel tanks dangerously low, he orders his gunner to throw his ammunition overboard if there’s a crash landing.

It’s then he’s hit with the terrifying vertigo. He’s flying in a right turn with his wing down liable to spin off into the sea, instead of flying straight level. He quickly switches to instrument flying as the fuel tank needle falls lower. He queries his gunner, should they bail or crash? “You can make it Mr. Standard” came the calm reply. Suddenly a radio voice crackles with the answer, “Don’t home on the lightning,” meaning he’s south of his fleet. He sees the ship lights riskily turned on for his return. He makes for the lights of the carrier with just enough gas to land onto the deck. It’s not the Yorktown but its home safe.

Chuck Standard A
Chuck holding cutout of his dog Dauntless with parachute on back.

Another cautionary tale points up the depth of Standard’s responsibility. He learns he’ll have a photographer on board to document his dropping a bomb on a Japanese ship. The photographer takes a picture. “There’s flak all around us, the other photographer plane is shot down, and the guy says we’ve got to get out of there. I tell him we’re going around again. I’m thinking the guy is yellow, and I wanted him to do his job.” Years later they bump into each other. “Standard, you son of a bitch,” he says pointing at me, “Because of you I’ll never fly again.” And he didn’t.

Standard values the training and discipline he received in his Navy service so much he favors a draft. “There should be a draft for every able boy after high school or college, after they finish their education – they should go for two years,” he says. “It would do a lot for them – the training and discipline. They would be contributing to society and the betterment of the country.”

“People thank me for my service,” he says, “but I got more out of it than I gave. I never would have been able to fly when I did.”  And he might never have met wife Nancy who he met and married in the last year of the war, then spent 67 happy years with her on Druid Lane in Riverside until her death at 90 three years ago when they moved into Edgehill in Stamford.

Standard found it hard to let go of those wings and stayed on two more years with the Navy as a “weekend warrior.” When it was civilian time he found he had no clothes. Arriving at Chicago’s A.M. Rothschild’s department store, the salesman proceeded to break all of Standard’s hard learned soft selling rules. “As soon as I put on the pants, the salesman says, ‘That looks good, now how about a shirt and a tie.’ He pushed so hard I piled all the clothes together in one chair and walked out.”

He would take his successful soft sell philosophy (“I would present my product – “I didn’t push) to A.C. Nielsen, NBC, and Adweek. And he handed down that sales philosophy to his daughter when she went into sales. “Don’t sell, just walk away if they don’t want it. Tell them if later they find a use for it to give you a call.”  A month later the call came.

His name is Larry Labriola and he keeps the L39 (Russian Training Jet) at Westchester Air Port along with his 8 passenger plane.  What other pilot would take a perfect stranger up for.
His name is Larry Labriola and he keeps the L39 (Russian Training Jet) at Westchester Air Port along with his 8 passenger plane. What other pilot would take a perfect stranger up for.

Standard has maintained his health considerably well though he had a stroke 11 years ago. Here again he cites his luck. “I got oxygen right away.” Headed toward the hospital in an ambulance he was telling himself out loud, “It could be worse, it could be worse”

Last Christmas time he expressed his desire to an acquaintance for some aerobatic flying. “Twelve hours later,” he says, “I’m invited to fly out of Westchester Airport to do aerobatics with a guy I’ve never met.” Sitting in the front cockpit of a two seater L39 Russian training jet, Standard takes off from a jet for the first time and soon after the aerobatics begin. “We’re pulling five g’s doing aerobatics,” he says. Those parachute jumps are getting a little old hat. “You drive two and a half hours in the traffic to get to the airport and the jump takes 10 minutes.”

Walking this reporter to the door mortality is on his mind. “I thought you’d like to know, I’m going to donate my body for research.” He’s found his body too old to donate his organs but discovered Yale New Haven would take his body for research. “They’ll pick me up, do the cremating, then take my ashes back to my daughters.”

Then comes that Standard refrain: “Things just come to me – I’m so lucky. I get things so easy.” Perhaps someday those doctors at Yale New Haven will ferret out the essence of Standard’s luck and his life-affirming positive thinking.

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