Posted by Joe Schatz on August 17, 2018:

It is impossible for any classmate to remember Charlie without flattering adjectives. Fred Dibella's compilation is the most comprehensive I have seen: "Hollywood handsome, football hero, humble, generous, caring, strong, selfless, and honest; he was the poster man for West Point and Army Football. Great classmate, teammate, soldier, husband, father, and provider." All true. And Gary Steele's eulogy at the funeral was eloquent and moving. But the words I think Charlie would be most flattered by are: "He was a quiet guy who let his performance do the talking." Those are not my words. They are Charlie's words. Of course, he was not talking about himself. Charlie never blew his own horn. He wrote those words on the death of his father, Charles Joseph Jarvis, Sr., whom Charlie loved, respected and measured himself against as a father, husband, brother, friend and man. I wrote back that if I outlived him, I would be saying the same about him. If his father were still around, I am sure that he would be saying that Charlie was not just a chip off the old block, he was a block off the old chip. Charlie also loved and respected his mother, Fran. She was in the audience, 96 and wheelchair bound, to hear Charlie's speech the night before his induction into the Army Sports Hall of Fame. Videotape shows that Charlie was so weak that he had to be helped to move two feet from a chair to the podium, and he struggled at times to get through his prepared remarks, but when he came to the part thanking his mother, he rallied like the exhausted fullback he was, summoning his last ounce of strength to get over the goal line. Soon after the induction, Charlie was receiving hospice care. He wrote to me that he was "packing bags to head up north." Until then we had pretended he was going to make it. I wrote back: "Since you mentioned packing your bags and heading north ... As I wrote in June '16, two months before you revealed that you were fighting for your life, 'Just in case fate grasps one of us suddenly, and because I never told you before, I am telling you now that from the time we first met, I considered you a standup guy and I hope to see you on the other side of the curtain.' Under the current ironic and bleak circumstances, I want to reiterate that now. One other thing I want to reiterate is that just as you wrote of your father, 'He was a quiet guy who let his performance do the talking,' the same may be said of you, and I will be saying it. Up north, the fish are always in season and the weather is always fair. Love, Joe." In September 2017 Mark Hoffman and I met Charlie at the Philadelphia Train Station. We three had been roommates for about two years. Charlie told us to meet him "under the statue of an angel cradling a fallen soldier." That was not his customary way of talking. We ate cheesesteak sandwiches and laughed it up, but we all understood that we would not meet again. It is said that a man's character is best revealed in adversity, and so it was with Charlie. After the fumble at the Navy game in '67, he was as gracious in accepting blame as he was in sharing credit for the many victories that Army would never have had without him, not just in football but also in lacrosse. He rebuffed the efforts of Jim O'Toole, the quarterback who handed him the ball, to share the blame, insisting for more than fifty years that he alone was responsible. Shortly after the '67 game, I delivered to Charlie from the mailroom a box of what looked like cookies that someone had sent to him. Turned out to be Elmer's Glue. Charlie never let such callous and unfair barbs get to him. He just kept going, grateful that he would have a chance to redeem himself the following year and quietly determined to do so. He did, and then some. Three touchdowns and victory in '68. Charlie's two marriages left him bewildered but not embittered. They left his classmates bewildered too, because most of our wives would have dumped us for Charlie. Maybe his wives were expecting a guy who would say, "Honey, quick, Streisand on PBS." That was not Charlie. Between wives, he had a girlfriend named Mickey. On a ski trip to Utah, she made breakfast for about eight of us, as we slept. When she got us up to eat, Charlie clapped her on the back so hard he almost launched her into the stove as he boomed, "Great job, Mick." That was Charlie. In Gary's eulogy, he alluded cryptically to an incident in South America involving Charlie, Dutch Harmeling and me, saying that Charlie had mentioned it for the first time only days before he died, and had showed him corroborating pictures. The rest of the story: in 1967, while on leave after yearling year, we hopped an Air Force C-130 cargo plane headed from Patrick AFB, near Tampa, to Ascencion Island in the South Atlantic, with stops along the way, thinking we would get off in Rio and look around. The flight was low and slow, maybe five hundred feet and 200 mph, with an open door to let in fresh air. We were the only passengers. We sat in net seats, played cards, told jokes, drank toasts as we crossed the equator, and stared out the door at the endless tree canopy as we passed over the Amazon Jungle. After several days we were still far from Rio, and our leave was shrinking, so during a layover in Recife, Brazil, we got off and went looking for what guys our age looked for. We got in a bar fight with Brazilian soldiers who did not like our cut off shorts. Someone broke a bottle over my head. At the hospital, as I was getting stitched up, Charlie was pleased to discover that a clump of someone's face was wedged under his ring. A week later the same flight crashed in the jungle with no survivors. At and after West Point, we had many other adventures, "evening the score" with a few abusive firsties at the end of plebe year, managing to graduate, skiing, fishing, traveling and just talking as roommates and friends do, but always looking forward. Looking backward is going to take some getting used to.

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