Richard Allen Chilcoat

West Point, 1964

Be Thou At Peace

Posted by Robert La Raia on April 6, 2010:

I was one of those trembling plebes who entered West Point in the summer of 1963 as a member of the class of 1967. The person at whom we trembled the most was the the tall one the upperclassmen told us was King of the Beasts. I remember him coming through one of our shower formations as we sweated our outlines against the wall of the sinks. I think I still held a little of that fear in me about 40 years later when I met Dick Chilcoat and his lovely wife in the Houston airport on our way to an Army-Navy game. Dixie complimented my wife, Jan, and I on our Beat Navy buttons and we started talking to the friendly couple. The man was Dick Chilcoat and he was so warm and personable that I wondered how he could have ever been the King of the Beasts. He had recently been appointed as dean of the Bush school and he joyfully and proudly (but with evident humbleness) invited us up to the school for a personal tour. Alas, we never took him up on the invitation but we did exchange e-mails from time to time. When he wrote me he was battling cancer, he was optimistic that he would beat it and I urged him to keep up the good fight. Today I had the opportunity to attend a moving and beautiful memorial service for him at College Station where the A&M Singing Cadets and George H.W. Bush as well as many family and friends honored him. All noted what a good and fine person he was, a person who treated everyone as an equal with great and sincere friendliness and I knew it was true because that brief meeting with him in the airport made such a deep impression on me. I wish him great peace and his wife and family joy in remembering what a fine man he was.

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