His chance came after the breakfast the next day when he spotted Mary Alice chatting with Charlie Bauer, a medical student who was about to give him a ride back to the university. Bauer and Mary Alice happened to live in the same neighborhood off Kensington Avenue and knew each well. Bauer offered her a ride and she accepted. By the time they reached their destination, Charles had asked her to lunch. Soon they were seeing each other at every chance. 

Buffalo was just the first step in Charles’s quest to become a pilot in the Army Air Forces. Two months later, he moved on to other training sites, but his romance with Mary Alice continued through the daily letters they wrote to each other.

After Charles left for his next phase of training, he considered calling Mary Alice long distance to propose, but again he got cold feet. Instead, he used his usual medium—a letter. He scribbled a note and dropped it in the mailbox. A week later, her response arrived in the morning post. She kept him waiting until the fourth page. “The answer is ‘yes’ my darling,” she wrote. “I want to wear your ring and I’ll be proud to wear it.” They would not marry until after the war—assuming Charles survived. 

Charles finished his flight training and became the commander of a B-24 Liberator, a four-engine heavy bomber, and its ten-man crew. By August, they en route to Europe to join the 15th Air Force stationed in Italy.  Despite the obvious danger of being shot down, Charles had received only a single, one-hour lecture on parachute jumping during his 18 months of training. He took no practice jumps—there was too much risk of injury. Instead, an apparently expendable woman parachutist made a demonstration jump, drifted into a swamp and nearly drowned. 

“I’ll stick to the plane, thanks,” commented Charles in a letter to Mary Alice.

Once in Italy, Charles and his crew were assigned to the 464th Bomb Group and a B-24G Liberator dubbed The Fertile Turtle. On Friday, October 13, 1944, Charles set off for his eleventh mission—a raid against one of the synthetic oil production facilities at Blechhammer in southern Poland.  Since Germany now possessed little petroleum, the USAAF considered such facilities to be Hitler’s Achilles’ heel. Knowing this, the Nazis defended the target with every anti-aircraft flak gun they could muster. The sky ahead shone an azure blue as The Fertile Turtle approached the target. Then the German flak gunners pumped their shells skyward and a barrage of black blasts carpeted the skies.

Charles’ formation penetrated the gauntlet as countless explosions belched clumps of razor-sharp shrapnel through the air. Booming concussions rocked the planes. A cliché claimed that flak could be “thick enough to walk on.” This looked more like an impenetrable wall. One cluster of shards perforated a B-24 called No Excuse and it spiraled to the right. A moment later, another plane—the optimistically-named Be Comin Back—took direct hits, winged over, fell 25,000 feet and transformed into a giant fireball as it impacted the ground. Gaps formed all over the sky as more B-24s fell in flames. 

Suddenly, the Turtle rocked as a shell ripped through its right outboard engine. Other nearby bursts perforated its waist. The plane plummeted downward and Stanley, straining at the yoke, wondered if he could stabilizer it. Tense moments later, he straightened the plane out and the crew took stock. The two propellers on the right wing were knocked out. High octane fumes pervaded the air. One spark could blow them to smithereens. The damage was bad, but no one was injured.

Charles mulled his options. The Turtle was too badly damaged to make it back to their base at Pantanella, Italy. Bailing out over Yugoslavia was a possibility, but the airmen had no idea which areas were held by the underground. The conventional move would have been to head east toward the Russian lines in Poland, but trigger-happy, often drunken Russian fighter pilots frequently fired on unfamiliar Allied aircraft. Romania, hundreds of miles to the southeast, was four times as distant, but its battlefront was less intense. Stanley knew of an American mission in Bucharest that would arrange to get his men home—if they could only reach it. It was a gamble, but Stanley decided to go for it. 

Two hours later, as they scraped over a ridge in the Transylvanian mountains, the navigator guessed they had passed beyond the Russian lines. Just then, their remaining engines coughed. They were nearly out of gas. Charles ordered the crew to bail out. As the pilot, he would jump last.

Eighteen days later, on Halloween, Mary Alice received a short letter from Charles’ mother. The War Department had informed her that Charles was missing in action. The note stunned Mary Alice, though the news was not unexpected. Charles had failed to write for two weeks. Still, he was missing, not dead or captured. There was room for hope. The next morning, she decided to go to school despite her sorrows. It was All Saints’ Day, a Catholic holy day of obligation, and she needed to attend Mass anyway.  

A letter from Charles awaited her when she returned home. He had parachuted over a friendly country and thus had been able to return to his base in Italy. He did not tell her how close a call it had been. He had been forced to jump with only 300 feet of altitude left—well below the recommended minimum height. It was a miracle he had survived. His gamble to try for Romania had succeeded, but just barely. A few days later, another note from Charles’s mother arrived. “If we never have another nightmare like that,” confided Mrs. Stanley, “it will be plenty soon enough.”

It was not to be. Charles’ letters began again, then stopped after six weeks. When Mrs. Stanley informed Mary Alice that Charles was missing again, the news came as less of a shock. If he had made it back before, she reasoned, he could do it again. Still, the waiting was hard. Her letters bounced back from Italy stamped “Return to Sender.” They seemed so final. Wouldn’t the Army hold his mail for him if they thought he was coming back?

Mary Alice and her family swung into action in the only way they knew how. She and her mother took a bus to the large, stone monastery of the cloistered Dominican nuns on Doat Street to ask them to pray for Charles’s safety. Certainly, God would listen to the entreaties of these holiest of women, who spent their lives in nearly perpetual prayer. Designated sisters acted as liaisons with the public. A pretty nun wearing a white habit listened to their request with equanimity. “He’s all right,” she responded, looking deeply into Mary Alice’s eyes. “I know he’s all right.”

Mrs. Stanley and Mary Alice received Charles’s letters announcing his safe return on February 12, 1945. More good news followed—he and the rest of his crew would be sent stateside.

As Charles had sheltered with his comrades behind enemy lines and then travelled across the snowy Alps, he had carried the white parachute that had allowed him to float to safety. It had already come in handy, keeping him alive in the sub-zero temperatures, but that was not its only purpose. He later claimed that Mary Alice had been disappointed he didn't bring his parachute back the first time he was shot down. She wanted to use the material for her wedding dress. So naturally, Charles had to bail out a second time to get another one.

Portions of the parachute had become stained with Yugoslavian clay during the frozen Yugoslavian trek and Mary Alice kidded Charles about it in a letter. “Now why couldn’t you have been more careful with my dress material, dear?” She worked around the problem by picking a pattern with plenty of seams and having her dressmaker cut away the stained portions. They salvaged enough clean nylon for the simple dress, with some left over for a baptismal gown for future babies.

Charles Stanley and Mary Alice Schmitz were married on October 27, 1945. The story of Mary Alice’s parachute wedding dress appeared on the front page of the Courier Express. That article was also picked up by newswire services and was published in newspapers all over the Northeast. The couple settled in the Buffalo area. They had five children, 13 grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren—many of whom were baptized in the baptismal gown fashioned from the parachute.

It all started with that chance meeting in the Blessed Sacrament chapel. And it was made possible by the parachute that saved the airman’s life nearly 80 years ago.