Always welcome, and now missed

At 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday, crew members of a fishing charter boat sat in the passenger cabin, waiting for customers who did not come. On other, warmer Tuesdays, they could at least count on the arrival of a group of old-timers, but most of that crowd was away for the winter months. At nearby piers, other fishing boats bobbed idly. As sunlight broke through the windows of the charter boat, the Brooklyn VI, its disappointed crew settled into the passenger booths and talked about loss: of the customers who once filled the fishing boats all year round, of the neighborhood’s vanishing landmarks, of a freedom to drift at sea without tightening government restrictions. But mostly they talked about their friend Julius Geller, a former bomber pilot and an incurable lifetime angler who had died two days earlier, a week before he was to turn 94.

No one called him Julius. He was Chuck or Chuckie or Chuckles, a nickname picked up during a tough, impoverished childhood in East New York. During World War II, Mr. Geller, a second lieutenant, piloted a B-17 bomber on 34 missions. (In his later years, he would talk about his service, but not much. Many of his friends learned about his record on the Internet.)