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Lieutenant Colonel Schretzman was the new ROTC commander at UD and he was about to deliver the resume of his wife Stacy — a former all-state basketball player at Troy High School and an All-American in college — who was applying to become the new secretary in coach Brian Gregory’s program.
“They still tell the story,” Stacy laughed. “They saw Chuck come off the elevator and come walking across the catwalk and Billy says, ‘You guys deal with this guy, I’m not.’ As he ran into his office, he said, ‘That right there is a head on a block of granite!’ ”
Schmidt nailed it.
It’s the same assessment many rival college teams came up with when they scoured game films of the Army football team in 1988.
Back then, Chuck was No. 55, the give-no-quarter outside linebacker of the Black Knights who would be the MVP of the annual Army-Navy game that year and a defensive cornerstone on a team that went 9-3 and lost 29-28 to Alabama in the Sun Bowl.
As former Army assistant Tim Kish, now Oklahoma’s linebacker coach, recently described Schretzman:
“He’s one of the toughest individuals I ever coached.”
After he finished at West Point, Chuck was an Army Ranger who spent 26 years on active duty and was deployed five times to Afghanistan and Iraq.
His initial tour came three weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when his unit did the first jumps and raids into Afghanistan.
His third trip was what he called an “intense” 10-month deployment with the 10th Mountain Division to Iskandariya and Habbaniyah in Iraq. The final deployment came in 2011, right after he left UD.
Although he retired from the Army in 2014, he’s still the stuff of legend, which is why he was brought in as the keynote speaker at the Army football banquet last season and was made an honorary captain of the spring game this season.
The 50-year-old Schretzman has been called back to West Point, not just because of all he’s done on the football and battle fields of the past, but because of the fight and toughness and resolve he’s showing now.
It was during that final tour in Afghanistan that he said he began feeling “something was off” with his body.
After he returned home, retired and began a new job as vice president of operations for EMCOR, a position where he oversaw some 500 people, the medical problems intensified.
After several misdiagnoses, it was determined Chuck had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
It’s a deadly malady in which the body’s nervous system breaks down, muscles weaken and there is paralysis and respiratory failure.
An especially alarming statistic is that soldiers are twice as likely to contract the disease than the rest of the populace.
“That could be from a combination of things,” Chuck said. “You work too hard. There’s a lot of stress and it could be the environment you work in, too.”
Stacy said while it might also go back to his hard-hitting “football days,” she believes his last trip to Afghanistan should be considered because “he was there breathing burned tires for 10 months.”
There is no cure for ALS and no real treatment.
There is also no denying the inevitable outcome, said Schretzman, who referred to the compelling ALS memoir by Bruce H. Kramer entitled: “We Know How This Ends: Living While Dying.”
“The disease attacks everything — your voice, hands, legs, throat, your emotions, feeding, breathing … everything,” he said quietly. “It’s just evil. What kills you in the end is your breathing. Your muscles in your chest deflate your lungs.”
While there may be a book on it, he’s writing his own final chapters with the same fight and toughness he’s shown throughout his life.
“We were college athletes and the only way we know how to fight is in the gym,” Stacy said. “You try to keep strong and keep what muscle tone you have left.”
As he continues to work out with a personal trainer in Troy and swim at the local YMCA, Chuck also is prepping for advanced problems with an eye-activated computer and he’s banking his voice — some 1,600 phrases already — to use on his computer when he can no longer speak.
He’s also doing everything he can to raise awareness about the disease and help find a cure. He’s told about the support groups and services provided by the ALS Association’s Central & Southern Ohio chapter (www.ALSohio.org) and he’s trying to get other ALS patients involved in the research program — Answer ALS — at Ohio State.
He also offered to answer questions from anyone who contacts him at schretz55@msn.com.
As he does all this he’s being buoyed by sports figures around the nation who know of his battle:
Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh sent him a note, as did Indianapolis Colts coach Chuck Pagano. Kansas City Chiefs defensive coordinator Bob Sutton visited with him last weekend and some 50 of Chuck’s former Army teammates gathered for a recent birthday party for him.
Yet for all the good will and embrace there remains a sobering truth, said Stacy, who has found herself on an emotional roller coaster:
“After 26 years and 17 moves and all the deployments, we were hoping that down the road — once we retired from the military, from serving our country — maybe we would go off and get a slice of the pie. Maybe get a real job and finally start to see some money and for the first time, live the life and not feel bad about buying a bottle of wine with dinner.
“But then all of a sudden comes this illness. And after being a physical person his whole life, he has this put on him and it’s devastating.
“It’s going to take him away from me piece by piece by piece.”
‘Cried like a baby’
Chuck grew up in Philadelphia, where his dad was a fireman and his mother a police dispatcher.
“When you grow up in that environment of public service, it’s natural for you to do the same,” Stacy said.
Recruited by several colleges out of high school, Chuck chose West Point.
“He comes in there a scruffy-headed inner-city kid who doesn’t know his head from a hole in the wall,” Stacy said. “But then he discovers the brotherhood of Army football and it opens a whole new world to him.”
Stacy knows about this not just from being his wife, but from once being an Army athlete herself.
An All-Ohio basketball and volleyball player at Troy, Stacy Pahl went to West Point and played basketball there two years before transferring to Bentley College in Massachusetts, where she was a two-time All-American and twice led the Falcons to the NCAA Division II Final Four.
While at West Point, she said she first noticed Chuck in the hallway:
“He was this big, good-looking football player. He was really cute, but he always had bed head.”
They met, first at a dance and then in summer school, where they were retaking a class they had failed.
“Yeah, we were black heads,” Chuck laughed.
Later Chuck was a squad leader and when units were divided up, he always chose Stacy.
“She was the wild card,” he joked. “She could handle herself.”
“I could ruck march,” she grinned.
Eventually, they married and now have three children: Zack went to West Point, as did Olivia, who had been a basketball star at Springboro High and then played four years for the Knights.
Both Zack and Olivia are still in the Army. Youngest daughter Chloe is a junior at Tippecanoe High.
Through all the address changes and deployments, one thing always remained the same, Stacy said.
Her husband was a natural born leader to whom others were drawn. He was known for his grit, his fairness and, especially, his loyalty.
You see that in his lifelong bond with fellow Army linebacker Greg Gadson. They ended up the best man in each other’s weddings and, as Chuck said, “best friends.”
In 2007 Gadson lost both legs and severely injured his right arm in an IED blast in Iraq. When he was flown back home, there was Chuck waiting to help take him off the plane.
Now, it’s Gadson’s turn and he’s been a stalwart in Chuck’s corner.
“He’s saved me,” Chuck said. “He drove me to work every day. He’d cry like a baby and yell and scream about this and yet, he always was right there with me.”
Chuck knows he also has people dear to him around here. The family initially spent four years in the Miami Valley – from 2007 to 2011 – when he led UD’s ROTC program.
His first day on campus he said he went to see assistant athletics director Mike Kelly, who had been the Flyers’ longtime football coach.
Wanting to develop a connection between his program and the football guys, he said he introduced himself, told how he had once played collegiately and then promised “my guys will come to your games. We’d like to have a Military Appreciation Day and we’ll have guys parachute in, all kinds of stuff.
“And we did everything we promised.”
Meanwhile, Stacy got the job as the basketball secretary/administrative assistant. When Olivia finished at Springboro and was headed to West Point, Chuck, who had been an assistant athletics director at Army, was in line for a job back there as soon as he put in another tour in Afghanistan.
That’s where the first signs of ALS showed themselves, but he and Stacy both believe because he was in such good shape, some symptoms were held at bay and it took doctors almost three years to come up with the right diagnosis.
It was Dr. Colin Quinn, a neurologist with the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian and Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia, who finally confirmed ALS.
“We cried like a baby when we heard,” Chuck admitted
Stacy nodded: “When we got in the car and drove from downtown Philly back home to Collegeville (a suburb), we literally just cried the whole way.”
Chuck had started his new job, one he said “he loved” and which had him flying all over the nation, and he decided to tell no one.
“I didn’t want to be known as a sick guy,” he said. “I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me.”
After six months, though, he was dealing with extreme fatigue, some balance issues and occasional speech problems.
“Thank God I have Stace with me,” he said. “Finally she said, ‘Chuck, enough is enough. You got to take care of you or you’re gonna drop dead.’ ”
She agreed: “I finally looked at him and said, ‘Look, this is going to go one of two ways. You’re either going to spend the time you have left enjoying your life and doing some things you really want to do or you’ll just work yourself into oblivion.’ ”
They ended up selling their new townhouse in Collegeville and moving back to Troy, where Stacy can get help from her family.
“For the first 20 years I dragged her all over the world,” Chuck said. “So now I had to let it up to her. I mean, she is my queen. She’s my princess.”
Wheelchair can wait
With Friday’s Veteran’s Day approaching, Chuck and Stacy — who have been quite private in this matter up to now — agreed to sit down and talk about the battle facing them.
“I just want to get people who are out there with ALS to know that there is a place to go for help,” Chuck said. “And there’s also the research they’re doing at Ohio State (and a few other hospitals around the nation). They want to get people’s blood, their DNA on file, in hopes of finding out what’s causing this.”
As the couple settled into the den of their Troy home the other day to talk, above them on the wall was a montage of framed photos of Chuck’s days playing football for Army.
Five minutes into the conversation, Chuck, whose voice is a little thick and breathless at times, made a quiet suggestion to his wife:
“Stace, so I don’t get too tired out, talk about what happened and how I felt coming back. Then I’ll do the diagnosis.”
Yet, soon after his wife had picked up the conversation, Chuck began interjecting side comments and soon was leading the discussion again.
While he spoke, you noticed a ticket stub from last Sunday’s Colts-Chiefs game lying on the table next to him.
He had been to that game and a couple of weeks earlier, he had been to Oklahoma’s game with Kansas State.
In September, he traveled to Jamaica, Queens for the funeral of Brandon Jackson, the Army defensive back killed in a car crash after the Black Knights game with Rice.
And this Friday he heads to Las Vegas to take part in a bachelor party for his son, Zack, who will be married soon.
As he charges ahead, it’s evident he hasn’t paid heed to the advice one medical staffer gave him at the Dayton VA, which Chuck otherwise commends.
But he said this person, rather than agreeing to set up a physical therapy regimen for him, suggested he: “go back home and rest up….He said, ‘Chuck you’re trying to beat his, but you can’t beat it. You can manage it, but you cannot beat it.’
“He told me to go home and start using my wheel chair.”
As he thought about that in silence, Chuck finally shook his head and spit out an expletive.
“Look I know my voice is a little kitschy, but I’m still walking. I’m talking. I’m going to the gym … I’m still living.”
And then, when he was done telling his story, he decided to make a detour as he walked you back to the front door.
“Let me show you something,” he said.
He led the way into the garage, where, against the wall, were stored two new wheelchairs. One was painted black and gold — Army colors — and had a U.S. Army decal on it.
The other, bigger one was “the Mac Daddy of all chairs,” Stacy said.
Chuck nodded and grinned: “You know what my plan is? To have those things setting right there next year, too.”
Stacy smiled: “Olivia’s getting married next Memorial Day in Nashville and he wants to walk his daughter down the aisle.”
And that — just like the vision Billy Schmidt had that day several years ago — would be a sight to see:
A smiling bride on the arm of a block of granite.
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