he sold shellfish, cod, flounder, and striped porgy. His palms were like leather from handling the cracked shells of clams and scallops, his fingers blistered from packing the fish in ice. Decades after he stopped working the port, his wife claimed his hands still smelled of fish oil.
He vowed he would never leave the sea, until he took to the air.
During World War II, for three years he flew P-47 Thunderbolts over France and Germany. Alrek received a Medal of Honor and had his photo taken with Dwight D. Eisenhower. For the rest of his life, the photo hung framed on the wall of his office.
During the war, he met Christina Davenport, who, against the wishes of her well-to-do Boston family, served as a nurse in the Italian rear hospital where Alrek had been laid up with a neck injury. When the war ended, they married and returned to the town of Winthrop. With the GI Bill, Alrek attended the University of Massachusetts, finally giving up fishmongering to become an accountant.
Gavin was their only child. “We got everything in our first try!” his mother said, though he later suspected she had wanted more but had been unable to conceive again.
Things came easily to him: blue ribbons in science fairs, first chair in violin. By sophomore year of high school, he was captain of the track team and class president. He graduated Winthrop High as valedictorian and won a full scholarship to Yale. Most important,Winthrop was a small town, and he was Alrek Olson’s only son, which meant he was beloved. The town had lost 111 sons and brothers in the war, and Alrek had not only survived but returned with a medal.
People sought Alrek’s advice on investments and wills, on building additions to their homes, on whether to vote for Kennedy or Nixon. He had even saved the marriage of the town tax collector, after talking with the couple for sixteen straight hours in their kitchen. He accompanied Marjorie Plymouth, the town librarian, to visit her estranged father in prison, where he was serving ten years for grand larceny. In 1954, when Hurricane Carol came north, Alrek went house to house helping people board up their windows. That same year, he was elected mayor.
Gavin’s father was also a licensed justice of the peace and officiated at thirty-seven marriages. He was godfather to six children, one named Alrek, another Oslo. He taught Gavin to fell a tree, to make snowshoes from twigs and bark, to catch and debone a fish, to skin a deer, to clean a gun. He was a volunteer firefighter, and in 1969, while Gavin was thousands of miles away filling out supply forms on a Smith Corona in a stuffy Saigon office, his father, at age fifty, died pulling Abigail Kentworth, Gavin’s eighth-grade teacher, from the second floor of her burning house.
It was Alrek who had first wanted Gavin to fight in the war. Before the political problems were clear, when Gavin was home from college they would watch the news on their small television. “First the Nazis, now the communists,” his father said in his thick Norwegian accent. “Good men have to clean up these messes.”
So after graduation, while his classmates were driving overpacked station wagons to Canada, or posting applications to medical and law schools, veterinary college, any institution that would keep the draft board at bay, Gavin walked into the naval air program recruiter’s office and asked to be a fighter pilot. But because of his vision, they wouldn’t take him. The army, however, had different standards.
Eleanor, whom he’d been dating for six months, was crestfallen.
“What if something happens to you? Why do you have to go?”
This was 1968. As Gavin later told himself many times, the draft board would have gotten its hands on him soon enough.
Eleanor Haggarty was the daughter of a French Protestant mother and a lapsed Catholic, Irish-American father. She wore short skirts and had a waist Gavin could practically put his hand around. He called her his Little Huguenot.
He
He vowed he would never leave the sea, until he took to the air.
During World War II, for three years he flew P-47 Thunderbolts over France and Germany. Alrek received a Medal of Honor and had his photo taken with Dwight D. Eisenhower. For the rest of his life, the photo hung framed on the wall of his office.
During the war, he met Christina Davenport, who, against the wishes of her well-to-do Boston family, served as a nurse in the Italian rear hospital where Alrek had been laid up with a neck injury. When the war ended, they married and returned to the town of Winthrop. With the GI Bill, Alrek attended the University of Massachusetts, finally giving up fishmongering to become an accountant.
Gavin was their only child. “We got everything in our first try!” his mother said, though he later suspected she had wanted more but had been unable to conceive again.
Things came easily to him: blue ribbons in science fairs, first chair in violin. By sophomore year of high school, he was captain of the track team and class president. He graduated Winthrop High as valedictorian and won a full scholarship to Yale. Most important,Winthrop was a small town, and he was Alrek Olson’s only son, which meant he was beloved. The town had lost 111 sons and brothers in the war, and Alrek had not only survived but returned with a medal.
People sought Alrek’s advice on investments and wills, on building additions to their homes, on whether to vote for Kennedy or Nixon. He had even saved the marriage of the town tax collector, after talking with the couple for sixteen straight hours in their kitchen. He accompanied Marjorie Plymouth, the town librarian, to visit her estranged father in prison, where he was serving ten years for grand larceny. In 1954, when Hurricane Carol came north, Alrek went house to house helping people board up their windows. That same year, he was elected mayor.
Gavin’s father was also a licensed justice of the peace and officiated at thirty-seven marriages. He was godfather to six children, one named Alrek, another Oslo. He taught Gavin to fell a tree, to make snowshoes from twigs and bark, to catch and debone a fish, to skin a deer, to clean a gun. He was a volunteer firefighter, and in 1969, while Gavin was thousands of miles away filling out supply forms on a Smith Corona in a stuffy Saigon office, his father, at age fifty, died pulling Abigail Kentworth, Gavin’s eighth-grade teacher, from the second floor of her burning house.
It was Alrek who had first wanted Gavin to fight in the war. Before the political problems were clear, when Gavin was home from college they would watch the news on their small television. “First the Nazis, now the communists,” his father said in his thick Norwegian accent. “Good men have to clean up these messes.”
So after graduation, while his classmates were driving overpacked station wagons to Canada, or posting applications to medical and law schools, veterinary college, any institution that would keep the draft board at bay, Gavin walked into the naval air program recruiter’s office and asked to be a fighter pilot. But because of his vision, they wouldn’t take him. The army, however, had different standards.
Eleanor, whom he’d been dating for six months, was crestfallen.
“What if something happens to you? Why do you have to go?”
This was 1968. As Gavin later told himself many times, the draft board would have gotten its hands on him soon enough.
Eleanor Haggarty was the daughter of a French Protestant mother and a lapsed Catholic, Irish-American father. She wore short skirts and had a waist Gavin could practically put his hand around. He called her his Little Huguenot.
He
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