He worked at the Pentagon’s Directorate of Space and Technology on reusable crewed spacecraft and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. He commanded the 6596th Instrumentation Squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. His final major command was perhaps the most fitting: in February 1970, he became commander of the 7350th Air Base Group at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, the airport where, twenty-two years earlier, he had walked out to a barbed-wire fence and broken his gum in half. He served there for two years, returning to the city that had come to define his identity as a public figure.
He retired from the Air Force on August 31, 1974, holding the rank of Colonel and the designation of Command Pilot. His career total was more than 8,000 flying hours and 31 years of service.
## The Reunions Begin
One of the distinctive features of the Halvorsen story is how it extended forward in time. The candy drops of 1948 were not simply a historical event that receded into the past. They generated a network of reunions, commemorations, and encounters that continued for decades and that Halvorsen actively participated in until his health prevented it.
The twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, in 1968, brought Halvorsen back to Berlin for a commemoration that drew more than 40,000 people. By this point the story of Uncle Wiggly Wings was well established in both American and German memory. Children who had been at the Tempelhof fence or who had received candy drops in 1948 were now adults in their late twenties and early thirties. Some sought him out. Some had kept the handkerchief parachutes or fragments of them as keepsakes.