He also received letters for decades after 1948. The anniversary commemorations generated correspondence from West Berliners who had been children during the airlift and wanted to tell him about their memory of it. Some of these people he met in person at the reunion events. The relationship between him and the children who had been at the fence, and the children who had caught parachutes, extended over a remarkable period of time.
By any reasonable measure, what Halvorsen experienced through these letters and reunions was something that most people’s actions do not produce: direct evidence, over decades, that a small act in a specific place had mattered to specific people. He said he found this difficult to fully credit. His standard formulation, “all from two sticks of gum in 1948, unbelievable,” captured the genuine dissonance between the smallness of the initial act and the size of what followed.
## The Homecoming That Lasted Decades
The post-retirement chapter of Halvorsen’s life, from 1974 to 2022, was organized substantially around returning to Berlin. He returned to the city more than thirty times. Three of those returns were in 2009 alone, the year of the airlift’s sixty-first anniversary. Each return involved some form of commemoration: a ceremony, a candy drop, a meeting with people from the original event or their descendants.
The texture of these returns changed over time. In the early decades, many of the people he met had been children during the airlift and remembered it directly. In the later decades, those direct witnesses were fewer and older, and the commemorations increasingly involved the descendants of the original participants and younger Berliners who knew the story primarily through transmission rather than memory.