The forty-first anniversary of the Berlin Airlift was in 1989, and Halvorsen was present for it. He participated in commemorations in a city that was still divided, with the Wall still standing, and within months of a border opening he could not have anticipated. The timing is a remarkable piece of historical coincidence: the man who had symbolized the beginning of West Berlin’s survival under blockade was present in the city as the conditions of that survival finally resolved.
## A Life Bookended by Service
Halvorsen’s career followed a trajectory that was common among his generation of Air Force officers: combat-adjacent service in World War II, the peacetime Air Force of the late 1940s and 1950s, the technological transformations of the 1960s, and retirement as the Vietnam era wound down. What was uncommon was the specific episode that marked his identity in both his own country and in Germany.
He married Alta Jolley on April 16, 1949, three months after returning from Berlin and while Operation Little Vittles was still running. The marriage lasted fifty years, until Alta’s death in January 1999. Their five children grew up in the orbit of their father’s public identity; Halvorsen’s fame was not the focused celebrity of entertainment or athletics but the more diffuse and durable recognition of someone associated with a historical event that remained significant over time.
His return to Tempelhof as a base commander from 1970 to 1972 was an experience he described in terms of personal completion. He had left the airport in January 1949 as a captain who had run an unauthorized candy-dropping operation for six months. He returned as a colonel commanding the Air Force base that occupied the same facility. He brought his family. He gave tours of the airport and spoke to German visitors about the airlift. He watched his children and his German counterparts’ children grow up in the same city where, twenty-two years earlier, he had broken two sticks of gum in half.