The retirement years, from 1974 to 2022, were long and occupied. The BYU position, the missionary postings, the farm in Spanish Fork, the foundation work, and the continuous return trips to Berlin were not the retirement of a man who had finished. They were the continued work of someone whose most significant act had generated obligations that extended forward in time.
He was asked about the candy drops thousands of times, in contexts ranging from elementary school visits to congressional hearings to diplomatic receptions. His account remained consistent in its essential structure even as the contexts varied enormously. He was not a man who seemed to tire of the question, perhaps because his answer was always really about what the children had given him rather than what he had given them. The question was about gum and parachutes; his answer was about freedom and restraint and what it had meant to listen to those children at the fence.
## The Weight of a Wrapper
The image Halvorsen returned to most consistently in his later years was the foil wrappers. The children who didn’t receive a piece of gum tore off strips of the foil and smelled the gum scent on the paper. This detail appeared in his accounts of the encounter from early on and remained there through the last interviews he gave before his health declined.
What it captured, Halvorsen seemed to feel, was the nature of the deprivation these children were living with. It was not simply that they didn’t have gum. It was that they had developed a relationship to scarcity that turned the wrapper of something they didn’t have into an object of value. The smell of the gum through the paper was something, in a context where most things were nothing.