This detail is small. It is not documented anywhere except through Halvorsen’s recollection. It cannot be verified. But it is the detail that most consistently, in his own account, explained why the encounter affected him as it did. He had walked out to the fence expecting, perhaps, to distribute something. He walked away having received something: a demonstration of how children in a blockaded city had adapted to their situation.
The subsequent drops, the letters, the reunions, the foundation, the congressional medal, the schools named after him in Berlin — all of it, in Halvorsen’s framing, flowed from that moment when a child smelled the wrapper of a stick of gum they hadn’t been given. The foil wrapper was the story’s hinge. Everything that followed was an attempt, perhaps impossible to complete, to respond adequately to what that moment had contained.
## The Candy Bomber Foundation
In 2016, two years before the Berlin Airlift’s seventieth anniversary, Halvorsen co-founded the Gail S. Halvorsen Aviation Education Foundation. The foundation was later renamed The Candy Bomber Foundation to make its connection to its founder’s story explicit.
The foundation’s work centered on aviation education for young people, using the candy bomber story as a vehicle for engaging students with aviation history and the values Halvorsen associated with the drops. The specific programming included school visits, educational materials about the Berlin Airlift, and efforts to connect students with aviation as a potential career and as a form of historical engagement.
The foundation reflected a pattern visible throughout Halvorsen’s post-retirement years: the institutionalization of a personal story into something that could outlast the person. He was in his mid-nineties when the foundation was established, and the choice to create an organization rather than simply continue his own speaking and visiting activities was an acknowledgment that the story needed institutional support to survive its principal narrator.