JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 5
When, after four years of out-of-town postings, the Galvins returned to Colorado Springs in 1958, the dusty town they’d left behind was fading into history. The United States Air Force Academy had opened while they were gone, and thousands of newcomers—cadets and their instructors and all the personnel needed to support a vast new military institution—were swiftly changing the character of the place. Where once there had been a dirt road with a couple of ruts, crossed by barbed wire gates that you had to open and close yourself, now there was Academy Boulevard, paved and leading to a gate that was guarded like it was the checkpoint between East and West Berlin. Inside, the Academy had its own post office, commissary, and telephone exchange. And the glistening new structures of the Academy itself were modernist masterpieces—sleek glass boxes designed by the largest architectural firm in the nation, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, rising up from the clay of the West, announcing the dawn of a new American era.
Don could be a part of that future, just as he’d always hoped. At his previous posting, in northern California, he had worked nights at Stanford to earn a master’s degree in political science. Now he was back in Colorado to start a version of the academic life he’d longed for, joining the Academy faculty as an instructor.
The Air Force moved the family into one of a warren of one-story military family houses on the new campus. Theirs was on a hill, with a small patch of grass and a south-facing front door. Don and Mimi set up four bunk beds in the basement level for their eight boys. That worked well until their ninth boy, Matthew, was born in December. Their oldest, Donald, was thirteen now, and he and the brothers close to him in age used the Academy grounds as a playground. They had the run of the place: the indoor and outdoor rec centers, the ice rinks, the swimming pools, the gyms, the bowling alley, even the golf course. No one held them back. In a time of feverish conformity, at the Academy there was also a sense of liberty—the Western frontier spirit, perhaps, or the optimism of a new generation, home from war, building an institution that faced the future with a serene confidence.
Don was like many of the teachers there: World War II veteran hero scholars, young and brash and erudite—and more open-minded than their counterparts at West Point or Annapolis, creating programs in philosophy and ethics that would have seemed out of place at an older, stuffier military college. His life plan firmly back in place, Don walked the Academy grounds with a certain infectious self-assurance. This was a return of the smooth and seamless Don of his high school president days—and those years in the Navy, playing tennis with the captain of the USS Juneau.
There had been a few years in between, it’s true, when it didn’t seem like things would go Don’s way. In his time away from Colorado, Don had hated his assignment in Canada seemingly out of proportion to what the situation seemed to warrant. As a briefing officer, he dealt with classified information, and he spoke in alarmed tones to Mimi about how lax the standards were there; to see papers tossed around without much care seemed to set Don off in a way that Mimi had not seen in him before. His emotional state was fragile enough to force him to take sick leave, first at a hospital at Sampson Air Force Base in New York, and then briefly at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. It seemed to Mimi that Don had had an attack of nerves, not unlike what a lot of veterans of the war had, particularly ones like Don who never talked about anything they experienced in battle. But his next posting, in California, was better; Stanford was near his base, allowing him to do graduate work. And now that he was back in Colorado, he, like many of the men in his generation, had come to trust that if you did all the right things in all the right ways, then good things would come to you.
A year before