The house itself was an early-1960s low-slung box, more long than tall, coated with the usual mix of siding and stone. Inside, a carpeted sitting room connected to a kitchen and dining room, just large enough for a mammoth dining table made by a family friend that could fit two people on each end, if needed, and six down each side. From the front hall, one half staircase led up to the bedrooms while another led down to a sublevel that, by necessity, the Galvins used for more sleeping space. Margaret, Don and Mimi’s eleventh child, was eighteen months old; she would have a bedroom of her own, upstairs near her parents, with pale lime-green carpet and a large pine tree outside the window. Mark and Joe shared a room on that floor. On the ground level, Peter and Matt shared a room with twin beds. The older boys still left at home were in the lower level, sleeping on corner couch units that unfolded into beds at night.
For Mimi, everything about the house on Hidden Valley Road shouted just enough: Enough of a living room to accommodate wrestling matches, enough of a kitchen to cook all day for the family, enough space outside to breathe when you needed to, or to play football, or ride bikes, or fly falcons. Mimi and the older boys put three coats of paint on every wall. And she herself started work on a rock garden in the back, near where Frederica the goshawk stood guard. Don built a large A-frame mews on top of the hill in the backyard that housed more birds, including Hansel and Gretel, two hawks they’d take flying on the sprawling lawns of the Carlson family’s nearby dairy farm. Their prized birds—Frederica, followed by her successor, Atholl—also were permitted to perch on the living room coffee table. For the first time, perhaps, the Galvins were home.
Mimi and all twelve children (Mary in Mimi’s arms) at the front steps of the house on Hidden Valley Road. Photo by Don.
* * *
—
DONALD’S FRESHMAN YEAR at Colorado State coincided with the move to Hidden Valley Road. None of his inner fears were on display, not to his family. He told them he wanted to be a doctor, and he saw how proud they were to hear that. His job, after he left home, was to maintain that veneer. On Hidden Valley Road, the power vacuum among the brothers was seized by Jim.
Having long since stopped competing on his older brother’s playing field, Jim instead set out to dominate in the areas Donald seemed weakest. If Donald won childhood, the first round, Jim would win the next round, real life. Jim tried assuming the role of the younger boys’ cool big brother—the brother in the biker jacket, the brother who drove a black ’57 Chevy, the brother most likely to offer to sneak a little Bacardi into your Coke. The younger Galvin brothers appreciated it sometimes, but remained mostly wary, particularly after Jim started hitting on any girls they brought home with them. Jim liked being known as provocative, and if he came off as menacing, so much the better. He had, he thought, a certain confidence, or brashness, his other brothers lacked. “At sixteen, we knew something was wrong with Jim,” said Richard, who was seven years younger, “but we just thought it was okay, just being a boy—out drinking, carousing, delinquent activity, skipping school.”
No longer burdened by the Galvin family’s demands of perfection, Jim drank more than Donald had, went out more, and got in trouble more—culminating in a stunt that got him kicked out of Air Academy High School in the middle of his senior year, the same year that the family moved to Hidden Valley Road. He and a friend were at the Academy’s jet center, clowning around on one of the planes. Jim was inside the cockpit, and his friend was just outside, when Jim pushed a button that made the plane move slightly, enough to send the other boy flying backward, colliding with the tail of the jet. An inch or two in a different direction and that boy might have died. Jim was forced to transfer to the local Catholic school, St. Mary’s. This would have been a shock if it had happened to Donald. Not so with Jim. The consolation of being a washout is the benefit of low expectations. Jim had nowhere to go but up.
Nor did the expulsion humiliate the Galvins as it might have another proud, striving family. Mimi understood how to take the worst possible bad news and cast it aside, moving on as if such a thing had hardly mattered to begin with. She’d watched her own mother do it, when her father left the family in scandal. Don, too, knew how to blot out the darker aspects of his life, leaving a number of subjects undiscussed: the horrors he saw firsthand during the war, his failure to advance in the Navy, his troubling hospitalization during his Air Force posting in Canada. And so now that they had hit their stride in Colorado, they were not about to let their strong-willed son’s ridiculous mistake define them. It was simple enough for Don and Mimi to decide that the problem of Jim, as they saw it, was already on its way to being solved. He was finishing high school and would soon be off on his own. Maybe he would take a year of community college to clean up his academics for a real four-year program. But no matter what, as Don always told Mimi, Jim would have to grow up sooner or later. All the boys would.
For Mimi, coming to Hidden Valley Road was meant to signal the beginning of her family’s long-awaited von Trapp family–style idyll. With Donald no longer living at home, and Jim about to leave, she felt as if they all had that perfect life now, almost within reach. What if what they’d needed all along—Donald, Jim, all of them—was some extra space to spread their wings? She wanted a house filled with music, and she enlisted the boys to help her. The boys learned piano on a bargain-basement $850 baby grand that Don and Mimi found in a shop downtown. John and Brian and Matt and eventually little Peter all played flute. On weekends, Mimi would throw a symphony on the record player and tell the story behind it, explaining the music with encyclopedic detail. When the boys got a tape recorder, they’d tape the Saturday morning Metropolitan Opera broadcast for her, and Mimi would play it all week long, alternating it with sing-alongs to ballads and folk songs by Burl Ives and John Jacob Niles. In the neighborhood, the Galvin kids played kick the can and capture the flag and kickball and Simon Says with the neighborhood children—the Skarkes, the Hollisters, the Turleys, the Warringtons, the Woods, the Olsons. In the fields and forests of Woodmen Valley, Mimi taught the children to identify wild animals, like the bobcat that lived in the small dark cave in the white cliffs down the road.
As the 1960s progressed, the habits and motivations of the younger generation became more mysterious and frightening to the parents of the Galvin children’s friends. Not Don and Mimi. The Galvins remained good Catholic New Frontier–era liberals, permissive socially but disciplined domestically, tolerant in their hearts yet strict in their ways. They prayed for the president who had died just a few weeks after their move to Hidden Valley Road, and they prayed for the president who had taken his place, and as the conflict in Vietnam escalated, Don, a colonel in the Air Force, held his tongue about how he felt. Only later would he tell his boys that the unfortunate ones who had been sent to fight in Southeast Asia were nothing more than, in his words, “assassins in uniform.” Most of his sons went to parties, played rock ’n’ roll music, and stayed out late. As long as they came to mass on Sundays, dressed appropriately, all was as it should be.