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THE GALVINS HAD done all the right things in all the right ways, and now, just as Don had always trusted they would, good things seemed to be coming their way.
Just before the move, Don, who was nearing the twenty-year mark of his military service, transferred to a new post at NORAD. His title was information staff officer. This was another job briefing generals, like the one he’d had years earlier, only this time, the job had an element of public relations, sending him out to deliver speeches to clubs and organizations around the country, explaining the international defense control center that coordinated the continent’s first ballistic-missile early warning system and the deployment, if or when the time came, of nuclear weapons located at eight hundred separate military installations in the United States and Canada. Back home, the Galvin boys, who along with their schoolmates were the first generation to grow up living with the prospect of possible nuclear annihilation, thrilled at eavesdropping on their father after dinner, when he filled in generals with end-of-day briefings on the kitchen phone. Back at headquarters, Don gave tours to reporters and visiting public officials, often working in mentions of his bevy of children and his beloved Academy falcons. Colonel Galvin “was apparently gone on birds,” wrote a columnist from the Daily Star in Hammond, Louisiana. “He kept telling the group how he trains falcons (to hunt) and was instrumental in getting the Academy’s sports teams named the ‘Falcons.’ ”
The greatest of all the good things happened in 1966, when Don retired from the Air Force and started a new career as a grant-in-aid man, overseeing programs funded by the federal government for the benefit of the states—first as the vice chairman of the Colorado State Council on the Arts and Humanities, and then as the first full-time executive director of the Federation of Rocky Mountain States. This new organization counted seven states in the American West as members, from Montana down to New Mexico. Soon enough, Arizona would make it eight. The Federation was a quasi-governmental group, formed to help the region attract industry, banking, the arts, and major transportation projects. The governors of each of the member states took turns heading the group. But the real man in charge, day to day, was Don Galvin. He was putting both his political science degree and his military experience into action as a sort of domestic diplomat—a liaison between the government and the private sector and nonprofit worlds. The older boys who were still at home were in awe of him. “He was telling governors what to do,” said Richard, the sixth son, who was twelve when Don started the job. “You knew he had the presence, but man, when you heard his voice, it resounded.”
With his new career, Don’s—and, by extension, Mimi’s—horizons were only broadening. What was once a quiet life in Colorado among the falcons now seemed like a stepping-stone to the world stage. In Washington, Don lobbied for a new railroad from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Cheyenne, Wyoming; and a pipeline to bring water south from Canada or Alaska; and the western United States’ first public television station. The Federation pooled risk capital for experimental industrial projects, worked to find new mineral and water resources, formed a science advisory council for technological development, and promoted tourism with touring art exhibits and support for the Denver, Phoenix, and Utah Symphonies and the Utah Civic Ballet, which Don renamed Ballet West. The new name actually was Mimi’s idea: “Utah Civic spells Mormon all over it,” she’d said with a roll of her eyes. But Howard Hughes had just named his new airline Air West; maybe if they followed his lead, Mimi suggested, Hughes would donate one day?
With money from the National Endowment for the Arts, Don started offering residencies to the East Coast’s most prestigious and accomplished dancers and choreographers and conductors. By the late 1960s, Don and Mimi and whichever children were too small to leave at home on their own would travel to Aspen and Santa Fe for concerts, fund-raisers, conferences, and galas. Which was how, with the Federation, Mimi’s old dreams of a life of art and culture and the best of everything really were coming true—first the dream house, then the dream life.
In Santa Fe, the Galvins were regulars at parties where the guest list often included Georgia O’Keeffe—in her signature black hat and long black skirt, her hair in a long braid down the middle of her back—and Henriette Wyeth, Andrew’s sister, who demanded to paint Don and Mimi’s little girls, Margaret and Mary, in their gossamer organdy dresses that made them look like they’d stepped right out of a double portrait by Gainsborough. For Mimi, very little could match the thrill of visiting Henriette Wyeth’s ranch in Roswell, New Mexico, standing in the barn where she and her husband, the artist Peter Hurd, painted, and seeing Hurd take her two little girls on a hike to look at the orange trees and the sagebrush that made little Margaret sneeze. Or having breakfast with the legendary conductor Maurice Abravanel and choreographer Agnes de Mille (who, like Georgia O’Keeffe, showed extraordinarily little interest in young Margaret and Mary). Or watching Don as he sweet-talked David Rockefeller into funding the Federation’s new public television project.
They made new friends, too, like the oil wildcatter Samuel Gary, whose 1967 strike in Bell Creek Field in Montana tapped an estimated 240 million barrels of oil—the largest oil strike west of the Mississippi at that time. Sam relied on Don and the Federation for help in building out Bell Creek into a town that could support hundreds of new oil workers. If the main drag of Bell Creek needed a new traffic light, Don Galvin was a phone call away. Through the late 1960s, with Margaret and Mary in tow, the Galvins visited with the Garys at their house in the refined Cherry Hills section of Denver. Sam and his wife, Nancy, had eight children, and a few of the girls were close in age to Margaret and Mary. The children would play together while the grown-ups would play tennis or talk politics. The Garys loved watching Don with his falcons; Don’s fame as the Air Force Academy’s falcon man preceded him. Once, in Colorado Springs, Don and Mimi enlisted young Donald to teach Sam and Nancy and some of their children how to rappel off the cliff at Cathedral Rock. Another time, when the Garys flew Don and Mimi to Swan Lake in Cedar Springs, Idaho, in their tiny, unpressurized private plane, Mimi got dizzy during the flight and passed out.
Back home, Mimi and Don became regular guests at dinner parties, where Don held forth with authority on politics and industry and the arts. All eyes were on her accomplished husband. Mimi felt she had it all on those nights. Don was handsome, intelligent, and a little flirtatious. Her friends would call him Romeo.
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NOTHING IS FREE, and before long, Mimi put her finger on the price. More than Don, she saw how her nose was pressed up against the windows of this world. She had no college education, and she and Don had no wealth. Her own pedigree, Grandfather Kenyon and his levees, mattered very little among the millionaires of the new West. At best, they were the help. Even at their most benign, Sam and Nancy Gary, their new multimillionaire friends, were living reminders that the world that Mimi and Don were traveling in—the world of the Federation and governors and oil wildcatters and world-class artists and dancers and celebrity orchestra conductors—was not really their world at all.