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Last Time Around (cont.)

HE WASN'T ALWAYS SO BOLD. My grandfather often told me how firecrackers had frightened my father as a young boy. This so vexed my grandfather, a former college tackle and avid wilderness canoeist, that early one Fourth of July he hauled my father out to the garage of the family's summer home on Pine Lake, in southern Wisconsin. There, away from the prying eyes of cousins, he gave Dad lessons in how to shoot off firecrackers.

"After that he liked firecrackers," my grandfather said with a satisfied laugh.

So much of my father's adventurous spirit sprang from my grandfather, Howard Stark. Growing up in Milwaukee around the turn of the century, Howard swam competitively against rival Chicago's ace, Johnny Weissmuller—soon to be an Olympic champion and star of Tarzan movies. Instead of heading to Hollywood, my grandfather finished college and joined his family's Milwaukee candy-making company. Still, he loved to take his young son and nephews on canoe trips and teach them, for instance, how to do back flips off the cliffs of the Wisconsin Dells for passing tourist boats. He always appreciated an audience.

My grandfather encouraged my father's travels; he regretted not traveling the world himself when he was young. But they had to be squared with a family rule handed down through Howard's Prussian ancestry: The summer you turned 16, playtime ended and you landed a job during summer vacation. My father had zero interest in farmwork, Howard's choice for his own 16th summer, and even less in stirring vats of caramel or stamping out valentine hearts in the candy factory. Dad had been smitten by the romance of the sea while growing up within earshot of a Lake Michigan foghorn and racing sailboats out at Pine Lake. In the summer of 1943, he decided to ship out.

With most of the country's young men in uniform, and civilian jobs plentiful, my father rode a bus down to the Milwaukee harbor and, in the union hiring hall, easily landed a berth as a mess boy on a 1,000-foot Great Lakes ore freighter. He stepped ashore two months later with a double-size paycheck—and his father's approval—unknowingly having done the work of two mess boys.

He spent the following summers at sea. Then came a stint in the Naval Air Corps, the end of World War II, and his matriculation at Dartmouth College. The summer he was 20, he chipped paint on a Swedish freighter steaming across the North Atlantic; when it docked in Gothenburg, he looked out over the ship's railing and remarked to the Swedish third mate that he wished he could see the countryside. The third mate offered to help him jump ship, clandestinely bought him a train ticket to central Sweden—where the authorities weren't likely to find him—and had my father's seabag spirited down the gangplank in the night. Dad spent the rest of that summer hiking with a young woman named Anne-Marie. He always liked, as he put it, to "beat City Hall"—to defy authority, to pull surprises. That was a theme of his adventuring life.

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