Will Steinfeld spends time with Anchorage resident Mike Thompson, uncovering the bizarre story of how he found his father, a former GQ model. Keeping this decades-spanning story pithy, Steinfield manages to reveal Thompson’s staunch character and own impressive achievements while documenting the journey to finding his long-lost dad.
Thompson doesn’t exactly come across as the son of a GQ model. He’s more likely to be outdoors, and dressed for it, biking almost every day out Lutak. His list of former ranger posts is a paragraph long and half a continent across: Girdwood, Yakutat, Sitka, Denali, Ketchikan. Then up to “the big leagues,” as he describes the National Park Service, working posts in Utah, the Cascades, Western Arctic National Park, Kenai Fjords, and Wrangell St. Elias, where he would fly patrols in a single-engine Supercub as one of three rangers responsible for a land area 20 times larger than the state of Rhode Island. Before his career as a park ranger, Thompson spent half a decade as a Federal Air Marshall, and before that was an Air Force aviator.
More picks on family
Behind His Great Novels, an Unbearable Family Secret
“The Irish author Sebastian Barry has made a career of mining his family history. But he kept one story buried.”
Still On Its Way to Cleveland
Nine months, 25,000 miles, one phone cord, and the kindness of strangers.
Murder-in-Law
“The twisted story of a domestic contract killing.”
Memory Architecture
“Devotion to a Florida home.”
The Sound of Your Voice
“The fact that I had song ideas, let alone a place where I was saving them, was significant. It had been 15 years since I’d last released an album.”
Black and Blue in Cleveland
Both of Wilbert L. Cooper’s parents were cops. In this excerpt from his memoir, Cooper recounts how his mother got into the force—and what the department did to try to keep her out.
