NOVEMBER 6, 2025 – Today Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that beginning Friday, commercial flights in the U.S. will be reduced by 5,000 a day each day until 10% of pre-reduction volume is achieved. The ultimate impetus for this action is the government shutdown. As I watched the 10-second clip of Mr. Duffy delivering his statement, I couldn’t help but be reminded of his father, Tom, when Tom was a full decade younger than Secretary Duffy. I worked for Tom during the summer of 1978. “Worked” isn’t wholly accurate. Tom generously paid me for showing up every day and accompanying him on his daily rounds, such as they were.
A shirt-tail relative of my family, Bob Fairfield[1], had made the original introduction in January 1978. As a local insurance agent and life-long member of Hayward’s business community, he was well acquainted with Tom Duffy, a fellow BMOC (“big man on campus”). Solely on the basis of Bob’s recommendation, Tom graciously accepted me as his summer law clerk and even more graciously agreed to pay me a decent wage—mostly for the company.
We hit it off well and became quite good friends. Five years later, he and his wife Carol attended our wedding at Björnholm. He had a very robust and varied practice, which took him all over the map, including the closing on a client’s purchase of a resort in Minocqua. For that trip, we rented a plane (with pilot) out of the Hayward airport.[2] We took numerous road trips, as well, to neighboring counties to court and on business, and these trips allowed for extensive conversations about a host of matters of mutual interest—the practice of law, local personalities in Hayward, sailing, skiing, and running.
At the time marathon running was the rage, and both Tom and Carol had gotten the bug. I was in my prime and within Tom and Carol’s local frame of reference, I was somewhat of a celebrity for having run the Boston Marathon. They welcomed me into their “cheaper by the dozen” family—of a dozen kids—and I wound up spending gobs of time at their house in town, as well as at their cabin on the east end of Grindstone Lake. The latter was a small place and served primarily as a get-away for Tom and Carol from the bedlam back in town.
Early every Sunday morning on the east end of Hayward, I’d meet them and one of their older sons, Kevin, who was also in law school at the time, and several other Haywardian friends of the Duffy’s, for a 23-mile training run to Telemark Lodge east of Cable, Wisconsin. We’d then gorge ourselves on a buffet meal in the main restaurant of the lodge. Often we were joined by Tony Wise, the inimitable visionary and founder of all tourist attractions in the region, it seemed—including the now world famous American Birkebeiner Marathon Ski Race.[3]
Most of the Duffy clan would also be on hand for the buffet meal. Sean was among them, but I hung out with his far older sister, Peggy, and her fiancé, Bruce, who were my age, and Kevin, the runner, a year younger. Thus, the four of us adults stuck together while the younger kids downed their food and went off to play the pinball machines.
Early in the evening before our weekly run-and-feed, however, Sean and his buddy-brother, Brian (the two being close in age), always joined Tom, Kevin and me to plant water bottles along our running route up U.S. Highway 63 from Hayward to Cable. Seated in the back of the family’s big station wagon, Sean and Brian would scamper out at our appointed stops and stash the bottles behind a signpost, then scoot back to the car for the next stop.
I turned 24 that summer, which meant that Sean was only a 7-year-old. Consequently, we didn’t talk much with each other. Usually he and Brian and the other “kid”-kids were off playing while their much older siblings and Tom and Carol and I hung out together.
Where am I going with all this? Secretary Sean Duffy’s announcement regarding flight reductions because of the government shutdown. You see, as he stood there behind the podium, a member of the Naked Emperor’s cabinet, I simply could not take him seriously. I saw a seven-year-old kid in the backseat of his dad’s station wagon, a bottle of water in each hand, waiting for the car to stop so he could jump out, run to the “No Passing” sign and drop off the bottle at the bottom of the signpost.
Little did anyone in the car know at the time that Sean would grow up to be a champion lumberjack, specializing in tree-climbing and winning top prize at the 1994 Lumberjack World Championship (see note 3 below). For his reckless technique he was compared to a “race-car driver who bumps the wall now and then.”
I know my impression is terribly unfair. I mean . . . after all, Paul Bunyan was a lumberjack and according to legend, anyway, a stand-up guy, and as to youth, everyone over the age of seven was at one time . . . well, seven. The difference is having met the future lumberjack when he was only seven and I was a full-fledged adult of 24 (and veteran marathoner!). This age differential left an impression I just can’t shake. The image sticks even though that young kid is now a full three decades older than I was that summer. When I saw the video clip of Sean Duffy today, I didn’t see myself as a 24-year-old and looking up to a 54-year-old. I saw him as a seven-year-old. Consequently, try as I might, I couldn’t take him seriously. I perceived him as a seven-year-old running the Department of Transportation, having been appointed by a permanent five-ye . . . Okay. I’ll stop while I’m ahead.
But nevertheless, I wish the seven-year-old the very best of luck wearing the shoes of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Bob and his wife Elsie were regular visitors at Björnholm, and we, in turn, at their place on nearby Spring Lake. Bob was married to Elsie, daughter of “Nellie,” my grandmother’s cousin who’d left Sweden around the same time my grandmother had emigrated. On one of my trips back to the Motherland, one of my cousins pointed out the farmhouse where Nellie had lived as a child. She’d wound up marrying another Swedish immigrant, Carl, who’d moved his family—Nellie and their four children—from Minneapolis to Hayward, WI in 1919, soon after Carl had lost an eye in an industrial accident. I don’t know Bob’s family background, but he himself, I believe, had grown up in Hayward. Carl, by the way, was a highly skilled craftsman (carpenter, wood-worker, stone mason), who built over 100 split-stone fireplaces in the area and served as a general contractor for many cabins in the Hayward area (including our family’s). For many years, Carl made the wooden trophy cup that was awarded to the winner of the Birkebeiner Ski Race.
[2] The pilot was the manager of the airport and flew us in a six-seater. I’ll never forget the aborted take-off from Hayward. Just before V-1, the pilot cut the throttle. A few seconds later he said, “Hmm, so there’s the problem” as he flipped a switch. He turned the aircraft back around and returned to the other end of the runway for another try (which worked). I was afraid to ask what “the problem” had been, and the pilot didn’t volunteer any further information. I decided it was best to go with the assumption that he’d been abundantly cautious in aborting the take-off, and that “the problem” was something minor or not really a problem but a cautious response to what had been misperceived as a “problem.”
[3] According to Tom, Tony Wise spoke fluent Chippewa, quite a feat for a white guy. Tony’s grandfather was from Maine and an alumnus of my alma mater, Bowdoin College. Tony himself was born in Hayward (1921), graduated from Ohio State University and obtained a master’s degree from Harvard no less. During WW II he was a Lieutenant General in the Ski Corps. A true visionary, Tony was a fountain of big, creative ideas, but he was never much concerned about the bottom line of any of the commercial enterprises he launched. (He became known as a “serial debtor-in-bankruptcy”). In addition to starting the American Birkebeiner Race, he was a key driver in assembling the 54-miles of easements to accommodate the Birkebeiner Trail through Sawyer and Bayfield Counties, which to this day, thousands of skiers—myself included—enjoy throughout the ski and biking seasons. With Tom Duffy’s active assistance and participation, Tony launched the World Loppet X-C Races, which still draw thousands of skiers from around the world every year. He was founder of the World Lumberjack Championships in Hayward—great entertainment that still never misses a beat. Along the way he was a founder of the Sawyer County Historical Society.
