Don’t Look Behind You

through the walls of someone else’s home. There were no pictures of Bob’s sisters.
    As young teenagers, Robert and Kenneth had to get up before dawn to milk the cows. If they failed to do that or didn’t do it fast enough, Bob later told people, their father beat them black and blue. However, the worst humiliation for Bob Hansen was that he didn’t have time to clean upafterward and he often went to school with cow manure on his pants. The other students made fun of him and called him names.
    “I made up my mind that no one would
ever
make fun of me again,” he told a neighbor some sixty years later.
    As America plunged into the Great Depression, making a living became harder, and the Hansen family had to move from Oregon to Washington State. Their parents separated—but only so their mother could find work in Seattle. Kenneth went with his mother, Helen, and their sisters, where they started a small bakery in the Fremont district of Seattle. Bob and his father, Lester, moved to the West Hill of Kent, which was mostly covered in old-growth timber. They started from scratch on what Bob called the “Stump Farm.”
    Bob hated it, and the work clearing the land was back-breaking, but Lester Hansen taught him the basics of carpentry, a skill that would be important to him in years to come.
    Still, he felt he never pleased his father, who often asked Bob, “Why can’t you be more like Kenneth?”
    Bob Hansen recalled his childhood with bitterness. He was a boy and then a man who would always see a glass as half empty.
    Beginning with his own father, Bob felt that people treated him badly, cheated him, and tried to get whatever he had away from him. He distrusted almost everyone, although he could put on a jovial mask that hid his real feelings.
    He told the few people he confided in that he could notwait to get away from the Stump Farm, but, most of all, he wanted to leave his father far behind.
    Bob grew to be six feet four inches tall, much taller than Kenneth and their father, and he weighed well over two hundred pounds. In his baby pictures, his hair was very light—what the Danes call “towhead”—and it was cut as if a bowl had been put over his head. At eighteen, it was still blond, but thick and wavy, and it added to his tanned good looks.
    As soon as he graduated from high school, Bob joined the army. It was 1943, and the Second World War changed everyone’s lives. Bob was sent to Calcutta, India.
    Although Bob saved the photos of his family that were taken up to the time he and Kenneth were about twelve and fourteen, there are far fewer family photographs as the years passed. And then, there are many pages of shots Bob took in India, usually of the natives who lived there, but occasionally he posed with the dark-haired Calcuttans while someone else took the pictures. One gets the sense that he really enjoyed his first trip outside the United States.
    He was quite good-looking at twenty-one. Even so, none of his photos taken in India were of women, although he had dozens of pictures of dead poisonous snakes.
    Bob Hansen was sent to the front lines, serving under General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, as the Allied Forces fought to regain access to the Burma Road, which was overrun by the Japanese army. Indeed, Hansen’s scrapbook has snapshots of “Stilwell Road” and the town of Ledo. Indian, British, and Chinese forces combined to build theLedo Road, which would eventually intersect with the Burma Road. It was a project that was essential in defeating the Japanese.
    It was also extremely dangerous, and Bob didn’t enjoy his time in India as much as he had earlier. Many years later, Bob told one of his few close friends, Marvin Milosevich, that he escaped his frontline duty—but he didn’t say how he managed that. He may have deserted; he may have only talked his way into a safer assignment.
    When he left the army, Bob Hansen journeyed into the far North, and found jobs on fishing ships in Alaska. It was—and still is—a dangerous, exhausting occupation where ships and men are lost almost every year as they fight the violent sea and icy winds. But it paid well, and Bob Hansen felt he could withstand even the frightening storms that sent waves crashing over the bows of the ships he was on. As he would feel for most of his life, he was invincible.
    Today the television show
The Deadliest Catch
draws thousands of viewers. It accurately depicts the kind of life Hansen lived when he set out to