Towards the end, my grandfather told us about the time he was sailing on a Navy battleship in the Mediterranean Sea and his convoy was attacked by the German Luftwaffe. It was not the only memory Jack Shevlin kept to himself over the decades. My mom didn’t know he was at Iwo Jima until a few years before he died last summer at 101 years old. His was a grand life, an adventurous one, a brave and extraordinary and unlikely one for a Depression kid born in a pandemic who stuck around long enough to see the next one. He unspooled a story across four continents before he returned home, married a pretty girl from down the block in Queens, and climbed the ladder in the textile business. It’s a story that still convinces me to believe, as I’ve grown old enough to know the difference, that there is something to be salvaged in this experiment of America. I’m so grateful to see it in the pages of @esquire’s March issue, out now on a newsstand near you.