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New Candy Bomber Foundation Executive Director Lorene Moore is pictured.

Courtesy Lorene Moore

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Gail Halvorson is shown interacting with kids in West Berlin in during the Berlin Airlift.

Courtesy Lorene Moore

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An airpline is pictured at a Candy Bomber Foundation event in an undated photo.

Courtesy Lorene Moore

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Kids shoot off toy rockets at a Candy Bomber Foundation event in 2023 in Richfield.

Courtesy Lorene Moore

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Kids participate in a STEM activity at an undated Candy Bomber Foundation event.

Courtesy Lorene Moore

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A girl participates in a STEM activity at an undated Candy Bomber Foundation event.

Courtesy Lorene Moore

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When Gail Halvorson wiggled his airplane’s wings over West Berlin and dropped chocolate and sweets in parachutes to children during the Soviet blockade of the city from 1948 to 1949, he wasn’t doing it for the candy itself.

The treats served as a vehicle for something greater.

“It wasn’t the candy the kids needed. What he saw was that they needed hope,” said Lorene Moore, the new executive director of Halvorson’s charity, The Candy Bomber Foundation. “They needed to see that they mattered and that somebody was paying attention to their needs.”

Moore is taking over the leadership role of the Spanish Fork-based charity after Dr. James R. Stewart chose to step down following an 11-year tenure at the helm. She told the Daily Herald The Candy Bomber Foundation will continue to honor Halvorson’s legacy by supplying hope to children in Utah and beyond through educational and community efforts.

“We recognize that one of the things that gives kids hope the most is having a good education and knowing that they have opportunities,” Moore said. “(Stewart) has helped it grow from a small group of pilots that wanted to help the Civil Air Patrol, which was a great cause, into an organization that is able to help support STEM programs all over the state.”

In a release, Steward said: “What an incredible journey it has been. Taking this foundation from a dream among friends to a mission with global reach has been one of the greatest honors of my life. … Lorene has exactly what this mission needs — vision, integrity, and hands-on leadership. I step aside with full confidence in her and great excitement for what comes next.”

Moore, an Elk Ridge resident, said her path to becoming executive director started when she took her kids to see Halvorson do a candy bomb drop in Orem in his C-54. She said her kids loved it so much that for Halvorson’s next candy drop, she took them to help wrap the candy in parachutes.

“After that, we were kind of hooked,” she said. “It was so fun getting to meet Gail, because he was still a 10-year-old at heart, even at 100-years-old. So he was always great with kids of all ages, and helping him bring that kind of joy to all those kids that he would do the candy drops with was really fulfilling for us.”

After volunteering for a few years, Moore began serving on the charity’s board until her newest appointment.

“Kind of surprising, kind of fun,” she said.

The foundation is launching a handful of new programs as Moore begins her new role. Beginning this fall is the foundation’s “Innovation Launch Pad” program, which will take a mobile science museum to schools in underserved areas who can’t easily visit science museums in Salt Lake City and provide activities for kids to interact with and learn more about the subject.

The foundation is also developing “CAMP SOAR,” a two-week summer program where students focus on service, opportunity, awareness and readiness. In the first week of the camp, students will learn about different community needs and service resources. In the second week, they will create a project intended to solve some of those problems.

“We’re really excited with the community partnerships that we’re building so that we can make this a really positive and hopefully life-changing experience for these students,” Moore said.

Another focus of Halvorson’s charity is aviation. The charity’s vision is to build an aviation education center and museum at the Spanish Fork Airport, and Moore said the charity will continue to aim for that while prepping the next generation of aviation workers.

“One of the things that we see in the aviation industry is they are quickly finding that there is a vast gap between the number of pilots, mechanics, engineers, and really, every level of the aviation industry,” she said. “It’s growing faster than they can fill those jobs. And so our goal is to help these kids to see they have a great future, and the aviation industry could be the perfect avenue for them to seek that in.”

The Candy Bomber Foundation’s next public activity is on Sept. 20 at the “Feed the Kids Fall Festival” at Salem Hills High School, where they will teach kids how to build and launch paper rockets with bicycle-pump launchers.

On Sept. 29, the foundation will be at Spanish Fork’s “Wings and Wheels” event, where it will launch the Innovation Launch Pad program.