James S. Rockefeller Jr. was born in 1926 and raised in Greenwich, Conn., and served in the Army Air Corp during World War II. A graduate of Yale University, he spent his youth traveling and exploring until settling down in Maine. His book about his travels in the Pacific, Man on His Island, was published in 1957 by W.W. Norton. He is a cofounder of the Owls Head Transportation Museum and was its chairman until 2017. Rockefeller built boats for twenty years at the Bald Mountain Boat Works, where he also restored a 1912 Etrich Taube replica airplane. He stopped flying at the age of ninety, after clocking more than 2,000 hours in the air. Rockefeller has two children, Liv and Ola, with former wife Liv Heyerdahl, now deceased. He married Marilyn Moss in 1983. The couple resides in Camden, Maine.