Daniel Ellsberg’s recent death at age 92 takes me back to my first Ledger-Transcript essay, “My lost airplane and Daniel Ellsberg.” I wrote it in 2006 while flying east from California, where I had met Ellsberg at a legal conference. For those who missed the earlier piece, here are the highlights.

When I was young, maybe 9 or 10, my mother gave me a toy airplane that I managed to lose the first time I got it into the air at Barnes Park in Claremont. It just flew away.

I went home, dejected. I looked at the box, which was all I had left of the plane, and wrote a letter to the Marx Toy Company. I wanted someone there to know what had happened and how unhappy I was, even if no one answered.

But I did get a reply, a personal, hand-written letter from Louis Marx, the “Marx” in the name of what was then the world’s largest toy company. I no longer have the letter, but more than 70 years later, I still remember that he complimented me on my writing and, even better, promised to send me a new plane.

Weeks went by with no replacement plane. I wanted to write a reminder letter, but for some unexplained reason my mother wouldn’t let me. I guess it didn’t occur to me to exercise some independence and write to Marx anyway, and the plane never came.

Decades later, the Rand Corporation, where Daniel Ellsberg worked as a strategic analyst, compiled a history of the Vietnam War now known as the Pentagon Papers. By 1971, Ellsberg had become disillusioned with the war, and he made a historic decision..

The fallout from what he did – copying some 7,000 pages and turning them over to The New York Times – was historic. The Supreme Court upheld the right of the press to publish the documents, the war ended sooner than might otherwise have been the case and Ellsberg acquired everlasting fame.

Somewhere in all the press writeups at the time was mention of the fact that Ellsberg was married to Patricia Marx, the toymaker’s daughter. I remembered my boyhood exchange of letters with Louis Marx, told the airplane story to my young sons and returned the lost airplane to the back of my brain.

Early in 2006, I went to the California conference and heard Ellsberg speak. I decided to introduce myself and tell him about my lost airplane.

When I got to the part where his father-in-law promised to send me the airplane, Ellsberg said, “That sounds just like him.” And when I told him it never came, he said, “You should have written to remind him.” I told him I wanted to but instead obeyed my mother. He said, “I can’t wait to get home and tell the story to Pat.”

Since 1971, other leakers have become prominent – Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks; Edward Snowden, now a Russian citizen; Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, who served several years in prison for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks; and, most recently, National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, now under indictment. I express no views on those four, but I join with many who have recently written letters in praise of Daniel Ellsberg.

One letter to the New York Times described his acts as “a heroic story of courage, character, and determination.” A letter to the Boston Globe called him “a champion of transparency and defender of democratic values.” My favorite came from a woman born in Saigon in 1968. She met Ellsberg at a conference in Portland, Ore., and approached him, as I had done, to introduce herself. But her reason was different and vastly more profound than mine. She thanked him for helping bring the Vietnam War to an end, enabling her to board an airplane to this country and to become an American citizen.

A few weeks after my 2006 trip to California, Ellsberg sent me his book, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” He inscribed the book, “To Joe, for peace and truth—and to restore the honor of Marx Toys and my wife’s father. Dan Ellsberg.”

Joseph D. Steinfield lives in Keene and Jaffrey. He can be reached at joe@joesteinfield.com.