In the 1960s and ’70s, during the Vietnam War, somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 Americans came to Canada to escape the draft — and many of them stayed. The New York Times recently profiled one of these expats.

Michael Wolfson arrived in Canada in 1968, after his application for conscientious objector status was rejected. According to the Times, he wrote to the draft board, saying, “The reason I did not comply with your order [to report for military service] is that I did not, on that particular day, feel like it….”

Eventually, though, Wolfson settled down and grew up. He earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of Toronto and went on to receive a Ph.D. in economics from Cambridge University in the U.K. Today, he has dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship and works as a senior statistician for Statistics Canada.

You can read the rest of the Times article here. To learn more about what happened to many of the Vietnam-era draft resisters in Canada, have a look at the book, Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada, by sociologist John Hagan.

Photo by WalkingGeek (flickr)