I was very gullible.  He could have told me anything and I would have believed it.  Ken said he wouldn't tease me again and for 57 years, he never did.

But it was a football medal.  When Korea was brewing and rumbling, the draft was instituted and many of the pro football players chose to go to flight school.  There were so many of them, that they decided to form a football team.  The Pensacola Goslings.  They had everything they needed except a halfback. One of them had heard that Ken had made all state as a half back so they asked him to join them.  "I told them," Ken said, "I'll get killed.  You guys are out of my league.  I only weigh 160."

"Get behind that All-American center, just stay behind him.  We'll take care of you."  I guess they did.  They beat Army, Navy, West Point and I don't know who all else and Ken made many of the touchdowns.  So he got a medal.  But it definitely wasn't the Congressional Medal of Honor.

He later told me that some of the guys he played with were really special.  James Stockdale ended up as  a prisoner of war in Vietnam.  He was the senior captive at Hanoi Hilton.  He also was a vice presidential candidate.  There were others.  Too many stories to tell.  Ken seemed to have a way of ending up on the cutting edge of what was going on in the world.

When he graduated from flight school, he and one other man in his class were chosen to go to jet training.  The first class of  Naval jet aviation since WWII.  And I don't even know if they had formal Jet training in WWII.  It was a good thing because the rest of his class went to Korea and over half of them were dead before the year was up.  So the commandant of the Marine Corps issued an order that no new cadet who got their wings could go until he had a year of training state side.  Ken was ordered to join the Seattle Reserves.  All of them were WWII veterans. "They taught me to fly," Ken told me.  "They broke all the rules.  They wanted to live, do their year and go home.  I was the only second Lt. in the squadron.  I probably owe them my life.  When I got to the war, I was ahead of the game."