Once, when I was writing about Ken's life, I told you that every Friday he would get in whatever airplane he could find that--wasn't being used by the Navy or Marines for that weekend.  He was in Pensacola, and had decided to fly to Pryor and try to talk me into marrying him.  If you missed that story, go back to mid-February.

I forgot to tell you about the first Friday. After work, (teaching cadets to hook wire so that they could carrier qualify), he put on a flight suit, crawled in whatever jet was available and flew to Oklahoma.  The first Friday that he did that, he came in from due East flying into the sun, and dropped to fifty feet over our house going rather fast. (Which was illegal, but in the early fifties those Marines did a lot of things that would get them locked up today. Besides which, there weren't many restrictions.)

What he failed to realize, was that in the nine years since he had left Pryor, they had built a water tower a block west from my house.   He saw the tower in time to flip sideways and miss it by a foot or two.  Our romance was almost over before it began.  I asked him if that was the closest he ever came to killing himself.  "Not even close," he replied.

That story is one of the reasons people from town were saying, "Marry him, so we can get some rest."  Of course some people tried to catch him, but he was there and gone before the noise (as he broke the sound barrier) was over.  It finally got to the point that everyone was expecting the boom on Fridays.  And being a little town, they were tolerant.  But I think there was a sigh of relief when I said, "I do," and moved to Pensacola.

I thought he must have been the James Dean of Naval aviation until I met some of the other pilots.  They were all equally nuts.  I guess that is how they survived Korea.  I told you he got hit seven times in his first twenty-five missions.  Unheard of today.  And he was one of many.

1 Timothy 1:7 "For God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."  
Ken was definitely fearless, flying a lot of power, in love, but the sound mind is questionable.  Who would do such a crazy thing.