When I was looking for information about a friend of Ken's, Pete Olson--because I was going to include something about him in this book I am writing, there was nothing out there.  It was as if he never existed.

But I knew he did, because Ken mentioned that he flew for the Blue Angels.  He and Ken went to flight school together, left Pensacola together, served a year at El Toro, then both went to VMF-212 in Korea, and flew missions together. 

But my son Scott and I remembered the story Ken told us a little different.  I know that Zeke Cormier asked Ken to join the Blue Angels.  I thought it was after Pete was killed; Scott thought it was before.  

It was probably after Ken turned it down. Pete took the solo position.  Ken turned it down because he didn't want to spend three years flying formation.  He did that with the Seattle Reserves before the war.  He was just back from a hundred and ten missions in Korea, and living out of a suitcase didn't appeal to him.  So he went to the carrier as a landing signal officer, training cadets to hook wire--horrendously dangerous.  Pete went to the Blues. 

It was if Pete vanished without a trace.  The Blues had no record of him.  And if I hadn't been writing a book and looking for information on Pete, and asked my son Scott for help, Pete would have been forgotten.  Scott searched newspapers from 1950-55, and found a record of the fatal crash.  Pete rolled an F9 into the ground off Corpus Christi in 1955.  March 24.  Practicing in the solo position. Now, the official record of the Blues will be corrected on their web page.  Pete was an only child, parents gone, and nobody to remember him.  Now they will.

He and Ken were friends.  If Ken had taken the position with the Blues, it might have been him?  The interesting thing is, if I hadn't started writing a book and looked for Pete's name, he would have been forgotten.  Scott found him.