Getting to Know You

Ken got involved in the aviation world just after his 56th birthday, when he received an introductory series of flying lessons as a Christmas present. It was “love at first flight.” He purchased his first plane, a Piper Archer, shortly after receiving his pilot’s license. He & Mary moved to Sequim from Vashon Island in 2000, and they joined EAA. Since joining, Ken has been the vice president, secretary, treasurer, membership, web master, newsletter editor and merchandise coordinator of EAA Chapter 430. He presently flies his RV 9-A.

Ken spent his early life in Cleveland, Ohio. After high school graduation he joined the Air Force and was stationed in Topeka, Kansas. While in the Air Force, he joined the Forbes Skydivers, a skydiving club formed before there was a Parachutes of America. Ask him to tell you the story when his parachute failed to open. (It can explain why “Ken is Ken“)

After moving to Phoenix, he attended night school to learn programming and ended up teaching programming at the school. He became a programmer for the City of Phoenix, developing a police tracking system and an automated dissemination of bookings, the first of its kind in the country. He also developed computerized online ballot tabulation software which enabled the city to certify an election in less than 12 hours after the polls were closed.

In 1969, while working at G.E. Mainframe Computer Division, Ken was part of a team supporting Bell Labs. They were developing new languages needed to create a new operating system. The first language he worked on was “B” which was used to create “C.” This was necessary for the operation system being developed called Unix. (In later years Unix morphed to what is now called LINXS). Apple iOS, Android and several operating systems are based on UNIX.

He joined Sperry Univac, working in the financial accounting office, where he discovered the operating system couldn’t add 1+1 = 2. He worked with the software developers to modify the operating system to do business math versus floating point math. He then went to work for the County of Maricopa police and court system in Arizona, developing the Support and Paternity System.

In 1971, he started DataPak Inc., a company that produced microfiche for major companies in the Phoenix area. He developed software for the State of Arizona that converted output on a mainframe computer to tape for microfiche conversion, a software valued at around a million dollars. After selling the company, he went to work for Honeywell in the Phoenix Sales Office, teaching classes in programming and database administration in cities throughout the United States and in Europe.

Ken and his wife, Mary, moved to Seattle in 1979 where Ken continued teaching for Honeywell. They bought land and built a house on Vashon Island. He was the database administrator for Virginia Mason Hospital for two years and then went back to work for Honeywell and their spinoff company, Alliant Tech Systems, in Seattle and Everett. As a database administrator and supervisor of the computer department, he traveled back and forth from Seattle to Minneapolis, working with a staff of four senior technologists in a “think tank” environment.

Since problem solving has always been one of his talents, he formed his own computer company, The Solution Centre, in 1990 after being down-sized from Alliant Tech Systems. The life lesson Ken has learned: “We are created for a purpose. It is a wise man who can find his purpose and use it to benefit others. In so doing, the rewards are beyond measure.”