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|
Adventures
with Commander Ken
August
21, 2016
The
bartender stood before our very confused band of late night
merrymakers, almost apoplectic with rage. He was shouting so
incoherently that we at first couldn't understand what he was
saying. What could have turned him from the usually affable
publican into this raving, arm waving lunatic in front of us, we
wondered?
It was the late '70's, and my visits as a
Representative for The Cessna Aircraft Company to Miller
Aviation in Endicott New York occurred every three weeks as
regular as clockwork. Regular too, were the visits to The Red
Lion, the little pub located just a stone's throw from the
Tri-Cities Airport. The food was good, the drinks were a fair
measure and the owner seemed to like us in spite of our sometime
boisterous sessions.
In
addition to my work as the 'Factory Expert' with regard to the
multi engine aircraft produced by Cessna, I was expected to
wine, dine and otherwise entertain my dealers. As you might
imagine, being young, single and social, I enjoyed this role
very much. My boss was very generous and understanding regarding
these turnouts, and in spite of the staggering expense accounts
that I turned in, He never questioned them.
As the
celebratory potential of my visits dawned on the young staff at
our newest Cessna dealership, everyone at Miller Aviation seemed
to become particularly atuned to the schedule of the Cessna
Credit Card. No one, from the line guy to the owners of the
company, missed the blowout that the first night of my visit
always occasioned.
As the guy who carried the card, I
soon realized that the universal joy apparent at my arrival was
really for the food and the libation that I represented, and
while I was well-liked by the Miller crew, I was regarded mostly
as necessary to the celebration, and the adulation for me never
rose to the levels enjoyed by the card.
On this
particular occasion the group of us had arrived at the Red Lion
much later than usual due to a late demonstration flight and
were told that the kitchen had closed. Most of the guy's took it
well, since drinking came before and often overshadowed eating,
but there were dark mutterings from the Chief Pilot of Miller's
Charter Department. This would be Ken, who ran the quickly
growing department for the company and who had a reputation as a
talented pilot and also, as I was to learn, had a reputation as
a bit of a character.
Because
the headquarters of IBM's was located a few miles away from
Tri-Cities, they chose Miller Aviation to transport their
personnel on their many trips to the Big Apple. Trips to The
City with a load of their engineers (covertly referred to by
staff as 'Zipperheads'), became as regular as a shuttle, and the
department rapidly added pilots and aircraft.
Ken ran
the department with skill but also with a sort of zany aplomb.
He was short and portly, with piercing brown eyes and he wore
his clothing as if he had dressed in the dark. He also possessed
perhaps the worst wig I had ever seen. He was quick to announce
anytime, to anyone listening, that not only was it a wig, but it
was a bad wig. However, he would add, it was his wig and he
loved it.
As the department added pilots he began
referring to himself as Commander Ken, in a rather joking way,
but with a minor note of seriousness that his whimsicality made
hard to define. The name was so bizarre and Ken's appearance so
unlikely that the title stuck, and soon no one around the
airport thought of addressing him as Ken without using the
Commander prefix. At a later time during a vacation, I addressed
a card to him and all of his pilots with 'Commander Ken and his
Lost Planet Airman' and that stuck too, making them probably the
most oddly named 135 operation in the country.
Over a
time, Ken and I became friends and I found his wacky sense of
humor to be catching, and I found myself caught up in his
slapstick ways that came out in both of us at odd moments.
For
instance, one afternoon when we were scheduled to fly together,
Ken took me by the apartment I was renting to pick up my flight
kit. With him in the idling car I sprang out of the passenger
seat and made toward the open sliding door of my apartment at
full tilt, making a good six knots over the ground. When I
arrived at the open door the closed and unseen screen door
instantly stopped all the forward progress being made by my
feet, while momentum carried the top of my body and the upper
part of the screen forward. The screen trapped my hands in their
original position by my sides and the screen and I toppled like
a tree, face first onto the carpet inside the door. I bounced
once and lay there stunned, listening to choked, hysterical
laugher and the sound of Ken pounding on the dash of the car.
One night we took our dates to a beautiful restaurant
which Ken had been raving about and which was new to me. As we
sat with the girls, sipping our drinks and waiting for our food,
Ken excused himself to go to the Men's Room. I sat for a couple
of minutes longer until the power of suggestion suggested that
it was time that I go too. Upon entering the rest room, I found
it to be empty, but I noticed that one of the stalls was
occupied. Wanting to help Ken with his ablutions, I gave the
stall door a mighty kick. Disappointed that I got no reaction
from him, it was at that moment that I noticed the feminine
hygiene dispenser on the wall.
The ring of keys that
Ken carried on his belt was impressive and he was proud of them.
When anyone remarked on the number of keys on it, he would take
that opportunity to prove that they were all working and vital
keys by naming, one at a time, what each key was for. One day I
found that I had a key to a lock that I didn't own anymore, and
I waited until I could slip it unnoticed onto Ken's key ring.
That night at the Red Lion one of the pilots asked him what all
the keys were for. Ken began the familiar litany, fingering each
beloved key while naming its lock. The confusion on his face
when he reached my planted key provided the evening's best laugh
for all the guys who of course, were in on the joke.
 Oh
yes, the hysterical pub owner. It turned out that Commander Ken
had broken a thirty-five-year tradition and the owner's
tranquility by being the first customer ever to order in a pizza
at the Red Lion. After the lot of us were thrown en masse into
the parking lot, the Commander told us he was hungry and would
eat it there before going home. He wondered if the bartender
would sell him a beer to go with it.
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