Ken never spoke much about religion but I found this carefully preserved in a family photo album:
By Mr. John Hughes
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1940s
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Ken with unidentified girlfriend, 1940s
 | 1943
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| Ken & Mary Ostrander, prospective mother-in-law (ca 1945) |
The Army shipped Ken & Mary off to Japan where he joined the Criminal Investigation Division. Thus began his lifelong career as a criminal investigator. By the time he retired in the early 1970s—and attended the University of Texas at El Paso on the GI Bill!—he had more seniority than any other Chief Warrant Officer in the Army.
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Kobe, Japan (1949)
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32nd Birthday Cake (March 1949)
 | 1949
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1950
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| 1950 |
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1951
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| Administering a Polygraph, Ft. Bliss, TX (1954) |
But Ken didn’t live to work, he worked to live, one of the many values he imparted to me. It seemed the older he got, the more he liked to come home to his garage and tinker on his stable of cars, including his prized Corvair, the nation’s first rear-engine automobile.
Unfortunately, I didn’t share his interest in all things mechanical, at least not until I started driving. “I knew cars weren’t going to be your thing the first time I took you to the races in Germany,” he recalled more than once. “You just wanted to play in the sand with your bucket and shovel.”
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| El Paso, TX, New Year's Day, 1954 |
Not that he didn’t try other gentle methods of persuasion. He gave me a model steam engine for Christmas when I was three. Just add water, fire up a white fuel pellet that looked like a sugar cube and watch it chug along. Mary thought he was nuts. Much later, he used to drag me to El Paso junkyards on weekend afternoons where more than one proprietor knew us both by name.
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| En Route to Germany, 1954 |
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| Munich, Germany (ca 1956) |
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Goodbye to Germany (1957)
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Washington, DC (ca 1957)
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| First-Time Homeowner, El Paso, TX (1959) |
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| 1960s |
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| Father & Son, Heidelberg, Germany (1963) |
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| Garmisch, 1963 |
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| Heidelberg, 1963 |
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| Heidelberg, 1964 |
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| 1960s |
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| 37th Crime Lab (1964) |
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| Saigon, MACV Headquarters (1967) |
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Saigon (1967)
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| With Friends in the Mess Hall, Long Binh (1967) |
But here’s the great thing: if Ken was disappointed that his son was more in tune with his mother than him, he never showed it. He truly didn’t give a shit about things he couldn’t control, although he did once betray some jealousy about Mary’s relationship with me. We were on a road trip in California the summer following his return from
Viet Nam. I convinced Mary we should grab the opportunity to see
Last Summer, an adaptation of a book about a teenage rape that we’d both devoured. “You’ll take that damn kid to a movie but you won’t go with me to a topless bar in North Beach,” he yelled before packing us both in the Rambler and driving back to
El Paso from San Francisco, non-stop. Yep, there’s a lot to unpack in that anecdote!
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| Home from Viet Nam (1968) |
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With Karmann Ghia (1969)
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| Father & Son, 9912 Collette (1969) |
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| Bewigged, with Oma (1973) |
Nevertheless, I was the ultimate beneficiary of our West Coast family drama. Mary, who held the household purse strings, agreed to let Ken build a dune buggy from scratch, using the chassis of a junked Volkswagen Beetle and a fiberglass body he mail-ordered from California. I got to pick the color—tangerine metal flake—my sole contribution.
As soon as he finished it, Ken and I drove the dune buggy to the Mint 400 in Las Vegas. The floor shows advertised on the strip floated my boat a lot more than the off-road race where he could show off his creation. It had not only a soft cover he’d designed and sewn himself, but a heater, too, which meant I would be able to drive it to school in any weather. Before the end of my junior year, Ken’s gift had inoculated me against bullying and boosted both my profile and popularity.
The trip also introduced a side of Ken I’d never seen when I spotted Flip Wilson, whose popularity as
Miss Geraldine was peaking. “Hey Flip, how ya doin?” Ken said nonchalantly, as we walked past my first celebrity in the wild. As if they were old friends! No wonder all the kids in the neighborhood thought I had the coolest Dad ever. He really was!
It’s odd. Few childhood memories of Ken have stuck, perhaps because as a momma’s boy, I established a much stronger relationship with him once Mary was gone. He didn’t believe in lunch and we ate so early that I occasionally found him late at night in the kitchen eating a peanut butter sandwich with a glass of milk while reading Motor Trend or Road and Track. When he took me deep into the desert for a gun lesson with his service revolver, he seemed as relieved as I when I couldn’t pull the trigger on a live target. We both loved “On the Street Where You Live,” from My Fair Lady and I vividly recall an incident when we each tried to kick higher than the other while he sang “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” from Annie Get Your Gun. But I also remember him saying “Christ, your breath stinks” one Saturday morning when I uncharacteristically joined him in the garage and the way he derisively asked me and Mary what we were watching on the “boob tube” when he came in from the garage after dinner.
Ken taught me that a man had nothing more valuable than his word. He also emphasized the three things a man must have to make a good first impression: a firm handshake, clean fingernails and shined shoes. All useful for job interviews but I found his personal hygiene routine embarrassing. After showering, he would lie back on the bed, throw his legs up in the air unabashedly and shake talcum powder over his nether regions. When Mary or I protested, he shut us down immediately. “It’s my house and I can be naked if I want to!”
I don’t recall discussing the facts of life with Ken, but he forbade me to join either the Cub or Boy Scouts—not that I was interested—and he warned me against sitting in the balcony when I started going to the movies on my own. Why was he so determined to protect me from the sexual dangers certain kinds of men pose? As a teenager, he had been hitchhiking back from the abandoned stone quarry where he and his friends swam. A man who stopped to pick him up flashed pornographic photos of naked men. Ken fled, traumatized.
Art, as they say, imitates life. Ken, who studied English at UTEP several years after I graduated from Columbia with the same major, sent me he a story called “Mr. Jones” he had written for a creative writing class. Imagine my stunned reaction when the title character turned out to be a pederast who used his Model T to lure innocent, car-crazy boys into his garage and show them dirty pictures. “Dad, you’re perpetuating a stereotype,” I protested weakly. It didn’t stop the teacher from giving him an “A” and the story convinced David, my “roommate” at the time that I wasn’t kidding about my father’s homophobia.
One of the few people to read my unpublished memoir observed that my life has been dedicated to finding a man who lived up to my father. I protested. Homosexuality would automatically disqualify anyone I ever coupled with from living up to Ken. Self-loathing never quite disappears, does it?
Still, I’d already lost one parent and I didn’t want to take a chance on losing another. Once I decided to stay in New York after graduating from college, Ken called every other Sunday morning (
David wasn’t allowed to pick up) in addition to writing a letter or two every month. Those letters, penned in long hand on a yellow legal pad interested me less at the time than they do now because I’m nearly the same age he was when he wrote them. They provide an eerie glimpse of retirement foretold.
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| Graduation Day (May 1975) |
I’ve never really seen the physical resemblance that people who knew both of us often remarked on, but Ken’s diary-like missives make me understand how much I really am my father’s son. After describing (in excruciating detail) car trouble on a trip to California with my stepbrother, Ken lamented: “instead of focusing on the simplest cause of a problem, I imagine the most complicated.” That apple fell very near the tree!
Coming out to him remained our only unfinished business at the end of his life. I had been trying since our first trip together as adult men in 1980 when we drove the Alaska Highway to the Arctic Circle. “He must know,” I kept telling myself. I’ll never forget the mornings he looked up from reading a newspaper obituary and pronouncing that the deceased must have been “queer,” the only word he ever used for homosexuality. Or one of the rare nights when he accompanied Mary and me to a movie in downtown El Paso. Afterward, we staked out a gay bar, leaving only after he confirmed the entry of a man under investigation.
Yep, Ken remarried. But not until after Mary’s mother died. Without complaint, he picked Oma up at her nursing home across the mountain and drove her to the beauty parlor every week. For three years. They genuinely got a kick out of each other.
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With Oma, 9912 Collette (1977)
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| Driveway Skateboarder (1979) |
Ken met Lois in 1972 when he delivered the German chocolate cake Mary asked her daughter to hand-carry to New York. I had invited Barb to visit me during Thanksgiving break sophomore year in a rebuffed attempt to establish my heterosexuality with tremendous parental enthusiasm.
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| With Lois, Barb & Ted, El Paso (early 1980s) |
I supported their marriage 100%. Not only did I know and like Lois, but her four children, three of whom lived in El Paso at the time, including one as car-crazy as Ken, took a lot of pressure off me, his only child. Even better, Ken soon had a grandson, too. Barb and her husband Ted adopted BJ shortly before Ken and I left for Alaska, only to divorce soon afterward. Ken called him “punkin,” BJ called him Pop Pop. They adored each other and I am eternally grateful that Ken got to assume a role I never could have provided him, if only for nine years.
BJ and I got together for coffee in Phoenix where he resides with his own family not long before the pandemic hit. I hadn’t seen him in more than 20 years, since he visited me in New York as a teenager. I was eager to reminisce about Ken and asked if he had a favorite story.
“He was really the only father I ever had,” BJ replied. “I remember his birthday every year on Facebook and Instagram, too.”
“That isn’t really what I’m asking,” I said, marveling that Ken had a bigger social media footprint than his son. “Don’t you have a specific memory of something you did together?”
BJ thought for a moment.
“Well, one time he took me to the Grand Canyon. ‘Get in the car, we’re going on a trip,’ he said, just like that. Like we were going for a Sunday drive or something. Anyhow, we stopped at a junk store somewhere along the way. A sign in front said you had to be 18 to enter. But KB took me inside anyway. When the owner asked if he’d seen the sign, KB said ‘it’s OK, he’s with me.’ They argued back and forth but KB kept saying ‘he’s with me, he’s with me, what the hell difference does it make?’ until the guy said he was going to call the cops.”
That BJ admired Ken’s behavior enough to retrieve it from childhood came as a shock. It reflected an attitude I always found embarrassing: Ken didn’t have to live by the same rules as everybody else. My cousin Doug told a similar story with just as much relish at Ken’s funeral. “He refused to declare the bottles of booze we bought in Juarez when we crossed the border to avoid paying duty. I was sure we’d get caught but Ken insisted he did it all the time.”
If anything, Ken and I grew closer during his marriage to Lois, at least initially. He brought her to New York, I occasionally went home for Christmas. When I offered him $1500 to restore an old VW bug, he agreed without hesitation and I picked up “Herr Cucaracha” a year later.
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Ken with Herr Cucaracha (New York City, 1991) |
We also continued taking occasional road trips together. We spent an unforgettable three months circumnavigating Australia when he was 66 and I was 30. His obsession with road trains and VW clubs drove me crazy but his insatiable curiosity provided us with entrée to an outback culture that I never would have experienced on my own. Our drive down the Baja Peninsula didn’t go as well; neither of us spoke Spanish, I’d already heard all his stories and his Vanagon broke down. By this time, I had just begun sharing a house in the Pines and establishing my own family. I vowed “never again.”
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| Ken's Garage |
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Ken's Stable, left to right:
VW Scirocco, Corvair, VW Karman Ghia, VW Station Wagon |
Still, Ken kept calling and writing. When I mentioned how nervous I was about addressing 500 people for work in Kansas City, he immediately offered to drive from El Paso—nearly 1,000 miles—so there would be a friendly face in the audience. “Just pretend you’re talking to me,” he counselled. I was so proud of his support that I mentioned it at the beginning of my speech, eliciting a collective “awwwwwww.” Afterward, Ken said, “You speak too quickly.” He was right, of course.
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| Final Father & Son Photo (Christmas 1991) |
I called Ken from the Pines on Father’s Day 1992. He didn’t sound well. He’d even been to the emergency room the day before, an unheard-of occurrence, where a doctor attributed his symptoms to the flu. I was glad I had a joke to help cheer him up.
Topical jokes always had been a favorite and unrevealing way to connect—we both were news junkies—except once, in 1985 when current events exposed the utter darkness of my closet. “Did ya hear how Rock Hudson died?” Ken asked, almost as soon as I picked up the phone. “Uh oh,” I thought, realizing that AIDS, which had been a 24/7 fear in my life for nearly four years, finally had permeated his consciousness thanks to Hollywood’s first casualty. “He got rear-ended,” chortled my father. “That’s not funny,” I responded icily, cutting the call short, as furious with myself for saying nothing as I was with him.
Ken usually got his jokes from a Jewish friend he met for coffee on Mondays. I knew my latest—told to me by my best friend, a very neurotic, gay Jew—would go over big but Ken barely managed a chuckle despite my Yiddish accent.
By the time I returned to New York that evening, Lois had left several increasingly urgent messages on my answering machine. I’d never given them my number in the Pines.
A stroke had killed Ken not long after we spoke. He was 75.
“It’s like he was waiting for you to call before he let go,” Lois said.
And just like that, for the first time in my life, I no longer had any secrets to keep. To this day, I wonder if I did the right thing.
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| Ft. Bliss National Cemetery (2021) |
A generation later,
my goddaughter and her husband delivered a surprising postscript to Ken’s story. Although he never said as much, like most men of his generation I’m sure “bloodline” must have crossed his mind once or twice. After conception, a last name is the first thing a father gives to his son. For obvious reasons, I didn’t continue this tradition.
So when Magda and Joe gave Dagny, their first child, “Hon” as a middle name I was as surprised as much as I was honored. It also got me thinking. While they never met Ken, parents do live on through children to a much greater degree than you ever realize when you’re young. Their unusual tribute to me may also keep the memory of Ken alive, however dimly, until the 22nd century.
More Ken:
Ken & Mary (1946-1975)
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