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Kenneth Bladen met his future wife, Edna, in 1943 after she began working at the Woolworth five and dime in Washington, D.C., with his mother.
He was 20 and stationed at the Norfolk Naval Air Station.
She was 15, working part-time and going to high school.
“My mother (Violet) liked her. She thought she was a nice girl,” Bladen said recently, while the Hagerstown-area resident sat in his son’s Myersville, Md., home.
They would write to each other, probably every week, as they got to know each other.
They married on Aug. 30, 1947.
Kenneth and Edna, now 95, recently had their 76th wedding anniversary, and on Oct. 12, he will turn 100 years old.
As can happen with couples of that age, he is caring for her at home as she deals with medical issues.
His affection for her is clear in his eyes when he’s asked why she was “the one.”
“The only thing I can say is she was the best wife that anybody could have,” he said, pausing.
She was a great wife and mother, Kenneth said. The couple have three children: Gary, Wayne and Holly Wallace.
She also was a “whiz,” he said, during her stints working at Vitro Laboratories where she helped as a liaison between manufacturers and atomic submarine crews to help repair problems.
He worked as a draftsman for Vitro in D.C. The family lived in Rockville at the time.
The couple retired in the early 1980s. They moved to Florida, then to Middletown, Md., and then to a community south of Hagerstown about 20 years ago where they would be close to family and have a one-story home that was easier to manage.
They would go fishing in their motor boat on the Chesapeake Bay, or simply go for a boat ride.
He would go hunting; she would crochet scarves, hats and throws; and they would follow the Washington football team during the George Allen and Joe Gibbs eras.
“Sometimes I just watched her jump out of her seat” as she cheered the team while they watched the game on TV, he said.
“I wanted to be with her forever and it seems like it’s going to work out that way,” he said.
Approaching 100 years
Kenneth said he never imagined living this long.
“When I’m sitting here thinking about it, it seems unbelievable because I don’t feel at this point in life like I’m 99,” he said.
Except when he has to walk. Like getting out of the chair, life’s pace is a little slower.
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His doctor recommends exercise, but he said he uses his energy keeping track of what he has to do.
His son and daughter-in-law, Wayne and Barbara Bladen, drive up to help him and Edna regularly. Wallace gives mom a weekly spa treatment at home. Gary Bladen and his wife, Sharon, help Kenneth “navigate the intricacies of insurance, healthcare, and other programs available” to their parents, Wayne said in a text.
Wayne said he believes that Dad taking care of his mother, including her prescriptions and medical appointments as well as household responsibilities, helps his dad stay engaged.
Asked what he thinks contributed to their longevity, Kenneth said he and Edna quit smoking in the 1960s. He said he doesn’t drink much.
As for his diet, “I can eat anything,” Kenneth said.
Kenneth still drives to the local store and has plenty of family to keep up with, including four grandchildren and six great grandchildren. One of those great grandchildren recently got her driver’s license, he said.
And the key to a long, successful marriage?
That’s partnership, Kenneth said. “And each partner has an equal right, an equal vote. If anyone wants to run the show, that’s not how it works.”
Witnessing history
Kenneth remembers his father didn’t have a regular job during the Great Depression and his mother made do with what she could for family meals.
“We ate a lot of bean soup,” he said.
His brother, Calvin, also known as “Buddy,” was working for the federal government when he helped cut trees down for the creation of Greenbelt Lake in Prince George’s County, Md.
Their father, also a Calvin, did freelance work repairing automobiles in people’s back yards or alleys during the Depression. After World War II, the elder Calvin briefly was a partner in a gas and repair station in the Capitol Heights, Md., area before working as a mechanic for a Packard dealer in Washington, D.C.
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Kenneth said he didn’t need to worry about being drafted for World War II because he was already working as a civilian apprentice machinist in the Washington Navy Yard’s Breech Mechanism Shop. But he, like his brother, enlisted because they both felt they should serve during the war.
Buddy told his younger brother not to join the Army Air Force like him, for fear the brothers could end up in the same unit during the war.
A radio man, Buddy would end up getting killed on Sept. 12, 1944, when the B-17 Flying Fortress he was in was shot down over Germany, Kenneth said.
Their cousin, Delbert Weast, had been a gunner’s mate on the USS Arizona and enjoyed his time with the Navy, so Kenneth decided to join the Navy.
Weast switched from gunner’s mate to an aviation ordnance man assigned to the USS Hornet, so he was spared from the tragic fate of many of the Arizona’s crew when the ship was sunk at Pearl Harbor.
Kenneth also served during the Korean War, again as an ordnance man mostly state side. He was stationed in Maine and then in Newfoundland, from where he helped patrol the North Atlantic.
Kenneth never saw combat.
“I guess the most exciting thing that happened to me, happened at the air station,” he said.
It was September 1943. He was in the office at the Norfolk Naval Air Station and he heard a small explosion, followed by a big one, about a half block away on the base. He would learn later that the explosion was heard and blew windows out for miles.
The incident killed over 20 people and injured others.
At first, all Kenneth could see was the debris coming down and an airplane flying overhead. The base hadn’t been bombed. Instead, a crew was hauling 350-pound depth charges on trailers for supplying an aircraft carrier. The charges were to be stacked a certain way, but someone piled an extra one on one of the trailers and one of the charges slipped off and was dragging on concrete, Kenneth said.
It began smoking and firemen came to extinguish it, but the charge went off followed by other charges exploding from the initial incident, he said.
The base sick bay filled quickly and others rushed injured in pickup trucks to the hospital.
