Kenneth  A Condon

March  22nd, 1931 September  8th, 2024
Kenneth  A Condon

Obituary

Ken was born into depression era Boston in 1931, to Fred and Svea Condon. Over the next few years, the family added a brother Jack, and two sisters, Jean and Judy. They moved frequently. This task was made all the easier because his grandfather was in the moving business. Ken’s prize possession was always his grandfather’s 1901, one dollar license, from the city of Boston to operate a horse and wagon.

Ken graduated from Dedham High School and went on to attend Northeastern University. Unfortunately, there was a draft on and Korea was in the news. Ken volunteered, and by a stroke of luck was sent to postwar Germany instead. When asked the happiest day of his life, he always replied, “the day I was discharged from the army”. It was his stint in the army that helped Ken finish his schooling at the University of Massachusetts with a degree in Civil Engineering. His first job was with Boeing in Seattle, WA. From there, he moved on to Lockheed in Palo Alto, California. Here is where he met and married his wife, Pat. The two decided to return to New England to raise a family and settled in Acton, MA. Ken found work at Stone & Webster Engineering in Boston designing nuclear power plants. During that time, Ken and Pat had two children,Timothy and Richard. As the desire for nuclear power faded, Ken decided to return to the defense industry and to his final work at Textron in Woburn, MA. After Ken’s retirement, the couple downsized and moved to Maynard, MA where they spent the next seven years. When Pat retired, they sold the house, put the furniture in storage, and made a long exploration of the country in a newly purchased VW van. This trip took them all the way to Alaska and eventually to Southern California. The lure of California weather motivated their next move from Maynard to Carlsbad, CA which remains home to the present day.

Ken enjoyed the outdoors. As a teenager he worked as a tour guide at the Polar Caves in New Hampshire. In his early twenties, he spent a summer exploring Northern Europe by bicycle with a friend. He would often share a memory from his time stationed with the army in Europe, where he was invited to join a flight patrol along the border of Eastern Germany in a small plane. He would describe in detail how the plane was flying so low, it would have to rise and fall with the contour of the landscape. At one point Ken spotted Russian troops in the distance, and when he asked the pilot what to do, the response back was “wave”. To his surprise, all of the Russian troops waved back.

Ken loved to garden and during his years in Acton, the summer table was abundant with fresh tomatoes and sweet corn. Later in life, Ken’s day always began with completion of the newspaper’s daily crossword puzzle. Then it was on to the Wall Street Journal, and a few hours spent checking the stock market. He greatly enjoyed his afternoon walks through Lincoln woods, sometimes stopping at Walden Pond. With the move to California, the woods were replaced by the Pacific Ocean, and daily walks were often shoeless along the beach in Carlsbad.

Ken never managed to build his “cabin by a trout stream”, but always looked forward to a good road trip. In addition to his Alaska adventure, he crisscrossed the country numerous times and was proud of the fact that he had visited every state. He battled dementia and died at age 93. Ken leaves his wife, Pat; two sons, Timothy and Richard; a granddaughter, Ruby; two sisters, Jean and Judy, and numerous nieces and nephews.







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