Ken Lyons, age 96, serves at Centennial Station near Lacey, Wash.
He was born in 1921 and grew up in Los Angeles. He remembers riding his bike down to the train station to watch the steam engines pull in. In the 1950s, he even got the chance to blow the whistle of a steam locomotive.
Lyons has spent a lifetime of doing. He was in the Navy during World War II, serving as a radio operator on a ship in the North Atlantic. After the war, he worked as a cabinetmaker, then reenlisted in the Navy. After earning his master’s in economics in 1959, he worked as an economist for a bank. In 1985, he retired from running his own hobby shop business. Amid all these things, he’s raced cars and boats, enjoyed jazz music, and painted oils and watercolors.
Monitor