There was not a kinder soul on this planet. The plum internships around the country for young photojournalists in the 90’s were the huge metropolitan papers, and the Muskegon Chronicle. Ken, Brian and Greg seemingly handpicked photographers in which they saw a lot of heart and a reasonable amount of talent. The moment you arrived in Muskegon, you smelled the paper mill, and you wondered where you had landed. The moment you entered the newsroom you knew.
Ken more than any person I have worked with in 30 years knew people. He had an enormous heart and was selfless to the point that you wondered how he produced such amazing images while constantly giving so much of himself to others. So many of us are driven by ego or ambition. Ken seemed only to be driven by making everyone around him better and making everyone reach the goals they had set out so many years before. If you had a project, Ken insisted on knowing everything about it, and how it could be taken one step further. To make something good something great.
Often times far past deadline you would run into Ken in the darkroom working on making his project better than good. There was an elderly security guard at the paper who carried an enormous clock around his neck which mystified both Ken and myself, and we wondered aloud if actually that guard was not in charge of time itself. “We’ve been waiting for ya!” the guard would bellow if you came in after 10 pm. And it became a running joke between us for many years after, long after I had left the paper and the country.
If we hadn’t spoken in a few years and I had moved on to another country, Ken would check in with “we’ve been waiting for ya!” Little did he know how much we all longed to return to Muskegon. And to the place which made all of us better human beings.
To say we will miss Ken somehow misses the point. We will not miss him because he is so far embedded in who we are. There is a little Ken in all of us. We just have to take the time to find it.