Kenneth Raymond Wiley was born in 1912 to Pearl Raymond (P R) Wiley and Mildred Holt Wiley in Bangor Maine. In 1917, when he was 4, the three of them drove cross country on the Lincoln Highway from Maine to Los Angeles California. They were driving the car of Mrs. Lou Bors who was newly divorced from her husband. They would meet her there.
Kenneth was very active in the Boy Scouts growing up and became an Eagle Scout. He knew the Our Gang Comedy actors and went to some of their parties. One of his best friends was Bill Sefton who competed in the pole vault in the 1936 Olympics.
His parents were divorced when he was about 7, but they all lived in the same house on Lomitas Street until Ken was 17 when he drove his mother back to Maine. He returned to Los Angeles to finish his last semester of high school and then returned to Maine to join the CCC. He was stationed at Eagle Lake in Acadia National Park and was very proud of the stone work he had laid there. He was offered a job on the racing yacht (Azura) of Mathesen of Northeast Harbor. He traveled to Florida and Hawaii for races.
He met Leonore Dorr at the Mathesen's where she was a maid during summers to earn money for school. Mr Mathesen sent Ken to the Vega school of Aeronautics in Burbank, CA to study aircraft design. After that Ken got a job with Vega, later to become Lockheed. He was a specialty design engineer, mostly doing wing design. He worked on a number of aircraft including the P2V and the Electra.
At the end of World War II, the Wileys returned to Maine. There, Ken worked as a plumber for Lee's father, Harry Dorr at Dorr Plumbing Company. Ken loved the outdoors and helped Harry build the family camp on Green Lake in Maine. He had a small sailboat that he enjoyed.
Around 1950, Ken decided that he needed to return to California and to aircraft design and was rehired at Lockheed. He stayed there until his early retirement. After retirement, he became active in traveling in his camper to explore Civil War history, rock collecting and genealogy, returning to Maine most summers.
Eventually they moved to Yucca Valley in the Mojave Desert, where he remained for the rest of his life. He enjoyed the desert and never lost his passion for aircraft. As long as he lived he rushed outdooors to see every helicopter that passed over his home.
Ken died of Alzheimer's Disease in 2000. He would very much have enjoyed knowing that he made it to the new century.