Ken Bolder

Kenny was always tall. Our mom reported people walking by looking concerned and maybe a little sad at the sight of such a large child in a playpen in the yard while she hung clothes out to dry.  It’s as if there were expectations based on size from the very beginning.

Our dad was from Wisconsin originally, the only one of his siblings to move West, but he remained a loyal Green Bay Packers fan.  That’s my only memory of any messages about sports being important, but Ken played Little League baseball, Pop Warner football and basketball at Kellogg Grade School every season he was eligible.  Thanks to our mom, he was always at practices and games, always had a clean uniform and someone was always there to watch. 

As he grew taller, he developed Osgood-Schlatter’s disease with the painful, swollen knee joints and shins that come with it.  By 6^th or 7^th grade, the treatment was splints on his legs so not only did his height make him stand out, but also the side-effects of growing quickly. He played basketball every year with our grade school team despite the condition of his legs, but he said he never really liked it.  He was expected to be good because he was tall, but in his words, “All you do is run back and forth, up and down the court.  It’s not that fun.” 

So, his freshman year, Ken enters Franklin High School and within the first weeks, the basketball coaches are courting him.  They got him out of class to talk about playing basketball.  They told him what an asset he would be.  They offered whatever incentives high school coaches could offer in 1964 simply because he was tall. From Ken’s point of view, he wasn’t that good as a player and he definitely didn’t enjoy the sport but I’m sure he never said that to any of the coaches, because he didn’t want to hurt their feelings.  After a successful freshman football season ended, much to everyone’s surprise Ken tried out for the wrestling team.  No one in our family even knew it was a sport, but he loved it from the start.

Success in wrestling is based on an individual’s strength, skill, strategy and technique, all of which Ken liked working on. And yet, you are part of a tight knit team that practices together, watches each other’s matches and has a special camaraderie because the success of the team as a whole depends on the individual achievements of each wrester.  Under the leadership of Coach Burri, Franklin’s team seemed to be particularly close, and Ken experienced success almost immediately.

Ken was able to wrestle comfortably at the 191-weight class as a freshman and into his sophomore year, but as he grew and developed more muscles, he struggled to maintain his weight.  The winters of his sophomore and junior years were spent avoiding food and beverages Monday through Friday afternoons to “make weight”, then binging on weekends.  The next higher weight class was Heavy Weight where his opponents had no weight restrictions. This class was occupied by wrestlers who outweighed him by 50 to 100 pounds, so he tried to avoid this class as long as possible.  By senior year, he had developed too much height and muscle mass to qualify at 191, but he never weighed in over 210.  Some of his opponents that year weighed close to 300 pounds.

As a wrestler, Ken was extremely dedicated.  As the last or next to last wrestler to compete each tournament, his performance mattered to his team’s success.  He always felt it.   He took that responsibility very seriously.  I think he embraced his responsibility toward the team but felt a lot of unspoken pressure at the same time.  An example was the PIL-Japan Wresting Exchange Tournament the winter of his senior year.  He was picked to represent the PIL at heavy weight and we hosted his opponent at our house.  We watched each PIL wrestler be defeated by their Japanese opponent until the heavyweight match.  Ken faced his guest on the wrestling mat and managed to win his match by pinning his opponent.  When we were home that evening the guest kept going up to Ken, patting him on the arms and saying, “very strong, very strong”.

Ken played the position of tackle for Franklin’s football team.  We were told by his friends on the team that Ken was made to stay in the locker room before games until the last minute so the coaches could try to get him mad, fire up some aggression before the games. I can’t imagine they were ever very successful.  Ken’s nickname in the halls of Franklin High was Jolly Green Giant.  He was modest, kind-hearted, funny, maybe a little shy, definitely self-deprecating and very humble.  He never thought of himself as having “made it” or as a star athlete.  He was just a guy who went out every week to do the best he could and whatever season It was, he spent mid-week diligently practicing and trying to improve as much as he could. 

Spring track and field was Ken’s sport in high school where he threw discus and shot put.  He may have participated in a running event as well, but I can’t remember which ones.  I remember the discus, because being his younger sister, we would go to Kellogg on weekends where he would practice throwing and I would run around shagging the discus for him.  Outside of school practices, he worked out with weights at the local YMCA, ran, and practiced his wrestling moves on me in the living room. 

Ken did a little over a year of college at the Air Force Academy, playing college football both years, but he felt conflicted about the kind of officer he was being trained to be.  Upon leaving school, he saw he had a low lottery number in the draft and decided to enlist, being advised he’d have more opportunities for training in the Army by enlisting instead of waiting to be drafted.  He spent the next year at Ft. Bragg and Ft. Benning training to be a paratrooper, a medic and eventually a special forces Green Beret.  He was deployed to Vietnam in early1971 with the 173^rd Airborne doing long range patrols.  He served in Vietnam for one year, then returned home to complete his military obligation with the Oregon National Guard.

In the fall of 1972, Ken returned to college to study physics at Oregon State and I started my freshman year at Stanford.  We were both in freshman dorms.  It was perfectly appropriate for me, but not for a recently returned Vietnam veteran trying to figure out what he wanted to do next.  Within the year, he left OSU to begin a heavy equipment repair and maintenance program through Feenaughty Machinery here in Portland.  Upon completion of his training and apprenticeship, he moved to Springfield, Oregon to work for Feenaughty Co.  Ken died ina single vehicle accident on his way to a job site near Sandy, Oregon on October 26, 1976.

Ken’s been gone nearly 50 years, but whenever my sister or I encounter someone who knew him, we get the same reaction.  “You’re Ken Bolder’s sister?  What an amazing guy.  Such a gentle, kind person.  We still think of him often.”

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