Norman Kinyon’s boyhood home was a lighthouse. His pet was a seal. From that unique start, he went on to be a Boeing aerospace engineer.
The bomber projects he worked on fueled the Allied victory in World War II. He traveled the world. Yet Kinyon — a life
long boater, fisherman and naturalist — never lost his first love, a devotion to the outdoors.
A legacy of his early days at the water’s edge, that love was passed down to Kinyon’s children and grandchildren.
“He gave us a gift of the knowledge of the outdoors — adventures, animals, rocks, everything,” said Eileen Loerch, one of Norman Kinyon’s four children.
“My dad was absolutely happiest if he had the wheel of a boat in his hands, or a pair of oars,” said Bill Kinyon, the youngest of the four siblings. “He was an expert navigator, able to handle any kind of boat in any kind of weather.”
Norman Oliver Kinyon died Jan. 29 in Coupeville. Since retiring in 1979, he and his wife, Betty, lived on Whidbey Island, in the Greenbank community of Honeymoon Lake. He was 91.
Along with his wife, he is survived by children Kenneth Kinyon, Lorna Smith, Eileen Loerch and Bill Kinyon; by 10 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his parents, David and Nora Kinyon, and by an older brother, Mars Kinyon.
Norman Kinyon was born Dec. 5, 1919, in Willets, Calif., the son of a railroad worker who had worked in lighthouses. “His father was the assistant light keeper at the Mukilteo Lighthouse,” said Jessi Loerch, one of Norman Kinyon’s grandchildren.
Dennis Link, of Vallejo, Calif., has researched his great-uncle’s lighthouse history. “When he was 2, they moved to Tree Point in Alaska,” Link said. Kinyon’s father manned lighthouses at Tree Point and Alaska’s Mary Island before moving to the New Dungeness Lighthouse overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. “He was about 5 when they went to New Dungeness,” Link said.
From the Olympic Peninsula, the family later moved to the Umpqua Lighthouse on the Oregon Coast. Kinyon graduated from Oregon’s Reedsport High School in 1937.
Bill Kinyon heard many tales of New Dungeness. The lighthouse is at the end of a long spit. “It was a 5-mile walk to the mainland, or 2 miles in a rowboat to go into the town of Dungeness,” he said. Norman Kinyon made the trip to grade school every day. “Growing up there, he found an orphaned seal. He raised that seal as his pet. He’d go swimming with it. When you live in a lighthouse, there aren’t any neighborhood kids to play with,” Bill Kinyon said.
After high school, Kinyon went to the University of Washington. He earned an engineering degree in 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought war and early graduation. Engineers were pressed into duty working on the Boeing B-17 and B-29 bombers.
“He was in the National Guard at Fort Lewis. Every time they tried to call him up to active duty, Boeing could not let him go,” Bill Kinyon said. After World War II, he worked at Boeing’s aerospace division in Kent. “He spent the rest of his career designing rockets to win the Cold War,” Bill Kinyon said.
On May 29, 1941, he married Betty Jean Falconer, a graduate of Seattle’s Queen Anne High School. They lived in Seattle, at Alki Point, and in Normandy Park south of Seattle where they raised their family.
In the last days of his life, Eileen Loerch said, her father struggled to find words. Before he died, the words returned. Norman Kinyon was able to tell his wife, “You are the apple of my eye and the light of my life,” Eileen Loerch said. The couple would have marked 70 years of marriage this year.
Daughter Lorna Smith remembers that while growing up at Normandy Park, across from Vashon Island, she was allowed to take a little sailboat far offshore. “To my mom’s credit, she always said she had to kind of push her fears aside,” she said.
“He always had a scientific mind,” Smith said. “At a tidepool he’d tell us the names of all the things in it. I’m a biologist and my son is a biologist and a ship’s captain. None of that would be true if it hadn’t been for my dad instilling in all of us this love of nature.”
Jessi Loerch has favorite memories of clamming with her grandfather. “He told me all about the types of clams and showed me how to dig. When we finished we headed back and had them for dinner,” she said. “He cooked them by cutting them in half and then heating them in a frying pan, using the shell like a lid. They were the best clams I’d ever tasted.”
Her grandfather had an impressive collection of guidebooks — rocks, fungi, birds, plants and mammals. “If you wanted to identify anything in the natural world, you should be able to do it from his bookshelves,” she said.
Being on the water was a second home for Norman Kinyon. “We spent our summers on boats in the San Juan Islands,” Bill Kinyon said. “He had a series of cabin cruisers. The last one was an old fishing troller from the Canadian fleet, a double-ender with a pointed stern. He remodeled that into a beautiful classic wooden boat.”
That boat was called The Petrel. “My dad’s boats were always named after sea birds,” Bill Kinyon said. “He taught all of us to have a great love of nature. There weren’t trees, there were Douglas firs or red cedars.”
“There’s a little bit of him in all of us,” Eileen Loerch said.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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