Ah, Kenny, we hardly knew ye when this 1947 St. Vincent-St. Mary High School senior photo was taken.

Ken later became BJ sports editor.

Still later, he left Ol’ Blue Walls to become an advocate for culture, art, clean river and parks in Medford, Massachussettts, where he lives on Mystic River with former BJ business editor and writer Maura McEnaney, who works for Fidelity Investments, headquartered in Boston.

Syracuse University graduate Maura had a hand in one of the BJ’s four Pulitzers, for “A Question of Color.”

Ken almost didn’t get his senior photo taken.

Let him explain it

”I wasn't planning to get a senior picture taken, but my sister Karen Becker (St. Vincent Class of 1969) insisted I should, and hauled me down to the portrait studio at O'Neil's in downtown Akron. And my sister Connie Kluender (St. V-M Class of 1973) made the sport coat I'm wearing!

Ken has four other siblings.

Ken and Maura wound up in Medford because Maura has a lot of family in the Boston area.

Since leaving the BJ, Ken has been free-lancing for civic causes and charities.

Ken received the Ripple Award from the Mystic River Watershed Association for his efforts in protecting the integrity of the Massachusetts river. He’s also involved with Friends of the Mystic River, Medford Green Line Neighborhood Alliance and the Communications Committee of WalkBoston.

While visiting in Ohio last year, he and Maura rode bikes in Holmes County behind Amish buggies.

Former BJ Features editor and pet columnist Connie Bloom, a quilt art guru in Ohio circles, did an art quilt for Maura as a Christmas gift for Ken of the late and lamented Belle, a lab mix that Maura found tied to a fence in Firestone Park in Akron years ago.

It was the first Christmas in 20 years without a dog in the Ken and Maura household.

Maura wrote “Willard Garvey: An Epic Life.” Garvey built homes in the USA, South America and Asia for people with low incomes, is owner-operator of the “world’s largest” grain elevator, is the “largest private landowner in Nevada” and builder of Kansas’s tallest building—the Epic Center with its slanted copper roof.

When BJ legend Harry Liggett passed away in January, Ken and John Olesky put their heads together with the authority that Harry had given them and kept this BJ Alums blog you are reading going as a tribute to Harry – and Pat Englehart and Fran Murphey and Ben Maidenburg and John Knight.