In our 50th reunion yearbook, Ken Cromwell wrote, “My last Foreign Service assignment was as foreign affairs adviser to the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard. Events during my watch included negotiating with Col. Noriega in Panama, taking the first U.S. military aircraft into Castro’s Havana airport, and sailing aboard the USCG square-rigger Eagle.”
On earlier assignments, Ken served the State Department in African countries such as Angola, Nigeria, Botswana, Somalia, and Uganda, where he and his wife, Cele, found that their next-door neighbor was then-Army chief Idi Amin, who later became Ugandan dictator. As Ken later wrote, “He had his machine gun pointed at us from the separating hedge.”
In retirement, Ken was an active skier, tennis player, biker, and sailor. He concentrated on researching an ancestor’s merchant-sailing voyages from the Chesapeake to Latin America and the Red Sea during the 1820s.
Ken lost his wife to cancer in 1984. His own death, Dec. 13, 2012, left two surviving sons. The class fondly memorializes this dedicated Foreign Service officer.