First Draft of a book on our Dad we are working on. I honestly think it could become a best seller - Gordon & Kevin
A Boy and a Radio
Kenneth Engle — from a Kansas farm to Moody, the war, and a life on the air
Drawn from his own letters, diaries, and the family record.
ONE
A Boy and a Radio
Every life has a thread running through it — some love or longing planted so early the person cannot remember being without it — and if you follow that thread far enough, you will often find the fingerprints of God. For Kenneth Engle, the thread was a radio.
He was born on the ninth of November, 1924, out in the Newbern community south of Abilene, Kansas — a farm boy, the son of Grant and Mabel Engle. He came to faith early; by his own reckoning he received the Lord Jesus as Savior at the age of nine, at a little meeting called the Grace and Truth Gospel Chapel. A Kansas farm, a Bible chapel, and a boy. So far, nothing to trouble the newspapers. But there was that radio.
“I liked radio when I was a boy at home,” Ken would write, many years later, “and the radio ran on a car battery.” Sit with that a moment — a set run off a car battery, out on the open plains, pulling voices and music down out of the air. He “enjoyed news, sports” — “that’s how I became a Cubs fan,” he admitted, a loyalty that would cost him dearly and that he would carry to the end of his days — “music, etc.” And he did not merely listen. Here is the boy showing you the man he will become: “we even had games at home,” he wrote — “I am sure it was my idea” — “and put on our own radio programs, with music from the old victrola and reading news from the newspaper.” Picture it. A Kansas farmhouse, a wind-up victrola, a stack of newspapers, and a boy playing announcer to an audience of family — broadcasting to no one, and rehearsing, though he could not have known it, for everyone.
He carried two dreams in those years, and I want you to hold onto both, because God had His eye on each of them. “Besides wanting to be an ‘airplane driver,’” Ken wrote, “I wanted to be a sports announcer.” A pilot and a broadcaster. Now tuck that away. A day was coming when the Lord would hand this Kansas boy both of his boyhood dreams — but not remotely in the shape he had drawn them. The airplane would be a bomber, and the microphone would carry not a ballgame but the gospel. God has a way of answering our childhood prayers on His own terms, and they are nearly always larger than ours.
The dream began leaking into real life sooner than you would guess. This was a busy, capable young man — Future Farmers of America, 4-H, the debate team at Abilene High, the class of 1942. And the radio kept finding him. “I got to give an FFA speech over KSAC in Manhattan the year I finished high school,” he remembered. “Also, in 4-H, I went to Manhattan and put on safety programs over KSAC.” A farm kid from Abilene, on the air at the state station. Those victrola games in the front room were quietly becoming something.
Now, you and I can see what young Ken could not. The Lord was not simply indulging a boy’s hobby. He was wiring him — patiently, quietly, through a battery-powered radio and a stack of newspapers and a couple of speeches over KSAC — for a life’s work that would one day carry the name of Jesus over the airwaves to the far side of the world. Isn’t that just like God? He is never in the hurry we are in, and He wastes nothing — not our interests, not our detours, not even our disappointments. The thing you love, the thing you are good at, the thing that lights you up: put it in His hands and stand back. He planted it, and He knows what it is for.
That is the invitation of this whole story, right here at the outset. Whatever God has placed in your hands — even something as small as a boy’s fascination with a voice coming out of a car battery — is not too small for Him to use. He is not looking for your qualifications. He is looking for your willingness to let Him aim what He has already given you.
As for Ken, the farm was about to grow too small for him. There was a school up in Chicago that trained young people for the Lord’s work — and, of all things, it had a radio station of its own. It was called the Moody Bible Institute. He would go. But between that Kansas boy and the microphone he was made for, there stood a war.
Sources & notes
Words & facts: the boyhood-radio quotations are from Ken’s letter of 19 Nov 1989; his birth, parents, boyhood faith, and school years are from his 2009 obituary. Verbatim; nothing invented.
TWO
One Year at Moody
The farm could not hold him. In the fall of 1942 a freshly graduated Kansas boy — class of 1942, all of seventeen going on eighteen — packed up and went east to Chicago, to a school that existed for a single purpose: to send young people out for God. It was the Moody Bible Institute, founded decades before by the shoe-salesman-turned-evangelist Dwight L. Moody, and it had been turning farm kids and shop clerks into missionaries and preachers ever since. For a boy who had given his heart to Christ at nine and had been playing at ministry over a victrola ever since, it must have felt like arriving at a home he had never seen.
And there was one more thing about Moody that would have set young Ken’s heart racing. The school had a radio station of its own. Its call letters were WMBI, and its signal carried the gospel out over Chicago and beyond. Imagine the boy who had broadcast the news off the old victrola to a living room of relatives, now walking the halls of a school with a real station humming inside it. Surely, he must have thought, surely this is the place.
And here is where the Lord did the very thing every one of us has felt and almost none of us have enjoyed. He said, “Not yet.” Ken wanted that microphone badly. But, as he would remember it, “In going away to Moody, I was not given any opportunity, though I longed for it. Moody had its own radio station, WMBI” — and the door to it stayed shut. A whole year at the school with the thing he loved humming just out of reach, and no invitation to come near it.
That first year ran its course — and then the world reached in and took him. The nation was at war, and it had a claim on its young men. On the first of August, 1943, Kenneth Ercil Engle was sworn into the United States Army. The radio station would have to wait. The Bible school would have to wait. A Kansas farm boy who dreamed of talking into a microphone was about to be handed a very different assignment, on the far side of the world.
I know that season, and I suspect you do too — the door you were certain God was leading you toward, and then the strange, silent “wait” just as your hand touched the knob. It is among the hardest things in the Christian life to trust a God who says “not yet” when everything in you says “now.” So hold the thought, friend, because you are about to watch it pay off. The microphone Ken longed for in 1942 was not denied him. It was being saved — for after the war, when he would be a different man, ready for a deeper reason. God’s delays are not God’s denials. They are almost always His preparations.
Sources & notes
Words & facts: Ken’s longing for WMBI that first year is his own (19 Nov 1989 letter, verbatim). The one year at Moody and the draft are from his 2009 obituary; the swearing-in date (1 Aug 1943) is from his wartime diary (“My Life in the Service”). D.L. Moody founding the Institute is general history.
THREE
The Great Interruption
He got his airplane after all. Remember the boy’s two dreams — the sports announcer and the “airplane driver”? God was about to grant the second one, though not in any shape a boy would choose. They made Kenneth Engle a tail gunner. He would ride in the cramped glass tail of a B-24 Liberator, a heavy four-engine bomber, with a pair of machine guns and a clear view of everything the plane was leaving behind. His outfit was the 90th Bombardment Group — the “Jolly Rogers,” who flew with a skull and crossbones painted on their tails — and by late 1944 the war had carried him clear across the Pacific.
“I entered the US Army Air Corps in the fall of 1943,” he would write, plainly, decades later. “I was a tail gunner on a B-24 Bomber. We started out in New Guinea and then moved up to Mindoro, Philippines.” The letters he sent home in those days brim with a young man’s wonder and a young believer’s faith. “Well a month ago I was home,” he wrote his folks in November of 1944, marveling at the “several thousands” of miles now between them — and, as ever, handing the credit to God: “I’m sure the Lord has helped a lot in this.”
It was dangerous work, and he never pretended otherwise. “We flew missions to places on Luzon and looked for shipping in the waters around the Philippines,” he remembered. “Also, we had 12-hour missions to Formosa.” And then, in the flat understatement of a man who had actually been there: “As we got nearer to Japan the flak got more accurate.” In the end it caught up with him. “We were hit by flak,” he wrote. “I came home on a hospital ship from Leyte.” He had gone to war a farm boy and come home on a stretcher — and through all of it, as he would put it, “the LORD has been good to us to bring us through that war!”
But here is the thing the Army could not have known it was doing — the thing that makes this far more than a war story. Somewhere over those green islands, in the tail of that bomber, God was planting a love. Ken looked down on the Philippines — the very place the guns had sent him — and something took hold of his heart that the war could never account for. “When I saw the Philippines, I really loved them,” he said. Years later, writing to the President of that country, he would frame his whole life as two arrivals on the same islands — he had first come to them in a bomber, and he would come back with a Bible.
Isn’t that just like God? We are so sure the enemy, or the draft board, or the sheer accident of circumstance has knocked us off course — and all the while the Lord is using the very detour to show us the field He means us to spend our life on. Ken did not choose the Philippines. God chose them for him, and used a world war and a tail-gunner’s window to do it. Nothing was wasted — not the danger, not the fear, not the flak. Friend, whatever hard place you are flying over just now, do not be too quick to call it a waste. God has been known to plant a calling in a war zone.
The war ended. Kenneth Engle came home to Kansas — thinner, quieter, marked by what he had seen, and carrying a secret burden for a nation on the far side of the ocean. And waiting for him in Chicago, still humming, was a microphone.
Sources & notes
His own words: the war summary (“I entered the US Army Air Corps… hit by flak… hospital ship from Leyte”) is from his 15 Nov 1998 letter to a fellow veteran; “I’m sure the Lord has helped” is his 29 Nov 1944 letter home; “the LORD has been good… through that war” is drawn from his letters (the family’s “War, Remembered” file); “When I saw the Philippines, I really loved them” is quoted in the 1978 Abilene Reflector-Chronicle feature.
Facts: the B-24, the 90th Bomb Group (“Jolly Rogers”), and the Pacific route are from his wartime diary, “My Life in the Service.” Verbatim quotations; framing editorial.
FOUR
Back to Moody
He could have gone home to the farm. Plenty did. A man comes back from a war like that and no one would fault him for wanting nothing more than solid Kansas ground under his boots for the rest of his days. But Kenneth Engle had unfinished business in Chicago. As soon as he was discharged he went back to the Moody Bible Institute to finish what the war had interrupted — and this time he would stay until they placed a diploma in his hand, in 1950.
Now watch what God does with a man’s timing. Remember the closed door of 1942 — the radio station Ken had longed for and never once been let near? Here is how he tells the sequel, and I want you to feel the two dates rub against each other: “when I came back from the war and again enrolled, I was not back in school a month before I was asked to take an audition.” A month. The boy who had spent an entire first year with WMBI humming just out of reach was, the second time around, all but pulled to the microphone before he had unpacked his bag. “That led,” he wrote simply, “to four years of broadcasting while I was in school.”
Do you see it? The door that would not budge in 1942 swung wide in 1946. Same young man, same school, same station — a different season. What had changed was not Ken’s talent; he had carried that since the victrola. What had changed was that God’s clock had finally struck the hour. In 1942 Ken was a boy who wanted a microphone. By 1946 he was a veteran who had seen men in danger, who had loved a nation from the tail of a bomber, who knew now in his bones that the gospel was worth a life. That is the man God wanted at that microphone — not the eager boy, but the seasoned man.
It is one of the kindest and most maddening truths about walking with God: He is far more interested in who you are becoming than in how quickly you get what you want. The delay that had felt like rejection was in fact an apprenticeship. And when the door finally opened, Ken walked through it not as a hobbyist chasing a dream, but as a servant handed a tool — and he sat down, four years running, before a Chicago microphone, and set about discovering what it was really for.
Sources & notes
His own words: the return, the audition “not back in school a month,” and the “four years of broadcasting” are from Ken’s 19 Nov 1989 letter, verbatim. Graduation in 1950 is from his 2009 obituary and the 1978 Abilene Reflector-Chronicle feature. Framing editorial.
FIVE
On the Air at WMBI
For four years the boy who had broadcast the news off a victrola to a room full of relatives did it for real. “I began in radio as a student at Moody Bible Institute,” Ken would write. “I served as an announcer there on WMBI for a period of four years.” WMBI — the Moody Bible Institute’s own station, one of the pioneers of gospel radio in America — put a microphone in front of him and a signal at his back, and out went his voice over Chicago and beyond, carrying music and Scripture and the plain good news into cars and kitchens he would never see.
Consider the tender arithmetic of it. The very thing the boy had loved for no reason he could name — voices coming out of a car-battery radio on the Kansas plains — turned out to be the exact instrument God would use to make him useful. The sports announcer he had wanted to be had become a gospel announcer. The dream had not died in him; it had been baptized. And somewhere in those four years Ken did the sum and reached the only conclusion a thoughtful man could reach: “I concluded that the Lord had given me a gift in that direction.”
That sentence deserves a second look, because it is the quiet turning point of his whole life. He did not say, “I discovered I was talented.” He said the Lord had given him a gift — and a gift, by its very nature, belongs to the Giver and is meant to be given away. From that point on Ken never again thought of radio as his hobby or even his career. It was a stewardship. For the rest of his days — through the mission field and long after — wherever Kenneth Engle went, he would find a microphone and put it to work for the Kingdom.
Here is a word for you, friend, whatever your version of the microphone happens to be. The thing you are good at is not, in the end, about you. It was handed to you, on purpose, by a God who intends to use it. The question is never merely, “Am I gifted?” The question is, “Whom will my gift serve?” Ken settled that question in a radio booth in Chicago — and it set the compass for everything that came after.
Because even as his voice was going out over Chicago, his heart was going out over an ocean. A larger field was calling him now — one he had first seen from the tail of a bomber.
Sources & notes
His own words: “I began in radio as a student at Moody Bible Institute… an announcer there on WMBI for a period of four years” is from his 31 Jan 1983 letter; “I concluded that the Lord had given me a gift in that direction” is from his 19 Nov 1989 letter. His daily broadcast work is documented across his 1950–51 datebook. Verbatim; framing editorial.
SIX
The Call to the Field
Every thread in this story was about to be tied into a single knot. As Kenneth Engle neared the end of his years at Moody, the burden he had carried home from the war finally spoke up and would not be hushed. “As I neared the end of my training,” he wrote, “I realized that I had a burden for the Philippines.” The islands he had once flown over with machine guns had never let go of him. He had loved them from the air; now he would go back to them on his knees.
His home churches sent him out with their blessing — commended, as his people would put it, by the Grace and Truth Gospel Chapel of Abilene, where he had first met the Lord at nine, and the Woodside Bible Chapel of Chicago, where he had worshiped as a student. And in 1951 he went. “In 1951 I went there as a single person,” he wrote — no fanfare, just a young man with a Bible and a call, sailing for the very archipelago the war had shown him.
There was a girl, of course; there is nearly always a girl. He had met a nurse named Mary Lou in the Moody crowd back in Chicago, and their story was only beginning. But it would keep. “Mary Lou completed her nurse’s training and came over in 1952,” Ken wrote. “We were married in 1953.” That, though, is a different book. This one is about a man and a calling.
And what a calling. Ken Engle would spend the better part of the next twenty-five years in the Philippines — and, true to the boy at the victrola, he would do a great deal of it by radio, sending the gospel out over the Far East by the very gift God had first stirred in a Kansas farmhouse. He told the story himself, writing to President Marcos of the Philippines in 1972: “I first saw the Philippines as I served with the Fifth Air Force during Liberation in 1944-45. I returned to the Philippines in 1951 — not with a gun, but this time with the ‘Sword of the Spirit,’ the Bible.”
Stand back now and take in the whole of it, because this is the place where it fairly takes your breath away. A boy on a Kansas farm loves a radio that runs on a car battery. He wants to be an airplane driver and a sports announcer. A war makes him a gunner and flies him over a nation he will come to love. A microphone in Chicago, withheld from him once and then handed to him, teaches him that his gift belongs to God. And a burden born in a bomber sends him back to those same islands with the gospel on his tongue and a radio signal at his back. Not one piece of it was wasted. Not one. The Lord had been writing a single story the whole time, and the boy never once saw it until it was nearly written.
He does the same with you, friend. The interests He gave you, the detours He allowed, the doors He closed and the ones He opened right on time — He is weaving them, even now, into something you cannot yet read. Kenneth Engle’s life is simply one long, clear proof of a promise you can stake your own on: that God works all things together for good, to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. Every thread. Every time. Even a boy and a radio.
Sources & notes
His own words: “As I neared the end of my training I realized that I had a burden for the Philippines,” “In 1951 I went there as a single person,” and the note on Mary Lou (“completed her nurse’s training and came over in 1952… married in 1953”) are from his 15 Nov 1998 letter; the “two arrivals” lines (“I first saw the Philippines… not with a gun, but this time with the ‘Sword of the Spirit,’ the Bible”) are from his 13 March 1972 letter to President Ferdinand Marcos.
Facts: the commendation by the Grace and Truth Gospel Chapel (Abilene) and Woodside Bible Chapel (Chicago), and the ~25 years in the Philippines, are from his 2009 obituary. Mary Lou is kept to a cameo by design. Closing Scripture: Romans 8:28, paraphrased. Verbatim quotations; framing and application editorial.