Celebrating Veteran & Philanthropist Len Kaine By Brooke Clifford
Four U.S. Navy aircraft from Fleet Composite Squadron VC-7 "Redtails" in flight near San Diego, California (USA), in 1969: a Vought DF-8F Crusader (BuNo 144427), an F-8C (BuNo 145562), and two Douglas A-4C Skyhawks (BuNo 147715, 149645). Photo credit U.S. Navy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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ne of Coronado’s most distinguished community members is philanthropist and retired Navy pilot, Leonard “Len” Kaine. Today Kaine is known for his work with the Golden Rule Society (GRS), which his experiences up until founding GRS nearly 50 years ago built up to. Born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Kaine knew the value of hard work from an early age when his father
was injured in a coal mining accident and he helped his family get by through his paper route. “I remember I was eight, nine, ten years old,” Kaine recalled, “and I was delivering newspapers for the Scranton Times. I was delivering about 100 newspapers a day and got paid a penny each so I was earning a dollar day – about $30 a month – which paid our rent for the home we lived in for three years.” Once Kaine graduated high school, he decided to join the Navy becoming a “teenage Ensign” in 1956. “The goal was get back from Navy at 21, go to Penn State, get a degree in electronics, work for IBM, and live happily ever after,” he explained. But the Navy offered a college Coronado Magazine | P33
equivalency test to Kaine, which he passed gaining two years equivalence of college and with that, he was told he qualified for Navy flight training. “I said, ‘what does that mean?’ and they told me, ‘That you can fly airplanes.’ ‘Where do I sign up?’,” Kaine had replied immediately. “So that’s how I got into the Navy and I absolutely loved it.” Proving to be a natural in the air, Kaine went on to set a record for flying six different Navy aircraft types in two days of combat maneuvering; he flew in 103 combat missions in Vietnam; and he became the first East Coast Top Gun and an All Navy Top Gun in the same year. In 1977, was the youngest officer promoted to captain at the time. “When I was in a
