Biography
Worley was born on April 27, 1948, in Farmington, New Mexico, and completed the 8th grade at Farmington Elementary School in 1962. After being orphaned, he moved to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and attended Hot Spring High School there for two years. He moved to Modesto, California, at age sixteen to live with an aunt. The conditions there were poor for Worley; he lived in a travel trailer with no running water or electricity. Instead of going to school, he worked as a truck driver, hauling loads of Christmas trees out of the mountains. After injuring his foot at work, he was taken in by Don and Rose Feyerherm of Modesto. They treated him like a son and became his foster parents.
Worley enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in Fresno, California on June 14, 1967, he received recruit training with the 3rd Recruit Training Battalion, Recruit Training Regiment, Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, California. Upon completion of recruit training in August 1967, Pvt Worley was transferred to the Marine Corps Base, Camp Pendleton, California, and underwent individual combat training with Company R, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry Training Regiment, and basic infantry training with the 2nd Infantry Training Regiment, completing the latter in October.
He was promoted to private first class on November 1, 1967 and, later that month, was ordered to the Republic of Vietnam. Assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division, he served consecutively as a rifleman with Company I, with Headquarters and Service Company, and with Company L. He was promoted to lance corporal on May 1, 1968. While serving as a machine gunner with Company L on August 12, 1968, he was killed in action, saving five fellow Marines by his actions.
Kenneth Worley is buried in Westminster Memorial Park, Westminster, California.
Read more about this topic: Kenneth L. Worley
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“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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