Despite—or maybe because of—what one of his medal citations calls Dahlberg’s “extraordinary determination to destroy the enemy,” he did not always prevail. Dahlberg was shot down three times, and he says some friends argue that he should only be given credit for twelve “net” victories, having ruined three perfectly good American planes.
Twice (once with the help of his future interrogator), Dahlberg returned to duty after being shot down. But after his third crash, in February 1945, he was captured. He made several unsuccessful escape attempts, but spent the last months of the war as a POW.
Ever since his days as a fighter pilot, Dahlberg admits, life has seemed “kind of slow most of the time. I’m always wondering, ‘Where’s the action?’”
CREEP
Dahlberg found new fields for action in the business and political worlds.
After working for an electronics firm for several years, he founded his own company in 1948. Though not an engineer, Dahlberg had a knack for imagining what was mechanically possible, which he attributes to his farm youth.
“My father always said that ‘farmers know where the handle is’,” he remembers.
The challenge of designing a better hearing aid particularly intrigued Dahlberg. Hearing aids in those days were bulky and unsightly, with a separate microphone unit typically attached to an earpiece by a cord. Dahlberg wanted to create a virtually invisible hearing aid, and someone said that if he could do that, “it would be a miracle.”
An early version of the Miracle Ear, the first all-in-the-ear hearing aid, appeared in 1955.
Dahlberg’s company thrived, for a time as a subsidiary of Motorola. But by the mid-1960s, events began to distract Dahlberg from his business. Aggressive antitrust regulators were moving to restrict the hearing-aid industry, complaining of high prices they blamed on manufacturers who owned exclusive retail outlets. This interference “stymied the business,” Dahlberg says.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater had run unsuccessfully as the Republican candidate for president, recruiting his old air corps buddy Ken Dahlberg as a fundraiser.
Dahlberg’s business experience stirred political frustrations over taxes and regulation. He became an enthusiastic Republican fundraiser and organizer at the state and national levels. In 1968, he served as a regional fundraiser for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign. Nixon narrowly defeated Vice President Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota that year.
