WILTON – After World War II, when many people repaired their own cars, Ken Blanchard’s Salvage Yard was the place to go for parts or for a used car if you couldn’t afford a new one.

“I used to go up there and buy an old car,” longtime Wilton resident Henry Moreau said. “I’d run it until it quit, then go get another one.”

It also was the place for young people to learn to drive. If you could make the car run, Blanchard told them, you could drive it around the yard.

“Lots of guys, and girls, too, learned to drive down at ‘The Yard,’?” said his daughter, Heidi Blanchard Wilder.

Isaac Kenton “Ken” Blanchard, 92, died April 16 in Nashua. He was a longtime resident of Wilton.

“He was a wonderful person,” his friend of almost 70 years, Cleveland Beard, said after private committal services on Thursday. Theirs is a lifelong story of close friendship, and an unusual war story.

“We met in 1941 at Grenier Field in 1941,” Beard said, referring to what is now the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport. “We enlisted in the Army Air Force together, went on the same troop ship together and stayed together through the war in the South Pacific,” serving in the 1955th Ordinance Group.

“The fact that we stayed together is almost unheard of. They usually don’t let you do that, breaking up friends and family” to increase the chances of one surviving.

They were together in Australia, New Guinea and the Philippines.

“We came home on the same troop ship and came to Fort Devens on the same train,” Beard said.

Throughout all of that moving around, Blanchard had his guitar.

“He’d get it out and play it,” Beard said. “Now you know how we won the war: Ken and his guitar. He carried it along with his duffle bag.”

After returning to Wilton, the two men started the salvage yard.

“I stayed with it for a while,” Beard said; Blanchard’s family still runs it.

When Blanchard married Winifred Dupell in 1946, Beard served his friend as best man.

“He was wonderful, a great guy,” Beard said. “Everybody liked him.”

“He was the kindest man I’ve ever known,” Wilder said. “His whole life was about helping people, helping them get started in business, when they needed help, like bringing turkeys and packages to people at Christmas. He was a very giving person.”

She added, “He had a gas station in downtown Wilton for a while, but he ran it into the ground. His friends couldn’t afford gas, so he gave it to them, and he never got paid.”

Blanchard was born in Boston in 1917.

He attended a one-room school in Wilton Center and then Friends Academy in Long Island, N.Y., and Edgewood High School in Greenwich, Conn. He held a degree in mechanical engineering from Wentworth Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

His love of cars and trucks led him to the salvage business. He first opened shop at the family home on Wilson Road in 1949, Wilder said, and moved to the present location on Route 31 south in 1951.

“That is a long time to be in business in one place,” she said.

Her sister Wendy is currently in charge of the business.

Blanchard kept his love of music throughout his life, taught his four children to play the guitar and performed often for family and friends.

He was a member of the First Congregational Unitarian Society of Wilton, Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and the Wilton Lions Club.

He is survived by his wife, five children, five grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

A memorial service was held Saturday at the Unitarian Church.

Jessie Salisbury can be reached at jessies @tellink.net.