Ok it got better when I add another dense later with “relu” and ran 7 epochs one with very low LR and one with higher LR just like in the class.
Yay!! Feeling encouraged 
Epoch 1/2
1496/1496 [==============================] - 41s - loss: 2.6742 - acc: 0.0836 - val_loss: 6.9782 - val_acc: 0.1716
Epoch 2/2
1496/1496 [==============================] - 20s - loss: 2.1978 - acc: 0.2413 - val_loss: 6.0879 - val_acc: 0.1716
Epoch 1/5
1496/1496 [==============================] - 34s - loss: 2.0497 - acc: 0.3329 - val_loss: 5.0679 - val_acc: 0.1440
Epoch 2/5
1496/1496 [==============================] - 21s - loss: 1.9034 - acc: 0.4358 - val_loss: 3.1969 - val_acc: 0.2022
Epoch 3/5
1496/1496 [==============================] - 20s - loss: 1.7915 - acc: 0.4967 - val_loss: 2.2603 - val_acc: 0.3136
Epoch 4/5
1496/1496 [==============================] - 22s - loss: 1.6926 - acc: 0.5374 - val_loss: 1.7427 - val_acc: 0.4157
Epoch 5/5
1496/1496 [==============================] - 21s - loss: 1.6004 - acc: 0.5809 - val_loss: 1.5945 - val_acc: 0.4811