Richard O’Keeffe
by Megan O’Keeffe

Sandra Day O’Connor, Hillary Clinton, Angelina Jolie- Just some of the names that come to mind when I think about people that have worked for justice, though they all did it in different ways. But today I am here to talk about my grandfather, Richard O’Keeffe. A father, a
husband, and in ways, a hero.

Richard Kevin O’Keeffe was born in 1930 and was the first of the O’Keeffes to be born in America. All of his older sisters and his brother were born in Ireland, and his mom moved to America when she was pregnant with him. So I guess you could say that he was a first generation American, at least for the O’Keeffe family.

Between 1950-1955 he was in the Navy. He served on the USS San Pablo, a sea plane tender, between 1954 and 1955 during the Korean Conflict. A sea plane tender takes damaged sea planes and brings them onto a ship so they can fix them up so they are able to be used again. My grandfather was more in the delivery part of that system. His job was to draw the big metal claws down onto the water and pick up the sea planes and put them on the ships to get fixed up so some men could go back out and fight.

During his time in the Navy he fell in love with Beverly Mone, my grandmother, and married her in 1953. At this time he was 23 and she was 22.

After he left the Navy, he and my grandmother settled down in New York. Throughout the 1960s they had five children, two daughters and then three boys. During this time my grandfather was a union organizer. He did this between the 1960s and 70s. He worked to make sure that nurses, maintenance workers, and hotel workers were treated fairly and got fair pay. The majority of people he organized and represented were underprivileged or new immigrants.

But during all of this, in the 70s, he was also doing his best to raise five children. One time, in 1973, he was going to the model store and asked everyone if they wanted anything while he was there. My dad, Will, who was 6 at the time, asked for a Woolly Mammoth. My Uncle Michael, who was 4 at the time, thought that he said Willy Mammoth, so he asked for a Michael Mammoth. So my grandfather went out and bought two Woolly Mammoths, left one as is and on the other he crossed out Woolly and wrote Michael on it just so his youngest son would be happy and wouldn’t feel cheated out of a model.

Although there are some things that he did in certain time periods, there are some things that he did basically throughout his whole life. Like controlling the radio. Take a moment and really imagine the picture I’m about to paint for you. He, my grandmother, and their five kids, a couple of them teens and the rest still elementary school age, all driving in the family Lincoln Continental—think long, but not spacious. They are driving down the highway peacefully, or at least it seemed like that, but then all of a sudden the Irish music stops playing and everyone starts yelling out the type of music that they want to listen to. One of the girls wants country, the other wants folk, and the boys want rock. My grandfather, however, just puts on more Irish music, completely ignoring what everyone else wants to listen to. It didn’t matter to him, as long as he had his Irish music, and I’m sure you could all imagine how that made everyone else feel. But nobody would argue, because it was the fair settlement.  No one received special treatment, and it was consistent.

And then there are the fundraisers that he did. He did them to help people who were displaced from North Ireland due to the conflicts between the British and the Irish Republicans. Since his family was from Ireland, he thought that it was right to help people who needed assistance and had their lives disrupted. He didn’t think it was fair for some people to have so much but for others to be so needy and really need help to get by. He thought it was important to help out others as much as you possibly could.

He even helped out his nieces and nephews out a lot. A lot of them came from bad home lives, parents or parent dead or divorced. So he employed them so that they could have an opportunity to turn around their lives and make something of themselves.  Just like King, he believed in fairness and people being treated justly. My grandfather didn’t care about someone’s race or gender or sexuality, he just cared about people being treated as they should be.

Although, unfortunately, he died of Melanoma skin cancer in 1978 at age 48, I know that he has helped many and that his legend lives on within me, my sister, my father, and many others out there helping out the less fortunate.