Position:
English Faculty
Keith McKean, 91, was scholar who liked to debate -- politely
February 10; 2007, by Erin Ailworth, Sentinel Staff Writer
Keith Ferguson McKean had the looks of a Botticelli painting, a professor's intellect, and the sensibility of a Southern gentleman.
To his wife, McKean was the "perfect" older man who turned her head. To his sons, he was the doting father who took them to parks to play catch and encouraged intellectual debate across the dinner table. To his friends, McKean was a "soul of courtesy" and one who loved to tell stories--again across the dinner table.
The rest of Central Florida might recognize McKean as a well-known local lecturer, and a past president of the Associates of the Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, founded by his sister-in-law Jeannette and directed by his brother Hugh.
"I was just thinking of the right word for Keith, and the word is ponder," friend Frank Brogan said Friday. "It suggests the kinds of thoughts he was given to. He would ponder deeply, he would ruminate . . . he loved to discuss."
McKean died Tuesday, February 6, 2007, of natural causes at Winter Park Towers. He was 91.
Born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, McKean spent his early childhood on a farm, where he and two brothers had been sent to weather a flu epidemic in 1919.
The family soon moved to Orlando, near East Colonial Drive, which was still a sleepy dirt road. For amusement, the boys used to lure passing motorists out of their cars with a wallet tied to a string, which they would yank away whenever a curious driver tried to pick it up.
McKean attended Williams College in Massachusetts and the University of Chicago, before serving in World War II as a navigator on a submarine-hunter aircraft patrolling the Florida coast. After the war, he earned a doctorate at the University of Michigan and went on to become a tenured professor at North Carolina State University, Elmira College in New York, and the University of Northern Iowa.
McKean met Joan, his second wife, while teaching in New York.
"I was his assistant, and we fell in love," Joan Canter Sanford McKean said. "He had a nice sense of humor, and he was just perfect for me because he liked the things that I liked. I liked to talk about books, and that was his livelihood."
McKean's sons remembered their dad's loving ways.
"I'll tell you what would be a big night for us . . . to go out to the railroad tracks where the Silver Meteor was coming by on its way from New York to Florida, and we'd put a penny on the tracks," said son Kevin McKean of San Francisco. The train would shoot by, squashing the pennies until "the image of Lincoln was like a ghost."
Son Bruce McKean, of Urbandale, Iowa, added, "He was big on engaging us in discussions . . . one of us would take one side of an argument and then he would take another.
"Those things [debates] were a hallmark of our growing up," Bruce McKean said.
McKean passed that love of debate and learning to everyone he met, Brogan said. He described McKean as proper man with a rolling voice and "that Southern cavalier spirit about him."
"The thing he liked to do best was sit at home with his darling wife, Joan--who is a wonderful cook--and she would make feasts," Brogan said. "It [always] was a sit-down dinner, top-level etiquette, and it was delightful. It was like going back in an earlier century."
McKean also is survived by his brother, retired Marine Colonel Vance McKean of Dana Point, California; stepchildren Karen Canter of Portland, Maine, Heather Canter Wheeler of Des Moines, Iowa, Christopher Canter of Boca Raton, Lynn Canter of Elmira, New York, Gerrit Canter of Vernon, New Jersey; and five grandchildren.
Memorial services will be February 19, 2007, at 3 p,m. in the McKean Pavilion of the Morse Museum. In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to the museum at 445 North Park Avenue, Winter Park, Florida.
Copyright Orlando Sentinel on-line edition, downloaded December 18, 2013.