Johnny helping on the farm with sons Gary and Phil, 1950.

John’s graduation photo, 1931

Back row: Phil, Gary, Steve. Front row: Grace, Linda, John, Judy and Stan, around 1957.

John

by Stan Keillor, son

Fathers today try to be buddies and hope to be remembered for playing catch and sitting endless hours on the soccer sidelines. I remember my dad, John Keillor, more as someone that I worked with, not always by choice, but memorably. I believe he was fondest of me when we cased mail together at the post office during the Christmas rush. And the only time I remember him truly angry was when we were raking leaves and my brother or I left the rake wrong-side-up and he stepped on it and got his bell rung.

John Keillor was a working man who lived his faith, a faith that lifted him far above the work room floor. His generation may have produced many John Keillors, but for his children, who got to follow him around when he was at his most magnificent, it didn’t matter.

John Keillor worked hard on his father’s farm, like other boys, following the horse-drawn plow along with his brothers. But although he was not one to complain, it is said he much preferred that little invention that Henry Ford had made so affordable for the common man. If his father and brother, Jim, had bought into having a gas-powered tractor on the farm, John might have stayed longer.

John graduated from Anoka High School in 1931. He found work somehow in the middle of the Depression, married Grace Denham in 1938 and began raising a family, working at the Pure Oil station in Anoka. When World War II came, despite having three young children and his brother Jim offering to take his place, John was drafted into the Army. But his country put him to work rather than to fighting. He worked for the Army Post Office on the island of Manhattan and never saw a single foxhole.

And so it was given to John Keillor to be a working man, not a fighting man. The bitterness of war, or any kind of confrontation was completely foreign to his nature. Oh, you could get him to complain at times — about how many things these days are made in Japan and not the U.S.A. and to criticize the abstract — “Some people,” he would say, “some people think that money grows on trees.” But real criticism, real criticism of actual people, you could not pry out of him with a crowbar.

After the war, John was hired by the Railway Mail Service, and for many years he made the run from St. Paul to Jamestown, North Dakota, on the Northern Pacific, traveling at speeds up to 70 miles per hour, sorting mail on the fly. For a boy who grew up walking a furrow behind a plow, this just might have been as exciting as one of our children getting a job on the Space Shuttle.

The job also gave John his many days off, when he could work as a carpenter and handyman doing projects on which he was his own boss. It also gave him time to build our house at 312 77th Avenue No. in Brooklyn Park. And I believe he liked rubbing elbows and throwing mail with his fellow mailmen, whose language may have been a little rough but whose labor blocked some of the vices.

John was blessed with a big family. We were his ever-ready work crew. The older ones worked with him building the house and picking potatoes. The younger ones helped him on the paper route. I got to work beside him one Christmas season at the Minneapolis Post Office, sorting mail. John Keillor could sort and case and bundle a sack of mail as fast as any man, and certainly it’s not the most important of his many skills but it’s the only one I could ever match him at. It typified his way of working, for John Keillor was a quick and nimble man, who liked to sprint up the ladder and skip along the roofline, with a hammer jiggling in his tool belt and three or four nails clenched between his teeth to speed along the process.

And in the summer he would haul his little helpers with him, loading up the Ford station wagon, tying the ladder on the top, throwing the tool chest and a couple of children in the back, and the unlucky one in the front seat. We never left the house before 9 o’clock, and there were many stops to make along the way. To talk with Mr. Burlingame in Camden, to stop at the bank, and at Federal Lumber, where his sister Ruth worked in the office, or at Northside Mercury where he knew all the used car salesmen. Or to drive downtown and stop at Sween-Lundeen to talk with one of them (I’m not sure if it was Mr. Sween or Mr. Lundeen). For John Keillor, one of the quietest, most self-effacing men at home or in a meeting, was a different man at work. He had to talk. Everywhere we stopped. Sometimes we children would wait out in the car, and he would come out in a half-hour later with a couple of 2x4s that hardly made it worth the trip. But in the meantime, John Keillor had talked to half-a-dozen people. And we could see so well that all those people were tied to a desk, or to a counter, or a forklift or a shipping office. To us, John Keillor appeared to be a free man, with seemingly all the time in the world to roam and with half his family in tow. He liked to work, don’t get me wrong, and sometimes his worried wife would call him when the supper started getting cold. But I think I can say that on the days when we were with him, John Keillor never worked a full eight-hour day.

John retired at the early age of 59 with a civil service pension and moved to Florida, where he bought a knife-sharpening business, again becoming his own boss and driving his Ford station wagon to restaurants all over the state of Florida. He must have known nearly every waitress and cook and kitchen manager along the way, and stopped to talk to all of them. When he returned to Minnesota, his son bought back the family home, and John at age 78 was up on a stepladder restoring it to what he had remembered.

How rich a life was given to this man and how bountiful God’s blessing in seeing things got built. And how very, very light his burdens, although ladders didn’t have to be of solid wood or pipes of heavy metal, or inventor’s heads so thick they couldn’t think of nail guns to save my father’s thumbs.