History of John Keehan

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IFAA John Keehan Historical Society
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By 1962, after the service, Keehan was teaching at Gene Wyka’s Judo and Karate Center in Brighton Park and made occasional trips to Phoenix, Arizona, to study under Robert Trias, who had opened the first karate school in the U.S. and was head of the United States Karate Association. Training full-time, Keehan quickly earned his second-degree black belt and was appointed the USKA’s midwest representative. In the early 60s dojos were rough, bare-bones joints largely inhabited by cops, ex-soldiers, and assorted other tough guys. (Trias, who died in 1989, was an Arizona highway patrolman who’d studied karate while stationed in the Pacific during World War II.) But Keehan, wanting a bigger audience, began to organize tournaments that emphasized the flashier aspects of the martial arts; he appears on the cover of one tournament program smashing eight rows of bricks with his elbow. He was a savvy publicist, making sure the first event he organized, at the University of Chicago field house on July 28, 1963, got mentioned in the Tribune’s “In the Wake of the News” column.

Keehan’s early tournaments attracted a host of martial-arts luminaries—like Ed Parker, Jhoon Rhee, and a pre-Enter the Dragon Bruce Lee—as well as new students. James Jones, a 66-year-old retiree now living in Hazel Crest, signed on at Keehan’s Rush Street school the day after he attended the U. of C. event. He studied with Keehan for three years and remembers him as an ideal instructor. “John was a person who focused on basics and fundamentals,” he says. “He had excellent form and techniques.” He also says that Keehan was one of the few men who could side kick or punch a brick in half, though at one event it took three strikes and Keehan wound up breaking five bones in his hand. Still, he showed up at the dojo the next day, his hand in a cast.

But Keehan also had an arrogant streak. “John was the type of person who enjoyed attention and being in the limelight,” Jones says. “‘If you’re talking about me, then you know about me.’ I thought that was a weakness: ‘What can I do for myself instead of the art?’” Arthur D. Rapkin, a Milwaukee-area acupuncturist who studied under Keehan from 1965 to 1971, recalls Keehan’s “chronic” arguing with other karate schools. His ideas for tournaments were the biggest problem. Unlike most other teachers, Keehan advocated full-contact matches—no safety equipment, no pulled punches.

“John was six-foot, well built, and looked like a bodybuilder,” says Michael Felkoff, a friend of Keehan’s now living in Las Vegas. “If you messed with him, he was liable to hurt you.”

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About John Keehan (aka Count Dante)

John Keehan was born in Beverly on February 2, 1939, to an affluent family: his father, Jack, was a physician and director of the Ashland State Bank, and his mother, Dorothy, occasionally appeared on the Tribune’s society pages. He also had an older sister, Diane. They’re all dead too, according to a cousin of Keehan’s contacted by Webb. (The cousin did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this story.) In his teens Keehan attended Mount Carmel High School and boxed at Johnny Coulon’s 63rd Street gym, and after graduating from high school he joined the marine reserves and later the army, where he learned hand-to-hand combat and jujitsu techniques.