History of John Keehan (Page 2)

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Keehan claimed that race strained his relationship with Trias. In 1969 he told Black Belt Magazine that in 1964 “the USKA didn’t have any Negroes in the organization, except for mine, and Trias didn’t like it one bit. . . . It’s the truth. Of course, now he has no qualms about it, but at the time, that’s the way it was.” Trias, in a 1975 article, dismissed this as “nonsense.”

Jones, who trained under both men, believes that there probably was a de facto ban on minorities in the early days of the USKA but that the battle between Trias and Keehan likely had as much to do with control as with race. Whatever the reason, Trias expelled Keehan from the USKA in December 1964. Keehan was on his own.

Trias later said that Keehan “was given too much power too young and too fast,” and in his mid-20s the future Count Dante did seem to start drifting off course. On July 22, 1965, Keehan and Doug Dwyer, a longtime friend and fellow instructor, were arrested after a drunken attempt to blow out a window at Gene Wyka’s school with a dynamite cap. After they were apprehended, Dwyer was charged with four traffic violations; Keehan was charged with attempted arson, possession of explosives, and resisting arrest. He got two years’ probation.

Around the same time Keehan bought a lion cub—a legal, if uncommon, practice before the 1969 Illinois Dangerous Animals Act—which he kept at his dojo on Ashland and walked around town like a dog. (He later sold it to the Lions Club of Quincy, Illinois.) In the summer of 1967 he promoted an audacious exhibition in which, as part of a tournament at Medinah Temple, a bull would be killed with a single blow. Keehan purchased a bull from the stockyards and drove it around town on the back of a flatbed truck festooned with signs announcing the event. He wouldn’t perform the deed himself: he’d picked Arthur Rapkin, then a 19-year-old student, for the task.

Bull killing was the signature stunt of karate legend Mas Oyama, and Rapkin initially seemed game: in a Tribunearticle about the event (headlined “Karate Expert Thwarted as Bull Hitter”), he’s quoted as saying that if the police prevented him from attacking the bull in the building, he would “kill it in the truck on State Street, if necessary.” But after the seats were filled Keehan announced that the event had been shut down by the Chicago SPCA. In hindsight, Rapkin says, he believes Keehan and his associates never seriously considered staging the event. “They were probably just howling at this little Jewish kid from Milwaukee they were going to put up against this bull,” he says.

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Keehan charged students $20 a month—pricey for dojos at the time—and he gained a reputation for being one of the first white sensei in the country to accept nonwhite students. “Race never played a part in John’s teaching,” says Jones, who is black. Ken Knudson, a white student of Jones’s who later founded the Sybaris couples’ resort chain, was interviewed by Webb a week before he died in a plane crash last January. “John loved the martial arts,” Knudson told Webb. “He loved it, he ate it, he breathed it. He was blind to race. It didn’t matter.”