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.

That year Keehan legally changed his name to Juan Raphael Dante, telling people that he wanted to reclaim the royal title he lost after his parents immigrated to the U.S. in 1936, during the Spanish civil war. It’s never been clear why a south-side Irish guy like Keehan decided he must be a Spanish count, or how he chose his new name (though Mount Carmel High School is located on Dante Avenue). Regardless, his new name and background came with a flashier stage presence. At a 1967 tournament held at Lane Tech, he arrived wearing a flowing cape and brandishing a cane capped by a lion’s head; he’d dyed his hair jet-black and had a neatly trimmed beard, reflecting his new side gig in cosmetology. Also in 1967 he opened a salon, the House of Dante, at 2558 W. Superior in West Town. Rapkin recalls that Keehan recommended hairdressing to him as a profession; the flexible hours would let him pursue martial-arts training, and it wasn’t a bad way to meet girls.

Continued

Bull killing was the signature stunt of karate legend Mas Oyama, and Rapkin initially seemed game: in a Tribune article 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.