Spring 2014 Bulletin

ALUMNI PROFILE:

Henry Keene ’38: An Inspiring Life Journey That Started at DCD

To visit Henry Keene ’38 in his home in Dedham is to take a walk through history. Paintings of ancestors line the walls, scrapbooks of newspaper clippings and old family photos fill the bookcases to bursting. An extensive collection of books on marine topics as well as an incredible collection of paintings of ships and wooden models of boats of all shapes and sizes testify to a family history of boatbuilding stretching back to to the old shipyards of Thomaston, Maine.

Curiously enough though, Henry traces a good part of the origin of his own boatbuilding history to his landlocked days at DCD.

“Working with wood at DCD was something that ran through my life,” he remembers. “We built just about everything.” He recalls fondly how “One classmate I remember made lobster traps that he used in the summer to catch lobsters.”

“Back in those days,” he recalls, “if you wanted something you had to make it yourself. It was the thirties, the Depression.”

Henry remembers those days at DCD’s High Street location at the corner of Bullard Street. “All the teachers were young. I remember Miss Boyd, who lived on the corner of Bullard. The teachers used to park their cars there. Our baseball field was next door, and there were many times a ball would hit against her house and we’d have to go and fix a window the next day.”

It was Mr. Ladd, the head of school then, who did much of the making and fixing at DCD, and who became a role model for Henry, as he was for many of the students of that era.

“I remember him building the toboggan run in back of where the school stands now. It lasted for many years. He had to do it himself. There was no money to pay anyone.”

Hard times didn’t mean bad times though. It was at DCD that Henry would come to build his first boat. “It was a kayak,” he remembers. “We had kits we had to put together. The kayaks were made of canvas and we’d pour water over them to shrink the canvas.”

As always there was need to improvise, especially to get them to the water. “I took some wheels from my sister’s old bike and made a little tow and put the kayak on it and attached it to my bike and rode it to Norwood or Dover to the water. We all did things like that, somedays riding out together along the roads with our kayaks in tow. I can’t imagine doing that now though,” he adds.

The lessons he learned at DCD would serve him well when the war came. “I finished up at Tabor on the 27th, and on the 28th, the Army came for me. We were brought to the old Packard Building by Boston University and sworn in after our tests and physicals. A few days later, we gathered again at the court house from where we were shipped out for training.”

For Henry, the war meant serving as a combat engineer at 18 and spending years in the Pacific. “I remember just before we left the ship, after the Sunday service, the familiar speech about some of you are not going to be alive tomorrow.”

And, there would be losses. He remembers standing almost next to the legendary journalist Ernie Pyle when the bullet struck that took his life on Okinawa. In the end, Henry’s company would suffer the loss of only two of its men.

Again, in the war, in the combat engineers, as it would be after, it was the same problem-solving ethic and sense of teamwork that saw him through, he recalls.

“Nobody knew what they were doing. Should it be this thick, that thick? What’s going to work? Some of it was just talking it out. It was all trial and error.”

Henry, far right, in June 1929, celebrating the birthday of Bill Mayo-Smith, pictured center on the bear, with classmates.

Henry Keene ‘38 outside his childhood home at 121 Village Ave. in Dedham, on his first day of school at DCD.

Henry pictured at his home in Dedham with a boat he made in the DCD Woodshop.

After the war, things were not easy. “At the end of the war there was a lack of things. There was no wood, no clothing, nothing really available, but then everyone shared in the hardships,” he recalls.

It was in these years after the war that he built his maritime business, designing and making marine hardware. Henry never would leave Dedham though, commuting the hour back and forth to New Bedford each day. His two sons now run the business, leaving Henry to entertain his grandchildren, sharing his models, showing them new ones under construction in his workshop.

He shows no signs of slowing down. He still takes in work on models for museums, and in spring 2014, he organized the 70th reunion of his graduating class from Tabor.

“I wanted to do things,” Henry says recalling those days back at DCD and after. An inspiration for us all, in his life, in his family, in his workshop, in his relationship with DCD, he continues on with that doing.