Living Socially

TwO weeKS AFTeR graduating from Grandview Heights High School, Don Keitz left on an adventure that took him half way around the world. He returned two years later, a bit worse for the wear, and has been anchored in the Tri-Village area ever since.

Keitz, 86, enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps as the battle of the Pacific heated up with American forces, island by island, fighting the Japanese. After boot camp, Keitz was shipped to Guam and then took part in the infamous invasion of Iwo Jima.

He doesn’t discuss details as he displays a certificate as a Blue Ribbon recipient. His wounds: shrapnel in the heel and leg. “A hand grenade,” he says without elaborating. Keitz readily concedes he was fortunate.

“Thousands of others weren’t. They put me on a hospital ship” and Keitz was returned to Guam, where he recovered in a hospital for a month and was reassigned to a unit being readied to invade Japan, Keitz says. But before they moved, the atomic bomb dropped, bringing an abrupt end to the conflict.

After the war, Keitz returned to Grandview, reunited with his high school sweetheart, Jean Murray, and eventually began working as a roofer. It was the first step to becoming an estimator for George Shustick & Sons, Inc., which would be his career – first as an employee and, ultimately, as owner of the company.

In 1952, he and Jean married. They bought a one-and-a-half-story Cape Cod home in Grandview but decided it likely would be too small if they had a family. Keitz knew a contractor who was building a house in Upper Arlington in what was then a wide-open field on Woodbridge Road between McCoy and Fishinger roads. The couple, who eventually had only a daughter, bought the brick ranch in April 1957. “It was the second one on the street. We could see a long way. I’ve been here ever since,” Keitz says.

In the mid-1950s, he joined the TriVillage Lions Club, in which his father, Julius, had been active.

That club began several significant Lions Club endeavors to help the blind. Julius Keitz, who was mayor of Grandview Heights in the 1950s, had learned of East Coast clubs selling light bulbs door-to-door to raise money, and the TriVillage club took it up as a fundraiser.

Don Keitz, still mentally sharp, recalls the annual effort vividly. Two-man teams knocked on doors on each side of the street, peddling bags of “two 40s, two 60s, two 75s and two 100s” for $2. Their wives followed in cars carrying more bulbs. Soon, other Columbusarea clubs started hosting similar sales.

At the time, the TriVillage Lions Club had more than 100 members, but the club is so much smaller now that the light bulb sales have been discontinued. Keitz was club president in 196364 and had a perfect attendance record with the Lions for more than three decades. He received an honorary membership, which means “I don’t have to go to meetings,” he says, but he still does occasionally.

The TriVillage club contributed to Pilot Dogs, a source of seeing-eye dogs for the blind, and as a past club president, Keitz was named to the organization’s board. “We introduced Pilot Dogs to Lions Clubs of Ohio,” Keitz says.

The Lions then designated it as a major cause to support. Keitz was board president for Pilot Dogs in 1974-1975. Eventually, Pilot Dogs formed a foundation to collect donations and Keitz became, and still is, a member of that board. “We didn’t know where were going to get our first nickel,” when it first started, Keitz says, but it has been a success collecting contributions from individuals and organizations.

Until 1963, he was a member of the Brotherhood of Rooks, a benevolent fra-

Tri-Village senior stays active amidst groups of friends

ternity that had a house on Elmwood Avenue in Grandview. After home football games, the Rooks charged 25 cents admission for dancing to a jukebox. There was no alcohol, but a state mandate closed the fraternity and others like it, Keitz says. The fraternity got $6,000 for the house, which went to help expand the high school library.

In 1990, five years after Keitz bought the roofing company, he decided to close it. “It got to be too much of a headache” because of many changes in the business. Within a year, his long friendship with Tom Sutphen, a school football teammate, came into play. Sutphen runs the Automotive and Fire Engine Museum housed in the Sutphen Corporation in Hilliard. The company builds fire engines.

After Keitz closed his roofing business, Sutphen invited him to keep the books for the museum. Sutphen also refurbishes old fire trucks and sells them, which accounts for the money flow at the museum where 90 antique cars, most of them restored, and one antique fire engine are displayed.