Neighborhood won’t be same without dependable everyman | Jerry Davich

He immediately noticed.

“Need a hand, sonny boy?” Keene asked me, holding up his toolbox.

I smiled. He chuckled. We chatted for a few minutes as he helped me install the mailbox.

“If you ever need anything, I’m just right over there,” Keene said, pointing to his home.

He and his wife, Connie, have lived in that house since the 1970s. The couple were a fixture in our neighborhood long before I moved into my wife’s house across the street in 2010. Keene’s home was truly his castle. He took great pride in keeping it up — mowing, raking, shoveling, pruning, whatever it took.

He was always the first neighbor to mow his lawn in the spring, and the first to begin raking leaves in the fall. The outdoor activities became his cardio workouts as he aged. Even in his 70s, he was out there pushing a mower or dragging a rake. I watched him almost every day from the upstairs office of my home.

Occasionally, a boy who lived next door would shadow Keene as he did his chores.

“I’m teachin’ him young, sonny boy,” Keene joked to me after.

It’s the same nickname my dad used to call me as a kid. Keene was like the neighborhood grandfather for generations of children. He would strike up a conversation with anyone who strolled past. He could probably hold a 10-minute conversation with a new rake.

“My Charlie loves to talk,” his wife once told me.

Keene was born Sept. 1, 1945, in Michigan City, Indiana, where the couple met and fell in love. They married on the day before Valentine’s Day, 1965, raising one son and later a great-granddaughter, Anneliese, who called him “Papa.”

Keene earned a living for decades as a central storekeeper, retiring in 2020 with a drive-by party outside his beloved home during the pandemic. Connie surprised him by organizing it after his last day of work. A sign in their yard, adorned with balloons, stated, “The Man, The Myth, The Legend Has Retired.”

The next afternoon, just as he finished up yard work, a couple dozen vehicles began parading down their street.

“Congratulations Chuck!” one motorist yelled while driving past.

“You deserve this!” a passenger screamed.

Keene, 75 at the time, deserved the tribute from family, friends and neighbors. He had been working for 60 years, beginning as a newspaper delivery boy. For most of his career, he woke up every weekday at 4 a.m.

“I started my job at 5 a.m. so that’s what you do,” Keene told me with a shrug in his front yard.

He learned this work ethic as a kid, though he probably never used the phrase “work ethic” to describe himself. He never hesitated to help anyone in need, whether it was a neighbor or coworker or stranger. He was kind, funny and lovingly ornery at times.

Keene loved a tasty hamburger and a cold beer. He loved bowling, playing golf and watching sports on TV, “anything with a ball bouncing around,” he once joked. He was a diehard fanatic for the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Bears, proudly sporting their colors and emblems in public.

Keene probably sounds like someone you know, possibly a neighbor of yours. He was an everyman in many ways. Dependable as a sunrise. A joke for any situation. A tool for any repair.

Keene kept his word to others, just as Connie kept her word to him for his final wish — to pass away at home, surrounded by love and family, not monitors and strangers. It was a promise that Connie, lovingly fulfilled in the early hours of Feb. 4, when she sat at his bedside as he took his last breath in their home.

“Chuck just passed away,” she texted me at 3:29 a.m.

Charles Joseph Keene was 80.

He had been in poor health for the past few years. One thing led to another. His condition worsened. I watched too many ambulances arrive at his home and transport him to an ER. He spent too much time at assisted living facilities for rehab. He hated staying at those places. He got banned from a couple of them for repeatedly trying to escape.

His plea to Connie was the same every time: “I want to go home.”

She and her great-granddaughter took great care of him there, later with help from the VNA Hospice during his final days. His other wish was to be cremated, with his ashes buried near his mother and brothers. His final outfit after death was in his favorite Bears sweatshirt, sweatpants and socks.

“He loved that outfit,” Connie told me in tears.

After spending more than 60 years with her husband, she looked lost while recalling their life together for his obituary. She sobbed. She laughed. She apologized for both.

“I can’t believe he’s gone,” Connie told me.

Our neighborhood can’t believe it either. Her husband was a fixture, like a streetlamp. Or an old tree. Or a crooked mailbox that will always remind me of that day when old Chuck strolled across the street to welcome me to the neighborhood with a toolbox in his hand and a smile on his face.