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Barney Keep retires – (18:31)
By George P. Edmonston Jr.
To younger generations of Portlanders today, the name Barney Keep means nothing. But for their parents and grandparents, for anyone who listened to radio station KEX from the 1940s to the ’70s, mention Keep’s name and eyes will light up, faces will break out in a huge grin.
For his faithful listeners, and that included just about everyone in Oregon and anywhere in the Northwest able to pick up the 50,000-watt station, Barney Keep’s morning-drive broadcast was as familiar as the sun coming up, as expected as winter snow falling in the Cascades. When the Portland broadcasting legend did his last show on February 14, 1979, before a crowd that had packed the city’s Civic Auditorium to say goodbye, Keep was arguably the best-known broadcast journalist in the region, maybe in the whole west. It was a fitting reward to a man who had spent 35 years entertaining the city and state with his signature brand of acerbic humor.
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Said Oregonian reporter Norm Maves Jr. when Keep passed away in July 2000, at age 83: “He made his listeners wince, squirm and hide with his understated needle. No social or political balloon stayed inflated for too long when Keep was at his mike, particularly if the balloon was filled with hot air.
“He made everybody laugh at one time or another as KEX’s morning-drive gab king. Keep didn’t just live and work in Portland; he was Portland. His humor was as much a part of the cloth of the city as the reds, yellows and whites of the Washington Park roses, the blue of the Willamette River, the greens of the firs.”
In that same story, Maves quoted KATU television’s Jim Bosley, who remembered Barney Keep as a “true pioneer in talk-slash-music radio. You tuned in Barney just for what he might say.”
And most of Portland did just that, in an every weekday show that ran continuously from 1944 to Valentine’s Day in 1979.
Portland’s lovable “Ol’ Barn,” as he was affectionately known to his thousands of fans, was born Byron William Keep on Jan. 9, 1917, in the Rose City. After graduating from old Washington High School, he entered Oregon State Agricultural College in 1936 to pursue a degree in forestry.
He turned out for Rook football under Coach Hal Moe and spent most of his time as a linebacker.
“It was a rugged but memorable experience for Barney,” wrote editor Chuck Boice in the Oregon Stater in the fall of 1970. “He only weighed about 180 pounds and much of his time was spent scrimmaging the varsity, which had big fellows such as Frank Ramsey and Ed Strack up front to knock him down. Joe Gray and Elmer Kolberg, two of OSU’s all-time greatest runners, led the hard-charging backs.”
In the end, it would take Keep six years, or until 1942, to earn his Oregon State forestry degree. According to Boice, Ol’ Barn needed the extra time to earn enough money to pay his school expenses.
“It wouldn’t be accurate to paint his college years with a lot of typical Barney Keep fun antics,” said Boice. “There were several years of dish washing…by hand, of course…at Seal’s (located where OSU’s Administration Building sits today) and (stints) at numerous other student jobs. In the summers his work was at a sawmill in Longview, Wash., the forests of Idaho, a Portland power company project, and several other locations.”
In addition his education, Keep’s time in Corvallis was shaped in two other ways, both of which became the great loves of his life.
First there was KOAC radio.
Remembers Boice:
“State-owned KOAC, one of the first college-based stations in the country, had a popular program called “Foresters in Action.” On the show, station manager Jimmy Morris, ’28, directed a group of forestry students each week in story telling, (usually) tall tales of the woods and also stories and information that included an educational message concerning the country’s forests. Looking back on it now, it’s obvious there were several ‘naturals’ on the show, one of them being Ol’ Barn, the other long-time OSU athletic trainer Bill ‘Scottie’ Robertson.”
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Keep’s second life-shaping event came about as a result of the one KOAC show he remembered more than any of the others.
Here’s the story, as told to the Oregon Stater in 1970:
“I’d taken part in one of Jim Dixon’s ‘smokers’ (boxing matches). I fought some wise guy from California and thought I’d worked him over very good, but all I got was a draw.
“I couldn’t figure it out. He had a couple of black eyes and I wasn’t marked up hardly at all. A little later I went over to KOAC to do the program and right away I realized this fellow had hit me in the stomach frequently…and hard!
“All the programs were done live, naturally, but I didn’t become ill there…fortunately. I waited until I got back to my rooming house on Monroe Street. This was probably my most embarrassing moment.
But the landlord’s daughter was very sympathetic and I was impressed. Her name was Eleanor Cleveland and her family had moved from Nebraska to Astoria in the 1930s and then to Corvallis. In 1939, we were married.”
Eleanor didn’t know it at the time, but at some point in the future she would achieve a measure of lasting fame of her own. On virtually every show Ol’ Barn did for KEX, he would affectionately refer to her as the “Biscuit Burner,” a title that became a house-hold word for Keep’s listeners throughout the Northwest and beyond.
Boice continues Keep’s story:
“In the meantime, Barney was doing more and more work for KOAC. But it was wartime and forestry seemed to be geared to all-out production rather than the public relations work in the lumber industry for which he had hoped. Besides, he had been bitten by the radio bug.
“A friend from an English class recommended him for some part-time work at KXL radio in Portland. In 1944, Westinghouse bought radio station KEX and immediately hired Keep to be their early morning man, with a 6 a.m. start for a show that came to be known as “Keeptime.”
Away from the microphone, Keep could be as zany as ever, with a career full of attention-getting activities that kept his fans buzzing for years. He once wrestled a 900-pound tiger, took part in a hot air balloon race, and spent the night on the summit of Mt. Hood. He was King of Fun for the Merrykhana Parade of the Rose Festival and was an honorary, participating clown for the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus.
He also had a serious side few people knew. Friday nights would find him with his wife, Eleanor, in a family bowling league, where he was talented enough to record a personal-best score of 278. He was just as good on the golf course and served as master of ceremonies at hundreds if not thousands of banquets around the state and region. He was a charter member of the Oregon Sportswriters and Broadcasters Association and took his turn serving as the group’s president.
And Ol’ Barn was a father, sharing two boys with Eleanor who both went on in the 1960s to graduate from Oregon State: Bill in 1965 and Byron Jr. in 1968.
Keep was honored many times during his long career but nothing compared to his trip back to campus on Oct. 10, 1970, in which he and Eleanor were feted in special half-time ceremonies during an OSU-Utah football game with a ride around the field in a beautiful 1933 Rolls Royce.
To celebrate his 30th year in broadcasting, Oregon Governor Tom McCall declared Dec. 28, 1975, as “Barney Keep Day.”
The Oregon Stater added its own special touch to the day when Editor Boice wrote a few weeks later: “(We add our) congratulations to the thousands that have been sent to Barney. Honors are appropriate. What OSU alumnus had been heard by more people? Thirty years, maximum 50,000 watts and a super rating do add up.”
In 1973, Keep told a journalist exactly how he wanted to be remembered:
“When I go, what I want on my stone is: ‘Barney Keep. He made somebody laugh one time.’ ”
