Keith Wear has seen a lot in his 93 years
Charbonneau Villager February 2026 3
A Day in the Life
By TED MAST
Keith Wear has seen a lot in his 93 years
93-year-old Fairway Village resident Keith Weir grew up in Deerfield, Illinois, a north Chicago suburb. After graduation from Highland Park High School, his parents offered to pay for his first two years of college. The Weirs had family in farming in Iowa and Keith decided to enter Iowa State A & M( Agricultural and Mechanical Arts). At the end of his first year, the realization set in that a person needed about $ 200,000 to be a farmer.
Keith left Iowa and enrolled in Washburn College in Topeka, Kansas. To get some spending money he got a job as a bartender, even though he was under the legal drinking age. Kansas had strange liquor laws in those days, including not being able to buy liquor on Sundays, but it did allow BYOB in certain establishments. Customers would bring their liquor in and give the bottle to the bartender, who would then sell them the mixers and pour their drinks. A patron was not allowed to tip their server in cash but instead the bartender could take a shot when he poured their drink. This worked fairly well when dealing with groups of one or two people, but, when a gang of six came in together, it became very difficult to overcome the hangover and get up for class the next day. His tenure at Washburn only lasted one term.
With parental funding running out Keith decided to enlist in the Army. Never a fan of joining the military, he reasoned that enlisting would provide a better path for preferred duties than being drafted during the Korean War conflict. Keith was sent to a camp in Alabama and, since he could operate a typewriter, became a company clerk. He thought his plan was working but he wound up being sent to Korea in 1953 at age 19. He worked in the transportation division hauling supplies and equipment to the frontline soldiers.
After the Army Keith made use of the GI Bill and enrolled in Syracuse University in New York, where he married his first wife. They only spent a year there before moving back to Jacksonville, Alabama to attend Jacksonville State University where he had attended night school classes while in the service. Upon finishing with a degree there, Keith took a job with General Electric in a vacuum tube manufacturing plant. 2,800 workers, mostly women, assembled the vacuum tubes by hand on a piecework basis. Keith’ s job was to time them. He realized that a degree from Jacksonville State might not get him as far as he wanted to go in life.
He headed back to the Midwest and to the University of Iowa to pursue an MBA degree in Labor and Management. Upon completion of his MBA Keith was hired by Sandia National Laboratories, a research and development lab of the United States Department of Energy’ s National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia was owned by the U. S. federal government but privately managed. It was established in 1949 with the primary goal of advancing U. S. national security by developing various science-based technologies including nuclear deterrence, arms control and climate change. When Keith was hired, nearly 5,000 people in Albuquerque, New Mexico were working on the development of atomic weapons and their delivery systems.
People were recruited to work at Sandia, as opposed to applying for jobs there. It would lure the best people with a benefits package unheard of in those times, five weeks of paid vacation and a generous sick leave policy. Sandia was a very compartmentalized company and everything was on a strict“ need to know’ basis. With a job of reporting on the progress of various units Keith saw more than most. Like the development of the Davey Crockett— a portable rifle that could launch a nuclear warhead just over a mile— his weapon was so dangerous it could kill the men who fired it. Designed
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