Keefe Olandis Powell was born in January ’54 in Washington DC. He was the first of five kids and the only boy.
He was a dreamy kid who liked westerns and even older films of dashing romantic fiction- his future bandmates would have been surprised to know he had a favorite superhero (Daredevil) and loved far-out popular culture of the time like the Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Dark Shadows. He also had a big heart, often bringing home injured animals he would find on his ramblings around the neighborhood and trying to nurse them back to health. The family would know something was up when he would come home and duck straight into his room without saying anything to anybody.
Cash was in short supply and generally the only Christmas gift he would receive was a football which he would wear out playing with in the street all year only to receive a new one, recharged and ready for battle the following winter. This was the time he developed an abiding love of the then Washington Redskins football club, which he never would call the Commanders.
When he was still in elementary school he went to live primarily with his mom’s mom in Philadelphia. Roaming around there, he came upon a poster for a Peter Max exhibition lying in the street. The design caught his eye, but the thing that made him take it home and put it up in his room to contemplate was the sentiment on it: “Whatever be your goal/Keep your eye upon the doughnut/And not upon the hole”.
He was always the QB in street ball, but when they wouldn’t let him play the position in high school, he decided being a musician was the next-best way to get attention from the ladies and buy a little lenience from the street toughs who made getting to and from the school an unwelcome adventure.
He returned to Maryland for his last year of high school in ’72. By that time, his mom and her husband had moved to a high-rise in Silver Spring. One day in the elevator on the way to the laundry room he met three young women who were rooming together in an apartment upstairs. Recent graduates from the midwest, they had just started their first grown-up jobs in the big city, far from home, as part of the steno pool for the FBI. They offered to help him with his laundry, and when he went to pick up his folded clothes from their apartment later in the day, he pretty much never resumed residence in his mom’s apartment downstairs.
The following year when he announced that he had fallen in love with one of them, his family was less than pleased, so they decamped to Colorado where her family was outright horrified, so they kept on going to San Diego where they started a tribe of two, shortly to be three and eventually four, sticking it out until the mid-80s before finally throwing in the towel.
He wandered the earth, a masterless samurai for a time, before meeting his eventual second wife Melissa and her sister and her kids, mostly daughters again, and after a rough start they became his “bulldogs” (and one min pin) who circled around him and provided the support he needed late in life to buy him a couple of extra innings, and without whom this obit would have to have been written several years earlier. Most importantly, over time they provided a new crop of grand-young’uns that he could be Papa to and dote over the way he once had his fallen menagerie in the District.
The Celestis flight is in response to the fact that as a young man with his head already in the clouds growing up during the space race, of course he entertained the idea of being an astronaut. These dreams were destined to be dashed even had he doubled down on the academics owing to the fact that he was A) black and B) well over six feet tall. A portion of the rest of his ashes are being distributed along the beaches that he loved, with the rest being safe at home. The other flights were too long; though he strove to take a lofty view of the world, he would not have wanted to leave it forever. This way represents a way to take in the entirety of the country he crisscrossed, and an “in person” look at distant places he only ever visited in his thoughts.
If you would remember him, try to bear your troubles with a light heart, put on some Robert Palmer, maybe toss the pigskin around, or scratch the chin of the local stray. When necessary, clip on your tin star (if in mind only) and try to help the good guys carry the day.
Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell? That demmed, elusive Pimpernel?” - Baroness Orczy, 1905
