His life was nearly as colorful as the Technicolor images he captured: Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind, Erroll Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood. But the incredible career of M. Peter Keane started out in Sapsucker Woods, making early birdsong recordings at the then-new Laboratory of Ornithology.
One of CALS’ oldest alumni, Keane ‘32, also led a long life, dying on Feb. 7, in Westport, Conn., just a few days shy of his 104th birthday.
One of his first jobs after leaving Ithaca was as lab assistant to photographer Margaret Bourke-White. When she took her famous images from the Chrysler Building gargoyles, Keane was out on the gargoyles too.
He then moved to Hollywood, where he was an assistant cameraman for many legendary movies. With his 25-pound fully loaded camera, Keane was filming God’s Country and the Woman in 1936 when a planned log jam explosion went awry, and a piece of log hit him in the head, landing him in the hospital for a few days.
He also rubbed shoulders with famed director Frank Capra - as a captain in his Army Signal Corps in the Pacific during World War II.
After the war, Keane returned to New York City, working as an executive at several companies involved in the early years of video technology, including Sony and HBO. He was a fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.
In recent years, he became noted for another reason: his longevity. Keane and his four siblings were subjects of a centenarian genome study conducted by Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
His elder sister Helen Faith 'Happy’ Keane Reichert '25 was Cornell’s oldest living alumna when she passed a few weeks shy of her 110th birthday in 2011, while younger sister Leonore died in 2005, several weeks prior to reaching 102. Brother Irving still lives and continues to serve as chairman of Kahn Bros., a New York City investment firm - at the age of 109.
Keane is survived by his wife of 29 years, Elisabeth, daughter Karin, son Marc '79, and grandchildren Kai Keane '14 and Luca Losecaat-Vermeer. The family is requesting that donations be made in his honor to the Lab of Ornithology in lieu of flowers.
