Baby On Board Tale Of A Spokane Sailor Who Finds And Adopts An Abandoned Baby During Korean War Becomes A TV Movie
The plot of “1,000 Men and a Baby” is made to order for made-for-TV:
A GI during the Korean War finds an infant in a garbage dump near Inchon, Korea. A Navy priest and a warmhearted captain bring the baby aboard their American aircraft carrier. The baby soon becomes the beloved “mascot” for the entire crew. A kindly Navy surgeon falls in love with baby, adopts him and brings him home to his delighted wife. And the baby lives happily ever after.
Actually, the baby lives happily ever after in Spokane and Ephrata, but that part isn’t even in the movie, which airs Sunday night on CBS.
That baby is now the 44-year-old sports editor of the Grant County Journal in Ephrata. He was brought up in Spokane, graduated from Gonzaga Prep and Washington State University and has spent his career covering high school sports in this region.
“I’ve pretty much had an ordinary life,” concedes Dan Keenan. “But I did have an extraordinary beginning.”
Did he ever.
Here’s his story, although be warned, it differs in several important aspects from the TV version.
Keenan is found shivering and bawling on July 11, 1953, in a garbage dump at a U.S. Army Supply Center in Inchon.
He is taken to the Star of the Sea Orphanage, run by a kindly nun named Sister Philomena. She knows this half-American orphan stands little chance of survival in Korea, so she uses her powers of persuasion on three naval officers who often visit the orphanage: surgeon Lt. Hugh Keenan of the hospital ship USS Consolation, Father Edward O. Riley of the USS Point Cruz and Capt. John Hayward, skipper of the USS Point Cruz. She tells the captain the baby will die without medical help, and she informs Keenan that he has a special rapport with the baby.
“She really kissed the Blarney stone,” said Keenan. “She’d say, ‘Oh, it’s a miracle. You’re the only one who can feed the infant.’ ” So, judiciously bending some rules, Capt. Hayward and Father Riley bring the baby back to the sick bay on the Point Cruz. Lt. Keenan helps care for it.
The sailors fall in love with young Danny and compete over who gets to feed him.
One petty officer, William J. Powers, is later quoted as saying, “It was as though he was the peace we had been fighting for.”
The men decide they want the baby to be adopted in America, but that requires a passport and a visa. Father Riley wins a passport from a Korean official in a poker game (four treys, beating a full house). Visiting U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon helps arrange for a visa. The men soon find a willing adoption candidate: Lt. Keenan himself.
“Dad fell in love with the baby,” said Keenan. “You notice I talk about this in the third person. It really is an out-of-body experience for me.”
So, Lt. Keenan adopts little Danny, to much press fanfare, and the baby ends up at Lt. Keenan’s home on the South Hill in Spokane with his wife, Genevieve, and daughter Coleen.
A story in The Spokesman-Review on Dec. 14, 1953, began, “‘He’s my nicest Christmas present!,’ Coleen Keenan, 9, exclaimed yesterday as she cuddled her new baby brother in the family home at W1024 Twenty-eighth.”
Looking back, Keenan can only marvel at this remarkable chain of events.
“If one thing doesn’t happen, I’m not here today,” he said. “It is miraculous, how I came from there to here.”
As miraculous as it is, Hollywood felt the need to improve it. Artistic license is exercised on several key points in Sunday’s movie. For one thing, the baby arrives at Lt. Keenan’s home in Seattle, not Spokane.
“I was so mad about that,” said Keenan. “I had no control over it.”
For another thing, sister Coleen doesn’t exist in the movie. The Keenans are shown as childless. And for purposes of streamlining the story, they made Lt. Keenan (Richard Thomas) the doctor of the USS Point Cruz, not the Consolation.
The biggest fib is that Lt. Keenan agonized over adopting the baby, because regulations prohibited him from adopting unless he quit the Navy, which was his “whole life.” Yes, he did have to quit the Navy, but he didn’t agonize.
“His goal all along was to come back to the U.S. and have a private practice,” said Keenan. “He was essentially drafted when the Korean conflict broke out.”
But in most of the essential details, the story of “1,000 Men and a Baby” is the story of Keenan’s beginnings. The real story, of course, continued from there.
After he arrived in Spokane, Keenan settled in for what he calls an “almost idyllic childhood” on the South Hill.
He vividly remembers one particular day when he was about 7 or 8. He and his dad were taking a break from painting a fence.
“Dad got all serious and he said, ‘Danny, I want to tell you a story.”’ His father told a story that seemed to his son almost like a fairy tale. It was about Korea, about a baby, and how he fell in love with this baby. Danny was enthralled.
When his dad was finished, he turned to his son and said, “And Danny, that baby was you.”
“That was the exact instant I found out I was adopted,” said Keenan. “It was such an incredible story, my reaction was, ‘Wow, that’s really neat.’ I felt special. As if I had been selected. As if I had been chosen.”
It’s not a story he dwelled on very much over the next three or four decades. He didn’t even tell his wife, Shirley Dragoo Keenan, until she found one of his old scrapbooks after they were married. He wasn’t ashamed of it; it just never came up.
But it did come up, in a public way, in the American Legion magazine in 1991. A biographer of Capt. Hayward, now a retired vice admiral, came across the story and turned it into a magazine article. Reader’s Digest then pounced on the story and published a piece by Lawrence Elliott in 1994.
“Once the story was published, we began to hear from movie producers, who said, ‘We want your rights,”’ said Keenan. “And they were able to sell the idea to CBS. I’m getting some money, but it’s not like I’m John Grisham getting three or four million dollars. But we were able to pay some bills.”
Keenan visited the shooting site, in San Diego, where he met stars Richard Thomas, Gerald McRaney (playing Capt. Hayward) and Jonathan Banks (Father Riley).
It was a “surrealistic” experience for Keenan at times.
“There was a scene where Mom is singing to the baby, and it’s very poignant,” said Keenan. “I started to get tears in my eyes. All of a sudden it struck me, ‘My God, that was me, some 40 years ago.”’ Keenan also has been to several reunions of the Point Cruz crew.
“I had grown men in their 60s and 70s, with tears in their eyes, come up to me and say, ‘You can’t believe what it means to finally meet you,”’ said Keenan.
He was able to meet and personally thank retired Vice Admiral Hayward at one of those reunions. Father Riley passed away in 1980, and Keenan regrets that he was never able to personally thank him.
“They were the three heroes, Father Riley, Capt. Hayward and Dad,” he said. “I was just along for the ride.”
He often visits his father in Walla Walla, where he is now retired as the head surgeon of the veterans hospital there. His mother died when he was a sophomore in high school.
Keenan plans to return to Spokane sometime next year, to take a new sports job within the same community newspaper group. Keenan has been a sports editor all of his career, and there’s nothing he’d rather do.
“My destiny is to be the sports editor for a community newspaper,” he said.
Maybe that is his destiny. When that GI found Danny in the garbage dump, he was wrapped in: newspapers.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (2 Color)
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: On TV “1,000 Men and a Baby” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on Spokane’s KREM-Channel 2.