Meet Pete Keenan
Pete Keenan was one of the eleven people who founded the Hilton Head Island Computer
Club in the fall of 1989, and is the last of that group to continue his active membership.
He is still a young man at age 96 and serves as a Resource Center volunteer every
Thursday morning. Pete and his wife Tee retired to the Island in 1976, built a house
in Spanish Wells, and got busy right away, he in a computer programming business
and she in the hospital gift shop and the HHI Garden Council. He had enjoyed a long
career at Union Carbide, first in Charleston, WV, and then in New York (where he
walked to work). In fact it was on his first day on the job that he met his wife-to-be.
She was the receptionist. He and Tee had been married 62 years when she died in
2005. They have two sons, John and Jim, and three grandchildren.
He is vague about his first years as a volunteer when the Computer Club set up its
first Resource Center in the Courtyard Building and later at the Technical College
Center, except for one activity he remembers well: Some time in the 90’s, he joined
eight or ten other enthusiasts in an HHICC-sponsored class where each student would
build his own desktop computer.
He owns three other computers. He bought his first desktop at a discount when his
son Jim worked at IBM, and later a laptop, and another laptop when the first one
was “full of financial stuff”. They are all in his office in the TidePointe home
where he now lives.
Pete turned 96 on June 19, 2009 but he’s not slowing down much. His current hobby
that keeps him constantly energized is an Excel computer program, the first version
of which he wrote four years ago, to show people how to solve Sudoku puzzles. He
reads books on Sudoku and keeps getting ideas on improvements he can make. He’s
now working on version nine!