Jean Keene - Early Life

Early Life

Jean Marie Hodgdon was born on October 20, 1923 in Aitkin County, Minnesota. The eldest of three sisters and one brother, she grew up on a dairy farm in Aitkin, where she helped with farm chores including herding, feeding, and milking cows. She learned to ride horses and became a talented horse breaker and trainer.

In 1952, she was recruited by the traveling rodeo outfit Red River Rodeo as a trick rider, and by the mid-1950s was anticipating an upcoming appearance at with Red River at Madison Square Garden. However, her rodeo career was abruptly cut short in a riding accident during a performance at Olympia Arena in Detroit, Michigan. While performing a trick called the "death drag", she missed a handhold after leaning back too far in her saddle. She fell from her horse and was knocked unconscious when her head hit the arena wall. Her foot was still caught in the stirrup, and she was dragged around the arena, tangled in the horse's legs, until other rodeo personnel were able to stop the horse. She suffered 15 fractures in her left knee. After surgery to repair her knee, she spent several months in recovery encased from the waist down in a plaster cast. After the cast was removed, she was still able to walk and ride, but not with the facility necessary to perform in the rodeo.

For a time she worked as a professional truck driver hauling cattle. In the late 1950s she married, and gave birth to a son, Lonnie, before divorcing. By the early 1960s she was a single mother. She opened up a dog and cat grooming business and also raised and bred cocker spaniels. She later became the owner and operator of Jolly Chef Truck Stop in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Keene came to Alaska for the first time in the early 1970s to attend a cousin's wedding. Attracted by the state's beauty, she returned for several visits before making the decision in 1977 to move there — alone. Her son Lonnie was deemed old enough to make his own decisions, and he chose to remain in Minnesota. Keene took a week to drive from Minnesota to Alaska in a secondhand motorhome, ending in Homer, where she parked the motorhome at the end of Homer Spit in the Homer Spit Campground, where it remained for many years. She took a job at a fish processing facility on the Spit, the Icicle Seafoods subsidiary Seward Fisheries, in the spring of 1977, where she later became a foreman.