out this spring.
"He always left a suitcase with us. It's still here. Do you want it?"
My father was a creature of habit. And up until his last hours, he lived his life on his terms, where uncertainty never cowed him. Like the bulls his father raised, Dad barreled ahead through life with little thought to social niceties. He was too focused on learning: There are no stupid questions, Dad would say - only questions you were too scared to ask.
Dad was born in Long Beach, California, on October 10, 1939, the child of Mildred Mae Collins, a housewife who persisted past the scandal of her first divorce to marry an ambitious oil-derrick worker, Bernard Arthur Jettie. The family eventually moved to northwest Iowa, where Keith attended middle school and high school. He helped his father and his brother Gordon raise cattle and hogs, walked the bean fields to pull weeds and skipped classes each fall to help harvest corn on the family's fields.
He returned to California in his 20s, and spent much of his 77 years with his feet - and his heart - in both worlds. As an engineering draftsman at McDonnell Douglas as well as Boeing, he earned patents for developments he and his teammates made in rocket seating. Later, he joined the staff at John F. Kennedy High School in Anaheim, California - teaching kids to machine metal in shop and, as a history teacher, detailing how his own grandmother toiled as a sharecropper during the U.S.'s Great Depression.
Along the way, he battled to preserve the family's farmland in Iowa - some of which has been in his family since the end of the Civil War. By the time his father Bernard died of dementia in 2001, Keith had been diagnosed with lymphoma for the second time and was battling for his own life.
Even so, he kept up the fight to preserve as much of the family lands as possible, selling off one parcel to pay off taxes and improve the fields. The farm survived, and Dad survived that bout with cancer, as well as a third round of lymphoma over the following decade.
Regardless of whether he was sick or well, Dad would head to Iowa each spring to walk fields he had crisscrossed as a child, visit neighboring farmers, and top off his steel blue Thermos with coffee at the local farm cooperative while listening to the latest bickering among highly competitive grain producers. Before the days of high-tech agriculture, with satellite forecast planting conditions and combines track crop yields, Dad each year hired a pilot to fly him in a crop duster over the family's fields - so he could take pictures and get a better view.
And he would stay at the same hotel - a short drive south of the fields. Over time, he sweet-talked the staff into storing a dusty red suitcase in their back office with some of his "farm clothes" and a few necessities: A paint brush to brush the dirt off his digital camera; an electronic photography frame, so he could connect the camera to the small screen and review the photos of the farm fields he photographed; and his Thermos.
He returned each fall, his favorite time of year, when dusk would paint the fields of corn in swaths of golden light. Dad timed his return to join the harvest - driving with crews hauling grain, climbing into the combine with his tenants and neighbors, and asking questions about the crops along the way.
Dad's trips and questions became a fixture in this corner of the country, as natural as the spring thaw and prayers for a late-summer rain. This is why people out here wondered what was wrong when Dad didn't show up this spring for his regular visit. By then, he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 kidney cancer - the one thing that ultimately stopped Dad from traveling.
Dad died in the early morning hours of July 18, 2017, in his own bed, as he wanted, in his home in Seal Beach, California.
He is survived by me (his daughter Patricia Huffstutter-Beets) and my husband, David Beets; David's daughter Christine Rhodes, husband Dave, and their daughters Daria Ava and Olivia Sunshine; David's daughter Diane Beets and husband Fabian Louton; Keith's son Robert; Keith's step-son Daniel Cusack, Daniel's wife Melissa and their children Andrew Lawrence, Elizabeth Anne and Isabella Jeanne; Keith's best friend Patrick Thorpe and wife Karen; Keith's companion Aleta; Keith's friend (and caretaker) Willie Boudevin; and scores of other friends.
Dad was cremated on July 21, 2017. His ashes, along with some of his beloved wife Judy Cusack-Jettie, who preceded him in death in year 2014, will be buried at the Holman Township Cemetery in Sibley.
Andringa Funeral Home is handling the arrangements. A graveside service will be held on August 26, 2017, at 11 a.m. It is open to the public.
In lieu of flowers, please make donations to St. Jude's in Keith's name.
AUG 26. 11:00 AM
Holman Township Cemetery-Sibley
Sibley, IA, US
To read the full obituary, please click here: http://www.andringafuneralhome.com/obituaries/Keith-Jettie/