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Donald McKeever Interview by Clay Everett, Robert Johnson & Brandon Strong, Jr..mp3
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My name is Brandon Strong, Jr. I’m 17 years old.
My name is Robert Johnson. I am 16 years old.
My name is Clay Everett. I’m 14 years old.
We interviewed Donald McKeever on July 19, 2018.
I grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood in Detroit, MI, Stansbury-Fenkell area. Lot of crime, lot of… kind of what, I guess, what I see here in the Hill District in some parts, but the neighborhood in itself was very tight knit. Everybody knew everybody. Everybody’s parents knew everybody’s children. You could get whooped by anybody on the block. If you did anything wrong, the message got back to your parents before you got home. There was a sense of community that kept us all kind of safe. When people ask me about where I grew up, I’m proud to say if you grew up in that neighborhood, a lot of people really just gave you that respect because they knew in order for you to make it out of that neighborhood and kind of doing well, then you went through a lot. It was really a positive experience for me, even though we were, I guess, what you would consider poor. We didn’t know that eating French fries every day was, like, something bad. We just thought it was, you know, that-that everybody ate 10 pound bag of potatoes each week.
Education was always a big stress. It was always stressed in my family as being probably the most important thing that we have. You didn’t have anything else to do as a child except to make sure that you made good grades and play, and you could play if you made good grades. If you didn’t make good grades, then you couldn’t play. My mother’s oldest sister was a principal. I was always brought up around educators. However, I was the first person in my immediate family that got a college degree. And that meant a lot. I could have gone to play professional baseball, but I chose to stay in school and get my degree. That was the best time I’ve ever had. I went away to school at 17, had never been out of the city of Detroit by myself without my parents. They taught me how to become independent, to be a team player, like with other people who were struggling. I tell all of my students that when I was teaching to experience college, preferably away from home, on the college campus. You would like it. It was the best experience I’ve had in my life. I got a baseball scholarship at Langston University in Oklahoma, which is a little, small HBCU in Oklahoma. I played there for two years and I found out that there was a chance that the baseball program was not going to survive. So I started sending my stats out to other schools. I transferred to Jacksonville, stayed and finished my baseball career there. You heard of Bo Jackson? I played against Bo Jackson. Bo Jackson was probably the best natural athlete I’ve ever seen in my life. If you don’t know him, he’s the guy… he played for the Kansas City Royals, and he caught this baseball, and he ran along the wall. He was that fast and in college, I threw him out. I once hit three home runs in the game. I don’t know if you guys know about batting averages, but as a freshman, I hit .425 as a freshman, which is almost unbelievable, but it was a small school. Competition wasn’t as good.
Later, I taught school for 23 years, so I’m still trying to think of ways to get kids more interested in how important it is to educate yourself. Because not only does it open doors to things that you want to do for a living, but it also gives you the ability to think for yourself and to make good decisions. When you’re young, you make decisions that are not in your best interest, and I have 4 children, 3 biological, 1 step child, and I thought that I would never have any children. But Donovan and Demi… I look at life now. It’s real simple. You got lessons and blessings. That’s it. Everything that I do is either going to be a lesson, or it’s going to be a blessing. When Donovan and Demi were born, it was definitely a lesson for me. Now that they’re 14 years old, they’re definitely a blessing. Everything that I do every morning that I wake up is because I want to make sure that they’re OK when I’m not here. I couldn’t have asked for two better children. They keep me stable.
I am still going to school. I started actually going to college in 1982. I would be probably what you call a professional student. I spent five years undergraduate, and then I started my graduate work at Wayne State University, and I have been just taking classes off and on because I’ve really… after all my scholarships ran out, I still did not have my Master’s degree, and I really had not been able to afford to just pay for it out of my pocket once, you know, the children and the divorce and all the other things that go along with that. So I still take classes now. I’ll never stop taking classes because I think that there’s always something to learn. Arm yourself with education, so just realize that if you’re working towards something, you’re not going to get anything out of it if you don’t put the time in it.