Most people know Bob Keaney because he was — forever, it seemed — the sports editor of the former Lynn Sunday Post. Bob didn’t just cover youth sports, he lived it.
Most of us do our jobs and then retreat into our personal lives. Bob spent his spare time the same way he spent his professional hours: promoting and writing about kids. And that meant all kids: boys and girls, from the smallest karate kid through the high-school seniors.
Bob died last week — at age 78 — and with him goes a walking, talking compendium of Lynn sports. I know that if I had a question about anything that happened in the 1950s or ’60s, the first person I’d try to contact was Bob Keaney. He’d always have an answer, or he’d always tell me where to go to get it.
Bob liked to help people. He just didn’t want a brass band around him when he did. Jim Wilson, our chief operating officer at The Item, said that he owes his career to Bob, because Bob used to let him take pictures for the Post.
Wilson eventually became an award-winning photographer for the Boston Globe before coming back to The Item, one of the first stops in his career.
“Bob used to say that he got his start by someone giving him a break,” said Russ Meade of Swampscott, a lifelong friend. “He was allowed to do something as a kid because someone gave him a break.”
That someone was Joe Pickering, who now lives in New Hampshire but was associated with the Boys Club in Lynn, Bob’s sister Karen Robidoux recalls.
“Joe asked Bobby to write something for the Boys Club,” she said. “From that, Bobby (a Lynn Classical graduate) developed an enjoyment for writing.”
While he certainly enjoyed the grown-up world of sports (“he was a huge Celtics fan,” Meade said), and would slip an item about them in his column once in a while, his focus was on what happened in Lynn — and, most of the time, with the city’s youth.
And, said Meade, “he wanted to keep it positive as much as he could. If someone made an error, or dropped a pass, he wasn’t going to name the kid. He wasn’t going to make it a negative thing.”
It was Bob’s devotion to the lower levels of Lynn sports, especially Little League, that led to his involvement in establishing the Sonny Man Hill Award, which was given annually from 1990 — when Hill died — through 2017 to the graduating little leaguer who showed the best combination of skill and sportsmanship.
William “Sonny Man” Hill was a longtime Little League coach whose son Ken won 117 games in a 14-year Major League career, pitched in two league championship series — the 1995 American League Division Series against the Red Sox (winning game 1 in relief) and the 1995 World Series.
“We (Meade, Keaney, the late Jim Price, and others) were mourning the loss of a good guy, and we started talking about doing something to preserve his memory,” said Meade. “We decided that it had to go to a kid of Little League age, and that an MVP wouldn’t be appropriate. That’s not what he was about. So it became a sportsmanship award.”
For the first few years, the award was presented at Flynn Field, where Hill coached; eventually, the ceremony was moved to the Lynn Housing Authority & Neighborhood Development building on Church Street. The Hill family always attended. However, it was discontinued after Hill’s late wife, Rosemary, became ill.
Bob liked to have a little puckish fun — once in a while at my expense. His best dig at me came in one of the annual “Dear Santa” Christmas columns he used to write. When the Beach Boys came to Fraser Field in 1984, the city set up an elaborate post-concert meet-and-greet with fans and Lynn officials.
The band — which did not include Brian Wilson on that day — had other plans. Mssrs. Mike Love, Carl Wilson, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston (plus their entourage of musicians and helpers) bolted as soon as they played their last note and left everyone high and dry.
The late Tony Marino, mayor at the time, was white with anger. I couldn’t stop complaining about it in the music column I wrote at the time. That December, for my imaginary Christmas present, Bob wished for me a lifetime pass to all future Beach Boys concerts, plus a collection of all their hits.
