TRAVERSE CITY — Somebody once told Ed O’Keefe Jr.’s son that there are two types of people in the world — those who got along with Ed and those who didn’t.
O’Keefe, who founded the region’s first winery, Chateau Grand Traverse, died Friday. He was 89.
Eddie O’Keefe, co-owner of the winery, described his father as aggressive and outspoken with a little Irish charm.
“He was a real force,” Eddie said.
After being told it was impossible, O’Keefe was one of the first to grow grapes commercially in the region, starting a revolution that would bring an entirely new industry to northern Lower Michigan.
He was also a gymnast whose trip to the Olympics was waylaid by illness, a Green Beret in the post-World War II era, the founder of a company that built and ran seven nursing homes in the Midwest region, and an undercover narcotics agent in the 1950s in New York City who chased after gangsters like Joseph Valachi and Vito Genovese, a mafia enforcer.
O’Keefe was born and raised in the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Philadelphia. As a young man he was athletic and was a runner-up for a spot as an alternate on the U.S. Olympics team. He had to drop out of the running after an attack of appendicitis, Eddie said.
O’Keefe served in France and Germany as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets. When he returned home he met Sharon O’Keefe, fell in love and got married. He signed up for law school and finished two years before the couple started having children and he dropped out.
The family moved to New York, where O’Keefe took a job with the U.S. Treasury Department, which ran drug enforcement in those days.
“He was one of those guys you would think was a bum on the streets, but he was actually an undercover agent,” Eddie said. “He carried his badge and gun in a lunch bag.”
O’Keefe reported directly to Harry J. Anslinger, who was No. 2 under J. Edgar Hoover, and many of the things he did were sealed in the Kennedy files, Eddie said.
Eddie compared O’Keefe to the main character in “Big Fish,” a movie about a man who tells tall tales that turn out to be true.
“If you ask him a question it’s a long story,” Eddie said.
One story O’Keefe liked to tell was the one about how he was given a lethal dose of morphine when he was in a bar owned by Joseph Valachi, who was convicted of drug trafficking in 1959. O’Keefe woke up in Bellevue Hospital with a priest leaning over him administering Last Rites.
It was during O’Keefe’s time in the Army that he was exposed to high-quality wines made with native European varietals. Many years later he researched grape-growing in the northern Michigan region, and specifically Old Mission Peninsula, where Chateau Grand Traverse is…
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