Who, What, Where...
The Colonial Panama Phase.
Keith was born in Ridgecrest, California, the isolated civilian town supporting the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the Mojave Desert. His father, an electrician and WWII submariner, married his mother, Brenda Miller, in 1944 in Perth, Western Australia. The nearby port of Fremantle was a large U.S. submarine base during WWII for patrols into the Pacific. Brenda was a nurse he met in an Australian military hospital when he became ill after a war patrol. After the war, they lived in California, including China Lake, until moving to the Panama Canal Zone in the mid-1950s. He lived there for nine years, finally moving to Northern Virginia in 1963.
The Aussie Boarding School Phase.
His father worked as a civilian military employee and traveled often including to Vietnam during the U.S. buildup there. In 1967, he moved the family to an obscure US Navy submarine communications base on the tip of Northwest Cape, Western Australia. The idea was to move the Yocum children closer to his mother's family in Perth. Keith attended Aquinas College, a Christian Brothers boarding school near Perth. While in school there, he was chosen to represent the state of Western Australia in the junior rugby championships in Tasmania, where WA was thoroughly trounced by the more experienced teams from the Eastern States.
The Hippie Phase.
After returning to the U.S. Keith finished high school in Arlington, VA and attended George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. He intended to get a degree in English but when a professor would not let me take a higher-level creative writing course, he switched majors to philosophy. After college he worked briefly for the US Postal Service and then went back to school at American University in Washington, D.C. for a master's degree in journalism. He followed his girlfriend Denise to the Boston area in 1978 and they married in 1980. Like many young journalists, he started out freelancing. Later, he was hired as an editor for three separate Boston-area weekly newspapers.
The "What's-it-all-about" Phase.
In 1983 he launched NewsWest, a weekly newspaper in the western suburbs of Boston. At its height, NewsWest had a circulation of 114,000. After 4 years the paper was sold to a competitor, and he went to work for The Boston Globe. He was employed in a wide variety of positions including copyeditor, strategic planner and director of online classifieds at boston.com. He worked at several dotcom startups afterwards, and eventually joined The New England Journal of Medicine as director of recruitment advertising, retiring after 13 years. Denise and Keith have two children and live full time on Cape Cod.