Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,274
By This is the grave of Ed McKeever.
Born in 1859 in Brooklyn, McKeever became a construction contractor. He did well and started really building his business in 1886. By 1899, he was a quite wealthy man. He also enjoyed the new game of baseball. In 1912, he and his brother Stephen bought one half of the Brooklyn Dodgers for $500,000. The other half was owned by Charles Ebbets. They worked well together and wanted to build a dominant team. So they decided to build a new and state of the art stadium. This became Ebbets Field. That McKeever had all the connections in construction–and presumably functional relationships with the unionized building trades, though I don’t know this for sure–they got the stadium built quickly and at a decent price.
There’s hardly any information about the man. He was definitely the quiet partner in the ownership. Ebbets and Stephen McKeever used to hang out fans, answer questions from them, all that stuff. Ed McKeever hated all of that stuff. He wanted nothing to do with the media or fans. So he would go to the games and then slip out a back way to avoid everyone after they concluded.
Ebbets died of a heart attack in 1925. Although McKeever was not a young man at this point, he was in good health. He became president of the team. But he caught a cold at Ebbets’ funeral. That turned into pneumonia and he died a week later. He was 66 years old.
Pretty much the only thing McKeever ever comes up with when you search for him on the internet or in books is dying. So there’s that I guess. Anyway, we’ll end this post here.
Ed McKeever is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.
If you would like this series to visit other baseball owners, all of whom are probably more interesting than McKeever, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Former Rangers owner Brad Corbett is in Fort Worth, Texas and former Phillies owner Gerry Nugent is in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. Previous posts in this series are archived here.