Alvin Keith

Alvin Monroe Keith, age 91, passed away August 15, 2018. He was born on January 16, 1927 to Roy and Ethel Keith in Corsicana, Texas. He was raised in Luling, Texas. He graduated from Luling High School then Texas A&I University in 1949. He served in the Army from 1952 to 1954. Alvin was honorably discharged and received National Defense Service and Good Conduct medals. He married his wife, Jonnie Mae of 69 years on September 5, 1948. Alvin was last employed by the Corpus Christi Army Depot where he retired. Alvin was a devout Christian, a loving husband and father.
Alvin was the son of hard working Christian parents who led him to Christ at an early age. He had an interesting life growing up in the Humble Oil Camp in Luling, Texas. Alvin grew up in a house with newspaper on the walls to keep the wind from blowing through. He had many stories from those days like when he found some old bed springs in the camp dump ground and hoisted them in a big old oak tree to make a place to sleep on hot summer nights. Another of his favorite stories was the time he rode his pet horse through his house with his mother close behind ready to convince him that a horse in the house was a bad idea. Growing up he spent many summers with his grandparents in the area around New London, Texas where his grandfather worked for the Humble Oil Company. He often talked of how he enjoyed those times. Alvin loved school, early on, it was a struggle for him, and he even had to repeat a half year in elementary school because no one knew he needed glasses. After getting glasses he was a top student and caught himself up to graduate from high school with the students he began school with. After high school he spent the summer working with his uncle in Tennessee as an electricians helper building the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the purpose of enriching uranium for the first atomic bombs.
After that summer his family moved to the Humble Oil Camp in Freer, Texas and Alvin enrolled in Texas A&I University. He paid his own way to attend Texas A&I by working in the oil fields during the summers and odd jobs like surveying for the expansion of the A&I campus during the school year. On September 5, 1948 he married his sweetheart, Jonnie Mae Jones, from Corpus Christi, Texas. Alvin had to spend an extra year at A&I to be in the first class of electrical engineers for the school. He took advantage of the extra year and in 1949 graduated with two degrees, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.S. in Mathematics.
After graduation, jobs for electrical engineers were hard to find so Alvin returned to the oilfield. In 1952 he was drafted into the Army and assigned duty at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. He served as a technician for the earliest electronic computers in use at that time. Two years later he was honorably discharged from the Army. He went back to the oilfield and in 1955 was working in Hobbs, New Mexico where his son Jon was born in May. Two weeks later he was moved to Odessa, Texas and shortly after that he started his first job as an electrical engineer working for Convair (now General Dynamics) in Fort Worth, Texas. In March 1958, his daughter Melinda Sue was born. While at Convair, he worked on the B-58 project, the first jet bomber capable of Mach 2 flight. After Convair, he took a job at Eglin Air Force Base in Fort Walton Beach, Florida gathering and evaluating telemetry data on military aircraft. He then packed the family up and moved to Fort Huachuca, Arizona where he worked for the Army Security Agency on Top Secret projects. Later, General Dynamics convinced him to move back to Fort Worth to work with the F-111 attack aircraft, the first aircraft to use swept wing technology. Over the years, Alvin kept in touch with Ray, one of his friends from the oilfield days. Ray invented an apnea monitor which did not require any physical connections to a patient. Ray convinced Alvin to get into the medical sales business and market his new invention. After years of persistence he was able to get hospitals all over Texas to test the devices and the evaluations were promising. Due to the period of time required to market the devices Alvin depleted all his resources and returned to the electrical engineering field. Apnea monitors of this type are now in common use, especially in pediatric units of hospitals. After moving to Corpus Christi, Texas in 1974, Alvin took an electrical engineering job at the Corpus Christi Army Depot. His first assignment was to oversee the power needs of the depot and later he provided engineering support for the maintenance and enhancements of military helicopter such as the Blackhawk.
After his retirement, Alvin spent his time watching his grandchildren and loved seeing them grow up. The grandchildren all loved those days. Unfortunately, Alvin was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Due to the dedicated and loving care by his wife, Jonnie, he was able to be at home until August of 2016. At that time he moved to the Alameda Oaks Nursing Home where he received exceptional and loving care until his passing on August 15, 2018.
A Visitation will be held from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. on Friday, August 17, 2018 at Seaside Funeral Home. A Funeral Service will be held at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, August 18, 2018 at Seaside Reid Chapel. Entombment will follow at Seaside Memorial Park.

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