Kalevi Keihänen

Kalevi Keihänen was born as the son of a shopkeeper in Vahto near Turku, and the family moved to Kihniö in northeastern Satakunta when Kalevi was only a little boy. Keihänen took part in the Lapland War. After the war he moved to Tampere, where he started a car rental business. Keihänen started his career in the travel business in 1954 by organising trips for sportspeople to the EM sports championships in Bern, Switzerland. He later organised ship trips to Visby, Sweden.

In 1965 Keihänen founded his own travel agency Keihäsmatkat, which began selling cheap trips to holiday resorts in southern Europe for Finns in the late 1960s. According to his own words, Keihänen flew 100,000 Finns to southern Europe every year. Financially, the best period for Keihäsmatkat were the years 1970 to 1972, but it gained the most public attention in its last years from 1973 to 1974. Kalevi Keihänen knew how to take good advantage of publicity to gain free advertising for his business. According to Keihänen, the common public travelled on his flights, and "the lords went their own way on chartered flights". The Keihäsmatkat head office on Kaisaniemenkatu in central Helsinki soon became a meeting spot of contemporary celebrities; friends of Keihänen included actor Tarmo Manni and publisher Urpo Lahtinen among others. As the activities expanded, Keihänen hired deputy judge Veikko Pajunen as an additional director of his travel agency. The agency's financial director was Keihänen's wife Tuovi Keihänen.

In the early 1970s Keihänen founded his own airline Spear Air which operated two DC-8-32 airplanes, named Härmän Jätkä and Härmän Mimmi. A third plane named Reissumies was on order but because of Keihäsmatkat's bankruptcy the order was cancelled.

Keihänen was also interested in winter travel – together with his friend publisher Urpo Lahtinen he built the first ski slopes and ski lifts to Tahkovuori in Nilsiä in the 1960s.

The 1973 oil crisis and large investments drove Keihänen into trouble. After the bank Helsingin Osakepankki stopped financing Keihänen's companies Keihäsmatkat filed for bankruptcy in May 1974, also causing the airline to stop operations, resulting in loss of jobs for over 200 employees. At the time of bankruptcy, Keihäsmatkat had about 1800 passengers abroad. Keihänen himself blamed the state-owned airline Finnair for the downfall of his companies. According to Finnair, the airline had offered extensive co-operation to Keihänen and had even been prepared to repaint some of its aircraft with Keihäsmatkat colours. Instead of leasing aircraft from Finnair, Keihänen wanted an airline of his own, and its investments ultimately brought on his downfall.

In 1978 Keihänen founded a new company called Seiväsmatkat, which only stayed in business for a short time. He owned the Pyhäniemi holiday resort in Kihniö: Keihänen had planned a "Seiväs Sex Village" as a tourism magnet in Kihniö in the 1970s, but the plan was never carried out. Almost all of the about twenty farms owned by Keihänen in Kihniö were auctioned off in June 1976.

In the 1980s Keihänen was sentenced to prison for tax evasion.

The latter part of Keihänen's life was shadowed by a grave illness, and he spent the end of his life in Pikku-Huopalahti in Helsinki. Keihänen died in 1995 at the age of 70, and he has been buried at the Turku Cemetery. In an article in Helsingin Sanomat in 2007, the authors of Suomen kansallisbiografia listed Keihänen as one of the biggest influencers in the time of independent Finland, and he has been described as the father of mass tourism in Finland.