William Myron Keck

William Myron Keck was born on April 27, 1880. After his father left home to work in the oil fields, he landed a job selling sandwiches and candy on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to support his mother.

Drilling as a speculator

In his younger years, he became a "roustabout" in the oil business in Pennsylvania, before making his way to California, where he worked as a speculator, drilling wells on contract for big oil companies. He often would take payment as leases instead of cash. He struck oil in Huntington Beach and in California's Kettleman Hills oil fields. Keck was very successful as an oil prospector. In one instance at the height of the 1920s oil boom in Los Angeles, he was the only "wildcatter" to retain a lease on 300 acres of Andrew Joughin's farm outside Torrance. While other prospectors turned away from the property, Keck's "46 highly productive wells were considered one of California's most successful oil-drilling projects".

Establishing Superior Oil

By 1921, he had accumulated enough leases to start his own firm. In 1921, Keck founded the Superior Oil Company in Coalinga, California. The company focused on the exploration and production of oil and natural gas, and was involved with a number of new methods under Keck. Under Keck, in 1930 the company was the first to successfully use directional drilling in California.

Author Kevin Krajick has described Keck as "the world's greatest oil prospector, a man whose instincts about the location of petroleum were so uncanny, some believed him clairvoyant." He was one of the first oilmen to move his business to Houston, Texas, and by 1931, his company had wells in Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Louisiana and Venezuela.

He had several children with his wife, Alice Bertha Cominski: Willametta Keck, Howard Keck, and William M. Keck Jr. In 1956, Keck purchased the historic Owlwood Estate in Los Angeles, installing a "24 carat gold bathroom sink feature shaped like an oil rig."

In 1954 he founded the W. M. Keck Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the United States. The organization has funded the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Keck School of Medicine at USC, and the Keck Institute for Space Studies at Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His foundation provided $70 million of the $87 million cost of the Keck Telescope on the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, which upon its start of construction in 1990, was to be the largest astronomical telescope in the world.