15 Facts About Bil Keane

William Aloysius Keane was an American cartoonist best known for the newspaper comic strip The Family Circus.

Bil Keane began it in 1960 and his son Jeff Keane continues to produce it.

Bil Keane was born in Crescentville, a neighborhood in Philadelphia, and attended parochial school at St William Parish and Northeast Catholic High School.

Bil Keane served in the US Army from 1942 to 1945, during which he drew for Yank and created the feature "At Ease with the Japanese" for the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes.

From 1946 to 1959 Bil Keane worked as a staff artist for the Philadelphia Bulletin, where he launched his first regular comic strip Silly Philly.

Bil Keane's first syndicated strip, Channel Chuckles, a series of jokes about television, premiered in 1954 and ran until 1977.

In 1959, the Bil Keane family moved to Paradise Valley, Arizona.

Bil Keane was president of the National Cartoonists Society from 1981 to 1983 and was the master of ceremonies at the Society's annual awards banquet for 16 years.

From 1981 to 1983, Bil Keane published the gag strip Eggheads in collaboration with his son Jeff, who now draws and writes The Family Circus.

Bil Keane died on November 8,2011, at his home in Paradise Valley, Arizona, near Phoenix, at age 89.

Bil Keane received the National Cartoonists Society's Award for Best Syndicated Panel four times, in 1967,1971,1973 and 1974.

In 2002 Bil Keane was honored with the Silver T-Square Award from the National Cartoonist Society for "outstanding dedication" to the Society and the cartooning profession.

Bil Keane was close friends with humorist and newspaper columnist Erma Bombeck.

Bil Keane was a pallbearer at Bombeck's funeral in 1996.

Pastis has parodied The Family Circus in his own strip several times, and Bil Keane wrote a satirical "attack" on these jokes as a foreword for Pastis' Pearls collection Macho Macho Animals.