President’s Death Recalls Plight of Former Superintendent

The recent death of former United States President Jimmy Carter once again brought to mind the Iranian Hostage Crisis and the plight of former Huntington UFSD Superintendent of Schools William F. Keough Jr., who was among the 52 Americans held in Tehran for 444 days until minutes after President Ronald W. Reagan was sworn into office on January 29, 1981.

A native of Waltham, Massachusetts and a graduate of Boston College, Mr. Keough was a teacher and administrator in Vermont, Massachusetts and New York, serving as a superintendent in Bedford, Mass., Burlington, Vermont and Huntington for three years. He later left Huntington and became superintendent of the American School in Teheran, Iran in May 1978 before being reassigned to head the American School in Islamabad, Pakistan upon the fall of the Shah of Iran.

Superintendent of Huntington UFSD from 1969-1972, Mr. Keough, who stood a towering 6’9, returned to the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979 to collect student records when the embassy was seized by militant students. He was among the 52 hostages held for 444 days before finally being released on January 20, 1981. During his time held captive, he became a spokesman for the hostages.

After returning to the United States, Mr. Keough worked for the US Department of Education and lived in Washington, DC. Within a year of his release, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the degenerative nervous system disease that’s more widely known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He died of the disease on November 27, 1985. He was 55 years old.

In the summer of 1984, a year before he passed away from ALS, Mr. Keough was quoted as saying: “There’s no sense wringing your hands. I keep remembering a line from Shakespeare;s ‘Julius Caesar’ that goes, ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; but the valiant taste of death but once.”

In an obituary, The New York Times quoted the soft-spoken Mr. Keough as saying that being held hostage in Iran taught him to be “more appreciative of life.”

Mr. Keough, who passed away in Washington, DC, is buried at Calvary Cemetery in Waltham, Massachusetts.