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MANSFIELD — It never occurred to Jeannine Skelton McKee, that she may be making history. She was just doing what she’d always planned to do — go to college and study something she enjoyed.
“It was what I wanted to do and I did,” said McKee, now 93, thinking back to her time at Miami University. “A lot of my friends were going and it was all just part of growing up.”
McKee was the first woman in Beta Alpha Psi, an international honor society for financial information students and professionals. The chapter recently featured McKee in its newsletter.
McKee said she was quite surprised when the organization reached out about doing a profile on her.
“I mean, that was over 70 years ago,” she said with a giggle. “But they explained it all, since it was Women’s History Month and I guess I’m history almost.”
After graduating from Mansfield Senior High School, McKee enrolled at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
McKee took every math and statistics course the university offered, then switched her major to accounting.
“After I went through calculus, I said, ‘What’s next?’ And they said, ‘Well, that was our last math class,” she recalled. “I had already had an accounting course, which I thought was great fun, so I switched over to accounting.”
Once McKee became an accounting major, she was part of the university’s school of business. There weren’t many women in her classes, but McKee didn’t think much about that. Her classmates were generally friendly and she didn’t feel out-of-place.
“That was where I was supposed to be,” she said.
For McKee, math is like a puzzle. She likes math for the same reason she likes Sudoku and jigsaw puzzles — the search for a solution.
McKee was born in Mansfield in 1929. Before graduating from Mansfield Senior, she attended John Simpson and Hedges schools. Her father Denny operated a radio repair shop out of their home and her mother Irene was a homemaker.
“Back then we didn’t have televisions and everybody listened to the radio, so he had lots of business,” she said.
McKee’s father fixed small radios from his work room in the family home, but sometimes she accompanied him on house calls to repair larger sets. She can still remember a trip to Charles Kelly King’s estate — now known as Kingwood Center — when it was still King’s private home.
“When I was little that was out in the country,” she said. “That was outside of town.”
After her father died when she was just 13, McKee began cooking and caring for her younger sister while her mother attended night school.
“They were married when (my mother) was 16. She had never learned to drive a car,” she said. “So the first thing she had to do was learn to drive a car. Then she went to night school to learn to be a secretary.”
While McKee’s father didn’t get to see her go to college, his advice stuck with her as she forged her path.
“He said I could be anything I wanted to be and I believed him,” McKee said.
McKee met her husband William in high school, but the two didn’t get to know each other well until Christmas break during their freshman year of college.
“When we were home at Christmas time, his friend dared him to call me for a date,” McKee said. “He called about 11 o’clock at night and my mother was upset. Who would call somebody at 11 o’clock at night?”
While it might have started with a dare, Jeannine and William’s date went well. They went on more dates. By the end of Christmas break, William decided to relinquish a football scholarship at Mount Union and transferred to Miami.
McKee graduated a few months before her husband, they were married four days after his commencement.
After college, McKee worked for the accounting department at Dominion Electric (now Hamilton Beach). She quit after three years when her first son was born. She went on to have three more children and spent much of her life thereafter as a stay-at-home mom.
William went on to serve as the the Richland County Prosecuting Attorney for 20 years and was twice appointed Judge for the 5th District Court of Appeals in Ohio.
McKee got to put her accounting skills to use again after her sons were grown, when she and her husband purchased Pine Burr Golf Course in Lillington, North Carolina. They ran the golf course for 14 years before retiring to Georgia.
After William died in 2011, Jeannine returned to Mansfield to be closer to her four sons and grandchildren.
Her advice to pioneering young women today is similar to the advice her father gave her so many years ago.
“You need to go with what you enjoy and what pleases you, not something just because it makes a lot of money or something like that,” she said.
