Joe Keim, prolific homebuilder in Wheaton, Lisle, Geneva and St. Charles, dies at 94

Over a half-century, longtime West suburban homebuilder Joe Keim constructed more than 4,000 single-family houses, mostly in Wheaton, Lisle, Geneva and St. Charles.

Brash, opinionated and bearded — with something of a resemblance to the late actor James Coburn — Keim never wavered when it came to the value of his product.

“The only true investment in America, as far as I’m concerned, is a home,” he told the Tribune in 1993.

Keim, 94, died Oct. 30, according to the Williams-Kampp Funeral Home in Wheaton. A longtime Wheaton resident, Keim had been dealing with dementia.

Born and raised in Mill City, a hardscrabble coal-mining community in northeast Pennsylvania, Keim lost his father when he was 12. After high school, he started working as a carpenter to help support his family. In 1952, he joined the Army, where he served for two years and took a course in construction.

After his time in the Army, Keim returned to Pennsylvania and briefly sold insurance. He quit after just a month, deciding the work was not for him, he told the Tribune in 1993.

In 1955, Keim moved from Pennsylvania to DuPage County with $30 in his pocket to join his older brother, Ed, who also was a carpenter amid a postwar building boom.

“To be honest, I was poor and all I wanted was to get out of that poor environment,” Keim told the Tribune in 1993.

Pledging to do the work of three men, Keim talked his way into a union card and onto a job site.

“I just wanted the decent living a carpenter had,” he told the Tribune in 1993.

Before long, however, Keim desired more.

“About the middle of my second year as a carpenter, I got tired of the mud and the cold,” he recalled to the Tribune in 1993. “I would drive by the office and see the builder and think, ‘Hell, that’s what I would rather be doing than being out here working myself to death.’ I decided to be a builder.”

So in 1956, Keim bought a lot on Howard Street in Wheaton, north of Wheaton College, and began his foray into homebuilding. Moonlighting, he constructed a home on the lot on nights and weekends while laboring by day as a carpenter, and sold the completed house the following year. The house stands to this day.

“I virtually built the house all by myself,” Keim told the Tribune in 1993. “I even put the roof up by myself.”

Over the next few years, Keim started building more houses on the side, doubling the number each time. In 1962, he participated in a Glen Ellyn builders show, at which he sold 25 homes. That success led him to retire his tool belt and become a homebuilder full-time.

During the 1960s, Keim focused heavily on developing and building houses in the Arrowhead subdivision, most of which is in unincorporated Wheaton.

Other developments followed, including the 102-home Hollybrook subdivision in Wheaton, Wheaton’s massive 633-home Butterfield Ridge and Stonehedge development, the 44-home Rolling Hedge neighborhood in Glen Ellyn, the 43-home Champion Forest subdivision in Wheaton, the 49-home Pine Hill development in Lisle, the 266-home Hunter’s Woods subdivision in Naperville and Wheaton’s 34-home Orchard Cove neighborhood.

Keim eventually specialized in more expensive homes. So even though he didn’t build as many houses as other builders who were thought of as local-market giants, his dollar-volume sales made him one of only 11 Chicago-area builders to make the Professional Builder magazine ranking of national housing giants in 1985, as the 405th largest builder in the land.

In Wheaton, Keim’s signature project was Danada Farms, a 576-acre multiuse development on the northern part of the Danada horse farm owned for many years by thoroughbred horse breeders and philanthropists Dan and Ada Rice.

After Dan Rice’s death in 1975 and Ada Rice’s death in 1977, the farm was owned by the Rice Foundation, whose president, Arthur Nolan Jr., told the Tribune in 1985 that he chose Keim as the site’s developer because he was “a good businessman and a good builder. I wouldn’t have considered him otherwise.”

Danada included three subdivisions with 733 houses in total, along with shopping centers, some offices, standalone retail and a satellite campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology.

“What impresses me about Danada is that it’s a big project,” Keim told the Tribune in 1993. “There are 700-and-some houses there, and I’ve built probably 50% of them. It’s got four major shopping centers that I had to approve the architecture on. I think Danada drastically changed Wheaton just because of its scope and size. It’s made Wheaton a whole different town.”

Keim continued developing other projects in DuPage and Kane counties throughout the rest of the 1980s and the 1990s, including the Wheaton Park Manor mixed-use redevelopment, the 82-home Marywood subdivision in Wheaton, the 16-home Hunt Club of Corporate Woods in Lisle, the 58-home Durwood Forest neighborhood in Bartlett, the 315-home Hunt Club in St. Charles, the 134-home Heatherstone development in Naperville, the 63-home Legends of Wheaton subdivision and the 138-home Majestic Oaks neighborhood in St. Charles.

Several of Keim’s later projects in Kane County were among his largest, including the Eagle Brook Country Club in Geneva, which consisted of more than 530 single-family homes, and the Deerbrook project in Aurora, which contained 289 single-family houses and 118 town homes.

“If you were to describe Joe Keim in one sentence, I would say he was a self-made man who was a very hard-driven businessman, but he had enormous integrity and his word was his bond and everybody knew it and they loved dealing with him,” said retired Wheaton attorney Henry S. Stillwell III, who represented Keim for close to 40 years. “People knew that he would come through once (a) deal was made, even if it was not easy sometimes.”

In addition to the thousands of homes he constructed, another of Keim’s legacies is putting his own name on streets in subdivisions he developed. There’s a Keim Drive in Wheaton, a Keim Drive and a Keim Court in Naperville, a Keim Road in Lisle, a Keim Trail in Bartlett, a Keim Court in Geneva, a Keim Court in St. Charles and a Keim Drive in Aurora.

An effort to name a busy roadway in Wheaton’s Danada area East and West Joe Keim Circle ran aground in 1989 after city officials told the builder that, to avoid confusion, the six homeowners on Wheaton’s existing, nearby Keim Drive needed to agree to change their street’s name to something else. The residents balked, even after Keim sent them letters offering them $500 each in exchange for written support of the name change.

“It gets rather hard,” Keim told the Tribune’s Eric Zorn in 1989. “Every town already has a Main Street, an Oak Street, a Maple Street, an Elm Street. You want to come up with something that sounds good, like Forest View Drive, but cities start to run out of good names.”

Keim’s two sons, Joe and Jeff, both went into the homebuilding business, including working with him. Keim never fully retired, although by the 2020s, his son, Joe, was managing his remaining land holdings.

“The biggest fear in my life is retirement,” he told the Tribune in 1985.

Outside of work, Keim enjoyed hunting, and he filled his Wheaton office with a dozen or so large trophy heads. On one trip to Africa, Keim told the Tribune he broke his back when he was thrown from a Jeep while chasing a wildebeest. On another, his hunting party was charged and surrounded by a herd of angry elephants for about 20 minutes before the herd took off.

“Once I get on that airplane for a hunting trip, I completely forget about the business,” he told the Tribune in 1993.

However, Keim clearly took great pride in his life’s work.

“I used to take my motorcycle out at night and drive through the subdivisions I built,” he told the Tribune in 1993. “It was amazing how proud I felt looking at those places I built and knowing the enjoyment they gave to people living in those homes.”

Keim’s wife of 65 years, Helen, died in 2021. In addition to his sons, he is survived by five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

A visitation will be held from 3 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at Williams-Kampp Funeral Home, 430 E. Roosevelt Road, Wheaton. Another visitation will be held at 9 a.m. Thursday at St. Michael Catholic Church, 310 S. Wheaton Ave. in Wheaton, followed by a mass at 10 a.m.

Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.