Alice was born 4 May 1892 in Arlington, Washington, Nebraska, the sixth daughter of Thomas Merrill Johnson and Hattie Ellen Duggan. She joined sisters Myra, Jean, and Laura; two other sisters, Julia and Nellie, passed away before her birth. Her younger siblings were Marie, Napoleon and Hattie Quintilla.
As a young girl, Alice moved with family to Rock Falls, Whiteside, Illinois; her parents divorced in 1901, and she and her mother and siblings moved to Kalispell, Flathead, Montana, where Hattie's grandfather, Adam Hetrick, lived. Alice's life history up till that point is found
here.
Hattie married Frederick Newell Golden and gave birth to three more children - Fred Jr., Floyd and Florence Golden. They settled in Spokane, Washington.
Alice left home as a teenager and found a job cooking for a boat crew. One granddaughter remembered that Alice said she would "bake all day and dance all night". While working in rural eastern Washington, Alice met and married Wildie Herbert Keen, on 25 June 1912 in Coeur d'Alene, Kootenai, Idaho.
Alice and "Bill" settled in Walla Walla, Walla Walla, Washington, where they had three daughters: Marguerite, Kathleen and Dorothea. Alice sewed, gardened, cooked, canned and raised her children. She enjoyed genealogy and researched her ancestry back to the Revolutionary War; she joined her local chapter of the National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR).
Just a year after Alice and Bill celebrated fifty years of marriage together, Bill passed away in Walla Walla. Alice was a widow for almost twenty-five years before she passed away on 31 August 1978. She was buried beside Bill in Mountain View Cemetery.
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