BUFFALO, N.Y. — Vince McKeown is a portfolio manager in the IT department at Kaleida Health, but before he joined Kaleida, he served in the U.S. Navy.
"I went to the recruiter right after graduating 11th and go into the advanced electronics computer field. So, it sounded like a fun thing to do," McKeown said. "You end up in places in the world that you would never even imaging traveling to. My first port visit was in Turkey. It's pretty interesting when you get off the ship for the first time in a foreign port and get to see the culture and the food, how people interact on a day-to-day basis in their communities, and it's a big world out there, and there's a lot of fascinating places to see."
McKeown served in the Navy for 10 years, leaving in 2009 to continue his life of service with the Department of Defense at one of the most famous places in the world.
"After my tour with the U.S.S. Normandy, I spent four years there, and was selected to be stationed at the White House, so I went there for five years. Arrived in 2004 during the campaign season for Bush. So my first year, I was traveling to a lot of small cities, and then after that, my job was maintaining the mobile communications that the White House uses," McKeown said.
"Met the President, met the First Lady, received a couple of awards while there, and when I got out of the military, I continued there under the Obama administration and then for the Trump administration. It was a high stress environment. They always emphasized no fail. So there was a lot of redundancies put in place. A lot of backup. A lot of training."
Technology has changed a lot since he enlisted. Many of the systems McKeown worked on then were pre-internet.
"When I first came into the Navy, a lot of the equipment I initially worked on dated back to the 1960s, so we were using cathode ray tubes, like the old TVs. That was powering up our radio systems. Our printers and computers took up an entire space," McKeown said.
And McKeown adapted as he went into IT and moved back to Western New York in 2019.
"My wife and I would always travel back to Buffalo, we loved it here, originally from Hamburg and we just wanted to get back to this area, so started looking to see where my skills would transfer," McKeown said.
He landed at Kaleida where he uses the skills from the military every day.
"I went in to just look at an application that was being installed and to my surprise I ended up going to an operating room and watching a person having their brain worked on and solving a clot that was in there. I was watching in real time I was like, oh my God, the technology that we have here saves lives and people come from all over the world to be treated at Kaleida," McKeown said.
2 On Your Side thanks McKeown and all of the veterans out there for their service as we honor them this Veterans Day.