Thomas B. Keith was born in 1897 and grew up on a wheat and cattle farm in Colfax, Washington. He never attended high school and joined the Army in 1916 and received his high school credits while in the service. He returned to Moscow in 1919 and graduated from the University of Idaho in 1924 with a degree in Animal Husbandry.

Keith served as a Captain in the Army during World War II from 1942 to 1946 as a food, nutrition, and agricultural specialist in the European Theatre of the war. His assignments in France and Germany were concerned with food and general agricultural issues and making sure the local populations were adequately fed. He arranged for food grown on farms outside Paris to be transported into Paris in 1945 to prevent a food shortage in the city.

He also taught in the animal sciences field and human nutrition to dieticians and home economics students at Penn State and Montana State before joining the faculty at the University of Idaho in 1948. He wrote many publications, including "The Horse Interlude" which presented a pictorial history of the role horses played in the wheat farming operations of the Pacific Northwest. Thomas B. Keith passed away in 1982.