McKeller (Thomas) is born in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Thomas McKeller arrives in Boston in 1913, finds work as elevator operator at the Hotel Vendome, meets John Singer Sargent and becomes his favorite model in 1916. Subsequently called “Boston’s Apollo,” McKeller serves as the model for for a number of figures (most of them white men) in Sargent’s murals and is the subject of a portrait in approximately 1918 that Sargent displays in his studio. McKeller subsequently becomes a postman. He dies in Roxbury in 1962.