Fritz (Frederick Louis) Keppler was born on September 29, 1947, in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Lloyd A. Keppler (1910-1997) and Helen (Kohler) Keppler (1913-2012). He graduated from Holy Cross School in New Orleans in 1965 and enrolled at the University of Notre Dame in the same year. He lived in Breen Phillips Hall as a freshman before spending his sophomore year abroad through Notre Dame’s program in Innsbruck, Austria. He spent his final two years in St. Edward’s Hall, graduating cum laude in 1969 with a major in Modern Languages.

After his graduation from the University of Notre Dame, Keppler enrolled in graduate school at Georgetown University in 1969. From 1970 to 1972, he served in the US Army as a Vietnamese language specialist in military intelligence before earning a master’s degree in linguistics in 1974. In 1977, he took a job with the German Military Representative USA/Canada office at Washington Dulles Airport where he worked until his retirement in 2017. Keppler lived with Earl F. Mellor in Virginia from 1978 until his death in 2020. They were legally married in 2014.