Farewell to Alfred Kahn, a True Player on the Stage of Life

When I heard last week about the death of 93 year old Alfred Kahn, widely known as the “father of airline deregulation,” I immediately thought of two things. The first was Dan Reed’s wonderful 2007 profile/interview of Kahn in USA TODAY. The other was the enjoyment I got in the 1980s when I regularly watched Kahn’s commentaries on the Nightly Business Report, on PBS. (Another regular commentator on the show in those days was a pre-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan.) Kahn’s TV essays were models of good communication: brief, clearly written and crisply delivered. What I didn’t know until reading Dan Reed’s story when it was originally published was how full and varied a life Kahn lived. It contained prodigious amounts of work, but also considerable time spent with family. There was also a detail that I found telling and touching. He had been singing and performing on the musical stage since high school, and deep into advanced age performed the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan with the Cornell Savoyards. (Kahn was an emeritus economics professor at Cornell, and had a longtime association with the school.) Kahn’s amateur acting career has been noted often since his death. Especially interesting is the post from Lisa Gold, “Remember, darling?”: Alfred Kahn was my Fredrik in “A Little Night Music,” in which she reminisces about casting him as the male lead in Stephen Sondheim’s musical in 1985 at Cornell. “Fred was wonderful in the role,” Lisa writes, “and a delight to work with and talk to.” In a sidebar to the 2007 USA TODAY interview, Kahn provided this quote about his future: “I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t continue working. I’ll never retire. I plan to keep living until I die.” He did keep working, but he also had a wider perspective that made for a life exceptionally well lived.