In his junior year at U.C. Berkeley, Myer — “Mike” to his friends — Kahn ran for class president against Robert McNamara and some other guy.
The other guy won.
Nobody knows what happened to him. McNamara went on to President Kennedy’s cabinet, but Kahn may have drawn the best card of all, living a long, productive and happy life in San Francisco, the city his family has called home for generations.
He died Thursday, Aug. 4 in the Pacific Heights apartment he proudly insisted on living in, even up until his death at age 89.
When Kahn’s son, Rabbi Doug Kahn, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, and his daughter, Nancy Stanton, a professor of mathematics at Notre Dame University, suggested dad get a little help, he’d always rebuke them. But nicely, of course, always nicely.
“He was the most even-tempered human being I ever met. He never lost his temper. I once asked him, ‘Don’t you ever lose your temper, don’t you get mad?’ And he said, ‘Yes, at other drivers, never family or friends,'” recalled Rita Semel, executive director emeritus of the JCRC and Kahn’s friend for 60 years.
Kahn had deep Bay Area roots; his grandfather, Rabbi Myer Sol Levy, emigrated here in 1870, and eventually took over as the spiritual leader of San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Israel.
Kahn also possessed a resonant Bay Area pedigree — he even attended Galileo High School with the DiMaggio brothers. He captained the debate team at U.C. Berkeley and, until late in life, attended more than 70 consecutive Big Games (Kahn bled blue and gold, and sat next to son Doug, a fellow Cal alum, at many of those games. His daughter, Nancy, actually attended Stanford, which made for something of a rivalry around the family table.)
Kahn’s family was deeply involved in San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El, where Mike served as president in the mid-1970s. Prior to that, he’d been president of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. He also was on the Board of Union of American Hebrew Congregations.
He took over the San Francisco Cash Register Company from his father, and, as a boy, Doug Kahn remembers playing with the “old-style, grand, gold cash registers, many of which would now be antiques.”
The Kahn household was a lively one, and often as noisy with discussion as the cash register sales and repair shop Mike worked in during the days. He was an ardent Democrat — “with a “big d” and a “small d” as Semel put it — and dinnertime discussion often revolved around Kahn’s passions for civil rights and Jewish issues (and, of course, U.C. Berkeley athletics and the Giants and 49ers).
Through the course of thousands of dinners and debates, however, nobody every recalled Mike Kahn taking things too far.
“I think what stands out about my dad is he was the nicest human being. And the public man and the private man were the same person. People knew him as this extraordinarily affable mensch of a human being, which is how we in the family knew him so well. But, at the same time, he was a person of extremely strong opinions,” said Doug Kahn.
Added Marian Levy, Mike Kahn’s companion of the past 15 years following the death of his wife, Sally, “He just had this way of accepting everybody for what they were and how they are.”
She read a letter written to her by a woman who had met Mike only once: ‘Mike seemed to be of the old school — charming, conversational, intelligent and a jovial companion.”
She sighed.
“And that was Mike. He had his hand out to everybody. You were his old friend or his new friend, but you were his friend.”
Myer “Mike” Kahn is survived by his son, Rabbi Doug Kahn of San Francisco, his daughter, Nancy Stanton of Indiana, companion Marian Levy and four grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his wife, Sally.
Services were held on Monday, Aug. 8 at Congregation Emanu-El.
His family requests donations made in his memory be sent to Congregation Emanu-El, 2 Lake St., S.F., 94118 or The Jewish Community Relations Council, 121 Steuart St., Suite 301, S.F., 94105.