Former Cabana Boy Now Heads Arts Effort
As the head of the Greater Hartford Arts Council, Ken Kahn lives a cultured existence. But he started out as a cabana boy, fetching drinks for tourists at a Long Island beach club.
It was the early 1960s, when the island’s south shore was dotted with private clubs. Kahn spent his summers cleaning out club-goers’ cabanas, which were locked rooms where club members kept their chaise lounges and towels during the summer. He was also in charge of running errands for those same club members, which kept him ferrying fresh towels and alcohol back and forth for most of the day.
“I used to work almost round the clock,” he recalled. Sometimes Kahn would work so late that instead of going home, he’d just go into one of the cabanas and fall asleep on a chaise lounge for the night.
But don’t feel too sorry for him — it’s easy to envision wealthy, demanding clientele bossing around a haggard employee at all hours, but the job landed him excellent pay plus plenty of leftover steak and lobster from the restaurant. As for the clients, Kahn said they were generally very pleasant, and not always rich; many were middle-class.
Life was all right for the 10 or so cabana boys at the club where Kahn worked; they could watch some of the entertainers, singers and comedians, who’d perform during the evenings, even bring their friends and girlfriends to the club sometimes. The owners were laid-back enough to allow these perks — the sleeping in cabanas, the leftover surf and turf meals, Kahn said, because they knew they had good workers and wanted to keep them happy.
Kahn remembers one bad incident, though, during a garbage haulers’ strike. After a few days of no garbage removal, piles of rotting food and trash were growing around the club, stinking in the summer heat. Kahn said he had the brilliant idea of spreading it out and shoveling sand over it temporarily, at least until it could be hauled away.
So he and his coworkers bought some gas masks from an army surplus store, took up their shovels and got to work. They were wearing just their bathing suits, boots and gas masks, “And none of us had the sense to photograph it, but what a stupid image,” Kahn laughed. The strike ended and the garbage was taken away, but Kahn said they’d at least saved the daytime crowd from the stench.
The beach lifestyle ended for Kahn after college, when he went to work for Reader’s Digest publishing in New York City. A junior — “very junior” he says — editor of a department that put out travel books, he got to travel to places like Spain, Mexico, Italy and England for work. But it was a few local volunteer gigs during those years that eventually led to his long-term career.
He’d done a little volunteering for arts organizations in the city, and a friend suggested he pursue arts administration work. With his department facing closure at Reader’s Digest, Kahn decided to give the idea a shot.
That decision launched him on a multi-decade odyssey around the country and into a career he’s still passionate about. He started out working for upstate New York arts organizations, then the Maryland State Arts Council. After that gig, he went to work for cultural affairs department for Miami — where his beach club background served him well when dealing with hospitality organizations there. He then spent a few years in Fort Worth, Texas, before boomeranging back to the Northeast when he took over at Greater Hartford.
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