KIPLINGER-AUSTIN

Excerpts from obituary published in New York Times on 11/23/2015:

Austin H. Kiplinger, who with his father started what is now Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine and expanded the family’s financial publishing company into a $100-million-a-year enterprise by the late 1990s, has died.  Austin Huntington Kiplinger was born in Washington, DC, on September 19, 1918. His father was a former economics correspondent for The Associated Press.  The younger Kiplinger knew early on that he wanted to become a journalist, but he also demonstrated entrepreneurial instincts.  When he was 11, he wrote in Washington History magazine in 2001, he and a friend happened upon the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, where they discovered that adults were not admitted unless accompanied by a child.  Austin and his friend offered themselves for a quarter a customer.  He graduated from Cornell University in 1939 with a bachelor’s degree in government after working as a campus correspondent for The Ithaca Journal.  He then took a job as a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle rather than go to work for his father’s company, because, he told Washingtonian magazine, he did not want to be a “hothouse flower.”

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Navy and wound up piloting torpedo bombers from escort carriers in the South Pacific, earning the Air Medal.  He was discharged as a Lieutenant.  After helping his father inaugurate Kiplinger’s Magazine, he joined The Chicago Journal of Commerce, where he wrote a front-page daily business column and hosted a 15-minute business news television program.  Mr. Kiplinger worked for the ABC and NBC television affiliates in Chicago before rejoining the family firm in 1956.  When his father died, he became editor in chief and board chairman.  He co-wrote books and was president of the Kiplinger Foundation.

His wife died in 2007 and his son, Todd, died of cancer a year later. In addition to his son, Knight, he is survived by six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.  Mr. Kiplinger was a benefactor of the National Symphony Orchestra, the Historical Society of Washington and other cultural institutions in the nation’s capital.  He was a trustee of Cornell University for more than 50 years.  As the university’s trustee board chairman in the mid-1980s, he opposed complete divestiture of the university’s investments in American companies doing business in South Africa.  Rather, he supported targeted investment in the most progressive companies.  As a civil rights advocate, Mr. Kiplinger joined the 1963 March on Washington as part of a fair-housing delegation.  In 1978 he intervened to avoid what might have been an international incident when Mstislav Rostropovich, the Russian cellist, whom he had helped recruit as conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra, joined striking musicians at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where they were about to be arrested for picketing on federal property.  To prevent an embarrassing arrest of Mr. Rostropovich, a human rights advocate, Mr. Kiplinger personally urged the Interior Secretary to intercept the park police before they could make the arrest. Mr. Rostropovich was spirited off to the Kiplingers’ Maryland farm for the weekend.

Kiplinger died on November 20, 2015, in Rockville, Maryland.  He was 97.  The cause was brain cancer, said his son.

Submitted by CDR Roy A. Mosteller, USNR (Ret)