Part 3 of a 6-part series

It’s a little before 2 p.m. and the crowd from Eastern Maine Healthcare is schmoozing it up near the rear of the Acadia Hospital gymnasium as Irving Kagan watches the clock.

A punctual man, Kagan is standing at the front of the gym behind a podium finished in a clear lacquer that allows the flamed grain of the wood to shine through. As chairman of the board for EMH, he struggles briefly with an uncooperative public address system in an attempt to open the hospital organization’s annual meeting.

“Everyone is cordially invited to take their seats now,” Kagan announces to a largely unresponsive audience.

Opportunities to demonstrate leadership come to different men in different ways. On this particular day, the challenge takes the form of a microphone that just isn’t loud enough. Still athletically built at 73, the wiry board chairman grasps both sides of the podium and leans forward.

“The countdown is under way for people to take their seats, PLEASE!” Kagan instructs, this time at a volume level that cuts through the banter without the assistance of the microphone.

It works. Now shoes are shuffling across the gym’s moss-green linoleum floor as the representatives and employees of EMH affiliates find their seats. Kagan, who tells his friends to call him “Irv,” is in control and the board meeting is right on time.

As he lays out his assessment of the delivery of health care services in northern and eastern Maine, Kagan touches upon all of the complex issues facing hospitals ranging in size from little Charles A. Dean Memorial Hospital in Greenville to EMH flagship, Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor. New reimbursement policies from health maintenance organizations, nursing staff shortages, physician recruitment efforts, fund- raising drives and capital improvements are all areas with which Kagan has become intimately familiar.

Yet for most of his professional life, Kagan was fascinated by a singular goal: the design, construction and marketing of the perfect shoe. While linking the worlds of stitched uppers and suture stitches might be a difficult leap for some, it is a feat Kagan has nimbly achieved with relative ease.

Those who know Kagan well are not surprised. Bangor businessman Lloyd Willey, who has sparred with Kagan on more than one occasion as a member of the EMMC board of directors, has a healthy respect for Kagan’s ability to size up the business of health care.

“I think Irving has excellent leadership skills,” Willey said. “And his work [at EMH] has less to do with the medical field than it does the business world. He knows business and how to delegate authority and how to lead. He is a strong leader.”

The ability to establish realistic goals, a hard work ethic, a knack for assessing troublesome situations and the resolve to take difficult stands are all strengths Kagan learned from a man who was a mentor and a friend: his father, Max. And if the Kagan story sounds as if it were ripped from the pages of a quintessential early 20th century American classic, it’s probably because it could have been.

Max Kagan was among the thousands of Russian Jews who made a desperate life-changing decision during an equally desperate time of change. Plagued by anti-Semitic pogroms and the oppression of the Bolshevik yoke, Kagan left his native Riga, Latvia, in the 1920s and arrived in the United States to begin a new life in Lynn, Mass., as a union organizer in the shoe industry. In Massachusetts, Kagan met a University of Maine graduate named Philip Lown and the two men forged a successful partnership that would eventually be known in Bangor as Kagan-Lown manufacturing.

Attracted by plentiful and comparatively cheap labor in Maine, Kagan moved his family to Auburn where the business opened a shoe factory on Minot Avenue. At the invitation of Albert Schiro, founder of the Standard Shoe chain in Bangor, both men came to Bangor in the 1930s.

In the post-Depression era, Schiro knew Bangor needed economic development to regain its prominence as a financial and industrial center. He convinced the team to launch a shoe company in the center of the city. The pair’s first enterprise, the Philco Shoe Co. on Oak Street, provided a hint of how successful they could be in Maine.

As profitable as that venture was, Max Kagan wanted to push the envelope. Intrigued by the Indian-themed Bass Weejan moccasins, Kagan began to scrutinize the design of the footwear. In 1939, he bought the defunct American Woolen Mill and began turning out footwear under the banner of a new company that, in deference to the tribe, was named Penobscot Shoe. Filled with hundreds of workers, noisy machines and the pervasive smell of tanned leather, the company left a vivid impression on young Irving, who accompanied his father to work on many occasions.

Kagan grew up in Bangor and graduated from Bangor High School in 1945. He went on to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated in 1948 under a wartime-accelerated program with a degree in construction engineering with an emphasis on management.

He had planned to take a job in Ohio in the fledgling modular housing industry, a choice he says was supported by his father, who had wanted him to choose a career path other than the shoe industry. But armed with a degree from MIT, the new graduate suddenly found himself looking at shoes from an entirely new perspective.

“I went into the factory with him and I got intrigued by the engineering of the shoe, because obviously, the shoe being built as it does to fit the human foot must withstand the stresses and strains of daily use, which posed certain engineering challenges,” Kagan said. “So I took a job with Penobscot Shoe and stayed there for 46 years, retiring as board chairman in 1999.”

Throughout that half-century, Kagan married, raised a family and pursued his interest in games, tennis and, especially, skiing. He became active in public service, rising to the chairmanship of Eastern Maine Healthcare, the sprawling confederation of large and small hospitals and other corporate health care facilities.

He also is a member of the Carrabassett Valley Academy board, a grade eight-12 school that places some of the best young skiers in the country in an educational environment that fosters their competitive skills. Six of the school’s graduates have competed on the U.S. Olympic Team.

A religious man, Kagan also is active on the Jewish Community Endowment Association and the Beth Israel Synagogue Endowment Association.

In 1989, while leaving an EMMC board meeting that had been particularly discouraging for him, Kagan got in his car and began the drive home. He didn’t get far. He felt a pain in his chest and then blacked out. The next thing he remembered was people pulling him out of his car telling him he had had a heart attack.

His doctor told him he had to retire, but Kagan resisted. He was 59 years old and, he thought, in the prime of his life.

“I used to fear retirement because I didn’t want to sit around in a rocking chair,” he said. “As CEO of Penobscot Shoe, I knew I had a challenge facing me every morning. Frankly, I feared getting up and feeling that no one cared where I was or what I was doing or how I spent my day.”

Ultimately, Kagan resigned as CEO and satisfied himself with the less-demanding duties of chairman of the board at Penobscot Shoe. But he became even more involved in EMH and EMMC, even though he received no salary.

“When you work for nothing, everybody wants to hire you,” he quipped.

Despite some recent controversies that have pitted Norman Ledwin, Kagan’s hand-picked choice to head EMMC, against members of the medical staff at the hospital, Kagan still finds his role on the board to be worthwhile. In fact, direct challenges to his leadership and authority probably only intensify his determination to prevail.

“The single-most important thing we do is to find the right leader to make happen what we perceive as our vision and our mission,” he said. “So nothing is missing from my life. Every morning when I get up, I feel that I’m doing something that’s important and that people value my contribution. I still have time for fun and games. I enjoy contributing to the society that I live in and the things that I enjoy – young people and sports.”

In fact, as Kagan crosses into the autumn years, he would rather look forward than savor the past. He is particularly concerned about the opportunities for Maine’s next generation who are leaving Bangor in droves in search of better opportunities. His own children have moved out of state or settled more than 100 miles away from Bangor. The solution, he says, lies in economic development strategies that focus on the region’s existing assets while striving to stay ahead of the curve on every high-technology opportunity that’s waiting in the wings.

“We can’t go back to the 1940s. Manufacturing’s over,” he said. “The state has to sell what it has, not try to sell something it doesn’t have and it must be competitive in doing so. Maine should sell its lifestyle, work ethic, and make the most of its abundant natural resources, hydropower, and forest products industry. Agriculture and aquaculture are all part of the picture as well as the rapidly emerging bio-medical research facilities and high-tech industries.”

On other issues of concern to the region, Kagan supports the construction of the much sought-after east-west highway, but with the reservation that it does not adversely affect the state’s scenic beauty. It is another shade of Kaganism: In your quest for a greater fortune, don’t kill the golden goose.

The suggestion of a new Bangor convention center to replace the aging Bangor Auditorium shouldn’t even require discussion. As far as Kagan is concerned, its construction is a foregone conclusion for a city that takes pride in its distinction as “the hub of eastern Maine.” And how that goal is accomplished is less important than the fact that it must be accomplished.

Viewing Irv Kagan’s reflection in the rear-view mirror as he waves goodbye from the driveway of his Carrabassett Valley ski lodge, one gets the sense that he has kept the promises he made to his father many years ago. Perhaps he has become an even greater man than the immigrant who found fortune in America. Yet years after his death, the legacy of the father continues to humble the son.

“My father’s strengths were incredible, his human kindness, his business acumen – well, what can I say?” Kagan said. “He was a private man who was always very self-conscious about his heavy accent. He never said two words if one would do. He taught me not to hesitate to lead and to make my point without making people dislike me for it. I don’t give people the back of my hand. I haven’t gone through life making enemies.”

Tomorrow: “I like to be on stage.”