An Alumni Legacy

Three generations of Kahne men attended UW and served their country. 

By UWAA Staff 

When UW alumnus Steven Kahne looks back on his time at UW, he immediately reflects on the similar experiences that he, his father David and his son Jason all had. The three men developed leadership skills with an expanded worldview. Their paths in life might have differed—but the core characteristics of their legacies are intertwined because of UW.

David S. Kahne grew up in Monte Vista, Colo. Initially he attended the University of Colorado. On Dec. 7, 1941, while he was playing football on the front lawn of his dorm, someone came outside and said the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Along with many of his classmates, he enlisted in the Army.

After completing flight trainings at several bases, he was assigned to fly B-17s from England over Germany. After his 35th and final mission in 1945, David returned to the U.S. and married Shirley Lee from his hometown. They moved to Sacramento, Calif., and started a family. As a member of the reserves, he was sent to Germany by the Air Force during the Korean War, where he was later joined by his family and where their youngest child and son, Steven, was born.

To continue being promoted as an officer, David, a captain at the time, volunteered to go to the University of Wyoming to finish his engineering degree. The whole family enjoyed Laramie so much that David and Shirley decided that they would eventually retire there.

David graduated in 1963 and was assigned to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where he was promoted to the director of operations at the Air Force’s high-speed test track. He launched sleds with rocket engines and aircraft capsules with speeds often exceeding Mach 2.

In 1966–67, David volunteered to fly cargo aircraft all over Vietnam. Eventually, he ended his career in 1971 with 29 years of service. He had flown almost every type of aircraft in the Air Force inventory.

In Laramie, David rose to the level of senior vice president at the Bank of Laramie. Later, he began his own commercial real estate business as well as starting a hobby of precision woodworking. David and Shirley had one last move before he passed away in July 2010.

At his memorial service, David’s navigator in Vietnam said that, among all the pilots with whom he had flown over the years, David was the absolute best. He brought the crew through many harrowing events safely each time.

David’s son, Col. Steven Kahne, was 8 when he decided he wanted to attend UW. He loved the UW Geological Museum and was struggling to build a model of a Brontosaurus skeleton. Steve packed it up and walked to geology Professor Samuel H. Knight’s office. Knight spent time with him going over the model and looking at documents in the artifact preparation lab. While Knight was building the Tyrannosaurus rex beside the museum entrance, Steve visited with him.

Steve’s neighbor, Mable Cheney Moudy, attended UW when the only building was Old Main. Her family lived in Lander, from where she would take a stagecoach to Rawlins and then ride the Union Pacific to UW. Moudy shared stories of the Old West with him.

Steve began UW in 1971 majoring in business and Spanish. He attended Air Force ROTC, was a resident adviser in McIntyre Hall and studied abroad at the University of Salamanca in Spain, which he says gave him “a different sense of culture and opened my eyes to a much bigger world.”

He is still fond of many of his UW instructors. After graduation, Steve received commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Force. He served as a contracting officer through his 26-year career, had 13 moves throughout the U.S. and spent about a third of his assignments in Europe. He also earned his master’s from the Air Force Institute of Technology.

After retiring in 2001, he and his wife of over 40 years, Teresa, ended up in Pinedale, Wyo. His love for languages continues as he studies online, and like his father, he is also making great use of his workshop to do woodworking. Steve and Teresa have four children and five grandchildren.

Jason Kahne knew from an early age that he also wanted to pursue military service. Two of Jason’s cousins attended UW while he was in high school. Attending UW had become a growing family tradition. In 1992, Jason moved to Laramie and spent the summer with his grandparents, Dave and Shirley. When classes started that fall, his schedule included Army ROTC.

As an RA, he lived in the same room as his father and also majored in business. He helped a friend start The First Story Café and worked at Washakie and other campus jobs. With his food service experience, the Wyoming Army National Guard asked him to manage a couple of dining facilities at Camp Guernsey for the summer. He participated in an Army-sponsored internship in South Korea and spent his senior year with the 1022nd Air Ambulance Company.

After graduating in 1997, Jason was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Transportation Corps. He is scheduled to retire in December 2021 after 24 years of service, with 12 of those overseas in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. Jason’s first assignment and his dad’s last assignment overlapped in Germany. He shared meals with fellow UW ROTC grads in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He also earned an MBA from Baylor University in 2009.

Jason has visited 75 countries thus far. His travels include hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu; doing the Tour Du Mont Blanc through the French, Italian and Swiss Alps; and an overland truck camping journey from Cape Town, South Africa, to Nairobi, Kenya. Over the course of his last tour to Germany, Jason visited all 17 American Battlefield Monument Commission Cemeteries in Europe, where 316 Wyoming soldiers from WWI and WWII are buried. He has also built a virtual cemetery for the 547 Wyoming soldiers buried in overseas graves.

The Kahne men share a deep love for their country and for Wyoming. They developed strong leadership skills through their time at UW. “My father developed a good and lifelong relationship with professors and fellow military personnel,” Steve says. “It put him on track to participate in leading- and cutting-edge technology assignments.”

Steve and Jason attribute their leadership and motivational skills to the ROTC program. Steve says, “We also understood how to be a good follower. A lot of people don’t know that being a good follower is just as good as being a good leader.”

Asked about a world and legacy they want to create, Steve says that he could confidently speak for his father, his son and himself: “Our focus in the U.S. military was to keep our forces strong so that any would-be enemy would not dare attack our nation, as well as supporting our allies around the world as needed. But if an enemy did want to attack us, then we wished to help defeat him and restore our nation to peace. The education we gained at UW was put to use for that very purpose—whether we were writing contracts to purchase our weapon systems, designing them, testing them, or making effective use of all logistics systems to take our forces anywhere in the world, and we did all of these.”