Kenneth Kann was born in Chicago in 1944, on the cusp of the baby boom generation. He grew up in the old Jewish West Side and the suburb Skokie. His father and mother, the children of East European Jewish immigrants, lived their entire lives in Chicago and Skokie.
Ken attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, one of the centers of the sixties student upheaval. He did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, a mecca for political radicalism and the counter-culture. He received his PhD degree in 1977 in modern U.S. history.
Ken taught history at UC Berkeley in the 1970s when he launched a project to write a popular history of the once famous Petaluma Jewish chicken ranching community. The California Historical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities supported Ken’s Petaluma work.
Ken’s father Sam was diagnosed with ALS in 1979. Over 15 months Sam became a quadriplegic, with ever more compromised eating, speaking, and breathing. Ken helped Sam live and die with this disastrous disease. That is the subject of Ken’s coming book: My Father's ALS: A Son's Healing Journey.
At age 39, in 1983, following Sam’s death, Ken started over and went to law school. Ken worked at a downtown San Francisco firm that represented corporations and government institutions in employment litigation. He was a litigator for fifteen years.
Ken began a third career in 2001, in court administration, when he took a job with the public agency that administers the huge California court system. Within a few years he became one of the directors of the agency, responsible for programs that strengthened the California courts. After he retired in 2011, Ken resumed writing history including My Father's ALS.
In 1985 Ken married Stephanie Pass, a child psychologist and writer, who appears in My Father's ALS, part of his coming of age story. They live in San Francisco. Their daughter Julia is in Washington D.C. where she works at a community college.
Ken is the author of two works of popular history, both begun in the 1970s: Joe Rapoport: the Life of a Jewish Radical (Temple University Press 1981) and Comrades and Chicken Ranchers: the Story of a California Jewish Community (Cornell University Press, 1993). Ken published Comrades and Chicken Ranchers 19 years after he began the project. As a historian, Ken thinks of himself as a long-distance runner.