Alumni Spotlight: Allen Kone - The Man Behind AIESEC Day
From Hitchhiking around Europe to raising 52 TNs!
It was 1963 and Allen Kone just finished hitchhiking around Europe for 12 weeks on his own. He was without a doubt bitten by the travel bug and was determined to find a way to return.
In the fall of 1964, Kone was a junior at Yale, majoring in British and Western European history. He saw a flier for AIESEC and he and his roommate Denny Olmsted, attended their first meeting and joined the AIESEC Yale local committee.
“I was able to raise a traineeship at the Second National Bank of New Haven, a place where I had worked from time to time as a teller,” says Kone. Olmsted, through assistance from classmate Leigh Wilson, raised a traineeship at the Rheingold Brewing Company in New York City. “On our pink forms, we asked to be placed together in London or somewhere else in the British Isles. We got Dublin for the summer of 1965,” said Kone.
While in Ireland, Kone worked for a local company, Roadstone, Ltd., and Olmsted worked for Bolands Biscuits. “My job was ill-defined, rotating through various departments. We shared a flat in Ballsbridge, Dublin with two other American AIESEC trainees, Mike Squires from Notre Dame and Marty Bellmore from the University of Chicago. We had a fabulous time, going out almost every night and singing at the pubs,” said Kone. At the time, the Irish committee had a series of events for the trainees to attend. And if that wasn’t enough fun, Kone had a BSA motorcycle which enabled him and Olmsted to visit 31 of the 32 Irish counties!
Once back in New Haven, Kone was chosen as a vice president of the Yale LC, responsible for outgoing traineeships. That year, AIESEC Yale raised an astounding 52 traineeships, which was a record at that time. “One of our outgoing members was former Secretary of State, John Kerry, who graduated in 1966 and went on a traineeship to Switzerland,” Kone remarks.
The summer of 1966 was spent in Gothenburg, Sweden, working at the Port Authority writing English-language brochures. Bruce Fenton, Yale 1967, another LC member, also had a traineeship in Gothenburg. Both lived in the dormitory of Chalmers Technical University. “Even though I had a new car that summer, a red Morgan 4/4, it was not as much fun as the previous summer in Dublin,” says Kone.
A Yale graduate and official AIESEC Alum
After graduating from Yale, Kone began working in New York as a trainee in the International Banking Department at Bankers Trust and stayed for six years. Kone attributes that position to his AIESEC experience.
Kone stayed in touch with the AIESEC National Committee, then located about four blocks from his job on Vanderbilt Avenue. Along with Wilbur Wong and Ed Cohen, Kone ran the Alumni Society of AIESEC US. They discovered that the national office had done some major housekeeping and what was left of an alumni list was very small. The group struggled to have events in New York. “At one point the then NCP got disgusted with the three of us and threw us out of the office, saying that the NC could do a better job of alumni affairs,” says Kone. According to Kone, they never did.
AIESEC Day is born
In 1975 Kone was recruited by the Office of The Secretary of the Treasury to join the local NYC staff that was overseeing the federal government’s role in the New York City fiscal crisis aka the “bail-out”. In August of 1979, Kone came up with the bright idea of having a champagne reception in the Blue Room at the City Hall for AIESEC trainees. By that time, he was on great terms with so many members of the City’s senior staff. “They went out of their way to accommodate us,” says Kone “They wanted to keep their lenders at the Treasury happy.” According to Kone, the Mayor’s proclamation of AIESEC Day in New York was the city’s idea. Through Kone’s relationships, status and drive, AIESEC Day was born on August 30, 1979!
For ten years, 1971 to 1981, Kone and his wife Ann, sponsored a Thanksgiving celebration in their home for foreign trainees and local alumni in New York. Kone remembers it being held on the Thursday evening, one week before Thanksgiving every year.
As time went on, Kone had lost touch with AIESEC completely. It was then in 2009, when his wife Ann was working for Habitat for Humanity in New York and had an invitation to join a Habitat Women’s Build in Tajikistan. Coincidentally, they also had a wedding invitation in Kazakhstan. So off they went to Central Asia. Kone says that although he was not invited to join the Women’s Build, he did have dinner with the international crew on their final night. “I sat next to a woman from Belgium, originally from Nigeria. We discovered we both were AIESEC alums,” Kone recalls. Once home, he googled AIESEC and discovered AIESEC Life. From there, he got in touch with Lili Hein, the executive director at the time. She put him in touch with AIESEC alumni in New York, the nascent NYC Hub. “Somehow, I became in charge of a program of speakers for the hub and from there the annual international alumni potluck celebration in our home developed,” says Kone. The first annual NYC AIESEC Alumni Potluck was held in 2010 and they have been hosting ever since.
Cover Photo:
This photo features AIESEC Trainees, AIESEC Ireland committee members and Éamon de Valera, who served as President of Ireland from 1959 to 1973. de Valera was a hero of the 1916 Easter Rising, and served as Prime Minister (Taoiseach) three times. This photo was taken in August 1965 at Áras an Uachtaráin in Phoenix Park, Dublin, the official residence of the President of Ireland (sometimes called in English the "Irish White House").
Allen Kone is in the front row, third from the left; Denny Olmsted is next to him, second from the left. At the far right in the front row are their flatmates Mike Squires and just to his left is Marty Bellmore.
"I spoke to the photographer afterward and he arranged for me to get de Valera to sign my copy. I suspect that this may be the only copy of this photo," says Kone. "I recall speaking to a delegate at an International Congress from Ireland who told me that they had no archives."