John “Jack” Goeken, 80, founder of telecom giant MCI and the father of air-to- ground telephone communication, has died after a long battle with cancer.
Goeken died Thursday at a hospital in his hometown of Joliet, Ill., said Pat Schneider, a close friend and executive vice president of the Goeken Group Corp., a company he founded in Chicago’s suburbs after leaving MCI.
Goeken is widely viewed as the father of air-to-ground telephone communication. As a founder of MCI and Airfone Inc., he sought to make communication possible anywhere people go — an idea that at the time revolutionized the telecommunications industry.
He also won a reputation as “Jack the Giant Killer” because of his passion for busting up communications monopolies like AT&T.
“You do it because it’s something you believe in,” Goeken said in 1994. “Everybody comes in and says you can’t do something, so I do it just to prove it.” The Associated Press
