Stephen G. Kehas
Died June 24, 2009
Stephen Kehas set out to be a pediatrician but took over the family businesses instead. After graduation, he went home to Manchester, NH and taught math at Memorial High. He left teaching to help his father whose business of renting golf carts was in financial distress – the carts could not endure the hilly, rocky terrain of New England, and the business was forced to close.
Steve decided to pursue a master’s in chemistry at the University of New Hampshire, which also would have satisfied the requirements for medical school. But financial needs intervened again and he went to work instead for Mutual of New York. 
Steve reconnected with Elinor Ferretti, whom he had met while a Yale sophomore, and they were married in 1971.
Steve left Mutual of New York to manage a furniture business owned by his new father-inlaw. He was given free rein to develop it the way he wanted and felt that would be more rewarding than working for a large company like Mutual of New York. Through the rest of his career, Steve owned and operated the Sleep Boutique and Whitney House of Furniture.
Steve had played on the Yale baseball team, but tennis became his sport after college, hitting the courts almost every day of the week. He was ranked in the top ten in the State of New Hampshire and became president of the New Hampshire Lawn Tennis Association, working to open more public courts in the Manchester area. Steve organized an annual tennis tournament sponsored by the magazine Seventeen for young girls who competed for scholarship money.
Steve was also an avid hiker. “I was very happy at the mall,” Ellie says, but Steve converted her and sometimes, when she would set off without him, he would shake his head and say, “Who would have ever thought?”
Steve and Ellie had four children, and his son David remembers that his father did not want them to follow him into the retail business. All four became medical professionals – the road not taken by their father: Stephanie is a physical therapist, David an MD, Christina a veterinarian and Arthur is in medical school.
Steve suffered from heart ailments which left him too weak to fight a case of pneumonia. He died on June 24, 2009.