Tag: colby chandler

Former Eastman Kodak Co. leader Colby Chandler died March 4. He was 95.

Mr. Chandler joined Kodak in the 1950s and served as chairman and CEO from 1983 to 1990. He presided over the company when Kodak employed more than 60,000 people in Rochester.

Mr. Chandler was a graduate of the University of Maine and received his MBA from the Sloan Fellows program of the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Throughout his life, Mr. Chandler served on a number of boards and in advisory roles. He was chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s Export Council. He was a director of Rochester companies Pictometry International Corp. and VirtualScopics Inc. He was chairman of the Industrial Management Council, which later merged with the Greater Rochester Metro Chamber of Commerce Inc. to become the Rochester Business Alliance Inc., now the Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce Inc.

“Even after 14 years of retirement, if somebody said to me, ‘Would you like to go back to work doing what you did before?’ I would jump at the chance,” Chandler told the RBJ in a 2004 interview.

Mr. Chandler was a proponent of the manufacturing sector and eschewed a shift to service industries.

″Watching the swing toward a service-intensive society and listening to some parties say that’s good is scary,″ he told the Associated Press in a 1988 interview.

In his spare time, Mr. Chandler was a tennis player and avid reader. He told the RBJ that when he retired he had some 1,000 books and nearly all were non-fiction. That changed when his tennis group became a book club.

“(With the club) I would say two out of the three books are fiction. And I love it. I love the discussions,” he told the RBJ.

Funeral services are being provided by Anthony Funeral Home. No memorial events are currently scheduled.

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