Born and raised in Philadelphia, Don Kaufmann is a board member of the nonprofit Association of BellTel Retirees. An engineer and division manager for AT&T, he spent a combined 30 years with the company that eventually became Verizon after antitrust regulators broke up the Bell System in 1984. Verizon spun off his pension and those of 41,000 of his fellow retirees in 2012.