John Goeken earned his nickname, “Jack the Giant Killer.” In 1974, he filed an antitrust suit that challenged AT&T’s grip on the long-distance telephone market and ultimately led to the breakup of “Ma Bell.” He also pioneered in-flight telephone service and built the computer network linking FTD florists. “Everybody says you can’t do something,” he told an interviewer in 1994, “so I do it just to prove” you can.
The son of a Lutheran minister, Goeken grew up in Joliet, Ill. A serial entrepreneur, he sought “to make communication possible anywhere people go,” said the Los Angeles Times. He entered the telephone business through a venture that sold two-way radios; he figured he could sell more radios to truckers plying the route between Chicago and St. Louis if he could provide them with uninterrupted contact with their headquarters. He did so by building a series of microwave transmission towers along the route to extend the radio signals’ range. But AT&T regarded Goeken’s makeshift network, dubbed Microwave Communications Inc., as unwelcome competition and petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to stop him. Goeken fought back, though the legal fight left him so broke that at one point “he used tape to keep the soles of his shoes from flapping loose.”
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