IRS official served as College Park mayor in '80s

Alvin J. Kushner, 82, an IRS official who served as mayor of College Park in the 1980s and was a seven-term city council member, died of renal failure Oct. 12 at Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park. He had been a College Park resident since childhood.

Mr. Kushner, a lawyer, spent his career at the Internal Revenue Service, first in the legislation and regulation division and later in the tax forms and publications division. He retired in 1995.

He was on the city council starting in 1968 and was mayor from 1981 to 1987. He then served one more term on the council and later was a member of the city's Advisory Planning Commission.

Each of his three mayoral bids was contested, and the 1985 race ended in a rare tie vote. The 24,315-resident city split 1,293 to 1,293 between Mr. Kushner and V. Charles Donnelly after a heated campaign. Mr. Kushner won the runoff by 279 votes.

Alvin Julian Kushner was born in Washington to parents who ran a kosher butcher shop in the city. His parents later had a variety store, a restaurant, a rooming house, a car dealership and an auto repair shop, all in or near College Park. Mr. Kushner graduated from Hyattsville High School and was a Navy veteran of World War II, serving in Bainbridge, Md.

After his discharge, he graduated from the University of Maryland and received a law degree from George Washington University in 1954.

As mayor, his proudest accomplishment was stopping the county practice of billing city residents for its services. He also set up a committee to mediate disputes between the city and university residents. It's "worth trying," he said in 1986, because "obviously, what we've tried in the past hasn't worked."

"Students are noisier, and come and go later than most folks," he said. "They just have different lifestyles. But for the person who has to get up at 6 a.m. to go to work, and has to hear rock music blasted until all hours of the morning, it's hard to be civil."

In addition to work and civic duties, Mr. Kushner helped set up a co-op preschool that still operates and learned to make toys, cook, bake, sew, iron and macramé. He also led a Girl Scout troop, repaired cars and built walls.

"He used say that if you could read, you could learn to do anything," Rabbi Bruce E. Kahn said at his memorial service.

Survivors include his wife of 47 years, Gail S. Kushner of College Park; three daughters, Jane Kushner Hopkins of College Park, Debra Kushner Hipple of Hyattsville and Jennifer Kushner Pfeiffer of Milford, Mass.; two sisters; and eight grandchildren.

-- Patricia Sullivan