CLASS NOTES | SUMMER 2024 | 55 I hope you are well and enjoying a great summer. You all have forsaken me. No one got in touch to let me know what they have been up to. I had to go find the write-ups that people include in their holiday cards to have something to write about. Gary Anderson is still working in Baltimore, helping highnet-worth folks achieve their financial planning goals, but finds time to get in some golf. He and Barbara are catching up on travel after the pandemic. They traveled to Costa Rica, Acadia National Park in Maine and the French and Italian rivieras. Family time includes visits with their three kids and two granddaughters. Bob Mathers and Linnea attended our 55th reunion and were immediately off for a trip to Ireland. They celebrated their 55th anniversary by taking a trip to Shenandoah National Park. In October, they made a return visit to Iceland, with a lot of day trips out of Reykjavik. One highlight was seeing the Northern Lights. Bob is president of the Verona Lions Club, which donated excess medical equipment— beds, walkers, ramps, crutches, etc., enough to fill a 20-foot truck—to Ukraine. Most of their summers are spent in Ocean City, N.J. Suzanne and I continue to attend the Lehigh Senior Alumni Council events. In January, we went to lunch at Rathbone Dining Hall and got an overview of the Lehigh wrestling program. This was followed by the exciting Lehigh-Cornell match, which was not decided until Ryan Crookham ’26 won the last match to give Lehigh the win, 17-16. I do not know enough about wrestling to understand why they saved the 133-weight class for the last match, but it worked. We have signed up for the next senior alumni event at Ben Franklin TechVentures at the Mountaintop Campus. If you live nearby, I suggest you come to these events, as they are interesting and well organized. The travel bug also bit us. We went on a river cruise down the Seine, from Paris to the beaches of Normandy. Great trip—we recommend it. We spend most of the summer in South Harpswell, Maine, in a summer cottage on the ocean. This summer will be more challenging. In January, the worst storms since 1978 hit the coast of Maine and did a lot of damage. We may spend a lot of the summer fixing things. Please send me an email, write or call to let me know what you are up to, so I have something for the next column. Do you have a bucket list? How is it going? If you finished the original, have you started a new one? MMXXIV ’69 Guest Correspondent: Bob Kirchberger, bobkirchberger@ yahoo.com Hope many of you attended our 55th reunion in June. The class reunion committee worked hard with LUAA to pull together an enjoyable experience. Rich Bond, Pete Dane, George Ikeda, Hal Fittipaldi and I were a cohesive team planning the event. Our class dinner was held at the newly opened historic Wilbur Mansion, located at the south end of the Hill to Hill Bridge in Bethlehem. The Wilbur family was closely involved with the founding of LU. Our class theme for the parade was the live concerts we experienced while at Lehigh, and Hal Fittipaldi worked this into some trivia questions at our class dinner. We hope to have more detailed feedback on the reunion in the next edition. In other happenings, a group of ’69 Betas got together in February for a week in La Quinta, Calif. The late Sandy Robinson’s wife, Minouche, was our wonderful hostess. The group included Jim Huston and wife Bonnie, Ray Snyder and wife Sandy, John Farrell and wife Donna, Bob Frawley and Bob Kirchberger and wife Suellen. All the group is retired, except Bob Frawley, who still runs his law practice in Morristown, N.J. Frawley claims he is semi-retired, since he does not go into the office on weekends. Bob does find time to travel the world on bike tours; some recent ones were New Zealand, Vietnam, Sweden and Bali. Jim and Bonnie Huston just became great-grandparents in March, welcoming a great-grandson. George Ikeda reports that he and his wife, Nina, relocated from New Jersey to the Gulf Coast of Florida in the Venice area (just south of Sarasota) in 2022. He’s been visited by Theta Chi brothers Dennis Tompkins and wife Marianne, from Loon Lake, N.H., and Carl Dietz and wife Elana from Jacksonville, Fla., and hopes to see many more sunseekers in the future! George and his daughter Janis ’08 (current Hawaii resident) did a Zoom call sharing of the Easterns this year from Bucknell but intend to attend next year’s tournament at Lehigh in person. Editor’s note: Please welcome George Ikeda (gaikeda425@gmail.com) and Pete Dane (pkdane@ sbcglobal.net) as the new correspondents for the class. Their first column will appear in the Fall issue. ’70 Editor’s note: To share your news or if you would be interested in becoming your class’s correspondent, reaching out to classmates and writing a column three times a year, please contact the Alumni Office at 610-758-3686 or classnotes@ lehigh.edu. Bob Bartholomay sent in the following note: “I now live in Des Moines, Iowa, to be close to children and grandchildren. Wrestling is big in Iowa, and I like to relate the connection between Iowa and Lehigh. “Gerald Leeman was Iowa’s first three-time state wrestling champ, winning in 1939, 1940 and 1941. Leeman attended Iowa State Teachers College (now UNI) and, in 1946, was national champ at 128 pounds and was named outstanding wrestler of the tournament. In 1948 (the year I was born), Leeman won a silver medal in freestyle wrestling at 125 pounds. In 1953, Leeman replaced Billy Sheridan as Lehigh’s wrestling coach. He retired the year we graduated. “I spent 30 years working at Merck, and many of my projects were designed by Jacobs Engineering. I reconnected with Robert Hartenstine ’67, a Jacobs engineer and Lehigh wrestler. Robert attended Leeman’s funeral along with many other wrestlers. “In retirement, I taught engineering and robotics at Cape Cod Community College. After COVID, we moved to Iowa. I am now a doorkeeper for the Iowa State House of Representatives. “As a freshman in 1967, I made the intramural wrestling finals in three weight classes — 175, 195 and unlimited. I lost all three finals matches to high school state champs that couldn’t make the freshman team. I wasn’t a good wrestler and made it to the finals by sheer luck. “My freshman year was so exciting, watching Mike Caruso ’67 compete for his third national championship. “One more story: At Merck, I had an engineering man ager who was a Lafayette wrestler and captain of the team. Lafayette’s season was over, but the Lafayette coach wanted his captain to compete at the Easterns. My boss got the clearance to work out at Lehigh. Before practice on the first day, he started working out with a Lehigh student, who continually bested my boss. Turns out the Lehigh student was a gym rat who couldn’t make the team. My boss went back to Lafayette and didn’t compete at Easterns. There is wrestling, and then there is Lehigh wrestling.”
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