July 2017: Acts of Kindness featuring Robert Biese
Bob Biese graduated from Villanova in 1966 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and he was a member of the National Mechanical Engineering Honor Fraternity, Pi Tau Sigma. In February of that year he met Christina Lewis, a day-hop freshman at Rosemont, who grew up in a nearby neighborhood and enjoyed ice skating on a pond, which had long since become the location of the South Campus. Eleven months later the two were married and began a life together in New Jersey, where Bob had grown up.
For the first three years of his career, Bob worked in new product development in the Advance Products Division of Worthington Corporation. He was blessed to be under the tutelage of one of the world’s most renowned designers of pumps and hydraulic equipment. During that time Chris and Bob’s family began growing. Three years later, in April of 1969, the two moved to Reading Pennsylvania with the first two of their eventual five children, all of whom arrived during the first seven years they were married. The “bookend kids” Robert and Whitney, are NOVA grads of ‘91 and ’97.
Of the other three, Kimberly and Lee graduated from Shippensburg and Tiffany from Albright. Looking back Bob said how great it might have been had there been a BWSF in the days he and Chris had three in college at once and one applying. At the time, the only financial avenues available to them were student loans. He remembers their mantra at the time as, “Eat a hot dog or pay a bill?”
The move to Reading in 1969 had been a career change into the world of consulting to the fossil and nuclear power industry at Gilbert Associates, now Worley Parsons. A project manager, senior Project Manager and Senior Consultant for most of that time, Bob retired from Worley Parsons in December of 2012, 43 years later. Of the many highlights of his career perhaps two stand out as unique. The first is when his team of neatly 240 developed qualification standards for equipment parts and spare parts during a project to restart Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station over a nearly two-year shutdown. The project was hailed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The second is somewhat different in character. In Cairo, Egypt on business, he walked up the mile-long hill to the pyramid of Cheops, from the Mena House Hotel below it - at three in the morning. Cairo, a city of ancient and contemporary contrasts, has a huge indigent population that thrived there each night unseen by the daily tourists. It was a culture eye opener.
Over all those years Bob enjoyed the extension of his athletic pursuit at NOVA, springboard diving. A letterman, he eventually finished eighth in Eastern Championships in his senior year. He became active in coaching immediately after graduation volunteering at Seton Hall Prep for a year to help with its divers. One became the New Jersey state Champion. Some years later he was asked to take on the age group and high school programs Wilson High School near Reading. He developed an All-American Pennsylvania state Champion diver there along with multiple district and state qualifiers. He continues to this day to coach age group divers from the ages of five through 19. He says that the honor of mentoring youngsters is the best way he has found to learn. He says that the he learns from “his Kids” every single day on the deck with them and that that you can’t be a coach expecting good things of young athletes if you look and act like a rotund couch potato. He is no longer competitive now, but for years he competed in running, cycling, duathlons, and triathlons, occasionally moving from the mid-pack to the podium.
Chris had been involved through a family connection to the Miss America Program from her youth. When their oldest daughter became interested in competing she and Bob followed up by becoming pageant committee persons for many years. Chris became Miss Pennsylvania’s traveling companion for 14 years. This afforded them both the experience of mentoring and learning from young women among the brightest, most talented, and most service orientated women that Pennsylvania has. A Miss Berks County memorial scholarship now bears Chris’s name. After a three-and-a-half-year battle with a rare blood cancer, Chris died last year six months before her and Bob’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. Between pageantry and coaching spanning nearly fifty years of service the two mentored many hundreds of young people. With his five children and seven grandchildren around him, he continues simply, “I love “my kids”, all of them. Helping in any way I can to provide a foundation for their bright future compels me”.
