By Michael Pastorkovich, Vice Chair, Allegheny Group
The year 2022 contained more of its fair share of sadness for the Allegheny Group as we lost three dedicated members and stalwart activists to our common destiny of death.
Claudia Kirkpatrick, age 79, passed on December 26. She sat on our Group's Excom for many years and served two terms as our Chair. She also edited for a time The Allegheny Sierran, our Group newsletter. She retired from our board in 2021 and moved to Michigan to be near family. Claudia was a graduate of Smith College, Boston University, and Carnegie Mellon University and was an associate teaching professor of management communication in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon. She also sang in the choir at her church,Third Presbyterian, in Pittsburgh, volunteered with the East End Cooperative Ministry, and was a lover of animals. She had been married for 30 years to WQED radio personality Jim Sweeney, who passed away in 2013. Claudia was a woman of clear, unambiguous moral principles, courageous in speaking out and standing up for those principles in the struggle for environmental and social justice.
There is an old John Wayne film entitled The Quiet Man, and anyone making a movie about Robert Lang couldn't do better than to steal that title for their effort. Bob was the farthest thing from being flamboyant, intrusive, pushy, needy, or whatever other adjective can be used to describe people who obsessively seek attention. An Army veteran who served in Vietnam, Bob was an early member of the Allegheny Group when it formed in the early 1970s. He served for a long time on the Group Excom and was for many years the Group Treasurer and later our webmaster. He was the go-to guy when we had questions or problems involving the technology of our internet era and if Bob didn't know the answer, he knew where to go to get it. He may not have been glib or flashy, but he was rock-solid and dependable, the kind of person organizations, institutions and civilizations need to survive and prosper. In addition to his service to our country, Bob had a BA and MA from the University of Pittsburgh and worked for 29 years as a software engineer at Mellon Bank. He passed away on May 7, 2022 at age 74.
Most untimely was the death, on July 30, 2022, of Ron "Jack" Read, age 31. Born and raised in Weirton, West Virginia, Ron was a brilliant young man full of high ideals who had graduated magna cum laude from West Virginia University with a degree in political science and then earned a law degree at the University of Pittsburgh. He passed the bar exam and was admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar. Ron was committed to many social justice causes. In addition to his intense concern for the environment, Ron was also endeavoring to revitalize the Peace Movement in the Pittsburgh area. Being young, he was sometimes impatient with "working within the system" and had a decided preference for taking "direct action". He served one term as co-Chair of our Group. Although his relationship with the Sierra Club was brief compared with the decades-long activism of Claudia, Bob and others, he had a profound impact on all who knew and worked with him. Ron was intelligent, compassionate, kind, generous and funny, with a future seemingly bright with promise and the prospect of decades fighting the good fight. When he passed, all of that passed with him. Ron was battling Covid-19 at the time of his death.
We in the Allegheny Group remember with gratitude and pay tribute to these our fallen comrades, and we rededicate ourselves to the vision, the hopes, the goals and the struggles we shared together when they were here on the earth with us.
This blog was included as part of the March 2023 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition.