Guy E. Pinter
Guy E. Pinter '60 1989 Fencing
The big, gangly youngster from Cleveland's West Tech High School didn't bring a long string of fencing credentials with him to Fenn College.
Chances are if you had asked him to explain the difference between an epee and a foil, he would have switched the conversation quickly to electronics - his reason for being at Fenn in the first place, and his original true love.
But soon after his arrival in 1955, he met Fenn Fencing coach Chuck Simonian who introduced him to his next love - the sport of fencing.
It was a match made in heaven as far as Fenn's fencing fortunes were concerned.
The respectably athletic 6-4 youngster learned his fencing lessons quickly. He lettered as a freshman and again as a sophomore. By the end of that sophomore year he had become so proficient that he finished ninth in the NCAA epee championships.
He was elected captain for the 1957-58 season and responded by setting a school record with 25 wins and just four losses, finishing second in the Ohio Amateur Championships and even more impressively, finishing seventh in the NCAA epee championships.
That was sufficient to get him named Fenn's "Athlete-of-the-Year." It also earned him a place on the U.S. Pan-American/Olympic Fencing squad for the period from 1958 through 1960.
And it obviously impressed yet one more true love, a Fenn College night school student named Elsbeth Leichle, who became his bride in That Wonderful Year, 1958.
The busy youngster, who somehow found time along the way to write for the Fenn Cauldron, serve as junior class president, sing in the Fenn choir, and serve on the student council, also found time to captain the fencing team again as a senior and to better his own single season won-lost record to 25-3.
In 1960, now a member of Wing & Torch and Tau Beta Pi honorary societies, Pinter graduated with a 3.28 cumulative average and a BSEE degree.
After graduating, he joined General Electric in Syracuse, N.Y. as a design engineer, and pursued his master's degree in electrical engineering at Syracuse University.
There followed assignments in Germany, Italy, England and finally back in the United States, first with GE and beginning in 1964 and continuing through 1986 with Sperry Rand Corporation, where he was involved in a variety of marketing positions.
Through all this he did not neglect fencing. In 1969 he won the Midwest Regional Championship and later placed well in numerous competitions across Europe, achieving recognition as one of the seven top fencers in Bavaria, Germany, no small achievement in one of the world's strongholds of the sport.
Still active in fencing, he now makes his home with Elsbeth in Penllyn, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, where he his a senior consultant with the international consultancy firm of D.F. Blumberg & Associates of Ft. Washington, Pa.
