If you ask Bob Hemphill when he graduated from Geneva College, he’ll just smile.

“I did not graduate,” he says firmly. “Everybody thinks I did. I was treated that way because of my long years and the service I gave. I gave the best of service, you know.”

Bob gave 35 years of his working life to Geneva College, as well as 17 years as a volunteer. And although his Geneva career officially began in 1949, he started working at the college long before that—as a young man fresh from a farm in Ohio.

Bob was born in 1914 in Northwood, Ohio, the town where Geneva was founded in 1848.

“After I graduated from high school I worked on a farm, a sheep farm,” he says. “Over the winter we fed 250 ewes, took care of them during lambing time and all that. We cut their wool off with tin shears like grass cutters.” After that, he spent six months working at a small country grocery store.

In 1934, Bob decided to move to Pennsylvania to join his brother who was going to college in Beaver Falls. “On a Saturday night, I quit my job and caught a bus,” he says. “I landed in Beaver Falls Sabbath morning on College Hill. I was dumped out right in front of Old Main and my brother met me there.”

Bob’s career at Geneva began with the campus janitor, dusting tables in the library with his brother and another student. He also got a job selling bread from the College Hill Bakery. “I drove a little red truck that went from the bakery to homes throughout the vicinity—Beaver Falls, New Brighton, Patterson Heights, College Hill and I think Rochester.” He later worked at the Armstrong Cork Company in Beaver Falls.

Bob enrolled as an engineering major and took classes at night. A heavy schedule of work and school kept him busy, but he tried to make time for fun. He made friends quickly and soon fit into the Geneva community.

“When I was a freshman, even though I was a night student, they joined me into a lot of the activities,” he says. “I remember going on a ‘thousand-mile walk’ as they called it. We walked around the center grass plot between the old buildings and every time a whistle blew you had to shift one person. And you got to meet a lot of people that way. It was nice.”

Bob spent time with a group of students who called themselves The Gang. “We would go roller skating, ice skating, and had some summer parties,” Bob remembers. “We would go on hikes, too, because the girls got athletic credit for gym.”

On one of those hikes Bob met his wife, Helen. Helen never went to Geneva, but one of her best friends, Rosie, was part of The Gang. “Helen came to visit Rosie one day, and she was with a group of girls who were earning credit for walking,” Bob says. “That’s where I met her.” Bob and Helen started dating and were married four years later. By the time the U.S. joined World War II, they had a daughter. Like any father, Bob wanted to provide a stable income for his growing family. He had been working at National Tube Steel Company in Ellwood City, but in 1947 the steel company announced it was moving.

Bob and a colleague took the train to the company’s main plant in Lorraine, Ohio, to evaluate the situation. “It was going to move, too—to Gary, Indiana,” he says. “Well, that didn’t sound too secure, so I came home on a night train. At breakfast I told my wife, ‘I’m going into town—Beaver Falls—and I’ll take the first job that’s offered me.’”

Bob was taking a leap of faith, but he certainly didn’t expect a new job right away. “In those days, there weren’t jobs,” he says.

But Bob believed that God would provide. He went to visit an old college friend who had a business in Beaver Falls. He suggested that Bob apply at the Monumental Life Insurance office next door, and Bob soon had a job collecting weekly life insurance debits throughout the Beaver Valley. Two years later, Bob received an invitation to work at the college. Stewart McCready, a member of The Gang, was Geneva’s business manager, and he offered Bob a position as his assistant.

Bob’s love for Geneva soon spread to the rest of his family. Both of his daughters became students and graduated from Geneva, and Helen started working as a secretary for several academic departments.

After 20 years as assistant business manager and purchasing agent, Bob became supervisor of the field house and equipment manager. By that time, Geneva had built and dedicated Metheny Fieldhouse. Bob loved his new job. He drove athletes to games, managed ticket sales, and hired students to help him maintain equipment, line the field, take care of uniforms and a thousand other tasks.

“While I was at the field house, I made a lot of friends,” he says. “When we’d win a game, I got a hug. I loved friends—students as well as coaches and their wives.”

Bob says that the 13 years he spent supervising the field house were his happiest years at Geneva. “I always have said those were my best years, just because of relationships that I had with faculty, faculty wives, and students.”

Bob’s busy lifestyle didn’t slow down when he retired from the college in 1984. One of the first things he and Helen did was travel. In the newspaper one day, they found a tiny ad offering tickets that allowed senior citizens to travel throughout the continental United States for one year. “We grabbed those right away,” Bob says. “I had never spent any money—I never had any money—but I spent $2,200 for those two tickets and it was the best money I ever let loose of.”

Over the course of the next year, Bob and Helen took 16 flights to major cities all over the U.S. While they were no longer part of daily life at Geneva College, they came back to campus whenever they could. In between trips, they volunteered in Geneva’s development office. “My wife and I worked there for 17 years, volunteering to do mailings and so on,” Bob says. Bob moved to the Reformed Presbyterian Home in 2003. Even though he can’t work or volunteer on campus anymore, he is still full of Geneva spirit—especially when it comes to athletics.

The photo of Bob’s room door was taken during Geneva’s Sept. 12 football game against St. Vincent College. Every time the two schools go head to head, Bob decorates his door and battles it out with Henry, a St. Vincent fan who lives four doors down, and Denise, the nurse in charge of the personal care floor at the RP Home.

“Her husband is a coach at St. Vincent,” Bob explains. “She and Henry are in cahoots now. They try to make it rough on me, but I kick it back at ’em.”

–Jenny Pichura

Jenny Pichura is publications manager for Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa. A Geneva feature appears semiannually in the Witness.