Former BJ reporter Pete Geiger’s widow, Sandy Geiger, has remarried.

Pete passed away January 29, 2015 only 10 days after Paula and I had dinner in Leesburg, Florida with Pete, Sandy and their son Bill of Detroit.

Sandy married Leonard Hatch in 2016. Both, like Pete, are Eastern Baptist College graduates.

Fairmont (West Virginia) Times editor Eric Cravey tipped me off when we were exchanging emails about a Monongah High Alumni blog that I publish in addition to this one. I wrote a blog article about a Marion County paramedic who got the coronavirus and had just been released from her 3-week quarantine. And Eric, who had Pete as his Clay County correspondent, asked me if I knew Pete. That led to this article.

I had two numbers in my SmartPhone with Pete’s name on them and, in a what-the-heck mood, called the home phone number.

Sandy answered the phone!

She still lives in the Penney Farms Christian retirement community created by department store pioneer J.C. Penney 8 miles from Cove Springs, Florida in Clay County.

Leonard’s wife passed away in the same week that Pete slipped into Heaven in his sleep.

Sandy and Pete have been volunteering most of their lives, including 13 years teaching English in Zuunmod, Mongolia, a provincial capital city of 20,000, where Sandy was director of the college and Pete edited and published a newsletter for American ex-patriate English teachers in Mongolia. They sponsored a kindergarten class for orphans and disadvantaged children.

After Pete’s demise, Sandy got a phone call to help match new Penney Farms residents with old Penney Farms residents.

“I told them I didn’t know if I had the time because I was doing so much volunteering but they said it was supposed to be only an hour.”

Well, Sandy and Leonard got matched up with the volunteer matching up of new and old residents, “I showed him the closest grocery” and “he walked my dog and asked me out to dinner.”

Less than a year later they tied the knot.

Sandy was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, which is only 18 miles from Youngstown.

Pete and Sandy moved to St. Augustine in 2007 when Sandy's quintuple bypass open-heart surgery scrubbed plans to return to Mongolia.

Pete was part of the BJ reporting team that won a 1987 Pulitzer Prize for the general news reporting of Sir James Goldsmith’s greenmail attack on Goodyear that cost millions to make JG go away.

I found out about Pete’s passing from BJ Chief Librarian Norma Hill, who was contacted for information by Clay Today editor Eric Cravey, where Pete was a correspondent in Orange Park, Clay County, Florida.

And when I contacted Eric today in Fairmont, 3 miles from my birthplace of Monongah, West Virginia, another circle of life came home to roost.  

Among Pete and Sandy’s other children, Ginger lives in Canton and Roger in Gainesville, Florida. Pete’s sister lives in Germany.