Since arriving in Hope Valley in 2017, George Kauffman has returned to a passion he left idle for fifty years. He completed a chapbook of poetry dedicated to his wife Maggie who passed away in 2016. Titled On Love and Separation, it is a compilation of poems George began writing for her while in college and through life to her funeral and after, as he grappled with the loss. George has also written a novel. Creative writing had long been on the back burner until he reunited with an old friend who encouraged him to make the dream a reality. 

In 2016, long-time Hope Valley resident Mary Panek attended her 50th class reunion at the University of Pennsylvania. She ran into her college friend, George Kauffman. She grew up in Hazleton, PA, and he nearby, attending rival high schools. They met their freshman year at U. Penn. and became good friends, often comparing their varied Hazleton area experiences. “She grew up in the city,” George says, “and I grew up in the country.”

 After graduating college, Mary completed a masters in chemistry at MIT and eventually a Ph.D. at UNC. She worked for the Agricultural Solutions Division of BASF in the RTP and had a fascinating career as a chemist with BASF. George had majored in creative writing. His senior year he started a magazine for the school. Mary shares, “Candice Bergen was a few years behind us. She was his photography editor.” George adds, “Candice was a good photographer and helped build the magazine.” Later in her biography, Candice mentioned the college magazine and getting her start in photography “on the other side of the lens” while at U. Penn.

George stayed after graduation working for the university in PR for a year. He was then commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Army and spent the last two of his three military years writing World War II history at Walter Reed Medical Center. From there, his career was a series of fascinating appointments in education and health care. He received a master’s in public administration at Cornell Business School. While writing was still part of his work, grants and policy replaced creative writing.

From Washington, DC, to a Navajo reservation in Arizona, and on to Brazil, George’s career in education and health care began with Project HOPE. His jobs included working as project director with HOPE to establish the first Indian-run health system, the Navajo Nation Health Foundation, then serving as a consultant and working with the Secretary of Health in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. He led as executive director/CEO of four healthcare non-profits in Pennsylvania, and he taught graduate healthcare administration and management for several universities. For the past eleven years, George has served as part-time Executive Director of an environmental council in NE Pennsylvania. While his four children were growing up, he coached youth basketball and soccer, high school soccer, and he directed the Keystone State Soccer Games.

During these years, Mary and George each married, raised families, and eventually both lost their spouses. Mary has two sons. George has four children. Between them, there are 10 precious grandchildren. Their paths did not cross again until that class reunion in 2016 where they renewed their friendship and exchanged numbers. 

After long-distance communication and lots of travel between North Carolina and Pennsylvania, George moved south to stay in 2017. That was when Mary encouraged him to write the books that have long been in his head. 

 George completed his first novel, Foam on Nescopeck Creek. He shares a bit about the theme, “In this first novel, Josh Bartlett is haunted by his accidental and undisclosed killing of a federal agent in 1932. He builds his business in the mountains of rural Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA) making and selling illegal alcohol to the New Jersey Mafia. In 1957, as three Mafia factions compete for control of the coal region where he lives, Josh tries to break relations with them. He falls for a beautiful journalist, Jennifer Walters, who is writing articles in her father’s local newspaper critical of the Mafia, putting Josh in the middle. Because of his long-term secret guilt, he can’t commit to her until a series of events raises the stakes.” George confides that writing the book was just the beginning. Now he is working on finding an agent and publisher, as he begins to write the sequels. Together, George and Mary love to travel and spend quiet time at the beach house in Duck. George says, “Mary and I are fortunate to have found a life partner in each other after each losing our spouse. I am very lucky to share my life with such a lovely, intelligent, caring lady.”