Class Notes
MUG SHOTS: A Rochester fraternity mug discovered in a home in Salisbury, Massachusetts, has been returned to the family of Robert Lohnes ’54 (below), thanks to Dave Skonieczki ’71, who asked for help from the University community in finding the mug’s owners. (Photo: Courtesy of Amy Fairchild)The cup has found a home.
In December 2016, a friend gave David Skonieczki ’71 a 1953 University of Rochester Psi Upsilon fraternity cup with the word LOOSE imprinted on the side.
“He found the cup while cleaning out his parents’ home in Salisbury, Massachusetts, and knew I had gone to UR,” says Skonieczki, who lives in Hampton, New Hampshire. “He wanted me to have it. But I wondered who it belonged to.”
(Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)Skonieczki contacted Rochester Review, which ran a note in the July 2017 issue. Donald Brady ’55, a former Psi Upsilon member, read the story and remembered that “Loose” was a nickname for fraternity brother Robert Lohnes ’54. “Loose was a character and very unique,” Brady says. “He was a happy-go-lucky, funny guy. I knew the mug was his.”
Lohnes had died in early December 2016—the same week Skonieczki had been given the cup. Review reached out to Lohnes’s family via Facebook Messenger and connected his daughter, Amy Fairchild, with Skonieczki.
“David and I had a great conversation on the phone,” says Fairchild, who lives in Lancaster, Kentucky. “I feel like I’ve made a new friend.”
No one knows how the cup wound up in a house in Massachusetts, but it’s back home in Kentucky. Skonieczki mailed the mug to Fairchild, and it sits in her office—a reminder of a mystery solved.
“I know Dad would have loved this,” Fairchild says.
—Caitlin Davie ’19
Rochester Review
Spring 2019
Vol. 81, No. 3
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