Alumni start technology fund in honor of mentor

It’s hard to put a price on great mentorship, but Donny and Amanda Wentworth Kemick, both 2004 graduates of the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, are doing their best to repay Donny Kemick’s college mentor, Don Lewicki.   

The Kemicks have pledged $10,000 to Pitt-Bradford to create the Donald C. Lewicki Technology Fund to provide scholarships to Pitt-Bradford students. The fund is a testament to a 20-year friendship that began when Donny Kemick -- a leopard-haired, pierced singer in a heavy metal band -- took a Microsoft Office class from Lewicki, a veteran of IBM, a company famous for employees in pin-striped suits and white dress shirts.   

“I liked it,” Lewicki said of Kemick’s style. “I was as much of a rebel as I could be at IBM. I was always in flannel shirts and corduroys.”   

Pitt-Bradford hired Lewicki from IBM to run its Computing, Telecommunications and Media Services office, but he had begun teaching classes about software applications like in the Microsoft Office suite.   

Kemick joked that the things he learned in that class are now taught in middle schools, but Lewicki pushed boundaries to explore the deepest corners of each program in the Office suite.   

“He just made it interesting to me,” Kemick said. Lewicki fed off his students’ interest.   

“Donny was one of the first students I taught, and he was really good, and that really set a hook in me in terms of teaching,” Lewicki said.   

A few computer science students were also taking Lewicki’s Office course, and the business management faculty noticed not only how capable they were, but how well they got along. Kemick wrote a business plan for the group and took it to his business management professors, including Lewicki.

Rick Nelson, then associate professor of business, knew that Zippo Manufacturing Co. wanted to create a website for Zippo lighter collectors, and he convinced Zippo to let these students try their hand at it.   

“We fed them sub sandwiches and Mountain Dew, and they did the rest,” Lewicki said of the students. “I knew we had something special. … It got them thinking they could do a good job with business.” Kemick’s business plan for the fledgling enterprise still hangs on the wall of the business, Protocol 80 in Lewis Run.   

For its first few years, protocol 80 was a co-curricular activity for Kemick and his friends. “The last couple of years of college were pretty intense,” he said. “We learned time management very fast.” The group worked out of the Bradford Office of Economic and Community Development.   

That tightly managed time didn’t leave a lot left over Kemick’s then-girlfriend, Amanda. “She was patient with me while I took 20 credits and worked more than 40 hours per week,” he said.

“We never thought [the business] would be something that lasted beyond college,” he said, but their timing was propitious, and demand for their services kept increasing.

Kemick eventually bought out his friends’ interests and took the company in the direction of providing marketing services with plenty of digital strategy involved.    

Today, protocol 80 employs 18 people, and Kemick works to achieve the kind of collegiality he noticed and admired among the Pitt-Bradford business management faculty. He’s kept in touch with his mentor, who has retired from Pitt-Bradford as director of the computer information systems and technology program he founded, but lives in nearby Olean, N.Y., with his wife, Judy.   

“Nobody in my life has really directed me and pushed me the way Don did,” Kemick said. 

Lewicki’s voice catches when he talks about the scholarship. “I was so surprised when Donny said, ‘I have something to tell you.’ I was really surprised. I didn’t realize how much of an effect I had on them. They always had an effect on me.”

To contribute to the Lewicki Technology Fund at Pitt-Bradford, contact the university’s Office of Philanthropic and Alumni Engagement at 814-362-5091 or visit upb.pitt.edu/giving.

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