In Memory of  Emily May Pfohl

PFOHL - Emily M. (nee Leyenberger)

Emily Leyenberger Pfohl of Derby, NY and Jacksonville, FL passed away gently on September 4, 2024. Emily’s parents had met while they were students at Penn State University, and after they married in 1936, they moved to Huntington, WV where her father worked for the Army Corps of Engineers.  Shortly before they celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary, they were blessed with their first child—Emily May.  When Emily was two years old, she was joined by her sister Sally Louise—an event which was understandably unsettling to a little girl who had had a monopoly on her parents’ attention up to that point.

Meanwhile, the girls’ father had accepted a new job with a civil engineering firm which sent the young family to live in a succession of Spanish-speaking locations during several years—Caracas, Venezuela, then Cali, Columbia, and eventually two different areas of San Juan, Puerto Rico.  Emily and Sally welcomed their first brother John Harry while they lived in Puerto Rico, and finally their family was completed when Lawrence Arthur joined his three older siblings.  Living outside the United States gave Emily quite a different perspective from that of children who had grown up in the USA.  Except for trips back to mainland United States to visit her grandparents, Emily had spent more than a decade of her young life in places where Spanish was spoken. She picked up the language easily, and throughout her life, she could speak and write it with native fluency.

When Emily was on the brink of adolescence, her father felt it was time to move his family Stateside, so he found employment with an engineering firm in New York City.  After spending part of a school year in Delano, PA with her maternal grandparents, Emily and the family moved to Ridgewood, NJ where her parents knew their four children would benefit from a superior education.

After graduating from Ridgewood High School in 1959, Emily attended Bethany College in Bethany, West Virginia, earning a degree and teacher certification in Spanish.  She first taught high school Spanish in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, but after two years, she decided to return to school, this time pursuing a Master’s degree in special education at the University of Pittsburgh. She continued to teach Spanish to high school students, now in North Allegheny High School in Wexford, PA, while studying part-time.

Once she finished her Master’s degree, Emily opted for a dramatic change of scenery when she moved to the US Virgin Islands and began teaching blind children.  After a few years there, she returned once again to the mainland US and accepted a position working for the Rochester, NY Association for the Blind as a Vocational Evaluator. She followed her supervisor, to the Elmira Association for the Blind as he assumed Directorship of that agency.  Eventually she moved on to a job with The Schuyler-Chemung-Tioga Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) as the Itinerate Teacher of the Blind and Visually Impaired. 

Always looking for ways to learn more and do more, Emily enrolled in a doctoral program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania while she was working at BOCES.  At IUP she took several courses in ESL teaching and Second Language Acquisition, along with reading theory and composition theory and pedagogy. Her dissertation study on The Composing Processes of Blind Students was a fresh and useful synthesis of the many areas she had studied throughout her life.  She earned her PhD in English: Rhetoric and Linguistics in 1987.

After many years of service with SCT BOCES, she had an opportunity to join the staff at the New York School for the Blind in Batavia, NY.   There she became a valuable resource to school districts and individual teachers in learning how to better serve students with the special needs of the blind and visually impaired. Emily was  eventually appointed the Director at Batavia. The position included Statewide responsibility for the New York State Education Department’s services to the blind and visually impaired in New York State’s secondary schools including the coordination of Braille services.

Despite all her professional accomplishments, Emily would say that the core of her life was her love story with Bob Pfohl.  They met in Elmira, NY. They  were both learning how to Square Dance, Emily in Elmira, Bob in Corning, NY. The wife of one of Bob’s friends at the Corning Club knew Emily and told him that he had to meet her. It was something of a blind date when Bob showed up at the Elmira Club as an “Angel” to dance with Emily, who as a student did not have a steady partner. Emily reported that Bob was the handsomest, gentlest, most gentlemanly man she had ever met.  She was almost instantly taken with him, and she was delighted that their relationship grew and deepened to the point where they decided to build a life together.  When they married in 1983, Emily’s bonus was becoming a second mother to Bob’s daughters Marge and Lisa.  The girls brought a new dimension to Emily’s life, one she enjoyed and embraced.  She later became a mother-in-law and a grandmother through the girls, and she deeply loved all of those special people.  She also welcomed the expansion of her family through Bob’s brothers and sisters and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  She counted herself to be truly fortunate in her marriage to Bob during the last 41 years.

Throughout her life, Emily enjoyed a close relationship with her own siblings, especially her brothers Harry and Larry who often referred to her as “MLE.”  She admired them, and they returned the compliment.  Spending holidays together in Florida while their parents were living was always an occasion for storytelling, sharing of memories, and much laughter.  Emily was also a bit of a matchmaker—she recommended that Larry call her IUP friend Kathleen, assuring him that they would be perfect for each other.  She was right: They have been together now for 34 years and counting.

Emily loved to travel, and she did a good bit of it with the Leyenberger clan, seeing England, Scotland, Italy, Greece, and more in that good company.  She and Bob also traveled extensively on their own and with friends, sometimes for fun and sometimes to serve others, as with their trips to Mexico with the Lions. Throughout her years of retirement Emily continued working in various part-time jobs using her many skills serving others. 

Emily’s exuberance and joy in living were unmatched, and she was always quick to see the humor in any situation.  Some, in fact, would call her sense of humor “quirky,” an attribute that seems to have been genetic.  She read voraciously—a habit instilled in her by her parents when she was just a child—and she was always ready to learn something new.

Emily’s sudden departure has left us bereft.  We shall not see her like again.

Emily was preceded in death by her parents Viola and Alden Leyenberger and her sister Sally Leyenberger Brower.  She leaves behind her much beloved husband Robert W. Pfohl, her stepdaughters and sons-in law Marjorie and Sujoy Chatterjee and Lisa and John Sciortino, her grandsons Robert Chatterjee and Jay, Joseph, and Peter Sciortino; also her brothers John Harry Leyenberger and Lawrence Arthur Leyenberger and his wife Kathleen Hunter, many great and great-grand nieces and nephews, and more friends than it would be possible to count.  She remarked shortly before she left us that she was surprised that so many people loved her.  We reminded her that the warmth of that love was merely a reflection of the love she had shown others throughout eight decades.

Family and friends are invited to a memorial visitation Saturday September 14 from 10-12 with a service immediately following at the Latimore Schiavone Funeral Home, Inc. Angola, NY. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in Emily's memory to the Evans Township Lions Club 93 Lake St Angola, NY 14006 or a charity of your choice.