Stanley G. Peschel '52, of Pawling, N.Y., an entrepreneur whose gifts to the
College made possible the Stanley G. Peschel Computer Center, died March 29. He was seventy-one.
A native of Hudson, N.Y., he studied electrical engineering at Union. After college and service in the Army during the Korean War, he went to work for his father's small electrical products firm. In 1962, he founded Hipotronics (an acronym for High Potential Electronics) in Brewster, N.Y. Starting with one employee in a building that had been a former chicken coop, he applied his years of high voltage experience to a new line of insulation test equipment. Within a half dozen years, Hipotronics was on its way to becoming the country's leading designer and manufacturer of high voltage test equipment.
Peschel sold his stake in Hipotronics in 1982, but soon founded High Voltage, Inc., of Copake, N.Y., which designs and builds lightweight, portable testing equipment for electrical utilities and manufacturers. A profile of him in Forbes magazine in 1983 described him as a “classic entrepreneur and tinkerer” who landed one of his first contracts after constructing a prototype from coat hangers. He once credited his success in design to Union's machine shop foreman, Walter Mathias, who “taught us to be machinists and gave us a practical education in designing and building a product.”
As an undergraduate, he participated in WRUC and was a member of Psi Upsilon. He received an honorary doctor of science degree from the College in 1982 and was awarded an Eliphalet Nott medal posthumously at this year's ReUnion (the Nott Medal recognizes distinguished alumni for outstanding success in their professional lives). In addition to his earlier gift for the computer center, which was dedicated in 1975, he made a $2,066,000 gift to the College in 1998.