Necrology

Peter Roland Porcino '48

Feb. 5, 1924-Jul. 18, 2006

Peter Roland Porcino ’48, long employed as a system programmer for the IBM Corp., was born on February 5, 1924, in Stoneboro, PA. A son of Peter Porcino, a shoe company employee, and the former Victoria Giuno, Pete Porcino grew up in Binghamton, NY, where he was graduated in 1941 from North High School. He entered military service in 1943 and first came to College Hill that year as a trainee in the U.S. Army Air Forces’ pre-meteorological program. Later completing the AAF’s communications course at Yale University, he was commissioned as an officer. He continued to serve in uniform through the end of World War II and was discharged as a lieutenant in 1946.

That year, Pete Porcino returned to the Hill as a matriculated student. A large man described by The Hamiltonian as “the easy-going scholar with that good-joe personality,” he excelled academically, capturing the Southworth Prize in Physics and the Root Fellowship in Science. In his spare time he “twisted the dials” for WHC, the campus radio station. He was graduated Phi Beta Kappa after only two years of residence in 1948, with honors in mathematics and physics.

Peter Porcino went on to obtain an M.S. degree in physics from Cornell University in 1951. The following year he was wed to Beverly Martin in Binghamton. In 1957, after a year of employment with Bendix Aviation and four years with the General Electric Co., he went to work for IBM in Owego, NY. He later became advisory programmer in computational processing at its Space Guidance Center located there. After retiring from the company in 1984, he continued to utilize his computer skills to assist local retirement home residents.

Peter R. Porcino, who had long resided in Binghamton, died while hospitalized in that city on July 18, 2006. Predeceased by his first wife as well as his second, the former Mary Tobin, he is survived by two sons and a daughter by his first marriage, Martin and Matthew Porcino, and Victoria Douglas; two daughters by his second, Bernadette O’Hara and Maria Rappazzo; and four grandchildren and a brother.

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