By SHANNON O. WELLS
On a recent mid-July afternoon, as Jim Borowski pondered his long-planned retirement date from Pitt, the last day of the month seemed to loom a little larger than before.
“Two weeks from yesterday, I guess, is my final day,” said Borowski, finance manager in the School of Medicine’s Department of Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, on July 18. “As much as it’s a celebration, it’s going to be awkward, because I don’t know much other than getting up on Monday through Friday and going to work at Pitt.
“I’ve been doing it since I was 23 years old.”
That said, acknowledging the enormity of the change — in which he’s joining his wife, Sue Borowski, who retired from Pitt in May — doesn’t mean the blast of newfound freedom it represents is lost on him.
“It’s gonna be awkward, but I’ll adapt,” Jim deadpanned. “I’m not worried about that.”
Nor should he, or Sue, another veteran Panther, who has worked for years as executive assistant to Julie Donohue, professor and chair in the Health Policy and Management Department in the School of Public Health.
The Borowskis, who met when Sue joined the Research Accounting department in in the early 1990s, are celebrating their recent 62nd birthdays and 30th wedding anniversary by retiring together, or very close to it. When they took time to chat with University Times, the couple had just returned from Las Vegas.
“We were out there for a bowling tournament that I participate in every year, and it was 120 degrees there,” Jim said. “But we had a great time. We celebrated our retirement, our anniversaries, our birthdays. One big party.”
As the couple adjusts to the non-daily working life, they plan to stay busy — as in fun busy — performing Celtic and Scottish music together in a duo called Steel Clover & Co. as well as with their friend Rich Lange in the RichPatrick Celtic Music trio.
All this soon-to-be full-time synergy started around 1991, when Jim and Sue encountered each other amid the bonhomie of Pitt’s Research Accounting department (now Sponsored Projects Accounting).
“We had a fun staff in that department, and we’d often go out to lunch together and sometimes meet after work for happy hour,” Jim explained.
Evolving together
Around Christmas 1992, Sue and Jim started dating. By June 1994, they were married. Along the way, both found Pitt a nurturing environment for professional development as well as satisfaction in their personal lives. Their intertwining journeys, in which each gravitated to different realms of the University, provide a micro-history of the Pitt’s departmental evolution from the ‘80s to the 21st century.
When Jim started in Research Accounting in 1985, Sue was toiling away in the provost’s office.
“I worked in the Faculty Records office, which was part of the provost’s office back in the ‘80s,” Sue Borowski recalled. “I was there for several years, and then I went to the English department for a few years, then to the Research Accounting department.
“Back then the only way to make more money was to change jobs,” she said. “I mean, you had to move up, starting as a receptionist. That was the only way. So eventually, I went to Research Accounting and met my husband.”
That department included many employees in the age range of Sue and Jim, who were born 32 days apart. “There were a lot of people in their mid 20s. So we would routinely go to lunches as a group,” Jim said. “We’d go to happy hours as a group after work. The department got along. We had good friendships that we established there.”
Around late 1992, “Sue and I just started going out without the group.”
While some changed department or jobs, the gang has remained intact. “The friendships are lifelong,” Sue said. “We’re still hanging out with them and enjoying our friendship with them.”
Once they became a couple, Sue moved on to the provost’s office so they wouldn’t be working in the same department.
“They just kind of suggested it might be a good idea,” Jim said, noting he “stayed on for a little while” until a job opening became available in the School of Medicine’s Molecular Genetics department in the summer of 1998.
Moving on up
Starting as an accounting clerk, Jim had taken advantage of the various units and experience-based tiers and roles within Research Accounting. “I just wanted to learn everything that everybody else in the office was doing, no matter if it was my job or not, because I just saw my possibility for advancement,” he said of learning and taking on his supervisors’ duties. “I just climbed, and it was never boring.”
For Sue, starting in the provost’s office provided a thrilling introduction to Pitt culture and community.
“It was so neat to start out in administration, where you’re in a high-ranking administrative official’s office, and we have the older regional campuses under us,” she said. “I started there, and then I never really knew what any of the other schools were all about.”
Moving from administration to the Department of English in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences is when Sue said she “really got the feel for the University, what it’s like in a department. Then, when I went to a graduate school, I got to see what it was like in the dean’s office, how hard they work, and the students bringing all the Board of Visitors in. It was a whole other ballgame.”
In the School of Public Health, she enjoyed working with medical faculty and Executives in Residence leaders that work directly with students. “And it was an amazing ride. It truly was. I feel like I (enrolled in) graduate school, two of them,” she said. “I mean, you’re never really bored at Pitt. Never. And if you’re bored, then you can change it.”
With Sue’s 43 years at Pitt and Jim’s 39 — with neither of them straying from campus for employment — the couple provide a textbook example of the now somewhat antiquated notion of workplace loyalty and employee longevity.
“We couldn’t have asked for a better place to have a career,” Jim said. “It’s just that time to let somebody else take over.”
Celtic souls
And that leaves more time for Celtic music, which the Borowskis, as Steel Clover & Co., share at senior living homes in the Pittsburgh area, along with Irish pubs and festivals in the area. It was Sue who first discovered music.
“I play multiple instruments, and I’ve done that since right out of high school,” she said of her guitar, violin and mandolin lessons. “And then one day my mandolin teacher said, ‘I don’t have any more to teach you. So just get out there.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Get out there with people. Go play music.’
“He taught me a few Irish jigs and reels, and I fell in love with … Irish music.”
Sue joined a band called Our Aging Gail, which led to the RichPatrick Trio, with Jim Borowski handling the sound board and band merchandise. When trio member Patrick Campbell passed away, to fill the void, Jim stepped in to play the Bodhran, a one-handed Irish drum.
“So it all fell together somehow,” Sue said. “It was like it was meant to be, you know?”
For his part, Jim — with a little help from modern technology — learned percussion on his own.
“I was the merchandise guy to sell the CDs and the T-shirts, and I would run the soundboard and stuff like that,” he explained. “When (Campbell) passed away, they wanted a third member, and (Sue) asked me, ‘Would you be able to play it, learn how to play the drum?’ … And I said ‘Well, I’ll look it up on online, on YouTube, and see.’”
Describing himself as a lifelong “air drummer … on the steering wheel of my car and dashboard and stuff, and I always had rhythm,” he said. “So I thought, ‘Well, maybe it won’t go so badly.’ And it actually worked out well.”
With Jim adding his karaoke-seasoned voice to the trio, he also joined Sue’s then-solo act, Steel Clover, which became Steel Clover & Co.
“It’s a lot of fun. I wish I had started sooner. I had no intentions on being in a band,” Jim said, of the duo and RichPatrick Trio.
Why they gravitated toward Irish jigs and Scottish ballads is anyone’s guess. “The weird thing is, we are not Irish, or Scottish, neither of us,” Sue said. “Well he’s a sliver of Scottish, a little bit. But it’s just that the music gets into your soul, and you want to play it. It’s crazy.”
Through his myriad experiences at Pitt, Jim Borowski managed to pick up some wisdom that goes beyond the strictures of the professional and academic realm.
“You want your significant other to be your best friend. … That’s what it takes,” he said of building a relationship that works. “You just got to be best buddies and have fun. And don’t expect anything from the other person. Let them be themselves.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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