Judy Seyerle Zieg, Capital ’66, had the ability to “always see the bright side of things,” remembers her husband Peter Zieg, Capital ’65, Trinity ’69.
“She always found a way to move forward from any challenges that came along in life” he says of his beloved wife who passed away Sept. 23, 2024.
Known as “Judy from Philo” because not everyone could pronounce her family name, she captured his heart from the first time the young sophomore speech major laid eyes on the first-year mathematics student. “We just, ‘Wow!’,” he recalls with a catch in his voice more than six decades after that initial meeting “We hit it off immediately and got closer and closer. I never thought I would become attracted to someone so quickly.”
It was a special time on the Capital University campus. Peter Zieg and his childhood best friend from Marion, Ohio, Dennis Hacker, “immediately felt at home and embraced.”
“We were so glad to be there,” Zieg recalls. Hacker, too, met his future wife, Karen, who happened to be Judy’s roommate. Together the two couples made life-long friends with eight other Capital alumni. Those bonds remain so tight that the group became 20-year traveling buddies and to this day host Zoom calls every Wednesday at 4 p.m.
Capital brought them together and they never wanted to give up those lifelong alliances. The Ziegs, who would move from Columbus to Baltimore, Maryland, before settling in Kissimmee, Florida, found many reasons to return to campus over the years for homecoming reunions, football games and Pete’s service on the Capital University Board of Trustees from 1982 to 2005. The tradition continued when son Mark, ’92, met his wife Laura Buxton Zieg, ’93, at Capital.
Pete describes Judy as being “a leader without being pushy.”
“A lot of values were enhanced at Capital – learning to be positive and move forward,” he says.
His wife was a woman of many talents from playing the organ at her home church – St. John Lutheran Church in Stovertown, Ohio – to teaching mathematics and eventually rising to become principal and an administrator in the Florida school system.
When Pete, who changed his major to pre-seminary his junior year, got his first call to the First Lutheran Church of Gray Manor in Dundalk, a suburb of Baltimore, Judy took the opportunity to earn her Master of Science degree in school administration from Johns Hopkins University.
The family – now with sons Mark and Scott in tow – answered Pete’s new call in Florida in 1975, where he served the rest of his career. Meanwhile, Judy, having retired from her career in education, found she had a knack for investing in the stock market, becoming an early backer of Apple. “She was intuitively good at it,” Pete says.
“We had decided some time ago that we wanted to make a major gift,” he says. Earlier this year, for the Capital University Day of Giving, Pete donated $75,000 in memory of Judy. He says the gift was an easy call. “Capital set the direction for my life. It’s my alma mater. It’s home. I always felt good when I went back. It’s a good investment of time and money. It was the basis for the most important relationships in life.”
And no doubt, Judy from Philo would give him her blessing.