WIRT ALUMNI IN ARABIA
BY: ROY KIETZMAN
WRITER - EDITOR - JOURNALIST

A native of Gary was featured on a talk show on nationwide television in Bahrain, a kingdom off the eastern shores of Saudi Arabia. On August 27 "Open Talk" was televised with Leroy Kietzman talking about his start in writing as a teenager in the 1950s with weekly and daily newspapers; the daily being the Gary Post-Tribune, the weekly, the Miller Herald.

The premiere of the 30-minute talk show was aired August 25 with the August 27 show a retransmission. Leroy says his parents were opposed to their son writing, and he took on a byline (James J. Sarsfield for the Post-Tribune, Robert Stewart Harrison for the Herald) so that they were unaware of his exploits. They wanted their son to work at U.S. Steel.

Later in Chicago and New York, he became assistant editor and production editor at Davis Publications, working on a series of five monthly magazines. When the parents saw their son on the newsstands appearing on the cover of certain magazines which bore his name and title, they changed their tune about being anti-publishing.

Leroy, at 65, has been in publishing from Chicago, New York, Istanbul and Geneva, Switzerland, to Kuwait and Bahrain, travelled to nearly 45 countries and is fluent in French and German. The writer talks in the TV show about people he has interviewed, his love of good food - starting in Gary at now defunct Hoosier Grill - and his passion for Scrabble for which he has been the chairman of the Bahrain Scrabble League for 18 years and is a member of the management committee of the World English-language Scrabble Players Association.

In Bahrain for nearly 19 years, Leroy was editor for seven years of a lifestyle monthly magazine, a public-relations executive for an international agency, headed an inbound tourism operation and has now concentrated on writing speeches, press releases, annual reports, feature articles ad copy and even a children's story. Asked whether he had any unfulfilled goals in life, Leroy said that he plans "to go into the jungles" next year for 12 months in order to write either an autobiography or a novel based upon his life.

He's a class of '57 Wirt alumni and Bethel Lutheran Church confirmation class of '54. When he was in Indiana in September 2004, a mini-reunion was organized at the Beach Cafe in Miller. H is brothers and sisters are all resident in northwest Indiana: Janice Blankman (Crown Point), Joanne Decker (LaPorte), Gerald Kietzman (Chesterton) and Kenneth Kietzman (Lake Station).