Biography
Frank Loevi received a B.A. in Labor-Management Relations from Penn State at University Park in June of 1967, just months before the Brandywine campus was first opened to students. That same year he accepted a graduate assistantship from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. After completing his coursework at Cornell, he took a job as an Instructor at the University of Missouri, where extension work provided the opportunity to produce his Master’s thesis on “The Development and Current Application of Missouri Public Sector Labor Law” (Missouri Law Review, Volume 36, Issue 2, Spring 1971).
After receiving his M.S. from Cornell, Frank moved to Washington, D.C. and began working in labor-management relations for the federal government. In 1974 he was appointed to the role of Labor Relations Officer for the U.S. Office of Education, where he served as chief negotiator and managed the agency’s full range of labor-management relations activities. During this period, he also cofounded and was elected as the first president of the Society of Federal Labor Relations Professionals.
While employed by the government, Frank felt hindered in his job by the absence of any organized source of federal employment case law, and in 1978 he left the government to form a partnership with a Pennsylvania-based publisher, going on to create a series of case reporters aimed at civil service attorneys and other federal employment professionals.
By 1982, at the beginnings of the digital age, but well before the availability of the Internet to the general public, Frank formed Potomac Systems, Inc., and began providing worldwide on-line legal research systems pertaining to human resources, equal employment opportunity and labor-management relations. In that same timeframe he also created a non-profit educational organization providing training in the field of federal employment, and also served as a labor arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association. During this period of his career, Frank was listed in multiple biographical resources, including Who’s Who in America.
In 1997 Frank accepted a buyout offer for Potomac Systems and the following year transferred the operations of the Public Administration Forum to another non-profit training company, so at the age of 53 he became a retiree, but one with a new mission.
An avid collector of antique beer steins since the mid-1980s, and in anticipation of his upcoming retiree status, in 1996 Frank began development of the online Beer Stein Library (beerstein.net). Over the years the Library grew to include catalogs listing for well over 10,000 steins, as well as multiple other collector research tools, and is generally regarded as the most important resource of its type in existence today. In 2020, the Library was donated to the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) in Pomona, CA. While building the Beer Stein Library, Frank also served from 1996 to 2003 as a contributing editor for Prosit Magazine, Journal of Stein Collectors International.
In what will most likely be the final chapter in his career, Frank has recently begun working with Penn State Brandywine to develop programs aimed at enriching the lives of local retired PSU graduates through social interaction with both the campus and each other. Assuming that effort meets with success, he is already looking forward to helping to develop similar programs at other Penn State campuses throughout the Commonwealth.