This week’s Portrait, Marianne Lieberman, is a bit of a Renaissance woman, a college athlete, business woman and wine maven. I happened to catch Lieberman on FYI Philly and took a chance to call and speak to her about wine growing in PA. I found out that she was about so much more than that as we had a wonderful chat. I think she asked me more questions about myself than I asked of her, which said a lot about the two-times retired, local entrepreneur. Some responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Where do you originally hail from?
I’m originally from Allentown, PA and that’s where I’m sitting right now, but I live in a little town about 30 minutes from here.
What was it like growing up there?
It was fabulous. As we speak, I’m in the country club that was walking distance from where I grew up. I’d come here at 8 a.m. and play tennis, which I later played in college and became competitive in. I also swam and played basketball. It was great. I went to Blair Academy, which is a prep school up by the water gap, for my last two years of high school.
Tell me a little about the family.
Sure, so I’m a Catholic Lieberman, and I’m the youngest of four kids. I have two brothers and a sister, and we have a huge extended family. A lot of them live in this area. For many years, I worked in the family business, which had lots of challenges. Working for your older siblings could be trying. My brothers were both national champion wrestlers for Lehigh. I went down to the University of Richmond and played tennis and basketball. [Laughing] I thought I was getting away from “Are you Mike and Mark’s sister?” and thought I might have a name for myself but it turned out to be basketball player Nancy Lieberman’s turf. She was a senior at Old Dominion when I was a freshman at Richmond, so all I’d hear was, “Are you Nancy Lieberman’s sister?” No! But we actually played each other and I found myself laying on my back at half court and the story was, “Lieberman runs over Lieberman!”
I’m sure you must be enjoying the upsurge in interest in women’s B-ball.
I’m loving it! In college, I formed a women’s athletic counsel and we sued the school over Title IX. It was incredible. I got to work with the lawyers and the people who wrote Title IX. I was an econ and poli-sci major so I was interning on the hill with a Republican politician and during my lunch break, I was getting calls from NOW, the National Organization for Women, and all these progressive lawyers. The women in the office loved it and he never knew.
We were semi successful with the case. We didn’t take it too far because then the school could have lost their accreditation which would not have been good for us, but to this day, the school gets reviewed for Title IX compliance each year. It had been really bad before, really misogynistic.
I remember walking into a meeting with the school’s board of directors after we filed the suit and one of the men saying, “Sweetheart, you’re lucky the women have any sports to play. When I attended, the women didn’t play anything.” We were playing basketball in a gym with a track above it, so that if you tried a corner shot, it would hit the bottom of the track, while the guys were in a huge, new stadium. When we sued to use it, they gave us a slot at 9 at night for practice. We were not welcomed. The guys traveled by plane and we had a broken-down bus. So suing was the right thing to do.
Right on. What was your greatest sports moment?
Winning pickleball last night!
[Laughs] What was a fun family tradition?
Our family dinners. I was, by far, the youngest. My sister was 13 years older. My brothers were five and 10 years older, so I used to love these dinners. Inevitably, they’d turn into big discussions and the encyclopedia would come out. The atlas would be used, and I remember always having my hand up trying to get a word in! They were interesting and intelligent exchanges and a great way for me to learn to have a voice and to fight to say something and to value that kind of intellectual debate. It was my favorite thing.
What did your parents do for a living?
My dad had an advertising agency that he and my mother founded together. She took a break to raise us and then when I was 7, we had a cousin who had to come stay with us because her mom died, and her father had some substance-abuse problems. And even though she was going for her master’s in English lit at the same time, my mom made time for me. After she got her master’s, she got her pilot’s license. My dad was a Navy pilot so we always had airplanes and my mom wanted to learn how to land the plane just in case anything ever happened to him. Subsequently, I too am a pilot. [Laughing] I always wanted to have an airplane just a little bigger than my dad’s and I succeeded in that. My mom used to tease, “If your dad really loved me, there would be a potty in the plane,” so I made sure I had one for her.
And where did the brewery come in?
It came from both sides of the family. On my father’s side was Lieberman and Sons Brewery in the 1850s. They were in business up until prohibition. My mother’s father bought a franchise of Brooklyn Brewery in the early ’20s and made it through prohibition by brewing 3.2 beers and supplying the cops.
What is a 3.2 beer?
Oh, that’s a really weak beer that had so little alcohol. They were able to legally sell it. He eventually became president of the North American Brewers Association. He also bought an airplane and got his friend to teach him to fly. This was pre-regulations and licenses! He later started a bank, which shows you how lucrative the brewing business was!
So what did you do post school with your degree?
I thought I was going to go to law school and save the world. I ended up going into advertising and saved my own world. I worked in Manhattan and did the Madison Ave. thing for years. Then my brother bought a little company my dad started called Interspace, which provided airport advertising services and that’s how I ended up coming back to Allentown. He hired me to run it in 1987. We had about five airports when I started and when we sold it to Clear Channel in 2006, we had 250 airports all over the world. That was probably my star career. There were some real highlights with that business, especially selling it! The day we announced it to the staff, we gave everybody envelopes with life-changing amounts of money. We spread around about three-and-a-half million dollars that night. Can you imagine walking around outside at a picnic handing someone enough money to pay off their house or help a kid go to college. That was probably one of my biggest highs in life. It was cool.
I imagine so, and I read you started a charitable foundation as well.
I was 47 when we sold the company. I’d been traveling six days a week for 20 years and we’d adopted two kids. The older one was 10 and the other one was 7 and I just wanted to spend time with them. The last business I was building was in New Zealand and Australia and on weekends, we’d get fired up and go to these wineries and I decided that when I came home to the farm, I would test the soil…literally. You dig a 10 x 10 pit and climb in it with your soil scientist and it turned out our property was perfect for growing grapes. I had a feeling it would be and we planted the vines in 2008.
I read something about having your first crush. At first, I thought it was something romantic, but apparently not.
No! No! A crush is when you harvest and bring the grapes in whole, then they run through a destemmer and the berries get the stems taken off. Then they drop onto tables and you get rid of anything you wouldn’t want ending up in your glass and then they literally get crushed where they’re getting pressed off of the skin. And that’s a crush!
Got it!
Starting the vineyard allowed me to be home and be on the board at the kid’s school where I was able to help them expand and build a real basketball court. And then I coached their teams too. It’s now been 15 years, and the kids are in college. Running a winery is more work than you’d think so I decided to retire again. I’m in my 60s and I want to do some more traveling internationally while I can still hike and kayak and do things.
But to answer your question, yes, I started a foundation. Ten percent of each of our top line sales go to the foundation so that we build up a sustainable revenue source, not to just write a one-time check. I wanted to teach the kids about giving, how and why you would work like hell to make money and then give it away. I didn’t want them to grow up spoiled. It’s been a lot of fun. We have a large wine club and it’s been motivating for them too. At Christmas, I delivered 700 pounds of goods to the shelter pantry. What I found out is that food stamps don’t cover shampoo, cleaning products, or feminine hygiene products — none of them! If you don’t have enough food for your family, stuff like that is hard, but still needed. So that’s the kind of thing that we delivered.
Yeah, and people forget at Christmas about presents for teens. They often got toys for tots, but not anything for older kids. Switching gears, when did you come out?
I figured out that I was gay in high school, had the typical crush on the coach, but ended up falling for a woman in college sophomore year, which brought me out and then I settled down with someone my senior year of college and we were together for 38 years. We got married in Delaware in 2013 when it wasn’t legal in PA yet. So the marriage — which has since disbanded — was for 28 years, two kids and 10 minutes in Delaware.
Are the kids interested in the business?
No, I wish! They were both adopted from China and Monte. The oldest, who was assigned female at birth but has since transitioned, was teaching school. He did his semester abroad in China and his goal is to go back and teach there. With COVID, that didn’t happen so now he works for the Chinese American Social League in Chicago. He’s fluent in Mandarin, which is a good skill to have.
For sure, and the other child?
She’s a photojournalist. She’s 23 and has done some great work with Gannett, the newspaper group. She got to shoot the Indie 500 in Indianapolis, got to shoot the Kentucky Derby, as well as the PGA. Some really cool stuff.
OK, let’s do a few random questions. If you had to pick three people to do a wine tasting with, who would you choose?
I like the wine-tasting twist, because once you get them drinking the wine, you could really get them to open up and get down and dirty into the truth! OK, let’s see…I’d first have to go with Neil Armstrong. The whole pilot thing and walking on the moon. There’s so much I’d want to know. I have it in my mind that somehow or another in my lifetime, I’m going to find a way to get to space. In fact this week, I’m going to the balloon festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ll be going up in a balloon with all those crazy people. I’m into anything that flies!
OK, for the second person…I think I’d really be interested in meeting Billie Jean King. I was sponsored by Wilson tennis rackets when I was a kid so I played with the old Billie Jean King wooden rackets. I have a collection of them. I think that would lead to some incredible conversations.
And probably along the same lines, on the sports side of things, I’d be interested in meeting Nancy Lieberman.
Without having her run you over, I’m guessing?
[Laughs] Exactly! She’s still coaching. She coaches a men’s pro team and she does broadcasting for the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team.
It’s amazing how much we’ve come forward. And speaking of moving forward, you’re in the process of wrapping things up and selling the vineyard to start doing some new things. Are you still selling the wine?
Well, we’ve stopped doing outside events on the property so we can keep it neat for prospective buyers, but I’m continuing our wine club for a bit. Wine club members get a case of wine each year and special events where we had people getting glasses straight from the barrels and the tanks. They even harvested with us, so we’re super committed to our members. I’m missing that part already, but it’s been a great second career. But I’m ready for the next step. I traveled for a living for years, all over the world, but a lot of times, I never even left the airport. I’m at the point where I want to travel for fun.
And let’s wrap up with words to live by.
I have two passages I like. I even have them lamented with one on each side when my mom passed away and gave them to everyone in the family. The first is the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi (Prayer for Peace) which we would say at the dinner table each night. It’s too long to recite here, but it’s the one that starts out:
“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace./Where there is hatred, let me sow love;/where there is injury, pardon;/where there is doubt, faith;/where there is despair, hope;/where there is darkness, light;/and where there is sadness, joy.”
Every line of it is what we need more of in this world, the other is a poem called, “If” by Rudyard Kipling. It’s the one that goes:
“If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,/If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,/But make allowance for their doubting too;/If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,/Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,/Or being hated, don’t give way to hating.”
They’re words I try to live by.
