Ralph G. Schwarz entered Lehigh in summer 1943 but left in December 1943 to enter military service in World War II (December 1943 to May 1946) serving as Forward Observer and Radio Operator in the 871st Field Artillery Battalion, 66th Infantry Division. He experienced the Battle of the Bulge and the War Crimes Trials. He returned to Lehigh in fall 1946 and graduated in 1948 with a BA in Mechanical Engineering and International Relations. He remained at Lehigh until spring '49 to produce and direct Lehigh's Music Festival in 1948 (April 16-17) and a repeat performance of the Music Festival in 1949 (March 17-19). While at Lehigh he subsequently acquired an MA in History in 1951. Later on in his career, he was awarded a LHD (1974) doctorate from Indiana State University for his lead on the restoration of the Historic New Harmony on the Wabash from 1973-1984. During his European wartime service, he studied in 1945 Cinematography at the Sorbonne and University of Paris; in 1946 University of Vienna Business Law, in 1947 at Columbia University Public Speaking and Theology. He worked 12 years for Bethlehem Steel Corporation as a Special Representative in the Financial, Legal and Real Estate Department during the time of its nationwide expansion. His career included a Presidency of the Fund for Area Planning and Development as a city planner and architect facilitating the needs of the building of the United Nations Secretariat and Plaza buildings in New York City. Continuing as an urban planner and architect, his talents are notable in historic restoration with the major study for Colonial Williamsburg revitalization. He was a director of the Ford Foundation in its Overseas Development Program, the New Urban Affairs Center of the American Institute of Architects in Washington, D.C., Advisor to the President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington. In 1984 he joined and eventually became a Partner in the Richard Meier & Partners Architects during the planning of the Getty Fine Arts Center in Los Angeles. He is a notable Bethlehem historian having authored books about Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: Bethlehem on the Lehigh, 1991, Moravian Bethlehem, 1993, Bach in Bethlehem, 1998 and more recently is researching the history of Moravians in Bethlehem before the Revolution. Currently he is a senior advisor to the National Museum of Industrial History, a Bethlehem subsidiary of the Smithsonian Institution; facilitator and president of the Historic Bethlehem Partnership including the Kemerer Museum, Historic Bethlehem, Inc., Burnside Plantation and the Moravian Museum. Mr. Schwarz was born in New Jersey in 1926 and resides in the Moravian Village Retirement community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania at the time of cataloging this collection in 2017. He has two sons and three grandchildren.