Sandra Lee Lapekas

Sandra Lee Lapekas left this world suddenly on April 25, 2025, at age 73.

Sandy (as she was known) was born to Albert and Marcia Phillips on August 26, 1951 in Janesville, Wisconsin. After graduating high school, she briefly attended the University of Madison where she habitually skipped class so she could instead play tennis. The courts were so close to the building in which she should have been learning French (her major) that the professor would sometimes throw open one of the classroom windows, remove the Davidoff Superslim cigarette from between his lips, and call out, “Oh, Sandra? Oh, Mademoiselle? Are you coming to class anytime soon?”

She was not.

Sandy dropped out of college to become a TWA flight attendant, a career that lasted eleven years and took her all over the world. She met her second husband, Stephen Lapekas, a pilot, on a flight from Denver to Phoenix, and together they raised two children, Joshua and Jenny, on eight bucolic acres out in the Eastern Pennsylvania countryside.

Sandy was a lot of things. She was a character. An oddball. She wrote ridiculous poetry and found joy in delivering ridiculous singing telegrams while dressed in ridiculous costumes. But she was also fiercely intelligent and uncommonly ambitious. She returned to college at the age of forty and went on to become an RN, finishing first in her nursing program and even publishing an essay about the end-of-life care she gave to one of her patients.

First and foremost, though, Sandy was a mother — a doting, proud, supportive, loyal and loving mother survived by her two children, Joshua Lapekas of Pittsburgh, PA and Jenny Lapekas of Williamsburg, VA, both of whom miss her more than words can express. Arrangements by John A. Freyvogel Sons, Inc.,  Pittsburgh (freyvogelfuneralhome.com) 

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