The fraudulent “Lehigh Valley” bears as much resemblance to reality as the Southern novelist William faulkner’s fictitious “Yoknapatawpha County” bears to the real Jefferson County of the Mississippi Delta.

The phantasmal “Lehigh Valley” is the creation of cynical poliical power-grabbers like the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of commerce’s Marta Boulos Gabriel and Lafayette College President-Emeritus Arthur J. Rothkopf whose cooperation with alchemists like Gabriel won him positions Inside-the-Beltway as counsel and a vice-presidency of the National Chamber of Commerce.

Before coming to Lafayette, Rothkopf was President George H.W. Bush’s chief counsel to the U.S. Department of Transportation, over which the elder Bush later made him Deputy Secretary.

Those positions and politcal clout enabled Rothkopf as president of Lafayette College and a member of the Lehigh Valley Interntional Airport Authority to transfer Forks Township’s small privately owned air strip from small, light aircraft, to the the ownership of the LVIAA.

Rothkopf’s motive was to prevent the use of the college’s 300 acres adjacent to the privately owned Braden field (also known as Easton Airport and now christened Braden Airpark) from Lafayette College campus expansion.

The motive behind that was the college’s policy of confining the expansion of its campus to the City of Easton - e.g., Bushkill Village - in the Delaware River and Bushkill Creek flood plains and on the equally environmentally steep slopes hovering above the flood plaiins.

The very next day after I exposed Rothkopf’s conflict of interest in a Billy Bytes newsletter hand-delivered in down Easton, Rothkopf resigned his position from the LVIAA’s Board of Governors.