F. Tremaine “Josh” Billings Jr., Rhodes Scholar, gifted athlete, and respected professor of medicine, died Sept. 16, 2007, in Nashville, Tenn. He was 95.
Josh graduated from Choate in 1929. At Princeton he was chairman of the Undergraduate Council, a member of Ivy Club, and captain of the football team senior year. He won the Pyne Prize, graduated magna cum laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
During his Rhodes study at Oxford, Josh contracted polio, possibly while visiting a lab in Germany. After recovering, he attended Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He did postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt University, where he was chief resident in medicine. In 1942, Josh married Ann Howe and left one month later for the South Pacific theater, where he served in Hopkins’ medical unit and was discharged as a lieutenant colonel.
He joined the Vanderbilt faculty after the war and held various positions there, including dean of students, until his retirement in 1995. He served as a trustee of Princeton, Choate, and Meharry Medical College, a historically black school in Nashville. In 2000, Princeton chose Josh as its Scholar-Athlete of the Century.
Secretary of the Class of 1933 since 1999, Josh and his classmates were affectionately portrayed in a 2003 New York Times article, “In Princetonian’s Spare Telling, Class of ’33 Drifts into Winter.” Josh’s signature sign-off for his class notes — “A great, strong class” — evolved over time to reflect the infirmities and losses of its members. His final column, published in the Oct. 24, 2007, PAW, ended with “The Class of 1933 seems to hang in there.”
Josh was predeceased by Ann, a grandson, Coleman Billings Harwell, and his brother, K. LeMoyne Billings ’39. He is survived by his daughter, Ann Howe Hilton, and her husband, Robert; two sons, John and Frederic III ’68; Frederic’s wife, Susan; a sister, Lucretia Fisher; six grandchildren; and a great-grandson, Tremaine V.