Bob, pioneering surgeon and arts philanthropist, died July 17, 2014, in Minneapolis.
Bob came to Princeton after Groton, majored in French, and took meals at Quadrangle. He rowed 150-pound crew, played club hockey, and joined the pre-med society, Flying Club, St. Paul’s Society, and the orchestra. He roomed with Mike Kennedy, Crowell Baker, and Lefty Thomas.
He received a medical degree at Columbia and Ph.D. degrees in both physiology and surgery at the University of Minnesota, where he was a professor of surgery for 40 years. He was widely known for his part in introducing laparoscopic surgery (a procedure for which a number of his classmates have cause to thank him).
When not skiing, he pursued his interest in music, playing in a hospital orchestra and a community concert band, thereby exercising his skills with the trombone and the recorder. His gifts to Minneapolis included restoration of a theater downtown.
Bob married Katherine Dickenson and they had four children, Anne ’80, Katherine, Margaret, and Robert III, to whom the class offers its deepest condolences.