From the Editor

In Class Notes in this issue, the Class of 1929 makes its last appearance. As ­secretary David Hoopes ’59 k’29 notes in his column, the final known surviving member of ’29, Robert Garland, has died. Hoopes uses the column to present a brief history of the last class of the Roaring Twenties.

Back in July 2004, PAW profiled the class as it prepared to celebrate its 75th reunion. At the time, only seven members were alive. In all, the classmates were a homogeneous bunch — overwhelmingly white, bridge-playing, Episcopalian or Presbyterian prep-school graduates — whose Princeton was one of compulsory chapel and Prohibition. Class members included philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III; Jacob Beam, who would serve as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union; and Price Day, who’d go on to edit The Baltimore Sun and win a Pulitzer Prize.

Day wrote the class poem, about the time when the Class of ’29 would leave Old Nassau to be succeeded by other young men: “Oh do not break / The silence that will hold them shrined / In the locked chapels of the mind. / But leave, while yet the Old North bell / Sounds us, unknowingly, ‘Farewell.’ ”

— Marilyn H. Marks *86