From the Editor

For eight-plus years, the Class Notes section in every issue of PAW has begun with a report from the Class of 1925. The report in this issue is ’25’s last.

The class’s last surviving member, Malcolm Warnock, died Oct. 9, at 107. He is believed to have been the oldest Princeton alum — ever. It is PAW’s tradition to note the passing of each class with a short history of its time on campus. 

The official class history records many newsworthy events: the end of the hated “hygiene” class; the anti-evolution lecture by William Jennings Bryan, whom the Prince found utterly unconvincing; the destruction by fire of the “Casino,” former home of the Triangle Club. (The New York Times reported that hundreds of undergraduates “cheered the firemen in such a manner that the latter turned the hose on the students.”) 

In 1922, students saw the “Team of Destiny” complete a perfect football season. As juniors, they fought a move by the student government to abolish the annual “flour picture,” in which flour was dumped on the freshmen. The pro-flour contingent got the tradition reinstated, but a new regulation prohibited freshmen from wearing coonskin coats.

Alumni angered by Princeton’s grade-deflation policy would have sympathy for ’25, the first class to graduate under tough requirements intended to make Princeton more intellectually rigorous. At first, many in the class welcomed President Hibben’s promise of an intellectual renaissance, the history reports — until “the full force of which descended upon the totally innocent heads, which in 1921 had born nothing weightier than black caps.” 

For many years, 1925’s class column has been written by Lewis C. Kleinhans III ’53, son of a class member. Kleinhans told of ’25’s past, of thank-you notes for class scholarships, of Warnock’s astonishing attendance record at Reunions — reporting to the class even when its membership had dwindled to one. For that devotion, PAW — and friends of ’25 — always will be grateful.