From the Editor: Farewell, ’32

“We have started a registered Hereford herd and hope to cut down on the family food bill this way ... We also put together a so-called Hi-Fi system which has been giving us fun for four years.” ... “We have one car, one dog, one house.” ... “The Great Depression of the early 1930s taught us that what we had gained at college could not be taken from us by economic adversity.”

These are voices of the Class of 1932, its members taking stock in their 25th-year reunion book in 1957. For almost 82 years, ’32 classmates have been telling their stories in their Class Notes column in PAW. The column in this issue is the last. 

The last two known surviving members of the class have died: Ashley B. Carrick, 102, on May 25; and William B. Morgan, 103, on June 18. Jimmy Stewart was a class member; he reported that after graduation, he got a summer job in a theater and “they let me play several small parts.” Laurance Rockefeller — conservationist and philanthropist — was another class giant. So was Alexander Bonnyman Jr., who died in 1943 in the battle for Tarawa and posthumously received the Medal of Honor. 

If the Depression intruded into their lives as Princeton students, the official class history does not show it. It speaks instead about Cane Spree and Triangle; bicker and houseparties; the football team’s fighting spirit and summer races on the Thames. 

But Class Notes, as always, offered another look. “The realization that we are out in the wide, wide world seems to be coming home to many of us only too cruelly,” began the first column, Sept. 30, 1932. “Who said ROTC was not practical?”