Farewell to a Class From The Greatest Generation

By Peter Barzilai s’97

Published Jan. 23, 2024

2 min read

Peter Barzilai s’97, Editor, pbarzilai@princeton.edu

Sameer A. Khan h’21 / fotobuddy

Choosing whom to profile in PAW’s annual Lives Lived & Lost issue is always a challenge. This year, we’ve featured 13 alumni among the 569 whose memorials were published in 2023.

Even harder than narrowing down that list is deciding whom to put on the cover. This year, you could say, we’re cheating.

Instead of one cover, we have published four, each with a different alum featured. The covers were mailed randomly, but here they all appear below here. (We’ll also be handing out issues — while supplies last — at the Alumni Day luncheon on Feb. 24.)

In addition to these Princetonians who died last year, there was another loss to the community: the Great Class of 1941.

Arthur W. Frank Jr. ’41 died in July at 103, the last of the 657 students who enrolled at Princeton in 1937. (Read about Frank’s life in the Memorials section on page 75.)

When 505 of them received their degrees at Commencement on June 17, 1941, they knew they were entering a “disturbing and distressing” world, as Theodore M. Black ’41 put it during his valedictory address. Less than six months later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and many of these young men were thrust into World War II.

“It was a defining moment for many of them, and they carried it with them the rest of their lives,” says Nancy Pontone, the class secretary, whose farewell column appears on page 58.

Pontone’s father, Paul Douglas ’41 *48, served as a Navy officer. “He was out on the boats in the Pacific trying to survey for possible attacks,” she says. “He didn’t have the same kind of combat experience as others in the class, like Lynn Tipson ’41, but it was definitely a profound experience and, in some ways, I think was the highlight of his life because he was helpful in diverting attacks and saving lives.”

Tipson, who died in 2016, was shot down over Austria and was in German POW camps until the end of the war in 1945. There are many heroic and tragic stories within the class. As Pontone points out, 29 members of the class died in World War II.

Those who survived went on to lead rich and rewarding lives. And although the class is gone, it is still making an impact.

Two current students, Gedeon Guercin ’24 and Nathaniel Noftz ’24, among about 30 recipients of Class of 1941 scholarships this year, recently emailed Pontone to express their gratitude.

“That scholarship holds a special place in my heart, as it represents not just financial support, but also a connection to the rich history and legacy of Princeton alumni,” Guercin wrote in an email to PAW.

PAW would also like to recognize Ken Perry ’50 and Charlie Ganoe ’51, class secretaries who contributed Class Notes and Memorials and died last year.

Ganoe was secretary since 2011 and served in many roles through the years, and Perry was secretary since 2000. His columns were consistently interesting and informative. Class Notes/Memorials editor Nicholas DeVito would often hear from people who made it a point to read Perry’s column even though they weren’t in the class.

“Two sets of big shoes to fill and two of the nicest guys,” DeVito says.

Published in Feb 2024, Issue

1941

2 Responses

Owen P. Curtis ’72 *75

6 Months Ago

The class notes and editor’s letter in the February issue regarding the farewell to the Class of 1941 brought to mind a part of the class’s legacy which I greatly enjoyed for three years: 1941 Hall. Along with a number of other classes from the 1920s through the 1940s, 1941’s members donated a dormitory in what became known as New New Quad. In my years on campus, they were the newest dorms, and by their design, they were distinctive residences for those undergrads lucky enough to draw into them. The dorms featured six singles on a hall with two shared bathrooms at the end, which collectively created what became, with the right mix of hallmates, a suite but with your own personal space. For a kid from a large family, my three years in 1941 Hall was the first time I ever had a room to myself, and I loved it.

Despite the waffled ceilings which, from time to time, led to nightmares of being pressed in a waffle iron, the rooms offered large windows, and for those of us lucky enough to be on the south side, a great view across Poe and Pardee fields, down toward the lake, and beyond.

When New New Quad was torn down for the new dorms of Butler College, I was crushed, and I wondered how the surviving class members must’ve felt. I regret that our major reunions were not on the same five-year cycle, so I never got to thank those good folks for what they had created for us all. So here’s a salute to the Class of 1941 for helping me and so many others enjoy our time on campus.

Thomas H. Pyle ’76

6 Months Ago

In a recent PAW, the Class of 1941 chronicler announced the death of its last surviving member. Thus closes the book of this wonderful class of 505 graduates. My dearly departed father, Dr. Louis A. Pyle, Jr. ’41 (1920-2002), was one of them.

My first visit to Princeton was in 1963 at 11 years old, with Dad at his 22nd reunion. Fond of mind, the next fall I sheathed all my sixth-grade schoolbooks with shiny “Princeton” book covers. And I’ll never forget Dad’s 25th in 1966 at Holder. The members of ’41 traded up from their orange baseball-suit reunion costumes to smart blue blazers, white pants, and boaters. (But not the irrepressible Thacher Longstreth, class president of epic personality and lanky Lincolnesque frame, who still wore his baseball suit.)

Dad outfitted me in a black Princeton T-shirt with orange neck tab which for a long time I never took off. A live band called Randy Hobler (’68) and the Nightwatch played all the current AM radio favorites, which the old timers seemed to enjoy. And the P-rade! Our marching throng shunted through 1879 Arch and spilled onto Prospect Street crowded with clapping townfolk cheering us all the way to Roper Lane, where we turned to the baseball field to watch Princeton beat Yale.

By 1971, I found my own way to Princeton — as again did my father, when he came to be a physician at McCosh Infirmary. I frequently passed by his McCosh office enroute to Terrace and spent many nights together at home when school was out. What a joy it was to hear his tales of classmates Malcolm Forbes, Bob Livesey, Win Short, Russ Train, Lyn Tipson, John Dorrance, Jim Green, Sterling Hutchinson, and the rest, even the later notorious Dr. Harvey Lothringer.

Graduating in 1976, like Dad before me I embarked on my own Princeton March of Time. There were many good times at his 1941 tent. Dad was always so fond of his distinguished classmates, as I was to share his Princetonian bliss. In later years, my P-rade always began with them at FitzRandolph Gate. I’d march with these Greatest Generation giants until arriving at my own class’s staging place, 35 classes down the line. Even after Dad died in 2002, I always checked in with his surviving pals, now hunched, humbled, and hewn by Father Time, yet still proud and convivial. To this day I still wear their unique class pin on my own class jacket.

And now they are all gone. Truly I am a Princeton orphan now, enriched by such fond memories yet fitful about this lamentable milestone, a foreboding of my own shortening temporality. God bless us all, especially the great Princeton Class of 1941.