Newsmakers

Alumni of Washin­g­ton-Lee High School in Arlington, Va., raised funds to restore a mural painted by JON R. FRIEDMAN ’69, left, when he was a ­student at the school. Friedman, who has received commissions from the National Portrait Gallery and the National Academy of Sciences, created the mural to express the grief that he and his classmates felt after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, according to an Oct. 22 Washington Post story.  

Nine Princeton alumni made this year’s Forbes magazine ranking of the 400 WEALTHIEST AMERICANS, based on a snapshot of net worth Sept. 10, 2009. The top-ranked Princeton alum is 73-year-old investor Carl Icahn ’57, with an estimated net worth of $10.5 billion and a rank of 22. The list also includes Amazon.com founder Jeffrey Bezos ’86 (ranked 28th at $8.8 billion); Google CEO Eric Schmidt ’76 (40th at $5.5 billion); industrialist Henry Hillman ’41 (154th at $2.1 billion); former eBay CEO Meg Whitman ’77 (326th at $1.2 billion); brothers John Fisher ’83 (326th at $1.2 billion), Robert Fisher ’76 (347th at $1.1 billion), and William Fisher ’79 (371st at $1 billion), sons of the founder of apparel giant Gap Inc.; and Progressive Corp. chairman and University trustee Peter B. Lewis ’55 (366th at $1.05 billion).  

LOCOMOTIVES Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn appointed MICHELLE SADDLER ’82 as ­secretary of the state’s Department of Human Services Oct. 11. ... Princeton engineering dean H. VINCENT POOR *77, a leading researcher in signal processing and wireless communications, was elected an international fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering of the United Kingdom. ... W. BARKSDALE MAYNARD ’88’s book Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency has been named an Honor Book by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. The award recognizes the best books in the humanities on a New Jersey subject or by a New Jersey author.