Thomas “Wick” Schmidt ’99, who slipped “Will you marry me?” into his Latin salutatory address at Commencement, and Anastacia Rohrman ’99, who held up a “Yes” sign provided by one of Schmidt’s friends, were featured not only on the cover of the July 7, 1999, PAW, but in newspapers and magazines across the country. The morning after graduation, Wick and Anastacia were interviewed on the Today Show. “We were surprised and flattered by all the attention,” Anastacia said. “We didn’t think it would get any attention beyond the Princeton community.”
The two were married in August 2000, after Wick’s first year at Yale Law School, and daughter Cassandra was born one month before his graduation in 2002. Work with a Virginia law firm and a clerkship for a Wisconsin judge followed for Wick, and Anastacia gave birth to son Joseph in April 2005. The Schmidts’ third child, Susanna, was born in September 2006, just a month after Wick joined a law firm in Green Bay, Wis. Anastacia, who worked as a mechanical engineer after Princeton, has been home with the children since Cassandra’s birth.
Wick began planning his very public marriage proposal immediately after he found out he would be Princeton’s salutatorian, and never considered that it might be rejected. “We had dated a year and a half [at that point],” he said. “I was pretty confident, and didn’t have a backup plan. There was no ‘no’ sign.”