While Pete Carril and the basketball team may have been the more famous Princeton athletes to grace Conte’s, long before 1980, the pizza joint was the preferred watering hole for Princeton’s Class of ’71 heavyweight crew. In addition to our undergraduate years, we returned regularly to Conte’s for our crew’s reunions. Conte’s staff once even made us Karl Hofammann ’71’s infamous “pig lips” pizza, for which Hofammann personally supplied authentic Alabama pig lips as a topping. Thankfully, it didn’t become a regular menu item.
After the passing of one of our freshman crew, Steve Powers ’71, in 2001, we decided to have a memorial service for Steve at Princeton. The service was followed by pizza at Conte’s and a row on Lake Carnegie. Since then, our crew has had a reunion almost every year at various locations around the country. We have also rowed in half a dozen or so masters races from California to Connecticut. It culminated at our 45th class reunion, where we gave the Princeton crew an eight-oared shell named “Class of 1971.”