The ever-engaging retrospective, “From PAW’s Pages,” featured a letter championing the ubiquitous campus umbrella in the Jan. 10 issue. Many from various classes through the years carried one (so often warranted) — many, but not all.
My old man was Class of ’44, one of the accelerated “war classes” of World War II. In my lifetime I never witnessed my dad carrying an umbrella, even under the most pressing of circumstances. He was a Princeton product, so that struck me as unusual, but he would never address the issue. The explanation fell to my mother, his war bride from Paris.
She explained how almost none of his generation here in the United States would even touch, much less carry, an umbrella. The culprit was umbrella aficionado Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of England. His appeasement of Adolph Hitler through the Munich Pact of 1938 was the undoing of the umbrella habit of a whole generation. Such is history, and fashion.