Peter Seyffurt ’40

Pete died of Parkinson's disease May 11, 2003, in Santa Barbara. He attended school in Switzerland and France before preparing at Woodbury Forest School in Virginia.

He majored in economics at Princeton, achieving departmental honors. Pete was on the football, swimming, ski, and rugby teams, and was a member of Cap and Gown. He was chairman of the Princeton Tiger, and a cartoonist of note.

During WWII, as first lieutenant on the USS Diploma, a minesweeper in the Atlantic and the Pacific, he was involved in the battle for Okinawa.

In 1946 he married Eleanor Cuyler Walker, moving his family to the Dominican Republic and then Peru while he worked for Merck, Sharp and Dohme. He also published a weekly bilingual magazine based on the New Yorker, Go! Lima's Weekly Guide.

In 1960, returning to the US, he became a Spanish and French teacher at St. Mark's and St. Andrew's, and earned a master's in Spanish at Middlebury. He retired in Chester, Nova Scotia, in 1977. There he enjoyed his hobbies of watercolor painting and tennis. Pete and Eleanor then moved to Santa Barbara, where she died in 1992.

To his second wife, Catherine; children Peter Jr., Helena Hill, Robert, and Mary Hamblin; and seven grandchildren, his classmates extend their sincere sympathies.

The Class of 1940