Robert L. Goodale Jr. ’52

Bob, pioneering surgeon and arts philanthropist, died July 17, 2014, in Minneapolis.

Bob came to Princeton after Groton, majored in French, and took meals at Quadrangle. He rowed 150-pound crew, played club hockey, and joined the pre-med society, Flying Club, St. Paul’s Society, and the orchestra. He roomed with Mike Kennedy, Crowell Baker, and Lefty Thomas.

He received a medical degree at Columbia and Ph.D. degrees in both physiology and surgery at the University of Minnesota, where he was a professor of surgery for 40 years. He was widely known for his part in introducing laparoscopic surgery (a procedure for which a number of his classmates have cause to thank him).

When not skiing, he pursued his interest in music, playing in a hospital orchestra and a community concert band, thereby exercising his skills with the trombone and the recorder. His gifts to Minneapolis included restoration of a theater downtown.

Bob married Katherine Dickenson and they had four children, Anne ’80, Katherine, Margaret, and Robert III, to whom the class offers its deepest condolences.