Roger V. Russell ’64

Roger died Feb. 6, 2026.  

He graduated from DeVeaux School in Niagara Falls, N.Y., where he was class president and participated in soccer, tennis, and track. At Princeton, Roger majored in sociology and anthropology. His senior thesis, “The Effect of Crisis on the Power Structure of the Tuscarora Indian Tribe,” focused on the Tuscarora, who, after losing a brief war in their North Carolina homeland in the early 1700s, migrated to northern New York and became the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. Roger joined Campus Club, participated in the Judo Club and Whig-Clio, and was commissioned from ROTC into the Army Reserves. 

After graduation, he served in the Army for a decade, including in Vietnam, rising to the rank of captain. He credited his service as shaping his lifelong sense of duty, discipline, and love of country. 

Roger earned a J.D. from the NYU School of Law in 1977 and then practiced contract law in Vietnam before returning to the U.S., where he worked for a tax-publishing company in New York City. 

He married Lee Ping in 1971. They shared 54 years together and had two children and four grandchildren, to all of whom the class offers its condolences. Roger will be remembered for his quiet strength, sense of duty, dry sense of humor, deep devotion to his family, and abiding faith in God.