Samuel B. Vrooman III ’47

SAM VROOMAN died Jan. 16, 1992. He had generated warm, fond memories among all who knew him. For many of us they began in the summer of '43 when he joined Princeton's V1 2 Navy. Always cool and dressed in impeccable Navy whites during that hot dusty summer, he was the prototype of the everyouthful Sam we knew thereafter: quiet and modest but with a keen wit and a wonderfully clear mind, uncluttered by prejudices and pretensions; always pleasant and sympathetic, never abrasive or selfseeking. "I've always thought saying 'please' and 'thank you' makes the road a lot smoother," he wrote in our 40th Year Book. Acting on the deeper implications of this simple, but subtle dictum, Sam seemed to glide effortlessly and successfully through those several career cycles that many of us have shared: V1 2 and the Navy; postwar Princeton; marriage and raising a family of four; a career in banking at the Philadelphia National: and a buys, engaged retirement.

Sam seldom told jokes, but in quiet conversation with good friends he conveyed a rare, sometimes truly philosophic, hurnor – remembering Sam automatically induces a smile. Typically, he often made fun of himself, never others. Typically, too, he never spoke much of his public service, but he worked long and well for a number of core humanitarian causes: wayward children, mental illness, and life assistance for those in deep distress. Beneath the veneer of a quite proper Main Line gentleman there was, possibly, a tiny bit oldfashioned populism in Sinn, certainly a lot of old-fashioned 'republican virtue." He wrote, on the eve of our 40th: "On the whole I think I have had a good run." He surely did. To his widow, Flodie, and to the children, we send this remembrance with love.

The Class of 1947