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Michael Hanko '86 (Photo: Courtesy Michael Hanko)

Since leaving the U.S. Army and becoming a classical singer and actor, Michael Hanko ’86 had not spent much time dwelling on his unhappy years as a gay lieutenant (and ROTC cadet) at a time when gays were barred from military service. But last year, while working on a translation of a piece of German lieder music, Hanko decided to experiment with writing his own lyrics. He began thinking about his Army days. “I guess somewhere, deep in my psyche, there was this unaddressed emotion,” he says.

The German lieder form — expressive poetic compositions, typically for one singer with piano accompaniment, composed by the likes of Schubert and Mozart — helped Hanko to capture an emotionally charged story that included both deep pain and humor. Working with colleagues Byron Sean and Stephanie Fittro, he developed an hourlong cabaret show, Platoon Lieder. Hanko will perform the show at Reunions May 31. The event is sponsored by the Fund for Reunion/Princeton Bisexual, Transgendered, Gay and Lesbian Alumni (FFR/BTGALA).

The themes of Platoon Lieder, Hanko says, speak to a wide range of audiences, not just those who are gay or who have served in the military. The story examines common problems — feeling like an outsider, choosing the wrong path — as well as positive outcomes. While stationed in Germany, Hanko began taking the voice lessons that helped him to find a new career in music.

Hanko, a baritone who lives and works in New York City, will be coming back to Princeton for the first time since he graduated with an A.B. in music 27 years ago. He recently found his class beer jacket in his parents’ attic. Tucked inside the pocket was a registration form for FFR/BTGALA.

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

Robert Musslewhite '92 (Photo: Courtesy the Advisory Board Company)

As CEO of the Advisory Board Company, a leading consulting firm for hospitals and health systems, Robert Musslewhite ’92 has plenty of business experience to draw upon. But in his recent contribution to The New York Times’ “The Boss” column, Musslewhite cited a key lesson from an earlier experience: swimming at Princeton.

An injury to one of the Tigers’ top swimmers forced Musslewhite into the lineup as the anchor of the 200-yard medley relay team at the NCAA Championships in 1989, his freshman year. Teammates Mike Ross ’90, Ty Nelson ’91, and Rich Korhammer ’89 handed a lead to Musslewhite, and he managed to hold off his opponents in a tight finish, winning the national title. Musslewhite wrote that the race “showed me how discipline and hard work could put you in a position to be lucky.”

Musslewhite’s path after Princeton included earning a law degree from Harvard, clerking for a Federal District Court judge, and working in management consulting. He joined the Advisory Board Company in 2003 and became CEO five years later. In 2012, he was among Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year honorees for the Washington, D.C., area, and earlier this year, Modern Healthcare named him as one of 300 nominees for its list of the most influential people in health care.

Like many of our Tiger of the Week honorees, Robert Musslewhite ’92 was nominated by a PAW reader. Do you have an idea for a future Tiger of the Week profile? Let us know.

“We’re going into this weekend thinking we have to win two games,” said Chris Bates, Princeton’s head coach.

The Tigers went 8-5 this year, including wins over Johns Hopkins and Yale, but they dropped one-goal games to North Carolina, Penn, Syracuse, and Dartmouth before suffering a 17-11 loss to Cornell at MetLife Stadium April 27. Princeton has struggled defensively all year, allowing an average of 9.7 goals a game, and Bates replaced goalie Matt O’Connor ’16, who started the first 11 games of the year, with Eric Sanschagrin ’15 against Harvard on April 19. Sanschagrin played well against the Crimson, making 8 saves in a 14-6 win, and respectably against Cornell with 12 saves.

Despite performing in front of 19,875 people in an NFL Stadium, “Eric was very poised,” against Cornell, Bates said. “The shots he gave up were in tight. We thought he played fine.”

Princeton’s normally potent offense sputtered in the first half against Cornell before scoring eight goals in the second half. They’ll need that kind of production for a full 60 minutes to beat the Big Red, which pelted Princeton with shots from close range. Cornell’s Rob Pannell may be the best attackman in the college game, and he scored five goals and four assists on Saturday in a dominating performance. Cornell attackman Steve Mock and midfielder Connor Buczek each added four goals as the team upped its record to 12-2 and 6-0 in the Ivy League.

Last month, when geophysicist Karin Sigloch *08 and co-author Mitchell Mihalynuk published a Nature paper offering a new explanation for the formation of the North American Cordillera, the large collection of mountain chains that stretches from Alaska to Mexico, peers hailed the work as “momentous” and “a mini-revolution.”

Sigloch was grateful for the response — and she understood the reaction. She told PAW that the research gave her a “feeling of surprise and wonder” when she and Mihalynuk were combining findings from geophysics and geology to re-envision how the western part of the continent formed. “A huge archipelago of volcanic islands rose from the proto-Pacific in our mind’s eye, and we pictured North America bulldozing over it during the age of the dinosaurs,” Sigloch said in an email.

Earlier interpretations had suggested that the mountain belt was formed “by relatively insignificant events,” Sigloch said, with small pieces of oceanic crust being delivered to the west coast as if they were on a conveyor belt. But that didn’t explain the geological diversity of the crust in the region.

Sigloch and Mihalynuk assert that the mountains came from larger formations: offshore island arcs similar to modern-day Japan and the Philippines. When North America drifted westward between 150 and 50 million years ago, the continent overrode these “micro-continents” and built up the Cordillera.

Sigloch’s Ph.D. work at Princeton played a key role in the Nature paper. She had developed a method for creating 3-dimensional images of the earth’s deep interior, “using waves generated by naturally occurring earthquakes,” and tested it on data from USArray, a network of seismological sensors. In the process, she discovered that the oceanic plate sinking back into the mantle under the Pacific Northwest does not connect to deeper fragments of ancient ocean crust — a detail that did not mesh with the standard hypothesis for the formation of the western part of the continent.

Sigloch now teaches at the University of Munich and has fond memories of her graduate school experience. “The Princeton community of colleagues, mentors, and friends is very special to me,” she said. “I grew at Princeton — it’s part of me now.”

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

Harold Hartshorne 1914 with partner Sandy MacDonald. (Photo: Courtesy The Daily Princetonian Larry DuPraz Digital Archive)

The most famous skater in Princeton’s Class of 1914 was undoubtedly Hobey Baker, the Tiger football and hockey star and World War I aviator whose name adorns college hockey’s version of the Heisman Trophy. But classmate Harold Hartshorne also made a name for himself on the ice, earning national championship medals in pairs ice dancing in the 1930s and ’40s before becoming a respected judge in the sport. 

Hartshorne, a stock broker in his day job, remained active in ice dancing into his late 60s and was traveling with the U.S. figure skating team in 1961 when its flight to the world championships crashed in Brussels, killing Hartshorne, his wife, Louisa, and the other 71 people on board. 

Hartshorne is still remembered in the Jersey shore town of Little Silver, where he built a country home that featured, among other things, a skating pond on the property. The home, designed by Roger Harrington Bullard, earned designation as a Monmouth County Historic Site, and through June 9, it will be on display as a designer show house, presented by the Visiting Nurse Association Health Group. Click here to read more about the Hartshorne family, the house’s history, and the show house program.

Graham Ezzy '11 (Photos: Quincy Dein [action]; Kevin Pritchard [portrait])

Not many Princeton alumni can claim the title of “professional windsurfer.” In fact, as far as we can tell, there’s only one: Graham Ezzy ’11.

Ezzy, the son of a well-known sail designer, was raised in Maui and competed as a pro before he came to college, specializing in wave sailing, the more extreme and creative form of the sport.

While wave sailing has gained popularity in Europe and Asia, Ezzy said that the sport is not as well known in the United States, where most people seem to see windsurfing as a leisurely sailing pursuit. On the waves, it’s more like half-pipe snowboarding. Competitors use the combined power of wind and waves to make physics-defying leaps and turn breathtaking tricks. At its best, Ezzy said, it’s “almost supernatural.”

With no waves to be found on Lake Carnegie, Ezzy put the sport on hold for much of his time at Princeton. Concentrating on coursework had its perks. “Taking the time off allowed me to break bad habits,” he says, noting that he won a pro event in Cabo Verde, off the western coast of Africa, during intercession of his sophomore year.

As a student, Ezzy managed to seek out other recreation on the water, surfing with Princeton’s club team and training with the lightweight crew. Since graduation, he has competed on the American Windsurfing Tour, tested new equipment for his sponsors, and starred in action sports videos, including “Take 1” (see below), a new short by filmmaker and windsurfing champion Kevin Pritchard.

In a recent blog post, Ezzy said Pritchard’s feel for the sport helped him capture the footage used in the film. He compared the experience to “a dance to an unfamiliar song with a familiar partner.”

Read more: Graham Ezzy ’11’s blog, surf-matic.com

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

Peter P. Blanchard III '74 (Photo: Courtesy Peter P. Blanchard III)

When Peter P. Blanchard III ’74 visits Greenwood Gardens, the public garden that occupies what once was his childhood home, he likes to see if it still passes the “360-degree test.” If you can stand in one spot, make a full rotation, and “not see or hear anything that reminds you of where you are” — in suburban New Jersey, not far from the train lines and highways that carry commuters to Manhattan — then the space is meeting its goal, Blanchard says.

Blanchard’s parents, Peter Jr. ’35 and Adelaide, a lawyer and a pediatrician, respectively, bought the Short Hills, N.J., property in 1949, looking for a retreat from city life. Proximity to bridle trails at the nearby South Mountain Reservation was part of the draw — both were fond of horses. Blanchard’s father also renovated the estate’s gardens, which had been designed by the architect William Renwick decades earlier, when Joseph P. Day owned the property.

“I wasn’t wild about the garden aspect, ironically,” says the younger Blanchard, a dedicated conservationist. “It was too formal, too fancy — too grand, I guess.” But since his father’s death in 2000, Blanchard has worked to preserve the gardens as an oasis of green in the country’s most densely populated state. That long road reaches another milestone later this month: The gates will be open three days a week from April 28 through October 29, the public garden’s first full season.

Converting the historic gardens to a center for horticultural and environmental education has been a challenging process, according to Blanchard. “We had a vague idea [of what was involved], but I don’t think we understood the complexity,” he says. An alliance with the Garden Conservancy, a national nonprofit, helped to direct the restoration. Since 2003, visitors have been coming to the gardens for scheduled tours and designated “open days,” watching the gradual conversion. Landscape Architecture Magazine called the gardens “a living preservation lab where visitors can observe the thorny trash of bringing an historic landscape back to life.”

Blanchard said he hopes the formal gardens, open meadows, and woodlands will be a space where visitors can develop a love of nature, much like he did as a child. In addition to his work at Greenwood Gardens, Blanchard is involved in safeguarding coastal lands from development pressures in Maine as a board member of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. He is the author of We Were an Island, a 2010 book about a couple that lived in seclusion on an island off the Maine coast for more than 35 years.

Read more: PAW’s 2010 interview with Blanchard about We Were an Island.

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

By Victoria Majchrzak ’15

Sam Ellis '13 will be part of the first team to represent Israel at the Women's World Cup. (Photo: Shannon Davis)

On Saturday, Sam Ellis ’13 had her fourth collegiate hat trick in a 11-9 victory over Harvard that clinched an Ivy League Tournament bid for the women’s lacrosse team. The senior attacker’s biggest goal of the game came with 1:24 left to play in the first half, when Ellis scored to tie the Crimson at 4-4. 

This summer, Ellis will try to build on the success that she has had at Princeton and make her mark in international lacrosse with the Israeli women’s national team. On March 25 the Israel Lacrosse Association announced the 2013 Women’s World Cup roster, made up of 10 Israelis and 10 Americans, one of whom was Ellis. She will play for the squad at the Federation of International Lacrosse’s Women’s World Cup, July 11-20 in Canada. It is the first time that Israel will have a women’s national lacrosse team.

“It’s really cool to play a part in growing a sport, because this is the first team in Israel,” Ellis said. “You’re dedicating your time to this country and doing something for your religion, which is something that’s so meaningful. So I’m in the process right now of getting citizenship so I can be over there and play for the country and do my part to help spread the word for lacrosse.”

But for Ellis, participating in the World Cup means far more than making an impact in women’s lacrosse. Her maternal grandparents, who were Holocaust survivors, met in Auschwitz where they were both interred.

“I know that they would just be so proud.” Ellis said. “They were such strong people to make it through that camp.”

Between the time he got out of the camps and immigrated to America, Ellis’ grandfather played for the German national soccer team. “It is kind of strange that he played, but that’s where my mom says I get my athleticism from,” Ellis said.

Ellis will travel to Israel to train with the team in the first week in July. The squad will then fly to Toronto before their first matchup against Germany on July 11. Ellis said she is excited for the “unbelievable experience” and knows that her grandparents would be happy that she will be a part of the experience.

“I just want to do something for them, in memory of them, and keep their spirit alive,” she said.

Will Venable '05, Princeton's lone major leaguer on opening day, is approaching Moe Berg '23's career hits record for alumni. (Photo: Rick Scuteri, USA TODAY Sports)

Will Venable ’05’s day began with a home run and ended with a face full of shaving cream, courtesy of an exuberant teammate. In between, the San Diego Padres outfielder drove in four runs — including three on a bases-loaded triple — to lead his team to a 9-3 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers April 9. All things considered, it was a pretty good day. 

Venable, now in his sixth major league season, was the only Princetonian on a big-league roster on opening day last week. (Pitchers Chris Young ’02 and Ross Ohlendorf ’05 are teammates on the Triple-A Syracuse Chiefs, an affiliate of the Washington Nationals.) Though he’s not known as a home-run hitter, his 46 major-league homers are the most by any Princeton alumnus, and he’s on pace to become the University’s most prolific hitter in the next few months. Catcher and World War II spy Moe Berg ’23 had 441 hits in his 15 major-league seasons; Venable currently has 405. 

Venable grew up around baseball — his father, Max, played in the major leagues and in the Japanese pro league — but Princeton fans are more likely to remember his exploits on the basketball court, where he scored more than 1,000 career points and helped Princeton win the Ivy League title in his junior season, earning a trip to the NCAA Tournament. Venable starred in the Tigers’ opening-round loss to Texas. 

In March, Venable reflected on the NCAA Tournament experience in an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune. “You realize how important it is not to just your team but to everyone around the country,” he said. “It’s really something special to be a part of.”

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

By Hillary Dodyk ’15

Jeff Froccaro '13 (Photo: Beverly Schaefer)

Jeff Froccaro ’13 has led the men’s lacrosse team to its first top-10 ranking since the 2010 season, and the senior attackman had another strong game against rival Syracuse April 6, scoring four of Princeton’s 12 goals, including two in the fourth quarter, and assisting on two other scores. But the Orange spoiled that performance with a fourth-quarter rally, edging the Tigers 13-12.

For Froccaro, a Long Island, N.Y. native, playing lacrosse was a family tradition. He made the switch from baseball to lacrosse in seventh grade, following the path of two uncles who played professionally and introduced him to the game.

He seems to have made the right choice, earning All-Ivy first team honors as a junior and Ivy League Player of the Week honors three times in his career, most recently after he became only the 27th player in the program’s history to reach 100 career points.

“Jeff’s one of the best attackmen in the country and definitely in the Ivy League [and] he has a good effect on the offense. He can calm things down and he’s obviously a really good scorer,” fellow attackman Mike MacDonald ’15 said. “Jeff draws a lot of attention on offense, he usually draws the number one defender from the other team, so he opens up chances for me and Ryan [Ambler ’16].” 

Even with his family history, Froccaro said that playing college lacrosse was not something he thought seriously about until he started getting calls from recruiters as a sophomore in high school. Then it became an opportunity too great to be ignored, especially when Princeton called.

By Cara McCollum ’14

From left, Madeline Cohen '16, Gabriella Rizzo '13, and Gary Fox '13 perform a scene in "It Takes a Village," a thesis musical by Sandra Fong '13 and Emi Nakamura '13. (Photo: David Kelly Crow/Courtesy the Lewis Center for the Arts)

Sandra Fong ’13 sat helplessly in the audience as she watched her creation come to life. “I hope I remember to breathe; I’m probably going to hold my breath ’til the end,” she excitedly whispered to a friend. By the end of Saturday night, she could breathe a sigh of relief after a run of three senior-thesis workshop performances went off without a hitch.

Twelve student performers sat in a semi-circle of chairs in the Marie and Edward Matthews ’53 Acting Studio, their music stands poised between them and the audience. They wore black and white, but the topic they sang about took on a decidedly gray tone.

It Takes a Village, the thesis collaboration between Fong and composer Emi Nakamura ’13, tells the story of a character ambiguously named “M.” as he moves to the town of Standard, USA, and struggles to live a “normal” life — or, as normal of a life as one can lead being raised gender neutral. M. (played by Terrence Fraser ’16), who wears dress-like tunics and enjoys both football and ballet, is confronted by the conservative citizens of Standard and pressured to conform to the stereotypes of his gender.

The topic of gender neutrality first piqued Fong’s interest two years ago when she read a news story about a family that had chosen to raise their child gender neutral, and was both surprised and saddened by the public outcry that ensued.