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Tiger of the Week: J. Robert Hillier ’59 *61

When architect J. Robert Hillier ’59 *61 and his wife, Barbara, created the online magazine Obit in April 2007, they envisioned a publication that would stretch the boundaries of the standard obituary. “Obit is about life’s stories,” Hillier explained in a recent press release. “We conceived of it to deal with life, death, and transition, and in doing so brought together some of the best journalists in the country.” So while there are plenty of stories about the lives and deaths of celebrities, politicians, and star athletes, the magazine also memorializes less traditional deaths, like the end of GM’s Pontiac brand (a farewell to the muscle car).

Two years after its launch, Obit (obit-mag.com) has earned high praise in the online magazine world. Last week, it received two Webby Awards from the International Guild of Web Designers. Obit was one of eight publications selected for the Best Magazines category and one of 12 honored for Best Copy/Writing. Apparently, as one of Obit’s taglines proclaims, “Death is only part of the story.”

(Photo courtesy J. Robert Hillier ’59 *61)

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.

New film will focus on RFK funeral train

Oscar-winning director Jon Blair plans to turn his camera on Robert Kennedy's funeral train in the upcoming feature documentary Is Everybody Alright? The film, which draws its title from Kennedy's last words, is based on photographs taken by photographer Paul Fusco of Magnum Photos on June 8, 1968, when mourners lined the track as Kennedy's funeral train passed. Princeton alumni, back for Reunions, were among the mourners at Princeton Junction, above.

On campus, alumni took part in perhaps the most subdued Reunions weekend in history. "The tragic events beyond the campus had members of all classes asking 'why?'" class secretary Martin Lapidus ’62 wrote in PAW's Class Notes. "Reunions is normally a time of levity, but this year, in this troubled world, it was also a time of self-questioning."

Blair's film will explore the interplay of personal memory and major historical events of our time. If you were one of those mourners along the tracks and you would like to share your story, contact Blair (jonrblair@gmail.com, 845-591-3895) or U.S. production coordinator Sheila Maniar (samaniar@earthlink.net, 347-731-7504).

(Photo by Paul Fusco, courtesy Lichen Films)

New book: Detective work

After Peter de Jonge ’77 wrote a not entirely flattering profile of Sarah Jessica Parker for Harper’s Bazaar, he ran into the actress on the street and “she just started yelling at me for like 15 minutes,” he says. That was the most dramatic backlash he experienced as a result of his freelance writing about the rich and famous, and it helped push him to reconsider the line of work.

A part-time copywriter for an advertising agency, de Jonge suspected it would get harder to gain access to the subjects due to PR handling and he grew tired of writing about celebrities.

So when James Patterson, the prolific thriller writer who also happened to be head of the advertising agency where de Jonge worked, asked him to co-author what became Miracle on the 17th Green, de Jonge jumped at the chance. That led to two more co-authored Patterson books, The Beach House and Beach Road, and this month to de Jonge’s first solo work of fiction, Shadows Still Remain.

Published by HarperCollins, the novel is about a scrappy and headstrong homicide detective, Darlene O’Hara, who puts her job on the line to solve the murder of a beautiful but mysterious college student. The action follows O’Hara from gritty dive bars and strip clubs to the provost’s office and library at NYU.

To conduct research for Shadows Still Remain, which The Washington Post called “first-rate crime fiction,” de Jonge spent a couple months hanging out with NYPD detectives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. One homicide detective he met provided much of the inspiration for his main character, as did his own characteristics. “Inevitably you end up putting a lot of yourself in your protagonist,” says de Jonge, who is already at work on his next novel, also starring Darlene O’Hara. By Katherine Federici Greenwood

(Photo courtesy Peter de Jonge ’77)

Hitting the wall

Each week, dozens of students visit Princeton Stadium to scale the Outdoor Action rock-climbing wall. Weekly Blog writer Julia Osellame ’09 made her first ascent and filed this report.

“On belay?” I asked, repeating the standard climbing call to indicate I was ready to begin my climb.

“Belay secure,” Hannah Grimm ’09 replied. Grimm guided the rope, breaking or giving slack depending on my climbing needs.

“Climbing,” I said before staring my assent up the purple trail on Outdoor Action’s indoor rock-climbing wall in the southeast corner of Princeton Stadium.

For a first-time climber, my assent was surprisingly smooth — I made it to the top without a slip or fall. But the strain on my arms proved I was not yet ready for one of OA’s rock-climbing trips off campus to places like Allamuchy State Park or Witherspoon Woods.

April 23 marked my first trip to the climbing wall, an alternative to “the Street” as one of the Princeton’s Alcohol Initiative events. Instead of strolling onto Prospect Avenue, students can visit the rock-climbing wall in the football stadium, where it was rebuilt in October 2007 after the demolition of the Armory, the original home of the OA rock-climbing wall built in 1983. OA supplies visiting climbers with a harness and climbing shoes. And with twelve belay stations, there are plenty of opportunities to learn to climb a variety of difficulties.

Each climb is marked using the Yosemite Decimal System (numeric rankings that describe the difficulty of a climb), and color-coded tape under each climbing hold — fake rocks, as large as your foot or as small as your finger, jutting out of the wall.

With free pizza, music, and rock climbing for undergraduate and graduate students, the rock climbing wall attracts up to 50 climbers a week, Grimm said.

Grimm, a climber since her freshman year, taught me the ropes, guiding me up the 32-foot high, 66-foot wide faux rock wall. After one visit, it was easy to see how climbing culture can grab hold of you. By Julia Osellame ’09

Photo: Climber Maddy Case ’12 scales the OA rock-climbing wall. (Photo by Julia Osellame ’09)

Names in the news

Aaron Cypess ’92, a researcher and physician at Harvard Medical School, earned widespread attention for his research on human brown fat, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April. [CNN, TIME, Scientific American]

F. Scott Fitzgerald ’17 will be enshrined in the New Jersey Hall of Fame May 3, joining fellow alumni Bill Bradley ’65 and Malcolm Forbes ’41, who were inducted last year as part of the inaugural class. [N.J. Hall of Fame]

History professor D. Graham Burnett ’93 discussed the landmark 1959 book Two Cultures with journalist Chris Mooney. [Bloggingheads.tv]

Alumni Eric Lander ’78 and Eric Schmidt ’76 were named to President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, along with Princeton professor Christopher Chyba. [Chronicle of Higher Education]

Tiger of the Week: Geoffrey Aguirre ’92

Neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist Geoffrey Aguirre ’92 was featured on the cover of Philadelphia magazine's April issue as one of 64 up-and-coming doctors in the area. The story highlighted Aguirre's research and clinical work on the loss and recovery of visual ability.

In studies using functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI), Aguirre has shown that the human brain seems receptive to therapies that restore sight. "When we looked at the brains of people with severe visual impairment from birth," he explained to the magazine, "the part responsive to vision was remarkably preserved, which was a big surprise -- studies in animals had suggested the opposite. In humans, who are so much more visual than other organisms, that may be the result of the brain getting just enough light through the retina early in life that it hangs on to that function." Aguirre is based in the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees.

(Photo courtesy Geoffrey Aguirre ’92)

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.

Q&A with writer, director, and producer Jac Schaeffer ’00

As an undergraduate, Jac Schaeffer ’00 poured her extracurricular energies into Triangle Club, Theatre Intime, and the Princeton Shakespeare Company. But the California native found her calling in film. After earning a master's degree at the USC School of Cinema, she began working as a director, writer, and producer in independent movies and documentaries, following a career path she'd thought about since her teenage years. On April 26, Schaeffer will premiere her first full-length feature, the romantic comedy TiMER, at the Tribeca Film Festival. She spoke with PAW's Brett Tomlinson earlier this month.

TiMER is a love story that also looks at issues of technology in our lives. In the movie, people are able to implant a chip that counts down to the exact moment that you'll meet your true love. Is that an accurate setup?

Yes, that's it.

What happens from there?

Well, the idea is that the technology allows this to happen, but the catch is that if you get a TiMER implanted, in order for you to have a countdown your soul mate also has to have a TiMER. The plight of the protagonist is that everyone around her has countdowns, but her TiMER is blank. Her soul mate does not have a TiMER, so she systematically dates guys who don't have TiMERs and then convinces them to get TiMERs, only to be disappointed time and time again.

Her situation is actually the real-world situation: We're all walking around with a question mark and with doubts and confusion. The fact that the answer is possible for her is what really screws her up. So she sort of gets frustrated with the whole thing and ends up falling for a guy who has a countdown of four months. And then, the story gets fun.

What was your inspiration for this storyline?

Tiger of the Week: W.S. Merwin ’48

Poetry will be in the spotlight at Princeton next week, as the University welcomes Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney and a dozen other prominent poets for the first Princeton Poetry Festival, April 27 and 28. So it is fitting that our Tiger of the Week, W.S. Merwin ’48, is a distinguished man of letters. On April 20, Merwin won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press), a collection of what the award citation called “luminous, often tender poems that focus on the profound power of memory.” Merwin also won a Pulitzer in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders.

As an undergraduate, Merwin was influenced by two notable English professors: highly regarded literary critic R.P. Blackmur and poet John Berryman. Merwin wrote about his Princeton mentors in his 2005 memoir, Summer Doors. While Berryman was a merciless editor, his exhaustive knowledge of poetry made an impression on the young Merwin. But Blackmur, who famously rose to prominence in the academy without the benefit of a college degree, offered the most memorable advice: “A good education,” he told Merwin, “won’t do you any harm.”

(Photo courtesy Pulitzer.org/Mark Hanauer)

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.

Baseball stands three wins away from division title

The Princeton baseball team has four scheduled games against Cornell this week, but head coach Scott Bradley sees the matchup as a best-of-five series: With the Tigers and Big Red tied atop the Ivy League’s Gehrig Division, the first team to win three games will clinch the title and earn a spot in the Ivy League Championship Series.

“You want to put yourselves in position to play important games,” Bradley said earlier this week. “Right now, it’s here in front of us.”

While three wins against Cornell would guarantee a title for the Tigers, Columbia does have a chance to force a three-way tie for the division title if Princeton and Cornell split their games. The Lions would need to sweep their four-game set against Penn.

For more than a decade, Princeton has been an Ivy powerhouse, winning five league titles in Bradley’s previous 11 seasons, but the Tigers stumbled at the start of the year, losing six of eight games against teams in the Ivy Rolfe Division (Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, and Harvard). In the last two weekends, Princeton’s bats came alive against Columbia and Penn, and the Tigers pulled even with Cornell at 8-8 in Ivy play.

Dan DeGeorge ’09 (.368 batting average, 12 doubles) has been Princeton’s most consistent hitter, and Greg Van Horn ’11 and Jon Broscious ’10 have made key contributions in the last two weeks as well. On the mound, Brad Gemberling ’09 (5-1, 59 strikeouts) has anchored the league’s top pitching staff. Gemberling, DeGeorge, pitcher David Hale ’10, and catcher Jack Murphy ’10 have attracted attention from pro scouts, Bradley said, and may be selected in the Major League Baseball first-year player draft in June.

Game time: Princeton hosts a doubleheader against Cornell April 24, beginning at noon, and travels to Ithaca for two more games April 26.

Softball knocked out of Ivy race

Princeton softball has won more Ivy titles (17) than the rest of the league combined, but this year, the defending-champion Tigers will not repeat. Even with four games remaining against division-leader Cornell, Princeton (8-8) won’t be able to catch the Big Red (13-3).

That means Princeton fans only have a few more chances to see Tiger star Kathryn Welch ’09 in action. Welch, a four-year starter, ranks second on the program’s career lists for doubles and home runs and third in runs batted in. Her .353 career batting average also is among the program’s top five, and she has a chance to hit over .400 for the first time this season (through April 19, she was hitting .402 for the year).

Game time: Seniors Kathryn Welch, Erin Miller, and Brianna Moreno will play their final home games April 24 when Princeton hosts a doubleheader against Cornell, beginning at 12:30 p.m.

An insider’s view of Obama’s new-media campaign

One out of every six people who voted for President Barack Obama opted to help with the campaign, said Joe Rospars, the campaign’s new-media director, in an April 16 speech titled “Making Change Happen: Lessons from the Obama Campaign.” Rospars, a founding partner at Blue State Digital, explained how the campaign used technology to help “lower the barrier to entry” for supporters to participate in the campaign.

The Obama campaign’s new-media program used text messaging, blogs, YouTube videos, and e-mail to encourage supporters to organize themselves into smaller regional and common-interest groups. Rospars and his team posted more than 2,000 campaign videos on YouTube, broadcasting everything from informal chats with Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, to instructions on how to participate in the Iowa caucus. Led by documentary filmmakers and journalists, Obama’s new-media team focused on “both the presentation and weaving together the story of our supporters,” Rospars said.

The plan proved successful — more than 45,000 grassroots volunteer groups helped bring voters to the polls for Obama. Connected to campaign headquarters through e-mails and text messages, these volunteers “knocked on millions of doors and made millions of phone calls,” Rospars said. Obama’s staff gave volunteers the necessary training and resources, he said, and allowed them to work as if they were staff members.

Though the use of new media brought Obama closer to his supporters, don’t be fooled into thinking that he is just an e-mail or text message away. “I hope that no one felt like it was actually Barack who was responding to your friend request on MySpace. If so, I hope that you would have been less likely to vote for him,” Rospars joked.

The new-media team’s job, Rospars said, was “to generate an emotional response and to turn it into concrete outcomes.” The result on Nov. 4, 2008, solidified new media’s position on the political stage. By Sarah Harrison ’09

An American hero in Iran

April 20, 2009, marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Howard C. Baskerville, Class of 1907, a fact briefly noted on the op-ed page of Saturday's New York Times. Baskerville, a teacher and aspiring theologian, went to northern Iran after college to teach in a school run by Presbyterian missionaries. While there, he became increasingly sympathetic with students who fought in favor of the constitutionalist government, and eventually he joined the cause. Leading 150 troops in defense of Tabriz, the city where he taught, Baskerville was shot and killed by a sniper. He became a martyr in the town and remains revered by many.

In a May 2007 PAW story, Mark Bernstein ’83 described Baskerville's gravesite:

Set in a small walled courtyard amid apricot and almond trees, the grave is a plain stone sarcophagus carved with the martyr's name -- Howard Baskerville, a member of Princeton's Class of 1907 -- and the dates of his birth (April 13, 1885) and death (April 20, 1909). A hundred years ago, the site, in the city of Tabriz, was a cemetery and hospital grounds for Presbyterian missionaries. Whoever once carefully tended to Howard Baskerville's grave, and his alone, with fresh flowers, no longer does so. The Armenian man who lives in the adjoining house built the wall in part to discourage pilgrims, but Tabrizis still can direct a visitor to the site.
That it is the grave of an American and a Princetonian makes the place remarkable. That it is the grave of a martyr to constitutional liberty, and that it is still honored in the heart of a nation whose government is hostile to the United States and many of its values, makes it more remarkable still.

To read more of Baskerville's story, click here.

Tiger of the Week: Ellie Kemper ’02

Ellie Kemper ’02 landed a dream job last week: She took over as Dunder Mifflin’s new receptionist on NBC’s The Office. Any role on a hit comedy would be a big boost for a young actress, but this one was particularly special for Kemper, a “huge fan” of the show. “Being on set with them is like being in a dream, except the dream is real and I can reach out and touch them,” she told PAW. “Except I am trying not to touch them too much, because I was raised right.”

Kemper’s character made an immediate impression on office mates Dwight and Andy, who angled for her attention on last week’s show. The performance also impressed PAW: She’s our Tiger of the Week.

Kemper, an English major from St. Louis, Mo., honed her comedic skills as an undergraduate with the Princeton improv group Quipfire! and the Princeton Triangle Club. For more from her brief e-mail interview with PAW, click below.

Young ’02, Ohlendorf ’05, Venable ’05 lead alumni in pro baseball

Princeton's two major league pitchers are off to solid starts this season. Chris Young ’02 of the San Diego Padres won his first two starts, allowing two earned runs in 13 innings, and Ross Ohlendorf ’05 of the Pittsburgh Pirates pitched well in his first start, a 2-1 loss to St. Louis. (He returns to the mound against Houston April 15.)

Other former Tigers have their sights set on reaching the majors -- or returning, in the case of Will Venable ’05, an outfielder who played with the Padres during the last month of the 2008 season. Venable spent spring training with the major league club and started the regular season with the Triple-A Portland Beavers. Through April 14, he has hit safely in five consecutive games and has a .348 batting average.

Pitchers Tim Lahey ’04 (Triple-A Rochester) and Erik Stiller ’08 (Double-A Akron) also have a chance to reach the big leagues this year. Lahey has one save in two appearances and has not allowed a run. Stiller has three strikeouts and no walks in two brief relief stints.

One alumnus decided to leave pro baseball this spring: Infielder Steve Young ’04 (no relation to Chris), who starred with the independent Traverse City (Mich.) Beach Bums for the last three years, announced his retirement in March. Young joined the team in its inaugural season and won the Frontier League's Citizenship Award in 2008. Jason Wuerfel, the team's director of baseball operations, called Young "the heart and soul" of the Traverse City franchise.

Above, from left, Chris Young ’02, Ross Ohlendorf ’05, and Will Venable ’05 in September 2008. (Photo courtesy Liz Young ’02)

A frontiersman's vision

In the April 20 issue of The New Yorker, Dorothy Wickenden tells the story of Farrington Carpenter, Class of 1909, a lawyer and cattle rancher who decided to make his adopted hometown of Elkhead, Colo., into a first-class place to live.

Carpenter started with the school -- a sturdy stone building that he had helped to design. He realized that by attracting smart young teachers from the East, he could both educate the children of the town and provide wives for the many single men in the community. The plan had mixed results, as Wickenden, the granddaughter of one of Elkwood's first teachers, discovered in her research.

Read Wickenden's story online (registration required) and view a narrated slideshow of Carpenter, teachers Rosamond Underwood and Dorothy Woodruff, and the Elkwood school.

Above, Farrington Carpenter 1909, center, with two Princeton classmates during his days at Harvard Law School. (Photo courtesy Class of 1909 Third Reunion Book)

New book: Reducing the odds of cancer with healthy cooking

Who says upping your odds of avoiding cancer can’t taste good? In her new book, The Anti-Cancer Cookbook: How to Cut Your Risk With the Most Powerful, Cancer-Fighting Foods, Julia Greer ’92 offers recipes and information that can help people consume more antioxidants and stem their chances of developing cancer.

Greer, a physician, has married her love of cooking and her medical specialty — cancer research — to come up with more than 200 recipes for soups, sauces, main courses, vegetarian dishes, sandwiches, breads, desserts, and beverages that are loaded with ingredients that have antioxidants known to reduce the risk of several cancers. On each recipe (which she collected from a variety of sources including other cookbooks, magazines, Web sites, friends, family members, and her own kitchen), Greer notes what antioxidants the food includes and what types of cancers it helps fight.

Some of her favorites are banana bread, low-fat blueberry muffins, balsamic chicken, and chocolate-almond biscotti. In the book she also explains what cancer is and how antioxidants work to prevent precancerous mutations in the body’s cells, and she describes which foods have been shown to help prevent certain types of cancers. An epidemiologist whose work focuses on pancreatic, ovarian, and breast cancers, Greer is a faculty member of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition. By Katherine Federici Greenwood

For the latest books and media by alumni and faculty, visit PAW Online.

Below, Greer’s recipe for Adzuki Bean-Citrus Salad, created while she was a student at Princeton. (The recipe won first prize in Suburban Living magazine’s salad contest.)

Taking the thesis plunge

Like polar-bear plungers, seniors in the Woodrow Wilson School celebrated handing in their theses at 4 p.m. April 7 with a dip in the Fountain of Freedom. The 40-degree weather did not deter the excited students from carrying on the annual tradition. Other departments, like history and English, which also had April 7 thesis deadlines, held less soggy celebrations with ice cream, cookies, and snacks in their department offices. By Julia Osellame ’09

Photos: Above, tradition trumped cold temperatures for the Woodrow Wilson School’s Class of 2009. At right, seniors Carol Shih, Katherine Fallon, and Devjoy Sengupta didn’t mind getting their feet wet. (Photos by Julia Osellame ’09)

Recent lacrosse alumni offer their take on Princeton’s ‘big city’ win

Hundreds of Princeton students and lacrosse alumni piled into Giants Stadium April 4 to watch the men’s lacrosse team take on the No. 2 Syracuse Orange in the Big City Classic. The Tigers delivered, maintaining an early lead and clinching a 12-8 victory over the defending NCAA champs. With hat tricks from senior Mark Kovler and sophomore Jack McBride, the Tigers (9-1, 2-0 Ivy League) showed the Orange that they came to score big.

In four of the team’s first nine games, the Tigers have taken more than 50 shots on goal. Before this season, the team had crossed the 50-shot mark only seven times in the last decade.

“This year’s offense has been incredibly fun to watch and has definitely helped the ’09 Tigers achieve the record they have,” said former Princeton midfielder Mike Gaudio ’08. Gaudio noted that the change began during a summer tour of Ireland and Spain, when head coach Bill Tierney encouraged the team to take more shots.

Former All-American goalie Alex Hewit ’08 said “the confidence and pride that the offense has been playing with is quite obvious. They are taking chances every time they have the ball, which is very intimidating for the opposing defense.” But this offensive success would not be possible without the “strong defensive unit” supporting the team, Hewit added. With the standout freshman goalie Tyler Fiorito backed by veteran defensemen Chris Peyser ’09 and Jeremy Hirsh ’10, the Tigers are strong on both ends of the field.

“They are a great group of guys, and it is about time that Princeton lacrosse returns to the prominence they enjoyed in the second half of the ’90s,” Gaudio said. Princeton topped Ivy rival Penn, 10-9 in overtime April 7, and has four Ivy games remaining, including home dates against Harvard (April 11), Dartmouth (April 25), and Brown (May 2). By Sarah Harrison ’09

Angels at 185 Nassau

Lovell Holder ’09, in the role of Prior Walter, and Heather May ’10, playing an angel, rehearse a scene from Angels in America April 1. The Lewis Center for the Arts production, staged at the Matthews Acting Studio at 185 Nassau St., began April 2 and will include performances of “Millennium Approaches (Part One)” at 8 p.m. April 9 and 2 p.m. April 11; and “Perestroika (Part Two)” at 8 p.m. April 10 and April 11. (Photo by Frank Wojciechowski)

Researchers, lab unharmed by Italian quake

The powerful earthquake that struck central Italy April 6 did not damage a major underground laboratory that has led to important findings in astroparticle physics by a Princeton team. Physics professor Frank Calaprice, principal investigator of the Princeton team that plays a lead role in the Gran Sasso National laboratory near the city of L’Aquila, said the mile-underground lab had been built to withstand a severe earthquake. The epicenter of the quake was less than 12 miles from the lab, he said. Three Italian employees who worked on the Princeton research were not injured, he said.

Names in the news

Michelle Obama ’85 isn’t the only Princeton alumna looking stylish in O Magazine this month. Law student Keiyana Fordham ’04 was featured in a story about finding the right look for a job interview. [O Magazine]

Business management consultant Peter Bregman ’89 spoke about starting a business in difficult economic times on CNN. [American Morning]

William Clay Ford ’79, executive chairman of Ford Motor Co., told NPR that his company does not need a bailout. [All Things Considered]

U.S. women’s hockey goalie Megan Van Beusekom ’04 shut out Japan in an 8-0 United States victory April 4 at the World Hockey Championships in Sweden. [Boston Herald]