I applaud Princeton's move to modify its financial aid policies to make the university even more affordable to lower- and middle-income students (Notebook, February 25). The change reminds me of the financial obstacles that might have prevented me and my twin sister, Amy, from attending Princeton had the university not been able to offer my family a generous package of loans, grants, and work-study arrangements.

I remember the dinner-table conversation when Amy and I casually mentioned our interest in applying to Princeton. With raised eyebrows, my father, who would do anything in the world for us, said that he wasn't sure he could afford to send us there. We applied nevertheless, and worried more about our grades, test scores, and essays than whether the cost of attending was within our middle-class means.

In the end, of course, my sister and I were able to attend the university of our choice because Princeton virtually eliminated the affordability question. I am forever grateful for that opportunity.

Mindy Niedzielka Rittner '91
Des Plaines, Ill.

As a senior in high school, I decided to take a flyer and apply to one Ivy League school. The accessible materials sent to me by Dean of Admission Fred Hargadon seemed to reach out to someone from a high school no one had ever heard of, 3,000 miles away. When Princeton accepted me I was ecstatic, but for fear of making promises to myself I couldn't keep, I told no one outside my family until the financial aid information arrived in the mail.

I am forever grateful to Princeton and its alumni for making it financially possible for me to attend. Hallelujah to the news that Princeton will devote additional resources to financial aid! Now Yale has followed suit. I am pleased that Princeton leads the way in further democratizing Ivy League institutions.

Kristin Brennan '96
Cambridge, Mass.

Big Sisters and Brothers

Thanks for publishing "Choices" by Heather C. Liston '83, about her experiences as a Big Sister (First Person, February 11). She has great insight into the interactions between a mentor and a young person.

At about her age I began working as a volunteer Big Brother. It proved so rewarding that I have stuck with it for more than 40 years, and am now mentoring my 10th boy. This past year, one of my early mentees was called to be the senior pastor of a church in Texas. But the route to that success was not always smooth and involved a period of incarceration in a Florida penitentiary. He and I are still in contact these many years later. These relationships often are for life.

Once you see the long-term impact you can have as a Big Brother or Sister, your whole life changes. I recall being offered an attractive career opportunity that would have taken me out of town for a year. But I was mentoring my fifth kid at the time, and there was no way I could abandon him. I have never regretted turning down that job offer. This summer I was best man at his wedding.

Gordon S. Brown '48
Burke, Va.

Malcolm Diamond

It was with deep sadness that I read of Professor Malcolm S. Diamond's death (Notebook, February 11). Your obituary listed several of his accomplishments but did not mention the profound influence he had on students.

I decided to apply to Princeton after reading of the opportunities to interact with professors. Professor Diamond exemplified this commitment to students. I was fortunate to get to know him through precepts and informal discussions, and felt honored to count him as a friend and mentor. When I took his course The Self in World Religions, a weekly requirement in his precept was to write a few pages discussing how we personally responded to the reading materials; he prodded us to explore ourselves, an assignment far more difficult than simply analyzing the text.

Over the years I have often thought of Professor Diamond, and on occasion I called him, just to touch base. His death leaves a hole not only in the Princeton community but in the lives of all those students fortunate enough to have known him. I decided I wanted to teach because of teachers like Malcolm

Diamond, who open up worlds for students and who challenge them to recognize the boundaries they set up for themselves, and then to exceed them.

Tamara Wexler '93
Philadelphia, Penn.

Rumbas and Rembrandts

Princeton's football season ended as fittingly as its basketball season began. Ira Burkhull, writing for The New York Times on December 21, described basketball coach Bill Carmody's wondrous five as "the carefully rehearsed syncopation and counterpoint of a symphony orchestra. It wasn't the jitterbug, but the rumba. It wasn't Picasso, but Rembrandt."

As for football, coach Steve Tosches finally demonstrated his ineptitude by calling for a quick kick in the mud and snow in the final game against Dartmouth. The kick produced the touchdown that sent the game into overtime and ultimately produced a win for Dartmouth.

Make no mistake, this was not a losing season for the players. Tosches has proven he can coach defense as well as anyone in the Ivy League. The admission office has given him talent superior to everyone else in the league. The problem is that football, even more than basketball, is an intellectual game. A football team has 22 offensive players who prepare for approximately 150 plays, with an infinite variety of sets and strategies. In basketball, Carmody wins by capitalizing on the safe plays that result from outthinking his opponents. Why can't Princeton's football coaches do this, too? No one would argue that Carmody's players are faster, taller, or more physical than the opposition. The bottom line is coaching.

Princeton over the years has had outstanding football coaches who propelled us to top-10 status. Bill Roper and Fritz Crysler set the stage for Charlie Caldwell '25 and his successor, Dick Coleman. Caldwell won coach-of-the-year honors in 1950 and 1951 with a buck-lateral series that is still confused with the single wing. In fact, it was a system every bit as complicated as Carmody's, in which the central figures alternated between spinning fullback, faking tailback, and a reversing wingback who could cut both ways, plus a blocking quarterback who both passed and received. Add to this pulling guards, trapping tackles, and crisscrossing ends and you have back-to-back undefeated seasons and national ranking. The players were good, but Princeton had outstanding players before the Caldwell era. Caldwell took the only real assets that Princeton provides a coach -- the brains and discipline of student athletes -- and massaged them to lethal effectiveness. There are ways to analyze the rules, adopt stratagems, and create personnel mismatches.

Next season we will have a new football stadium. Hopefully we will have a new coach prepared to deliver something that will live up to the tradition of Caldwell. Give Tosches defense and recognize his enormous contribution to 50 percent of the game. But let's find someone who understands the other 50 percent.

Charles F. Huber II '51
Greenwich, Conn.

Head shaver identified

In his October 22 letter our class secretary, Jack Paul '55, couldn't identify the student on the left in the From the Archives photo of last May 7. He is Jack Howell '55. Shaving heads was a sophomore stunt played on unsuspecting freshmen when they stormed Holder Hall, a sophomore stronghold. But freshmen often reciprocated, as we see in this picture. Taken in the fall of 1951, it shows three members of our freshman class (Howell, John Roos, and Hayes Walker) barbering sophomore Homer Smith '54.

Robert H. Collier '55
Garden Grove, Calif.

Department of amplification

Re Guy Tudor '56's attribution of the phrase "We was robbed" to Leo Durocher (Letters, February 11): the line actually belonged to Joe Jacobs, boxer Max Schmeling's manager, who shouted it into the microphone after Schmeling lost a fight to Jack Sharkie in 1932.

Jay Crawford '54
Pacific, Mo.

I read with pleasure and amusement of the heroics, physical and verbal, of Lucius Wilmerding '27 during the Princeton bank heist as recounted by his classmate Curtin Winsor (Class Notes, February 11). Please allow me one correction: I worked for 38 years for The New York Times as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and executive, until my retirement in 1991, and I do not believe that Walter Lippman ever worked as a columnist for the Times. His newspaper associations were with The New York World, The New York Herald Tribune, and The Washington Post.

Bill Blair '47
New York, N.Y.

The drawing of a red abalone that accompanied your January 28 cover story on materials science made it look like a bivalve resting on a sandy bottom. Bivalves, such as clams and oysters, have two shells joined by a hinge. An abalone is a marine snail, with one shell and a large, muscular foot it uses to clamp tightly onto rocky bottoms, which are its natural habitat.

Georgia C. Weatherhead s'53
Fairfax, Va.

Jimmy Stewart '32 tribute

The Princeton Triangle Club presents an evening of reminiscence and laughter as it bids farewell to Triangle's beloved alumnus Jimmy Stewart '32, at McCarter Theatre, 8 p.m., Monday, April 6 (admission free). Biographer and film historian Scott Berg '71 will reprise his presentation "Mr. Stewart Goes to Hollywood," an overview of Stewart's life and work. Triangle undergraduates will perform some of Triangle's best songs.

Steve James '74
Chairman, Triangle Club
Ancramdale, N.Y.

Notice to readers

After the February 25 paw was mailed, several readers informed us that the first paragraph of that issue's On the Campus column, entitled "Astral Winter," had been published without proper attribution. The paragraph was taken from an essay entitled "Astral Weeks," written by Lester Bangs and originally printed in Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, edited by Greil Marcus, first published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1979 and reprinted by Da Capo Press in 1996. We regret the improper use of this material.