From the Editor - April 5, 2000
In doing some research for our paw anniversary story-double-checking which issue, exactly, F. Scott Fitzgerald '17 was reading when he suffered his fatal heart attack-I stumbled across the subject of another story in this issue: Robert Haig, Jr. '41.
Haig-who is remembered in our new occasional column, Institutional Memory, for the short-lived newspaper he founded as an alternative to the Prince-was an On the Campus writer during his junior year. Witty and irreverent, he enjoyed tweaking his fellow students and his alumni audience. After being castigated by readers in the Letters column for some flippant remarks about the U.S. Navy, a local girls' finishing school, and the Iliad (in unrelated items), he turned in a column full of mundane news that ended with: "It snowed Tuesday, but then again it melted Wednesday. The duck-boards are down, Christmas vacation starts on the 22nd. Ha! 396 words at $.02 per word=$7.52."
Sam Schreiner '42, who wrote this issue's essay on Haig, calls him "my most unforgettable Princetonian" (and Haig's sense of humor makes it easy to see why).
Discovering Haig's column brought him to life for me, and it struck me how, in so many ways, paw has immortalized Princeton's alumni during its first century. Looking back at 100 years of publishing, it's easy to marvel at how the magazine reveals the history of the university: new presidents, new initiatives, new buildings. But the real story is the way the lives of alumni-your lives-are chronicled. In letters and in features, in Class Notes and On the Campus, page after page records your accomplishments, your passions and your worries, your memories and a few things you might like to forget. Whether your name showed up just once in Class Notes, or your face was featured on the cover, you're here. And you aren't just the subjects; you're also the bylines-famous names such as Fitzgerald, John McPhee '53, Frank Deford '61, and George Will *68, side by side with many more of the not-so-famous.
"An independent magazine by alumni for alumni" is a very recent slogan for paw; it first appeared on the masthead February 23, 1994. But new as it is, it seems to me a very appropriate motto. For 100 years that's exactly what paw has done: recorded the lives of alumni. In doing so, it's made all of us, like Father Haig, unforgettable.
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