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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy July 19, 2006: The
heartbeat of PAW Former PAW editor Jim Merritt ’66 dedicated his book The Best of PAW to PAW’s class secretaries, whose columns, he wrote, “are the soul of PAW.” No one who has worked at the magazine could argue with that. Indeed, I’d even say Class Notes are the heartbeat of the magazine, the pump that keeps it going. When I first began editing PAW, I asked myself the question, How do you engage 75,000 readers who have nothing in common other than a sliver of time spent on a campus – in different decades across a century? The answer, though I’m not sure I ever realized it at the time, is Class Notes. They’re why people read PAW back to front. They’re looking for that thread of familiarity, that name they know, that recognition of a moment of shared life history. Class Notes are the ultimate embodiment of what first editor Jesse Lynch Williams 1892 described as PAW’s mission: to serve as a kind of “long-distance telephone” line among alumni and the University. Class secretaries will doubtless be surprised to read these words coming from my keyboard. Epic battles raged behind the scenes at PAW during my first year on the job, with, apparently, fully three-quarters of the secretaries convinced that I meant to do away with notes altogether, or at least curtail them into meaninglessness. Heartless was perhaps the kindest of epithets thrown my way. It comforted me somewhat, then, recently to come across a Class Notes column from 1936. Among the jokes about the New Deal and bon mots at classmates’ expense (“XXXX, famed in intelligently shooting off his mouth, has been made a canon”) lies an entertaining, caustic reaction to a secretaries’ guidebook compiled by the Alumni Council of the day. Secretary Rudolph Zinsser ’10 wrote that the handbook “tells all class secretaries the many things they should do and all the things that they have left undone.” “They list 21 duties of the class secretary so that we are cheered to learn that we have only 19 more to perform,” he added. Among the pieces of advice handed down: The class secretary “should prevent any individual in the class, no matter how willing, from becoming overloaded with Class and Princeton work.” Zinsser noted that this admonition carefully excluded the secretary himself, and pointed out that the additional suggestion to ask the chairman of the class for help also missed its mark. “Since in our class the secretary is also the chairman of the council, don’t be surprised if you find your chairman talking to himself,” he wrote. The guidebook recommended that “at least one mention of every classmate every year should be the goal of every secretary,” but conceded that “this is practically impossible of achievement. “Not at all,” fired back Zinsser. “If no class secretary before has ever before achieved it, we will. From now on our notes will read like this: ‘Spring is almost here, Atkinson. Business is better, Baldwin. Don’t forget to vote this fall, Carpenter’ – and so on through the alphabet.” Zinsser wound up his column with a poke at another piece of wisdom: “Sometimes when all other methods of eliciting news from a non-corresponding classmate have failed, a letter to his wife will do the trick.” “Oh, well, now there’s a real idea! Hold on to your hats, girls!” scoffed Zinsser. It’s a relief to know some truths, indeed,
never change. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to drop a news-laden
line to my class secretary. Jane Chapman Martin ’89 is PAW’s former editor-in-chief. After four years of writing Under the Ivy, she has decided to give up the column and take on other ventures.
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