by April C. Armstrong *14

In this week’s installment of our recurring series, the Graduate School is looking for help from town residents, a professor is lost, and more.

August 12, 1959—Due to record enrollment, the Graduate School has asked local residents to help house graduate students. University facilities are full to capacity.

August 14, 1937—Robert Reischauer, a professor working to establish Oriental Studies as a department at Princeton University, is killed in the “Bloody Saturday” bombing of Shanghai, becoming the first known American casualty of World War II.

August 15, 1923—Andrew Fleming West ’74, Dean of the Graduate School, writes to a friend from Princeton: “While you are in Paris, the paradisus mundi, as medieval writers called it, here I sit sweltering in the office, smoking an inferior cigar known as the ‘Flor de Seward.’”

August 16, 1861—The local post office has received new stamped envelopes. Residents have six days to exchange their old stamped envelopes for the new, thus ensuring that the stamps remaining in Confederate states will not be possible to use for currency. (After this six-day period, the old stamps will be invalid.)

Did you read the previous installment in this series?

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