Anonymous

She grew up in Highgate Village, London, an only child. Her father was a partner in a Rolls Royce dealership. Her family would holiday at his parents’ resort in Clacton-on-Sea (on the southeast coast of England), as well as in Belgium and Holland.

In 1940, her family moved to the United States—ironically, as we shall see, to escape the war. They went by Dutch freighter, which took a course near Iceland to avoid the German u-boats. They went first to New York City: her father had done some business in the City, and his brother lived there. (He was a cartoonist for the New Yorker.) After remaining with her uncle for a month or so, they crossed the country and took a ship to Hawaii, where her father began working for Packard in Waikiki.

On the evening of December 6, 1941, her father and mother joined the captain and officers of one of the American battleships in Pearl Harbor for a dinner party on board the battleship. Most of their dinner companions would be killed the following morning.

On the morning of December 7, her husband-to-be—whom she had not yet met—was with a group of fellow students on a hike through the countryside. His father, a professor of botany at the University of Hawaii, led the group. As they stood atop a high hill, wave after wave of fighter planes went by close overhead. No one recognized the planes as Japanese.

She was babysitting at a house in Waikiki. As explosions began to rock the house and shrapnel to hit its walls, she grabbed the baby and dashed for one of the interior doorframes—something she had been taught to do in war preparations in London. Her father called: he would come for her. Somehow or other, he was able to get through.

In the days that followed, wild rumors filled the Islands—for instance, that the Japanese had poisoned the drinking water. (In spite of such rumors, however, the Japanese who lived on Hawaii—of whom there were many—were never placed in camps during the war.) She volunteered to tear up sheets to make bandages for the wounded at Pearl Harbor, which civilians were barred from entering.

Determined to place their daughter far from the fighting, her parents enrolled her in a private school in Palo Alto. The voyage was quite frightening, as Japanese submarines were criss-crossing the Pacific. Indeed, so dangerous was the passage that she would not see her parents again for two years.

After the war ended, she visited England with her father and then enrolled at the University of Hawaii. Upon graduating with a degree in education, she accompanied her husband—they had met at the University while playing badminton—to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a degree in engineering.

She was the Republican Chairwoman and tax collector of Princeton Borough and then Director of Elections for New Jersey under Governor Kean. He spent much of his career with U.S. Steel and Transamerica, designing pumps and gears for ships. They have one child, a daughter.

Both she and he included Princeton Medical Center Foundation in their wills. (He died some years ago.) Why? “The hospital is near and dear to my heart, both because I was a volunteer for many years, and because it offers superb health care. Furthermore, once we made certain that our daughter, granddaughters, and great-granddaughter were well provided for, we decided that we did not want whatever remains to go to Uncle Sam, but rather to an institution about which we care deeply.”