The Daily Princetonian: November 8, 2019

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Friday November 8, 2019 vol. CXLIII no. 100

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U. professor emeritus, World War II veteran Samuel Hynes dies at 95 By Allan Shen staff writer

Samuel Hynes, a World War II veteran, as well as the University’s Emeritus Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and emeritus professor of English, passed away at his home in Princeton on Oct. 10 at the age of 95. Hynes died of congestive heart failure, according to his daughter, Joanna Starr Hynes. Born in Chicago on Aug. 29, 1924, Samuel Lynn Hynes, Jr., was one of two sons born to his father, Samuel Hynes, Sr., and mother, Barbara Hynes. Hynes, who lost his mother at the age of five, grew up in a working-class family in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and developed a love for aviation early in his life, imitating World War I aces at playgrounds and observing early planes at the local airport. After earning his high school diploma at the age of 16 in 1942, Hynes began studying at the University of Minnesota, where he learned under the famed novelist Robert Penn Warren. He signed up for the Navy flight program and enlisted in the Marine Air Corps at the age of 18. “I left Minneapolis for service on a dank, wet, cold, March Minneapolis evening,” said Hynes in an interview in Ken Burns’ 2007 documentary, “The War.” “... and at the far end [of the railroad station platform] there was a navy yeoman with a clipboard and the gathering of young men and boys around him … My

father shook my hand … Then he turned around and walked back toward the entrance … and out to the street and was gone. I turned to the yeoman and went up and said, ‘Present,’ when my name came up, and I was in the Navy.” As a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, Hynes served as part of a torpedo bombing squadron at the Caroline Islands and Okinawa Island. Hynes received a Distinguished Flying Cross for his service in the Pacific theater. After being discharged at the rank of major, Hynes returned to the United States, turning 21 just two weeks after the end of the war. Hynes completed his bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Minnesota under the G.I. Bill in 1947 and then received his master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University in 1956, after flying in the Korean War. Hynes would celebrate his birthdays by doing loops and rolls in a biplane until his advanced age prevented him from doing so. In 1944, Hynes married Elizabeth Ann Igleheart, the sister of a fellow pilot; the two were married for over 60 years, until Elizabeth passed away in 2008. Hynes taught British literature at Swarthmore College until he moved to Northwestern University in 1968, where he remained until joining the faculty at the University in 1976. Hynes was named the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Lit-

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erature in addition to his appointment in the Department of English; he transferred to emeritus status in 1990. Among Hynes’s many honors were the University’s Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities in 1990 and the Arts and Letters award for literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Supervising Committee of the English Institute. He is the author of many works of history, literary criticism, and memoirs, including “The Edwardian Turn of Mind” (1962), “The Auden Generation” (1977), “Flights of Passage” (1988), and “The Growing Seasons” (2003), among numerous others. As a literary critic, Hynes wrote frequently for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The London Review of Books, and several other publications. “[Hynes] had a remarkable ability to research his subjects exhaustively, but not be the prisoner of his own research,” said Alex Star, an editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux who edited Hynes’s “The Unsubstantial Air.” “He fundamentally knew what kind of book he wanted to write, what the message of it was, what the feeling and ambience he was trying to achieve was,” Star said. “He used the skills not just of a scholar but really also of a memoirist and a prose stylist to evoke forgotten but really important realities.”

Alan Thomas ’81, editorial director at the University of Chicago Press who completed a junior paper and senior thesis under Hynes, published Hynes’s final work, “On War and Writing” in 2018. The publication is a collection of Hynes’s previously unpublished personal essays and criticisms of other works on war. “He grew up in Minnesota and had something of that rural Minnesotan economy to his expression and his emotional make-up,” Thomas said.

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ON CAMPUS

ROBERT MATTHEWS / OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS

Hynes taught literature at Swarthmore College and Northwestern Universty before coming to Princeton in 1976.

“It came across on his page, and I’m sure it came across in his teachings.” Thomas also highlighted the fact that despite being known for his study of British prose literature, Hynes wrote a great deal of criticism of poetry, especially on the works of Thomas Hardy and W. B. Yeats. Hynes is survived by his two daughters, Miranda and Joanna; three grandchildren, Alex, Sam and Lucy Preston; and three great-grandchildren, Alastair and Aurelia Preston, and Elias Preston Hassan.

Bezos ’86 Q&A with Workers Lab loses, regains CEO Carmen Rojas status as richest man in the world senior staff writer

COURTESY OF JEOPARDY PRODUCTIONS

Gilbert Collins GS ’99 poses with Jeopardy host Alex Trebek.

U. alumni find success in Jeopardy Tournament of Champions By Sam Kagan Contributor

Emma Boettcher ’14 and Gilbert Collins GS ’99 achieved success in this week’s Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions, winning their initial matches and qualifying for next week’s semifinal games. The Tournament of Champions is a staple of the long-running television trivia quiz show, in which Jeopardy! invites back 15 of its strongest recent competitors, pitting the champions against one another in a series of 10 matches. The tournament episodes airing from Nov. 4 through Nov. 15 were shot at Jeopardy!’s studio in Culver City, Calif., on Sept. 17 and 18. Clad in an orange and black tie, Collins — the University’s Direc-

In Opinion

tor of Global Health Programs and Associate Director at the Center for Health and Wellbeing — punched his ticket on Monday’s program. The Wilson School graduate finished with $16,801, beating out an instructional design consultant from Utah and a music teacher from Colorado for the automatic berth. “There were so many questions there that I knew, and I was trying to ring in, but [my opponents] might have been a millisecond faster than me so I couldn’t ring in,” Collins said. “One dark secret is that most of the people know most of the answers on the show. It’s just a question of who gets in first.” A former youth tennis player, See JEOPARDY page 2

Contributing columnist Anna Mcgee criticizes news coverage that misconstrues protests against police brutality as “anti-cop,” and columnist Shannon Chaffers argues that Facebook’s civil rights abuses are being under-scrutinized.

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By Omar Farah Contributor

On Oct. 24, after a sharp drop in Amazon’s stock price, Jeff Bezos ’86 momentarily lost his title as the world’s richest man, only to regain the distinction after markets closed the next day. This incident interrupted Bezos’s almost-two-year reign as the world’s wealthiest man. Bezos first gained the title, surpassing Bill Gates, in October 2017. Last month’s market shift saw Gates regain his former title, albeit for a few hours, with a net worth at the time of 105.7 billion dollars, to Bezos’s 103.9 billion. Gates had previously held the title for a total of 24 years. The brief loss resulted from a 7 percent drop in Amazon’s share price following the release of the company’s thirdquarter earnings. With the company moving into a high expenditure season, looking to make the shift from twoto one-day shipping for all Amazon Prime customers, See BEZOS page 2

Carmen Rojas is the cofounder and CEO of The Workers Lab, an organization that invests in innovation that empowers workers in the United States. This month, she will leave her position as CEO of the organization to become the CEO and president of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which supports lowincome families in achieving justice and equality. During her recent visit to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, The Daily Princetonian spoke with Rojas about her work at The Workers Lab and her thoughts on the most pressing issues facing American workers. The Daily Princetonian: As a child of immigrants, how has your background inf luenced your work? Carmen Rojas: I feel like it has deeply inf luenced my work. My mom is from Nicaragua, and she immigrated to the United States at a time when 3 percent of workers were in a labor union. She immigrated at the peak of the civil rights movement. And so she came here really at a time when social movements

Today on Campus 11:00 a.m.: A Masterclass with Jeremy Denk, Piano Taplin Auditorium, Fine Hall

had created infrastructure and opening[s] for people to live really amazing lives. For a good number of people, not everybody, but a good number of people, to live really amazing lives. And I always had this feeling of being in between. My mom is from Nicaragua. My dad is from Venezuela. I grew up in the Bay Area. And so I feel like, as a Latina in particular, I always felt like I was moving between the United States, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and, especially in 2008, when Obama ran for office the first year, I was living in Venezuela and imagined going back and having a prodigal daughter moment where people would be, like, “Oh, she’s back!” And it wasn’t the case. I was clearly an American person. My relationship with race was different. My relationship with them was different. And so I feel like, being the kid of immigrants, you learn to sort of hold so many histories at one time from a very young age, that you learn about choices, choices that my parents made that were really powerful and indicative of them wanting a better life and See ROJAS page 3

WEATHER

By Karolen Eid

HIGH

42˚

LOW

21˚

Sunny chance of rain:

0 percent


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