Paul J. Hill

Paul Joseph Hill passed away on Monday, November 23, 2020 in Newtown, PA.

A lifelong resident of Princeton, he was born on March 16, 1923 in a house on Aiken Avenue just a block away from the Murray Place home where the family moved to and lived for many years. He grew up with his two older brothers, Homer and Dan, and went to The Nassau Street School for his elementary and junior high education and went on to graduate from Princeton High School in the class of 1940.

After attending Syracuse University with his two brothers, Paul enlisted in the Army in 1942 and was stationed in Los Angeles, California, where he met his wife June, who was living in Beverly Hills at the time. Within four months of their meeting they were married. Paul was honorably discharged February 1946 as a Corporal in the medical detachment of the 1905th Service Command Unit. After leaving California, they moved for a short time to Colorado Springs to be closer to June’s family.

After about a year in Colorado they moved back to Syracuse so Paul could take advantage of the GI Bill and finish his college education; however, within the first year after returning to Syracuse, he received a call from his father Homer M. Hill Sr. requesting that he return to Princeton to manage the store, as his father had fallen ill. Shortly after returning to Princeton from Syracuse, Paul and June built their home on Morgan Place where Paul lived for over 70 years and where they raised their two sons, Dan and Mark.

He was a third generation proprietor of Hill’s Market located on the corner of Witherspoon Street and Spring Street in downtown Princeton. The store was opened in 1909 by his grandfather William D. Hill after he sold the family’s 200-acre farm in Harbourton where the family had lived for many generations. Hill’s Market was destroyed by fire in 1977 after 67 years in business.

A good father, father-in-law, grandfather, and great-grandfather, Paul was very well known in the Princeton Community. He was a member and past general manager of Springdale Golf Club, The Old Guard of Princeton, and The Romeos, where he very much enjoyed his every weekday morning meetings at Bon Appétit in the Princeton Shopping Center with his friends and acquaintances. Paul marched in many Princeton Memorial Day parades and was thrilled to be more recently joined by his great-grandson Sandro.

After his wife June passed in 2013, he became close friends with Lorna June Andre, her daughter Anne Gunter, and her family. They very much enjoyed their time together taking walks and talking about their families.

Paul leaves behind many great memories for all that knew him. His passion for life and the people he knew live on in his rhymes, of which he penned over 100, many of which were published in the Town Topics and Princeton Packet.

Paul is survived by his son and daughter-in-law Dan and Norma Hill of Doylestown; son and daughter-in-law Mark and Beth Hill of Hopewell; Maggi Hill, mother of Ryan, Brady and Rebecca; five grandchildren and their husbands and wives — Ryan and Kyle of Williamsburg/Brooklyn, NY; Caitrin and Matt of Yardley, PA; Braden and Blair of Mullica Hill, NJ; Ellen Hill and Brian Vanderford of Doylestown, PA; Rebecca Hill of Pompano Beach, FL; and six great-grandchildren Sandro, Abram, Rockwell, Evie, Jameson, and Bonnie; niece Jude Erhardt and husband Gary Greely of Maryland; many more nieces and nephews in Colorado; and his close friends and neighbors whom he loved, including his very close friend Ann Goeke and her family.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Princeton High School Scholarship Fund at Fund101.org/donate.

Due to the continuing Covid virus pandemic the family will not be holding any services at this time. A celebration of life service will be scheduled sometime in 2021.

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Theodore Ziolkowski

1932–2020

Theodore Joseph Ziolkowski, renowned American Germanist and comparatist, prolific author of 35 books on literature, religion, and culture, died around 6 p.m. on December 5, 2020, in Kirkland Village, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Known as Professor Ziolkowski to thousands of students in his lecture courses and seminars at Princeton University, and as Dean Ziolkowski from his 13 years at the helm of the Graduate School there, he was Ted to close friends and acquaintances.

Ziolkowski was born on September 30, 1932, in Birmingham, Alabama. His mother, née Cecilia Jankowski, a second-generation Polish-American from the Chicago area, taught piano. His father immigrated to the United States from Poland. A composer and concert pianist who trained at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin and with Ignacy Jan Paderewski, he found security and happiness during the Great Depression as a music professor at the present-day University of Montevallo. In his Americanization, Mieczysław Ziółkowski shed the accents in the spelling of his names and came to be routinely called Professor Z for short.

As a boy, Theodore Ziolkowski (in those days Teddy to almost everyone) excelled scholastically, completing his secondary education at 15. In addition, he starred on the high-school football field and was even offered an athletic scholarship to the University of Alabama. His main extracurricular passion was the trumpet, especially jazz. For many years, he played the brass instrument professionally on most weekends, deriving from it a major source of income until he set the instrument aside in his early thirties. At that juncture he attained a full professorship — and realized that the advent of Elvis Presley would ring the rock-and-roll death knell for his style of trumpeting.

Theodore’s father brought with him all the trappings of an Old World formation. He peppered his heavily accented and colorfully formulated English with proverbs in Latin, German, Polish, and Russian, to mention only four tongues. The lush linguistic texture of the household inspired both his children, Theodore and his much younger brother and future classicist John, to immerse themselves in languages.

Theodore Ziolkowski received his A.B. from Duke University at 18 in 1951 and married Yetta Goldstein, his partner for life, a fellow Alabamian whose father had likewise emigrated from what is today Poland. A year later Ziolkowski earned his A.M. from the same institution, and the young couple had their eldest child, a daughter. In 1957 he took his Ph.D. from Yale University, where he studied under Hermann Weigand, Sterling Professor of German Literature. These busy times witnessed the birth of his first son in 1956, his second in 1958. Also in 1958, Yetta and he forged a friendship in Cologne with Heinrich Böll that would endure until the end of the German novelist’s lifetime.

Ziolkowski’s master’s thesis, focused on the translation of the Iliad by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, gave early evidence of his lifelong preoccupation with the reception of the Classics in later literature. His dissertation, on Hermann Hesse and Novalis, displayed his fascination with the continued vitality of Romanticism in what at that point was still relatively recent German prose: the Nobel prize-winning Hesse did not die until 1962.

After holding short-term appointments for a few years at Yale University, Ziolkowski moved to Columbia University in 1962; but he first attained real permanency when summoned as a full professor to Princeton University in 1964. From the start he taught large lecture courses, especially a perennially popular one on the development of the European novel. In acknowledgment of his teaching and scholarship, in 1969 he was named Class of 1900 Professor of German and Comparative Literature. In administration, his highest and most demanding service extended from 1979 to 1992 as Dean of the Graduate School.

In the 1960s his oeuvre comprised, in longer examinations, one devoted to Hermann Hesse and another tome bearing the title Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Contexts (1969). In the 1970s and 1980s he maintained those areas of attraction but delved ever more into the analysis of literary themes. His most innovative book from this phase may well have been Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (1972, recipient of the National Book Award). The 1990s saw his range expand yet again, with the far-reaching German Romanticism and Its Institutions (1990), the now-classic Virgil and the Moderns (1993), an exploration of the appearance of legal crises in literature entitled The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (1997, winner of the Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society), a study of the meaning held by towers as an image in literature, and, finally, the first in a series of volumes in German about the cultural role of specific cities in late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany.

After supposedly retiring in 2001 from active duty, Ziolkowski embarked upon what proved to be the most remarkably productive period of his life in book writing, at the tempo of one annually across two decades. As an emeritus, he was kidded admiringly by his family for
behaving like an assistant professor bucking for tenure. Long before retirement, he had earned a quiver of distinctions in North America, such as multiple Fulbrights, a Guggenheim, and a James Russell Lowell Prize, and he had merited recognition from the profession of language-and-literature scholars by election to the presidency of the Modern Language Association. Now his center of gravity was often situated in Europe.

Late in his career Yetta and he were drawn to spend at least a few months each year in Berlin. The devotion to Germany was reciprocated. In due course he was singled out for tribute by his peers there by such honors as the Goethe-Medaille, Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm Preis, Forschungspreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse. On a personal level, he treasured the ties he forged, flanked by his wife, through regular participation in the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt, and the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen.

The score of books, mostly in English but sometimes in German, from the past 20 years covers a breathtaking gamut. The final one, just out in 2020, entitled Roman Poets in Modern Guise: The Reception of Roman Poetry since World War I, caps his many explorations of the afterlives that the Greek and Roman Classics have enjoyed from the late eighteenth century until now. But other volumes to attest to his deepening and widening attraction to a host of other topics, especially involving religion and myth, from Gilgamesh down to the present day. Three examples, out of many, are The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modern Variations (2000), Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (2007), and Uses and Abuses of Moses: Literary Representations since the Enlightenment (2016).

Shortly after turning 88, Theodore Ziolkowski entered the advanced stages of heart failure. To the last, he retained his gusto for music and poetry. He rhapsodized about Bach, and he recited from memory German verses by Goethe, Hölderlin, and Novalis, especially those relating to particular sites, from the tops of mountains to the bottoms of mines, that he had visited with his wife of nearly 70 years. Often they would take turns in reciting poems, with a special favorite being Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Nightsong II,” with its closing lines “Warte nur, balde / Ruhest du auch,” translated by Longfellow as “Wait; soon like these / Thou too shalt rest.”

No further new books will appear with the letters Theodore Ziolkowski on the title page. No fourth dozen will spill onto another shelf. In the stock formulation of “publish or perish,” he took care to fulfill the first verb before succumbing to the second. That thought would make him happy, since he liked to finish well and to meet deadlines.

He is survived by his beloved wife Yetta Ziolkowski, of Princeton, NJ, and Bethlehem, PA; brother John Ziolkowski, of Arlington, VA; and daughter Margaret Ziolkowski and her husband Robert Thurston, of Miami, OH; elder son Jan and his wife Elizabeth Ziolkowski, of Newton, MA; and younger son Eric Ziolkowski and his wife Lee Upton, of Easton, PA. Also grieving his loss are a grandson and six granddaughters, along with two great-granddaughters and two great-grandsons. Despite his zeal for reading, learning, and writing, Theodore Ziolkowski cared deeply about those he loved and put his values as a humanist into practice as a richly rounded human being.

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Dail Archer Forsyth

Dail Archer Forsyth, 84, of Orrtanna, PA, formerly of Princeton, NJ, passed away peacefully on December 1, 2020. She is survived by her loving husband of 62 years Alexander M. Forsyth.

Dail was born in Baltimore, MD, the daughter of the late John Anthony and Margaret Henderson Brawner Archer. She was a graduate of Princeton High in 1954 and attended Dickinson College. She worked for her father’s laundry business, University Cleaners in Princeton, NJ, worked as a Bank Teller for Princeton Bank & Trust, and later for Princeton Day School before retiring to Gettysburg, PA. Dail enjoyed spending time with family, traveling, camping with her IDTT friends, bowling, attending Philadelphia Phillies games, and was a former member of the Princeton First Aid Ladies Auxiliary and a current member of the American Legion Auxiliary Post 262.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by her two daughters, June Miller (Jerry) of Biglerville, and Cindy Stadulis (Tom) of Austin, Texas; seven grandchildren, Jeremy Miller (Kris), Leslie Davenport (Travis), Philip Stadulis, Meghan Kapilevich (Gary), Ben Stadulis, Justine Miller, and Sara Stadulis; three great-grandchildren, Jocelyn Miller, Jaedyn Miller, and Emma Davenport; and two sisters, Lynn Waller (John) of Danbury, CT and Braith Eldridge (Howard) of Princeton, NJ.

Private services will be held at the discretion of the family. Memorial contributions can be made to the Buchannan Valley Fire Company, 1180 Buchanan Valley Road, Orrtanna, PA 17353 or the Adams County SPCA, 11 Goldenville Road, Gettysburg, PA 17325.

Arrangements have been entrusted to the Monahan Funeral Home in Gettysburg, PA. Online condolences may be expressed to the family at www.monahanfuneralhome.com.

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Rita M. Santora-Porter

Rita M. Santora-Porter, 78, of Winslow Twp. entered into God’s care Saturday, November 14, 2020 at home with her family by her side.

Born in Philadelphia, PA, she resided in Hammonton most of her life. Mrs. Porter was a manager with the Sands and Tropicana Casino and Hotels and retired from Design Benefits. Rita was a former member of St. Anthony’s Padua Church in Hammonton. She loved going to the casino and playing video poker

Predeceased by her parents, Vincent and Anna (Perri) Angelini; her siblings, Franny Graves and Jean Calabria; her husbands, Eugene Ashburn, Donald Santora Sr., and Ted Porter; and son Randy Ashburn. She is survived by one daughter, Teresa Santora; son and two daughters-in-law, Donald and Janine Santora Jr. and Stacy Ashburn; her grandchildren, Jennifer Speed, Emily and Sean Santora, Anthony Jones, her loving granddaughter who took amazing care of her Alison Campione and Jacob Ashburn; and three adored great-grandchildren, Michael, Giavonna Rita and Kaylee.

All services will be held privately for the family. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to Parkinson’s Foundation, 200 SE 1st Street, Suite 800, Miami, FL 33131 (www.parkinson.org).

Arrangements are entrusted to the Blackwell Memorial Home, Pennington, NJ.

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Philip Alexander Cruickshank

Philip Alexander Cruickshank, 91, of East Windsor died Friday, December 4, 2020, at the Meadow Lakes Senior Living Community. He was born in Bremerton, Washington, to Donald F. and Theodora Cruickshank. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Washington (1950) and a Doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1954).

Dr. Cruickshank and his family settled in Princeton in 1963, where he spent most of his career as a chemist at FMC’s Princeton Research Center. He was active in his sons’ scouting troops and served on the Princeton Board of Education in the 1970s.

After retiring, Phil pursued his photography and woodworking hobbies and was a member of the Old Guard of Princeton.

Phil was predeceased by his loving wife of 61 years, Natalie Cruickshank, and his eldest son Stewart A. Cruickshank, who passed away on June 8, 2020. He is survived by two children and three grandchildren: Marsha C. Wagner and her daughter Jessica; Walter D. Cruickshank, his wife Debi Gartland, and their daughters, Delaney and Riley; and Stewart’s widow Betty Cruickshank.

Arrangements are under the direction of the Mather-Hodge Funeral Home, Princeton.

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In Memoriam

Joann Henninger

1956-2020

From kind, courageous kindergarten classmate to confident, knowledgeable bakery customer rep.

Always remembering you on St. Patrick’s Day.