In the second year, contributions picked up after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and when the campaign ended, 25 percent of the alumni, and friends, had given $102,000. During the war, foreign currency came in from alumni stationed in military theatres throughout the world; a Class of 1923 lieutenant colonel in Italy sent a thousand-lira note in Allied Military currency, its modest value enhanced by Marlene Dietrich's autograph.
Contributions grew steadily in the postwar period, and the tenth year, 1949-1950, the half-million dollar mark was passed. Non-alumni parents, in their second year of participation, contributed $60,000. This pioneering program, which eventually brought upward of $100,000 annually from approximately 2,000 non-alumni parents, was adopted by many other colleges.
Six years later, in 1955-1956, the million-dollar mark was passed. Meantime, alumni participation was also growing steadily, and in 1958-1959 it reached 72.2 percent, the best attained by any college in the United States up to then. Contributing to this record were 2,000 alumni workers in some three hundred cities here and abroad, who followed up the appeals of sixty-odd class agents with telephone calls and visits, in a program that had been started in 1947-1948. Their work was especially valuable in combating procrastination, which is not only a thief of time but, Annual Giving holds, a cause, if not cured, of Lybunts. A Lybunt is one who gave Last Year But Not This. Regional workers also helped in recruiting Tybnols. A Tybnol (another Princeton-originated term) is one who gave This Year But Not Last.
The Class of 1898, which had 100 percent participation the first year of Annual Giving, continued blissfully ignorant of both Lybunts and Tybnols, maintaining its perfect record for twenty-five years.
In the 1960s, total contributions increased dramatically in response to expanding University needs. ``More is expected of us,'' President Goheen told his fellow alumni, ``because more is expected of Princeton. There is more to be learned today; more to be done.'' In the silver anniversary year, 1964-1965, Annual Giving celebrated ``twenty-five years of thoughtful dependable support'' by exceeding $2 million for the first time. Three years later, it reached the $3 million plateau.
In 1962 and again in 1968, Princeton received the American Alumni Council's Grand Award for Sustained Performance in Annual Giving; no other university had received this award more than once.
One factor in the rapid rise in total contributions in the 1960s was the growing participation of Graduate School alumni, first begun in 1957-1958. The seventy-eight contributors the first year had grown to 1,000 ten years later. Another factor was the support of corporations, who matched gifts of Princeton employees in a plan initiated in 1954-1955 by General Electric and who, in some cases, made additional corporate contributions. This support grew steadily until Annual Giving was receiving between $300,000 and $400,000 annually from 450 corporations. But the most important factor was the rivalry among alumni classes vying for the honor of contributing the most to Princeton. The Class of 1922 was the first to top $100,000, just before its forty-second reunion in 1964. Thereafter, classes preparing for major reunions led the way. In 1966, the Classes of 1926 and 1941 passed the $200,000 mark, and a year later, the Class of 1942 topped $300,000. In 1971 the fiftieth reunion Class of 1921 broke the $400,000 barrier, and three years later the twenty-fifth reunion Class of 1949 became Annual Giving's first half-million- dollar class. The 1949 class agent, Ralph Glendinning, had started a few years earlier to prepare his classmates for their achievement with this counsel: ``Make your contribution proportionate to Princeton's place in higher education -- and to what having gone to Princeton has meant to you, your career, and your family.''
In 1971-1972 a special Annual Giving effort in honor of President Goheen, on the eve of his retirement, brought in a record-breaking total of $3,805,872. The following year, another special effort in honor of newly elected President Bowen produced another record: $3,955,842. These results, President Bowen told the alumni, demonstrated once again their pride and confidence in Princeton. ``We thank you for your trust,'' he said. ``We shall strive to live up to it.''
Following eight consecutive years in the $3 million range, contributions to Annual Giving in 1975-1976 exceeded $4 million for the first time in the program's thirty-six-year history. In the same year two other major records were set when the Class of 1951 became the first twenty-fifth reunion class to contribute as much as $700,000, and the fiftieth reunion Class of 1926 became the first class to pass the $2 million mark in accumulated contributions. The total achievement in the year of the nation's bicentennial -- $4.4 million -- represented a 26 percent increase over the previous year, the greatest one-year jump in Annual Giving history. This record sum was the equivalent of income from the endowment of more than $100 million.
Credit for Annual Giving's perennial success belongs, in part, to its small professional staff, which has been headed by Edgar M. Gemmell '34, Edward A. Myers '38, George J. Cooke, Jr. '22, Arthur J. Horton '42, and Joseph L. Bolster, Jr. '52. Credit also belongs to the legions of dedicated volunteers who have worked so effectively under the leadership of the Annual Giving chairmen, and who have each year, in the words of one chairman, ``sacrificed their evenings, their weekends, and perhaps, temporarily, even the affection of their long-suffering families'' to earn Princeton's ``abiding thanks for a job well done.'' Annual Giving chairmen, since the beginning, have been: Harold H. Helm '20, Richard L. Kennedy '28, Ernest C. Savage '19, Richard K. Stevens '22, S. Barksdale Penick '25, Baldwin Maull '22, Franklin T. McClintock '25, Sidney Lanier '24, Geoffrey Stengel '37, Harry H. Neuberger '17, Arthur Gardner '23, Macpherson Raymond '40, Amos Eno '32, Gilbert Lea '36, Duncan Van Norden '35, Edward C. Eisenhart '42, F. Stark Newberry '27, Douglas H. Hahn '34, Robert P. Hazlehurst, Jr. '40, John F. Maloney, '35, Winthrop A. Short '41, Sharon Clay Risk '43, Roby Harrington III '51, and Charles T. Bellingrath '56.