By Terence P. Jeffrey | December 30, 2020 | 9:53am EST
Hobey Baker (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
The Great War had been over nine days when Hobey Baker took off in his S.P.A.D. to explore some of the territory the Allies had seized back from the Germans.
“On the way home, my engine suddenly went dead and I had to land on the side of a hill only ten kilometers from Metz,” he wrote in a letter to his father. “Had my engine stopped the same way any time during my work over the lines, when the war was on, I would have been a prisoner.”
The success of Disney’s 1964 movie Mary Poppins has often obscured the fact the popular series of books describing the experiences of the enigmatic nanny were in fact written by the Australian born author P.L. Travers.
Travers’ own sense of ownership of her creation in turn obscured the contribution made by the illustrator Mary Shepard. Despite a 54 year collaboration, Shepard is regularly ignored in discussions of the books: the 2013 movie Saving Mr Banks, which detailed the genesis of the film, did not even mention Shepard or the pivotal role she played in the books’ success.
Shepard was born in Sussex on Christmas Day in 1909, the only daughter of Florence Chaplin, a painter, and E.H. Shepard, who illustrated Winnie the Pooh and the Wind in the Willows. Her mother died suddenly in 1927, and that same year Mary was accepted into the Slade School of Art where she studied painting and drawing.
The Office of Communications
Dec. 21, 2020 noon
From coronavirus to the environment, social justice to civic engagement, Princetonians rallied to make 2020 a year of purpose and achievement.
Video by
The Office of Communications
Princetonians demonstrated incredible resilience in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic fighting the virus, pushing forward academically and growing stronger as a community, as shown in the year-in-review video above.
The video features the song “I won’t sleep soundly,” written by first-year student Molly Trueman after attending a Black Lives Matter rally in June, and arranged and performed by Trueman and the Princeton University Glee Club.
The year began with a drumbeat of academic and co-curricular events. Students returned from winter recess, taking final exams in January for the last time before a change in the academic calendar, and then participated in Wintersession classes, and then the start of the spring term. Maya Lin’s new public art