Robb Prince ’63 P91

A remembrance by Bob Seddig

Robb Prince lived on First Burton during our freshman year (far down that long hall from me). We both came to Carleton as apprehensive, high-achieving students who were maybe more average than even Garrison Keillor would allow, and we gradually became lifelong friends.

He hailed from Duluth, which made him an expert on Minnesota winters and sailing. As a sophomore, he was an accomplished graduate of “Industrial Organization and Pricing Policy,” taught by the redoubtable Professor Ada Mae Harrison, which presaged a successful career in business.

Our friendship deepened junior year when Robb and others led us to Hill House, an off-campus home of our own (though not without the maid service that characterized men’s, but not women’s, residences). Leadership came naturally to Robb, and soon he was manager of KARL (now KRLX), the campus radio station. He and I put our possibly misguided talents to good use writing and taping clothing-store commercials for the station. Classics in their own right, they belong in the Smithsonian, or at least the archives of the Northfield Chamber of Commerce.

Gadgetry, electronics, and mechanical wizardry also came naturally, whether with radios, tape recorders, or his self-designed alarm clock. This last device, originally designed in high school, was piloted by a timer which closed the window, activated an electric space heater, and turned on the morning radio news on WCCO, all before he rolled out of bed.

After Carleton, Robb attended the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with an MBA in 1965. He worked briefly for United Air Lines, then shifted to the more congenial local setting of Josten’s in Minneapolis, where he undertook a decades-long position as chief financial officer.

Robb maintained an intense commitment to the values of liberal education. He was a loyal and active alumnus of Carleton, one of the pillars of our ongoing identity as a graduating class. Owing to his financial acumen and success, Robb was invited to join the Board of Trustees of Hamline University. He was serving as its chair at the time he became ill.

When we were at Carleton, I often visited the Prince family (his father was Milton, ’27) in Duluth. I shall never forget the family hospitality, including sailing on Ottertail Lake, where the Prince family had a cabin. The hospitality was lifelong. Years later, when our daughter Erica ’98 was a student at Carleton, Robb and his wife (Jackie Marik Prince ’65) often visited and treated her to dinner out. Erica remembers this with great fondness.

Robb called me two summers ago (June, 2010) when we were living in Maine, to inform me that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We talked on several occasions, but the illness was aggressive and unrelenting, and he died within two months. With great sorrow I spoke for our class at his memorial service, giving public testimony to a man of honesty, integrity, selflessness, and great warmth.