50-Year-Old Princeton Junior Returns

Ernest H. McCall is not like most of his colleagues in the junior class at Princeton University. He may have already been to his 25th class reunion, even though he has not yet graduated. And for the past 14 years, he has been the president of his family business in Portland, Ore.

McCall, originally a member of the class of 1957, returned to complete his undergraduate degree after a thirty-year hiatus. And if he makes it through the next year and a half without deciding to take more time off, he will be 52 when he graduates in 1987.

Required to withdraw for academic reasons after his sophomore year in 1955, McCall took some time off. Thirty years later, after after an "independent study" in Germany, a motorcycle trip through Africa and a flying career in the Navy, McCall reenrolled in school.

McCall said that when he entered Princeton, he was burned out after finishing five years of prep school in four. He said freshman year was uninspiring, largely a repeat of his last year of high school. One semester he didn't buy any books.

His sophomore grades weren't abysmal, but McCall's cumulative GPA was low enough to prevent him from advancing to junior year. So he left, worked in Alaska for a summer, and spent the next year at the University of Washington.

Thirty years later, the 50-year-old junior eats at his old eating club, the Cap and Gown, and is president of the Flying Club.

McCall is frequently reminded, though, that he is old enough to be the father of his fellow students. Fifty-six current undergraduates are children of his original classmates; 150 are children of men who were at Princeton while he was. And McCall's youngest son says he will apply to the university next fall.