Fred Woodbridge, class of 1978, showed strong qualities of leadership as senior class president of Princeton Day School and impressive qualities of fine citizenship. His concern for the good of the community was always sincere and steadfast. Fred’s parents have established a memorial award at PDS to be presented each year to a graduating senior who has exhibited outstanding leadership qualities in developing class unity and spirit.
Andrew Hildick-Smith who was Fred's Princeton roommate our senior year shared the following very poignant insights about Fred's unique talents and interests.
Fred had an extraordinary visual memory. A sort of parlor trick expression of it was that you could name a State of the United States and he would meticulously draw its outline to scale and in great detail. As a project when he was a senior in high school, he painted all the states of the union on a tarmac of the school’s playground. I think that skill was part of why he became involved with transportation engineering at Princeton.
Politics was very important to Fred. He was a young conservative at a time that must have been exciting for him with Ronald Reagan in office. He had plans to be a congressman. I think he would have succeeded. After college, I was living in Trenton and he was living in Princeton. He was working in a local stock brokerage firm and attending law school at Rutgers at night. The law degree was part of his political aspiration plan.
Fred was a fan of Fred Astaire. The era, the style, the dancing. Maybe a physical similarity too. Both being trim and smaller people. It is sadly ironic that one time I remember Fred telling Paul Horvat and me how he was going to live longer than us because smaller people generally live longer and he had relatives that lived to an old age.
Shortly after college, I was going to visit a friend in Japan and Fred was planning on taking the Trans Siberian railroad. So we teamed up and traveled from Helsinki to Yokohama together. In 1982, there was still a Soviet Union and they were embroiled in Afghanistan. I remember when we were on the train in Finland and were approaching the Soviet border. We had a sort of a James Bondish image of the USSR with spies everywhere and surveillance of foreigners being standard practice. With the train slowing down, Fred decided to put on a coat and tie with the idea that the border guards would pass over a well-dressed individual. I cannot remember if it was currency or what it was, but he had something thin hidden inside the pages of the book he was reading that we thought was prohibited. Of course when the guard came into our sleeper berth to examine passports, he only asked Fred to open his travel bag for inspection. Whatever it was that Fred had hidden remained so and we proceed to Leningrad. We also stayed in Moscow and Irkutsk. The food on the train was not very good. For one lunch, Fred selected the “whale” soup. Perhaps it was a mistranslation. That soup and the trip itself were good windows into Fred. He enjoyed doing things that were different. After reaching Vladivostok we took a boat to Yokohama and then went our separate ways.
While eating “whale” for lunch does not sound too environmentally friendly, Fred was a fiend about conserving water. In college anyway, when he had a shower, it would just be a trickle of water.
Fred had a lasting impact on my life. A few years after college, Fred and his friend Tom hosted a party in Princeton in what I think was Fred’s uncle’s house. I was one of the people that Fred invited and my future wife was one of the people that Tom invited. Thank you Fred.
We invite you to send any other insights about Fred which you can add to the section of the site found on the home page where you can offer your reflections in the comments area under that heading.
We invite you to send any other insights about Fred which you can add to the section of the site found on the home page where you can offer your reflections in the comments area under that heading.
