With Scholarship Gifts, Gary Forlini Shines a Spotlight on Two Members of the Class of 1943

On a warm October day, Gary Forlini traveled from his home in Bronxville, New York, to Princeton to have lunch in the Garden Room at the newly renovated Prospect House. It was a meal Forlini had been looking forward to because the menu included one of his passions: connecting present-day Tigers with two great Princetonians he admires: James “Smoky” Randall Stack from Cleveland, Ohio, and Maurice “Mo” Kirby Collette from Pelham, New York.

To be clear, Smoky and Mo wouldn’t be joining the group at the table. Both had been killed in service to their country soon after their Princeton graduations in 1943. But both are very much alive in Forlini’s mind, and he was eager to share their stories. On this autumn day, armed with the Class of 1943’s Nassau Herald and its 25th Reunion book, and brimming with information about Stack and Collette, Forlini dined with two undergraduates, the 2024 recipients of scholarships created in the 1943 classmates’ names.

Forlini isn’t related to Stack or Collette. He isn’t a Princeton alum, though he has a high regard for the University and its mission. He graduated from New York University and went on to have a career as a teacher, a textbook and technical writer, and then as an entrepreneur, establishing businesses related to education, market research and even a hotel in the Caribbean.

The paths that led him to create the James R. Stack Scholarship Fund and to make a documented bequest intention to the Maurice Kirby Collette Scholarship are remarkable ones. They included recollections from his childhood in Pelham, digs through archival material at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library and sifts through other primary source materials. His knowledge of them is formidable. “I know the biographies of these guys,” Forlini said. “You could give me a month and a year, and I could tell you what each was doing at that time.”

One might well ask, Why? What about these men inspired Forlini to call Princeton out of the blue to make a gift?

The Courage of Collette and the Class of 1943

Mo Collette lost his life in Luxembourg during the Battle of the Bulge, but people in Pelham were still talking about him in Forlini’s neighborhood as he grew up. His mother and aunt knew Collette’s parents. “I picked up a lot about him from very early on,” Forlini said.

When, in his 20s, Forlini became a textbook author for Prentice-Hall, he met Bob Boynton, another member of Princeton’s great Class of 1943, who was then a sales manager with the publishing company. Boynton became “instrumental,” Forlini said, “in connecting me in meaningful ways that reached the universe of teachers, principals and headmasters who would be the users of my books in their schools and who, later, would find some of my online educational services helpful.”

Forlini knew a scholarship had been set up by Collette’s mother in 1952 to honor her son. As he learned more about Collette, and came to know Boynton, his interest in the Class of 1943 grew.

Things didn’t always come easy for Collette, Forlini said, but he persevered: “What endears me to Mo is the depth of this desire to reach the school of his choice, which was Princeton.” Collette was rejected when he first applied to Princeton. He was only 15 at the time. “He was two years younger than his classmates because Pelham High School, where I also went to school, had the habit then of pushing ahead bright children.”

Hoping that a post-graduate year at the Lawrenceville School would help him gain Princeton admission, Collette applied and got in — but suffered a spinal concussion on the tennis court just days before the fall term started. His teachers helped him catch up with his studies when he finally arrived in Lawrenceville that spring, and Collette was admitted to Princeton for the fall of 1939.

He struggled academically that first year. Forlini found a letter in the Mudd library that informed Collette that he wouldn’t be invited back sophomore year unless he drastically improved his grades in the three subjects he was failing. He did, and he made even better grades his sophomore year. He also became a star on the golf team.

Everything changed for Collette and his classmates in December of their junior year, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States joined World War II. Collette, who graduated with honors in psychology and wrote his thesis on soldier morale, was one of the 309 students in his class of 636 to opt for early graduation in an accelerated program that the University began offering in January 1942. Those who enrolled took heavier course loads, attended school through the summer and entered a program of physical conditioning.

The accelerated plan coincided with an influx of military and war-related personnel. Patriotic fever ran high. Tigers adapted to a military life, sharing barracks with thousands of officers who trained at the V-12 Navy school that opened on campus in October 1942 and other programs for various branches of the armed forces that soon followed. Undergraduates shouldered up to six courses a semester and took “emergency” courses in radio, navigation, and Japanese and German languages. As President Harold Dodds *1914 observed, the goal of Princeton students became “losing themselves in the war effort.”

Collette and the other accelerated students in his class graduated in January 1943. Having joined the Enlisted Reserve Corps of the Army while at Princeton, Collette went for basic training at Camp Hood in Texas after graduation. He received his commission in tank destroyers and left for Europe. “He was really only on the ground in Europe for nine days before he was fatally wounded,” Forlini said. His death was recorded on Dec. 24, 1944.

When the remaining ’43ers on campus graduated in June, L.W. “Bill” Waters Jr. noted in the class history, “Even the graduation ceremonies were brief and to the point; there were no guest speakers and no honorary degrees . . . The Class of 1943 had at last graduated, and, almost to the last man, its members were preparing to leave immediately for military service or for work directly connected with the war effort.”

Twenty-six members of the Class of 1943 died in service to their country before peace came in the summer of 1945.

Among them was James Stack, whose story also caught Forlini’s attention as he researched the class’s history.

Giving Stack “legs in life”

“Jim was ‘Smoky’ to his friends and acquaintances,” Forlini wrote in a biography of Stack that is presented to recipients of his named scholarship. “While the appellation undoubtedly began as a pun, it stuck probably because its connotations fit an affable guy, one with the ease and polish of a musician and the potential of a powerful intellect to be disarming, mischievous, clever yet never fully fathomable. Adding to his aura was the fact of being a left-hander and a trumpet player and an enthusiastic music lover overall — to wit, a devoted band member for the duration of his time at Princeton. His inquisitiveness, the ‘innate cheerfulness’ his friends enjoyed (their words), his potential for fun and fairness and the fortitude he would later embody during wartime — all this was part and parcel of Smoky.”

James Stack was born in Pittsburgh. His father died when Jim was 6, according to Forlini. When his mother remarried, they moved to Cleveland. At Princeton, he majored in basic engineering. Like Collette, he joined the accelerated graduation program.

“He wanted to be a pilot,” Forlini said, “but his eyesight was not good enough, so he took his second choice, which was the Navy.” In Stack’s file at Mudd, Forlini found notes from the Princeton Alumni Weekly. On May 14, 1943, PAW reported that Stack was at the Navy Reserve Midshipmen School, an intensive four-month officer training program. Students took classes at Columbia University and conducted boat drills aboard the USS Prairie State, anchored in the Hudson River.

Additional PAW notes gave Forlini insight into the young man’s life. One from July 2, 1943, said Stack had graduated from the Prairie State program on June 16. In October of that year, PAW reported that “Smoky Stack is an ensign out on the high seas somewhere. He says that he and Andy Turnbull ’42 are taking a beating from officers of other colleges!” On June 2, 1944, PAW published: “Jim Stack, also somewhere on the broad expanses of the Pacific, sums up his past few months’ adventures in this paragraph: ‘You’ve heard often of the islands of the Pacific, calm lagoons, cool breezes … bliss and comfort personified — well, I’ve heard of them too — get out your map and tell me where they are — we must have hit the wrong ones.’”

Forlini’s research showed Stack could also be serious. In the summer of 1944, as chief engineer on the USS Palmer, Stack wrote his mother, “I have made a valuable and responsible man of myself in a few small ways. To me it means self-pride and confidence with modesty.”

Forlini’s biography of Stack notes the Princeton alum “was the Palmer’s chief engineer during its long and sometimes treacherous engagements in the western Pacific, including the Allied invasions of the Marshall Islands and the Marianas. Because the ship was old, the ongoing challenge to its chief engineer was to keep it running and to work around frequent mechanical failures, as the Palmer was a vintage World War I warhorse refitted as a mine sweeper.”

On Jan. 7, 1945, the Palmer entered the Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines. Forlini described the event: “A lone Japanese bomber sighted the Palmer, turned toward it … and released two large bombs, sinking the Palmer in minutes. Of the ship’s crew of 120 men, Jim was among the 28 killed. Because of his shipboard responsibilities, Smoky probably worked to his end to keep his ship afloat.”

“I feel the more I can learn and share about these men, the more I can keep them relevant,” Forlini said. “That really was my motivation for the scholarship. I wanted to give Stack legs in life. Jim was a bright light who, sadly, marked the end of his bloodline.”

Scholarships carry the legacy forward

For Forlini, Collette and Stack are “two wonderful examples of what they sacrificed for the rest of us, but also what the rest of us lost by losing them. They would have made contributions. It’s just such a heart-wrenching thing.”

Stack’s father was an only child. His sister had no children. Forlini wanted to ensure that Stack’s legacy would live on. “I decided to put the scholarship in his name — especially when I learned there would be an opportunity for recipients of the scholarship to know who it was for,” said Forlini. “That’s why I wrote the biography of Jim.”

The lunch with the scholarship recipients at Prospect made his gift that much more meaningful for Forlini, whose career has been dedicated to education. “It was an unexpected treasure for me to have the opportunity to have lunch with these wonderful students and tell them a bit about Jim and Mo,” he said, “and to get a sense of the contributions these students have already begun to make.”

In that meaningful lunch conversation, Stack’s and Collette’s names were revived on Princeton’s campus, almost 100 years after they arrived as eager freshmen. Not so far away in an archway of McCosh Hall is an inscription of a poem from a member of the Class of 1914: “Here we were taught by men and gothic towers democracy and faith and righteousness and love of unseen things that do not die.”

Two Princetonians who gave their young lives for democracy were also unseen, yet in the air, that autumn afternoon, thanks to Forlini.

For Forlini, the scholarships are not only about honoring the past but also about ensuring the future. He hopes to inspire the next generations of Princetonians to live lives of learning, service, sacrifice and character in the spirit of Smoky and Mo.

“And by the way,” he points out, “11% of the Class of ’43 ultimately chose careers in education, second in number only to the 13% who chose law. Maybe we still have much to learn from the Class of 1943!”

To learn more about how you can document your bequest for Princeton or start your own scholarship, please contact the Gift Planning team.

—Catherine Mallette ’84