From a road trip to a lifetime: Bonnie Hewson ’73 and Chuck Marboe ’71 share a Princeton legacy

It might have started with a roommate assignment — an administrative decision that can alter the course of a life. In her first year at Princeton, Bonnie Hewson ’73 was matched with roommate Kitsie Eckert ’74. Kitsie had a boyfriend, Ned Claxton ’71, who was a senior.

Or maybe it started before that, with Hewson’s grandmother, who had given her a Ford Maverick— “a huge, heavy car, so underpowered, but it could hold four people,” said Hewson. It was unusual to have a car on campus, and it turned out to be useful — Bonnie, Kitsie, Ned and Ned’s friend, Chuck — Charles Marboe ’71 — piled into the Maverick for winter break to join Ned’s family and other Terrace Club friends in Center Sandwich, New Hampshire.

They snowshoed and ate huge family meals and played Elton John and Tom Rush and Workingman’s Dead in the evenings by the fireplace. Chuck was witty and fun and charming.

A week later, Hewson called her mother, Barbara Stanton Hewson, from campus. “I’ve met the guy I’m going to marry,” she said. Barbara Hewson, who graduated from Parsons School of Design in the 1930s and had a trailblazing career in magazine publishing, culminating in the role of editor-in-chief of Collier’s, was not impressed by the pronouncement and urged her daughter to explore more options. “Play the field,” she said.

But the heart wants what the heart wants.

Their initial road trip became a lifetime journey filled with joy and excitement, and sometimes, shared sorrows. “We had a wonderful life. We dated for 55 years and were married for 52 of them,” Hewson said with a laugh.

Princeton brought them together and continued to play a role in the couple’s busy lives. It was a love story that started the moment she submitted her application to Princeton, an action taken in secret because her father, William B. Hewson ’33, was adamantly against the idea of women attending his alma mater.

Changing her father’s mind was just one of Hewson’s accomplishments, among them professional successes she credits to her Princeton education.

Rah rah rah, Tiger Tiger Tiger

“My dad loved Princeton with a passion,” Hewson said. “When I was a little kid, we would go to football games. We didn’t live that far away. For me, it was just a time to go and play with children of his friends. I loved the band. I loved the pageantry. But I didn’t really know anything about the University.”

While Hewson was in high school, her father, who had happily supported her older brother, Bill ’57, when he chose Princeton, made clear his thoughts on the prospect of women at Old Nassau. “He’d say, ‘It’s going to ruin the education,’” Hewson said.

Fortunately, the University decided otherwise. In the fall of 1969, the first women arrived on campus who would have a full four undergraduate years at Princeton and graduate in 1973. One of them was Emily Fisher ’73, a dear friend of Hewson’s. In Hewson’s senior year of high school, she visited Emily on campus. “We had a wonderful time,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Oh this is absolutely it for me.’ But I didn’t tell my dad I was applying.”

When she was offered admission to the class of 1974, she finally filled her father in. “And it was so sweet,” Hewson said. “He just went 180 degrees. He was like one of those dolls that went like this,” she said, making a motion to show her head spinning around. “‘You’re going to Princeton? That’s the best thing ever,’ he said. All issues about women going to Princeton were forgotten.”

As a student, Hewson dove into the nascent women’s athletics program. She added her voice to those of other female athletes who felt the University’s multiyear plan to gradually build club and varsity teams for women was too slow. “We’d been playing at good schools in high school,” said Hewson. “We pointed out that we would try out for varsity teams if we had chosen other colleges. So why not now?”

Merrily Dean Baker was hired in 1970 to start the women’s athletics program. She had no budget and no coaches, according to “I Can Do Anything: Stories from the First 50 Years of Women’s Athletics at Princeton University,” by Jerry Price.

But Baker listened to the student-athletes, and the University listened to her. In the 1971-72 academic year, the first wave of women’s varsity teams included tennis, swimming, diving, basketball, squash and field hockey. Hewston played on the squash team, coached by the formidable Betty Constable; in 1973 they won the inaugural intercollegiate Howe Cup. Hewson and Fisher co-captained the varsity field hockey team, coached by Baker.

“When the University said, ‘Well, we’ll give you little pins in lieu of letter sweaters,’ we said no,” Hewson said of her time as a pioneer in Princeton women’s athletics. “I wanted to be like my dad and my brother. I didn’t want to be different.”

The women got their sweaters.

Hewson’s father, who had retired at age 55 as president of the Brooklyn Union Gas Company, was then working on special projects in Princeton’s development office and had moved back to the area with her mother. “My dad, the person who didn’t want coeducation, came to every field hockey match, most squash games. And that was so fun for me to have a fan base.”

Hewson was just as tenacious in the classroom, and she flourished in the liberal arts curriculum.

“I’m a history major, but my senior year, I took an elective that was measuring nerve impulses up and down a squid axon. If you wanted to explore something, you did,” she said. “I took Econ 101 also in my senior year and I loved it, and then I ended up going into finance.
“I loved precepts or small classes where you could go toe-to-toe with people, including professors. Maybe your arguments held water and maybe they didn’t, but boy, it gave you so much confidence.”

A grant from the Department of History allowed her to do original research in the D.C. area for her senior thesis, which examined Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s role in leading social and economic reforms in the post-World War II reconstruction of Japan. “The fun part was I got to go interview a lot of guys who had worked for MacArthur.”

As passionate as she was about Princeton, Hewson was also eager to advance her relationship with Marboe, who was then in medical school at Penn State in Hershey. She drew up a plan where she could graduate in three years rather than four, and received approval from Dean Dennis Gray and Dick Challener ’44, chair of the history department (and her thesis adviser). She graduated early with highest honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

On Aug. 31, 1973, Bonnie Hewson and Chuck Marboe were married in the sweltering heat of the Old North Vestry of the First Congregational Church in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Her sister, Jane Hewson ’77, was maid of honor, Mike Tourtellot ’71 was best man, Fisher and Cece Herron ’74 were bridesmaids, Bill Hewson ’57 was an usher, a very Princeton wedding.

In partnership, following passions

Hewson and Marboe were able to both follow their passions in their careers. “It takes a spirit of shared aspiration and sacrifice to make it work,” Hewson said. “We kept trading off. He was in medical school, and then he was a resident and I went to law school. Somebody was always going to be the breadwinner.”

When he completed his medical training, Marboe accepted a faculty appointment in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University, where he spent the majority of his career. When he retired in 2021, he was a professor, vice chair for education and director of professional development.

Hewson graduated from New York University School of Law and became a partner in a New York law firm.

When Marboe wanted to go to the University of Southern California to help start a cardiac transplant program in 1993, a role that would last for three years, Hewson supported the decision, even though it meant relocating their two young daughters and making a career shift. “I left my law firm and took a job in banking because I couldn’t move my practice to L.A.,” she said.

She credits the confidence she built at Princeton for her success in a career that included several successful pivots.

“When I got into the business world, there were no women in law and then there were no women in finance, and I thought, ‘Well, there were no women at Princeton when I got there. No prob,’” she said. “I never felt uncomfortable and that’s what Princeton gave me.”

Over the years, she became a founding partner in an investment joint venture that provided financial advisory services in emerging and frontier markets. In 2009, she joined U.N. Habitat for two years as director of urban finance, launching a program that used microfinance techniques to help people get homes in emerging markets.

“I was based in Nairobi, Kenya. During that time, Chuck started a residency training program in pathology in Rwanda,” she said. “Those were really exciting times. I felt hopeful internationally. I felt like we were making a difference. And our family did all kinds of fun things. Chuck and I went to see the mountain gorillas. Our younger daughter, Elinor, was working in Israel. She and I went on safari in Kenya and Tanzania. Our daughter, Kari, met me in Morocco when I was looking at a housing project there.”

Her Princeton thesis research informed her approach to her job as she worked to build infrastructure in emerging nations. “When MacArthur was in Japan during the reconstruction, there was a lot of, ‘Tell me your ideas. Let’s work together. Let’s really do something positive.’” Hewson took a similar approach. “I was trying to listen to what people wanted,” she said.

When Hewson retired at 60 from the U.N., she took on new roles at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, first as department administrator and CFO for the Department of Orthopedic Surgery, and then as executive director of development for Orthopedics until January 2021.

Creating a shared legacy

Princeton was an abiding part of Hewson and Marboe’s life together. They both served as ambassadors for the Alumni Schools Committee, and Hewson was on her class leadership team for Annual Giving. She also served on the board of the Princeton Club of New York. And of course, the couple enjoyed attending both their major Reunions, reconnecting with family and many close friends.

Two photos Hewson shared are tributes to the two Tigers’ long relationship with the University. One shows them at Marboe’s graduation day, the other is at her 50th Reunion. “That was our last reunion together,” said Hewson. “Sadly, we lost Chuck to cancer last year. We were lucky that he lived two more years after his diagnosis.

“One of the things we did was accelerate our thinking about what we wanted to do to give a legacy to places.”

A primary concern was to honor their daughter Kari, who died in an accident in 2022. “We made some donations and pledges to California College of the Arts where Kari was on the faculty, including a lectureship and a scholarship fund,” Hewson said. She is now on the board of trustees at CCA.

They also wanted to include Princeton. “We wanted to do something that would hit both our interests,” Hewson said. Marboe had been in the Program on Science in Human Affairs and also did a lot of research as a biology major. Hewson remembered how important her research grants were to her as a senior working on her thesis: “The first installment of our gift, the Marboe Hewson Fund, is going to support undergraduate research in biology. For future installments, we will explore wherever else the need is.”

Their gift will help ensure that today’s students will have the means to follow their curiosity and pursue original scholarship.

“When I think about Princeton, I really want to recognize how much exposure I had there to so many different ideas, and how students have the ability to explore and pick and choose things that interest them,” Hewson said.

Their gift also supports Princeton’s dedication to open dialogue — essential to building the kind of confidence Hewson attributes to her years on campus.

“It was a big deal for me, really for all my life,” she said.

The gift is also, of course, another chapter in the couple’s never-ending love story. A sweet Tiger tale that began at Princeton and will live on for the benefit of others.

—Catherine Mallette ’84

To learn more about joining the 1746 Society, please submit a Generations response form or contact us at 609.258.6318 or GiftPlanning@princeton.edu.