Gift Planning

From Arts to Scholarships to Neuroscience: Decades of Support from Langenberg ’35 Reflect Diverse Interests

October 8, 2012

Oliver M. Langenberg ’35’s broad intellectual curiosity was evident in his enduring support of his alma mater.

Langenberg, who died March 28 just seven weeks before turning 100, was a loyal supporter of Annual Giving. His perfect record of 71 consecutive years began the year Princeton instituted AG. He also created a scholarship in honor of his father, Harry Hill Langenberg, Class of 1900, and an endowed fund for course development and research in the Bendheim Center for Finance. In 2000 he donated nine rare Soviet propaganda posters from the 1930s to the University Library’s Graphic Arts Collection.

Langenberg bookended the Aspire campaign with two scholarships—one made soon after the campaign launched, in honor of his close friend William K. Selden ’34, and the other in its final months, through a bequest. He also created an Innovation Fund for Neuroscience, one of the campaign’s areas of priority.

“Princeton is in my bones,” he said in 2009. “My father, brother, son, and uncle all went to Princeton, but the most important thing is that I went there. It’s part of me.”

The lifelong resident of St. Louis also was a generous patron of its educational, cultural, and civic institutions. He enjoyed a 70-year career in his hometown, largely with A. G. Edwards & Sons (now Wells Fargo Securities), where he rose to senior vice president of investments.

Langenberg was serving as president of his class and planned giving class chair at the time of his death. A philosophy major and squash varsity letter-winner, he returned to Princeton several times, most recently in 2010 for his class’s 75th Reunion; and in 2008, to give his namesake granddaughter, Olivia, a campus tour in celebration of his 96th birthday.

“He talked often about what an opportunity it had been for him to go to Princeton,” his wife, Mary, remembers. “He would tell stories with a sincere, deep, and abiding feeling about his years on campus.”