Last week’s cover story on Princeton area private clubs that are becoming increasingly visible on the business networking scene was pencilled onto our story list several months ago. But we needed a person and a club to serve as a focal point.
That problem was solved easily enough on Wednesday, June 16, when U.S. 1 hosted a reception for entrepreneur-astronaut Greg Olsen and the co-writer of his autobiography, Tom Lento. One of the first people to show up was an outgoing, pleasant young woman named Jennifer Ross, the director of marketing for the Gallup Organization at 502 Carnegie Center. We soon discovered that Ross, a graduate of the University of Nebraska who did post-graduate study at Oxford, was also an enthusiastic member of the Nassau Club and she immediately offered to support our effort to find out more about the club and its members.
But for the fact that she was just too busy, Ross might have been the person on our cover on July 21. But events played out in another, totally unexpected and tragic way. Jennifer Ross, 40, died on July 18 of a sudden illness. She is survived by her father, Hal Ross, who ran the market research firm Mapes and Ross for many years at Research Park, grandmother Phyllis Grainger, and brothers Peter and Brian Ross.
We express our condolences to her family, her colleagues at Gallup, and to her many, many friends who gathered at the Nassau Club to celebrate her bright but brief life.
New School’s 50th
In our July 21 account of the New School for Music Study’s rich history of music education, we gave the Kingston-based school credit for more longevity that it actually has. The school is celebrating its 50th anniversary, not the 60th, as our headline and several references in the article indicated. The celebration begins with a jazz concert on Tuessday, August 3.
#b#To the Editor: Another View Of ‘Cheap’ Energy#/b#
In rebuttal to the comments made in the July 21 article “Energy Was Cheap — Hope You Enjoyed It” by Stephen Morgan, CEO of American Clean Energy in Saddle Brook, I question the basis of Morgan’s assumptions that energy costs “must” rise, given that he “spent most of his career with First Energy,” a Texas-based Big Energy company.
As for opinions from the New Jersey BPU, anyone who has ever had direct contact with spokespeople from BPU can attest to the fact that in New Jersey, BPU consistently takes the biased pro-Big Energy position versus the consumers.
BPU consistently passes rate increases onto consumers. PSEG is the best example of this. Two rate increases in four years when American Natural Gas publicly stated that there was an abundant supply of natural gas? Using increased numbers of consumers as the excuse to pump energy prices is becoming the common excuse seen in a very different light when a single energy company earned more in one fiscal quarter of the worst recession in January, 2009, than it earned in 10 years.
High energy consumption is a term that can easily be bandied about. Given the Enron debacle that caused quadrupling of energy costs in California, without factual basis in the late 1990s until the discovery of fraud in 2001, it is far easier for pro-Big Energy supporters to insist that continuing costs must rise without limit.
The costs rise in order to sustain huge profits. This is the reason many New Jerseyans are making the switch to solar energy and why New Jersey and California are now leading the nation in the switch to alternative energies.
In my opinion, this particular editorial needed a less biased view than that of cronies of Big Energy.
Eleanore Whitaker
Old Bridge
While Whitaker is the office manager of Ambient Engineering at 5 Crescent Avenue in Rocky Hill, she says her views of the energy market are solely her own.
