It was, says longtime friend Pete Boutin, a typical Bob Pringle gesture. Having defeated his opponents in the swimming pool by a wide margin, he waited for Boutin to finish and congratulated him on a great race. They were all of 5 years old, recalls Boutin, ’72, but that childhood moment was emblematic of the Bob Pringle he would come to know in adulthood—generous, companionable, irrepressible. “Bob was a quintessential giver,” recalled Boutin at a memorial service for Pringle in an overflowing Memorial Church on January 24. “He enriched my life.”
Pringle, a prominent Bay Area marketing professional and former associate vice president of development at Stanford, died January 18 after being struck by a train in Menlo Park. He was 54.
“Bob was such a tremendous support for everyone. He was always willing to help anyone who was in need. I could not have asked for a more supportive husband, and I don’t think you could find a more supportive father,” says his wife, Maggie (Ely) Pringle, MA ’77. “His children were really his life.”
He grew up in Woodland, Calif., and attended Woodland High School, where he was a star swimmer. As a student at Stanford, he was a member of Sigma Chi fraternity and the Axe Committee, and attended Stanford in Florence. After graduating with a degree in history and economics, he earned an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University.
Pringle worked at several San Francisco marketing firms, including Crown Zellerbach, Ketchum Communications and J. Walter Thompson. From 1988 to 1997, he served as executive director and principal at Landor Associates, a branding and design consultancy.
A longtime Stanford volunteer, Pringle joined the University’s development team in 1997 as associate vice president and director of marketing. During his five-year tenure, he oversaw branding and marketing for The Stanford Fund and for The Campaign for Undergraduate Education, and he played a key role in planning and executing the University’s “Think Again” program—a nationwide tour featuring faculty and students that went to 12 cities in seven months. University President John Hennessy says Pringle was “a great treasure to have in our midst.”
Pringle left Stanford in 2002 to work as chief marketing officer for Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe, a San Francisco-based law firm.
In addition to his wife, Pringle is survived by his children, Abby, David and Will; his mother, Janet; and his mother- and father-in-law, Shirley, ’48, and Leonard Ely, ’48, MBA ’50.
