Anozie A. Ozumba (1942-2025)

 

The Class has learned that Ano Ozumba passed away on August 25, in Nigeria.

 

Ano entered Princeton in the fall of 1963, as a sophomore. Regardless of what the Nassau Herald says, he was a member of Dial Lodge as a junior and senior.
 
After graduating with a BS in Electrical Engineering, Ano went on to graduate school at Rutgers, where he earned a PhD in Computer Science. While there, he met Michele Ann Hudgins, an undergraduate at Douglass (Class of ’73). Ano and Michele married, and had a son, Njikoka (NJ), born in 1973, and two daughters, Obiageli (Oby, 1976) and Adora (1978). NJ is now an IT consultant in Atlanta; Oby lives in Boise, Idaho where she’s a project manager in the St. Luke’s Health System; and Adora is an emergency medicine physician in Trumbull, CT. Michele, who also lives in Atlanta, has her own consulting firm and is currently president of the Jeanette Rankin Foundation.
 
PhD in hand, Ano joined the fledgling IT Department of the First National Bank of Central New Jersey, in Bridgewater Township. He was a key part of the team that installed the first ATMs in New Jersey.
 
As time went by, Ano increasingly felt the pull of his native land. He believed he could put his talents and education to better use serving his own people, in his own country, than he could here. In 1982 he and his family returned to Nigeria, where he was appointed a professor in the first department of Computer Science at the newly established Anambra State University of Technology. In 1985, they came back to the US, where he was again employed as an IT consultant at First National Bank in Somerville, NJ.
 
Ano returned to Nigeria in 1991 and established Superior Computer Services, which became a leading telecommunications and electronic security company in Enugu. Michele and the children, all American citizens, have lived mostly in the USA, but they all did a lot of traveling back and forth.
 

Ano was very active in the alumni association of his secondary school, Government College Umuahia. The school had been through hard times, and the alumni have banded together to rebuild it. Ano was deeply involved in that effort and served as the school's choir director, and he recently established a prize for the top music student in the school. He is remembered by his high school classmates fondly especially for his role in the school's music program.

 

Ano's family created an online platform (Click Here) for those who wish to share condolence messages for Ano's Memorial.  Feel free to share with the group.

Nassau Herald

Tributes and Memories

Dick "Woody" Woodbridge '65

 

Trying to summarize my relationship with Ano Ozumba '66 isn’t easy, as it spanned over 63 years. It started when I was an Orange Key Keyceptor, and Ano, entering as a sophomore, was assigned to me along with freshmen in the Great Class of 1967. It ended, I guess, three weeks ago with my last email from Ano. I find it hard to accept that he's gone. None of us saw it coming.
 
Ano was a good friend and an interesting human being. Since he was Nigerian, he was, of course, black. But his friends thought of him as a man who happened to be black, much as you might think of a person who happened to be left-handed. It was an interesting feature - nothing more. 
 
What impressed me most about Ano, as an incoming sophomore, was that he made an effort to fit in and rarely complained. Based upon that experience, I encouraged him to join Dial Lodge, where I was President my senior year. My good friend Ned Groth '66 was in the same group. Dial was a good fit in that many of us were engineers - Ano and I were EEs. I also encouraged Ano to write for the Princeton Engineer, where I was Managing Editor. Ano enjoyed his Princeton experience and made many good friends in the process. Except for the fact that Ano was from Nigeria, he was a typical Princeton student. 
 
During the summer of 1964, Ano stayed in Princeton for part of the summer, during which time I got to know him better. He came to our home in Princeton for dinner on several occasions (I lived in Princeton at that time), and I helped him get his driver's license. We spent several days in the ETS parking lot while Ano learned to drive my parents' old 1955 Buick Special, which had a shift on the steering column.  
 
After Ano's graduation, I would see Ano on occasion and visit him and his wife, Michele, once or twice, and watch his little family grow. He had a good position at a bank, working for Lee Duxbury, a Rutgers grad, who would also become a close friend. At some point, Ano felt he was needed back in Nigeria and eventually was offered a teaching position at the Enugu State University of Science and Technology. In 2004, Ano and I began exchanging emails regularly. Some of it was business, and some social and political. Fast forward to 2017, when Ano and I and Ned Groth and Lee Duxbury began a regular exchange of emails on pretty much every subject you can imagine. Some of the email exchanges were pretty spirited - to say the least. That continued right up to three weeks ago when I got my last email from Ano. His passing caught Ned, Lee, and me completely by surprise. 
 

In summary, when Ano felt he was needed back in Nigeria, he gave up the comforts of life in America and returned to his native land to serve his country in the best way he knew how. Isn't service to your country what Princeton is all about? R.I.P., good friend and loyal Princetonian.

 

Ned Groth:

 

When we were undergrads at Dial, we both liked to hang around the pool tables, in the intervals before
and sometimes after the evening meal. There were a couple of real pool sharks in the club (Rick Siller '66
and Jack McDonald '67), guys who owned their own cues, who usually monopolized the pool table, so
Ano and I spent most of our time playing billiards. I actually got pretty good at three-cushion billiards, to
where I could make 10 in a row now and then – a skill I made no use of after PU...But Ano and I got to be
fairly good friends, bonding over the billiards table.
 
Then we graduated and went our separate ways, and I completely lost touch with Ano. Come the time
of our 50th reunion, I took on the task of organizing a Dial mini-reunion, and set out to find Ano (among
others). The Alumni office had no contact or other information about him, but, armed with his middle
name and date of birth (thank you, Nassau Herald), Google found him, living in Enugu, Nigeria. Google
even found email address that actually worked!
 
When I reached out to him, Ano was interested in attending the reunion. The US consulate in Nigeria
gave him fits about getting a visa to make the trip (even though Ano had an American wife and children,
and had come here regularly for decades), but with a little advice from Frank Ward ('66 and Dial), who
had long worked for the State Department, Ano navigated the process, got his visa, and attended the
50th. He had a wonderful time, we reconnected, and I met Michele (who came to the reunion).
 
Ano invited me to join a small chat email group involving him, Dick Woodbridge '65 (Dial president that
year), and Lee Duxbury, a colleague and friend of Ano's from post-PU years. Our discussions generally
were political (although Ano repeatedly asserted that he could not get his mind around the concept of
transgender.) Woody is an unrepentant Republican and Lee is a perennial optimist, but Ano and I grew
increasingly alarmed about the direction things were going in this country. Ano would frequently strike a
pose, sitting out there in Nigeria, of "What on Earth is wrong with you people??"
 
I last saw Ano about two years ago. He was visiting Michele, and Sarah and I went into Atlanta and had a
lovely lunch with them (photo above). He was planning to come here again in late September, and we

were going to get together. His death came as a shock, and I’ll miss him a lot.

 

One other Dial Lodge memory: At some point, possibly between the end of classes and commencement
our senior year, a bunch of us were sitting around drinking beer and bullshitting. We got into a "where
will we all be in 25 years" thing, and Jim Papa, who had some of the best answers to that question w/r/t
the rest of us, pointed at Ano and said, "King of Nigeria." Well, it didn't exactly work out that way, but he had a good life. R.I.P., Ano.
 

David Bonnett:

 

I met Ano sophomore year when we were two Electrical Engineering majors taking a physics E&M course. We were lab partners. David Wilkinson was the lab instructor.

 

Six of us roomed in a suite in Patton tower junior year - Jeff Weiss, Chuck Kulczycki, Bob Klahn, Vic Reusch, Ano, and me. I had a car off campus, and one time Ano and I went off campus to some meeting which turned out to be about librarian positions. He became friendly with one of the ladies there, and later I let him borrow the car to drive to New York for a date with her. We also went skiing (I think) with Jeff and he accompanied me on a visit to my grandmother in Yorkers, NY, and to my parents and younger brother in Wellesley, Mass. My brother recently remembered that where Ano came from (Nigeria), if you didn't want to hear what someone is saying, you stuck your arm out and showed them the palm of your hand.

 

After graduation, my memory is Ano was laying low, because I think he didn't have permission to stay in the US indefinitely. We were both at the 50th reunion, but unfortunately didn't connect. He called me a little later and we talked a while. He said he'd earned a PhD and had a computer related career. We hoped we'd see each other at a reunion, but the 55th was during Covid, and now it's too late, sadly.

 

Jon Holman:

 

I didn't know Ano back in campus days. In fact I really didn't know him at all until 2020, when he responded to a '66 birthday card. But since then we exchanged 30-40 emails.

Ano was a pretty private guy. Although he came to our 50th and was talking of coming to our 60th, even when he lived in New York he didn't participate in '66 activities much. More recently he has been living in his home country of Nigeria. He maintained some '66 friendships; often he spoke of Ned Groth and I know there were others. He doesn't even have an email address listed in the the '66 or University records. He didn't want to get all of our mail. But he did want to get memorials, so he gave me his address just for that purpose. Every time I sent him one he sent back the same response: "May his soul rest in peace."

Ano, may your soul rest in peace also.

 

Lee Duxbury (Rutgers grad, sometime in the '60s), Ano's former boss/colleague:

 

I am in shock and very saddened about this news. I also never saw it coming and we don’t know if it was a long-standing health issue or a sudden attack. Ano was a very important member of my team at First National Bank of Central Jersey on Bridgewater Rt22. (nee FNB of Somerset County, nee FNB of Bound Brook). I needed a Computer Science major at the IT department that I managed. At the time we were installing the first ATMs in the banks in the Central Jersey area. I hired Ano first as a Consultant and then as an employee. He was very important in integrating the conservative bigots in the Bank. He first was regarded as an intruder but when the bigots learned that he was a Princeton Grad and the son of a Chief, he was accepted. One of the SVP’s played tennis and took him to the Raritan Valley Country Club where he also was first regarded as an exception but later accepted. He contributed more than he knew to integrating the area because of course us bankers were the ‘pillars of the community’. There were not many Blacks living in Bound Brook. In fact, my high school class had only 3 out of 330 and they came from South Bound Brook, so Ano made a major contribution to the attitudes when I worked with him. He proved he was just as smart, competent, friendly, and honest as the Whites. I will always cherish him as a friend.

 

 

If you have photos or memories that you wish to share, please send them to the '66 Memorial Team (66_MemorialTeam@tiger1966.org). We will add them to this page.