Did you know Indiana Jones was born in Princeton, NJ? Supposedly on July 1, 1899. According to his fictional biography, he lived here until 1908, at which time his father, Henry Jones, Sr. – a professor of medieval studies at Princeton University – embarked on a lecture tour.

The Joneses returned to Princeton in time for Indy to attend Princeton High School. However, he never did graduate. While on spring break during his senior year, he fell in with Poncho Villa, while visiting the Southwest, then got caught up in World War I.

Indy himself is supposed to have taught at Princeton University in 1933. However, his longtime employer, and the one we see in the movies, is Marshall College, a fictional institution, in Bedford, Connecticut.

40 years after the release of “Raiders of the Lost Ark (on June 12, 1981), and all this is news to me. Then, I was never a follower of “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” television show or the spin-off novels or video games.

The period during which the Joneses lived in Utah, in 1912, portrayed in the opening sequence of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” coincides with Henry Jones Sr.’s Princeton sabbatical. Henry Jones taught at Princeton from 1899 until at least 1938.

At some point, Oxford-graduate Marcus Brody, Indy’s boss at Marshall, also took courses at Princeton.

Needless to say, as a “Raiders” fan and now a Princetonian, I find this newly-acquired Indy lore fascinating.

https://indianajones.fandom.com/wiki/Princeton

https://indianajones.fandom.com/wiki/Princeton_University

In real life, William Hootkins, the actor who played Major Eaton in “Raiders” (and memorably uttered the line “TOP… MEN”) graduated from Princeton in 1970. I wrote a post about it in 2019.

PHOTO: Indiana Jones and the Princeton Tiger?