Gregg Popovich speaks during the 2023 Basketball Hall of Fame Enshrinement Ceremony on August 12, 2023 at Springfield Marriott in Springfield, Massachusetts. (Photo by Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)

We knew he would. In his induction speech at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in August, San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich gave the Sagehens some priceless air time.

“How could this happen? It’s hard to describe. Because I’m a Division III guy,” Popovich said in his speech. “I was gonna wear my Pomona-Pitzer shirt … .”

Popovich invited Pomona-Pitzer Coach Charles Katsiaficas—one of his assistants during his eight seasons as coach of the Sagehens—to join him for the induction ceremony in Springfield, Massachusetts, where the game was invented.

“I feel so lucky to have him as a mentor through the years, and to have been with him since the early days during his first head coaching job,” Katsiaficas says. “He is one of the most driven, motivated and innovative people I have ever known. And he never has forgotten his time here. He continues to be a great ambassador for Pomona-Pitzer basketball and a great mentor and friend.”

Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky at bat.

Where do the paths of the campus nurse, the chair of the Politics Department and an assistant vice president cross? This past summer, it was on the softball field as faculty and staff participated in the Pomona College Summer Softball League.

Bob Robinson, assistant vice president of facilities, started the league in 2022, with the goal of building community. He wanted to get “faculty and staff interacting in a very different way than they’re used to,” he says.

Meeting new people was what motivated Amanda Hollis-Brusky, professor and chair of politics, to join the league the last two summers. This past summer, her team consisted of members of the Office of Facilities, Asian Studies Program, Finance Office and various other offices across campus. “These are people I never would have met or gotten to know very well had they not been on my team,” Hollis-Brusky says.

Fentanyl. Ukraine. Race. The sixth season of Sagecast, the Pomona College podcast, launched in October. Hosted by Marilyn Thomsen and Travis Khachatoorian, this season features interviews with faculty and alumni who tackle difficult problems. Among this season’s guests:

Sagecast Pomona College: Tackling the Difficult

Dr. Michael Sequeira ’73, who became the public health officer for California’s vast San Bernardino County in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, and continues to battle the deadly fentanyl crisis there.

Mietek Boduszyński, a politics professor at Pomona and former U.S. diplomat who spent the 2022-23 academic year working at the U.S. Department of Defense on atrocity prevention and Ukraine, among other issues.

Leah Donnella ’13, an editor for NPR’s popular Code Switch podcast, blog and newsletter, which take on what NPR calls “fearless conversations about race.”

Listen at pomona.edu/sagecast or look us up on the podcast sites of Apple, Google or Spotify.

The Claremont Colleges Library Special Collections’ citrus industry archives include the Oglesby Citrus Label Collection donated by the late Emeritus Professor of Biology Larry C. Oglesby and his wife, Alice. Special Collections also houses the David Boulé California Orange Collection, the Matt Garcia Papers on citrus and farm laborers, and the California Citrus Industry Collection, collected and gifted by Claremont Heritage.

The heyday of Claremont’s citrus industry in the first half of the 20th century is long past, but vibrant examples of crate labels featuring local scenes endure. The 1908 Carnegie Building, depicted below, served as the library of both Pomona College and the city of Claremont until 1914. Today, it houses classrooms and offices for politics, international relations, public policy analysis and economics.

Mason Hall, (presented below), was completed in 1923 as a state-of-the-art chemistry facility, is 100 years old this year, as is Crookshank Hall, originally a zoology building.

Today, Mason is home to classrooms and offices for history and languages, and Crookshank houses the English Department and media studies. In this view from what is now Stanley Academic Quad, Mason is at center and the building at left is Harwood Hall for Botany, built in 1915 and demolished in 1968. The displayed labels are from the Oglesby Citrus Label Collection. The late Professor of Biology Larry C. Oglesby, also known as “Doc O” to some, taught at Pomona for 30 years and was a mentor to several of the alumni featured in this issue, including Doug Bush’94, Cathy Corison ’75 and Kim Selkoe ’97.

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, celebrating its centennial this year, hosted its first varsity college football game on October 6, 1923, with the USC Trojans playing none other than the Sagehens of Pomona College. (See story) The citrus label commemorates the 1932 Olympic Games, with the Coliseum’s famous peristyle incorporated below.

As commercial art, labels weren’t signed by the artists and lacked descriptions, though some might not have represented actual scenes. The image below at first suggests Bridges Auditorium, built in 1931, but Bridges has five double-height arches on each side, among other differences.

The idealized vision of the citrus industry and life in a college town depicted on crate labels was not the experience of everyone in Claremont and surrounding areas. The Matt Garcia Papers in The Claremont Colleges Library Special Collections include research materials such as photos, oral histories and newspaper clippings related to Garcia’s book A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970. This image of citrus pickers in San Dimas around 1930 from the Pomona Public Library collection is included in Garcia’s book and used as its cover image.