A Mufti burger from 1974–75

Tidmarsh:  “… Joshua Tremblay, the editor of TSL in fall 2003 actually did a ride-along with two Mufti members for a night, and they told him that most of the 20-odd members at the time had either been approached by an active member or caught them in the act. But good luck trying to catch them. A TSL columnist in 1981 wrote that, quote, ‘Mufti is to Pomona College what Bigfoot is to Northern California. Nobody’s really sure who or what it is, but the telltale evidence for its existence is everywhere.’ Conor O’Rourke, who graduated in 2003 … is one of the few people who can give some insight into how Mufti recruits students. He went through the majority of the induction process, but he couldn’t attend the final challenge.”

O’Rourke:  “My senior year, things had relatively calmed down, I guess, with Mufti, and they seemed to be somewhat inactive. But that spring semester of senior year … we had been looking closely, I guess, for whatever reason, and came across an unusual message in the Digester that on first glance seemed a little incoherent. It was complete sentences and actual words but didn’t mean anything either. If you were really reading into it, you might have been able to interpret that it was somehow in reference to a return of some kind. There was something that was trying to make a return to campus. So it was cryptic enough that our ‘spidey senses’ told us it might be Mufti-related. And the idea of a return certainly fit with where Mufti was at the time, which was that they were relatively dormant that particular year. So we tangled with this message for a while.

“Eventually, you know—one of us was a computer science major and started kind of taking a more technical approach to deciphering this and used some type of number-to-letter language—I’ve forgot what it was called. But what happened was that we found that these numbers corresponded to, essentially, a Dewey Decimal code, and the book that came up with those numbers was called The History of Secret Societies, or something thereabouts. And that was a light bulb going on. Wow! This has gotta be—this has gotta be it. And so we went to the library—we went to Honnold-Mudd—and we looked up that book. It was there, somewhere deep in the stacks—didn’t seem like it had been checked out for a very long time. It was an old book, from maybe the 1920s or 1930s. So we checked out the book, and we played with it a little bit. … One of us actually read the entire thing. Again, we were looking for answers. It was kind of hard. And one of us had the idea of kind of cracking open the book—literally cracking open the book. Took a pen knife and made a very small incision on the back cover, and lo and behold, hidden beneath that was a small note that basically said, ‘Congratulations. You’ve come this far. If you want to go further, you know, contact us.’ And there was an email address, some AOL address or something like that.

“And it took a day or two to hear back from them, but eventually we did. And their message back was written in a cryptic way, but it was another challenge—once we interpreted what the message meant, it was another challenge to us. The challenge was: they essentially wanted us to bring back the Mufti T-shirt to the Coop Store. You know, it was a very large challenge. So we thought long and hard as to how we were going to do that. I don’t know how it came about, but eventually we decided to take the scarecrow from the farm up at Pitzer, and we put a suit on this scarecrow, which fit, actually, quite well, and took him down to the Campus Center and propped him up against the door to the Coop Store, and then pinned to him a document that we called ‘Peter Stanley’s Last Will and Testament.’ And Peter Stanley was, of course, David Oxtoby’s predecessor, and this was his final year as president of Pomona College. So this last will and testament was written as a will in which he was requesting the Coop Store to bring back the Mufti T-shirt. I happened to be writing for TSL at the time and in charge of something called the Security Briefs—I don’t think this is a section they have any more, but it’s essentially a police blotter from CampSec [Campus Security], and I worked that into the police blotter for the week. … [Mufti] contacted us and said, ‘Congratulations—you’ve gotten this far. And if you want to keep going, you know, you need to meet us out on the Quad at midnight’ or something, of this particular night that was down the road. Now unfortunately for me, when we got this response from Mufti inviting us to learn more and meet them on the Quad with a blindfold on—they wanted us to blindfold ourselves—I was already down in San Diego for Senior Week, and I actually got the call about the email from one of my friends, who was a junior and obviously not in San Diego for Senior Week. It was at that time that I thought, ‘Darn!’ This was happening too late for me. …”

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Desai: “… By the time that some of the early founders of Pomona College arrived in Claremont, much of the Tongva population had been decimated by a major smallpox outbreak in 1862, a generation before the College’s founding. After the outbreak, the population of the Tongva in the area fell to around 4,000, a fraction of what it once was. When the founders of the College actually came to Claremont, there was barely a trace of the original people.”

Tidmarsh: “The accounts of interactions between the Pomona students and Native Americans around this time are tantalizingly sparse. In an account of Pomona’s history, Charles Sumner wrote that, in 1913, quote, ‘a party of wild Indians, fittingly mounted, invaded the town soon after daybreak, racing through the streets, brandishing their weapons and giving the war whoop at every turn.’ It would be great to have more context or information or anything about this event, but it’s all that Sumner mentions. We’re left to guess what happened that day.”

Desai: “One of the most enduring legacies of the interaction between early Pomona people and the Native Americans of the area is the song ‘Torchbearers.’ Originally titled ‘Ghost Dance,’ the song was written in 1890, and it’s been performed countless times in a million different versions since then.”

Tidmarsh: “The story goes like this. Frank Brackett, an astronomy professor, went with David Barrows, a student at the time who was interested in the local tribes. They went away off campus to the San Jacinto Mountains, around where the town of Idyllwild is today. This land belonged to the Cahuilla people, who’d lived in that area for thousands of years. Brackett and Barrows ostensibly went up there to observe the native people, and the two wrote down what they could remember of the Cahuilla dance that they’d observed. At a college celebration soon after, they broke into the chant they’d half-remembered, but it was a huge hit. Someone wrote words, and another person a melody. The finished product was titled ‘Ghost Dance,’ and before anyone knew it, Barrows’ and Brackett’s trip up to the mountains was memorialized. And it was apparently quite the sensation among Pomona students at the time. Some archival photos show members of Pomona’s Glee Club performing the song dressed in white robes, dancing around a mock-up of a ritual fire.”

Desai: “Fun fact: Barrows went on to become the first person to receive a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and eventually he became the president of the University of California system. A lot of his work as an anthropologist had to do with Native Americans. His doctoral dissertation was titled ‘The Ethnobotany of the Cahuilla Indians of Southern California,’ and he conducted his research by returning to Southern California for the summer. So his relationship with the tribes of Southern California wasn’t just some passing craze.”

Tidmarsh: “That being said, though, he and Brackett got a number of facts wrong. For one, they interpreted the Cahuilla dance as warlike, and the lyrics reference ‘Indian maids and warriors.’ But they were just completely off base with this. It wasn’t a war dance at all, like they assumed. An article in the Pomona magazine recounting their trip noted that the shaman who was leading the dance was advocating for racial harmony. It was a peaceful dance. In its original incarnation, the song also included bits of nonsense words that were supposed to approximate the Cahuilla language, but neither Brackett nor Barrows spoke the Cahuilla language at the time, so they did the best they could to transcribe the refrain they heard at the dance. ‘He ne terra toma’ is what they ended up with, but no one’s been able to say for sure what these nonsense syllables were actually supposed to mean. …”

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Special hand-headlined TSL after the Carnegie bombing in 1969

Tidmarsh: “… The bomb was placed in Government Professor Lee [’48] McDonald’s mailbox, which led some to question whether the bomber was targeting him directly. Claire McDonald, Lee’s wife and a Pomona alum from 1947, remembers how scary of a time it was for them.”

Claire McDonald: “Lee called me and said there was bombing going on at his office, and I was to be careful and stay in the house. And the kids were to stay in the house. So we were immediately scared. And I called up my daughter, and she and her husband joined us, and we had a very bad night. Every car that went by, we wondered if they were going to throw a bomb at us.”

Tidmarsh: “Professor McDonald was known on campus for being an opponent of the Vietnam War and an ally for the student protesters. However, Professor McDonald was told by law enforcement, and believes to this day, that it was completely random that the bomb was placed in his mailbox. He told us that the bomb wasn’t addressed to him in particular.”

Lee McDonald: “The mail, all the faculty mailboxes were adjacent to the staircase that goes from the lobby of Carnegie down to the first floor. And the mail is usually delivered in the morning. Our secretary for what was then the Government Department just happened to be coming up the stairs in the—guess it was around four o’clock. I’m not exactly sure of the hour. And she saw this shoebox, wrapped in brown paper, in my mailbox. It was a good question, why it was in my mailbox, but I think the ultimate conclusion of everybody was that if a person was running up the stairs, or in a hurry up the stairs, this was the box on the bottom level of all of the boxes and right in the middle. And that would have been the easiest place to quickly place the bomb.”

Desai: “About 40 seconds before the bombing in Carnegie, an identical bomb exploded in a women’s bathroom in the basement of Scripps College’s Balch Auditorium. While no one was injured, the windows were blown out, and the building needed a lot of repairs.”

Lee McDonald: “I also remember that it was Tom Brokaw, who was a pretty well-known NBC reporter for the rest of his life—[he] was a local reporter for the local NBC station in Los Angeles, and he came out and interviewed me. We stood in the Quad.”

Desai: “It’s worth noting that Pomona and Scripps weren’t the only colleges that this happened to. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, college campuses across the nation were bombed. Just in California, San Francisco State University and Southwest College were bombed within a couple of weeks of the Claremont bombing. In 1970, a bomb at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, killed a physics professor and injured three others. The Department of Commerce and the Portland, Ore., City Hall were also bombed. While some remain unsolved, most of the bombings that were prosecuted were tied to statements against the war in Vietnam.”

Tidmarsh: “At Pomona College and across the nation, protests erupted over the Vietnam War and racial justice. It was a tense and tumultuous time that disrupted the status quo in idyllic Claremont. …”

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Pomona’s 1919 Debate Club, including Arthur Williams 1919 (front row, second from left). The College’s second Black graduate, Williams would go on to become a physician in White Plains, New York.

Desai: “… For the next three months, we’ll be investigating the questions about our school that we’ve had since orientation. What were relations like between the College’s founders and the original inhabitants of the land? How exactly did this decidedly New England-style liberal arts college get founded in the middle of Southern California? And what are the stories of the early students of color at the school?

“Let’s start with that last one. Right now we’re going to focus on the period between 1887, when Pomona was founded, and 1958, when the College accepted its first cohort of Black students. But for its first seven decades, the College was almost entirely white. That’s not to say that some students of color didn’t attend or even thrive at Pomona, however. …

“Winston M.C. Dickson arrived in Claremont in 1900 at a time when there probably weren’t any other African Americans in the Inland Empire, and only about 2,000 in the entire city of L.A. He was born to two freed slaves in 1872 in a farming community close to Crockett, Texas, which means he actually would have been almost 30 when he arrived at Pomona. There basically wasn’t any public education for Blacks in the South at the time, so it makes sense that it took him some time to get to Pomona. I’m really curious as to how Winston Dickson could have ended up here in 1900, especially considering that Claremont is more than 1,000 miles away from Houston and that Pomona was pretty much unknown at that point and had fewer than 100 students. Probably the only explanation that makes sense is that the Congregationalist Church played some role in getting him to Claremont. Both Pomona and Tillotson College, a small Black college where Winston Dickson studied before coming here, were founded by the Congregationalist Church. During his four years at Pomona, Winston Dickson seems to have thrived. I looked through all the yearbooks from his time on campus and was absolutely floored by how many clubs and organizations he was a part of—The Student Life, the Choral Union, the Literary Society and the Prohibition League…”

Tidmarsh: “Wow, he was all over, as Pomona students are wont to do.”

Desai: “So there’s a ton of photos of Winston Dickson from his time at Pomona, and he really seemed to be an integrated member of his class. In some pictures, he’s standing off to the side, and while he’s a member of an early frat on campus, he’s not pictured in most of their photos, for some reason.”

Tidmarsh: “It’s not hard to imagine why.”

Williams’ daughter, Eileen Williams ’50, the first Black woman to graduate from Pomona College.

Desai: “What’s really amazing to me is that Winston Dickson was the Class Day speaker for the Class of 1904, and an L.A. Times reporter who made the trek to Claremont for the event wrote that he had, quote, ‘the magnetic voice and manner of a trained orator.’ He was actually the first Black graduate of any college or university in Southern California. Then he got law degrees from Harvard and Boston University, and for the next half-century, he established himself as one of the most well respected Black attorneys in Houston, Texas. In 1915, there were just 19 Black attorneys in all of Houston, serving a Black population that had swelled to 30,000 people. Most of the cases he litigated were in the divorce or probate courts, which seemed kind of strange to me, but then I talked to a professor who studies the history of Black Houston, and he said that basically, this was all the work that Black lawyers could do at that point. It was such a difficult profession that many Black attorneys decided to leave it entirely. Over the course of his career, he became the president of the city’s Colored Bar Association and then later helped found the Houston Lawyers Association, a mentoring organization for Black attorneys that still exists today. From a son of freed slaves to a Pomona- and Harvard-educated lawyer in Houston, it’s hard not to think that Winston Dickson lived an absolutely remarkable life.”

Tidmarsh: “But to this day there’s nothing named after him on the campus—not yet, at least.”

Desai: “Right. Other schools have buildings and scholarships named after their first Black graduate, but I think it’s pretty surprising that Pomona doesn’t have anything, especially since he was the first Black grad of any college in Southern California. Anyway, after Winston Dickson graduated in 1904, it’s not like Black students suddenly became a frequent presence on campus. There wasn’t another Black student in Claremont for the next 11 years, when Arthur Williams enrolled at Pomona in 1915.

“Born in Houston in 1897 to an influential columnist for the Houston Informer, a powerful Black newspaper at the time, Arthur Williams grew up in Houston’s fourth ward, just a few miles southwest of where Winston Dickson lived in Houston. There weren’t that many African Americans in Houston in the early 1900s, so I have a hunch that it must have been Dickson who introduced Arthur Williams to Pomona and then played a role in his coming to the school. …”

This entire episode is available for download at soundcloud.com, iTunes or Google Play.