Articles Written By: emae2021@pomona.edu

Sweet deal: O.J. flows from alumnus’ old grove

March 5, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

The O.J. flowing in campus dining halls these days doesn’t come from frozen concentrate, nor was it born thousands of miles away in Florida.

Instead, three times a week for much of the school year, John Adams ’66 sends to campus a load of 1,500 lbs. of Valencia oranges grown in his century-old family grove, the last of its kind in the city of Rialto, 25 miles east of Claremont.

For the College, the deal offers a chance to serve local produce and provide healthier food—previous juice concoctions contained corn syrup and food coloring. For Adams, it provides a stream of income to plant new trees.

So Adams is leaving some of the Valencias—typically picked in summer—on the trees longer and longer, which only adds to their sugar content. Then, it’s into the dining-hall juicers.

While the oranges Adams provides from his grove aren’t the prettiest-looking, they sure are sweet. “They’re so much better than the large, perfect oranges in the stores,” says Adams, who this spring is also growing veggies for the College.

Gone country

February 28, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Trees, Ph.D.s and … country? Claremont is a long way from Nashville, but this school year brings two country superstars to Bridges Auditorium, with new-fangled sensation Taylor Swift having performed in the fall and old-timer Willie Nelson here tonight. That inspired us to do some digging and discover that over the years, a surprising number of country crooners—from Larry Gatlin to Linda Ronstadt to Johnny Cash—have played Pomona. But the College’s greatest country-western moment so far brought two legends on the same day in 1973 when Kris Kristofferson ’58, accompanied by his good friend Cash, came to campus to receive an honorary doctor of fine arts degree.

Myrlie Evers-Williams at Pomona

January 9, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

With the announcement this week that Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68 will give the invocation at President Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 21, it’s worth taking a look back at her time in Claremont.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of her husband, civil rights activist Medgar Evers, who was shot in the back outside their Jackson, Miss., home on the morning of June 12, 1963, while Myrlie and their three children were inside.

The next year, Evers-Williams decided to move to Claremont, as she recounted in a 1965 piece for Ebony magazine titled “Why I Left Mississippi.” In that piece, she wrote that she found purpose in speaking engagements, but was like the “walking dead” when she returned to her house and the memories. Ultimately, it was the welfare of her children, particularly her oldest son who was nine at the time, that prompted the move:

“They were awake that terrible night, and heard the thunderous roar of the death shot. They saw their father lying in a scarlet pool of blood as his life ebbed away,” she wrote. “… So it was that in the spring of 1964, while on a speaking engagement in California, I asked friends to ‘look around’ for a house for me.”

She chose Claremont, Evers-Williams wrote, for the college town atmosphere, and more specifically because it was home to Pomona College, where she enrolled. Her time in Claremont received widespread media attention — in 1965 alone her life here was featured in Look, Good Housekeeping and in the Ebony magazine cover story, as the Claremont Courier noted in a story about the stories.

Evers-Williams told Look that she had to wake at 3 a.m. to juggle the demands of school, raising kids and writing down her memories of Medgar. “Someone asked me what I wanted for Christmas,” she told the magazine. “I told them: a secretary.”

While still a Pomona student, Evers-Williams wrote a book (with Peter Williams), For Us, the Living. After graduating in sociology in 1968, Evers worked for several years at The Claremont Colleges, starting at the new Center for Educational Opportunity. In 1970, she ran for Congress as a Democrat, losing in the largely Republican district that included Claremont.

She went on to work for ARCO as national director of community affairs, served as a commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works and, in 1995, she was elected chair of the NAACP’s national board of directors. The next year, Pomona College awarded her an honorary degree and she delivered the Commencement address in Bridges Auditorium, where she had graduated nearly three decades earlier.

On Board

November 14, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Two new trustees have been elected to the governing board of Pomona College:

Laszlo Bock ’93 is senior vice president of people operations at Google, leading the attraction, development and retention of “Googlers.” He also leads or has led various business groups at Google, including the services group, technology and operations and other areas. At Pomona, Bock majored in international relations, and served as a residence hall sponsor and in student government and Mortar Board. Bock, who lives in the Bay Area, has an M.B.A. from the Yale School of Management, and has testified before Congress on immigration reform and labor issues. In 2010, he was named “Human Resources Executive of the Year” by HR Executive Magazine.

Sam Glick ’04 is an associate partner at Oliver Wyman, a leading global management consulting firm, advising clients in the healthcare and life sciences industries. An economics major and classics minor at Pomona, Glick graduated with distinction, and as a student was ASPC academic affairs commissioner, judiciary council chair, member of the presidential search and senior class gift committees, and a director of the Claremont Community Foundation. Glick previously served on the board as young alumni trustee from 2007 to 2011. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Emily (George) Glick ’04.

New on the alumni board

November 14, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Onetta Brooks ’74

Lives in: She is in Fairfax, Va., through May serving as an interim pastor. Education: B.A., mathematics, Pomona College; master of public administration, Cal State Dominguez; master of divinity, San Francisco Theological Seminary/Southern California.

Career: Ordained in 2007 in the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) and is serving as the interim pastor of MCC of Northern Virginia. She worked for 34 years as program manager/systems engineer/software engineer/programmer analyst at aerospace and defense companies such as Rockwell, Hughes, Logicon and Northrop Grumman.

Alumni involvement: Served on the Alumni Council from 1986 to 1989; after she was inducted into the Pomona–Pitzer Athletic Hall of Fame (volleyball and basketball) in 1984, she served on the Athletic Hall of Fame Committee for several years; supported and participated in activities of the Office of Black Student Affairs over the years; participated in a few alumni phone-a-thons.

Community involvement: Brooks serves on the MCC Governing Board through 2016 and supports various social justice groups in the Los Angeles and in the D.C. metro/Fairfax County areas.

Adam Conner-Simons ’08

Lives in: Cambridge, Mass.

Education: Conner-Simons majored in psychology. He was part of the campus band the Fuzz, was involved in The Student Life newspaper and the gender-discussion group Male Dissent and served as a student representative for the Admissions Committee.

Career: As a student, Conner-Simons did research for Psychology Professor Patricia Smiley, and worked at the Career Development Office and the Office of Communications. He is communications coordinator at Brandeis International Business School at Brandeis University.

Alumni involvement: Conner-Simons writes regularly for Pomona College Magazine, and has helped organize Boston-area alumni events and served as an alumni ad- missions interviewer.

Bill Ireland ’81

Lives in: Venice Beach, Calif. Education: Ireland majored in history, before attending UCLA Law School. He played water polo and swam at Pomona and is in the Athletic Hall of Fame. He met his wife, Ellen Brand Ireland ’82, when he was visiting her roommate, Caren Carlisle Hare ’82, who was a freshman swimmer.

Career: Ireland is a partner, specializing in commercial litigation, at Haight Brown and Bonesteel, a Los Angeles-based law firm. One of the cases he worked on re- sulted in two published books, Greenmail by Norma Zager and Parts Per Million by Joy Horowitz. Ireland competes in open water swimming competitions, which is mostly an excuse for trips to places with warm water.

Alumni involvement: Ireland was on the Alumni Council from 1987 to 1996. After working with events, and volunteering for the 90th and 100th anniversary celebrations, he was president of the Alumni Association for 1993-1994. Later, Ireland served as an alumni volunteer on the Board of Trustees Nominating Committee. Ellen and he have both repeatedly chaired their class reunions. Bill was also an Alumni Admissions volunteer. Community involvement: Bill and Ellen have been involved with their local Presbyterian church. Bill has been a trustee, and an elder, as well as clerk of the Presbytery Judicial Commission for the Presbytery of the Pacific. Bill also has been an officer and board member for the governing board and the foundation for Ghost Ranch, a Presbyterian camp and conference center in Abiquiu, N.M.

Kayla McCulley ’09

Lives in: Amherst, Mass.

Education: A Pomona double major in international relations and French, McCulley is working toward her M.B.A. and master’s in sport management at the University of Massachusetts. At Pomona, McCulley was a four-year member and senior co-captain of the lacrosse team and was active with the European Union Center of California.

Career: After graduation McCulley departed for Europe, first to Brussels as an intern with the U.S. Mission to NATO and then to Switzerland as a Fulbright scholar. Since then, McCulley has pursued her passion for sports with positions at the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Octagon and the Ivy Sports Symposium. She is a frequent contributor to national media outlets such as espnW, Women Talk Sports and The Business of College Sports.

Alumni involvement: McCulley serves as an alumni admissions volunteer in the liberal arts college hotbed that is Western Massachusetts, enticing would-be Williams/Amherst/Mount Holyoke students to head west and become proud Sagehens.

Sociology, theatre and the law

November 14, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

By now, Jeanne Buckley’s sociology degree should be well worn from good use. Since graduating in 1965, she has applied her Pomona parchment to a fascinating range of work, and now the former Superior Court commissioner, mediator, social worker, mother of three and long-ago TV actress has a new role leading Pomona’s governing board.

A trustee since 1999, Buckley could have reasonably expected to be winding down, pulling back a bit, as she completes the final few years of her term. Instead, the Santa Rosa, Calif., resident agreed to step up to the role of board chair.

As an undergrad, Buckley had a full plate at Pomona, too, participating in student government, choir and glee club, and helping to put on a jazz festival. Amid all the activities came the turmoil and change of the Civil Rights Era. For much of the time, she was the only Black woman attending Pomona, but she had been in the same situation in high school in Pelham, N.Y. “It was not a shock in a cultural sense,” she says. “I could navigate it.”

Post-Pomona, she found her way into social work, following her mother’s example, and was involved in the early days of Head Start. She also trained as an actress, landing a seven-episode stint on the popular primetime soap opera Peyton Place. Buckley even tried out a Broadway singing career—she had sung in church choir since childhood—that didn’t pan out.

Eventually, a decade after graduating from Pomona, she was on to law school, and the field would become her central career calling. In time, she earned a spot on the bench as a juvenile court commissioner, handling both delinquency and dependency cases—in other words, kids in trouble and parents in trouble.

In both realms, she applied her social-worker experience, nudging government agencies to en- gage struggling parents before they wound up in court and working to convince all players in the system that, “we are trying to make change in kids’ lives, rather than just state, ‘You did X; this is the consequence; go on to the next case.’”

She also handled tough family law cases that had gone to mandatory settlement conferences. “Maybe, again, because of my sociology background, I enjoyed these kinds of cases,” says Buckley, who was named Juvenile Court Judge of the Year by a statewide group of judicial peers in 1995. “They’re emotional, high anxiety cases, but I really enjoyed the assignment and I stayed in it. Most folks stay in the juvenile court maybe 2 years, 3 years. …I did it for 15—that was a long time.”

Buckley points out that the juvenile court role combined three of her key interests: law, social work, even a bit of theatre, “and that may be the reason that I enjoyed it so much.” Buckley still gets asked about the Peyton Place part, and she is quick to note: “It was a long time ago.” She adds, though, that theatre training had some application to the courtroom. “I even wore a costume,” she says, laughing about the robes. “You’re kind of up on a stage.”

In 1999, she retired from the court and, around the same time, she joined Pomona’s board. Over the years, she has served in meaty assignments such as the board’s student affairs and academic affairs committees, and also sat on a task force on diversity, and, more recently, the ad hoc committee looking into the board’s response to the worker documentation issue last year.

She still sings, too. Even amid a long career related to social work, she kept up the vocal work. Buckley performs with a small Northern California chamber group, and musical talent runs through the family: her husband Edmund Buckley ’66, a retired college administrator, plays the drums and vibraphone; son Paul ’92, writes music for television; and one of his brothers plays saxophone; the other, guitar. “When they are all home, there’s lots of music,” says Buckley.

A Carefully Calculated Caper

November 14, 2012 by Staff Comments Off

John Irvine ’76 hoists the finished Zappa frieze from atop Bridges Auditorium in 1975.

Set in Styrofoam, not stone, Frank Zappa’s name and likeness appeared, seemingly overnight, high upon the face of Bridges Auditorium back in the carefree spring of 1975.

Snugly hung between Wagner and Beethoven, the phony frieze only remained in place for a few days. But the identities of the students who pulled off this high-profile prank—and the tale of how they did it—have stayed under wraps to all but a few Sagehens for nearly four decades. Now the original pranksters finally have come forward with the story of a caper that required a precarious climb, careful calculations and a touch of artistic flair.

Strange as this may seem, it was a Commencement speech given in May by the then-U.S. ambassador to Pakistan that finally shook loose their secret.

Speaking on Marston Quad with Big Bridges looming in the background, Cameron Munter, a veteran diplomat who served in Serbia and Iraq before the Pakistan post, recalled the last time he spoke here, some 40 years ago, as valedictorian of Claremont High School. That led into an anecdote about the epic prank that briefly placed Zappa amongst the iconic composers honored on the front of the auditorium. Munter’s memory, though, was a bit misty—the ambassador just may have had weightier matters on his mind—and he dated the Zappa caper to 1972, crediting high school students “who shall remain nameless” for carrying it out.

Next, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin columnist David Allen dug deeper into the matter, pegging the date to three years later and straightening out a few other details. Still, the notion that the stunt was pulled off by local high-schoolers remained the operative story until a digital dossier laden with black and white photos and a complete account of the caper reached PCM via back channels. The material was pulled together by John Irvine and Greg Johnson, both math majors from Pomona’s class of 1976. After learning of Munter’s speech, the pair decided it was time to spill the beans.

They did it.

Irvine works on the Zappa frieze.

Irvine and Johnson weren’t huge Zappa fans at the time, even though the rocker lived in Claremont for part of his youth. The prank came to mind when Irvine and Johnson learned Zappa was coming to play Bridges in April of 1975. “We were looking up at the front of Big Bridges and said, ‘Well, gosh, he should have his name up there,’” recalls Irvine, who went on to get his Ph.D. and now works at a research laboratory in Cambridge, Mass.

This casual thought launched an intensive, two-week effort. The first big obstacle: How would they scale the imposing auditorium? It was Johnson, another future Ph.D., who figured out that they could get onto the roof of the adjacent old Renwick Gym (long since gone) to extend a ladder across a four-foot gap that separated the two structures, and climb onto the roof of Bridges. “Being young college students, we were stupid enough to do that,” says Irvine of the dangerous move. “I would never do that today.”

Once on the roof of Bridges, they lay down, reached down and measured the dimensions of the frieze, which, they note, was a surprisingly sizeable 15 feet by 5 feet.

Next: Security breach! While they were still atop Bridges, some friends passing by spotted them and asked the guys what they were doing. Irvine and Johnson waved them off, and lucky for them, their rooftop hijinx didn’t draw campus authorities.

The pair had decided it was Chopin whom they would cover up amongst the five composers commemorated on the face of Bridges. “I’m not big on the Romantics,” explains Irvine. “I would never cover up Beethoven or Bach.”

Onward to the design phase: phony frieze would have to be lightweight enough to hoist onto the roof, but sturdy enough to stay in place. Johnson settled on Styrofoam set on an aluminum frame. Irvine, meanwhile got to work on the two end pieces of the frieze, a papier mache bust of Zappa for one end and a marijuana leaf for the other. (The pair has gotten some blowback for the pot image, since Zappa was opposed to drugs. Their response boils down to: “Hey, we know, but it was the ’70s.”) The end pieces were small enough to work on in a dorm room, but to assemble the entire frieze, they set out for the Wash, where they had room to lay everything out.

After a late night that crept into early morning, they were just about done. Then it started to rain on their newly painted masterpiece. They rushed their work of art into the Mudd-Blaisdell trash room. More bad luck: trash pickup arrived that next morning, and Irvine was rousted by an early morning call to retrieve his “art project” which was blocking access to the garbage.

Greg Johnson ’76 makes the dangerous climb from the gym to the roof of Big Bridges.

The guys covered up the frieze and stashed it behind Big Bridges in preparation for the final stage. With the risk of getting caught by Campus Security patrols, the rooftop operation would require some assistance from their friends in the “Statpack,” a group of math and statistics students studying under Professor Donald Bentley. As Johnson and Irvine write in a summary of their caper provided in the dossier given to PCM:

“So, using the expertise in statistical analysis that they were developing under the tutelage of Professor Don Bentley, they modeled the frequency and regularity of the passage of Campus Security in the early hours of the morning. At between 2 and 3 in the morning, the frieze was surreptitiously installed on the front of the building.”

As Johnson recalls it, the Styrofoam had enough give to easily wedge into the notched, recessed space for Chopin’s frieze. They secured the replacement with heavy fishing line tied to various rooftop fixtures just in case it fell—even with the lightweight materials, the frieze’s sheer size meant it weighed 60 to 70 lbs.

Frank Zappa was now shoulder to shoulder with Beethoven and Bach on the campus’s most imposing edifice. Chopin had been shown up, and the two math majors had succeeded in pulling off a highly-visible prank.

The pair climbed down from Bridges, and kept their involvement on the lowdown. They couldn’t resist, however, showing off the stunt to their mentor, Professor Bentley. They got him to take a walk with them, making sure he noticed their handiwork, without explicitly claiming credit. Bentley, to the best of their knowledge, was the only campus official who knew they did it. While the professor didn’t know about the plan in advance, Johnson says Bentley indirectly played a key role in the caper by creating “the camaraderie, the closeness and the culture out of which this whole endeavor arose.”

Campus officials were quick to remove the faux frieze, and the pair never saw their creation again. That helps explain the alternative story from the Commencement speech. Former Ambassador Munter (since hired to teach in Pomona’s International Relations Program) told PCM that he had visited some Claremont High classmates back at the time of the prank, and in the garage of their home was the Zappa frieze. He asked them about it, and they then took the credit for the caper. Irvine and Johnson, meanwhile, largely kept mum over the years, hoping to maintain a mystique around the prank.

And even though the Zappa frieze only stayed up for a few days back in 1975, the Statpack relationships were built to last. “We are friends to this day,” says Johnson.

Postscript: The math guys’ mission did suffer from one miscalculation. Irvine and Johnson didn’t manage to get the phony frieze up until a week after the Zappa concert that had inspired the prank in the first place. “We kind of got an incomplete,” says Johnson. “We weren’t quite ready in time.”

Letters to the editor

November 14, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Immigration & Consequences

I was astonished at how the open-borders advocate in the Summer 2012 magazine could be so utterly clueless as to the consequences of his position. I have never understood how many of the same “progressives” who love to prattle on about “sustainability” advocate at the same time for increased immigration. Are they so detached from reality that they do not understand that the two positions are irreconcilable? The mass immigration policies of the past were at a time when there was a continent to populate, railroads to be built, labor-intensive factories to staff. Mission accomplished. Country full.

We are already the third most populous country on Earth, exceeded only by those environmental showplaces, China and India. And, the environmental footprint of the average American is much greater than that of the average Asian. Let’s for a moment dream the “open borders” nightmare and assume that in 50 years our population has doubled to 600 million. Where are we going to put them without devastating most of the last “breathing-room” open spaces of the West?

How much arable flat land will be left to grow their food? Where will they find work in a time of increasing automation? And where are they going to get the water? The southwestern U.S. (case in point: Las Vegas) is already in a scramble for every drop of water they can get their hands on to sustain the current and projected population, and the Colorado River famously no longer runs to the sea.

The inevitable result of “open borders” will be environmental and social chaos and a drastic lowering of descendants’ standard of living. (No doubt immigration would taper off when living conditions in this country are as lousy as they
are for the average Asian.)

Immigration policy, like all other national policies, exists to benefit our own citizens, not everyone else. An environmentally trashed, overcrowded, Third World America is clearly not in the best interests of our current and future citizens. “Open borders” advocates must be stopped. Cold.

—Robert C. Michael ’66

Immigration is not only an issue in the U.S. In Europe, post-war labor shortages led to large- scale immigration from African and Middle Eastern countries, a phenomenon that has completely altered the racial and religious makeup of the host societies. Integrating these new people into European societies has proved to be the major social problem of the last half century. The problem is compounded by the fact that these immigrants are today not aliens. Many are second- or third-generation people who are citizens of the countries in which they reside, yet remain outsiders socially, economically and, in some cases, even linguistically.

Also, immigration is not only inward to the U.S. There is also emigration, as people become expatriates for jobs or personal reasons, and later become citizens where they reside. I know, since this was my path. I took my first job at a law firm in Brussels. The job was interesting, but Brussels was just a place where the train stopped on the way from Paris to Amsterdam. Over 40 years later, I’m still here, now a Belgian citizen, though also living part-time in Italy. For Pomona students of my generation, programs like semester abroad (then administered by the Experiment in Interna- tional Living) or the Peace Corps showed us that life could be interesting and rewarding in a lot of places.

—Fred Lukoff ’64

Serving Up Nostalgia

I simply could not resist penning this response to what Connie Fabula ’48 wrote in your spring 2012 issue regarding the Pomona College Wedgwood china. It was difficult to determine whether she was disparaging the china, simply stating a fact or aligning herself with other alumni who hold onto College memorabilia. Whichever the case, I only wish that I had shown the perspicuity to collect more of the set pieces. We didn’t begin to acquire individual items until relatively recently. We lost out entirely on special-purpose pieces such as the salad and dessert plates and the cups and saucers as they have gone out of stock.

However, we now own 10 of the dinner plates, including duplicates of some of the original eight designs, and one small ashtray which portrays the sophomore arch. The plates are strikingly done in that calming Staffordshire blue on white, depicting cam- pus scenes. The interesting border design

of a mixture of camellia flowers, oak leaves and eucalyptus flowers and leaves set off the center scenes handsomely.

The plates are large enough and beautiful enough to be useful for both formal and informal occasions. I remember many years ago, after phoning alumni from Seaver House, we volunteers were treated to a sit- down dinner using the College’s cache of Wedgwood china. It was a time and place which I have never forgotten.

At home, our dinner guests invariably comment on the Wedgwood. When there are just the two of us, the plates are poignant reminders of the campus as I knew it more than 60 years ago.

–Larry West ’49

Doing the Reunion Math

I had a wonderful reunion time at Pomona this past spring although it was not a reunion year for me. It was for a daughter, Caroline Johnson Hodge ’87, a son, Steve Johnson ’82 and a son- in-law, Ed Cerny ’92. I was there for the three grandchildren. (In the Alumni Weekend photo spread in the summer issue, they’re the two girls and the boy on the left helping to carry the 1992 banner.) We had a great time while their parents, Ed and our daughter Julia ’91, attended reunion events. As we walked the campus I could over- hear the two younger Cernys, a first grader and second grader, discussing who among the relatives would be at their own future five-year Pomona reunions. (Quinn thought he might be Class of 2026 and Sarah ’27.) Would it be grandmom ’54, aunts Polly ’56, Caroline ’87, Amy ’84, Marilou ’85 or uncles Tom ’84, Steve ’82, Paul ’85, Peter ’81, or mom or dad? Each will have several from among the DuBose, John- son, Pitsker, Hodge and Cerny alums to share their future reunion years.

—Frances DuBose Johnson ’54

Alumni and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or to send them by mail to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters are selected for publication based on relevance and interest to our readers and may be edited for length, style and clarity.

Pomona in 47 Charts

November 14, 2012 by Elisabeth Fosslien '09 Comments Off

A mathematical economics major at Pomona and ad-agency analytics whiz in the real world, Elisabeth Fosslien ’09 spends her free time cooking up tart little pie charts on topics ranging from Chicago crime to getting a job to “14 ways an economist says I love you,” which drew praise from The Economist magazine, one of many nods she has earned for her minimalist musings. To no surprise, it was her online ode to her alma mater, “Pomona in 47 Charts,” that caught our eye. The facts, figures and feelings behind them are her own, derived from her perceptions of Pomona, but even if your data set is different, we think you’ll still find some laughs in her graphs.

D.B. and That Number

November 14, 2012 by Mark Kendall Comments Off

Don Bentley doesn’t want to talk about 47, the enduring numerical fixation the legendary math professor long ago placed in Pomona’s collective consciousness. It all started with a paradoxical proof Bentley put up on the chalk- board back in 1964, showing that all numbers are equal, which then morphed into all numbers equal 47—and spawned our endless, obsessive search for the magic number. But remember, Bentley doesn’t want to talk about that.

For my part, I don’t want to talk about math or statistics. So we’ve agreed to talk about people, and Bentley shows up for the interview with a banker’s box laden with old photo albums full of fresh-faced college kids burdened with ’70s sideburns. It was two of those kids in the box, Greg Johnson and John Irvine, both from the class of ’76, who piqued my curiosity about the noted statistician. In talking to them for another story, I noticed that after all these years, their beloved professor still seemed to hold a mystical, Sontag-like sway over them. So I set up an interview.

Bentley, who taught here from 1964 to 2001, turned out to be hard to pigeonhole. He started off at Stanford with plans to study religion but found firmer ground in math. In conversation, he references a slew of noted statisticians, but there also are plentiful mentions of beer and pizza. He waxes statistical at academic seminars and plays folk music on the guitar. He has fought his share of battles, calling himself a “thorn in the side” of the administration at times, and yet he also is an ordained minister.

The professor taught some of the Math Department’s toughest classes—such as linear algebra with differential equations—that weeded out some students and built confidence in those that passed. As he puts it, “The kids, if they could survive the curriculum, got out feeling wonderful about themselves.”

But Bentley hardly cut the figure of the hard-nosed mettle-tester. The emeritus professor recalls that he felt closer to the students than to his fellow faculty members. “It just is natural for me … because I’m immature maybe and I relate better to kids than I do to adults.”
He remembers how students came in and out of his family home at will, whipping up meals in the kitchen, washing their cars in the driveway. Once, he recalls, his bedroom door swung open at 5:30 a.m. as a crowd of students broke into singing “Happy Birthday.” “They had come in, they had decorated the living room, they had cooked breakfast and the dog didn’t even bark because they were just part of the family.”

That all-in-the-family attitude did create a dilemma for Bentley early on in his career. Bentley couldn’t figure out just what the students should call him. Mr. Bentley, Dr. Bentley, Professor Bentley—they all felt too stiff for a guy who considered his students to be his best friends on campus. Having them call him Don, on the other hand, didn’t feel quite right either. Somewhere along the way, “D.B.” caught on.

Me and D.B., we cover a lot of ground, a lot of memories and accomplishments. He points to his “close fellowship” with former students—and their accomplishments in fields as varied as teaching, law, medicine—as most significant to him as he looks back. “I really want to thank them for what they’ve done for me,” he says.

And then, well past an hour into our talk, Bentley lets loose a surprise. It turns out he’s not entirely done with 47. He’s says there’s more to the lore behind it, more details to clarify and lay out someday. He’d like to do a paper, with input from alumni who were there for the mathematic myth’s long-ago birth. But that’s sometime down the road, and, remember, we’re not going to talk about that now.

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