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Smoke in the Wine

February 4, 2019 by Alissa Greenberg Comments Off

A wildfire burns along a ridge line above a Santa Rosa vineyard a few days after the fire that devastated Ancient Oak Cellars. —Photo by Paul Kuroda

The night of Oct. 8, 2017, was unusually warm, so Ken and Melissa Moholt-Siebert left the windows of their home near Santa Rosa, California, open to the breeze much later than they usually would have. Their farmhouse was perched on 31 acres, including pasture for their modest sheep flock and 15 acres of vineyards for their winery, Ancient Oak Cellars. Its redwood beam ceilings and a stonework fireplace hand-laid by Ken’s grandfather made it perfect for cozy late-night movie sessions. Tonight the air was much warmer than the usual cool evenings typical in Sonoma; before bed, they watched a documentary about Leonard Nimoy and enjoyed the breeze.

Around 10:15, the scent of wood smoke started to drift in through the windows, but Ken and Melissa didn’t worry, imagining it could have been from some distant neighbor’s barbecue. But when the smell didn’t go away, Melissa called the police nonemergency number to ask if she should be thinking about evacuating, but the police could offer no definite advice.

Ken and Melissa Moholt-Siebert with the new barn they’re building to replace the one that burned. —Photo by Brian Smale

Melissa fell asleep before the movie ended, but Ken stayed up thinking about the Hanley fire, which had rampaged through the area half a century before but missed the property. The wind was starting to kick up in strange, fitful gusts, flinging pine needles against the roof. Ken turned on his computer and, as was sometimes his habit, composed a poem—this one about “vanguards of embers and palls of smoke” and his grandfather wetting down the grass around the house, just in case. “Outside the sheep/Are dead silent—not a clank of the bell—but/The crickets strum and I mark the sound of sirens,” he wrote.

Just after midnight as he was finishing his poem, Ken heard a knock on the door. It was a neighbor, there to tell him and there was a fire in Fountaingrove, about three-quarters of a mile away. That was when Ken woke Melissa up. “You need to grab some stuff,” he told her. “We might have to run.”

Ken set about doing everything he could think of that might save the property if the worst were to happen. He drove to the other side of the property to turn on his agriculture pump. He grabbed a broom and got on the roof to brush the needles off. He cleaned out the gutters and tried to cut down a limb from a nearby tree that was leaning toward the house.

Meanwhile, Melissa was racing around the house gathering up what few valuables she could and packing the car. She knew, though, that there were some things she couldn’t bring even if she wanted to: not the sheep, scattered in the pasture, or the piano. And not the ancient oak down the hill in front of the house—the one she and Ken couldn’t fit their arms around, the one that was said to have predated Spanish settlement, the one that was the namesake for their winery.

There was no moon. At first, as he worked, Ken eyed the dark red glow beyond the hills to the east. By the time he was done, fire had circled around to the north and towered above the hillside in between; a sudden gust brought embers racing toward the house. One of them landed in the pasture up the hill, and before Ken could quench it, a backdraft from the south blew the flame into a wall of fire. Debris was falling all around; the drip lines in the vineyard had started to burn. Flames had begun to lick the side of the barn by the time Ken and Melissa drove away. The sound of the smoke detector inside their house followed them down the road.

Miles of rolled wire, salvaged from the ruined vineyard and awaiting reuse. —Photo by Brian Smale

Some 15 months later, on a December afternoon that’s blustery and dotted with clouds, Ken and Melissa show me around what’s left of their home. A visitor who doesn’t look too closely might never guess that a fire happened here. The hills, just greening up with winter rains, are speckled with straw that looks charmingly pastoral; a creek runs cheerfully through a little dell above the road. But the stumps of burnt trees and the blackened street sign at the front of the property tell a different story. The straw is there to prevent erosion in the newly tilled soil where the vineyard used to be. What looks like a gravel driveway branching off the little road through the center of the property is actually the spot where the farmhouse once stood.

Ken tells me about his earliest memories visiting his grandfather, back when the vineyard was only a sheep ranch and he’d come up during vacations to help his grandfather run it. “I always looked forward to coming up to the farm,” he says. “I enjoyed the physicality of it.” After the wool was collected in burlap sacks, it was his job to jump up and down on the fleeces to compact them. He would end the day sweaty and covered in lanolin, ready to hop into the back of his grandfather’s truck for a ride to the nearby lake.

Ken and Melissa met not long after those days, at Pomona in 1985 in a Human Sexuality class. People always get a kick out of that, he says wryly. She liked that he was something of a Renaissance man who studied classics, wrote poetry and attended feminist lectures. He admired her intelligence, tenacity and considerate nature. After graduation, they moved to Portland, Oregon, where he became an architect and she worked in a research lab. They had two kids, Austin and Lucy, who grew up tromping through the creek and running in the vineyard; by then the property had been planted with 10,000 grapevines.

When Ken’s grandparents died and the funding for Melissa’s lab began to ebb, they decided to take ownership of the farm, keeping the grapevines and opening Ancient Oak Cellars as a companion business. With help from farmhand Arnulfo Becerra, who had been working alongside Ken’s grandfather for decades, they learned to coax award-winning wines from the land. They continued steadily gaining experience and momentum until the night of the fire, when the flames destroyed the vineyard and everything around it entirely.

After the fire, Ken was the first to return to the property. Melissa was away on a wine sales trip that was now more critical than ever. Ken found every structure reduced to a thick layer of ash, occasionally interrupted by liquefied evidence of the recent inferno. The cast iron in the piano had split in half, and its glazing had poured out through the bottom. A pallet of wine that was set out for labeling had melted, the bottles transformed into glassy puddles only a few inches high. The steel barn roof had heated red hot and flopped over. Aluminum from Ken’s truck had pooled downhill from its charred hull.

Some of the winery’s 3,000-odd reclaimed stakes in front of vines on a neighboring vineyard. —Photo by Brian Smale

Today, Ken points out where the barn used to be—here was where the aluminum pooled, here was where the two domesticated geese and the mean rooster lived—and tells me there was little time for grief or anger in the face of such overwhelming destruction. Instead, the natural pragmatism he shares with Melissa helped them get through the first difficult months. They became “professional refugees,” as she puts it, dividing up the enormous labor necessary for rebuilding. “My new full-time job is insurance paperwork; Ken’s is being a contractor,” she says. “Maybe it’s fortunate that that’s the kind of people we are, the kind that just tackle the next project.”

The grieving process has thus been slow, with sorrow arriving in spurts. The first step for Melissa was seeing and accepting the reality of the burnt property; that really hurt. When FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers came to help with cleanup, removing some 130 truckfuls of debris, that hurt, too. And when it became clear that the vines weren’t going to recover, that was a new, entirely different kind of pain.

Now, she says, the gentle rise of the naked, grassy hills is almost beautiful. That, in a way, feels less difficult than before. “But then,” she says, gesturing at the empty fields, “you start thinking about what isn’t here.”

After our tour, Ken and Melissa sit at a little table set up by the creek, under a canopy of oaks that has recovered heroically. “The native trees did OK,” Ken notes; that includes the ancient oak, which continues its reign over the vineyard as the land struggles to recover. Finding out the oak had survived was a bright spot in all that destruction. Maybe it meant they could, too.

Ken points out an old redwood grape stake that appears to grow out of the base of one of the oaks—the result, his grandfather always told him, of a crow alighting on the stake and dropping an acorn on the ground. The sounds of the countryside underpin our conversation: the chirp of birds and frogs; the soft baaing from the herd of sheep, diminished after the fire but still here. Nearby, some of the 3,000 modern metal grape stakes and 121 miles of wire Ken, Melissa and Arnulfo removed by hand in the last year sit in piles near a half-constructed building that will one day be a new barn.

Ken is building that barn, although he occasionally hires help; aside from the Corps of Engineers, he’s had to do most of the recovery work himself. The permitting process has been especially difficult. Few vineyards were affected the way theirs was, so no methods of streamlining have been put in place, as they often are in areas of acute destruction. In fact, in the case of most Santa Rosa vineyards, the rows of vines acted as firebreaks, mitigating damage. But the speed and ferocity of the fire, the distance of the vines away from the neighboring houses and the topography combined to make the Ancient Oak vineyard a terrible exception.

A bottle of 2016 Ancient Oak pinot noir, posed in a burnt tree stump. —Photo by Brian Smale

Even so, Ken and Melissa’s insurance, although extensive, did not cover the vineyards. Instead, Ken stretches the assistance he’s received from disaster recovery funds and farm assistance programs as far as he can by doing much of the initial construction work himself and hiring crews directly to help with more-industrial tasks. Along with wine they had stored off-site and some Ancient Oak vintages made with grapes from other vineyards, that strategy has helped Ken and Melissa limp along financially as they reconstruct their lives.

The first step after the last destroyed vine and blackened stake had been removed was to use an enormous tractor with 5-foot claws to tear through the ground of the vineyard and to add nutrients to improve soil fertility—including, Ken notes wryly, wood ash. After that, Ken and Melissa ordered 15,000 new vines, which will arrive next spring; they are taking advantage of a bad situation to increase their crop, using some extra space where the old barn used to be.

“One thing I think is hard to understand is just how long the recovery period is,” Melissa says, looking around the property and counting. Out of some 13 neighbors whose homes were damaged or destroyed, there are only a few houses under construction more than a year later. In 2019, their new vines will be planted and grow waist high; the next year those vines will need trellises. Finally, in 2021, Ken and Melissa will harvest their first small postfire crop.

But the new harvest is part of a silver lining they both recognize here: the chance to remake the farm on their own terms. Ken’s grandfather knew and loved the land, but he wasn’t a grape grower by trade. And the farmhouse was certainly cozy, but it’s not the house they would have designed for themselves. Now they will be able to update the vineyard, bringing to bear all the wine expertise 2019 has to offer. And they’ll be able to design a house for themselves. Melissa fantasizes about French doors leading out onto a patio with expansive views.

At a recent wine club dinner in Ohio, someone asked her if she had thought about cashing out: deciding not to replant or rebuild and selling instead. She shakes her head, gesturing to the creek, the oaks, the hills. Yes, the first year back has been emotionally and physically challenging, she says. For a while, they stayed in a friend’s house in town. Then another friend loaned them a pop-up camper, allowing them to camp out on their own property, showering in the open. This winter, they’re still camping, in a slightly improved structure, showering at the YMCA and eating at restaurants that are struggling to keep going after a catastrophic postfire tourist season. But still: “We came here, leaving perfectly respectable lives in Oregon, because this land is a piece of Ken’s heart,” she says. “And this hasn’t changed that.”

In some ways, Ken admits, he has enjoyed this time—even having to sleep exposed to the elements. He’s come to love the proximity to nature, the frogs, the owls, the night sounds. “Melissa and I were talking recently, and I said, ‘Maybe we just don’t build a house,’” he says. He imagines more nights under the Sonoma moon or, in case of rain, in the barn.

Melissa looks at her husband across the table and raises her eyebrows, taking in the half-finished structure. “Maybe this could be our summer house,” she replies.

Melissa and Ken Moholt-Siebert, sit on bundles of straw beneath the eponymous ancient oak tree, which survived the 2017 fire that destroyed their home, vineyard and tasting room.

Melissa and Ken Moholt-Siebert, owners of Ancient Oak Cellars, sit on bundles of straw beneath the eponymous ancient oak tree, which survived the 2017 fire that destroyed their home, vineyard and tasting room. —Photo by Brian Smale

Running Toward the Volcano

February 4, 2019 by Mark Wood Comments Off

Jim Kauahikaua ’73 stands on one of a series of lava flows blocking a highway just south of Pāhoa, on the Big Island of Hawaii.

The eruptions on the island of Hawai‘i—better known as “the Big Island”—are a few weeks old, and it’s becoming clearer by the day that this time is different. Bigger. Less predictable. More explosive. At a press update at the Civil Defense office in Hilo, a tall man with a tangle of gray-white beard and a baseball cap turned backward steps in front of the cameras and introduces himself in a soft, gravelly voice.

“Jim Kauahikaua, U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. I’ll do a quick summary of what’s happening. Vents eight and 16 have reactivated. Twenty-two and 13 are still the main southbound channels going into the two ocean entries, though those have been quite weak today …”

His tone is quiet, his words measured—full of unembellished facts. His answers to questions are patient. If his eyes roll just a bit at some of the uninformed queries from mainland reporters, you can’t see it through his sun-darkened glasses.

His colleague Tina Neal, who succeeded him four years ago as the observatory’s scientist-in-charge, calls this “the voice of the consummate scientist.” And even as repeated explosions rock the volcano’s summit in the days ahead, launching vast columns of ash miles into the sky, that imperturbable baritone, explaining each day’s events, will remain strangely reassuring.

Born on O‘ahu and raised amid the volcanic starkness and splendor of the islands, Jim Kauahikaua ’73 has been studying the volcano known as Kīlauea for most of his life. The first native Hawaiian to serve as scientist-in-charge at the volcano observatory, he is one of a handful of people who can claim both a deep scientific understanding of the world’s most active volcano and a rich and intimate knowledge of its history.

While earning his doctorate at the University of Hawai‘i in Mānoa and throughout the early part of his career as a geophysicist, he probed the volcano’s subterranean secrets with scientific instruments, studying—among other things—the way lava tubes form. More recently, he has worked on assessing hazards and reconstructing the volcano’s past through vintage news accounts, many of them taken from now-defunct Hawaiian-language newspapers that have never before been translated.

As a result, he wasn’t completely surprised by the sudden violence of the 2018 eruptions. It simply reminded him of events from long ago. It’s the kind of connection he’s always on the lookout for as he searches for patterns from the past that can help explain how the volcano is evolving today and predict what it might do tomorrow. “We’ve known for some time that Kīlauea has had explosive phases,” he explains. “The most recent one killed at least 80 Hawaiian warriors at the summit.”

Sagehens vs. the Volcano

Jim Kauahikaua ’73, who served as scientist-in-charge at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory from 2004 to 2015, wasn’t the first Pomona alumnus to serve in that role. In fact, Sagehen geologists have dominated the post in recent years, holding it for about 20 of the past 44 years. Long before Kauahikaua’s term, there was Bob Tilling ’58, who served from 1975 to 1976. While he was there, Tilling introduced his old geology classmate, Tom Wright ’57, to the volcano, and a few years later in 1984, Wright was appointed scientist-in-charge, serving until 1991.

What he’s referring to is an event that happened in 1790, the final stage of several centuries of explosive summit eruptions that inspired one of the great Hawaiian sagas about the goddess Pele. Many years later, a geologist named Don Swanson connected the folkloric and scientific dots to recreate a vivid picture of what happened near the summit that day.

“Hawaiians had no written language prior to contact with the Western world, so we only know about it through oral traditions,” Kauahikaua explains. “We don’t know how many explosions there were or how strong they were, but we do know that the explosion cloud for one of them was viewed from the other side of the island, so it was visible above the summit of Mauna Loa. That means it was big—a 20,000- or 30,000-foot-high explosive column.”

He even has a good idea about how those 80 warriors may have died. They were probably the victims of what’s known today as a base surge.

“In an explosion, a lot of material is thrown up into the air,” he explains. “The very fine stuff drifts off in the atmosphere and can travel 100 miles or more. But the larger, coarser stuff will just fall right back down, and it falls down as sort of a superheated, gas-charged mass. So it doesn’t just fall and hit the ground. It falls and starts to travel very fast horizontally. That’s a base surge, and those warriors were caught in it.”

For Kauahikaua, Swanson’s work is a model for the kind of pattern-seeking research he’s engaged in today. “Our primary way of trying to forecast what is going to happen in the future is by knowing in detail what has happened in the past,” he says.

These days he’s focusing primarily on the 19th century, a period that he believes still has a lot to offer in understanding the cycles of activity that Kīlauea has passed through.

“I’ve mostly been concentrating on large lava flow eruptions,” he says. “One thing I’ve found is that they all kind of exhibit the same behavior the last couple of months of their existence, and that is that they start to stall and then pulse forward and then stall again. So it’s sort of a pulsating, rather than a steady advance.”

He found that pattern in eruptions in the 1881 event, when a lava flow from Mauna Loa was advancing on what is now the city of Hilo. And he found it again in eyewitness accounts of another Mauna Loa eruption that again threatened Hilo in 1935.

And he saw the same thing near the end of the 2018 eruptions at Kīlauea.

During these most recent eruptions, Kauahikaua found himself right in the middle of the action but, at the same time, frustratingly far from the front lines.

As the observatory’s liaison with the island’s emergency operations center, he saw very little of the historic eruptions with his own eyes. “I was at Civil Defense virtually through the entire thing,” he recalls. “I think I did about a half dozen of the overflights out there, and I was only on the ground twice.”

And yet, every significant piece of information reported back by the teams of observers who were patrolling the rift zone each day passed through his hands as he updated representatives from all relevant organizations—from utility companies to the National Guard—keeping them informed about unfolding events and the resulting hazards that might be facing them that day.

From the first, Kauahikaua says, the public demand for information was “crazy.” But just getting reports from the field was often a struggle. Some of the cell towers in the area had burned down, making cell phone reception spotty. And some members of the teams were novices who had to learn on the job how to make a clear report.

Another problem, Kauahikaua says, was the role of social media, which was handled by USGS geologists thousands of miles away on the mainland. “We were prepared for regular media with conference calls and information releases via email and our website,” he explains. “But social media added a whole new set of demands, sometimes seemingly favoring quickness over quality of information. And anything but quality information would defeat our mission.”

But the main thing that Kauahikaua says tried his patience during those long weeks was the bureaucratic conceit of some of the early incident management teams sent in by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which used the emergency as a training exercise. “None of them had Hawai‘i experience or eruption experience, so—for example, safety out in the field. All of a sudden, we had these people from God knows where, Georgia maybe, telling us what was safe and what was not safe. And that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.”

The 2018 Eruptions by the Numbers

˜1 BILLION CUBIC YARDS OF LAVA ERUPTED

13.7 SQUARE MILES OF LAND INUNDATED BY LAVA

875 ACRES OF NEW LAND CREATED BY OCEAN ENTRIES

716 DWELLINGS DESTROYED BY LAVA

˜30 MILES OF ROAD COVERED BY LAVA

˜60,000 EARTHQUAKES (APRIL 30–AUGUST 4, 2018)

6.9 MAGNITUDE OF THE STRONGEST QUAKE

Another Hilo resident who was quickly drafted to lead one of the teams on the ground, Professor Emeritus of Geology Rick Hazlett, seconds that opinion: “I’ll tell you that they didn’t know volcanic gas from a hole in Kansas. It was disgraceful, I thought.”

However, he believes Kauahikaua was the perfect choice to deal with all of those complicated communication issues. “He’s very exact about the certainty and clarity of detail,” Hazlett says. “So he’s a good filter in terms of making sure that he got good information. The last thing he’d want to do was spread a falsehood. Secondly, he speaks with calm equanimity, irrespective of how he’s feeling inside. And thirdly, he’s a voice that is trusted in this community, because he is Hawaiian, and he’s been here throughout his postgraduate career. He’s not passing through.”

That’s actually an understatement. Hawai‘i is not just Kauahikaua’s home—it’s pretty much the full range and scope of his professional interests and ambitions. “Many of my colleagues are interested in volcanoes, period,” he says. “There is this type, and there is that type. I can honestly say that I am way more interested in our volcanoes than in any other volcanoes.”

Part of that, he admits, is a love of the cultural side of the phenomenon. Native Hawaiians have had a complex and intimate relationship with their volcanoes for centuries and continue to relate to them in ways that outsiders have trouble understanding.

“As a matter of fact,” he says, “you can see this in the most recent event, where lava threatened people’s homes, and native Hawaiians would take the attitude, ‘Pele is related to us. She is in our family tree.’ So they would actually see it as if a relative were visiting, which made me think, ‘That is a very clear understanding of our place on this landscape.’ If you feel that you own a piece of land, it is kind of temporary.”

For Kauahikaua, that sense that everything is temporary isn’t just academic. Indeed, he considers every day that he is able to study the volcano that he loves to be a gift—one he almost lost 15 years ago when he began to have blinding headaches and double vision and was eventually diagnosed with stage-four nasopharyngeal cancer, a tumor just below his brain.

For the better part of a year, he and his wife, Jeri Gertz, moved to Honolulu, where an oncologist put him through more than 40 radiation treatments and five or six chemo treatments. “He said he was going to nearly kill me to cure me, and that’s how it was,” he recalls.

The treatment left him with one deaf ear, significant hearing loss in the other and an enhanced appreciation of his opportunity to keep doing the things he loves. “There are gifts inside the most difficult of challenges,” Gertz says, “and both Jim and I would agree that we found those gifts.”

Asked about retirement, Kauahikaua said he thinks about it often, especially now. The observatory’s offices at Kīlauea were so badly damaged by earthquakes that the organization has had to scatter its personnel among crowded, makeshift office spaces around Hilo—a situation that he finds less than appealing. But he’s not ready to retire just yet.

In any case, Gertz says she doesn’t think retirement would be a change of direction for her husband—just a change of employment. “He will always continue to be this man who studies volcanoes, whether he’s employed with the USGS or not,” she says.

The latest eruptions started at the end of May and petered out near the end of August. They left behind a changed island—not only in a portion of its topography but also in its expectations. As Kauahikaua likes to say, “Our volcano isn’t the type you run away from. It’s the type you run toward.”

He means that literally—Hawaiian volcanoes have enjoyed such a reputation for tameness over the years that they’ve actually been draws for millions of visitors. In fact, he explains, “the activity at Kīlauea was the initial attraction for tourists in the 19th century and the location of the first hotel in the kingdom.”

Indeed, in this idyllic Hawaiian setting, even something as powerful and potentially dangerous as a thousand-foot-high lava fountain can somehow end up seeming harmless, as happened at Kīlauea in 1959. The fountain was right at the edge of a long crater, he recalls. “And so if the winds were right, the winds would blow the fountain debris away from the viewing areas, and any lava produced would fill up this crater. So it was a perfect thing for viewing. It became known as the ‘drive-in volcano.’”

Today, people still come to Hawai‘i to see lava flows and fountains or to watch glowing streams of molten rock slide into the ocean amid roiling clouds of steam—as if it were all a show put on for their entertainment. “Even during this past summer’s explosions and collapses at the summit, there were a few that wanted to see the summit area,” he says. “Several were arrested or cited by the National Park Service.”

But all of those years of constant but fairly predictable activity—more effusive than explosive, in a volcanologist’s terms—might at last be coming to an end. Certainly, the 2018 eruptions seemed to break the mold in a big way—or maybe it would be better to say that they turned back the clock. “Basically, it erupted 10 years of Kīlauea lava in three months,” Kauahikaua says. And it did so with a violence that the island hadn’t seen in centuries.

One good thing he thinks might come out of it is a greater acceptance among island officials of the unavoidable dangers of development in a rift zone, something the scientists at the observatory have been preaching about—largely in vain—for decades. The destruction of more than 700 homes over a three-month period, he says, may have finally changed some political hearts and minds. At least he hopes so.

After all, living in close proximity to one of the most powerful and unpredictable forces on earth calls for a certain degree of humility.

As Kauahikaua says, “Volcanoes were here first.”

Charlie 2.0 (The Paris Version)

September 5, 2018 by Dan Carlinsky Comments Off

Photos By Antoine Doyen

It was 2007. He was pushing 70. He and his wife had separated, and he was about to retire. Pages in his life were turning. It was time, he decided, to flip ahead to the next chapter.

Now, 11 years later, Charlie Crummer ’59, a one-time physicist in Southern California, lives in an apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, a quiet, mostly residential plot of land in the River Seine as it flows through the heart of Paris. He’s an inch or two over six feet tall, his white hair mildly scattered, as Einstein taught us a physicist’s hair ought to be. On the street, he winds a scarf around his neck, which isn’t actually a municipal fashion ordinance in Paris but might as well be. Inside a quiet, simple neighborhood crêperie, he relaxes over lunch as he talks about how the seeds of his move from California to France had pretty much been sown long before he shipped out. About how, really, it all started with a car.

But not just any car.

“It was a 1966 Citroën DS,” he says, smiling at the recollection. “Do you know it? A French classic. I’d been driving an old Chrysler—a real tank. I brought it to the repair shop and the owner had this ’66 DS, a Pallas, which was the luxury model. He said ‘Take it for the weekend and try it out.’ Fifty miles later I was a raving convert. This was 1972. Riverside, California.”

For car guys back then, the front-wheel-drive Citroën DS was a dream vehicle, with self-leveling hydropneumatic suspension, power steering, disc brakes and other features that were, for the time, trophies of cutting-edge engineering and an oddly attractive space-age body design. A decade ago, a poll of 20 top automotive designers named the introductory version of the iconic vehicle—the 1955 model—“The Most Beautiful Car of All Time.”

“I kept that car for 13 glorious years,” Crummer continues, “until one day it ran out of water and the engine was damaged. We were going on vacation and drove it as far as Sacramento airport and it died. I left it in the airport parking lot for quite a while and then sold it to a Citroën aficionado. It was approaching 200,000 miles; all it needed was an engine overhaul. I dream that somewhere it’s still on the road. It was a work of engineering art.”

“Really,” he says, “it was because of the Citroën that I fell in love with France. I knew it in 1977, when we took a family trip to France—we were there just a week, less than a day in Paris. That was my first time in the country, but when we left… I can’t explain it, but I felt kind of homesick. It was like leaving my hometown.”

He especially connected with Paris—the soaring churches, the endless art, the streets and squares—but he didn’t go back for more than a quarter-century. When he did return at last, for a short stay in 2004, he found the city’s appeal was still there. He visited again the next year, and the next. It was after his separation in 2006 that he began to think seriously about moving there. Moving—you might say—to his spiritual hometown.

The following March 28, Crummer retired from his job as a physics lab manager at UC Santa Cruz. That same day, he was on a plane to Paris.

He brought along his two big lifelong passions: physics and jazz. (Ask him to name his major influences and he’ll start with Albert Einstein and Charlie Parker.) Both interests go back to his time at Pomona. A physics major (he later earned a Ph.D. in quantum gauge theory at UC Riverside), he was a versatile reed musician who played oboe in the orchestra as well as jazz on several members of the saxophone family. “I remember playing Dixieland on an exquisite gold-plated Selmer soprano sax owned by a professor in the music department,” he recalls. “That was ‘Doc’ Blanchard. To this day, I’m amazed he let me borrow such a valuable horn.”

It being the 21st century, among the first things Crummer did in his new Paris home was to establish a blog, so he could express an occasional thought about his new surroundings and a stray opinion about the world as he sees it. He headed his page:

Charlie

France

Some thoughts and some pictures

Impressions of Paris and other random thoughts

In his first blog post 11 summers ago, he celebrated the city’s parks and alleys and gardens. He responded emotionally to the sound of the great 19th-century organs in the churches of Saint-Sulpice and La Madeleine (“Tears of joy well in my eyes, taking me by surprise. My heart swells in my throat and explodes with the passion of the moment”). He reported briefly on visits to two jazz clubs. In one, a tiny bar (“about 4m by 8m, good beer, not so good sandwiches”), the audience barely outnumbered the performers: There were, in total, three listeners, including Crummer; the band was a tenor sax player and a pianist (“I listen to the sound of six hands clapping as they finish each tune”).

And then: “I took my clarinet down to the Seine the other evening. I found a place where I could sit alone. Carefully, I put the horn together and then paused. Who am I? An old guy sitting in rapture beside the ancient river ‘flowing under’ that has lived its life continuously since before the first man came there to receive its succor. I’m a little nervous even though there is no one else around. I can’t remember any tunes so I just play some changes. The river is kind. It flows on.”

Crummer brought his clarinet and his alto sax to Paris; he left two other horns—a tenor and a baritone sax—behind. “A bari is too big,” he explains. “You can only take so much on a plane.” In a life reboot, wherever you go to, you take some of you along, you leave some of you behind.

To keep up his musical chops, Crummer downloaded a copy of the famous Universal Method of Saxophone, the sax man’s bible (“I had it as a kid”) for exercises. He started playing in a saxophone quartet. “The leader of our group is a tenor man who’s an economist,” he says. “He travels a lot, so we can’t rehearse regularly. We have a guy who doubles on soprano and alto, and I’m on second alto. The other two are the leader on tenor and another guy on bari. We play mostly jazz and tango. We have a terrific jazz chart by Gerry Mulligan, better than anything else I’ve seen from him. We also have great charts from Astor Piazzolla, the ‘nuevo tango’ composer.”

Not that joining a group means the end of his solo playing. “I look forward to the good weather,” he adds, “when I can walk down by the old coal ramp by the Seine and play, alone, next to the swans and ducks. It’s so romantic.”

His occasional blog entries, usually brief, are written at home or, on occasion, sitting on a bench in a park with a laptop and free wi-fi. He mentions musical events ranging from a solo balalaika concert to a quartet playing gypsy jazz in a church. He marvels at Paris architecture. He offers quick opinions on capitalism versus socialism (the way economist Milton Friedman uses them, they’re cartoon-like loaded terms, he argues, and “Life isn’t a cartoon strip”), on oil drilling and oil spilling (“It’s time to just leave things alone down in the deep ocean”), on gun deaths and the NRA (he’s very opposed), and on his kids (he’s very proud).

Lately, Crummer has also been guest blogging for a small not-for-profit publisher in San Francisco, which has appointed him its “Paris Bureau Chief.” Since he finds managing the French language an ongoing battle, he schedules weekly one-on-one sessions with a French woman in which they converse for an hour in French and an hour in English. He’s a retiree apparently with no shortage of ways to keep occupied.

The physics part of his life came along to Paris mainly in the form of a paper that has been, typically for the scientific world, years in the making: “Aerodynamics at the Particle Level,” a continuation of work he began back in Santa Cruz. The paper—90-some pages long—explores the collision of fluids with solid surfaces from the particle perspective. It has been posted online for comments and suggestions from the scientific community; he’s revised it multiple times. “The way aeronautical engineers design a wing,” Crummer explains, “is to look at a bird and make a model and put it in a wind tunnel. We actually know a fair amount about just why things happen as they happen, although not enough. But engineers don’t care; they just want to make something that works. I want to know what’s behind the phenomenon.”

Considering all the elements of his Paris life, could he return to the States? That may depend on someone who entered his life soon after he arrived in Paris: Christine.

During his first month in the city, at the coffee hour after a regular service at the interdenominational American Church in Paris, he noticed a woman across the room. “She looked like a damsel in distress,” he recalls. “I thought ‘Uh-oh, that’s trouble’ but I went over and introduced myself. This is a church for Americans mostly, but she was French. She had an apartment to rent on the Île Saint-Louis, and she was there to post a notice on the church bulletin board.”

The woman was Christine, and as it turned out, she wasn’t trouble at all.

At the time, Crummer had a six-month rental arrangement across town, so he didn’t need the apartment Christine was looking to rent out, but when the six months ran out they moved together to her childhood home in a close suburb, where she was able to care for her aging mother. “If I hadn’t been religious when I came,” Crummer says, “I would have been converted just because of the magical things that have happened to me since I moved here.”

Eventually, they took over the apartment she had been looking to rent that day, the apartment on the Île Saint-Louis. The island is just a few hundred yards from the tourist hordes around Notre-Dame Cathedral yet light-years away on the serenity scale. “I’ve been all over the city by now,” Crummer says. “The Île Saint-Louis is the absolute best location I can imagine.

“Christine would love to live in San Francisco—she’s thought about that for a long time. I might go back there with her. After all, she has a dream; she helped me realize mine, so what could be fairer? We might do six months and six months. There’s a lot to be worked out.”

He pauses a few seconds to reflect, then continues: “I’m thinking of the old saying: ‘Go with the flow.’ It’s all an adventure. We’ll see what happens.”

Breakthrough (And Aftermath)

September 5, 2018 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

Biochemist and UC Berkeley Professor Jennifer Doudna ’85 and her team discovered CRISPR-Cas9, a game-changing gene-editing technique with tremendous possibilities for curing diseases of all kinds, thanks to its precision. But with that finding, Doudna (who is also a Pomona trustee) discovered something else—that a great revelation sometimes brings with it a lot of wrestling. In A Crack in Creation, she tells a story that is about both success and struggle. PCM Book Editor Sneha Abraham talked to Doudna about the implications of what might be the most revolutionary scientific breakthrough of our time. This interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.

Jennifer Doudna ’85

PCM: You say in your book that, as a research scientist, you need adventurousness, curiosity, instinct, grit, practicality. Where do you get these traits from, and who’s your greatest influence?

Doudna: I think it comes from a combination of innate curiosity—I think we all have it, certainly as kids—and appropriate encouragement from family, friends and mentors along the way. That mix gave me an open-mindedness to ideas and a way of figuring out how to ask questions about the natural world.

PCM: Did your Pomona education prepare you for this in some way?

Doudna: I am grateful to Pomona every day, honestly, because it was a liberal arts education that exposed me to so many ideas that I would never have come into contact with, probably, without having attended Pomona. Many smart people, lots of really bright students, and not only those interested in chemistry, as I was, but also people thinking about history, French, physics, mathematics and geography. All sorts of topics. It’s a rich intellectual environment that opens one’s mind to the incredibly interesting diversity of the world in terms of cultures, ideas and perspectives.

PCM: Was there a class or professor that really impacted you while you were here?

Doudna: I think [Professor of Chemistry] Fred Grieman. I know he’s retiring soon, but Fred Grieman was a newish professor at the time when I attended Pomona. He was teaching physical chemistry, and he was spectacular. I think he’s a great combination of really deep understanding of the material so that you could teach it in a very clear and comprehensible way—and it’s not an easy topic, as you know—but also somebody who was very human, very funny, great sense of humor, really great at connecting with students. We used to play softball together in the summertime, and he always had students working in his lab over the summer and would have barbecues and things like that. He was very good at teaching us students that you could be a terrific scientist, very smart and intellectual, and still have a life outside of the lab.

PCM: In the book, you talk about that moment of discovery, that moment of pure joy in your kitchen. What was that like for you?

Doudna: Well, I’ve had a few, I would say, such moments in my career, and in this case, it was really one of those rare times in one’s life when the stars align. In our case, the ideas had come together, the data for experiments we were working on in the laboratory had given rise to a really sudden understanding of, not only how the CRISPR bacterial immune system works, but also how it could be used in a really exciting way. And that night, that moment I describe in the book, was really one of just unadulterated joy thinking about how amazing it is to explore science and make a discovery that you realize is going to be really impactful and change the world in certain ways.

PCM: That discovery presents so many amazing possibilities Was there an immediate thought that came to mind?

Doudna: For me, it was probably thinking about opportunities to cure genetic disease. When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, my lab was located at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where a professor named Jim Gusella was mapping the gene that causes Huntington’s disease. It is a terrible neurodegenerative disease that people get usually in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and then suffer from for many years with progressive loss of neurological function. So, being aware of that gene mapping experiment that was done in the ’80s, and then fast-forwarding a couple of decades and realizing that CRISPR technology, in principle, will allow the correction of that kind of mutation was a really profound thought.

PCM: You’re a research scientist, but with this discovery, you’ve become an ethicist as well, right? Were you expecting that as this was unfolding? How has that unfolding been for you?

Doudna: Not at all. I was absolutely not thinking, originally, about the kinds of ethical challenges that would come up. However, it became clear over the ensuing months that CRISPR was working better than anticipated, opening game-changing opportunities in how we might treat existing patients and how the technology might help future generations. What would be the ethical impact and what would go into making the right society and species-defining decisions needed to be explored and debated. I went from being a biochemist and structural biologist, working in my lab on this esoteric bacterial system, to realizing that I needed to get up to speed quickly on how other kinds of technologies that have been transformative had been managed and handled by the scientists that were involved in their genesis. Because the field of CRISPR was moving so quickly, the ethical discussions needed to catch up.

PCM: This is a big question. Is there an ethical dilemma that you’re most concerned about with genome editing?

Doudna: Well, there are a few that have gotten a lot of media attention. I think I would say that, at least in the near term, what I worry about the most is a rush to apply genome editing in ways that might inadvertently harm people. That might be because of over-excitement or the desire on the part of a scientist somewhere to do something first. I think that competitive want to move ahead with new ideas can be a very healthy drive in science but it can also lead to problems. In this case, I really hope that there is a concerted effort globally to restrain ourselves and do things in a measured and thoughtful fashion that doesn’t get ahead of the technology and the ethical debate.

PCM: It raises a lot of questions about us as a society, right? In the book you write about some of the implications socioeconomically and politically. How do you see this unfolding for the good? What are the dilemmas there?

Doudna: That’s another really big question. The good news is that there are now lots of discussions happening about the ethics and appropriate uses of gene editing technologies. I think that’s great progress but how we ultimately deploy CRISPR is going to come down to the pace at which helpful applications are actually developed and approved for use. For example, one of the most promising applications is called “gene drive.” It is the ability to drive a trait through a population very quickly using gene editing. Gene drive could be a real environmental impact concern due to its potential to wipe out a species of mosquitoes and perhaps cause unknown damage to associated species and ecosystems.

On the other hand, if deployed correctly, gene drive could have a hugely positive impact on human health by preventing the spread of mosquito-borne disease, perhaps by adding a trait that made mosquitoes incapable of transmitting a particular disease such as Zika virus. This is the type of cost-benefit calculation that has to be made in each case.

PCM: With CRISPR, when you’re looking ahead, or maybe it’s happening now, what kind of effects do you see on the biomedical industry or pharmaceutical companies, or the health care industry? Because this will change a lot of how we do medicine, right?

Doudna: I think it will in a few ways. One effect is using genome editing to discover genetic causes of disease. I think that’s still a very big data opportunity, to figure out, not only single genes that might cause disease, but also genetic interactions. Where there might be genes that interact with others to create a risk for certain people that bear that particular genetic makeup. I think that’s important, and it leads to opportunities to target those genes with drugs, and drug companies are increasingly using CRISPR technology to do exactly that. We are also trying to mine the human genome for new potential targets and then use genome editing to correct those mutations or create, if not a cure, at least some kind of a palliative approach to genetic disease. I think that will happen increasingly, especially as challenges like how to deliver these molecules into cells are addressed.

I also want to mention the incredible commercial opportunities. I’m seeing a lot of young entrepreneurs starting their own companies focused on making use of CRISPR technologies, investors excited to contribute money, and growing opportunities for companies to partner in different areas ranging from biomedicine to agriculture. It is very exciting and these opportunities are not just for scientists, but also for people that have a variety of backgrounds such as business. It’s really an interesting convergence of young people with a mix of expertise.

PCM: You write a bit about food politics, and the issue of GMOs, and that gap between the scientific community and the public. What do you think is driving the narrative that you say is false, that GMOs are a danger to our health? What’s behind that narrative that’s being pushed by other people?

Doudna: I think it’s a couple of things. Partly, it’s a lack of understanding about what we mean when we say “genetic modification,” and the fact that essentially all the food that we eat is genetically modified, because it’s edited by plant breeders that introduce genetic mutations. You just have to reference back to what tomatoes looked like before plant breeders got involved. They were very different from how they are today but why is that? Well, changes to the DNA, of course, but those changes were introduced, not by a precision genome editing technology like CRISPR. They were introduced by random mutation and then selection for desired traits. So, the unknown that can worry the public is what other genetic changes come along to the ride? We know they do but we just don’t happen to know what they are. I think when people understand that, they start to realize that the whole definition of GMOs is a bit contrived.

Also, I think the public can be suspicious about the intentions of corporations. That perception that corporations do not have our best health interests in mind, that they are out to make money, and that they do not care about potential risks, choosing instead to forge ahead with “Frankenfoods” or whatever you want to call it. We have seen this in the media, and it’s potentially at the expense of people’s health.

It really comes down to those two things then — not understanding what genetic modification really means and how our current food supply was created by plant breeders, and also being suspicious of the real motivations of corporations. We need to take a step back and really ask ourselves, “What makes sense here?” Then, we need to take a thoughtful path forward that allows technology to advance and help us solve important challenges in a way that is responsible. It’s not an easy balance, but I think we have to try to tackle that.

PCM: So who decides how this technology is used? You talk about that being a dilemma, as well, between scientists and the public. How is that dialogue going, currently, and how do you see that developing?

Doudna: Right now, the way that science progresses is largely decided by scientists, and then there are funders. So, if the scientists have an idea, something they want to do in the lab, they have to get money to do it. If they’re getting money from the public, namely from the taxpayers, that involves typically writing a grant, writing a proposal that says, “Here’s the science that I want to do, and here’s why,” and submitting it to a review committee of peers who review and comment on it. For example, they may say, “Well, good idea,” or, “Not a great idea,” and they then make a recommendation to the government about whether that type of science should be funded. That is how it currently works.

Now, if you’re a scientist who has other kinds of resources that are from private money—you have a wealthy donor or a foundation—you have to convince those folks rather than representatives of the government. Either way it usually comes down to an idea on the part of the scientist, and then convincing somebody or some entity to pay the bills. There’s a lot of science that involves things that could cause risk to humans. There are various kinds of regulatory controls that are placed on that work and various kinds of panels or review boards approve those kinds of projects. However, there’s not a broader oversight other than that, and a number of scientists have commented upon the fact that, for example, institutional review boards, or IRBs, have rules for how researchers can do things like work with human subjects or human tissues. The issue is that the rules are different at every institution.

Since the IRB rules at my institution, UC Berkeley, are different than other universities, I could have colleagues working elsewhere that would be under a different set of rules. That’s something that various groups are looking at—ways to try to streamline. As you can imagine, it’s very tough because you have a lot of different people with different opinions about these sorts of things. So, it’s just an ongoing challenge that we have.

PCM: This is half-joking, but I was chatting with a friend about CRISPR, and he asked, “At what point can we clone ourselves, get out of work, and still get paid?”

Doudna: Wow. That sounds very ambitious. It’ll take a lot of work to not have to work. That’s all I can say.

PCM: It’s not in the immediate future?

Doudna: No.

The Shadow of Korematsu

September 5, 2018 by Jonathan Van Harmelen ’17 Comments Off

Of the many divisive cases in U.S. legal history, few are as haunting as Korematsu v. United States (1944). In the ruling, the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Hugo Black argued that national security took precedence over individual liberties. And they maintained the legality of the infamous Executive Order 9066—which ordered the incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.

This decision has remained a stain on civil liberties ever since, and the June 26, 2018, Supreme Court’s reversal of Korematsu represents the first major victory since 1988 related to rectifying Japanese-American incarceration. However, by overruling Korematsu while approving President Donald Trump’s travel ban, the court has simply appropriated one tragedy to justify another. While Chief Justice John Roberts argued that President Donald Trump’s travel ban is legally different—and constitutional—in comparison to the Korematsu case, they both have the purpose of unjustly singling out individuals based on race. And although the subject of Japanese- American incarceration focuses on racial injustice towards U.S. citizens, it is also a story of immigration and how the U.S. government has employed racialized immigration policies under the vague guise of “national security.”

Even before camps like Manzanar existed for holding U.S. citizens of Japanese descent against their will, the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service—the forerunner to ICE—had built their own camps to house Japanese citizens, often separating families in the process. Although Japanese immigrants had arrived in this country en masse since the 1870s, they were barred from naturalization. Long before U.S. involvement in World War II, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover drafted extensive lists of so-called “disloyal enemy aliens” because of vague associations with Japan. While Germans and Italians were on this list as well, they numbered far less and always had the option to become U.S. citizens; Japanese immigrants would not share that opportunity until 1952.

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI conducted mass arrests of Japanese-American community leaders—sometimes in the middle of the night—and detained them in internment camps across the U.S. from Montana to Louisiana. Families often heard very little from their relatives in these camps, where their detainment lasted anywhere from a few months to several years. By 1943, the U.S. began a policy of deporting Japanese-Americans back to Japan as part of an exchange program with U.S. prisoners of war. On July 14, 1945, less than two months before the war’s end, President Harry Truman signed into effect a proclamation that permitted immigration officials to remove internees from the United States if they were deemed “a danger to the public peace.”

One man who faced such a scenario was Katsuma Mukaeda.

In 1908, he immigrated from Japan to the United States. According to his 1995 obituary in the Los Angeles Times, he distinguished himself as a law student at USC and established himself as a successful lettuce grower in Southern California and a prominent figure in L.A.

Despite being unable to practice law because he was Japanese, he worked as a paralegal supporting the Japanese community. He was a champion for improving race relations within the greater Los Angeles community, and in 1935 helped establish the Society of Oriental Studies at The Claremont Colleges. According to scholar Malcolm Douglass, the society was founded with the intention of making the “Claremont Colleges the center of Oriental Culture on the Pacific Coast.” With help from a Rockefeller Grant, scholars at Pomona and Scripps worked alongside Mukaeda to established a strong emphasis on Asian Studies, and provided the foundation to the Asian Studies Library at Honnold-Mudd Library. To many, Mukaeda was an ideal U.S. citizen who advocated greater civic engagement and mending the issues of society.

Yet because of his activism, the FBI decided he was the perfect target. On Dec. 1, 1941, Hoover recommended Mukaeda’s internment “in the event of a national emergency.” Within a week after Pearl Harbor, FBI agents detained him with hundreds of other Japanese merchants, Buddhist priests and community leaders in the Los Angeles County Jail. Although no evidence of treason or sabotage was ever produced, Mukaeda was nonetheless interned for being “a suspect.” For years, he was shipped to various internment camps such as Camp Livingston, Louisiana, and Fort Missoula, Montana. By 1945, he found himself at Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico, where a large number of internees were subjected to abuse by guards and sometimes received poorer treatment than enemy POWs in stateside camps. Following Truman’s proclamation, Mukaeda also found himself facing deportation back to Japan.

All the while, his family was separated from him. While Mukaeda was sent to one internment camp after another, his wife, Minoli, and son, Richard, were incarcerated at Poston Incarceration Camp in Arizona. When Minoli received word of the July 1945 deportation list that included her husband, she pleaded to the U.S. government and others for help, arguing that their only son “needs a father’s care now more than anything.” While researching Mukaeda’s FBI file at the National Archives as a part of my graduate studies in June, I found dozens of letters of recommendation and support written to FBI officials, all testifying to his loyalty and future importance of mending relations between Japan and the U.S. The letter writers—mostly long-term residents of the Los Angeles area—ranged from close friends to L.A. Times publisher Harry Chandler and former Pomona College President James Blaisdell.

For President Emeritus Blaisdell, the story of incarceration was clear throughout Southern California. Shortly after the arrest of Mukaeda and the passage of Executive Order 9066, thousands of Japanese-Americans were herded into so-called “assembly centers” at the nearby Los Angeles County Fairgrounds and Santa Anita Racetrack. Three students from Pomona were also forced to leave campus due to the executive order, and were famously given tearful goodbyes by their fellow classmates. While the College itself did what many other universities did at the time—provide students with transfer options to East Coast schools—Blaisdell went further to help out his friend.

Throughout the years of Mukaeda’s internment, Blaisdell wrote multiple letters to the FBI reaffirming both the activist’s loyalty to the U.S. and his importance to the Los Angeles community based on his previous work with Pomona and Scripps, the only Claremont Colleges at that time. Blaisdell’s first letter of May 17, 1944, was sent to help secure Mukaeda a second hearing by the FBI. When the hearing did not clear his name, Mukaeda went back to Blaisdell for help. In a letter to the FBI in November 1945, Blaisdell praised Mukaeda as “a man, I believe, who can be of great usefulness in healing the relations between the two countries and establishing just and honorable relations between the Japanese and Americans in this country.” After a reappraisal of his case, Mukaeda was deemed loyal and freed from the Santa Fe camp in February 1946, after four years in detention separated from his family.

Following the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, Japanese nationals were finally able to become United States citizens. A final attestation of their friendship was a letter from Blaisdell to Mukaeda dated June 3, 1953, congratulating him on becoming a citizen and proclaiming,“I only hope that we who have been native born will be worthy of you.” Mukaeda continued to be a champion for the Japanese-American community until his death on November 8, 1995 at the age of 104.

There are two important lessons from Mukaeda’s story. One is that foreign policy dictated by racism and the violent separation of families are both, sadly, a recent chapter in U.S. history. Immigrants of all backgrounds have participated in the building of our nation’s history, and a system focused on exclusion only harms ourselves.

When Mukaeda was being held captive by immigration officials and on the brink of being deported, there were Americans who stood up for him. Pomona’s mission as a college—while constantly evolving—has always focused, in part, on the importance of social justice and activism. Often we think of these stories as being driven by powerful figures that leave everyday people as mere spectators; in reality we all can play a role. Mukaeda’s story, and Blaisdell’s tireless support, remind us of our constant duty to support those victimized by unjust laws or systems such as our current immigration system—and of the ability we have to effect change.

Jonathan van Harmelen ’17 is a graduate student at Georgetown University studying the comparative history of incarceration.

What’s Next for Pomona?

September 5, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

PCM: You’ve said your first year at Pomona has been a year of listening. What have you heard, and are there some important things you’ve gleaned from it? Any big surprises?

Starr: Well, even though the College has changed a lot over the last 30, 40 or 50 years, there are some things about it that remain the same and should continue. And one of the things that I think is most remarkable is that every Sagehen I’ve met is defined by being intensely curious. There’s a kind of curiosity that is a fundamental characteristic of Pomona alumni and students and faculty, and there’s also a persistence to the relationships that people build. I’ve met with alumni five years out. I’ve met with alumni 50 years out. And for many of them, their core friendships, the ones that defined who they are, were forged here at the College. The fact that this has persisted is a really wonderful testament to what happens on this campus, and that is something that we have to continue to nurture.

Also, we’re an incredibly caring community. Most of us want to serve other people in some significant way in our lives. Whether this happens through teaching or building things or nurturing communities or health care, this is a group of people who really want to be there for others.

PCM: Strategic planning implies change, but Pomona is already one of the very best liberal arts colleges in the world. So the obvious question is: Why should we change? Or is the planning process really about something other than change?

Starr: Strategy does not mean simply change. I think a key part of the strategic planning process is setting priorities. Pomona has been really lucky to do everything we do so very well, but as we move into our next phase, we need to say: “We don’t have unlimited resources, and the question is: How are we going to use those resources best?” We’ve done some wonderful things at this college by prioritizing people. That’s been in financial aid; it’s been in resources for faculty; it’s been in benefits. And now it’s time for us to say: “Okay, where do we decide we’re going to make our next range of investments as a college?”

And while we are, I think, one of the best, if not the best, liberal arts college in the world, “best” is always contextual. And because the world changes around us, we don’t want to sit still. So we have to think about how we are helping to develop the best talent that is coming through our doors today and then the next five years and the next five years after that. So that, hopefully, is what planning is going to help us achieve.

PCM: The rapidity of change today has gotten quite daunting. What does that do to a planning process? How far ahead can we legitimately plan?

Starr: I think five to seven years is a reasonable horizon, because one of the things that we do as a college is try to take the long view and not be reactive to everything that comes across the bow. Part of what’s supposed to happen in your time at a liberal arts college is for you to slow down and think, and so, even though change happens at a very rapid pace, we have to be thoughtful.

Still, you can rationally look out and say, “We know we have buildings that we need to think about. We know that we have an endowment that we have to take care of. We know that we’ve got a four-year horizon for just about every new student who comes in.” So some time scales are a given. But I think the time of a 10-year strategic plan has probably passed, because the economic conditions change too rapidly, and global conditions change too rapidly to think that far out.

PCM: Are there any past commitments that you think are untouchable because they’re so intrinsically a part of who we are?

Starr: I once had a student who did her dissertation on the idea of culture and the origins of that term—coming out of the earth. Culture builds up over time. Every seed that’s planted changes it—as does every wind that comes in, every person that walks through—but the culture still rebuilds.

The culture of Pomona that seems most self-perpetuating, and also best, is that sense of a contemplative, sharply focused, curious, residential, broad, liberal arts education. I don’t think we would ever want to change that, because the whole point of a liberal arts education is that it allows you to adapt to the world around you.

I think that our commitment to the diversity of human experience should not change because, again, what we are here to do as an educational institution is to make the fullness of human history, of human knowledge, continually available. And that needs to be available to as many of the most talented people as we can properly serve. So our commitment to diversity, I think, can only continue.

And ultimately, we have defined ourselves, in some ways, as an opportunity college, so being able to admit the best students regardless of their need is really important to our future.

PCM: Of course, the world around us continues to change. What external factors do you see out there going forward that may call for us to evolve?

Starr: I think national changes around immigration are certainly very concerning. Again, if we are committed to the actual human beings who make up the world, being able to welcome people from all corners of not only our own country but of countries from around the world is really important. For students and faculty, knowledge doesn’t sit happily within any one country or state, and we want that access to be there. So that’s certainly a very important consideration.

There are financial pressures, such as the tax on endowments, that mean that we will have to make some hard choices.

I think that there are certainly possibilities for us to focus on the human side of technology, and how it is that we ethically use the technologies that we create, and how we can design them inclusively, with an eye, as I said, to ethical use. We have lots of faculty members who are focused on that.

And then there are always the uncertainties that come with life. That, again, is the reason that we have a strategic planning process—so that we can take the time to say, “When that fork in the road comes, which of those paths are we going to walk?” So strategic planning is meant to help us manage those changes that we know about, but also externalities that will pop up on their own.

PCM: One of the things that continues to change is the nature of the students who are coming here. They’re all talented, but their experiences change. Their expectations in life change. What do you think we should be looking forward to in the next generation of Pomona students?

Starr: We know that there are massive demographic shifts going on in the U.S. and globally right now. There are going to be fewer and fewer college-age students, certainly in the Northeastern U.S. There’s going to be some growth in the West and in the South, but there’s going to be increased competition for the best students, and we want to continue to be able to draw the very best students that we can.

Many of us are concerned about the effects of lots of social media usage by this particular generation of high school and college students. There’s very good psychological evidence that social media can have a strong negative effect on adolescents. As they come into college, how do we build a community that can move beyond the digital to really focus on the face-to-face? That’s going to be a lot of work that we have to do.

It’s also true, as Beverly Tatum has pointed out, that this generation of students comes from schools that are much more segregated than any since pretty much Brown v. The Board of Education. And that means that when we talk about bringing a diverse group of students together, for many of them, if not most of them, this is the first time that they will be in close proximity to people very unlike themselves, and we are one of the most diverse communities in higher education today. So being intentional about how we bring people together is going to be a major challenge that we have to keep our eye on.

And I think it’s a wonderful challenge to have, frankly, because this is the world that we hope to create: a world where everybody can exist in a way that’s true to who they are and can work toward their own goals, but also the collective goals of what’s good for the world—clean water, good health care, functioning economies, strong schools. All of those things. Being one’s true self is not in conflict with being part of a caring community.

PCM: Years ago, I think many of us had the naïve notion that once you built up the diversity of the College it was mission accomplished. Of course, making a place truly inclusive isn’t quite that simple. Do you think we have a handle on that now?

Starr: Well, I think we’re close. I will say that something that I keep reminding myself is, you know, I’m an African-American woman who was not from a monied family and dealt with real prejudice growing up. And I was successful in a much less diverse environment than this, the one that I’m in right now, and so I have something of survivor’s bias, in that I was able to make it through despite all sorts of things that didn’t exist or were wrong. So I may have a predisposition to say, “Okay, well, you know, let’s get on with it.”

And I think many people who are successful—which would be just about all of our alumni and all of the people who are in power in the country—may have a kind of survivor’s bias. And it’s very difficult for us to imagine all those who didn’t make it and understand why. There could have been 20 like me, right?—40 like me, 50 like me—if things had been different or we’d had the same support. What would our world look like now?

So I think we need to really listen to our current students and try to understand how to broaden the path instead of thinking that the path that we were on was fine as it was.

PCM: Like most institutions of higher learning over the past year, Pomona has had some intense discussions about the nature and limits of free speech on campus. How do you think that is going to play into this planning process?

Starr: Well, I think that it will play into it on several levels. One is: We’re going to certainly think about our living communities and our learning communities and how we bring intentional dialogue into them. We already have one space that does this in a particular way, which is Oldenborg—where people come with the purpose of talking in a particular language—but how can we take that model of purposeful dialogue and expand it throughout our residential communities so that people can come in and speak intentionally with one another in an open and caring and critical and thoughtful way?

So as we think about residential programming, but also our facilities, how we bring people together is really important. A funny anecdote: When we were talking with students about plans for the new Oldenborg, we asked, “Well, do you want to have separate bathrooms or communal bathrooms?” Now, when I was in college, everybody wanted their own bathroom in a single. That seemed obvious. Why would you want anything different, right? But the students were saying, “No. Now, many of us live in these small rooms by ourselves, and the only place we have surprising, accidental conversations is on the way to the bathroom.” And that said something to me about the way in which we have provided so much individualized opportunity that people are yearning for the casual conversation. So how can we think about that?

We also need to think about what changes may be needed in our curriculum. This is a conversation that is deeply in the hands of the faculty as we think it through. How we structure discussions in our classrooms. What new tools we might need for students who may have learned to speak to one another over a screen rather than face-to-face.

PCM: On the subject of the curriculum, do you think the planning process will need to address the exploding interest in STEM fields and the imbalances that grow out of that?

Starr: Yes, that’s not going away any time soon. I think we’ve seen—not just here at Pomona but nationally—a large expansion in the need for computer science instruction, and that’s a need we have to meet. And in the allocation of resources and the need for new resources, we need to think about both the curriculum and how we deliver it.

One of the things that I think is very interesting about the way some of our faculty are thinking about technology is that technology is human. It’s not something that is outside of the liberal arts tradition at all. In fact, the liberal arts tradition—when we think about what liberal arts meant in their earliest incarnations—was about tools. Mental tools, physical tools and how to be creative in this new technological landscape—those are things that are going to be really important going forward.

We also have great things going on in the humanities, with Kevin Dettmar’s Humanities Studio, and in the social sciences, where people like Tahir Andrabi and Amanda Hollis-Brusky are thinking in dramatically new ways about old problems. Our athletics faculty are teaching amazing life skills, as well as nursing leadership and the whole student. We have a lot to be proud of.

PCM: There are a number of small private colleges today that are failing or having to make significant changes to keep their doors open. How does that affect Pomona and small colleges in general as we think about our future?

Starr: I actually think, nationally, the question’s not so much size. People talk about a crisis in small liberal arts colleges, and you can look at Antioch or Sweet Briar. Even Oberlin has had some financial challenges in the past few years. However, we just learned this summer that Northwestern, a large research-one university that’s highly endowed, is having financial challenges—slowing down on building projects and laying off staff, cutting budgets by as much as 10 percent in some divisions. So it’s not size that’s the question. It really has to do with how we think about our budgets and the priorities that we’re going to set and realizing that while we may have a list of 20 things we want to do, we can’t do them all at once. Staging our accomplishments is what’s crucial. And just keeping our eyes open, because a lot of problems don’t crop up overnight. The question is whether or not you are continually keeping your eye on where difficulties can arise.

PCM: I know Pomona is not immune to resource problems, though a lot of people probably think we are. Will the new strategic plan address the way we dedicate resources?

Starr: One thing that it’s really important for folks to understand is that 10 years ago, $19 million is what we spent on financial aid. Now we’re spending closer to $50 million. That money hasn’t emerged magically. The money comes primarily from the growth of our endowment. That endowment growth comes from investing, but it also comes from giving, and so when people ask, “Why should we give to Pomona?” it is because that’s an extra $30 million that goes to support every one of those promising students who are able to take advantage of this education. And we don’t only support our students with direct aid. The cost of a Pomona education is subsidized for every single student here by the generosity of past and current members of our community.

So one of my goals, personally, but also as part of strategic planning, is to come to a point where we have fully endowed all of our financial aid. So that we are not relying on tuition to help us bring the best students here. And ultimately we’re going to be calling on our community to help us to do that, and we will need every single dollar in order to achieve it.

We look at the students who are admitted and the students who applied, and we ask, “Are we losing people because we can’t give them enough aid?” We’re doing some of that analysis now to see how well we are doing at bringing students who we know would be successful here and helping them to stay, because part of the challenge is that family circumstances change. Parents may go through a divorce, have a health care crisis, an immigration challenge, and then suddenly what was full need only covers half of it or less. So it’s a problem I’m glad we have, but it’s still a challenge. How will we secure the purse strings to free the minds to thrive?

PCM: You’ve said you want everyone to feel free to put forward new ideas, big ideas. What are some of the criteria that you’ll be using to evaluate those new ideas?

Starr: I think the question is what benefit do they bring and to whom? We want to be able to say, “Are we getting the largest benefit that we can?” Even if it’s in one small area.

As a liberal arts college, we have to continue to prioritize our students. We are here to teach them. Faculty research, though, is a really important part of that because the curiosity that defines Pomona has to be fed, and research is one way that we feed that curiosity.

And we’re going to have to make decisions. For example, should every single person have a research opportunity in the summer, or should we think about research as a year-round experience? How do we think about prioritizing investments in health? How can we best serve the students who are here? If it means that we can’t, for example, have perfect, full-time medical care all year round, then maybe we need to have fewer people on campus in the summer.

There are going to be all sorts of trade-offs that we’re going to have to consider, but what we want is to know that we’re benefitting our students with every dollar that we spend. We want to know that we’re retaining and attracting the best faculty and staff, and we want to know that our students are going off to better themselves and to better the world. Those are the three things that are the ultimate criteria we have to judge anything by.

PCM: Pomona has never intentionally grown its enrollment, but as a practical matter, there has been slow, incremental growth over the decades. Should the College be more intentional about how it grows?

Starr: Absolutely. There are several important questions we should be asking. One is: If we think we’re doing this better than anybody else, is it morally acceptable to us to do it at this particular scale? And the question that I always want us to ask is: Who are we missing, and are we comfortable with that?

And there are different ways for thinking about this. Would we want to bring in more international students? Exchange programs for a year? That’s one way of thinking about who we might be missing. Would we want to have more robust exchange programs with other colleges as a way of thinking about who we’re missing? Historically, Pomona has grown by founding new colleges. That was the model that we took. We said, “No, we’re not just going to get bigger and bigger.”

We don’t seek to educate 10,000 people here. That’s not who we are. But what size would allow us to say, “We’re doing the most for the world in the best way we think we can?”

So we should talk about it. However, serving our students requires a ratio of students to faculty that is small, and I believe in that. So if we ever were to increase the size of our student body, the size of our faculty would have to increase too.

PCM: Are there obvious issues or opportunities that need to be addressed in the planning process? What excites or worries you going forward?

Starr: Yeah. I think some of the obvious things are in the physical plant—Rains, Oldenborg and Thatcher are buildings that need attention. We have been a very thoughtful institution in thinking about equity among the students and their experience. So if students in physics have access to great things, students in music should have access to great things. To me, that’s quite obvious.

We clearly need to think about financial aid, as I said, and we need to work with the other colleges around health and mental health, as well as preventing sexual violence—I think those are obvious. Asking questions about career outcomes and life outcomes—I think we’re definitely going to have to keep an eye on that too.

Beyond that, I’m really excited to see what comes up from the community as people start to think about what we want to be seven years from now. Ten or 11 years from now, looking back, what will we see as the defining experiences of the first-year students that come in between now and the end of the strategic plan? What will be different for them? What can we do to lay a foundation?

There’s the old phrase: You plant trees under which other people will sit. That’s what this is about. We are going to be planting trees for other people, and that is good gardening.

PCM: Ultimately, what is your best hope for both the strategic planning process and its outcome?

Starr: Ultimately, what I hope is that people enjoy engaging in a constructive, collective visioning of our future, because it’s about what we hope. It’s not about what we want, you know? What we want is about now. What we hope is about the future, and so hope is knowing you’re not going to get everything out of it, but still being enthusiastic and optimistic about the next steps that we’re going to take.

So that would be a big win if we come out of this feeling really hopeful about our future. Then it’s up to us to do the work.

How to Become a Circus Performer (and a Doctor)

September 5, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

Photo by Beihua Guo (Pitzer ’21)

Thanks to a childhood fascination with circus activities, Jack Gomberg ’18 found himself, at the tender age of 18, at a crossroads, having to choose between two radically different paths in life. Should he seize a rare opportunity with Cirque de Soleil or keep his love of the circus arts as an avocation while pursuing a more traditional education at Pomona? Put yourself in his shoes…

Jack Gomberg ’18
Neuroscience Major

Grow up in a baseball-centric family in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago—near the Chicago Cubs’ famed ballpark, Wrigley Field—and start playing tee-ball at 3. Discover that you’re “a little above average” as a toddler-athlete, meaning that you can run all the way to first base without falling down.

In kindergarten, attend a hands-on workshop by the nonprofit social-circus group CircEsteem. After failing miserably at juggling scarves, test your sense of balance on a rolling globe—a hard sphere about four feet in diameter—and do so well that the group invites you to join them for practices.

Partly because the workshop was so cool and partly to escape the soccer practice you despise, join CircEsteem’s new after-school program and discover an awe-inspiring new world—a cavernous circus ring where kids up to high-school age are performing all sorts of acrobatics on the ground and in the air.

At first, stay in your comfort zone with your rolling globe. Then slowly branch out to other circus arts, such as trampoline and partner acrobatics. Avoid two things like the plague: juggling and aerial acrobatics. Conquer your dread of juggling at the age of 8, and two years later, overcome your fear of heights on the static trapeze.

See your first Cirque de Soleil—Corteo—at age 12 and realize that the circus can be truly artistic. Then, when world gym wheel champion Wolfgang Bientzle comes to Chicago to create a Team U.S.A. in the sport, catch his eye and fall in love with the gym wheel under his expert tutelage.

Win your first national championship in gym wheel at 14 after telling your mom she didn’t need to stay because the competition was “no big deal.” Go to your first World Championships in Arnsberg, Germany, and make friends from around the world while reaching the finals in all three 18-and-under events, including one fourth-place finish.

Two years later, apply to Cirque du Soleil to spend a week at their training facility in Montreal, Canada, and get invited to serve as a temporary gym wheel coach for the Cirque du Soleil acrobats. Then, when the World Championships come to Chicago, defend your home turf by winning two bronze medals.

While applying for college, also apply to the École de Cirque in Quebec, a feeder school for Cirque du Soleil. Since you know its three-year program is impossibly exclusive, apply for a gap year in its slightly more accessible one-year program. Get accepted to the three-year program instead. Have to choose between a circus life and Pomona. Choose Pomona.

Even before arriving on campus, make arrangements to form a club at The Claremont Colleges because you want to build a community of people with an interest in the circus arts. Name the club 5Circus and serve as its president for three years before, in the name of continuity, letting someone else take over during your senior year.

Major in neuroscience and decide to become a doctor. But since you didn’t take a gap year before college, decide to take one before entering medical school. Win a Fulbright Fellowship to spend the year in Israel, melding your passions for medicine and the circus by studying an innovative paramedical practice known as “medical clowning.”

From Theory to Practice

September 5, 2018 by Patricia Vest Comments Off

Professor Nicholas Ball

A rare collaboration between one of the world’s leading biopharmaceutical companies and a chemistry lab at a small liberal arts college began as the result of a chance encounter.

Chemistry major Ariana Tribby ’17 was presenting a poster at the American Chemistry Society (ACS) National Meeting in Philadelphia in 2016 when her research, under the guidance of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Nicholas Ball, caught the attention of Pfizer’s Senior Principal Scientist Dr. Christopher am Ende.

The biopharmaceutical giant was interested in Ball’s lab work using sulfonyl fluorides to make other sulfur-based molecules. Dr. am Ende was particularly interested in Ball’s work with sulfonamides.

Sulfonyl fluorides have been used in biology for decades, are valued for their stability in water and bioactivity and are now emerging as precursors for a myriad of sulfur-based compounds. According to Ball, the stability of sulfonyl fluorides are more attractive over traditional routes using sulfonamides that require reagents that have a short self-life or undesirable side reactions. The key challenge for Pomona-Pfizer collaborative study was to figure out a way to unlock the reactivity of sulfonyl fluorides for the desired reaction.

Sulfonamides are widely prevalent in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries. They represented 15 percent of the top 100 most prescribed drugs, with therapeutic applications against cardiovascular, infectious and neurological diseases in 2016.

This mutual interest between Pfizer and the Ball Lab led to a year-long research partnership to develop a methodology to make sulfonamides from sulfonyl fluorides using calcium salts. Pfizer did the initial work to come up with a sketch for a synthetic route, while Ball’s lab work involved optimizing that synthetic route and testing its versatility. After countless hours in the lab–both at Pfizer and at Pomona–many teleconference calls and more than 100 chemical reactions later, the research team had found an optimal reaction by the end of the summer of 2017.

The study was recently published as an open access article in Organic Letters, one of the most highly-regarded academic journals in organic chemistry. Their work will hopefully translate into more efficient ways to make a diverse array of sulfonamides, key for discovering new drug targets.

The article’s authors include five Pomona students who worked with Ball: Cristian Woroch ’19, Mark Rusznak ’18, Ryan Franzese ’19, Sarah Etuk ’19 and Sabrina Kwan ’20, who are a mixture of chemistry and neuroscience majors. On Pfizer’s side, along with am Ende, the research and article author team includes scientists and medical chemists: Paramita Mukherjee, Matthew Reese, Joseph Tucker, John Humphrey, who work in Pfizer’s Worldwide Research and Development division. Leah Cleary of Ideaya Biosciences was also part of the team.

For Ball, the goal for students in his lab is to learn how to turn theory into practice, to critically work through scientific challenges and to understand and take ownership of their work. With this Pfizer study, Pomona students were able to better understand the applications of pharmaceutical and medicinal chemistry.

“My experience with industry wasn’t until I was on the job market,” says Ball. “I was never exposed to the fantastic science that is occurring at these companies or realized that it was a career possibility. My hope is that this collaboration shows students that there are options for the them with a science degree other than academia.”

Woroch, who was second author in the study, worked closely with both Ball and Pfizer’s am Ende. This project had such an influence on Woroch’s research interests that he is continuing to pursue the topic for his senior thesis, and am Ende will be a second reader for it.

“What I am most excited for is an opportunity to answer questions that have been popping up since the project began,” says Woroch. “Since our collaboration started over a year ago, there has been a clear direction for the research and so when tangentially-related issues arose, I couldn’t address them. Now, I can revisit them and find an entirely new project that is derived from my interests. Dr. am Ende is a very talented scientist and will be a great guide to help me do meaningful and interesting research.”

Woroch adds that the ability to apply science to real world problems is a big part of what drew him to research. “Particularly when projects are challenging or frustrating, having a practical application for your work is a driving force,” he says.

According to ACS data from 2013, 53 percent of chemistry graduates are employed in industry sectors after attending graduate school, while 39 percent go to work in academia.

Besides this research study, Ball, am Ende and Woroch share another commonality: They all received a Beckman Scholarship at some point in their chemistry research careers. The Beckman Foundation provides grants to researchers and nonprofit research institutions in chemistry and life sciences to promote scientific discoveries and to foster the invention of methods, instruments and materials that will open up new avenues of research.

“I am very excited that our collaboration with Dr. am Ende’s group at Pfizer is continuing,” says Ball. “We already have a follow-up [study] to this recent paper underway. During my first conversation with Dr. am Ende, he stated that we should be working together versus working against each other and I couldn’t agree more! It is even more special that we share the bond of being Beckman Scholars.”

What’s Next?

September 5, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

As a thought experiment, we asked alumni, faculty and staff experts in a wide range of fields to go out on a limb and make some bold predictions about the years to come. Here’s what we learned…

Start reading (What’s Next in Revolutions?)

WHAT’S NEXT FOR:

Alt Rock?

Artificial Intelligence?

Ballroom Dance?

Big Data?

Biodiversity?

California Fruit Farming?

Technology Investing?

Women in Mathematics?

Writers?

Something’s Happening in Greensboro

March 23, 2018 by Alexis Barton Comments Off

Dorsey on a street in Greensboro (All photos by Porfirio Solórzano)

SOMETHING’S HAPPENING in Greensboro, Alabama.

The crisp winter air buzzes with activity one morning in early January: from construction at the historic Seay house to a pompom-making session at a nearby Victorian farmhouse to jokes and laughter in the converted kitchen of an old hotel downtown.

If you’re looking for a kudzu-wrapped cliché about well-meaning do-gooders who rescue a fading town and its impoverished citizens—well, this isn’t that.

“People have told the same old story over and over about Greensboro,” Dr. John Dorsey ’95 says. “This is a new story of potential and hope and movement forward.”

It’s the collision of past and present and future, all having a meeting in the middle of Main Street. In historic buildings downtown, brick residences serving as temporary office space and housing and a restored Victorian several miles away, Dorsey is leading a charge to provide a range of services through a series of community-based programs he founded under the name of Project Horseshoe Farm. These include adult and youth programs addressing mental and physical health, housing and after-school care, plus gap-year fellowships and internships for top recent college graduates from around the country.

His methods are creating a new model for the way mental health care and community health are addressed in communities while simultaneously helping reshape a thriving downtown and preparing the next generation of social entrepreneurs to create their own paths.

Alabama by Accident

Dorsey, a licensed psychiatrist, initially thought he’d live closer to his family in California.

Dorsey conducts a meeting with the Project Horseshoe Farm fellows in a room that is undergoing renovation by students of the Auburn University Rural Studio architecture program.

However, part of him was pulling him to a more personal way of living and practicing medicine. A tip from a colleague at a medical conference led him to an interview at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. While driving cross-country to begin working, however, he learned Bryce no longer needed his services. Unsure of what he would find in Alabama, he drove on to Tuscaloosa and took cover in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in a motel room.

His savings dwindling, he had to come up with a plan—and a place to live—fast.

“I stumbled upon a mobile home sales office in Moundville and asked them to rent me a mobile home. They sent me down to Greensboro and connected me with a local pastor and nonprofit director,” Dorsey remembers.

“It was a quintessential small town with interesting energy, and they didn’t have a psychiatrist,” he says. “That’s how I ended up here 12 years ago. There was no plan that I was going to Greensboro.”

And yet, this little town of 2,365 residents would turn out to be exactly the kind of community where Dorsey could carry out his grassroots vision of integrated, community-based health care—a vision that he developed in medical school while studying what he terms a “frustrating” disconnect between doctors and patients.

“‘Focusing my residency on community psychiatry and people on the margins really crystallized the mismatch: You have to understand the person’s housing, transportation, finances and relationships,” Dorsey says. “There’s a spectrum, and when you have someone who is homeless, in chaotic relationships or who abuses drugs or alcohol, a test in an ER or primary care setting won’t solve their issues. I wanted to set up systems to address the needs of the patients, particularly in underserved communities.”

Dorsey visits with children at Greensboro Elementary School during an after-school program.

Since then, Project Horseshoe Farm has grown through a series of small steps, beginning with an after-school program for kids that met a community need. Then, in 2009, Dorsey began building a housing program for women with mental illness. He also selected his first group of three student fellows to spend a year partnering with the community and learning to take care of patients in a holistic way. He describes his success at attracting them to a brand-new nonprofit with no reputation in little Greensboro, Alabama, as “a miracle. We had great fellows right from the start and have grown ever since.”

As the project celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, it had expanded to encompass a range of other services as well, including the Adult Day program, a kind of community center where people come together for companionship and mutual support, and the Health Partners program, pairing individual fellows with vulnerable adults to help them navigate the complexities of health care and social services.

“Welcome to the Hotel”

Seeing is believing, so Dorsey offers a tour of downtown and Project Horseshoe Farm, starting at the old Greensboro Hotel property, donated to Project Horseshoe Farm in 2014 for use as a community center and project headquarters. Located right on Main Street, the old hotel was once listed as a historic building in peril, but now it’s being lovingly restored. One can see glimpses of its former grandeur in the embossed ceilings, pale mint walls and gleaming wood floors. w

Project Horseshoe Farm fellow Greta Hartmann (second from left) plays dominos with adults in the community center on Greensboro’s Main Avenue

“There is such a rich, complex history here,” Dorsey says. His tone is reverent. In addition to being a hotel, the building also once housed a dress shop, a café and a sewing plant that employed some who now come through its doors as patients.

This morning, the place is bustling with students preparing a meal and guests in conversation. Kevin Wang, a first-year fellow from Northwestern University and future medical student interested in health care delivery systems, steps away from lunch preparations to describe his own experience here. “I was surprised at how willing people were to work with us, especially having no personal ties to Alabama. It’s a testament to the organization,” he says. “People know we’re here for them and understand we’re here to learn from them, and they’re willing to share. That’s really cool.”

Toward the rear of the building, retired nurse Jane Prewitt, known as “Nurse Jane,” organizes patient prescription trays with the assistance of Berkeley graduate Michelle McKinlay. “Until you truly get down here and walk with the people, you have no idea,” McKinlay says. “Walking through health care barriers with them and really getting to know people has changed me and helped me understand the issues better.”

Prewitt invites patients and visitors to sit in one of the outsized white Adirondack-style chairs that dominate the space, a striking change from the usual exam chairs or tables one might see in a doctor’s office. Her husband made them. Prewitt had brought one in to use and it was a hit with patients who found the chairs comfortable and easy to get in and out of. Another plus—staff found them easy to clean.

It’s one way the group has learned to meet needs with practical solutions. “You don’t have to be fresh out of college to understand,” Prewitt says. “You just wonder at how well people do with the minimal resources they have.”

The tour proceeds across rough-hewn floorboards and around paint cans and stacked chairs. Dorsey bounds up a flight of stairs obscured by a tarp and stands in the center of his future office. “I love the light,” he says, walking to a window to point out the corner of the room where sunlight streams in.

Administrative space is planned for the area next to his, and the closed-off third floor may one day serve as housing for students in the health professions.

“Having a community center in the heart of Main Street where people are welcome and supported is a wonderful testament to Greensboro. It’s one of Greensboro’s strengths,” Dorsey says. “In most communities, Main Street renovation is about stores and restaurants. But Greensboro has embraced having people who are usually on the margins come right downtown. It’s not just about commerce. It’s about the soul of the community.”

“Build Around What is Beautiful”

Being situated on Main Street also allows the students to get a sense of how the community’s pieces fit together. A few doors down, a new sandwich shop and gym have opened. Across the street is the old opera house reimagined as event rental space, plus a specialty pie shop. The Hale County library and mayor’s office are within walking distance, and a technology center offers residents Internet access.

Fellow Kevin Wang, right, offers support to resident Sylvia Deason at the farmhouse.

“There’s an interesting momentum on Main Street,” Dorsey says. “Each thing creates more movement.”

Construction equipment and stacked wood slats, piles of pale sawdust and brand new buckets of Ultra Spec 500 paint sit amid aged flooring and exposed beams. But one can see the dream taking shape throughout.

In another room upstairs, 10 church pews line one wall and windows look down over the grounds where a courtyard is being planned with the help of the Auburn University Rural Studio architecture program. “We imagine having community performances there,” Dorsey says, pointing.

Downstairs, he foresees a space where patients can gather while waiting to be seen. And he’d like to turn the grand old ballroom at the rear of the building into a fitness center for program participants. Its filigreed mantels, honeycomb-patterned floors and ornate ceiling hint at the elegant atmosphere guests once enjoyed. In many ways, that legacy of graceful hospitality and comfort is being continued.

Dorsey is quick to acknowledge that his efforts are part of a network of engaged leaders working together. He also considers the relationships he made at Pomona College instrumental. “Professor Richard Lewis worked with a group of us to start a neuroscience major and created a wonderful community. I wouldn’t have gotten into medical school without that support.”

His continued Pomona connections have also been important, Dorsey says. Tom Dwyer ’95, a founding and current Horseshoe Farm board member, was Dorsey’s first-year roommate in Harwood. “We’ve had several past Horseshoe Farm fellows who were also neuroscience majors at Pomona and who had some of the same classes and professors I had.”

For the future, he anticipates exploring opportunities to replicate Project Horseshoe Farm’s successes in other small towns, but he urges humility for anyone looking to improve a community. “The idea alone is not enough. The missing piece is understanding who people are and what they want and developing trust in order for it to work. So often people look at the deficits. But you can’t build around deficits. You build around what is beautiful and strong in an existing community.”

Dorsey’s love for Greensboro and its people is evident as he speaks. “Here you have all this richness and the complexity of the culture. It’s humanity—in one word,” he says.

He gestures to the inviting shops and businesses lining Main Street, “Ten years ago, 80 percent of this was boarded up. Now 80 percent of it is being used. People are sensing that ‘Hey, something is going on!’ You may ask, ‘How in the world is that happening in Greensboro?’

But it is.”

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