Olenka Villarreal ’85 with the Magical Bridge playground in Palo Alto, Calif.

Photos By Robert Durell

Children crowd onto the wheelchair-accessible spinning dish at the Magical Bridge playground.

ON A SUNNY WINTER morning, Olenka Villarreal ’85 is appointing kindness ambassadors, handing out smiley-face stickers to children taking a break from spinning on a giant dish at the sprawling Magical Bridge in Palo Alto, the accessible, socially inclusive playground that she founded.

Boys and girls reach out their hands, exclaiming “I want blue!” “I want red!”

“Will you be extra kind on the playground today?” asks Villarreal. They nod, promising yes, yes. After weeks of rain and chill, the playground is packed with visitors of all ages: a beaming Asian grandmother swings on a disc, and a father shouts “3-2-1, blast-off!” and sends his son in a cardboard box down a slide.

When Villarreal’s 14-year-old daughter Ava arrives, she skips and claps. Though non-verbal, her joy and excitement are clear. Villarreal hugs her daughter, who stands taller than her, and strokes her soft, fine blonde hair.

Magical Bridge, which opened in 2015 at a cost of $4 million, is the only local playground where Ava can run—elsewhere, she trips over the sand or is too big to get onto the equipment sized for younger children. She loves dashing across the bridges that connect the playhouse to the slide mound. “At any other park, she towers over everybody, but when you design for everybody, no one stands out,” Villarreal says.

Now, after hearing from people in Taipei, Greece, and from across the country, she has her sights set on creating Magical Bridges around the world through her new foundation. “I was ready to take a break, but then I received an avalanche of emails and calls. I can’t physically get to everyone who asks questions, so my goal is to create a model that is far less expensive and easily replicable.”

Villarreal’s project has now become her calling, one that began when her daughter was born in 2003. As a baby, Ava struggled to sit up and stand and did not start walking until she was three years old. Eventually, at the advice of doctors, Villarreal started taking her daughter to expensive indoor occupational therapy sessions at a center located 45 minutes away, where Ava could work on improving her balance and coordination. The center was so booked she could only schedule a session for her daughter once a week, and she wanted to go somewhere daily where they lived, in her hometown of Palo Alto.

Families take advantage of a beautiful day at the Magical Bridge in Palo Alto.

At local playgrounds, she searched for swings, with their therapeutic vestibular w (back and forth) movement, but Ava lacked the strength to sit up in bucket seats or hold onto the swing chains. Frustrated, she met with the city’s director of parks and recreation, hoping he might be able to direct her to a playground that met the needs of Ava and children like her. She learned that the city’s playgrounds were all ADA compliant, but that the guidelines center around access for individuals in wheelchairs and other mobility issues, with ramps and paved walkways; they aren’t designed for children with impaired hearing and vision, developmental, sensory, cognitive or autism spectrum disorders.

Olenka Villarreal ’85 is joined at the playground by her two daughters, Ava (center) and Emma.

One in five Americans has a disability, and one in 45 is on the autism spectrum, which has led to a growing push for playgrounds designed for people of all abilities. As Villarreal soon discovered, parents have often led the charge, motivated by their child: Tatum’s Garden in Gilroy, Matteo’s Dream in Concord, and Shane’s Inspiration in Los Angeles.

The city struck a deal with Villarreal. If she raised money for the playground’s design and construction, the city would donate almost an acre of land in Mitchell Park. “I was grateful for the land. Around here, land is gold,” she says. “Maybe I was naïve, but I thought, we’re in Silicon Valley, how hard can it be to raise money? I didn’t know how much it would cost, or what it would entail.”

She launched her grassroots campaign, recruiting co-founders Jill Asher, to work on public and media relations, and Kris Loew, who designed the logo, flyers and other marketing materials. She also drew upon the support of her family: her husband, Robert, donated wines from his collection for her volunteer meetings—“You have to keep the board happy!” she says—and their older daughter, Emma, came up with the playground’s name while sitting in the back seat of the car, scrawling down ideas in her notebook. Anytime someone crosses over the bridge leading into the playground, they would find themselves in a magical place where barriers to play no longer existed, thus bridging the gap between those living with and without disabilities.

Because Villarreal knew donors might hesitate to write checks to a brand-new group, she joined the board of the Friends of the Palo Alto Parks, a trusted local nonprofit that acted as a fiscal sponsor to collect the contributions. “When the board saw the magnitude of my project, they thought I was a cockeyed optimist,” Villarreal says with a laugh. “But they were willing to stick it out, to see how far I could get.”

After a career in sales and marketing in Silicon Valley, she was returning to an interest in civic engagement first kindled at Pomona, where she had studied public policy and economics. As she embarked on fundraising, she deepened her research into inclusive playgrounds to incorporate into the design.

Physical access allows children to get around the playground and get into close proximity to play activities, while social access emphasizes how children can play together. “From a very young age, so much of play is a social experience,” says Keith M. Christensen, a play and accessibility specialist who advised Villarreal. “When you are participating equally, you are able to use your abilities and your strengths without the need for assistance or adaptations that might draw attention to differences rather than to similarities.”

Within two years, Villarreal and her volunteers raised about $600,000, but they lacked a detailed set of plans to win over bigger donors. When she despaired, she pictured returning the hundreds of individual donations if she gave up. She also knew people were counting on her. “As my husband said, ‘If we don’t get this park, we’ll have to move out of Palo Alto!’”

She was also dealing with the challenges of caring for Ava, who sometimes had seizures at school while Villarreal was hosting volunteer meetings. “I’d have to rush her to the ER, and I’d tell them to just to continue,” she recalls. “You know that stage when your child is one year old, when they’re getting up once or twice a night, they’re in diapers, and you’re feeding them? I’m still in that.”

Palo Alto stepped up with money to pay for plans and assigned a landscape architect, Peter Jensen, to help shepherd and advocate for the project. “That was a huge leap forward,” she says. After that, they hit their fundraising goal within a year and a half.

Villarreal brought a personal, passionate touch to her pitches, according to Asher, a co-founder. She asked a mother of a child with special needs to make chocolate chip cookies that they brought to every donor meeting.

“We leave them munching on cookies,” she told Asher. “Every time they put a cookie in their mouth, they’ll think of us.”

Added Loew, the other co-founder: “She’s hard to say ‘no’ to—she finds a job for you, and it feels really good to help. She makes everyone feel special.”

At the Magical Bridge, Villarreal makes visitors feel special, too, chatting with the helpful, bustling air of an innkeeper. “You like it here? Do you know the story of this place?” she asks a curly-haired dad leaning against a wall as his toddler rattles metal bells shaped like flowers that stand as tall as him

“It’s my first time here,” he says. “I read a little bit about it online. My son loves the bells.”

The playground is divided into seven play zones: swing and sway, slides, spin, music, tots, a kindness corner picnic area, and playhouse/ stage. Grouping the activities together helps visitors of all abilities navigate the Magical Bridge, which also stands apart from other playgrounds because of how it showcases innovative artists.

Jen Lewin’s interactive laser harp sculptures have been featured at Burning Man, the desert arts festival popular with tech workers. The sculpture—which senses user movement, speed and tempo—is irresistible, inviting people to twirl and hurl their limbs and their bodies under the arch.

“If it’s approachable to everyone, then it’s successful,” Lewin says. “My mission has been to make public art that engages the community.”

George Zisadis’s motion sensors trigger audio recordings: the squishy suck of mud, the slosh of puddles, crunch of autumn leaves, and quacking ducks. You can’t help but run through it again and again, trying to figure out how it works. “It’s been great seeing the installation become part of the daily experience of the playground,” he says, “offering moments of delight.”

Barbara Butler—a custom builder of luxury play structures, whose clients include actor Robert Redford and singer Bobby McFerrin—designed the whimsical, wheelchair-accessible, two-story playhouse and lookout built around a stony pine.

As Villarreal makes her way through the Magical Bridge, she greets friends and newcomers alike. “Many years from now, when we’re no longer here, I hope that people will know Ava’s story, and will say hello to her,” she says. “She loves when people say hello.”

For many families like Villarreal’s, Magical Bridge has become a welcome routine. Every week, a van transports medically-fragile children to the playground. A mother takes her 35-year-old son; in the past, she had to wait until night fell to bring him to playgrounds so people wouldn’t stare and ask questions. A girl in a tiara and a wheelchair—dubbed by Villarreal as the “Princess of the Playground”—is another regular.

Because not every family can get to the Magical Bridge, Villarreal is trying to bring it to them. She and her co-founders formed a nonprofit foundation to replicate two Magical Playgrounds in neighboring cities. If the city makes a financial commitment, the foundation will help raise the rest. Redwood City was the first to join forces with the foundation, and if fundraising stays on track, the next Magical Bridge will break ground late this year or in early 2018.

A wall around part of the playground bears messages of kindness and encouragement.

In late February, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted to set aside $10 million to go toward at least five inclusive, accessible playgrounds. Groups such as the Rotary Club and the Magical Bridge Foundation would raise matching funds. “It’s great not only for Santa Clara kids and families, but it also demonstrates to other parts of the nation that this is something people can do,” said Supervisor Joe Simitian, who co-sponsored the proposal.  “If we each take a little piece of responsibility, we can do something extraordinary. That fits very well with the Magical Bridge approach.”

With each playground, they gain expertise, Villarreal says, learning how to bring down costs, and exploring different equipment options. By the time the foundation finishes its third playground, she aims to sell packages of construction drawings and components that can be customized to work in a variety of terrains, spaces and budgets at parks and schools, spreading the magic of Magical Bridge. “This has been a transformative journey. Doing this type of work is so fulfilling,” she says. “We’re doing something for families. It makes me want to do more of it, to get out and leave our little mark on the planet.”

Winston Dickson 1904 (in bowler hat), Pomona’s first Black graduate, chats with members of the Class of 1906 football team. See “Strangers in a Strange Land,” page 30. (From the Boynton Collection of the Claremont Colleges Digital Library)

It begins with two alternating voices, each carefully modulated for audio recording:

“I’m Saahil Desai.”

“I’m Kevin Tidmarsh.”

“And this is ‘Hidden Pomona.’”

The podcast’s signature burst of electric piano music swells, then vamps in the background as Tidmarsh picks up the thread: “Hidden Pomona is a podcast about the forgotten, obscure and overlooked parts of Pomona College’s history. We’ll be releasing episodes every other Friday until the end of April. Stick with us as we uncover the hidden history of our school.”

The theme music fades, and the story begins…

Looking back, the two classmates and friends agree that the idea of a podcast first came to them in the fall of their senior year, in Professor Susan McWilliams’ class on W.E.B. Du Bois and his famous book, The Souls of Black Folk. McWilliams recalls that both Kevin Tidmarsh ’16 and Saahil Desai ’16 were excited about their final projects, which involved a journalistic approach that dovetailed with their career interests. For Tidmarsh, it was research into the history of the Black population of his hometown, South Bend, Ind. It was Desai’s project, however—digging deeply into the life of Pomona’s first Black student, Winston Dickson, Class of 1904—that would open their eyes to new possibilities.

As he uncovered lost details from Dickson’s time at Pomona and Harvard Law School and his subsequent career as an attorney in his segregated hometown of Houston, Texas, Desai was struck by the relevance of this little-known story to Pomona students today. “As a student of color at Pomona, it’s hard to feel like you have a stake in its history,” he explains. “It’s much easier, I think, to connect to your school and feel like you belong there when you see other people who have done that in past decades and past generations. So I think doing that research project made me really more connected to the school, but it also made me realize that I wish these stories were more accessible at a broader level.”

As the students discussed these ideas with McWilliams, a plan began to take form that would lead them in a new and wholly unexpected direction. “Somehow, we got to talking about how Pomona is a place where—especially compared to other elite institutions—we have very little written-down history,” McWilliams remembers. “And so, those casual conversations, as they do sometimes at a place like Pomona, became a formal proposal for them to do an independent study—where they would take what they learned in four years of politics classes and their education more generally and do this podcast about hidden episodes in Pomona’s history, especially those that had something to do with what we in political science would call the political development of the institution.”

And so, in the last semester of both students’ four years at Pomona, Hidden Pomona was born. Its purpose was simple—to tell obscure but relevant stories from Pomona’s past in the friendly style of radio journalism. “It’s almost like you’re sitting someone down in a coffee shop or in a bar or whatever and telling them the story—it’s just that you can’t see the other person,” Tidmarsh says. “You don’t know who the other person is, but you still want to try to capture that same sort of intimacy with the listener. So that was one hundred percent what we were trying to do—just tell stories.”

Their first episode grew directly out of Desai’s research paper, focusing on Pomona’s early students of color. The next two—on the bombing of the Politics Department in w Carnegie Hall in the late ’60s and the relationship between Pomona College’s founders and their Native American predecessors in the Claremont area—were topics that had long intrigued them both. The final two episodes—examining Pomona’s secret society known as Mufti and relating the story of the Japanese-American students at Pomona during the World War II-era internment—were developed on the fly.

“It wasn’t like we had a set-in-stone schedule from the beginning,” Tidmarsh recalls. “And it was great to have Professor McWilliams be so flexible with what we were trying to do. She was basically just like, ‘Hey, if you have a good idea, go out and do it.’” As a result, he says, they felt free to follow their own curiosity. “And we figured that, hey, if we’re wondering about this, there’s probably a good number of other people at Pomona who are wondering the same thing,” he adds.

McWilliams describes her own role in the process as a mix of sounding board and cheerleader.

“I’ll tell you what I told their parents at graduation,” she says with a laugh, “which is that in some ways, it was the easiest independent study ever to supervise. They would come to my office, sketch out this elaborate plan for an episode. I would ask a couple of questions, but they knew what they were doing, so mostly, I said, ‘Yep, sounds good to me.’ And they’d come back two weeks later with an episode and plans for the next one. It really was probably the most independent independent study I’ve ever supervised, which is really a tribute to how competent and talented they were.”

Hidden Pomona creators Kevin Tidmarsh ’16 (left) and Saahil Desai ’16

But if they made it look easy at the time, today they remember their struggles and failures as clearly as their triumphs. Though both had some journalistic experience, having written for the student newspaper, The Student Life, neither student had ever tackled anything so complex or demanding as a podcast. For each of the five episodes, there was in-depth research to be done, interviews to be conducted, scripts to be written and rewritten, music to be chosen, voice-overs to be perfected, final edits to be completed, deadlines to be met, and through it all, a range of new technical details to be mastered.

“There were definitely new skills we had to develop along the way,” Desai says. “When I’m listening to them now, I realize how the episodes progressed in quality. There was definitely a big learning curve that we had to overcome.”

“Yeah,” Tidmarsh agrees. “Right around episode three is when I can start listening to them and not feel totally ashamed of the editing.”

The high-water mark of their work that spring, they agree, was their fourth episode—focusing on Mufti, the decades-old secret society known for papering the campus late at night with small slips of glue-backed paper known as burgers, bearing succinct little messages full of double entendres, sly jokes and cryptic allusions to the most current campus controversies, from grade inflation to the difficulty of getting ice in the dining room.

“The research there was the most ambitious,” Desai says. “We definitely went into it having no idea whether it would all materialize. That was really scary at first, but everything came together. We put a lot of time into that, and it all really kind of came together at the last minute.” One of the things he learned from that episode, he says, was: Never stop hunting for new information. “I’m just glad that w we kept on researching through the entire process and didn’t give up at any point.”

In fact, they were about halfway through recording the episode when new information forced them to start all over. But as a result of their persistence, the finished product included the first-ever recorded interviews with members of the secret society itself, as well as a revealing discussion of the group’s eccentric induction process with Conor O’Rourke ’03, whose effort to join the group was ultimately interrupted by graduation.

After the episode aired, the secret group even acknowledged Hidden Pomona in one of its signature burgers, with the comment: “Mufti Saalutes Hidden Tidbits: Catch Us If You Conor!”

“That was great,” Tidmarsh recalls. “I never would’ve thought as a first-year I would’ve been name-checked by Mufti before I graduated.”

That burger may have been the oddest bit of feedback they received, but it was far from the first or last. “Initially, I wasn’t sure how many people on campus, how many students would be interested in it,” Desai recalls. “So it was satisfying that there were a lot of students that came up to us and told us that they really enjoyed listening to it, which was a nice thing to hear.”

They also heard from a number of alumni as the podcasts were passed from friend to friend on social media. “Our audience just kept getting bigger and bigger with each episode,” Tidmarsh says. “I think the biggest one was probably the Mufti episode.”

Looking back at what they learned during that frenetic final semester, the things that stand out in their minds aren’t the technical details they mastered, but less tangible lessons in project management and persistence. “I think the biggest thing that we learned,” Tidmarsh says, “was probably how to take a super ambitious project like Hidden Pomona and make it manageable—break it down into steps and processes that in the end lead to a finished product.”

The project also gave their fledgling careers an unexpected boost. After graduation, Desai was accepted for a highly competitive internship with the NPR news program Morning Edition, after which he moved on to his current job as an editor with the Washington Monthly, a political magazine in the nation’s capital. After taking some time off due to an illness in his family, Tidmarsh applied for and won the same NPR internship that Desai had just vacated.

“I think it’s definitely paid off way more than I thought it would, honestly,” Desai says. “I didn’t do this project for a semester with the idea that, ‘Oh, I’m going to do it just so I can get a job or it can lead to some career opportunities,’ but it’s been so helpful for that, I think, for both of us.”

Without Hidden Pomona, both students say, that sought-after internship would probably have gone to other applicants with more impressive résumés. “I had been editor of TSL but that only gets you so far,” Tidmarsh says. “And being able to say that you have experience putting together an ambitious audio project—that’s big. That definitely was something that I think they were looking for.”

For her part, McWilliams considers the project a perfect conclusion to a Pomona education. “I thought it was one of those projects that are a testament to liberal arts education—where the two of them, at the end of college, put a lot of things together that they’d learned and came up with this interesting and innovative project that made a serious contribution to their community. And so, I was very proud of them.”

Today, a year after the last of the five episodes was released, all five remain available to listeners online on the podcast-hosting site SoundCloud, as well as on iTunes and Google Play. They’ve also become an official part of Pomona history, in both the Pomona College Archives and the special collections of the Library of The Claremont Colleges, which also plans to offer them for download.

That kind of availability was exactly what Hidden Pomona’s creators had in mind.

“That was one hundred percent an intention of the project,” Tidmarsh says, “so that people 20, 30 years from now can use this for their own research and sort of work off the threads of what we have already done.”

It ends as it began, with vamping theme music and two calmly alternating voices.

“Thank you for listening.”

“I’m Saahil Desai.”

“And I’m Kevin Tidmarsh. And this is Hidden Pomona.”

To listen to any of the five podcasts, search for Hidden Pomona at soundcloud.com, iTunes or Google Play.

Hilary Swarts ’94 on the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge

Photos By Crystal Kelly

SURVIVAL CAN BE A REAL CAT FIGHT when you get squeezed out of your rightful home. When your food supply dwindles. When you are small and cute and easy to run down. Even though you are standoffish and try to keep to yourself.

In 22 countries, from Uruguay to south Texas, the ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), one of smallest and most secretive of all wild cat species, is facing this sad plight. Its habitat—thorn scrub, coastal marshes, tropical and pine-oak forests—has shrunk alarmingly, swaths destroyed by building and farming and other human activity. With diminished space in which to establish territories, find secure denning sites and forage for rodents, birds, snakes, lizards and other prey—plus the increased threat of becoming road kill as highway construction boomed in the 20th century—the ocelot has been in the fight of its life.

Back in the 1960s and early ’70s, ocelots were nearly loved to death. Laws then did not prohibit taking them for exotic pets or hunting them for their beautiful, dramatically marked fur. Babou, Salvador Dali’s frequent sidekick, may have been the most famous of captive ocelots.

In the U.S., as the wild population of these little cats became depleted under development pressures, the fashion industry turned to import, reaching a peak of 140,000 pelts from Central and South American countries in 1970. Toward the end of the century, all these human endeavors had chipped away at the historic U.S. ocelot range—which once stretched from Louisiana to Arizona—cornering the few known remaining individuals in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, where Texas meets the Mexican border and the Gulf of Mexico. Wildlife biologists, scientists, researchers, conservationists and other experts started running the numbers and saw that time was running out. Now, even after several decades of legal protection and some active conservation projects, only 55 or so known individual ocelots remain in the U.S.

Swarts with one of several “Ocelot Crossing” signs on the refuge

There are few rays of sunshine in this grim picture, but one of the brightest landed at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge a little over three years ago in the form of wildlife biologist Hilary Swarts ’94.

Radio-collars are attached with breakable string. This one was dropped by a male bobcat.

CHARMED BY THE PROMISE of year-round Southern California sunshine, Swarts arrived at Pomona in 1990 from the four seasons of Greenwich, Conn., expecting college to be “a safe way to have an adventure.” She had no idea what that adventure would be or where it might lead, but she knew one thing for sure: “I always liked animals like crazy,” she says. “But it was two professors at Pomona who gave me the idea that you could have this kind of career—that jobs [with animals] other than veterinarian or zookeeper were possible.”

Swarts listens to the signal from a radio-collar.

It was in Anthropology Professor James McKenna’s courses on biological anthropology and primate behavior that she first encountered the area of study that would become her path into the world. “Animal behavior!” she says, “I was hooked.”

Another mentor, Biology Professor Rachel Levin, introduced her to the kind of research that would become her life’s work. Assisting Levin in her study of songbirds—including an eventual trip to Panama to study the communication behaviors of bay wrens in their natural habitat—fed Swarts’ enthusiasm and left her convinced that she was on the right track. And at a time when men still dominated the sciences, Levin also gave her confidence that she could succeed. “She showed me how women scientists work,” Swarts recalls. “I got amazing support from her.”

In her senior year, Swarts threw herself straight into fieldwork, flying to Tanzania to spend her study-abroad semester in a wildlife conservation program there. However, midway through the semester, her plan to be immersed in chimpanzee communities took a bad turn: “I broke my ankle, had surgery in Nairobi [Kenya] and spent four weeks at Lake Manyara National Park designing exhibits for the Arusha Natural History Museum.” Instead of taking a planned hike up Mt. Kilimanjaro, she hobbled around on crutches for the rest of her stay.

Despite these disappointments, she returned to Pomona and forged ahead. Since the College had no major in animal behavior, Swarts designed her own, combining the fields of her mentors to create a major in “biological anthropology.”

After graduation, she spent seven years project-hopping—from black howler monkeys in Belize to the famous mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s Parc National des Volcans. “Each work experience was confirmation that I’m doing the right thing,” she says. “I’d see something shiny and think, ‘That’s worth checking out.’ I’ve stumbled into some pretty amazing situations.”

If she had to pick a favorite, she says, it would be the time she spent in Suriname, monitoring a troop of capuchin and squirrel monkeys. “I lived in a hut with no electricity. The wildlife was mind-blowing. You’d stand still for five minutes, and all around you would come alive. Life was work and reading books and planning what to have for dinner and socializing with the locals.” She built up her explorer skill set by wielding a machete to cut trails and map sections of unexplored rain forest.

But eventually, despite all the “cool stuff” she was doing, Swarts began to wonder if she was missing the bigger picture. As an undergraduate, she had felt certain about two things: “I would not go to graduate school, and I would never work for the government.” Now, however, those vows were beginning to feel limiting. “I missed education and being surrounded by people who are curious and informed. I was ready to get into more academics.”

Entering the ecology program at the University of California, Davis, she earned a Ph.D. in ecology with an emphasis on conservation. Then, shrugging off that “never working for the government” notion, she took a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, working on regulatory projects involving endangered species. “Regulatory work is so important,” she emphasizes. But after a while, the day-to-day responsibilities of what she terms “desk biology” began to wear. “It’s soul-crushing work,” she explains. “You know exactly what each day, a month ahead, will be.”

So, when a job opening in the wilds of south Texas popped up in her email for a wildlife biologist charged with leading the hands-on effort to save the ocelot in the U.S., she leapt at the challenge.

THE LAGUNA ATASCOSA National Wildlife Refuge is a flat, sunbaked remnant of coastal prairie mixed with thorn bush, bordering on a vast hypersaline lagoon across from South Padre Island. Its dense thicket of low scrub is home to—at last count—15 of the remaining ocelots still living in the U.S., and for Swarts, it’s where the fight to save them from extinction is being waged.

Meeting with her here can feel like a bracing seminar in All Things Ocelot. For starters, she’ll whip her refuge pickup into her driveway (on Ocelot Road, of course) and say, pointing at the license plate  on her 2000 Buick LeSabre, “Look!” The plate says “OCELOT” (of course), and the vanity fee collected by the State of Texas goes to Friends of Laguna Atascosa for outreach programs.

More important, it quickly becomes clear that she’s a walking compendium of information about the species she’s working to rescue. “We think that these Texas ocelots may have developed great fidelity to thick underbrush because of pursuit by hunters back in the 1960s,” she explains. More facts come tumbling out: Two-thirds of births are single, after a gestation of 79 to 82 days. Kittens stay with their mothers, to learn survival and hunting skills, for up to two years. “Although,” she adds, “I’m beginning to think it may be closer to a year and a half, if the teaching goes well and there is a reliable prey base. And the past two winters have been super wet, so there’s been prey out the wazoo.”

Swarts visits a wildlife underpass under construction. Though currently flooded, it will be dry when complete.

The first confirmed ocelot kitten at the refuge in 20 years.
(U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo)

Swarts holds a sedated ocelot, who was then given a radio collar and released. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service photo)

Working with ocelots, because they stay so well hidden, is different from her previous fieldwork, when she could watch the animals she was studying in their own environment (such as following gorillas around as they nosed about on their daily routines, which she describes as “total soap opera”). In fact, the only time Swarts and her small staff of interns actually see ocelots in the flesh is during trapping season, from October to May, when the little cats are lured by caged pigeons posing as an easy meal, then sedated long enough for blood and genetic samples to be taken. After a quick exam and insertion of a microchip, they are photographed, fitted with a GPS collar, given reversal drugs and released.

“With the ocelots, I’m essentially doing detective work,” she explains. Across the refuge, there are more than 50 cameras tucked into the thorn scrub, monitoring animal activity night and day. Using cameras and GPS collars may not be as immediately satisfying as shadowing gorillas, but it’s the only way she can keep tabs on the elusive little creatures she’s trying to save.

For instance, last year, on March 25, 2016, a heavily pregnant female was captured for routine data collection and then released. On the following two days, GPS signals from her collar indicated that she was staying put, likely in a den. After a few weeks, GPS showed more activity—she was almost certainly leaving the den for water, repeat behavior that is usual for a lactating female. “On April 15, when we knew she was away and couldn’t detect us, we found the little kitten, tucked under some Spartina. A male, healthy, weighing less than a pound, with his eyes just opened.” Swarts, who took hair samples, DNA swabs and his baby picture (below), was ecstatic to document and report this first confirmed ocelot den at the refuge in 20 years.

“From my perspective they are doing their job—reproducing,” she says. “And ecologically we are in great shape.” However, she has grave concerns that the confirmed refuge population of 15, including kittens, may be approaching capacity. Home range for a female varies from one to nine square miles, depending on the availability of water and prey. For a male, figure four to 25 square miles.

That brings us to exhibit one for the three top threats to survival of the species—habitat loss. Hemmed in by agriculture, highways and industry, the refuge itself can’t be greatly expanded. The other Texas ocelots, about 40 individuals, live on limited private lands in neighboring Willacy County, with no safe passage connecting the populations.

And that leads directly to the second threat—vehicular mortality, which stands at an astounding 40 percent. Swarts cites the ugly statistics that piled up between June 2015 and April 2016, when seven ocelots, including six males, were killed by vehicles on roads adjacent to fragile ocelot territory.

Which brings us to the third item on Swarts’ list of top threats to the ocelot’s long-term survival: in-breeding, which occurs when populations are so isolated that no new genes can get into the mix. Even before her arrival in Texas, efforts to freshen the gene pool by bringing in a female ocelot from Tamaulipas, Mexico, had started and stopped several times, partly due to cartel violence. Still, she remains optimistic that, with research and negotiation, a female from Mexico will eventually be allowed to cross the border.

Progress is agonizingly slow—as Swarts stoically puts it, “Conservation is often two steps forward and one step back.” However, she has begun to see encouraging signs. The refuge has cranked up an aggressive habitat restoration project—planting ocelot corridors, extensions of the habitat that ocelots are known to use, with the low-growing, bushy native species they prefer. As a precaution against vehicular mortality, the refuge has closed some of its roads and plans to relocate its entrance. Most heartening, the Texas Department of Transportation is installing 12 new underpasses specifically designed for ocelots at known hot spots on two highways where there have been multiple incidents of road kill. “And now it seems likely they will put wildlife crossings into new road design from the start,” she adds. “This is a sea change—and for this state agency to come around bodes so well for the state and its environmental future.”

The work is hard, sometimes tricky and frequently thankless. However, it also has its rewards. “I love the element of variety in my job,” she says. “The nuts and bolts. Speaking the legalese. Ocelot outreach. Hearing people’s questions. I get fired up; they get fired up.”
Best of all, there are the little discoveries, the aha moments that move her work forward. That den discovered in April? “It was a surprise to find it in an open area, not in super dense brush,” she explains. It’s new ocelot information, the kind that can drive new policy and practice. In this case, it may lead to a new prescribed burn protocol designed to leave a protective margin outside the brush.

For Swarts, as always, it’s about rethinking the ongoing help this little cat needs, using clues from her ongoing research, then doing whatever it takes. “I want to do everything I can to give these cats the best chance to survive.”

Rose Portillo ’75 and co-star Daniel Valdez in a 1978 rehearsal of Zoot Suit (below) and reunited in 2016 for the famous play’s revival (above).

IN 1978, A YOUNG ACTOR fresh out of college got the role of her dreams. Rose Portillo ’75 was cast as Della Barrios in the then-new Chicano play Zoot Suit, written by one of her heroes, the father of Chicano theatre and founder of El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez.

Nearly four decades after her first audition for Zoot Suit, Portillo, now a lecturer in Pomona’s Theatre Department, found herself auditioning before Valdez one more time last year for the revival of this now-classic Chicano play, which ran from January to mid-March at the Mark Taper Forum.

“I auditioned in the same room I auditioned in 40 years ago with the same person I auditioned for 40 years ago and with the same person across the table from me from 40 years ago,” says Portillo. “So, you know, when I walked in the room, we just looked at each other and I said, ‘OK, I need to take a moment’—it’s very surreal.”

The play, written by Valdez, is based on the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riots that occurred in early 1940s Los Angeles. The play tells the story of Henry Reyna and the 38th Street gang, who were tried and found guilty of murder, and their subsequent journey to freedom.

Zoot Suit premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in April 1978, and sold out in two days. The play debuted on Broadway the following year, and was turned into a feature film in 1981. Portillo, who played Della Barrios, Reyna’s girlfriend, was in every production. In this current run of Zoot Suit, Portillo will play the role of Dolores, Reyna’s mother.

Portillo was first introduced to Chicano theatre as a theatre major here in the early 1970s. “While I was at Pomona, I saw ‘La Gran Carpa de los Rasquachis’ that had a weekend performance at the Mark Taper Forum. It was a Teatro Campesino play and it resonated so deeply with me—it was one of those moments that you don’t know what you’re missing until you see it. So, I got on a committee to bring Luis Valdez—to bring El Teatro Campesino—to campus.” Luckily for Portillo, the committee’s efforts were successful and Valdez paid a visit to Pomona soon after.

Portillo, who is also the director of Theatre for Young Audiences, a program of Pomona College’s Draper Center for Community Partnerships, started writing and performing plays while still in elementary school. She was cast in everything that was produced on campus—from Tennessee Williams to the Shakespeare canon. And Portillo’s parents, who lived in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood, came to see all of her performances.

It was at Pomona that Portillo first came to identify as a Chicana—a term her parents balked at in an era when the word had negative connotations for older generations like her parents, who rarely talked in-depth about their heritage. “On Parents Day, the Chicano Studies Department had a program and they read the poem ‘Yo Soy Joaquin’ and other Chicano poetry. I turned to my father, and he was weeping, and it was never an issue after that.”

Reclaiming her identity and finding her love for Chicano theatre helped Portillo as she built her career—giving her a voice when the roles for Latinas were nothing more than one-dimensional stereotypes.

When Portillo was cast for the role of Della in Zoot Suit, her agent let her know she wouldn’t be able to take the role because she had already committed to another project, a film.

Portillo’s response to her agent: “I told her, ‘That movie is a movie, and this is a dream. You’re not stepping on my dream. This is my dream. Make it happen.’ And she did.”

And her parents were right there beside her. Once the play moved to Broadway, her parents went to New York to accompany her, with her mother staying longer to soak in the city.

Fast forward to 2017, and Portillo’s mother will be there on opening night of the revival of Zoot Suit, nearly four decades after it first premiered in the same theatre in Los Angeles. “She’s 84. A lot of our parents are gone, but she’s still around. I think she would’ve killed Luis [Valdez] if I didn’t get the role.”

For Portillo, the opportunity to be part of Zoot Suit in 2017 is just as special as it was in 1978. “It’s very rare that you get to live a full circle within a play, but with such a piece of history—to be able to be part of that history again, there are just no words for it,” she says.

“It was timely when it happened. To see Mexicans on stage in original theatre doing a play about a Mexican-American story was earth-shattering and groundbreaking. We sold out before we opened, and to come back in this particular moment of our national history makes it all the more important again.”

“And personally, it’s so historic for me, to be able to be this age and, at this point in my career, to be able to physically and viscerally revisit this—wearing different shoes and being older and wiser, it’s just… It was a dream the first time; it’s a dream the second time.”

Some of these old tales about Pomona are actually true. Others are sheer fabrications or exaggerations. Still others remain mysteries. Can you tell which ones are fact, which are fiction, and which are unknown?

1. Huns to Hens

Legend has it that Pomona got its unique mascot, the Sagehen, because of a bit of century-old political correctness and some creative cost-avoidance. The original Pomona mascot was far more warlike than the current flightless bird—the Huns. However, that name lost its luster when the U.S. entered World War I in 1917 and the popular epithet for the enemy became you-know-what. The teams had already invested in uniforms bearing the word “HUNS,” so to save money, the “U” was changed to an “E” and they became the “HENS.”

2. The Shakespeare Garden

Almost every student has heard the story that the border of Marston Quad is home to a garden containing plants mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays—pansies, fennel, willows and rosemary from Hamlet, violets and thyme from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, daffodils from A Winter’s Tale, daisies from Love’s Labour’s Lost, and so on. According to the tale, every plant mentioned in the Bard’s body of work is to be found somewhere in the garden.

3. Things That Go Bump

There are several persistent tales of ghosts on the Pomona campus. There’s Walter, the worker who fell off the roof of Bridges Auditorium during its construction and has haunted the place ever since, playing pranks with the lights and appearing in shadowy passageways. There’s Gwendolyn, who died in the old Claremont Hotel before it became Sumner Hall and occasionally can be seen or heard in its lower level or bell tower. And there’s Nila, the ghost of a young woman who reportedly wanders the attic and hallways of Seaver House.

4. The Flying Sailboat

A classic prank that has become Pomona legend happened in 1978. The place was Frary Hall, or rather, the rafters of Frary Hall. In a scene worthy of a Magritte painting, students arriving for breakfast one morning found a 13-foot sailboat suspended in space high above the tables, with sails set and framed in Pomona blue.

5. The Duke and the Madonna

Is that Little Bridges behind John Wayne and Charles Coburn in the movie Trouble Along the Way? That, at least, is the story, which includes Wayne coming to campus in 1952 as Pomona played the role of a small Catholic college in the film. That visit is also remembered for a double-take moment when the sculpture of the flutist in the fountain in Lebus Court was covered by a fake statue of the Madonna.

6. The Borg and the Borg

The story goes that the Borg of TV fame—the swarming, half-cybernetic zombies from Star Trek: The Next Generation who lived in a cube with warrens of maze-like hallways—got its name from Pomona’s Borg—otherwise known as the Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages and International Relations, also known for its warrens of maze-like hallways.

7. Winner and Still Champion…

The Men’s Glee Club of 1932 took first place in the Pacific Southwest Glee Club Championship in San Diego, then traveled to St. Louis to compete in the first-ever National Championship, which they won. And since the first National Glee Club Championship also turned out to be the last National Glee Club Championship, Pomona can still lay claim to being the reigning champ.

8. The Roosevelt Shovel and Oak

According to legend, the shovel that Pomona presidents bring out to break ground for new buildings was used by President Theodore Roosevelt to plant a California live oak on campus during his visit in 1903. Arriving at the Claremont train station, Roosevelt was transported by carriage to campus where he spoke to a throng of 7,000 to 8,000 people from a rostrum in front of Pearsons, later planting the tree, which survives to this day.

9. All Numbers Equal 47

The 47 craze at Pomona started in 1964 when Donald Bentley, then Professor of Statistics, presented a paradoxical proof with the title, ”Why all numbers are equal to 47.” Two students in a summer program, Laurens “Laurie” Mets ’68 and Bruce Elgin ’68, then embarked upon their own tongue-in-cheek experiment to determine whether the number 47 occurred more often in nature than other numbers, and the rest is history.

Fact or Myth Answers.