Mufti Origins Revealed

Early Mufti messages
were simple yet cryptic. One citing
“Vincent,” above, was a reference to History Professor Vincent Learnihan, who taught at Pomona from 1949-82.

After over 60 years of silence, we founding members of Mufti wish to offer a bit of Pomona history. Over the years we have been pleased to see occasional references to Mufti and are thrilled that once again, “Mufti is near.”

Mufti was started in 1958 by four women, all juniors, with strong senses of humor and mischief. We lived in Harwood Court, a women’s dorm complete with all-seeing head residents, 10 p.m. curfews and overnight locked doors. We admired the occasional strange events that occurred on campus, pulled off by unknown perpetrators: a letter on the College president’s stationery announcing amazing new rules for College behavior, the ringing of the bell in the Little Bridges bell tower during unusual hours of the day and night, and creative enhancements of the Orozco mural in Frary Dining Hall.

Who were the perpetrators and how did they do it? We knew a particular group of men was having all of the fun and we wanted to match them with a creative but subtle response! We started with orange footprints painted on the pathways of the quad. That approach became too time-consuming so we turned to simple messages plastered on mailboxes, lampposts and buildings, signed “Mufti.” We would sneak out of the dorm at 4 a.m., post our mysterious messages throughout the campus, go out to breakfast and return in time to attend our 8 a.m. classes.

Our senior year, we were “pillars of the community.” Our group included the president of the Associated Women Students, the chair of the AWS Judiciary and several members of the senior women’s May Court. Who would guess that we were Mufti?

By then living in Blaisdell, a senior-sophomore women’s dorm, we recruited

four sophomores who committed to carrying on the Mufti legacy with whole-hearted devotion. And that they did! We have lost track of those who carried the torch, but we toast you all.

We had such fun breaking the dorm rules and making people pause to wonder who could be behind the messages. We have unearthed a few original Mufti messages. They are simpler than those shared in the Pomoniana piece (Winter 2023), but we are thrilled that Mufti has survived and evolved and we say, “All Hail.”

—Jean Wentworth Bush Guerin ’60
Alice Taylor Holmes ’60
Martha Tams Barthold ’60
Thomasine Wilson ’60 (RIP)

Another Generation’s Protests

In 1980, students of The Claremont Colleges held the largest anti-Reagan protest in the country. It was so large and boisterous that a friend who had recently graduated from Pomona saw it on the evening news in Malaysia. We feared so many things should Ronald Reagan become president: nuclear escalation, further environmental degradation, the demise of the middle class—and the loss of women’s right to abortion, only recently won.

There is no satisfaction in being right.

My sign read, “Motherhood is Optional”; a male friend’s said, “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, Too.” On the verge of adulthood, it was inconceivable that neither would be true 40 years in the future—and much earlier for those without the advantages of place and privilege that we possessed.

So I was gratified to see the very thoughtful and informative article “The Choice I Make” by Dr. Atsuko Koyama ’96 in the latest edition of PCM. Reading “While all of the air has been knocked out of me as I raise a young girl in a state where legislators and the courts have control over our bodies,” I struggled to breathe, too. Who are we if we don’t have control over our own bodies? Who are we if we are complacent in California while girls and women in Arizona, Texas, Mississippi and too many more states suffer from the loss of their basic human rights?

It took courage for Koyama to write this piece and for our alumni magazine to publish it. Thank you for making us proud.

—Sheri Cardo ’81
Petaluma, California

Remembering Irving Rosenthal ’52

I appreciated the fullness of the obituary for Irving Rosenthal ’52 (Winter 2023). Although I graduated five years later in 1957 and would not have known him there, I became acquainted with Irving in the 1960s when I was a partner in Auerhahn Press, which published Beat Generation writers. One of our poets was John Wieners, much admired by Irving.

—Andrew Hoyem ’57
Honorary Doctor of Letters ’15
San Francisco

On Choice

I really appreciate the article “The Choice I Make” (Winter 2023). We need more people and physicians like Atsuko Koyama ’96. She is so right that choice is not only about abortion. It is about equal access to medical care for all, control over our own bodies. As she says,  “Reproductive justice is the right to have children, to not have children, and to raise the children you have in safe, sustainable communities.”

—D.B. Zane ’85
Los Angeles
Editor’s note: Koyama credits the group Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice with coining and defining the term reproductive justice in 1994.

Families of Children with Rare Diseases

Being the parent of a child with a devastating, ultra-rare disease can be incredibly lonely. It means a lifetime membership in a club you never want to see another family join. So it was with mixed feelings that I read “Moonshots for Unicorns” (Winter 2023) about Zach Landman ’08 and the journey he and his family are going through with their daughter.

Justin West ’96 holds his son Andrew during one of Andrew’s many stays in the hospital as an infant.

My wife and I are also both physicians. We met in medical school and did our residencies together at Georgetown. We delayed having children until we had the time and resources to care for them. Our third child, Andrew, was born when we were in our early 40s, a period with higher risks for both moms and babies.

Andrew’s first few months of life were like that of our first two children. Then, in a subtle flicker of his left foot, our lives changed forever. Over the course of a few weeks Andrew’s seizures became more dramatic. He went from a few a day to dozens. He spent over 100 days of his first year of life in hospitals across Southern California as we desperately raced to find a medication to make his seizures stop.

Andrew will be 6 years old in April. His seizures have slowed down, but his profound developmental stagnation persists. Andrew functions at the level of a 5-month-old. I have never heard his voice. I have never seen him walk. Without a dedicated treatment we will be caring for an ever-growing infant for the rest of his life and ours.

West plays with Andrew, left, Colin and Carolyn in 2019. His children are now 6, 7 and 9.

Like Zach and his wife, we are not willing to accept Andrew’s fate. Our KCNT1 Epilepsy Foundation is collaborating with more than a dozen teams around the world looking into drug repurposing, new small molecules and gene therapies to save Andrew’s life.

Along the way we have been fortunate to have received advice and assistance from Pomona alumni including Jeffrey Raskin ’03, M.D., Emil Kakkis ’82, M.D., Ph.D., and Jennifer Doudna ’85, Ph.D. We are also working on building a multidisciplinary team of Pomona students to help with our foundation initiatives.

The rare-disease pathway is beyond challenging. I am forever grateful to Pomona for preparing me to take on seemingly insurmountable challenges and for giving me the chance to be part of a community that comes together to help people in need.

—Justin E. West ’96
Newport Beach, California
Kcnt1epilepsy.org

It’s become more difficult to talk to people we disagree with in recent years. It’s been even harder to listen.

Looking through the memorabilia in the historic archives donated to Pomona College by Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68 this year makes the dignity and discipline of the nonviolent principles of the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s all the more palpable. The irony, of course, is that the reaction to the call for change was often horrifically violent. Among the photos in Evers-Williams’ belongings is one taken by her son, photographer James Van Evers, of three widows of the civil rights era: Betty Shabazz, Coretta Scott King and Evers-Williams. Both a defiant strength and resilience are visible in their faces and bearing. Shabazz and King even seem to smile slightly.

If they could do that, it seems we can at least talk to each other at Pomona about things like politics, faith, race and campus culture. To that end, a program on learning how to better connect has been offered at the College since 2021 through the model of the Sustained Dialogue Institute. Designed for small groups of students, faculty or staff that meet 90 minutes a week for 10 weeks, the sessions have included topics such as building a culture of inclusion, the Black experience at Pomona, queer culture and more. Theatre Professor Joyce Lu and Dean of Campus Life Josh Eisenberg also teamed to offer a class called Applied Theatre: Sustained Dialogue in Action.

“I know that it resonates,” says the coordinator of the campus effort, Christina Ciambriello, chief of staff to College President G. Gabrielle Starr and secretary to the Board of Trustees.

The program grew out of a 2017-18 task force on public dialogue established by the Board of Trustees, a 2018 Gallup survey on speech and campus climate at the College and a Mellon Foundation presidential leadership grant awarded to Starr.

Jackson Lennon ’24 has been a student leader of the effort, first taking part during the pandemic closure in a remote session about the climate around race, class and politics at Pomona that was the first dialogue group in the nation to include trustees.

“We talked a lot about the differences in culture that have evolved over time from the trustees’ time and up to the incoming students, which included me,” Lennon says.

Inspired by that, he became one of 35 to 40 people from Pomona now trained as moderators through the Sustained Dialogue Institute. But when Lennon and another student planned a series on “cancel culture” for spring 2021, they ran into the time crunch that seems to make it hardest for students to engage with the program.

“We really wanted to work that out,” Lennon says. “Unfortunately, I think the timing was just not right because our sessions were late at night, a lot of students had homework and so they couldn’t really commit.” The session ended after a few weeks.

One of Lennon’s goals is to ensure that people don’t misunderstand a liberal arts college as an entirely politically liberal community, in part because, “I actually identify as a Republican,” as he puts it. “For me, I have found it’s been very effective to talk to people as a human being rather than becoming the stereotype that a lot of people think of as Republicans, and that’s kind of helped me because later, further down the road, I’ve opened up a little bit to these people about my political views,” he says.

Bridging differences takes time. The late Harold Saunders, founder of the Sustained Dialogue Institute, knew this: A U.S. diplomat, he was instrumental in Middle East peace negotiations, including the Camp David Accords of 1978. However, like Middle East peace, campus understanding can be temporary and ever shifting. It’s still worth persisting.

“I really do believe it can work,” Ciambriello says, noting that a benefit to students is that managing differences is a crucial career and life skill. “Even if it’s just, honestly, that people who never thought they would talk to each other are talking to each other, if that’s the takeaway, that’s meaningful. Because then they can talk to other people, or say, ‘Hey, here’s a little skill I learned, to hold a beat and listen and hear someone out.’ It’s not for me to change your mind or for you to change my mind. That’s really not the point at all.”

As we set out to write about pairs of Pomona people whose lives or work are intertwined in this issue of PCM, we weren’t thinking so much about mentorship. Yet it emerged as a subtext, and not only in cases of an older person guiding a younger one. Sometimes, the roles seemed almost interchangeable, and it struck me that mentoring is a very natural outcome of the Pomona experience.

One of the best examples of Pomona’s mentoring efforts for the community returned to campus this summer for the first time since 2019. The Draper Center’s Pomona College Academy for Youth Success (PAYS)—a multi-year program to prepare area high school students from low-income or traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to enter selective colleges and universities—was back in classrooms and residence halls for the core four-week summer experience after two years online because of the pandemic.

Pomona students serving as PAYS teaching assistants include, from left: Gerardo Hurtado ’24, Jose Sanchez Mara ’24 and Katherine Rivas ’25, who is a PAYS alumna. David Diaz, in green, is a PAYS alumnus attending Swarthmore whose younger brother is now in PAYS.

What unfolds during those campus stays can be astounding. As Biology Professor Sara Olson mentioned while introducing Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna ’85 at the Class of 2022 Commencement in May, the revolutionary gene-editing technology Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier pioneered is something even teenagers can learn.

“CRISPR is fast, easy and accessible, allowing even our high school PAYS students to use and understand this technology,” says Olson, who dedicates part of her summers to the program.

The first year Olson incorporated CRISPR was 2019, the last time PAYS was on campus. Students designed edits for a C. elegans worm eggshell project, with each student assigned one gene to delete to explore whether it was important in forming the eggshell. The students designed and created DNA plasmids that would then be injected into the worm to carry out the CRISPR edit. They nearly made it through the plasmid construction stage but didn’t quite make it to the injection stage before the summer session ended.

In 2020, the necessity of being online limited the scope of the work, but students worked to design a theoretical CRISPR-based treatment for COVID-19. “They ended up narrowing in on the same target that some antiviral therapies are now targeting, without even knowing anything about it beforehand,” Olson says.

Among those who worked on that 2020 project was Khadi Diallo ’25, then a student at Ontario’s Colony High and now a rising sophomore at Pomona. She works in Olson’s lab and is a teaching assistant for this year’s PAYS program.

“It’s neat to see her come full circle and be a mentor for them,” Olson says.

It’s the Pomona way. We hope you enjoy the issue.

“At the Hop,” released by Danny and the Juniors in 1957.

’At the Coop’

A popular song at the time I was at Pomona was “Let’s Go to the Hop,” which had a catchy tune and a recitation of all the current dance fads; the chorus consisted of “Let’s go to the hop,” sung five times. At Pomona of course it turned into “Let’s go to the Coop.” After 59 years, I can’t get it out of my head (“The Coop Reinvented,” Spring 2022).

—Carolyn Hunt ’63
Livermore, California

About Those Beanies

Archivist Sean Stanley (“Our Bird’s Beginnings,” Spring 2022) may have told you about blue-and-white freshman beanies, but they were green in the 1950s. See mine. Love reading the Pomona College Magazine and attending reunions. Chirp.

—Frances DuBose Johnson ’54
Newbury Park, California

Remembering Francisco Gonzalez ’75

Last year, another Pomona College classmate, Bradford Berge ’75 (Santa Fe, NM) and I were reminiscing and decided to find Francisco Gonzalez ’75 or “Frank” (as we knew him back in the day). I started with the Alumni Office but it had no record of his whereabouts. Brad and I then embarked on our own mad search dubbed Finding Frank Gonzalez.

After a few weeks of online searching in December 2021, following obscure lead after obscure lead, we (mainly Brad) finally found Frank in Kansas. Frank’s wife, Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez, is a professor at Kansas State University. On December 23, 2021, Brad and I had a long phone call with Frank. Although he was dealing with Crohn’s disease, he sounded like the same ol’ energetic, life-loving guy we met and fell in love with 51 years ago in Claremont. Frank was a product of the streets of East Los Angeles and a gregarious, kind, intelligent and musically talented force of nature. (He gave us permission to call him “Frank” because that is how we knew him at Pomona College).

Part of our obsession to find Frank was because Brad and I are musicians (with a very small “m”). When we met Frank at Pomona College, we were amazed at how he could channel music from Boyle Heights, singing Chicano songs and playing guitar with reckless abandon. I will never forget how he sang and played “Malagueñas” from his guts, almost in a trance.

In the ’70s we lost track of Frank when he left Pomona College early to pursue his music career as one of the founders of the iconic band Los Lobos. Brad and I were not aware of his connection with Los Lobos until our search a few months ago.

At the end of our call, we wished each other happy holidays and agreed to do it again “soon” as is always said at the end of a phone call but that was not to be. (Obituaries, p. 60). Pomona College is fortunate to have Francisco “Frank” Gonzalez as part of its legacy and we are blessed to have met him and rediscovered him. I would say “may he rest in peace” but knowing Frank, he’s still rockin’ and rollin’ somewhere and causing those around him to say what we said when we met him: “Who the hell is that guy?”

We extend to his wife, son and his vast universe of friends our prayers for the loss of Francisco “Frank” Gonzalez.

—Bruce L. Ishimatsu ’75
Marina del Rey, California

On the Court with Darlene Hard

I was saddened to learn of the death of professional women’s tennis player Darlene Hard ’61 (“In Memoriam,” Spring 2022).

In 1958, Darlene and I were both sophomores at Pomona. One day I was down near the campus tennis courts, hitting balls against the backstop and there she was—Darlene Hard, practicing her serve. After a bit, I got up my nerve and approached her. We engaged in a little small talk and then she smiled at me and said, “You want to hit a few balls with me?”

She stood there, bouncing the ball up and down a few times, and said, “Do you want me to hit shots you can return?” I had played on my high school tennis team and thought I could surely return any shot she could hit. I was 18 years old and felt generally invincible in all areas of life, including tennis.

She bounced the ball once and hit a forehand shot to my forehand side that cleared the net by about half an inch. The ball screamed into my side of the court and hit about six feet in front of me. Then, instead of bouncing like it should have, it literally skidded, never getting more than two or three inches off the ground. I missed it by a foot. “Do that again!” I said. She did. Same result.

At that point, we swapped a few shots that I could return and then my tennis session with Darlene Hard came to an end. I have never forgotten that wonderful encounter and how totally gracious she was the entire time. To this day, I can picture in my mind the way that ball hit and skidded a foot under my racquet as I swung mightily at nothing but air.

 —Michael R. Coghlan ’61
 South Pasadena, California

Meeting Virginia Prince

I so enjoyed reading about Virginia Prince ’35 in the excellent piece by Michael Waters ’20 (“Crossing Boundaries,” Spring 2022).

In the early 1990s I interviewed Virginia Prince at a West Hollywood café for a book I wrote on the 18th-century transgender pioneer and diplomat, the Chevalière d’Eon. In some respects Virginia modeled her life on d’Eon’s. I will never forget how Virginia embodied the spirit of d’Eon, who like Virginia, lived the second half of her long life as a woman, after living 50 years as a man (see Monsieur d’Eon is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade). As Virginia shook my hand with a hard grip, she theatrically bolted out: “So you are writing a book about the Chevalière d’Eon!?! What can you possibly tell me about her that I don’t already know?” And there began a two-hour conversation that I will never forget. Virginia was amazing: intelligent, articulate, with a rich sense of irony and a great sense of humor.

When, a decade later, I moved to Claremont as Pomona’s dean of the College, I visited her in a nursing home, after learning that she had moved back to the Claremont area.

Thanks so much for drawing our attention to this very special alumna.

—Gary Kates
H. Russell Smith Foundation Chair in the Social Sciences and Professor of History
Pomona College