PCM: Thumbs Up

After a near 50-year hiatus from contact with the College, I am now re-engaged. Two obvious factors have been the 50th^–Year Reunion and the College’s email listserv. A third factor is your excellent publication. Very professional in layout and content. I suspect this may play a role in the increasing recognition of the College in national publications.

—Jerry Parker ’64, Olympia, Wash.

Thanks for the years of editing PCM—I have copies from the ’50s that look like the monthly tool store “what’s-on-sale” mailings. What a change! For me, I would like to see more on the current faculty and profiles of what graduates have accomplished to be a “tribute to Christian society.” (This used to be on each tea bag in the ’50s.) Harvard asks for voluntary contributions, which I have maintained over the years, and you can plan on a steady, small, but constant stream from me. All best wishes for the next 16 years.

—H.G. Wilkes, Hingham, Mass.

Thank you for your letter regarding the Pomona College Magazine. I thought the recent issue was excellent—particularly the article “Ash Heap of Success.” Thank you, Professor Seligman.

—Ellen Walden Hardison ’44, Corona, Calif.

I was in Claremont visiting my sister at the San Antonio Gardens, and one evening we decided to visit the Skyspace installation by James Turrell. I keep most of my old PCMs, and so I found the Winter 2008 publication and was able to read some of the background about the Skyspace. What a wonderful experience. We enjoyed viewing the colors as they progressed after sunset. The night sky changed colors too!

Keep up the good work and thanks.

—Barbara McBurney Rainer ’53, Carmel, Calif.

Commentary on PCM, Fall 2014: For some of us, coding is a means to an end, not an end in itself. It has to be continually upgraded. A while ago, I wrote a large number of papers on wavelets, but only as long as I had access to MATLAB’s Wavelet Toolbox.

“The Ash Heap of Success” is a patent dispute (for lawyers). However, the DNA diagrams were marvelous. (I postdoced in DNA.)

DIY Physics: lab projects for electronics; they are confined to mechanics, which makes good sense. A photonics lab might be useful also, using lasers for the same applications.

Keep up the good work.

—Katharine J. Jones, Ph.D., Class of 1961

PCM: Thumbs Down

I have wanted to write this letter for some years, but your August 29 letter, along with the current issue of Pomona College Magazine, prompted me to write you immediately.

If the magazine is in such a financial situation that it has to nickel and dime the alumni to keep going, I have a strong suggestion for you—the same suggestion I have been holding for some years: Cut back!

Let me also put your request in the context of last week’s New York Times article which states that Pomona College’s endowment sits at more than $1 million per student.

The production of the magazine, which has to be extremely costly, is way overblown. If you cut back on paper quality, make it a smaller size—both in measurement and number of articles (nine-plus in this issue; you could do with half that)—but most of all, scale back the DESIGN, the savings would be substantial.

The magazine is so over-designed that it becomes difficult to read. Where is your eye to focus? Where does the article start? Are the sidebars relevant? For those of us slightly older folks whose eyesight is beginning to fail, the type size of many of the articles is too small, and the color tone is slightly lighter than other comparable magazines. The heavy, slick paper makes it harder to read, causing reflections. It is also more difficult to recycle. Perhaps it is time to give alumni the option of receiving all issues online.

I would much rather have my donation to the College spent on tuition relief for a needy student than on a fancy, overdone magazine.

—Susan Hutchinson Self ’62, Santa Rosa, Calif.

Clearer heads didn’t speak up for goodness sakes? A letter announcing the launching of a “voluntary subscription program” has arrived with this latest edition of the Pomona College Magazine. Putting aside the increasingly slick and unnecessarily thick stock chosen for recent publications, let me address my deep aversion to the ploy of “voluntary subscription.” I quote: “everyone will continue to receive PCM whether or not they give.” How very kind of you.

Didn’t anyone realize that such a ploy disenfranchises? Has anyone heard about the unemployed, about fixed incomes further dwindling, about the broader economic chasm experienced by, yes, even Pomona College graduates? You propose the 1% “subscribe.” Even if I were a member of that group I would still be writing this letter because I question whether your need to win accolades has become more important than the mission of maintaining a link with ALL Pomona College graduates. May I respectfully suggest someone needs to put on the brakes.

—Silvia Pauloo-Taylor ’57, Tinton Falls, N.J.

PCM: Thumbs Green

The most recent issue of the Pomona College Magazine is very nice looking, as always, but I was distressed that it was mailed in a plastic bag in order to include the letter asking for funding and the mailing envelope. This could have been easily avoided! It is more difficult in many communities—if not impossible—to recycle plastic than it is paper. Stapling in the envelope, including the letter in the text of the magazine, would have worked very well.

I also noticed that while you do use paper from “responsible sources,” you could go much further to limit the publication’s impact on the environment. I know recycled paper can be more costly and doesn’t always look as nice, but I suspect your audience would forgive you for that. Please include environmental concerns in your aesthetic decisions. In our house, we do almost all of our reading online anyway.

—Ellen Wilson P’15, Pittsburgh, Pa.

Editor’s Note: Sustainable printing is not as simple as it may appear. Some aspects of the matter are counterintuitive. For example, coated paper kills fewer trees than uncoated paper, because it uses less wood pulp and more clay. And recycled sheets may come from Europe or Asia, with a huge carbon footprint. Add to that the fact that there is no reliable certification process for recycled papers to ensure that their production is truly environmentally friendly, and you have a difficult puzzle to solve. The best solution we’ve found so far is to use printers overseen and audited by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). This means the paper they use in printing the magazine comes from a mix of recycled waste and sustainably harvested (and monitored) forests. It also means the printer uses environmentally friendly chemicals and inks. —MW

Sagehen Senate

I graduated from Pomona 58 years ago. The world has changed since then. Astronauts have landed on the moon, and I have experienced the Vietnam War; the Civil Rights movement, Women’s and Gay Movements; and the development of the computer age. But I never thought that I would see the day that sagehens, and their male counterparts, the sage grouse, might determine which political party will control the Senate after the forthcoming elections.

My wife and I live in Bend, Oregon, during the summers. Yesterday the following lead-in appeared on the front page of the local paper. (See below.) Upon seeing the lead-in, I wondered if the sage grouse might be related to the sagehen, so I read the entire article. I learned that the sagehen is the female of the sage grouse species. Seemingly, the candidates for Senate in Montana and Colorado have differing views on whether the sage grouse species should or should not be on the federal endangered species list, and that this issue might indeed determine the composition of the Senate after the fall elections.

I had a convertible during my senior year at Pomona, and the rally committee asked me if I could transport Cecil the Sagehen to the night Pomona-Caltech football game which was being held in the Rose Bowl. We managed to squeeze Cecil into the back seat of my car, and I set out for Pasadena. I couldn’t go more than 20 mph because the wind might damage the Bird, so I wandered through the back roads of Monrovia, Arcadia and Altadena. At one point a motorcycle officer pulled up alongside me at a stop sign. I thought he wanted to give me a ticket for some type of violation, but after looking at me and the Bird with a puzzled expression on his face, he roared away.

—George E. Sayre ’56, Bend, Ore.

Sad News

I was saddened to read of Professor Emerita Margery Smith Briggs’ death just 12 days shy of her 99th birthday.

When I was a freshman, 50 years ago, my first class at Pomona College was elementary music theory, taught by Mrs. Briggs. It was the most difficult class that I ever had either at Pomona or later at Yale. As a teacher, Mrs. Briggs was enthusiastic, demanding, hard-working, organized and inspiring. She expected excellence from herself and from her students.

When I eventually began my own career as a college professor, the first class that I taught was elementary music theory. Then and ever after, I kept the energetic, inventive, dedicated example of Mrs. Briggs before me as a positive paradigm of teaching and personhood.

Over the years, I kept in touch with Margery. We often spoke on the phone, and I saw her in Claremont a year before her death.  She was, at the age of 97, bright, engaging, filled with philosophical, musical and historical insights. Always independent by nature, she was still driving and insisted on taking us out to lunch at one of her favorite restaurants.

—David Noon, ‘68, New York, NY

Art on Campus

May I congratulate you and your staff on conceiving and designing the attractive new Pomona College Calendar. It is one of the best I have seen, and aptly demonstrates not only the College’s dedication to art, but also how much its chosen artworks add distinction to the College.

But not everyone appreciates art in the same way, and disagreements about what constitutes good art have not always come down on art’s side in Pomona’s history.

In the spring of1953, Walker Hall had been open about a year. Its lounge was a happy gathering point for those who appreciated a view across a green expanse that perfectly framed Mt. Baldy. It must have been one of those persons who had an idea: Why not place a sculpture in front of the huge new window? In any case, I was at a meeting of the Associated Men Students’ Council when that idea was proposed. Specifically, why not use a $5,000 surplus in the AMS budget to commission a sculpture for the area outside Walker Hall? Even more specifically, the individual floating this proposal seemed to have a commitment from the sculptor Isamu Noguchi to install one of his pieces there for $10,000. AMS approved the idea, and through the Dean of Students, asked that the trustees come up with an additional $5,000 for the project.

Later I talked to the Dean Shelton Beatty (or possibly his assistant, Bill Wheaton) after word had come down that the Board had not granted the requested matching money. Why, I asked, had that happened? One prominent trustee, the Dean said, had opposed the idea, even going so far as to offer, by contrast, a donation of $5,000 to “paint over Prometheus.” That last bit is hearsay, to be sure, and may have been spoken in jest. But clearly Pomona missed out on a Noguchi to go along with its other distinguished artworks. Over the years I have seen a number of Noguchi sculptures. One has stuck with me: it looked a bit like a rocket ship ready to take off. I wondered if that was the piece Pomona missed out on and thought, even then, how stunning it would have looked next to Walker Hall.

One other event was not a miss: Prometheus is gloriously with us. But a collection of incidents adds humor to the creation of Orozco’s masterpiece. My parents were missionaries in Mexico (where I was born) and they knew Orozco personally. They may have heard this story from him and told it to me, or I may have heard it as a student at Pomona. The trustees and Pomona’s president viewed Prometheus as it neared completion and objected to scenes of writhing naked bodies. Orozco angrily effaced the bodies with a strident blue color, a clashing, almost insulting contrast to the colors in the rest of the fresco. The blue is very much still there. Orozco also asked for more money and was turned down. His next commission was at Dartmouth College where, among other scenes, he depicted a group of robed academics at the gates of Hell. Apparently the faces of the first two figures are identifiable as those of the president of Pomona and of the chairman of Pomona’s Board of Trustees.

Art’s price is paid in differing currencies!

—Charles B. Neff, 1954, Mercer Island, Wash.

Hail Pomona! Thank you for the calendar. I took the time, at last, to really look at it. I’m curious about Peter Shelton ’73—the artwork “GhandiG” for July 2015. Is he related to Hal, John, or Marty, who were old Pomona artists, professors, etc.? I have three or four Hal Sheltons hanging here and one Joe Donat, also Pomona. They were 1930s to 1940s—before the ’70s, but certainly could be related.

The map was useful but could have been larger, easier to read and locate—especially better names for buildings on sites for an old dame of 98 years.

Art is delightful. I miss the staged “artistic” performances that melted away with traditions such as the classic Plug Ugly, done annually by faculty and the other traditions that produced “Hail, Pomona, Hail—May thy sons and daughters sing praises of thy name, praises of thy fame ’til the heavens above shall ring—” etc.

“Hail, Pomona” became our standard greeting for a long time—still is with me. An operation that I had about a year ago began with that. The MD performing the operation also was a Pomona graduate.

So—Hail, Pomona!

—Mollie Miles, Portland, Ore.

[Calendar Erratum]

In the 2014–15 Pomona College Engagement Calendar, which was sent to all Pomona College donors last summer, the date for Ash Wednesday was mistakenly listed as March 18, 2015. The correct date is February 18.

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

I had the good fortune of traveling to Borneo last summer and seeing orangutans and gibbons in their natural habitat. I also saw the absolutely devastating effects of palm oil plantations that are destroying one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. I want to express my support and enthusiasm for Madison Vorva’s work!

—Rebeca Plank ’92
Boston, Mass.

 Agricultural Adventurer

The cover story “Back to the Farm” in the fall issue caught my interest. During my last trip to Alumni Weekend five years ago, Pete Stephens ’68, Mark Sweeney ’69 and I stopped by the Wash to find hippie-style concrete domes with a garden of tomatoes and other vegetables, along with chickens in the area. Finding a young co-ed puttering around there, I inquired whether she thought such activity was worth the sizable tuition her parents were paying, particularly at a college with no courses in agriculture practice.

 The back story was that I graduated from Pomona a published author with Clifton Trafton in brain research, went on to UCSB and NYU grad schools to publish more brain research with M. S. Gazzaniga, only to run screaming to the horizon and the middle of nowhere (east of Garberville, Calif.) on 60 acres (with Jacob Smith ’69) to pursue a career in art, for which I was basically untrained and arguably unaccomplished.

 There, off the grid for the next 30 years, I hunted or raised, prepared and preserved my meat and foraged, or grew and preserved my fruit and vegetables in a 100-by-100-foot garden. Eventually, I returned to civilization, to the small village of Blue Lake, Calif., 100 miles north of my rural property. Along with doing some art, I’ve been propagating rare and endangered succulents and selling them along with fruits and vegetables my family grows at local farmers markets. In this sense, my entire adult life has been occupied with activities Pomona College did nothing to prepare me for, although I’m grateful for the wide worldview I obtained there. I wonder what percentage of other graduates have strayed so far from their training.

—Bob Filbey ’68
Blue Lake, Calif.

 Rooftop Memories

Every Christmas season, I think about how much I would enjoy having a CD of the “tower music” that we played from the roof of Big Bridges each December when I was at Pomona. For those who aren’t familiar with this bit of campus history, Professor William F. Russell was the director, and the group was meant to be similar to the musicians, apparently common in Renaissance villages, who would play for the townspeople from the tower of the village church on important occasions. At Pomona, the group was maybe 10 musicians, with prominent brass, and the tunes simple songs of that era such as “Il est ne le divin enfant” and “In dulce jubilo.”

 One thing that made the process memorable was getting to the roof of Big Bridges. We had to work our way through the labyrinth of the backstage passageways, following each other through a succession of narrow hallways and stairs until we finally emerged into the cool night air. We couldn’t actually see our audience, so we played to the night sky and hoped the people on the ground could hear well enough. It was a special privilege to be permitted to play up there.

 It wasn’t a spectacular event or a showing of musical virtuosity; it was just a comfortable holiday tradition. But for me it was a special part of the Christmas season. I expect many alumni have pleasant memories of playing in the group or listening from the quad. It may not be practical to produce a CD, but maybe a download would be economical. I hope there is a way to make the music available.

—Don Wolfe ’73
Portland, Ore.

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

When the Interactive Timeline of Pomona College history launched online last October, on the College’s 125th birthday, it was the culmination of a great deal of research. For six months, my staff and I had pored over the College history books, combed through old publications, leafed through ancient press releases and sought out every credible source of information that we could identify in order to bring those lost years of Pomona history back into the light.

 Along the way, we made some intriguing discoveries. Like the fact that Pomona and Occidental considered merging in 1909. (Pomona proposed; Oxy declined.) Or the puzzling photo (below) showing Lebus Court with a Madonna in place of the familiar sculpture of a boy with a Pan-pipe (a prop for the 1952 filming of the John Wayne movie Trouble Along the Way).

 But some of the most interesting details have come directly from you—alumni, parents and friends of the College—by way of the comments many of you have added at www.pomona.edu/timeline as part of our year-by-year unveiling of the project. Here are a few of my favorites so far:

 1949: “Snow on the quad was a lot of fun. It lasted for two or three days. It also brought a lot of smudge from the snudge pots that burned oil in an effort to keep the citrus groves alive and well. Smudge crept through any slight crack so we wrapped our clothes in sheets in the closets. It helped a little.” —Pat Wickersham Newton ’51

 1952: “Addition to the filming of Trouble Along the Way: a scene was filmed with the character played by John Wayne and his daughter walking through the main gate. Wayne reads but doesn’t say ‘Let Only the Eager, Thoughtful and Reverent Enter Here.’ Wayne then says to his daughter, “Well, let’s go in anyway.” This scene was not included in the final version.” —Peter Wait ’54

 1964: “Regarding the origins of the 47 fun: I remember a lunch in Frary during which Bruce Elgin’s older brother Bob mentioned that a math professor had given his class a proof that all positive integers equal 47. Homework was to disprove it. And THEN folks began to notice that 47 is everywhere.” —Beye Fyte ’65

 1977: “… there was no women’s soccer team, club or varsity. I tried out for the men’s JV team and played in a few practices, but after getting run over by a player, I realized that I wasn’t going to make it. I don’t recall all of the details, but I joined with Mollie Busterud, Sue Troll and others to spread the word that we wanted to women’s team. A couple of varsity men stepped up and took on the job of coaching us, the Athletic Dept. gave us balls and old JV shirts, and the first women’s soccer club team was born.” —Sarah Clark Stuart ’81

 1987: “I was in line outside Frank Dining Hall, when a gentleman asked to cut in line in front of me and my friends. I said, ‘No. This is a line. It has a beginning and an end. The end of the line is where you join the line.’ … When I sat down with my friends, they asked if I knew who that man was. I said, ‘No, but what does it matter? A line is a line.’ Then I asked, ‘Who is he anyway?’ ‘Oh,’ they replied, ‘that is David Alexander, the president of the College.’” —Rebekah Westrup ’89

 As we go to press, we still have a few more years on the timeline to unveil, and every year remains permanently open to comments, so please do keep the memories flowing. After all, it may sound like hype to say that you and your memories are a part of Pomona College history, but it’s also the simple truth.

When Brubeck Played Pomona

When the great jazz composer and pianist Dave Brubeck died on Dec. 5, 2012, a day short of his 92nd birthday, some members of the Class of 1957 reminisced about their having sponsored a concert by the Brubeck quartet in Little Bridges 58 years earlier.

 This was mainly the doing of our classmate Marvin Nathan, who was a big fan of Brubeck and had gotten to know the members of the quartet the summer after our freshman year, in 1954, when the musicians had a three-month gig at Zardi’s in Hollywood. Nathan went to the club nightly during the vacation and returned to college full of enthusiasm for the new style of jazz played by Brubeck. Marvin recounts: “That Christmas I gave the four of them their first matching set of ties, handkerchiefs and cuff links, which, I think, they wore at the Pomona concert.” He made the arrangements directly with Brubeck, and a committee of the Class of ’57 was formed to produce the concert. Brubeck was the first to play college dates, lifting jazz out of smoke-filled clubs. Those were simpler times: no agent or manager or record company was intermediary. We just asked Brubeck, and later, for another concert sponsored by the class, Andre Previn; they said yes, turned up with their sidemen and played and got paid.

 But paying the musicians required a paying audience. Steve Glass ’57 and subsequently professor of classics at Pitzer College, recalls that early ticket sales for the Brubeck concert were going slowly. His classmate and future wife Sandy was in charge of publicity and she was worried. In those days, West Coast/Cool Jazz was a relatively arcane phenomenon. Then, shortly before the concert, the Nov. 8, 1954 issue of Time magazine had Dave Brubeck on the cover, only the second jazz musician to be so featured (after Louis Armstrong), and the place was packed.

 For the program I drew caricatures of the musicians: Brubeck (piano), Paul Desmond (alto sax), Bob Bates (bass) and Joe Dodge (drums). Marvin Nathan wrote the notes. Reflecting on the concert, he writes: “We caught the group at its acme, in the wake of the remarkable recordings of Jazz at Storyville and Jazz at Oberlin, which, for my money, are the two greatest albums Dave and Paul ever did.”

Marvin left Pomona after two years to study jazz saxophone at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music but decided the instrument should be left to the likes of John Coltrane and instead became a humanities professor. All of us amateur promoters remained jazz aficionados. Why, just this morning I refolded my fedora into a pork-pie hat and set off looking the hepcat I wished to be.

 —Andrew Hoyem ’57
San Francisco, Calif.

 Save Pomona’s LGBT History

Watching the results of the November election, I couldn’t help but notice the sea change that has occurred in attitudes toward LGBT people. I wish someone at PCM would document highlights of the LGBT community at Pomona over the last 40 years or so before that history gets lost.

 When I chaired the Gay Student Union/Lesbian and Gay Student Union (we changed our name during my term) in the ’80s, we understood that we were the second oldest gay student organization in the country (after Columbia University), and the oldest on the West Coast. I think this is another area where Pomona has had enormous social influence and I’ve yet to see it documented. We lost a lot of our history with AIDS; it makes sense to me that with marriage equality on the march, Pomona takes its proper credit.

—Paul David Wadler ’83
Chicago, Ill.

 More Shocking Pranks Revealed!

 We read in the fall issue (“A Carefully Calculated Caper”) about the 1975 prank that replaced Chopin with Zappa on Big Bridges. That prank may have eclipsed our homecoming caper in Frary a decade earlier, but we think it is time for our prank to be revealed, especially since Pat Mulcahy ’66 is now retired from coaching.

 It was the night before the homecoming football game with Oxy. We don’t know whose idea it was, but someone hid in a china cabinet in Frary at closing time and opened the back door to the rest of us after hours. Frank White ’66 helped Mulcahy rappel down a wall from the “Orozco” room in Clark to Frary’s locked utility courtyard below, though we can’t remember why that was necessary. Then we stole a huge Oxy Tiger from a float that was built somewhere on campus for the game the next day. We carried the tiger undetected across campus and through the very loud front doors of Frary. We set up four or six of the large dining tables on the Frary stage below Prometheus as one very large table, fluffing up the Oxy Tiger and putting it on the table as if it were the meal. Then we got the formal dinnerware and cutlery out (from locked cabinets?) and set up place settings and chairs around the table. The Oxy Tiger was served for the Sagehens’ dinner.

 The next morning at breakfast, nothing was said. The students seemed to think it was an authorized set up. Dean Batchelder (we think) walked around the dining hall looking suspiciously at everyone. The dining hall czar seemed very put out that her best dishes had been violated, but no one in authority sent out a search party or even asked about it. It was hard for us to feign surprise and not to brag about our exploits. So as far as we know, it has remained a secret since. We were only foot soldiers, though. Do others remember who planned this? Does anyone have photos?

 —Gary Thompson ’66, Excelsior, Minn.
& Frank White ’66, Colorado Springs, Colo.

 The intriguing account of the Zappa prank reminded me of a campus adventure in which I was involved. Our escapade did not rival the artistic complexity of Zappa, but perhaps it was a bit more physically challenging. In spring of 1962, during my freshman year, I was a struggling scholar, mostly overwhelmed by the demands of all my classes, and also a social recluse. I was acquainted mainly with my own sponsor group in (then all-male) Clark Hall, and also with the cross-country and track teams. For reasons I can’t recall, I decided to run for sophomore class president.

 My support was concentrated mainly within my own sponsor group. The notion emerged that my candidacy would be enhanced by a placard at the top of Smith Tower. Two members of my group, our junior class sponsor Rich Kettler ’62 and Mike Freid ’67, were enterprising climbers and welcomed the challenge.

 In the wee hours of morning, we carried two desks from our rooms to the base of the tower. The desks permitted access to the tiled sides of the tower which would allow a climber foot and hand holds to the top. The plan was that Mike and Rich would climb on opposite sides, joined for safety, by a rope around the tower. This arrangement quickly proved awkward; the intrepid pair discarded the rope and climbed separately to the top, carrying the campaign signs, while the rest of us held our collective breath.

 Less than half an hour after they disappeared over the edge at the top, the climbers emerged, to our great relief, from the door at the bottom. The next morning the poster announcing “Plumb for Sophomore Class President” was visible at the top of Smith Tower.

 The signs atop the tower and the open door at the bottom were not ignored by the administration. The co-conspirators and I were summoned to a stern but un-punitive reprimand. Despite the unique publicity on my behalf, Steve Schaffran was elected sophomore class president. He later distinguished himself by leaving Pomona to join the then-nascent Peace Corps, then returning to Pomona after his Peace Corps service to earn a Rhodes Scholarship.

—Jim Plumb ’65
Redwood Valley, Calif.

 I recall the night, when I was a freshman, that our group (The Vultures) at the east end of Walker Hall, upstairs, swapped the rooms of our two senior live-in “counselors” while they were out carousing. We used Polaroids and changed every item exactly, including switching the doors, which may be out of sequence to this day, and the telephone connections. The two seniors came back a bit blurry and looked around, saying to a few unlikely witnesses, “Didn’t I used to live over …? Oh, hell, forget it.” They went to bed that way and as far as I know it stayed.
—John Shannon ’65
Topanga, Calif.

 Bad Grammar

I’m writing in reference to Mark Kendall’s article “D.B. and That Number.” I know little or nothing about math other than being able to balance my checkbook on occasion, but I do know a little about English grammar. You began the first sentence in the next-to-last paragraph of your very interesting article about Professor Donald Bentley by saying, “Me and D.B., we cover a lot of ground.” This is a very common mistake which I too often hear from kids and teenagers. When referring to oneself as the subject of a sentence, the right pronoun to use is the word “I,” and it should always come second (or last) in a compound subject. My dad, who was a 1926 graduate of Yale, was a stickler for proper English and I just want to pass his heritage along.

—Barbara Brainard Ainge ’57
St. George, Utah

Mourning a Man of Action

 Last September my good friend Ted Smith ’63 died in the Montana mountains that he loved, just six weeks after my wife Cheryl ’65 and I visited him, his brother Roger ’64 and Roger’s wife Libby on Flathead Lake. Over the almost 50 years since we were at Pomona together, Ted had become a close friend. Our lives intertwined, often by coincidence and often to my benefit.

 In 1970, on my first visit to Indonesia as a UNESCO consultant on education planning I made a courtesy call on the Ford Foundation office in Jakarta. When Ted walked into the room you may imagine how surprised both of us were to run into someone from Pomona. My surprise turned to astonishment when I found out that

 Roger, a fellow Nappie, was also in Indonesia for a few months. Three years later, I was teaching at a state college in Vermont when Ted called me out of the blue from the Ford Foundation in New York to ask if I’d like to move to Surabaya, Indonesia, to establish the Ministry of Education and Culture’s first provincial education planning unit. Shortly after our move to East Java in 1974 with two small children we adopted our third child, Nathan Hadianto, from an orphanage in Surabaya. The next year Ted, now back in the Ford Foundation’s Indonesia office, contacted us to help arrange for Roger and Libby to adopt a child from the same place. Ted came to check out the orphanage, and Libby followed to pick up Theo, named after his uncle Ted.

 After I retired and Ted was visiting us in Vermont in 2007, we were riding up a chairlift at Jay Peak when I told him of my application for a job leading a new initiative at the Hewlett Foundation. After months with no follow-up from the headhunter, I was disappointed. When I mentioned the name of the headhunter whom I’d written Ted said “I know him. I’ll call him on Monday.” Monday afternoon I got a call from the headhunter, and soon I had started three exciting and rewarding years of work that I had not expected.

 From the testimonies to Ted that I’ve seen since his death, I know that he quietly supported many other people and groups besides me in his career in conservation and the environment. I attribute Ted’s interest in and concern for others, wonderfully leavened by chance in my case, to be due to values that were strengthened by the knowledge, ways of looking at the world and responsibility for those around us that our Pomona education encouraged.

Ted bore his added riches in trust for mankind, and I miss him.

—Ward Heneveld ’64
Enosburg Falls, Vt.

 Musical Memory

 I noted the death of Gil Plourde ’66 with melancholy. In September 1962, Gil walked into my room and noted that the music to which I was listening was his mother’s favorite and it must mean that I had good taste. That acknowledgement early in our freshman year has remained with me for 50 years, and each time I hear d’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Air, I remember Gil.

 —Tully Wiedman ’66
Dixon, Calif.