When Amy Watt ’20 got the call that she would be traveling to Rio de Janeiro in early September, her joy in making the U.S. Paralympic track and field team was tempered by worry about missing the first two weeks or so of her first semester at Pomona. She remembers calling Pomona-Pitzer Women’s Cross-Country and Track & Field Coach Kirk Reynolds with trepidation.

“I didn’t know who I should contact or what to do about missing some school,” recalls Watt.  “He just asked when I’d be gone, information about the events, and the dates for everything. He talked to several people and the dean; he took care of a lot of it for me and made it easier for me.”

Born without part of her left arm, Watt has been an athlete since discovering soccer in kindergarten. She continued playing the sport until she fell in love with track and field in junior high school. “I was encouraged by my mom and friends,” says Watt. “It was also a fun activity to do.”

Her path from there to the Paralympics involved a couple of chance encounters and an aha moment concerning the rules.

One day during track practice at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, when Watt was in the 10th grade, a Gunn alumnus who is an amputee recommended that she check out the 2014 U.S. Paralympics Track and Field National Championships, being held in nearby San Mateo.

There she happened onto an amputee friend who was competing in a 4×100-meter relay. By chance, the group needed one more person. Watt agreed to fill in and was immediately hooked.

“Never thought I could do Paralympic track and field until I saw some other arm amputees and realized I could also do it,” says Watt, who had always assumed that those competitions were meant for leg amputees. What she discovered was that the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) has a classification system that determines athletes’ eligibility and divides them into sport classes with athletes with similar impairments. The category in which she was eligible was one that seems perfect for a Pomona-bound athlete—IBC classification T47.

Soon she was competing at the international level, traveling to the Netherlands for the International Wheelchair and Amputee Sports Federation World Junior Games and then to Toronto for the Parapan American Games, where she took fourth place in the 100- and 200-meter events. Last year, as a high school senior, Watt traveled to Doha, Qatar, where she participated in the IPC World Champion­ships and came in fifth in the 400-meter dash and seventh in the long jump.

Between homework and world competitions, Watt had a tough decision to think about: college. Having decided she wanted to attend a Division III school, she got in touch with track and field coaches from her top choices.

When she visited Pomona, she was struck by the people she met and the tight community. “I liked that family feel before you get to campus. I liked having small classes; that’s something I really wanted in any school. I liked the general feeling on campus and could envision myself here being really happy. I met a lot of intelligent but humble people here.”

In Rio, Watt competed in three events—the long jump, in which she finished sixth; the 100 meters, in which she made it to the semifinals; and the 400 meters, in which she also finished sixth.

“Even though I didn’t perform as well as I had hoped in my events, the overall experience I had was incredible,” she says. “Now that I’m back, I’m catching up on a few assignments and other classwork that I missed, and all my professors have been understanding and supportive. I was touched that many of my classmates have congratulated me on my perfor­mance and watched some of my races.”

Although she’s not sure what she plans to major in, she is sure she’s going to continue track and field at Pomona.

“She is a remarkable jumper and sprinter who has had a successful high school career, and I know she can continue to improve her performance in all her events,” says Reynolds.

And though the next Paralympics won’t happen until her senior year is over, she can’t help thinking about it sometimes.

“Sometimes I still have a hard time grasping that I went and competed in the Paralympics,” she says. “It was such an unforgettable experience to be running with the best athletes in the world. I would love to go to Tokyo in 2020, but I’ll need to keep working hard to get better and perform well at trials.”

This is not how most of us think of Pomona’s third and perhaps best known president, James A. Blaisdell, but like the rest of us, he was once a child, and unlike most of us, he had his likeness recorded at the age of about six in the form of a plaster bust.

Blaisdell would grow up to become a minister, theologian and president of Pomona College from 1910 to 1927. Today he is perhaps best remembered as the principal founder of The Claremont Colleges consortium and the author of the quotes on Pomona’s gates.

The bust, done in the classical style that was popular at the time (including clothing the boy as a child would have been clothed in Greek or Roman times), may have been intended to be cast in bronze, but no one knows whether this was ever done. Dating from around 1873, Blaisdell’s childhood likeness remained in the Blaisdell family until it was donated to the College this year by his great-granddaughter Susan Blaisdell Cornett.

ITEM: Sculpture
DATE: Early 1870s
DESCRIPTION: Plaster bust, 18” x 10.5” x 8”
ORIGIN: Gift from Susan Blaisdell Cornett

If you have an item from Pomona’s history that you would like to see preserved in the Pomona College Archives, please call 909-621-8138.

Suzanne Schultz Reed’s classroom is not your typical seminar room. Upon entering, visitors are immediately greeted by a costume rack boasting dozens of hangers and garments in various states of completion. Long project tables dominate the open space, ringed by smaller workstations furnished with bright white sewing machines and strips of fabric. The walls are covered in color sketches of period dresses and men’s breeches; visible in the supply cabinets are buckets of buttons and thread and pincushions. Today is Wednesday and the room is uncharacteristically quiet, humming only with the sound of sewing machines and soft conversation between Schultz Reed and her student worker, Amy Griffin (Scripps ’18). “On Fridays, I have six students working in the shop,” Schultz Reed explains. “It’s very social. Everybody’s chatting, everybody’s doing something, music is on. And—” here she grins wickedly—“I bring brownies on Fridays.”

Schultz Reed has been the Pomona Theatre Department’s costume shop manager for nearly 25 years, producing the costumes for every production the department puts on and teaching sewing to her nine to 16 student workers in the process. She has been sewing for over half a century, since learning from her mother, a sewing teacher, at the age of six. Schultz Reed came to Pomona from a freelance stint at South Coast Repertory, a Costa Mesa–based theatre company, after an accomplished career as a freelancer, a costume shop manager at Mount Holyoke College and a costume shop assistant manager for the Atlanta Ballet.

Although she possesses her own extraordinary design skills and has designed one show for Pomona in the past, Schultz Reed prefers working with her hands to making conceptual decisions about how the costumes should look. “When I went to grad school [at UNC Chapel Hill], I discovered that designing wasn’t what I really liked. What I really liked,” she confesses, “was making the stuff. I liked taking somebody else’s vision and turning it into reality.”

Now Schultz Reed takes the renderings of the department’s guest costume designer, Kimberly Aldinger ’11, and finds ways to bring her ideas to life on the stage. This can mean borrowing from other theatres, renting from costume shops or theatre companies, pulling from the department’s stockroom, or building new costumes from scratch. Gesturing to the sketches that decorate the walls, Schultz Reed explains: “Her renderings are my blueprints.”

Those blueprints reflect the fact that the needs of each production are very different. If a production calls for a costume that looks uncommon or serves a scene-specific purpose, it will most likely need to be handmade. “That dress, the pink one,” Schultz Reed says, gesturing to one of the renderings on the wall, “has three tiers of petals that have to come off during the show. There’s no way we’re going to find that, and no way we’re going to borrow it. So we’re going to have to build it.”

The biggest challenge of Schultz Reed’s job is making sure all the building and borrowing gets done in time. “You have to get it done by opening night,” she stresses. “There’s just no way you can fudge that. Tickets are sold; people are coming.” The dress rehearsals are crucial to this process. Often Schultz Reed will come away from the first dress rehearsal with pages of notes and 24 hours to address as many of them as she can before the next dress rehearsal. “In last year’s production of Urinetown, Amy had a fabulous quick change,” she remembers, smiling at her student. “She had to go from a dress and a wig and heels to a full-body black costume with a mask. In 30 seconds! We had to practice that.” Schultz Reed also worked on redesigning elements of the costumes to make the transition easier, such as replacing a real belt buckle with a magnetic replica. Those kinds of adjustments, from hemming dresses to swapping out collars to the rare overhaul and redesign of entire costumes, ensure that the actors aren’t inhibited from giving a great performance.

And while the actors are working hard onstage, Schultz Reed keeps her students working hard offstage. “I teach the basics to those who come in with nothing, and I try to expand the knowledge of those who come in with a lot of sewing experience,” she says. “You can really see their progress, and it’s a life skill that everybody should have— knowing how to sew. And being creative in here works a different part of your brain than traditional studying does.”

Here Amy chimes in, speaking up from behind her sewing machine: “One of the advantages afforded to you in the costume shop is that you get to produce something that isn’t attached to grades. You’re productive, but you’re not productive in a way that’s stressful. It’s about creating.”

Schultz Reed nods emphatically—to her, this job is about her students as much as it is about her own creativity—and adds: “One of my older students was talking to a newcomer and said, ‘Oh, you’ll love it here! It’s like having a sewing class, but you get paid to do it.’” She laughs. “That’s how I feel. You get paid to sew, to learn and to have fun.”

The Class of 2020 gathers on the steps of Carnegie Hall.

—photo by Jeff Hing