Pomoniana

Myrlie Evers-Williams at Pomona

With the announcement this week that Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68 will give the invocation at President Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 21, it’s worth taking a look back at her time in Claremont.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of her husband, civil rights activist Medgar Evers, who was shot in the back outside their Jackson, Miss., home on the morning of June 12, 1963, while Myrlie and their three children were inside.

The next year, Evers-Williams decided to move to Claremont, as she recounted in a 1965 piece for Ebony magazine titled “Why I Left Mississippi.” In that piece, she wrote that she found purpose in speaking engagements, but was like the “walking dead” when she returned to her house and the memories. Ultimately, it was the welfare of her children, particularly her oldest son who was nine at the time, that prompted the move:

“They were awake that terrible night, and heard the thunderous roar of the death shot. They saw their father lying in a scarlet pool of blood as his life ebbed away,” she wrote. “… So it was that in the spring of 1964, while on a speaking engagement in California, I asked friends to ‘look around’ for a house for me.”

She chose Claremont, Evers-Williams wrote, for the college town atmosphere, and more specifically because it was home to Pomona College, where she enrolled. Her time in Claremont received widespread media attention — in 1965 alone her life here was featured in Look, Good Housekeeping and in the Ebony magazine cover story, as the Claremont Courier noted in a story about the stories.

Evers-Williams told Look that she had to wake at 3 a.m. to juggle the demands of school, raising kids and writing down her memories of Medgar. “Someone asked me what I wanted for Christmas,” she told the magazine. “I told them: a secretary.”

While still a Pomona student, Evers-Williams wrote a book (with Peter Williams), For Us, the Living. After graduating in sociology in 1968, Evers worked for several years at The Claremont Colleges, starting at the new Center for Educational Opportunity. In 1970, she ran for Congress as a Democrat, losing in the largely Republican district that included Claremont.

She went on to work for ARCO as national director of community affairs, served as a commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works and, in 1995, she was elected chair of the NAACP’s national board of directors. The next year, Pomona College awarded her an honorary degree and she delivered the Commencement address in Bridges Auditorium, where she had graduated nearly three decades earlier.

Mobile Home

Replica House, originally built to hold onto the College’s history, has hit the road. Late last night, the quaint cottage was moved off campus to make way for construction of the new Studio Art Center. (Student photographer Bryan Matsumoto captured the home’s move in the pictures at bottom and top; the older photo is from the Honnold Library collection).

Conceived in 1937 at the College’s 50th anniversary, the house is a two-thirds scale look-alike of Ayer Cottage in the city of Pomona, where the College held its first classes in the spring of 1887.

The College had attempted to buy that original home at White Avenue and Fifth Street, but when the price was wrong, trustees went for a replica that would serve as a mini-museum of Pomona memorabilia.

In the ’50s, the house became home for KSPC. Then, for construction of Oldenborg in the ’60s, the house was moved from College Way and Fourth Street to land near Brackett Observatory. Now, with construction set to begin for the art building, Replica House is being relocated to private property in north Claremont. And, no, there will not be a replica Replica House.

Awkward!

On the first day of his Critical Inquiry class, Linguistics and Cognitive Science Professor Michael Diercks strolled into the room, looking very much like any other college student, wearing a plain T-shirt and a pair of jeans. He sat down among his students and introduced himself as Michael. After engaging in conversation with his “classmates” about how late the professor was, he finally introduced himself to the class as their teacher. An awkward silence fol- lowed. And then some nervous laughter. What did they expect? This was a class on social awkwardness!

Inspired by the humor around awkwardness in media, particularly TV shows such as The Office and Arrested Development, Diercks created this class as an extension of his Social Awkwardness Project, which seeks to understand those gawky moments in real life, examining, why, where and when we experience the phenomenon.

In the Pomona College class, students look into the linguistic triggers of social awkwardness, reading papers on the topic and investigating situations that are considered to be awkward. The larger project started more than a year and a half ago, with student research carrying on over the summer. “We are trying to put together a new body of knowledge around social awkwardness,” says Diercks. “The extent to which we become successful remains to be seen.” And if there are trip-ups along the way, let’s just hope they don’t happen while he’s carrying a tray through a crowded lunchroom while walking past the cool kids’ table …

Everything Must Go!

Before moving on, Pomona’s Class of 2012 first had to move merchandise and shed accessories. So, for weeks before this year’s Commencement, the daily Student Digester turned into a swap meet laden with “SENIOR SALES!” We looked past the expected futons and floor lamps for the finer things, listed here with the original asking price:

• Tempur-Pedic pillow: $40
• Half-used 3.4-oz DKNY perfume: $10
• Top hat: $10
• Chin-up bar: $15
• Cocktail shaker: $5
• “The cutest toaster you’ll ever see”: $10
• Pioneer PL-530 Turntable: $120
• NFL Fever 2004 for Xbox: $9
• Ski goggles: $15
• Pair of sake cups: $8
• Mosquito net “that you can hang over your bed to make you feel like a princess”: $10

The Game That Must Not Be Written About

We knew it was coming. For years, we have happened across little items in other colleges’ alumni magazines about students playing Harry Potter-inspired Quidditch matches. Competitors in “Muggle Quidditch” move the ball down the field while holding broomsticks between their legs in a gravity-bound version of the aerial competitions at Hogwarts. In the absence of real magic, the winged and evasive Golden Snitch (above) is replaced by a tennis ball stuffed in a sock and carried in the shorts of a player known as the snitch runner. The Muggle [that is, non-magic] version started at Middlebury in 2005. Now, via the Student Digester, we learn there is a recently-formed team for students of The Claremont Colleges. They call themselves the Dirigible Plums, and they will compete against UCLA, Oxy and others at the Western Cup tournament in March.

 More about Harry Potter at Pomona:
Ritual and Magic in Children’s Literature: In Class with Professor Oona Eisenstadt
Pomona Student Union’s “Veritaserum: The Truth About Harry Potter” event

Top 5 albums played in the Coop Fountain

From rap to country-western, there always seems to be music playing from behind the counter at the Coop Fountain. So the Coop crew came up with a list of their most-played albums:

1) Graceland by Paul Simon

2) The Beatle’s White Album

3) The Essential Michael Jackson

4) Thriller by Michael Jackson

5) “anything by Johnny Cash”

Hen Hunter

It’s not part of her official job description, but P.E. Coordinator Lisa Beckett still puts plenty of gusto into her once-a-year hunt for the “weirdest-looking hen I can find at the cheapest possible price.” Scouring the clearance racks at places like Marshalls and Tuesday Morning, the former women’s tennis coach always comes up with perfectly kitschy cluckers—ceramic bobble chicken, anyone?—to serve as prizes for the competitions at the annual tennis event held during Alumni Weekend. Taking home the tacky treasures this year were Brenda Peirce Barnett ’92, Robb Muhm ’91 and Constance Wu ’14, who, we are sure, now have their poultry prizes on proud and prominent display.

Cereal Thrillers

Cold cereal is a hot topic for Sagehens who rely on General Mills for a fast fill-up before class. Some 664 students responded to an online cereal survey conducted in the spring by the ASPC Food Committee. These favorite cereals, along with three others, will be served in Frank and Frary dining halls this semester.

And if wolfing down a bowl of cereal is often an auto-pilot routine, some students are mixing things up and thinking outside of the cereal box. “Cereal mixing is truly an art,” says Ellen McCormack ’12. “One of my staple breakfasts [while studying abroad] in Ireland was generic Cheerios, plain yogurt, one glob each of peanut butter and Nutella and a ripe banana cut into slices with a knife … As a bonus, I grossed out my Irish flat mates.”

 

 

Pomona’s Top 5 favorite cereals:

  1. Honey Nut Cheerios
  2. Cinnamon Toast Crunch
  3. Special K Red Berries
  4. Frosted Flakes
  5. Golean Crunch

Catchy Classes

Each fall semester brings a new batch of critical inquiry courses, the intensive writing seminars that all first-year-students take.  As a side benefit, the titles and descriptions for these creatively-conceived classes always enliven the course catalog. Read these blurbs and you’ll wish you could enroll:

Fragrant Ecstasies: A Cultural History of the Sense of Smell. Mr. Rindisbacher. “The reek of a Kansas feed lot, the aroma of fresh-baked bread, the scent of jasmine on a breezy spring day… Smells connect to perfumery and luxury, to chemistry and neuroscience, to aromatherapy and advertisement, to stench and death—but always also to the erotic and sex. It is an interdisciplinary field par excellence …”

Can Zombies Do Math? Ms. Karaali. “We have all heard of the objective and universal nature of mathematics. Bertrand Russell talked about a beauty cold and austere. Are these perceptions of mathematics related? Accurate? “Can anyone but the warm-blooded humans that we are do math? Does a zombie have what it takes to comprehend and appreciate the aesthetics of mathematics? …”

Nanotechnology in Science and Fiction.  Mr. Tanenbaum. “Nanotechnology … is currently one of the most heavily funded and fastest growing areas of science. Depending upon what you read, nanotechnology may consume our world or enable unlimited new materials, destroy life as we know it or enable immortality, lead us to squalor or utopia, or simply make better electronic gadgets. … ”

Capitol Quest

Soaring dome, gleaming marble, statues galore—you’ve seen one state capitol building, you’ve seen them all, right? Oh, no, no, no, says Sociology Professor Jill Grigsby, who has made it her decade-long hobby to visit these symbols of democracy, “they are very different.”

Grigsby has set foot in 32 state capitols so far, most recently hitting Dover, Del., Harrisburg, Pa., Providence, R.I. and Salem, Ore. over summer break. She hopes to visit all 50. The quest began a decade ago when Grigsby and her husband, Computer Science Professor Everett Bull, were on sabbatical taking a cross-country drive. After their  first capitol stop in Salt Lake City, it was on to Helena, Mont., and then once you’ve done both of the Dakotas, you’re pretty well committed to the quest.

Bismarck, by the way, has one of the most unique state capitol buildings: a 19-story, art deco-ish tower—no dome—dubbed “the skyscraper on the prairie.” To the east, the attractive capitol buildings in Minnesota (pictured) and Wisconsin should be visited one after another, says Grigsby, who suspects the neighboring states were trying to outdo each other. “Madison’s is imposing and impressive,” says Grigsby, who blogs as Capitol Diva. “But St. Paul has this gorgeous, gorgeous sculpture on top of the dome.”

After so many capitol trips, Grigsby can offer a few tips. Tagging along on a tour with school kids is great fun because “fourth-graders have wonderful questions.” And while you’re soaking up history, do make a detour to the loo, as the lavish lavatories are usually “amazing.”