Coolest name for a college band: The Inland Emperors. The group formed last fall, and Wes Haas ’15 and Lee Owens-Oas ’15 came up with the moniker during their Physics with Music class. As Haas explains, they were talking about how they now live in the Inland Empire and wondering whether anyone’s ever thought whether “there’s an emperor of the place” and—voilà—the band, which includes three more Sagehens, had its name. What do they play? “Loud rock music,” says Haas. Gigs so far have mostly been on campus, but with a name like that, we’re sure their reign will someday reach all the way to Riverside.
Pomoniana
Rock ‘n’ Roll Rulers
Sweet deal: O.J. flows from alumnus’ old grove
The O.J. flowing in campus dining halls these days doesn’t come from frozen concentrate, nor was it born thousands of miles away in Florida.
Instead, three times a week for much of the school year, John Adams ’66 sends to campus a load of 1,500 lbs. of Valencia oranges grown in his century-old family grove, the last of its kind in the city of Rialto, 25 miles east of Claremont.
For the College, the deal offers a chance to serve local produce and provide healthier food—previous juice concoctions contained corn syrup and food coloring. For Adams, it provides a stream of income to plant new trees.
So Adams is leaving some of the Valencias—typically picked in summer—on the trees longer and longer, which only adds to their sugar content. Then, it’s into the dining-hall juicers.
While the oranges Adams provides from his grove aren’t the prettiest-looking, they sure are sweet. “They’re so much better than the large, perfect oranges in the stores,” says Adams, who this spring is also growing veggies for the College.
Gone country
Trees, Ph.D.s and … country? Claremont is a long way from Nashville, but this school year brings two country superstars to Bridges Auditorium, with new-fangled sensation Taylor Swift having performed in the fall and old-timer Willie Nelson here tonight. That inspired us to do some digging and discover that over the years, a surprising number of country crooners—from Larry Gatlin to Linda Ronstadt to Johnny Cash—have played Pomona. But the College’s greatest country-western moment so far brought two legends on the same day in 1973 when Kris Kristofferson ’58, accompanied by his good friend Cash, came to campus to receive an honorary doctor of fine arts degree.
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.