Blog Articles

Starts in the Arts

November 6, 2013 by Agustin Gurza Comments Off

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Veteran arts teacher Sal Perez ’75 roams around his high school ceramics studio like the benign boss of a buzzing Santa’s Workshop. He looks the part, with his stocky build, silvery hair pulled back in a ponytail, that cheerful round face and full-throated laugh. And Perez clearly loves guiding his artists in training, the students of Monrovia High School where for 23 years he has taught them to turn shapeless clay into objects of function and beauty.

Soon, a student calls him over to the electric wheel where she is struggling to give shape to her creation, which so far is a simple cylinder with straight sides.

“Let’s see,” says Perez, his strong hands permanently crusted with the white powdery coating of his trade. “What shape were you looking for?”

“I wanted it to go that way,” says the student, indicating a rounded vase with a small opening, “but it just kept going up.”

Perez dips his hands in water and leans over the clay, almost like an offensive guard at the scrimmage line, a position he played in his own high school days. He stands feet apart, leaning forward, his shoulders directly on top of the malleable material. As the wheel spins, he applies pressure and the clay suddenly turns wobbly and warped.

“He’ll fix it,” assures another student. “Calm down.”

By now, a group has gathered to watch Perez work. Their faces are a mixture of respect and astonishment. They smile and whisper to each other as their teacher turns the cylinder into a beautifully shaped vase with a rounded body and lipped opening, all within seconds.

Senior Tobi Scrugham can’t disguise her disbelief: “Wow, it took two periods to get as tall as it did, and he just takes one pass.”

Sal Perez is a rarity these days—a public school arts teacher with a flourishing classroom. In an era of severe funding cuts for the arts, Perez reigns over a roomy, well-equipped new studio on the high school campus in the San Gabriel Valley, halfway between Claremont and downtown L.A. With its rows of wheels, array of kilns and thriving enrollment, Monrovia High’s award-winning ceramics program would be the envy of any community college, and even some four-year institutions.

“For me, you can’t really have a good education unless you’re doing art,” he says. “Art is a way for students to be creative, and use the right side of the brain which also helps develop the left side.”

The son of Mexican-American field workers, Perez, 60, is an unlikely hero of arts education. Studies show that students from the socio-economic status of his youth are the least likely to be exposed to arts classes. As a child, his art instruction was grass roots. Perez’s father did sketches which he admired. And his cousin Ernie had a flair for painting cool flames on the sides of orange crates converted into go-karts. Perez didn’t discover his love of ceramics until he came to Pomona as the first in his family to go to college.

But his talent was evident from the start.

“Sal is by far the best student that I ever had, in terms of being a pure potter,” says Professor Emeritus Norm Hines ’61, his former arts teacher and mentor at Pomona. “Nobody came near him in terms of his ability as a ceramicist. To watch him on the wheel is like watching magic. But it’s not magic, it’s skill, acquired as a result of hard work and observation. And that’s what he transmits to his students. They don’t come out of his class thinking it’s magic. They come out thinking that they can do it, if they work hard and if they apply themselves. And I think that’s a really important thing to learn, especially for the kids he’s working with.”

AT MONROVIA HIGH, more than half the students are Latino, one of the groups hurt the most by cuts to arts classes. A 2011 report published by the National Endowment for the Arts showed that participation in childhood arts education has been on the decline since the early 1980s. Latinos have the lowest levels of arts training, 26 percent compared to 59 percent for their white peers, according to NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.

“When a school takes away art, it’s really doing an injustice to the students because they’re not getting a complete education,” says Perez, who built his program by hook and by crook through grants, donations and plenty of his own resources. “It’s actually hurting the students, but somehow that’s what they believe they should take away.”

When it comes to providing long-term educational benefits, the arts do not discriminate. Longitudinal surveys have found an overall correlation between arts instruction and academic success. Low-income students with high arts participation have much lower drop-out rates and are twice as likely to graduate from college, compared to those with less arts involvement, according to another NEA report, “The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth,” published last year.

Among the benefits, researchers note that “the arts reach students who might otherwise slip through the cracks.” That could well apply to 17-year-old senior Jonathan Bailey, who joined Monrovia High’s ceramics class last year. He was having family problems, with three separate moves to different homes. The imposing teenager was cutting class and getting into fights, his teacher recalled.

Ceramics turned out to be his therapy. The physical work shaping clay at the pottery wheel, a process known as throwing, relieved his stress. The creativity increased his confidence.

“Whenever I’m angry I seem to throw better because I take it out on the clay,” says Jonathan, who now wants to get his own wheel for his backyard. “I love hands-on work where I can build something and be proud. Ah, it’s the greatest feeling on the planet!”

Perez says he can relate to students because he’s seen his share of troubles too. Like trying to fit in at Pomona among more privileged white kids back in the early ’70s. Of the 35 Latinos accepted in his freshman class, he recalls, only 15 graduated. For Perez, the oldest of three brothers, the social pressure was heightened by being the family role model. He couldn’t fail because he had to set the example for those who would come after: “Hey, if Sal can do it, we can do it.”

“As a student at Pomona I was very alienated, because here I was living with people who were better economically off than I was, who had gone to private schools,” he recalls. “But I overcame that isolation through my work in ceramics. I would spend two or three days at a time in the studio, which was opened 24 hours a day. I had found a niche where I was comfortable. And as I got better in making the ceramic work, I found people started respecting that.”

SALVADOR RODRIGUEZ PÉREZ, as he is named on his college diplomas, was raised in one of the concrete homes built for Mexican workers by the San Dimas Packing House, a citrus farm company. There was no hiding the hostility of the time: As recounted in The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape, some believed the housing was too good for Mexicans. The farm’s manager argued it helped stabilize a workforce that arrived here “in a certain state of savagery or barbarism.” The goal of good housing was to encourage strong families, with the benefit of adding women and children to the labor pool. So it is not by chance that his mother, Clara, and father, Antonio, met at the packing house where they both worked.

As kids, Sal and his two younger brothers were always with their parents in the fields, which is where he learned the ethic of hard work. “I ate more oranges than I picked,” he jokes, “but we were never without any food. And I saw the sacrifices they made.”

Though his parents only had elementary schooling, they both stressed the importance of education. But being studious didn’t win him many friends in La Colonia, the barrio south of the tracks in San Dimas. “I was like the Latino nerd,” says Perez. “Everybody else was going to parties except me. My brothers would get invited, but they’d say, ‘Don’t invite Sal because he’s not one of us.’”

After graduating from Bonita High School, where he was co-captain of his football team, Perez attended Pomona, partly on scholarships, and ceramics quickly became his passion. His hours in the studio paid off, and before he turned 20, his ceramic work was already being featured in national exhibitions. He went on to get his MFA in 1977 from what was then The Claremont Graduate School. His goal was to teach at the college level, but when he failed to land a permanent appointment, he worked multiple jobs and saved money to open his own studio.

By the late ’70s, when rapid development devoured the old workers’ housing in La Colonia, Perez used his savings to buy his parents a new home in San Dimas, this time on the north side of the tracks. Tragically, his mother passed away just four months later and his father was left alone. So Perez, then 26, moved in with his father, and they lived together for the next three decades. When Perez got married, his wife Leticia also moved in, and they soon added a son, Seth, and daughter, Alana, to the extended family.

Perez was drafted into teaching, recruited in 1986 by middle school principal Linda Harding in Monrovia to teach ESL and bilingual classes. She offered an art class to sweeten the deal, and Perez accepted because he needed the money. His first year in the classroom was trial by fire, but four years later he was hired at the high school.

As his domestic responsibilities expanded, his dream of opening a studio faded. But he never stopped working, setting up a ceramics shop behind his house in a chicken coop with dirt floors, churning out pots for sale at festivals. Though it had been years since his student days, he still did his kiln work at Pomona, where Professor Hines kept the doors open for his former student, now his friend.

It’s a kindness Perez today passes on to his own graduates, who regularly return to Monrovia High, where he moved into a roomy new studio two years ago. That open-door policy is only one of the classroom practices he inherited from his former professor. Hines, for example, always kept a full supply of what he called “the people’s clay,” for anyone who wanted to use it. Perez emulates the communal approach, assuring his students they don’t have to pay for materials if they can’t afford it.

“You can’t be selfish if you’re a teacher,” he says. “You make personal sacrifices and your own work has to take a back seat. What I find satisfying is when my students get recognition for what they’re doing here. There’s a different type of satisfaction that you get from that. In a sense, you live on through their work.”

A New & Improved Millikan

November 6, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

A new Millikan Science Hall is on the way. When students leave for winter break in December, crews will begin tearing down the old building and replacing it with one that will include up-to-date classrooms and labs in a structure designed to meet some of the most stringent green building standards. With its domed planetarium, outdoor physics lab and two-story atrium entrance, the rebuilt Millikan will be one of the College’s most prominent buildings, an inviting space for the campus and the wider community.

Built in 1958 as part of the Seaver complex of science buildings, Millikan was remarkable for its time, more than doubling the space for physics and mathematics. But, in recent years, it has shown its age. Problems included a cracked foundation and antiquated classrooms and labs built for the ’50s—long before advanced optical and laser technologies and nanotechnology became major fields in physics teaching and research. The College weighed whether to renovate or rebuild, and found that, thanks largely to energy savings, the additional cost of rebuilding could be recouped in less than five years.

Alma Zook ’72, a professor of physics at the College since 1982, welcomes the redo, noting that features once considered modern have become outdated. “Now we need more flexible lab spaces, with shared equipment and more interaction,” says Zook. “We also have experiments that require a fair amount of square footage.” Designed by San Francisco architectural firm EHDD with input from faculty, students and staff, the Millikan reconstruction and concurrent renovation of the connected Andrew Science Hall will take about two years at a cost of roughly $63 million. During construction, the math and the physics and astronomy departments will be housed next door in Seeley G. Mudd Hall.

The new three-story, 75,000-square-foot building will make use of chilled metal beam technology, which uses water for more efficient heating and cooling; disconnected outside and inside walls to create a thermal barrier; and other green features such as LED lighting and native landscaping. One piece that will be saved from the old building is the iconic atom sculpture by Albert Stewart, which will find a new home on the second-story window of the new building.

WHAT’S NEW?

Major features of the new Millikan will include:

• A digital planetarium, its dome visible from the corner of College Avenue and Sixth Street, will provide a 360-degree view of the night sky, including simulations of planetary surfaces and visualizations of thousands of years of astronomical events. The 3-D system also can be used, for example, to allow a biology class to view molecules from all sides or history students to “walk” through an ancient city.

• An outdoor classroom and physics teaching lab, where students become part of the experiments, will include a raceway with moving carts, pendulum-style swings, in-ground rotating platforms and a solar sculpture/sundial designed by Bryan Penprase, the Brackett Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and Sheila Pinkel, emerita professor of art.

• New physics labs will better accommodate individual research by students and faculty, including projects that couldn’t have been imagined 50 years ago, such as new techniques to measure temperature through photography; high-speed cameras (up to 100,000 frames a second); and the ability to grow nanotubes.

• An observing room for remote operation of Pomona’s 1-meter telescope at NASA’s JPL Table Mountain facility and a new space for the field emission scanning electron microscope will improve access to these important resources.

• A colloquium on the first floor, with a seating capacity of 80 to 100, will be used for invited speakers, conferences and lectures.

IN THE BLOG

Learn more about the artwork that adorns the outside of Millikan — and its fate — in our Pomoniana blog.

Millikan Hall, decades ago.

Aaron Becker ’96 enchants kids and critics with his richly-illustrated Journey

October 30, 2013 by Rachel Stewart Johnson '96 Comments Off

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As a boy growing up in Baltimore, Aaron Becker ’96 knew a trick: when he drew pictures, he became all-powerful. “Drawing was a way of making sense of what life was about,” Becker says, “On a piece of paper I could make all the rules that I wanted to.”

This year, with the release of his debut children’s book, Journey, Becker has created a world that invites its audience to follow the spirit of that child of years ago. Journey features a girl who uses a magical pen to slip from her distracted family to a rich world of her own timbre. With not a single word of text, Journey unfolds over 40 pages of captivating illustrations, detailed but not busy.

The book has won widespread positive notice. Amazon included it among its “Best Books” for young readers in summer 2013 while the New York Times called it a “masterwork.” School Library Journal placed the book on its list of contenders for the Caldecott Medal, the most notable award for picture books.

Comparisons to the 1955 classic Harold and the Purple Crayon have been numerous. People Magazine, for example, called Becker’s work “a descendant” of the earlier book. But Becker says that it was not until he completed Journey that he sat down with a copy of its predecessor—and was startled by the similarities. After mentioning a few of the plot parallels, he jokes, “Obviously I read the book when I was 3 and it entered my subconscious.” Becker feels he owes a greater debt to someone like Bill Watterson, creator of the popular comic Calvin and Hobbes, both for the quality of Watterson’s art and for his ability to authentically evoke childhood.

Becker eyed the possibility of writing a children’s book for years, but his path toward the goal was indirect. “I never had an art class,” he says of his K-12 education. He did briefly try one out in sixth grade, but found the approach was rote. Having drifted away in his teens from his artistic interests, Becker arrived at Pomona with a plan to study the Japanese language and Pacific Rim politics. When that desire dimmed, he considered designing his own major before settling on media studies, a newly offered concentration. His
coursework led him to renew his interest in the visual arts.

After Pomona, Becker settled in the San Francisco Bay Area with a job in web design. Still, he felt unready to sink into a desk job for the long haul. He left his position to travel and work with kids as a camp counselor. Next he decided on a further leap of faith: he would invest in classes at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., a move that paid off when it led to a job as a concept designer in the film industry. His work on such films as The Polar Express and Cars offered him artistic challenges and the opportunity to design for a children’s audience.

The moniker “kid at heart” is an apt one for Becker, who describes himself as a happy-go-lucky child who became a young man determined not to take life too seriously. Friend Aaron Rhodes PI ’97 says, “Aaron’s always had a playful side, and a very creative, active imagination. He’s never lost the ability to connect with his inner child.”

Becker has never been one to let life grow too routine. He and wife Darci Palmquist ’96 moved from California to the town of Amherst, Mass., in their mid-30s with plans to buy a house and start a family while telecommuting to their jobs back on the West Coast. When his company folded, Becker found himself the father of an infant daughter, living where he wanted to be—but with no job. That’s when he turned to children’s literature. It was a natural fit.

“Children are not jaded,” he says. “I’m not a jaded person. I don’t like cynicism.” He goes on: “I get that part of being a human being, when you’re young. The world can be scary, and it can be adventurous, but it’s something to be explored and something to find some wonder inside of. I think that wonder and enchantment are very much things that belong to the realm of childhood and children’s books. It’s its own emotion—wonder.”

In an online posting, he recounts how reading to his daughter reminded him of the comfort he gained as a boy from the pages of a book. It was not so much the story, but the color of the pages, the characteristic hue in the pictures. “Certainly, the experience of a good children’s book is far more interesting for kids than for adults who quickly assign meaning, judgment and structure,” he writes. “As kids, it can all just float and mingle.”

Becker is pleased with his publisher’s decision not to pursue an electronic version of the book. “Even on a big computer screen you don’t really see everything that’s going on,” he says. “The book is meant to be held. The other thing a physical book does is it brings the child toward the book as opposed to the book coming toward the child.”

Becker is far from a technophobe, however. He makes frequent use of software to create digital images of three-dimensional scenes that can be rotated and manipulated like a physical model before being brought to life by hand with watercolor and ink.

Journey, which landed on the New York Times bestseller list for picture books, is the first installment in a three-part collection. The second book, an extension of the dreamscape developed in the first, is completed and due out next year. Another project in the works features new characters set amid a “pirates and knights” tableau. Determined to make this stick—“failure is not an option,” he says, in a rare gritty departure from his usual buoyant manner—Becker is also learning the ropes of marketing and promotion. He secured a spot as the “Artist of the Month” at the Amherst gallery Hope and Feathers this fall. Becker is “elated” at the warm welcome his work has received. It’s been a journey in itself, one that began with a boy and pages of drawings, and a drive to map his own route. “I think that’s the lure for learning how to draw better,” he says. “I don’t want to learn how to draw a house, I want to draw the house I want to live in.”

Sagehen surprise in Lethem’s new book; Pynchon’s latest tome mentions Pomona, too

September 4, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

dissident1 Though it is set in Queens, Pomona College Professor Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, Dissident Gardens, contains a fun little nod to his SoCal college home. Deep in the novel about “three generations of All-American radicals,” as Lethem is unspooling a bit of background about purist music teacher Harris Murphy, we learn that Murphy was part of the short-lived duo which contributed one song to the anthology LP Live at the Sagehen Cafe.

For those who are decades away from campus life, the Sagehen Cafe is the sitdown eatery in the Smith Campus Center, adjacent to the Coop Fountain.

Lethem says it is the only Pomona allusion he dropped into the book (available Sept. 10), but he did pass along the news that Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Bleeding Edge (available Sept. 17), also set in New York, contains a brief reference to Pomona College in its first few pages.

Perhaps it is no surprise that Pomona was recently named to Flavorwire’s list of the most literary colleges …

More from the magazine about Jonathan Lethem, Pomona’s Roy Edward Disney ’51 Professor in Creative Writing.

Sociology, theatre and the law

November 14, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

By now, Jeanne Buckley’s sociology degree should be well worn from good use. Since graduating in 1965, she has applied her Pomona parchment to a fascinating range of work, and now the former Superior Court commissioner, mediator, social worker, mother of three and long-ago TV actress has a new role leading Pomona’s governing board.

A trustee since 1999, Buckley could have reasonably expected to be winding down, pulling back a bit, as she completes the final few years of her term. Instead, the Santa Rosa, Calif., resident agreed to step up to the role of board chair.

As an undergrad, Buckley had a full plate at Pomona, too, participating in student government, choir and glee club, and helping to put on a jazz festival. Amid all the activities came the turmoil and change of the Civil Rights Era. For much of the time, she was the only Black woman attending Pomona, but she had been in the same situation in high school in Pelham, N.Y. “It was not a shock in a cultural sense,” she says. “I could navigate it.”

Post-Pomona, she found her way into social work, following her mother’s example, and was involved in the early days of Head Start. She also trained as an actress, landing a seven-episode stint on the popular primetime soap opera Peyton Place. Buckley even tried out a Broadway singing career—she had sung in church choir since childhood—that didn’t pan out.

Eventually, a decade after graduating from Pomona, she was on to law school, and the field would become her central career calling. In time, she earned a spot on the bench as a juvenile court commissioner, handling both delinquency and dependency cases—in other words, kids in trouble and parents in trouble.

In both realms, she applied her social-worker experience, nudging government agencies to en- gage struggling parents before they wound up in court and working to convince all players in the system that, “we are trying to make change in kids’ lives, rather than just state, ‘You did X; this is the consequence; go on to the next case.’”

She also handled tough family law cases that had gone to mandatory settlement conferences. “Maybe, again, because of my sociology background, I enjoyed these kinds of cases,” says Buckley, who was named Juvenile Court Judge of the Year by a statewide group of judicial peers in 1995. “They’re emotional, high anxiety cases, but I really enjoyed the assignment and I stayed in it. Most folks stay in the juvenile court maybe 2 years, 3 years. …I did it for 15—that was a long time.”

Buckley points out that the juvenile court role combined three of her key interests: law, social work, even a bit of theatre, “and that may be the reason that I enjoyed it so much.” Buckley still gets asked about the Peyton Place part, and she is quick to note: “It was a long time ago.” She adds, though, that theatre training had some application to the courtroom. “I even wore a costume,” she says, laughing about the robes. “You’re kind of up on a stage.”

In 1999, she retired from the court and, around the same time, she joined Pomona’s board. Over the years, she has served in meaty assignments such as the board’s student affairs and academic affairs committees, and also sat on a task force on diversity, and, more recently, the ad hoc committee looking into the board’s response to the worker documentation issue last year.

She still sings, too. Even amid a long career related to social work, she kept up the vocal work. Buckley performs with a small Northern California chamber group, and musical talent runs through the family: her husband Edmund Buckley ’66, a retired college administrator, plays the drums and vibraphone; son Paul ’92, writes music for television; and one of his brothers plays saxophone; the other, guitar. “When they are all home, there’s lots of music,” says Buckley.

A Carefully Calculated Caper

November 14, 2012 by Staff Comments Off

John Irvine ’76 hoists the finished Zappa frieze from atop Bridges Auditorium in 1975.

Set in Styrofoam, not stone, Frank Zappa’s name and likeness appeared, seemingly overnight, high upon the face of Bridges Auditorium back in the carefree spring of 1975.

Snugly hung between Wagner and Beethoven, the phony frieze only remained in place for a few days. But the identities of the students who pulled off this high-profile prank—and the tale of how they did it—have stayed under wraps to all but a few Sagehens for nearly four decades. Now the original pranksters finally have come forward with the story of a caper that required a precarious climb, careful calculations and a touch of artistic flair.

Strange as this may seem, it was a Commencement speech given in May by the then-U.S. ambassador to Pakistan that finally shook loose their secret.

Speaking on Marston Quad with Big Bridges looming in the background, Cameron Munter, a veteran diplomat who served in Serbia and Iraq before the Pakistan post, recalled the last time he spoke here, some 40 years ago, as valedictorian of Claremont High School. That led into an anecdote about the epic prank that briefly placed Zappa amongst the iconic composers honored on the front of the auditorium. Munter’s memory, though, was a bit misty—the ambassador just may have had weightier matters on his mind—and he dated the Zappa caper to 1972, crediting high school students “who shall remain nameless” for carrying it out.

Next, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin columnist David Allen dug deeper into the matter, pegging the date to three years later and straightening out a few other details. Still, the notion that the stunt was pulled off by local high-schoolers remained the operative story until a digital dossier laden with black and white photos and a complete account of the caper reached PCM via back channels. The material was pulled together by John Irvine and Greg Johnson, both math majors from Pomona’s class of 1976. After learning of Munter’s speech, the pair decided it was time to spill the beans.

They did it.

Irvine works on the Zappa frieze.

Irvine and Johnson weren’t huge Zappa fans at the time, even though the rocker lived in Claremont for part of his youth. The prank came to mind when Irvine and Johnson learned Zappa was coming to play Bridges in April of 1975. “We were looking up at the front of Big Bridges and said, ‘Well, gosh, he should have his name up there,’” recalls Irvine, who went on to get his Ph.D. and now works at a research laboratory in Cambridge, Mass.

This casual thought launched an intensive, two-week effort. The first big obstacle: How would they scale the imposing auditorium? It was Johnson, another future Ph.D., who figured out that they could get onto the roof of the adjacent old Renwick Gym (long since gone) to extend a ladder across a four-foot gap that separated the two structures, and climb onto the roof of Bridges. “Being young college students, we were stupid enough to do that,” says Irvine of the dangerous move. “I would never do that today.”

Once on the roof of Bridges, they lay down, reached down and measured the dimensions of the frieze, which, they note, was a surprisingly sizeable 15 feet by 5 feet.

Next: Security breach! While they were still atop Bridges, some friends passing by spotted them and asked the guys what they were doing. Irvine and Johnson waved them off, and lucky for them, their rooftop hijinx didn’t draw campus authorities.

The pair had decided it was Chopin whom they would cover up amongst the five composers commemorated on the face of Bridges. “I’m not big on the Romantics,” explains Irvine. “I would never cover up Beethoven or Bach.”

Onward to the design phase: phony frieze would have to be lightweight enough to hoist onto the roof, but sturdy enough to stay in place. Johnson settled on Styrofoam set on an aluminum frame. Irvine, meanwhile got to work on the two end pieces of the frieze, a papier mache bust of Zappa for one end and a marijuana leaf for the other. (The pair has gotten some blowback for the pot image, since Zappa was opposed to drugs. Their response boils down to: “Hey, we know, but it was the ’70s.”) The end pieces were small enough to work on in a dorm room, but to assemble the entire frieze, they set out for the Wash, where they had room to lay everything out.

After a late night that crept into early morning, they were just about done. Then it started to rain on their newly painted masterpiece. They rushed their work of art into the Mudd-Blaisdell trash room. More bad luck: trash pickup arrived that next morning, and Irvine was rousted by an early morning call to retrieve his “art project” which was blocking access to the garbage.

Greg Johnson ’76 makes the dangerous climb from the gym to the roof of Big Bridges.

The guys covered up the frieze and stashed it behind Big Bridges in preparation for the final stage. With the risk of getting caught by Campus Security patrols, the rooftop operation would require some assistance from their friends in the “Statpack,” a group of math and statistics students studying under Professor Donald Bentley. As Johnson and Irvine write in a summary of their caper provided in the dossier given to PCM:

“So, using the expertise in statistical analysis that they were developing under the tutelage of Professor Don Bentley, they modeled the frequency and regularity of the passage of Campus Security in the early hours of the morning. At between 2 and 3 in the morning, the frieze was surreptitiously installed on the front of the building.”

As Johnson recalls it, the Styrofoam had enough give to easily wedge into the notched, recessed space for Chopin’s frieze. They secured the replacement with heavy fishing line tied to various rooftop fixtures just in case it fell—even with the lightweight materials, the frieze’s sheer size meant it weighed 60 to 70 lbs.

Frank Zappa was now shoulder to shoulder with Beethoven and Bach on the campus’s most imposing edifice. Chopin had been shown up, and the two math majors had succeeded in pulling off a highly-visible prank.

The pair climbed down from Bridges, and kept their involvement on the lowdown. They couldn’t resist, however, showing off the stunt to their mentor, Professor Bentley. They got him to take a walk with them, making sure he noticed their handiwork, without explicitly claiming credit. Bentley, to the best of their knowledge, was the only campus official who knew they did it. While the professor didn’t know about the plan in advance, Johnson says Bentley indirectly played a key role in the caper by creating “the camaraderie, the closeness and the culture out of which this whole endeavor arose.”

Campus officials were quick to remove the faux frieze, and the pair never saw their creation again. That helps explain the alternative story from the Commencement speech. Former Ambassador Munter (since hired to teach in Pomona’s International Relations Program) told PCM that he had visited some Claremont High classmates back at the time of the prank, and in the garage of their home was the Zappa frieze. He asked them about it, and they then took the credit for the caper. Irvine and Johnson, meanwhile, largely kept mum over the years, hoping to maintain a mystique around the prank.

And even though the Zappa frieze only stayed up for a few days back in 1975, the Statpack relationships were built to last. “We are friends to this day,” says Johnson.

Postscript: The math guys’ mission did suffer from one miscalculation. Irvine and Johnson didn’t manage to get the phony frieze up until a week after the Zappa concert that had inspired the prank in the first place. “We kind of got an incomplete,” says Johnson. “We weren’t quite ready in time.”

Letters to the editor

November 14, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Immigration & Consequences

I was astonished at how the open-borders advocate in the Summer 2012 magazine could be so utterly clueless as to the consequences of his position. I have never understood how many of the same “progressives” who love to prattle on about “sustainability” advocate at the same time for increased immigration. Are they so detached from reality that they do not understand that the two positions are irreconcilable? The mass immigration policies of the past were at a time when there was a continent to populate, railroads to be built, labor-intensive factories to staff. Mission accomplished. Country full.

We are already the third most populous country on Earth, exceeded only by those environmental showplaces, China and India. And, the environmental footprint of the average American is much greater than that of the average Asian. Let’s for a moment dream the “open borders” nightmare and assume that in 50 years our population has doubled to 600 million. Where are we going to put them without devastating most of the last “breathing-room” open spaces of the West?

How much arable flat land will be left to grow their food? Where will they find work in a time of increasing automation? And where are they going to get the water? The southwestern U.S. (case in point: Las Vegas) is already in a scramble for every drop of water they can get their hands on to sustain the current and projected population, and the Colorado River famously no longer runs to the sea.

The inevitable result of “open borders” will be environmental and social chaos and a drastic lowering of descendants’ standard of living. (No doubt immigration would taper off when living conditions in this country are as lousy as they
are for the average Asian.)

Immigration policy, like all other national policies, exists to benefit our own citizens, not everyone else. An environmentally trashed, overcrowded, Third World America is clearly not in the best interests of our current and future citizens. “Open borders” advocates must be stopped. Cold.

—Robert C. Michael ’66

Immigration is not only an issue in the U.S. In Europe, post-war labor shortages led to large- scale immigration from African and Middle Eastern countries, a phenomenon that has completely altered the racial and religious makeup of the host societies. Integrating these new people into European societies has proved to be the major social problem of the last half century. The problem is compounded by the fact that these immigrants are today not aliens. Many are second- or third-generation people who are citizens of the countries in which they reside, yet remain outsiders socially, economically and, in some cases, even linguistically.

Also, immigration is not only inward to the U.S. There is also emigration, as people become expatriates for jobs or personal reasons, and later become citizens where they reside. I know, since this was my path. I took my first job at a law firm in Brussels. The job was interesting, but Brussels was just a place where the train stopped on the way from Paris to Amsterdam. Over 40 years later, I’m still here, now a Belgian citizen, though also living part-time in Italy. For Pomona students of my generation, programs like semester abroad (then administered by the Experiment in Interna- tional Living) or the Peace Corps showed us that life could be interesting and rewarding in a lot of places.

—Fred Lukoff ’64

Serving Up Nostalgia

I simply could not resist penning this response to what Connie Fabula ’48 wrote in your spring 2012 issue regarding the Pomona College Wedgwood china. It was difficult to determine whether she was disparaging the china, simply stating a fact or aligning herself with other alumni who hold onto College memorabilia. Whichever the case, I only wish that I had shown the perspicuity to collect more of the set pieces. We didn’t begin to acquire individual items until relatively recently. We lost out entirely on special-purpose pieces such as the salad and dessert plates and the cups and saucers as they have gone out of stock.

However, we now own 10 of the dinner plates, including duplicates of some of the original eight designs, and one small ashtray which portrays the sophomore arch. The plates are strikingly done in that calming Staffordshire blue on white, depicting cam- pus scenes. The interesting border design

of a mixture of camellia flowers, oak leaves and eucalyptus flowers and leaves set off the center scenes handsomely.

The plates are large enough and beautiful enough to be useful for both formal and informal occasions. I remember many years ago, after phoning alumni from Seaver House, we volunteers were treated to a sit- down dinner using the College’s cache of Wedgwood china. It was a time and place which I have never forgotten.

At home, our dinner guests invariably comment on the Wedgwood. When there are just the two of us, the plates are poignant reminders of the campus as I knew it more than 60 years ago.

–Larry West ’49

Doing the Reunion Math

I had a wonderful reunion time at Pomona this past spring although it was not a reunion year for me. It was for a daughter, Caroline Johnson Hodge ’87, a son, Steve Johnson ’82 and a son- in-law, Ed Cerny ’92. I was there for the three grandchildren. (In the Alumni Weekend photo spread in the summer issue, they’re the two girls and the boy on the left helping to carry the 1992 banner.) We had a great time while their parents, Ed and our daughter Julia ’91, attended reunion events. As we walked the campus I could over- hear the two younger Cernys, a first grader and second grader, discussing who among the relatives would be at their own future five-year Pomona reunions. (Quinn thought he might be Class of 2026 and Sarah ’27.) Would it be grandmom ’54, aunts Polly ’56, Caroline ’87, Amy ’84, Marilou ’85 or uncles Tom ’84, Steve ’82, Paul ’85, Peter ’81, or mom or dad? Each will have several from among the DuBose, John- son, Pitsker, Hodge and Cerny alums to share their future reunion years.

—Frances DuBose Johnson ’54

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.

Pomona in 47 Charts

November 14, 2012 by Elisabeth Fosslien '09 Comments Off

A mathematical economics major at Pomona and ad-agency analytics whiz in the real world, Elisabeth Fosslien ’09 spends her free time cooking up tart little pie charts on topics ranging from Chicago crime to getting a job to “14 ways an economist says I love you,” which drew praise from The Economist magazine, one of many nods she has earned for her minimalist musings. To no surprise, it was her online ode to her alma mater, “Pomona in 47 Charts,” that caught our eye. The facts, figures and feelings behind them are her own, derived from her perceptions of Pomona, but even if your data set is different, we think you’ll still find some laughs in her graphs.

D.B. and That Number

November 14, 2012 by Mark Kendall Comments Off

Don Bentley doesn’t want to talk about 47, the enduring numerical fixation the legendary math professor long ago placed in Pomona’s collective consciousness. It all started with a paradoxical proof Bentley put up on the chalk- board back in 1964, showing that all numbers are equal, which then morphed into all numbers equal 47—and spawned our endless, obsessive search for the magic number. But remember, Bentley doesn’t want to talk about that.

For my part, I don’t want to talk about math or statistics. So we’ve agreed to talk about people, and Bentley shows up for the interview with a banker’s box laden with old photo albums full of fresh-faced college kids burdened with ’70s sideburns. It was two of those kids in the box, Greg Johnson and John Irvine, both from the class of ’76, who piqued my curiosity about the noted statistician. In talking to them for another story, I noticed that after all these years, their beloved professor still seemed to hold a mystical, Sontag-like sway over them. So I set up an interview.

Bentley, who taught here from 1964 to 2001, turned out to be hard to pigeonhole. He started off at Stanford with plans to study religion but found firmer ground in math. In conversation, he references a slew of noted statisticians, but there also are plentiful mentions of beer and pizza. He waxes statistical at academic seminars and plays folk music on the guitar. He has fought his share of battles, calling himself a “thorn in the side” of the administration at times, and yet he also is an ordained minister.

The professor taught some of the Math Department’s toughest classes—such as linear algebra with differential equations—that weeded out some students and built confidence in those that passed. As he puts it, “The kids, if they could survive the curriculum, got out feeling wonderful about themselves.”

But Bentley hardly cut the figure of the hard-nosed mettle-tester. The emeritus professor recalls that he felt closer to the students than to his fellow faculty members. “It just is natural for me … because I’m immature maybe and I relate better to kids than I do to adults.”
He remembers how students came in and out of his family home at will, whipping up meals in the kitchen, washing their cars in the driveway. Once, he recalls, his bedroom door swung open at 5:30 a.m. as a crowd of students broke into singing “Happy Birthday.” “They had come in, they had decorated the living room, they had cooked breakfast and the dog didn’t even bark because they were just part of the family.”

That all-in-the-family attitude did create a dilemma for Bentley early on in his career. Bentley couldn’t figure out just what the students should call him. Mr. Bentley, Dr. Bentley, Professor Bentley—they all felt too stiff for a guy who considered his students to be his best friends on campus. Having them call him Don, on the other hand, didn’t feel quite right either. Somewhere along the way, “D.B.” caught on.

Me and D.B., we cover a lot of ground, a lot of memories and accomplishments. He points to his “close fellowship” with former students—and their accomplishments in fields as varied as teaching, law, medicine—as most significant to him as he looks back. “I really want to thank them for what they’ve done for me,” he says.

And then, well past an hour into our talk, Bentley lets loose a surprise. It turns out he’s not entirely done with 47. He’s says there’s more to the lore behind it, more details to clarify and lay out someday. He’d like to do a paper, with input from alumni who were there for the mathematic myth’s long-ago birth. But that’s sometime down the road, and, remember, we’re not going to talk about that now.

The Man with a Plan

November 14, 2012 by Paul Sterman '84 Comments Off

flat bronze plate. It reads: “Allen F. Hawley, 1893-1978.”

In 1949, when Allen Hawley, Class of 1916, was a fundraising administrator at Pomona College, he answered a local group’s request for biographical information on himself. In a letter, Hawley highlighted the pertinent details of his youth and his career.

“It’s not much of a life story,” he summarized, “but it’s a thrilling life to me.”

Not much of a life story? Consider: The man grew up on a turn-of-the-century California ranch, was expelled at least once from high school, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Pomona, then attended the Harvard Graduate School of Business until dropping out to volunteer as an ambulance driver in France serving the wounded during World War I. After the war he worked in Hollywood as an assistant director at the Fox movie studio.

And we haven’t even covered the best part. Hawley returned to his alma mater in 1938, and his contributions over the next 24 years played a key role in the College’s rise. Launching what would later come to be known as the Pomona Plan, Hawley pioneered a game-changing vehicle in the world of educational fundraising. At the heart of what he hatched was this: a new kind of charitable-giving program in which the College, in essence, manages a donor’s money in return for a financial gift released to Pomona after the donor dies; the contributor earns a tax break and regular payments for the rest of his or her life.

So years later, when it came time to put Pomona’s new fundraising plan out into the world, Hawley knew from experience the best way to spread the message—especially to those outside the Pomona family. (He had been instructed by the College not to solicit alumni or parents for such financial gifts for fear of simply diverting away more traditional annual donations.)

How Hawley marketed the fundraising plan is another unique part of his legacy. He turned to newspaper advertising—something viewed at the time as almost sacrilegious in academia.

Consider Hawley’s life story in this context: When he toiled in Tinseltown, working on Western serials, he helped craft fictional vehicles—but the Pomona College story is a real one, and Hawley is a central figure in its telling.

Scholarly and Stylish

Those who knew Allen Hawley described him as a quiet and modest man. He had a distinguished manner and enjoyed col- lecting first-edition books. He also liked to look good. The fundraising whiz wore a natty suit and tie to work, and donned a hat—indeed, a Borsalino, the stylish Italian brand.

However, Hawley, who died in 1978 at the age of 85, didn’t fit a predictable profile. The dignified, scholarly man had a weakness for tobacco and a salty sense of humor. He was shy and intensely private (almost nothing is known of his personal relationships beyond the fact that he married a woman in 1922 and the union apparently ended in divorce), yet he thrived on cold calls to potential donors and reached out so attentively to members of the Pomona community that a good friend referred to him as the “Mother Hen” to students and alumni.

“As with many unusual men, different people could see different sides to him,” the late Pomona Philosophy Professor Fred Sontag once said of Hawley, whose last 10 years at Pomona (1952 to 1962) coincided with Sontag’s first 10.

A Pioneer’s Roots

The Pomona Plan pioneer grew up on a ranch in rural El Cajon near San Diego. He graduated from San Diego High School, but “not without an expulsion or two,” as he later recalled (though he never gave a reason for such disciplinary actions). After high school came an education of another kind: Hawley’s father required him to work on the family ranch, performing grueling tasks at the discretion of the ranch foreman. The experience provided great motivation, Hawley wrote nearly 40 years later:

“After a year of this fate I decided anything would be better than ranching, and certainly the offer of going away to college was inviting.”

So the young man enrolled at Pomona. (“Fortunately, the entrance requirements were not very high in those days.”) Though shy, Hawley was a leader, elected as Pomona’s student body president his senior year. After his war service and three-year stint in Hollywood, he went into the newspaper business, joining the advertising staff of William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner. The career move would prove critical to his later success at Pomona.

The Ad Man Flourishes

Hawley’s life story was chronicled by William B. Dunseth, who came to Pomona in 1959 to work for the fundraising maven. When Hawley retired in 1962, Dunseth became director of the Annuity and Life Income Program. For his 1994 book on his former boss, Dunseth interviewed many people who knew and worked with Hawley, including a former colleague at the Los Angeles Examiner. The man said Hawley had a real talent for the newspaper ad work, describing him as “a dynamic salesman” who wrote clever ads and had a knack for selling advertising space and nabbing new clients.

“I couldn’t resist using some of the [same] principles of advertising here as I did in the newspaper world,” Hawley said, according to Dunseth’s book.

It wouldn’t be easy, though. The idea of higher learning institutions advertising for financial contributions was viewed as unseemly. Thus, Hawley’s marketing method raised the hackles of the academic community, especially East Coast universities. (Dunseth wrote that a former fundraiser for just such a school told him, “It is uncouth for this little college out West to advertise for money.”)

Even Pomona’s “academicians resisted heartily” when Hawley initiated the newspaper concept, he recalled. Yet when the strategy proved lucrative, those objections suddenly didn’t seem so important.

“They melted when we started getting results,” Hawley said.

The Pomona Plan Emerges

Hawley came to Pomona in 1938 as the school’s new public relations director. In the mid-’40s, uncertain about student enrollment in the war’s aftermath, Pomona intensified fundraising efforts to cover potential deficits in the next few years. Hawley became its go-to guy.

For years, friends and neighbors had been asking Hawley investment questions. “Allen was well known in the little town of Claremont not only as a man of great financial acumen but of great financial integrity,” says Kent Warner ’66, former director of Pomona’s Annuity and Trust Office (now called Trusts and Estates). Warner worked for many years with Howard C. Metzler, who preceded Warner as director of Annuities and Trusts. Warner says Metzler passed on many affectionate stories about Hawley, including one recounting a time Hawley was walking down the streets of Claremont and two widows approached him. Turns out they wanted him to manage the inheritances their late husbands had left them.

With the new fundraising plan Hawley conceived in the mid-’40s, the College would in effect provide free money management for individuals in exchange for their philanthropic contribution. The beneficiaries received income for the rest of their lives, and then upon their deaths the financial gift was re- leased to the College. This kind of agreement provides donors with sizable tax deductions while allowing them to feel good about contributing money toward the future of young people.

These elements represented the core concept of the much-imitated Pomona Plan. (Dunseth points out that Hawley actually developed the program with three other men who worked at or with Pomona, including prominent Los Angeles attorney William B. Himrod, Class of 1908; however, Hawley was the day-to-day driving force behind the plan’s emergence.) In 1946, the College received approval of its financing concept from the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS ruled the plan was acceptable—and Hawley was off and running, free now to start offering the “Life Income Plan” to prospective donors.

Frank Minton, a national expert on charitable giving, says Pomona was the first college to develop this kind of plan, where the school acts as a trustee and the donor gains tax benefits and life income.

“They were the first out the door,” says Minton, who established the planned-giving program at the University of Washington and co-authored what is widely regarded as the bible in his field, Charitable Gift Annuities: The Complete Resource Manual.

Advertising in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, Hawley played up the tax benefits, knowing that would be a key appeal to the Journal’s financially-savvy readers. Drawing these people into the plan expanded the College’s donor base. As the Chronicle of Philanthropy put it in 1989: “Throughout its life, the so-called Pomona Plan has followed a highly unusual marketing strategy: trying, through newspaper advertisements, to turn wealthy strangers into friends of the college. The logic has been that Pomona can offer older people the chance to support a good cause and to get paid for doing so.”

The promotional campaign, as Professor Sontag noted, “reached people this little college in the orange belt of the California desert would otherwise never have touched.”

(By the early ’50s, Pomona was hearing from colleges requesting brochures and tips, and a 1953 Time Magazine article on the topic mentioned the College.)

Hawley felt very strongly about the writing of the ads. He wouldn’t let anyone else pen them and was meticulous about all manner of details, including grammar and punctuation, according to Dunseth’s book. His exacting standards could make him an intimidating colleague, added the author—apparently drawing on firsthand experience.

“A visit to his office to explain an action of which he didn’t approve or to be handed a letter for re-writing was not to be anticipated with enthusiasm. He was exceptionally polite and seldom displayed anger, but his ‘righteous coolness’ on those occasions didn’t make the experience a happy one.”

Pomona’s Prosperity

Ultimately, Hawley’s efforts led to many millions of dollars coming Pomona’s way over the years, money that helped erect campus buildings and pay for world-class teachers, among other benefits to the College.

The Pomona Plan became a model for deferred-giving programs, which are now the norm at most institutions of higher education. Not only colleges benefitted: Many different charitable organizations use a form of what Hawley started.

“In the 1980s, many other charities adopted Allen Hawley’s outline, and now every charity you hear advertising or soliciting is benefitting from his inspiration,” says Robin Trozpek, the current director of the Pomona Plan.

Adds Minton: “Pomona had a lot of influence beyond its campus.”

Just how much has the Pomona Plan meant to Pomona? Financial figures tell part of the story. Since the fundraising plan was kicked off in the ’40s, Pomona has amassed a whopping $216 million in life-income agreements, and more than $172 million of those deferred funds have been released to the College, according to statistics from the Trusts and Estates Office. There’s another factor in the equation as well: the amount Pomona currently manages on behalf of beneficiaries.It’s about $140 million, which is significantly higher than the sum of $216 million minus $172 million; the number reflects how the assets on hand have appreciated.

Of course, the Pomona Plan has grown more sophisticated and elaborate since Hawley’s time. A Forbes magazine article this summer touted Pomona’s offerings: “Its payouts are so generous that half of the annuities it sells are to non-alumni.” The plan now has a number of different variations, and Howard Metzler, longtime director who died in 2012, is credited with playing a big role in its progress.

Still, Hawley’s lessons and methods carried on with his successors. At the top of the list: “The personal visit was the heart and soul of Hawley’s marketing program,” according to Kent Warner.

Hawley, who was Pomona’s vice president of development his last eight years working at the school, knew the best way to reach a potential donor was through conversation, in person. One reason is that it played to his strong suit—Hawley was a very persuasive salesman, say those who knew him. But selling Pomona was never about pitching product for him. He genuinely loved the school. In fact, Hawley maintained the primary goal of his ads was getting readers to visit the Pomona campus because he knew the school would sell itself.

After his death—in a nursing home in Hemet, Calif.—Allen Hawley was buried in Oak Park Cemetery in Claremont. The only marker at the gravesite, according to Dunseth, is a simple, flat bronze plate. It reads: “Allen F. Hawley, 1893-1978.” The bare-bones wording is in stark contrast to the streams of praise uttered about Hawley over the years. His influence on the enduring success of Pomona is profound.

Leave it to Fred Sontag, the longest-serving faculty member in Pomona’s history, to put Hawley’s achievements in the proper philosophical perspective. After Hawley died, Sontag paid tribute to his former colleague at a meeting of the Pomona faculty.

“As a teacher, I am bound to affirm that good colleges are made of teachers and talented students,” said Sontag, who taught in Pomona’s Philosophy Department from 1952 to 2009. “As a human being, I know in fact that all great colleges are built on the quantities of money needed to support what is exceptional.

“In that sense, Allen Hawley had as much or more to do with what Pomona is today as any faculty member. It is hard to exaggerate what he did to secure the college we currently enjoy.”

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