Blog Articles

How to Take Command of the ROTC

Torbjorg “Tori” Holtestaul ’13 is this year’s cadet battalion commander for the Army ROTC Battalion based at neighboring Claremont McKenna College. In this top student role, Holtestaul, a double major in Spanish and biology, helps oversee training for new cadets at three nearby schools. Though she now loves the program, Cadet Holtestaul wasn’t exactly set on ROTC from the start. Follow her path:

1)  Grow up in Denver’s suburbia. Always dream of becoming a doctor. Work hard and get good grades. Fit in well at your 4,000-student high school. Seek out a small college with science strength to put you on the path to med school.

2)  Go visit your aunt in Southern California to check out schools. Hunker down at Barnes & Noble with your mom and pour over college guides. Like what you read about Pomona. Come to campus, dig the tour and fall in love with the place.

3)  Get in. Then get a financial reality check from your folks. Brush aside your Navy-veteran dad’s talk about looking into ROTC for the scholarships. Realize the deadline for making a final commitment to Pomona is drawing near. Finally pick up the phone and call the Claremont ROTC.

4)  Struggle at first to get in step. Feel awkward wearing your uniform on campus. Start practicing missions and battle drills. Begin to hit your stride.

5)  Get asked to attend the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Find a sense of satisfaction working with Columbian cadets. Go on to airborne training school. Feel terrified about having to parachute from a plane. Do it anyway.

6)  Spend junior year working closely with the cadets in your class group. Bond. Devote 30 hours per week to ROTC on top of your school work. Help to train the freshman and sophomore cadets. Get excellent marks at assessment camp held at the end of junior year.

7)  Accept the battalion commander role for your senior year. Welcome the new cadets. Help lead training in everything from navigation to first aid. As graduation nears, set your sights on medical school, residency and then becoming an Army doctor.

 

Bulletin Board

Alumni Weekend May 2–5, 2013

What do you call 1,500 Sagehens flocking together for four days of revelry? Alumni Weekend! Please make your calendars for May 2–5, 2013—especially class years ending in ’3 or ’8. This is Pomona’s 125th anniversary year, so we will be celebrating our shared history while looking ahead to the future. Start on Thursday evening by dining with current students. Attend classes, “Daring Minds” lectures, and academic department open houses on Friday. Enjoy the Parade of Classes, Wash Party and your class reunion dinner on Saturday. Sip champagne in the beauty of the Richardson Garden on Sunday. For more details, visit www.pomona.edu/alumniweekend.

Travel Study:

Galapagos Cruise With Professor of Biology and Associate Dean Jonathan Wright August 3–12, 2013 Join Professor Jonathan Wright on his third trip to the Galapagos with Pomona travelers. You will visit a place where animals live without fear of humans and enjoy close en- counters with giant tortoises, sea lions, marine, land iguanas and Darwin’s finches. You will also be joined by a Lindblad-National Geographic certified photo instructor.

Coming in 2014:

Walking Tour of Sicily with History Professor Ken Wolf

Land of the Ice Bears/Arctic Svalbard with Biology Professor Nina Karnovsky

For more information about these or any of our other trips, please contact the Pomona College Alumni Office at (909) 621-8110 or alumni@pomona.edu.

Reflecting on Change

 Susanne Garvey ’74 came to Pomona at the inspiration of her grandmother, Madeline Willard Garvey, Class of 1911, who spoke with awe of the atmosphere of cooperation and commitment to learning.

Susanne wanted those things, too. At Pomona, she embraced the life of the mind, engaging in those deep late-night conversations, and finding “just the right mix of serious study and social life.” She was an English major—Phi Beta Kappa and Mortar Board—who had many friends in the sciences. She served as arts and culture editor for The Student Life, and also took modern dance classes from Professor Jeannette Hypes, performing several times in her dance troupe. She soaked up everything she could from the small liberal arts college atmosphere.

Then came senior year. Her first semester, spent studying abroad in England, was amazing. Coming back to Pomona for the final semester, though, was a letdown, with the campus now seeming too cloistered at a time before Pomona of- fered the breadth of summer research, community service and internship

So, after a year back home in Menlo Park, Calif., working at an antiquarian bookstore, she was off to earn her master’s at the University of Virginia. Garvey was part of the small percentage of master’s students accepted to stay on and pursue a Ph.D.; but when it came to dissertation time, she realized she was going to have to focus on something very narrow. She decided against that path.

Garvey did remain in the realm of education, though. Her next stop was the U.K., where she spent a year organ- izing a college-level semester abroad program—the very program she had participated in as a Pomona student. Then, Garvey moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked for a semester-in-Washington program before becoming director of development for MATHCOUNTS and National Engineers Week, STEM programs serving elementary and secondary school students across the U.S.

For the last two decades, Garvey has been director of external affairs for the D.C.-based Carnegie Institution for Science. Part of her work takes her to the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, which have historic ties to the Mount Wilson Observatory—and that connection brought her back into contact with Pomona nearly a decade ago.

Carnegie astronomers from Pasadena were invited to give guest seminars at Pomona for advanced astrophysics classes. That led to Pomona and Harvey Mudd students doing internships working with Carnegie’s astronomers. And that, in turn, led Garvey to meet three Pomona student interns.

“They were everything that I remembered that was good about Pomona,” Garvey says. “They were smart … relaxed and interesting. I thought ‘what an amazing place Pomona still must be to produce students like these.’”

When Garvey was invited to serve on the alumni council a few years later, she readily accepted. She didn’t expect to become president. “I don’t have an agenda,” she says, though upon further thought, she adds, “I do have a theme— English majors have themes— ‘Reflecting on Change.’”

Garvey notes that before she joined the alumni council, she hadn’t been back to Pomona in decades, and she was impressed with all the changes in terms of opportunities for internships, research and travel, as well as the physical improve- ments to the campus. “I just felt that everything was better,” says Garvey, who, in a sense, is getting an extended re-do of that last semester of senior year.

The Fixer

Maintenance Shop Supervisor Orlando Gonzalez is a hands-on kind of guy, working alongside his five-person crew on everything from unclogging shower drains to replacing shingles. But it’s his mind and his memory that are key to keeping the campus in tip-top shape.

While work orders come in through an online ticketing system, Gonzalez’ head holds another crucial data center. Growing up with dyslexia, he wasn’t big on writing, so he learned to remember things. “When I stroll the campus,” says Gonzalez, “there’s always flashbacks of what things need to get done, things to go back and check on.”

He knows there’s old furniture stored in such-and-such room, where the plumbing shut-offs are and where not to dig. Everybody, it seems, has his cell phone number, and weekend calls are part of the routine. “I have a lot of information about this campus,” says Gonzalez. “I’ve been in areas where people never go.”

He and his team work from the Gibson Residence Hall’s basement, where the hallway walls of their fix-it lair are lined with the detailed floor plans of campus buildings, all the better for dealing with anywhere from 20 to 40 work orders daily: “We get one done and there’s another just right after.”

Friday afternoon, when other workers might be winding down, is when those get-it-off-the-list work orders flow in fastest. Even summer is no vacation: they bring in extra workers to sweep through every dorm room and make repairs that can’t be done during school. They do, however, get together for a bonding lunchtime barbecue every few weeks.

“Our thing we have here, I think, is special,” says Mike Binney, a generalist on the crew for five years. “We get along, we have an understanding of what each other does—and respect.”

Gonzalez is always looking for a better way. For a time, the College was paying $800 a pop (ouch) to replace damaged security card readers; he worked out a method to only spend $100 to replace just a part.

He has worked at the College since 1997, first as an em- ployee of the central consortium, and then hired by Pomona. The maintenance team includes a plumber, an electrician, a boiler technician and two generalists, but nobody sticks to a single field of work—including Gonzalez. As Binney puts it: “I could be working on a sewer line and if I need help, he’ll jump down there and work with me.”

Still, Gonzalez and crew can’t do it all, not on a campus with 63 buildings, and so he also oversees the work of various contractors, from painters to gutter cleaners. They’d better do it right. If a contractor is getting called in for a repair that’s been done before, he’s going to recall it and go back to check his paper stack of work orders he keeps for the last 10 years. “We need stuff fixed,” Gonzalez says.

My Pen Pal, John Cage

Note-O-Gram

When I think back on it—or look back, since I’ve of course saved both sides of the correspondence—the sheer temerity of the thing surprises and embarrasses me. I was a Ph.D. student at UCLA, two months from finishing my degree; he was, at age 77, nothing less than the great granddaddy of the American avant-garde. And yet I wrote him; and stranger still, he answered.

“He,” of course, was John Cage. I first encountered his work while writing a dissertation about the Irish novelist James Joyce. Joyce studies, or so it seemed to me at the time, was stuck in a pretty boring rut—a situation I felt jejunely confident my dissertation would soon remedy. And as I read around looking for genuinely new and innovative thinking about Joyce, I was surprised to find it in the work of Cage. While not a “literary” writer (though the author of several important books, including Silence [1961]), Cage was an inveterate, and more importantly an irreverent, reader. He stood so far outside the system he seemed not to know its rules; his natural curiosity constantly bent and broke them. He mostly wrote not about Joyce (or Thoreau, Stein and other favorites), but through them: he treated their texts as found objects (“readymades,” his friend Marcel Duchamp would have called them), and subjected them to “chance operations”—throwing the dice, casting the I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes), or in his later years, processing texts through randomizing computer programs. In so doing, he estranged these texts from their writers as from themselves, rendering them new and freshly revelatory in the process. (A group of Pomona students will be performing one of Cage’s Joyce-derived texts, Muoyce [1982], on campus this spring.)

I wrote Cage asking him to contribute to a collection of scholarly essays I was editing which sought to revisit the impact and reputation of the literary avant-garde of the early 20th century. He wrote back immediately. My letter was sent April 23, 1990; his reply was written four days later. Mine was word processed and printed out on the then-exotic laser printer, rather like pages of that dissertation; his, almost calligraphic, was inscribed in a scratchy hand, on a peculiar piece of (im)personal stationery called the Note-O-Gram®—a triplicate form using carbon paper, bearing his name and address in Gothic Copperplate across the top. John (as he signed himself after the first letter) followed the directions printed at the bottom of the form precisely—keeping the yellow copy, tearing out the carbons, and sending the white (original) and pink (second carbon) to me. I was meant to reply on the white & return it to John, keeping the pink; but since he’d flowed out of the “Message” column and over into my “Reply” column … I just mailed back another laser-printed letter.

Shockingly (!), John found himself with too many commitments to be able to contribute to my project: “I am busy with music and graphic work, prints, drawings, watercolors.” But he never made me feel foolish for having asked. What’s more, he asked for my help with his work—“a large work (music) connecting Zurich & Joyce” for the 1991 James Joyce/John Cage festival in Zurich.

His were short letters—short, and sometimes strikingly beautiful. Reading the opening sentences of that first letter still makes my heart stop: “I would very much enjoy talking with you. Conversa- tion is so rare.” Imagine writing to John Lennon and getting that in reply: Cage was my Lennon (who shared his fascination with Joyce—Lennon was an inaugural subscriber to the James Joyce Quarterly). In that first letter, John invited me to visit him in New York; too shy, I quietly demurred, while cherishing the hope that someday I’d screw up the courage. Two years later he was gone.

The leitmotif in the three letters I received from Cage was, quite simply, generosity. Thank you for your letter and articles which I enjoyed,” he wrote on May 16. (Looking back 22 years later, I’m more than a little horrified to be reminded I’d sent him my graduate school publications.) Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Cage testifies to this quality: no American artist of the 20th century was more gracious toward those upon whom his work had made such a profound impression.

“Our intention,” Cage wrote in Silence, “is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of a chaos or to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.” Most of the photographs of Cage—and a greater percentage, the longer he was with us— capture him somewhere between an impish grin and a tremendous laugh. That’s not the picture you’d necessarily imagine when encountering his often-difficult art: but that’s the man I was privileged to get to know, just a little, through a flurry of Note-O-Grams® in the summer of 1990.

Kevin J.H. Dettmar is the W.M. Keck Professor of English at Pomona College.

John Cage Centenary:

Born in 1912, composer John Cage ’32 pushed the boundaries of music, experimenting with sound, environment and audience perception. The son of an inventor, his work also influ- enced painting, dance, performance art and poetry. In 1930, after two years at Pomona, Cage left for Europe. Throughout the year the College will join the centenary celebration of his birth.

The Politics of Hunger

In today’s class session of The Global Politics of Food and Agriculture, the discussion focuses on Joel Berg’s book, All You Can Eat, about hunger in America. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently estimated that 48.8 million peo- ple, or about 14.5 percent of all house- holds, reported not having enough food on one or more days in the previous month. “Those numbers are sobering,” says Professor Heather Williams. “One in six households. That’s high enough for me to know someone who is hungry—someone at my church, someone who works with me, maybe someone in my neighborhood who puts on a good face but is really struggling.”

Williams: I want to talk about Berg’s policy arguments, which are controversial. He says we should consolidate all federal food programs into one efficient entity, have a universal school breakfast, reward states to reduce hunger; allow nonprofits to compete for federal funds; give recipients more choice, provide additional services such as job training. What do you think?

Allie: I’m convinced. I’ve read about these hunger statistics, and am now thinking anyone and everyone should have a breakfast program.

Williams: Berg wants breakfast available to all kids. You don’t have to apply for it or be marked as the kid who is so poor his parents can’t give him breakfast. No judgment. Breakfast food is pretty cheap. The bang for the buck is that any kid who hasn’t come to school with a meal in their belly isn’t going to be missing out on what is being taught in the morning because they’re hungry.

Maya: These policies seem like retroactive policies. If you were to pull back one more step and see why these people can’t access any types of food; why they don’t have jobs. What is the bigger picture? Every week we’ve talked about a vulnerable group of people who are abused or mistreated or lack nutrition or something else, and it all seems to come back to the general structure of capitalism.

Williams: To be fair to Berg, he’d be the first to say, “Amen, sister”— I totally agree with that. This is very much bound up with distributive politics. You need to have corporations called out on their big public Thanksgiving food drive when they’re paying their own employees below a living wage. He couldn’t agree more with you that food insecurity is bound up in complicated ways with inequality.

Monica: What I really liked about reading this book is that there is a solution, a concrete solution of what we can be doing to cut the food insecurity number to a thirtieth. Right now, when people are hungry, we’re talking about what government policies need to be fixed, because those are the mechanisms that are holding this society together. There are a lot of really plausible things that could be done.

Learning by Design

Sydney Dyson ’14 considered a math major until a drawing class during freshman year led her in a different direction. Now a studio art major and religious studies minor, Dyson helps run the College’s student art gallery in the Smith Campus Center and works in the theatre costume shop. Last summer she was awarded a Summer Experience in the Arts grant as part of the Mellon Foundation Elemental Arts Initiative.

FROM HOBBY TO COLLEGE MAJOR
“Both my mom and grandmother are artistic and had a big influence on me when I was growing up. In Chicago, I did some drawing and painting as a hobby, but I wasn’t that serious about it and didn’t consider art as a career until I
started taking drawing classes from Mercedes Teixedo in my freshman year. She’s great. I’m also interested in sewing and, at the end of last semester, Mercedes took me to the fashion district, which was really amazing.”

INSPIRATION ACROSS DISCIPLINES
“One class that really influenced my thinking about art was History of Africa. Sidney Lemelle gave a lecture about how for a long time, there weren’t words or concepts of art in many African languages, and it’s still the case today for some. Europeans would take sculptures and relics that had been used in ceremonies in Africa—and had no real purpose after that—and display them in museums as art objects. When I go to study abroad next semester in Cape Town, I want to learn more about how that idea has affected African schooling of fine art, which is essentially a Western construct.”

THRIFTY TRANSFORMATIONS

“My Summer Experience in the Arts project was called ‘Thrifty Transformations.’ I looked into the clothing industry and how clothing moves from point of manufacture to resale to being discarded, as well as issues of labor and sweatshops and the environment. I also inter- viewed owners of small thrift shops and consignment stores to get their perspective from the business and creative side. Finally I took items from four people’s wardrobes and repurposed them into something new and functional.”

IDEAS MADE REAL

“I was able to bring certain ideas to life this summer that have always and have only been ideas, and it felt amazing to see them materialize. Details and patterns are what draw me to art most, and I like to carry that into whatever medium I am using whether it is sewing, drawing, or experimenting with photography, which is where my interest in abstraction comes into play.”

NOT YOUR STEREOTYPICAL “STARVING ARTIST”

“My dad told me ‘you’re going to have to deal with the choices you make, and if you want to be in the arts, just do it.’ I don’t want to be the stereotype of a starving artist, so I’ve worked out a plan for the future. I want to combine my interests in art and business and someday have my own clothing line, café/store, and a gallery that provides space for other artists and musicians. I’d also like to open a youth center to give more young people a chance to experience the arts. I don’t know how all my plans will work out, but I do know that being at a liberal arts college has helped me think about ways to weave all my interests together.”

SIDEBAR:

SUPPORTED BY THE ELEMENTAL ARTS INITIATIVE

This four-year initiative, funded by a $600,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is a multi-pronged effort to enliven Pomona’s arts programming and foster collaboration across disciplines. The initiative focuses on a different element each year; the first year’s theme was water, this year’s is earth. Programming last year included an environmental analysis symposium on local water issues, original music and theatre productions, and the Summer Arts Experience, which supported six student art projects.

 

Ritual flames

Under the night sky, local Native American tribes led an evening of drumming, singing, chanting and ritual dances in early September to mark the beginning of Pomona’s 125th anniversary. Held the same day students gathered in the morning for Convocation, the Native American ceremony brought to campus individuals whose ancestors inhabited this site long before the College was founded.

The bear ceremony was the first held at The Claremont Colleges, notes Scott Scoggins, Native American program coordinator at Pitzer, who helped to organize the event. The traditional healing ritual ends with everyone joining in a dance around the fire. “Fire is our connection to the universe and the spirit world,” says Chief Tony Cerda of the Ohlone Costanoan Rumsen Carmel tribe, one of several whose members participated. “The same fire that burns in the stars, the sun and the center of the Earth also burns within us.”

Theatre Professor Betty Bernhard and playwright and performer Susan Suntree, who are co-teaching a new theatre class this fall, Sacred/Sites, came up with the idea of hosting the ceremony. “We hope it will become an annual event,” says Bernhard.

Construction Begins on Studio Art Building

Pomona College will begin construction this fall on a Studio Art Center on the east end of campus. Designed to reflect to a more modern, integrated approach to the arts and provide space for interdisciplinary teaching, the 36,000-square- foot center will replace the venerable 100-year-old Rembrandt Hall, which will be repurposed for another use.

Gifts of $500,000 from the Ahmanson Foundation, $500,000 from Trustee Bernard Chan ’88 and $100,000 from the Hearst Foundations will be used toward construction of the center, which is scheduled to be completed in spring 2014 at an estimated cost of $29 million. The planning and design of the building was made possible by an earlier gift from the estate of Pamela Creighton ’79. The College is seeking a naming gift for the center, as well as funding for additional spaces and other support.

Located north of Seaver Theatre and near the Wash, the new building will more than double the space available for studio arts. Designed by Culver City-based wHY Architecture, it will surround a central courtyard and feature studios for painting, drawing, sculpture, digital arts and photography, as well as classrooms, a gallery and cutting-edge facilities for printing, fabrication and digital output.

Sustainability will be another key feature, with the College setting a goal of building to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) gold standards. The design incorporates solar photovoltaics and hot water heaters, daylight harvesting and low-volume lighting. Even the location of the building on an existing parking lot reflects the College’s goal of preserving green space.

With its courtyard, performance spaces and student lounge, planners hope the Studio Art Center will draw students from Pomona and the other Claremont Colleges, making the arts a more visible part of campus life.

The Book Budget Bind

save our library

For the past several years, veteran Pomona City Councilwoman Paula Lantz ’67 has found herself acquiescing to constant cutbacks to her hometown library, where she had spent so much of her youth. As city coffers shrank, library budgets were sliced, hours were slashed, staffing and special programs were squeezed.

Yet, as the library slouched toward insolvency, Lantz was surprised by the silence. No citizens storming the council chambers. No emails or phone calls. Not even a tap on the councilwoman’s shoulder from a fellow library lover in line at the grocery store.

It wasn’t until earlier this year, when the city announced that it would be forced to close the library for a full year, that supporters came forward in strength. They held rallies on the library steps, protested at council meetings, organized fundraisers and revived a dormant foundation for raising private funds to help keep the library afloat. That burst of activism, says Lantz, is the only silver lining in a budget crisis that threatened to give Pomona, the College’s birthplace and namesake city, the distinction of becoming one the largest municipalities in the country without a public library.

Under public pressure, the city found funds to keep the library open another year, albeit on a skeleton staff and a miserly annual budget of $400,000, less than 15 percent of its peak funding in 2007. The city council has also approved a ballot measure calling for a library tax of $38 per year on all Pomona properties. The tax, which requires two-thirds approval in November, is considered a long shot, but it may be the library’s only shot considering the city’s dismal long-term fiscal forecast.

Next year, without a new source of funds or a miracle, the library may be broke again. For now, the protesters succeeded in delaying the doomsday decision.

“It makes it a whole lot easier to make cuts if it’s just numbers on a page, rather than looking into people’s eyes,” says Lantz, who launched a community task force to save the library. “It took the drastic measure of closing the library to get everyone’s attention. But I wish it had happened four years ago.”

POMONA HAS PLENTY OF COMPANY in its biblio-budget battles. For more than a decade, libraries across the country, including the Library of Congress, have been forced to tighten their belts and cut back on service. And, as it turns out, the public’s reaction to the Pomona library’s plight—chronic unconcern before last-minute mobilizations—is also part of the national trend.

Budget cuts have crippled libraries from New York to Newport Beach, Calif., where a plan last year called for replacing librarians with videophones for patrons to call in their reference questions. Three years ago, only state intervention averted a radical plan that would have closed all 54 branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia. The following year in Brooklyn, protestors staged a 24-hour read-in to stop the imminent closure of 40 library branches. Their slogan: “We will not be shushed.”

The library cutbacks are so widespread that the Huffington Post created a special section titled, “Libraries in Crisis.” Just perusing the headlines underscores the extent of the threat to these temples of knowledge:

–Children’s Laureate Warns ‘Society Will Pay’ For Library Closures
–Can a Protest Save a Library?
–After Branches Close, Students Set Up Outdoor Libraries

In his introduction to the series, HuffPo Books Editor Andrew Losowsky calls for a “national conversation” about the evolving nature and future of libraries. “If information is power,” he writes, “then libraries are the essence of democracy and freedom.”

NOBODY KNOWS THE budget ups and downs of the Pomona Public Library better than Greg Shapton ’71, the former director who retired last year after almost half a century as a library employee. Shapton started there as a part-time page, working with the library’s collection of 16-mm movies. It was 1967, the same year he enrolled as a freshman at Pomona College. Though he graduated with a degree in psychology, his major for a while was math. That training would come in handy as an administrator, juggling budgets and allocating ever-diminishing resources.

Now 63, Shapton looks back at his first decade as a golden era for the library, a modern architectural centerpiece of the civic center on Garey Avenue. But with the passage 34 years ago of Proposition 13, the state’s sweeping anti-tax measure, “the library was really gutted,” says Shapton, who was head of the reference desk at the time. “That began the downward slide, not just for the Pomona Library but for cities in general.”

In the immediate aftermath of the 1978 tax revolt, the library lost half its budget and half its staff, recalls Shapton. Exactly 30 years later, the library would be buffeted by yet another historic force, this time the worldwide financial collapse of 2008. Since then, the city’s general fund budget—which pays for essential services such as police and fire protection, as well as the library—has plunged by $20 million, or 22 percent of its high of almost $90 million. Pomona went from budget surpluses to annual deficits.

In fiscal 2007-08, the library budget had peaked at just over $3 million with 56 hours of operation. Three years later when Shapton finally retired, it was down to a tight but survivable $1.6 million and 26 hours.

Just when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, they did. The budget was trimmed even further in the current fiscal year, down to $1.1 million and 20 positions. Then, the real calamity struck. Suddenly, there was a gaping new hole in the city’s operating fund.

This year, the city faced an unanticipated shortfall, due in part to the loss of $1.1 million in tax revenue tied up in a messy, drawn-out legal battle. The funds vanished in May as a result of a surprise appellate court ruling in a case involving the state Board of Equalization and several Southern California cities. The city was caught flat-footed when the court shot down a deal that cities had hammered out over how to share the disputed tax revenue.

In its scramble to make up for the loss, the city almost immediately announced it would be forced to close the library for a full year and lay off the entire library staff. In their defense, city administrators argue that Pomona has been hit disproportionately by hard times, leaving them with only painful options for cutting the budget. The city’s tax base, already weak in comparison to some wealthier neighbors, was crippled in recent years by the flight of major retailers. Car dealerships shut down. Big-box stores like Toys “R” Us left town. The result: Pomona’s sales tax per capita was $87 in fiscal 2010-11, compared to $316 for the nearby city of Ontario.

The paradox in this municipal numbers game is that the deeper the economic crisis, the more people need their free library. That is especially true, supporters say, in a poor, predominantly Latino city like Pomona where people may not have Internet access at home and rely on the library for school research, job searches and even adult literacy lessons.

“It’s tragic,” says Religious Studies Professor Erin Runions, who has lived in Pomona for four years. “The cities are being cut by the state, the state is being cut by the federal government. And who ends up paying for that? It’s people who can’t afford to buy books or computers. People who rely on the library as a source of education, a source of information, as a source of transformation. Those are the people who lose out.”

POMONA’S FIRST LIBRARY was founded in 1887, the year before the city itself was incorporated, by a small group of women who were members of a garden club. By 1890, the city officially took over library operations, promising under contract to keep it in good condition and add new books every year. Soon, the library was seeking a permanent building and turned to philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who saw free public libraries as essential to the development of communities and supported their construction throughout the country.

In a letter to Carnegie dated Dec. 3, 1901, a Pomona library board member made a pitch for funds. His letter included an appeal on behalf of students attending a fledgling college that had been established in the city the very same year as the library. “Pomona College, a young but growing institution of some 300 students, relies largely on the facilities offered by the Pomona Public Library,” the trustee wrote, “and greatly needs more assistance than we can now afford with the resources at our command.”

By then, the College had already moved to its new location in Claremont, which at first was considered temporary. But the letter to Carnegie underscores how closely intertwined were these two institutions at the start.

To mark its own 125th anniversary, Pomona College has established a theme of “community,” pledging to connect the campus with its neighbors, including the city of its birth. A handful of faculty members and students are looking for ways to put that theme into action by connecting with the Pomona Library in its time of need. They have met informally to discuss the issue, explored ways for the College to get involved, posted appeals for action on their Facebook pages and privately alerted college officials of their concern.

“We’ve been talking a lot recently about our interactions with the local community,” says History Professor April J. Mayes ’94. “To me, this is a perfect opportunity to bring Pomona College back into Pomona again.”

Mayes feels so strongly about the issue because, like many supporters, her whole life has been memorably intertwined with the library. As a child she spent hours in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Children’s Room, fascinated by the collection of memorabilia from the author of Little House on the Prairie. Later, while attending Pomona Catholic Girls High School, Mayes worked as a library page. And finally, while researching her senior thesis on local history at Pomona College, Mayes returned to her hometown library to make use of its special collections, consulting newspaper microfiche and first edition books written in the late 19th century.

“The special collections is pretty amazing,” she says. “It’s a pretty extensive gathering of great materials on the history of, not just the city of Pomona, but the entire region.” Professor Runions, the biblical scholar, moved to Pomona four years ago, looking for more diversity than Claremont had to offer. This summer, Runions got involved in the library task force and joined the opposition in another messy issue, the battle over a proposed new trash transfer facility she considers an example of “environmental racism.” She also is helping to campaign for passage of the library parcel tax.

As a transplant from British Columbia in 2005, Runions felt “somewhat like an outsider trying to make a home here.” She settled on Pomona and has not regretted it.

“We love it here,” says Runions, who lives in the city’s historic Lincoln Park area. “There’s a real sense of community in Pomona, and I think that’s what the library task force really shows, that there are citizens who are concerned about the well-being of this city. Deeply concerned. They’ve been here many years and they’re really willing to put in the time and the work. But they need some leadership.”

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP is precisely what’s lacking in Pomona, says Gwen Robinson ’60, head of Friends of Pomona Public Library, a volunteer group founded in 1955. Robinson, a retired school teacher, assails city leaders for consistently short-changing the library in favor of other city services. She fears if the tax plan doesn’t pass, the library will shut down for sure next year, and she blames the city council for letting it happen. “They don’t have a plan and they don’t want to look for any other cuts,” said Robinson, who attended Pomona College for two years as an undergraduate. “They just don’t want to deal with it any more.”

Robinson and other library supporters bristle at the suggestion that civic apathy permitted the library to become an easy target for the budget axe. Yet, a study by Public Agenda, a public opinion firm in New York, found a pattern of what it calls “benign neglect” has undermined libraries nationwide. Libraries enjoy broad public support, the 2006 study found, but even the most ardent library lovers are not aware of budget problems until there is a full-blown crisis. And cities don’t act until the public mobilizes.

Civic leaders surveyed echoed Councilwoman Lantz’ concerns about the public’s “impassive advocacy” in the face of repeated library cutbacks. But she adds that what appears to be apathy may be a matter of generational values instead.

Lantz, who majored in sociology and earned a master’s in education from Claremont Graduate School, uses her own four adult children as examples. They all have moved away, settling in cities from Nashville, Tenn., to Oakland, Calif. But they have one thing in common. Their 30-something generation has grown detached from civic life at a local level, even as they engage on a global level with communities on the web. They can’t name their mayor, don’t read a local paper, don’t know about redevelopment and, she adds, “they don’t care.”

Things were different in her day, says Lantz, now 66. She was born in Pomona, like her dad before her. His was a generation that put down roots in one place for a lifetime. Her mother, who’s 97, still lives in the home the family built when Lantz was attending Pomona High School. Her folks didn’t have money to buy books, so they took her as a child to the library, then in the old Carnegie building. That turn-of-the-century structure was torn down for a bank parking lot and replaced in 1965 by the current building. But no matter where the books are housed, Lantz’ mother still visits the library to this day.

Lantz is encouraged to see young people join the library task force. And she concedes the city shares the blame for failing to find a way to reach them, until it was almost too late.

“We don’t communicate with them in the way they communicate,” Lantz says.

LIKE LANTZ, Carla Maria Guerrero ’06 was also born and raised in Pomona. She hasn’t volunteered on the task force, but she’s following the library issue on Facebook. She says the threatened closure has “galvanized” library supporters on the Internet.

“It’s a little unfair to say the newer generations don’t care,” asserts Guerrero, 28. “In activist circles online, I would dare say people are upset. Many people might not be able to come out (for meetings), but we’re all still avidly following it.”

Guerrero is the daughter of immigrants who came from Mexico with limited schooling. But they always stressed education. Her father, Homero Guerrero, was a factory worker who, on his time off, was “always on the hunt for good Spanish books.” He built a respectable collection by scooping up the tomes discarded by libraries from Los Angeles to Riverside.

Even after earning her bachelors degree in Latin American studies and her masters in print journalism from USC, Carla still lived in Pomona, sharing the family home with her parents and her two younger sisters. She also still used her hometown library, but now to check out audio books for her three-hour daily commute to Los Angeles where she works. That’s how she discovered the library hours had been cut back. Then, after moving to L.A. last year, she found out about the planned shutdown from her sister, who saw it posted on Facebook.

“If the closure ever happens, it would be really sad,” she says. “The library is one of the few public institutions that stands for knowledge, not for profit. It’s something so pure, it’s actually there for the good of the people. It’s something that a city like Pomona, that is already pretty impoverished, cannot afford to lose.”

Update: The library parcel tax, Measure X, failed in the Nov. 6 election, receiving just over 60 percent approval, short of the two-thirds required.