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Life in My ($135) Bargain Shorts

Life in my $135 (Bargain) Shorts: Our Writer Test-Rides a Pair of Fancy-Fabric Action Pants Created by Urban Innovator Abe Burmeister '97

 

 

One drizzly afternoon in July, Abe Burmeister ’97 stood in a makeshift fitting room at the Brooklyn headquarters of Outlier, the apparel company he co-founded four years ago, holding a pair of Three Way Shorts in his hands.

Meant for summertime use as both active and leisure wear—“Run, swim or just straight up look good. Our Three Way Shorts can do all three,” reads the online marketing copy—the shorts were the second item that Burmeister and his partner, Tyler Clemens, designed when they formed the company. (The first was a pair of trousers that were meant to look like business- casual slacks but behave like cycling pants.)

The pair that Burmeister handed me, and which I intended to field test, were brick red. They were size 32. And they sold for $135—more than I had paid for my last suit. More, in fact, than I would consider spending on almost any item of clothing, given my penny-pinching ways.

“I’ll take good care of them,” I said, suddenly intimidated by the cash value of the merchandise I’d just received.

“No,” said Burmeister. “You should beat the hell out of them.”

Burmeister’s response might lack the poetic concision of his company’s motto (“tailored performance”) or the high-mindedness of its official philosophy (“we want to build the future of clothing”). But it gets at the essence of what Outlier does: construct hip, all-purpose clothing from the kind of high-tech fabrics normally reserved for outdoor apparel and sportswear.

In response to Burmeister’s injunction, I wore my new Three Way Shorts on a series of summer adventures, bicycling through the mean streets of NYC and swimming, sans undergarments, in the occasionally toxic waters of Lake Michigan while staying with my wife’s parents in Chicago. And while I hesitate to use underworld metaphors when describing a visit to my in-laws, I feel confident that, short of falling off a mountain or diving off a cliff, I gave those shorts as much of a workout as they’ll ever receive.

More of one, than perhaps even Burmeister had in mind when he first toyed with the idea of starting a clothing business back in the early aughts. At the time, Burmeister was partner in an animation studio in San Francisco, and spent much of his time flying back and forth between California and his native New York. Living out of a carry-on bag, he came to wonder if there might be money in making better clothes for business travelers.

That particular idea went nowhere. But several years later, after joining the ranks of New York City’s bicycle commuters, Burmeister was once again drawn to the needle trade. Crossing the Williamsburg Bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan by bike on a regular basis, he became frustrated by his inability to buy a pair of pants that would hold up to the abuse of hard cycling and inclement weather while looking nice enough to wear into a meeting. So he decided to create them himself.

A trip to the Fashion Center Information Kiosk at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 39th Street—essentially a fashion industry help desk with an enormous button sculpture positioned on top—yielded a list of factories in the garment district. And so it was that, with the help of a local patternmaker, Burmeister made his first pair of slacks using a durable, water repellent, stretchy material from Schoeller, a Swiss textile mill that produces a line of what garmentologists refer to as technical fabrics.

After wearing the pants for a year, Burmeister decided that he could use another pair. He also decided that it was time to start making more than one at a time.

Burmeister’s resume already was impressive in its variety: An anthropology major at Pomona, he worked briefly on the bond floor at Morgan Stanley; ran the aforementioned animation studio and web design firm; acquired a masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU; toiled as a freelance graphic designer; and developed data visualization tools for a Wall Street firm run by a couple of nuclear physicists. Along the way, he wrote a book, Economies of Design and Other Adventures in Nomad Economics, that explored alternative approaches to the “dismal science.”

Still, Burmeister knew he would need help jump-starting an apparel company.

Then one day, the barista at his neighborhood coffee shop introduced him to Clemens, a fellow urban cyclist who worked at a men’s shirt company and who was, in his spare time, trying to do for shirts what Burmeister was trying to do for pants. Within months, the two had founded Outlier.

(In statistics, an outlier is a data point that lies beyond the norm; the company logo, a black swan inside a black ring, alludes to the rare but catastrophic “black swan events” that roil financial markets. But the term was also once applied to those who lived in outlying regions, apart from their places of work: “the original commuters,” as Burmeister says.)

Burmeister and Clemens initially set up shop in Clemens’ living room. They have since moved into a former wedding dress studio on the third floor of an old Brooklyn sewing factory; a pile of bicycles belonging to Outlier staff lies just outside the door, paying silent homage to the company’s roots.

Their offices comprise an open workspace limned by Apple computers; a small development room crammed with sewing machines, fabric swatches and a rack of reference garments (a Burberry trench coat, an early Gore-Tex jacket); and the fitting room where I tried on my shorts. Outlier’s public face, though, is almost entirely virtual, and the firm uses social media to reach the young, active urbanites who represent its target market.

The partners now employ a professional designer who previously worked at the upscale menswear company Thom Browne, and they have expanded their offerings to include a variety of pants, shorts, shirts and accessories. They continue, however, to seek the same grail: to produce clothing that acts like rugged outdoor gear but looks (and feels) like premium lifestyle apparel.

“They have a nice little niche, which I think will prove to be a very good business for them,” says David Parkes, a tex- tile developer and marketer whose New Jersey-based firm, Concept III, does business with Outlier.

Burmeister and Clemens are forever looking for technical fabrics that might be adapted to other uses, whether that means attending events like the biannual Outdoor Retailer tradeshow, which attracts major outdoor brands like Patagonia and Timberland, or investigating the materials used to make protective clothing for firefighters.

They have cultivated relationships with contract cutting and sewing factories in Manhattan’s garment district, giving them access to skilled workers who are willing to learn how to handle difficult materials.

And they have kept their sticker prices relatively low by selling almost exclusively online through their own website, thereby eliminating the traditional retailer’s mark-up that would miraculously transform my $135 pair of shorts into a $270 pair without improving them in any way.

“Our stuff is certainly not cheap, but it’s half the price it would be otherwise,” says Burmeister, who likens that particular achievement to going from an “incredibly niche price point” to a “semi-niche price point.”

Burmeister and Clemens have reached that point even though their business model diverges from the industry standard. Outlier does not follow the typical seasonal model. Instead, the pair experiment constantly with new designs. “It’s a very development-intensive process. Everything goes through multiple iterations,” Burmeister says.

That costs money: after testing an item in-house, Burmeister and Clemens typically produce a small run for initial release, like a bespoke beta version. “It’s more expensive to make a small amount like that, but it’s worth it to figure out if an item is successful. You don’t get the full range of feedback until you have customers in the wild putting it through all kinds of crazy situations,” says Burmeister.

EAGER TO OBLIGE, and initially skeptical about the technical specs of the clothing I’d been handed, I wore my Three Way Shorts for five days before washing them, bicycling through the steamy summer streets of Queens and subjecting them to the kind of abuse that only animals and small children can dole out: Within hours, my 3-year-old had turned them into a napkin, wiping the remains of dinner (steak marinated in red wine) off his face and onto my lap. Yet Schoeller’s Nanosphere finish, which binds to individual fibers and repels water, dirt and oil, kept them surprisingly clean.

Testing began in earnest the following week, when I lived in the shorts during the two-day drive from New York to Chicago; drenched them in sweat along the bike paths of Illinois and Wisconsin during a scorching Midwestern drought; and finally rinsed them off by diving into Lake Michigan just days after the authorities had posted a swim advisory due to the troublingly high E. coli count.

The internal drawstring—a second-iteration feature that replaced an earlier, and less effective, set of pull-tabs—kept me from accidentally mooning the attractive young female lifeguard, a face-saving feature that was probably worth a few bucks in and of itself. And as I waded back out onto the beach, the lake water drained rapidly from the mesh in the flow-through pockets. When I mounted my bike a few minutes later, the shorts were still moist, but they were already dry enough for me to cycle home without any awkward squishiness.

And marketing hype aside, the nylon-polyester-elastane blend did indeed prove to be both stretchy and durable. Just as important, the double-weave technique employed during milling pushed the tough, Cordura-grade nylon towards the outer surface while keeping the softer polyester threads on the inside. That comfortable inner surface also had a waffle-like texture that Burmeister claimed would prevent the fabric from sticking to my skin, rendering it more breathable and al- lowing moisture to escape.

I won’t argue with him, any more than I will argue with the steady stream of compliments I received on the appearance of the garment. Indeed, after a month of steady use, the shorts had become my go-to clothes—the ones that I found myself slipping into almost every morning. The $135 price tag still triggered my cheapskate reflex, but I don’t exactly belong to the company’s target demographic (i.e., people who have money and are willing to spend it). And as Mary Ann Ferro of the Fashion Institute of Technology pointed out, any fabric that repels dirt and therefore requires less laundering should save water and electricity in the long run. “So maybe,” she ventured, “it’s not so expensive when you think about it.”

Maybe. Maybe not. But even if I might still balk at buying a pair with my own money, I have come to appreciate the advantages of clothing that looks good, feels good—and is literally tougher than dirt.

BEHIND THE PRICE

Performance wear—a category that includes everything from bike shorts to mountaineering pants—is one of the fastest growing sectors in the textile industry. According to a 2011 report by the market research firm Global Industry Analysts, the worldwide market for sports and fitness clothing will exceed $126 billion by 2015.

That growth is helping to drive the development of technical fabrics that have been engineered to possess magical properties: some stretch, others repel water, a few can even kill the germs that make your sweatpants smell not-so-fresh after a workout.

Originating in the first water-repellant fabrics of the 19th century, today’s technical fabrics include synthetics like the finely spun polyester called microfiber; natural materials such as cotton and wool that have been treated with special finishes; and complex concoctions that incorporate a bit of this and a dash of that—perhaps a nylon-cotton blend for durability and comfort, with a bit of polyurethane-based elastane added for stretch and a water-repellent finish to protect against the rain.

Yet adapting technical fabrics designed for spe- cific performance contexts to more fashionable ends can be tricky. The people who design and assem- ble men’s and women’s wear are often unfamiliar with the materials, which do not behave like ordi- nary ones. “It takes skill to sew stretch fabric,” notes Mary Ann Ferro, an assistant professor at the Fash- ion Institute of Technology who formerly designed outdoor wear for London Fog.

And the fabrics themselves—often synthetic, often treated with special finishes—can be shiny, or noisy, or otherwise ill suited to places of work or leisure. “You don’t want to be that guy swishing through the office,” says Outlier’s Abe Burmeister ’97, musing on the loud crinkliness of nylon.

Finally, all of that performance comes at a cost. “The price,” Ferro says, “is a problem.”

Burmeister agrees. Fabric alone accounts for ap- proximately 60 percent of the expenditure involved in manufacturing a pair of Three Way Shorts—a figure that includes the 25 percent bump accruing from tariffs and shipping fees. (Most fabrics used in American garments, including ones that are assembled here in the United States, are made abroad.)

“The materials that The Gap uses cost nothing compared to what we use,” he says.

In the Right Place

Jordan Bryant ’13 grew up playing on the competitive club soccer circuit, taking van rides all over Southern California for weekend tournaments, and shuttling back and forth to practices in Orange County every afternoon. By the time she reached Claremont High School she harbored hopes of playing Division I. It had always been her dream, in fact, to play for USC.

Bryant knew about Pomona College, but it wasn’t on her radar academically or athletically. Then she signed on for the Pomona College Academy for Youth Success (PAYS), the program in which promising high school students take classes and live on campus in preparation for college. “I absolutely fell in love with it,” she says.

That shifted her priorities. “I knew how competitive Pomona was academically, so I made the decision to quit club soccer and really focus on schoolwork,” said Bryant. “I knew I could play Division I soccer if I stayed with it, but when I decided I wanted to be here, I knew that I couldn’t afford to spend three or four hours a day going back and forth to Orange County.”

She continued to excel for Claremont High, earning team awards all four seasons (MVP as a senior, Captain’s Award as a junior, Defensive MVP as a sophomore, Rookie MVP as a freshman). She was named the Outstanding Player of the Baseline League as a senior, and her com- mitment to academics helped Bryant rank in the top 10 of her class. And so came that acceptance letter from Pomona.

Bryant stepped right into the starting lineup as a freshman. Last season, she led the Sagehens to a 10-win season (10-6-1) and their first SCIAC Tournament berth in five years. She was a first-team All- SCIAC selection and a second-team NSCAA All-Region honoree.

As a central defender, Bryant’s impact on the program is enormous, but tough to quantify. You won’t see her name in the scoring summary due to her position, but she drives the ball as hard as any player in college, on any level. She’s also a savvy defender who has that knack for being in the right place, so much so that at times the Sagehens played with only three defenders last year, relying on Bryant to cover huge amounts of territory to allow more teammates to get forward. “She always provides cover for everyone and picks up the little mistakes around her,” says Head Coach Jen Scanlon.

The one thing she most wants to add to her resume in her final season is an NCAA bid.

“In the past, people would ask us how the season was going and we’d answer in vague terms, like ‘it’s going well’ or ‘I’m enjoying it,’” says Bryant. “Now that we’ve had some success, we can actually brag about our record and can afford to set the bar a little higher. Making the NCAA’s my senior year would be a dream come true.”

It would also mean a lot to Bryant for another reason. Her father, Neil, had a huge influence on her athletic career be- fore passing away suddenly in December, right after the Christmas holiday. He was a fourth-round draft pick of the San Diego Padres, and played in both the Padres and Cubs organizations during his professional career.

“I think the biggest thing my Dad taught me was to work hard and treat competition seriously,” she says. “I like to joke around and laugh off the field, but on the field, I think I put all that aside and play with a sense of toughness and arrogance. Not in a bad way, but I think all good athletes have to believe in themselves to be successful, and I think I took that from my Dad’s personality. I always liked to say that I was a chip off the old block, and I know I’ll keep that part of him with me whenever I take the field.”

 

Sewing Comfort

When Karen Gerstenberger ’81 holds a quilt in her hands, she sees more than red and purple and blue and more than crisscross lines of thread. She sees the patterns that grief can make on the lives of patients and families. She imagines a young face, cradling the blanket they may receive on their first day of cancer treatment at a Seattle hospital.

Her own daughter, Katie, died at the age of 12 after about 10 months of treatment for a rare cancer. Before the diagnosis, in a hurry to catch a ferry across Puget Sound to the hospital, Katie grabbed a comforter Karen had made. Through the emotional turmoil of many months, this comforter absorbed symbolism and memories. “After she died, I slept with that blanket,” says Karen, holding the blanket. One side has the cheerful images of official state flowers and the other is just a pale yellow floral. When times were tough for Katie in the hospital, she used the blanket and its state flowers as a distraction, a wrap, hiding place and a comforter.

Five years later, Karen helps others to find safe topics and comforting spaces inside of the toughest months of their lives. She runs a formal guild of volunteers who sew blankets for patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital. She hopes the quilts will be therapeutic.

Some quilts have cowboys, rocket ships and electric guitars on them. Her volunteer army includes people who find donations of fabrics and people who like to sew them together. One woman, Lucile, is 90 years old and puts together almost a whole quilt every day. The guild has given away almost 1,000 blankets at last count.

Through a special patient support system at the hospital, the blankets of many colors and designs are chosen to fit a pa- tient’s interests. Karen and her guild members do not hand them out or meet the patients, but sometimes receive delight- ful notes. Each blanket has a tag with the guild’s name and a dress. From one patient’s mother came this message:

“We had a major setback, and she had to be admitted. … She was so scared at the big bed—she [had] never slept in
one—and having to stay. When she saw the Minnie Mouse blanket she said, ‘I OK now Mama. Minnie is with me.’”

When she was paralyzed by her own grief, in the early months after Katie’s death, Karen found herself motivated to make the first blanket for another child. “Picking out the fabric and thinking about a child I did not know was very satisfying. I knew that child would have that blanket, and if the child didn’t make it, the parent would have that blanket,” she explains. It was there, at her dining room table, that the idea for the blanket guild was born. Karen studied art history at Pomona College before transferring to another college in the early 1980s. But she doesn’t feel especially artistic about these blankets.

“I sew some, but mostly what I do [for the guild] is the administrative stuff,” Karen says. Starting the guild and devoting herself to helping families “opened up a huge new adventure for me.” Katie’s cancer was a rare form known as adrenocortical carcinoma. The family’s journey with Katie included a surgery and eventually the knowledge that she could not be cured. She was in hospice care for about a month before she died in 2007.

During that time, Karen feels her family was lucky to get expert counseling and support from the hospital and health-care team. But not every family is so lucky. She has chosen public ways of sharing her family’s stories in hopes of helping to train physicians and other caregivers.

She wrote a book titled Because of Katie, and was asked to speak at various fundraisers, including one for a summer camp for children with cancer. She also created a video that will become part of staff training at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

“We don’t give young doctors enough help in understanding how to cope with death,” she says. “They need to take care of themselves.” Taking care of others includes preparing for the time when treatment may not be practical. Some states don’t have hospice care for children, for example, which Karen believes is very important. For Karen, there is a thread of writing and sharing that runs through her whole life, even though she didn’t call herself a writer until recently. She found a certain courage in telling Katie’s story, and the courage shows in how she handled an interview full of tough questions with humor and grace.

“I got in trouble [as a kid] for talking in class. Writing is really the same thing, and it is a part of me now.”

FROM BECAUSE OF KATIE:

“IN THE FIRST WEEKS AFTER KATIE’S PASSING, I slept with her comforter—the one which I had made for her. She had held onto that quilt all through her treatment and recovery; you can see it in many of our photographs.

If I needed to wash it, I had to return it to her on the same day. There are two kinds of fabric in it, and she preferred to have it on her bed with a certain side up. She loved that quilt, and used it as a real comforter all through her cancer journey: as a mask, a bathrobe, a blinder, a hiding place, a lap robe, a privacy screen. After she died, sleeping with her quilt felt like a link to her, physically.”

—Karen Gerstenberger ’81 in Because of Katie

(Photo by Larry Steagall/Kitsap Sun)

 

Can Zombies Do Math?

Can Zombies Do Math?

Is there any reason for today’s academic institutions to encourage the pursuit of answers to seemingly frivolous questions? The opinionated business leader who does not give a darn about your typical liberal arts classes “because they do not prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s work force” might snicker knowingly here: Have you seen some of the ridiculous titles of the courses offered by the English/literature/history/(fill in the blank) studies department at the University of So-And-So? Why should any student take “Basket-weaving in the Andes during the Peloponnesian Wars”? What would anyone gain from such an experience?

Yes, the professor will probably claim that our common global ancestry and the dependence of today’s culture on the classical morals of the era will provide much food for thought and much room for growth for the 18-year-olds who will be sitting through three hours of ancient basket-weaving lectures a week. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the industrialist will say with a dismissive wave.

But if our impeccably dressed friend is honest, perhaps he will admit that what he is demanding from college educators is to create for him an army of docile and respectful workers, ones who come out of the factory of higher education in time to be immediately recruited by the factory that is the job market. Workers who are faceless in the midst of a sea of millions like themselves, workers who are cheap and obedient and dispensable. Workers who should NOT learn to ask questions. And especially stupid or frivolous questions—those are the worst!

In these kinds of debates our friend will often find support amidst the faculty teaching in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. It is not tough to find an engineering professor who smirks at the titles of courses offered by his humanities colleagues, nor is it uncommon for faculty in the pure science disciplines to consider themselves at the core of the curriculum and the foundation of a real education.

My own disciplinary colleagues, the mathematicians, are not completely innocent either. True, many of us view mathematics as a creative art, but many of us also have the illusion that mathe- matics is the only path to universal truth. (Now what does that even mean?)

Last year I took a different path. I volunteered to teach a first- year seminar. A strange path indeed for the rational, linear-think- ing mathematician who had taken a whopping two courses in humanities during her own undergraduate studies. The first-year seminar series at Pomona is a perfect foundation for a deep and engaged liberal arts education. The courses are writing-intensive; most are discussion-oriented seminars. Students are expected to engage with analytic readings, sophisticated writing experiments, creative arts and aesthetic sentiments. That’s absolutely mar-velous for a humanities scholar. How about me? What would I center my course around?

I followed the example of my most daring colleagues and chose a completely frivolous question to guide the semester’s activities: Can Zombies Do Math? The inclusion of zombies was a pragmatic move on my part. The Humans vs. Zombies game has been a hit on my campus for years now, so I knew that students would find the bloody stench and the gory manifestations of the living dead irresistibly appealing. However the central idea of the course had been simmering in my mind for several years before I even heard of the game.

Mathematics is undeniably a human endeavor, even though we mathematicians unfortunately do a poor job of sharing this fact with the rest of society. Mathematical practice gracefully integrates a certain comfort with ambiguity and a deep desire for elegant simplicity amidst complex patterns. I wanted to create a course where students, fresh out of the factory line that is the K–12 education system, would engage with ideas and experiences about the true nature of mathematics.

Throughout the course, my students and I read books, articles, essays, short stories and poems. We watched movies about zombies and mathematicians. Students reviewed novels they were individually assigned, and interviewed mathematicians to discover what motivated them. The main essays of the course focused on the two serious questions that were hidden under my frivolous one: What does it mean to be human? What is the true nature of mathematics? The culminating writing assignment was a narrative statement asking students to come back to the course title ques- tion and resolve for themselves the question that began the whole trip.

On the last class discussion of the semester, Kimberley, the student discussion leader, asked her classmates:

“Now that the course is coming to a close, how would you answer the question “Can zombies do math?” Would you answer it any differently than you would have at the beginning of the semester?”

There was consensus around the room that most of students had not changed their gut response to the question, but now they had a more crisp understanding of the path that led them to that answer. Along the way they tackled questions such as what makes us human, what we ostracize as subhuman, other, mon- strous, and what, if anything, is a soul. They also had the chance to explore ambiguous, wild patterns and strange, undetermined paths in the mathematical universe. But I think what mattered most in the end was summarized best by Kenny’s response to Kimberley’s question:

“Does the purple hippo that I just conceived like to brush his teeth? It depends.”

Yes, the course was centered around a frivolous question, but the point my students and I left the semester with was deep and nuanced: that the answer to any question we pose depends on what our basic assumptions are, what we are already inherently implying with our choice of words, tone of voice and turn of phrase, and what lies inside us as individuals who are reflecting over the question. The minor issue about what makes us human was, of course, a side attraction, which will hopefully allow these keen students of the liberal arts to proceed through the rest of their voyage in college with some carefully examined and deeply felt sentiments about their place in this universe.

Gizem Karaali is an associate professor of mathematics at Pomona College. This is an abridged and adapted version of a piece that originally appeared in Inside Higher Education

Spring 2012 Sports Report

 

WOMEN’S WATER POLO

Come Home With Me

Mahalia Prater-Fahey ’15 knew that she was going to be returning home to San Diego at the end of the spring semester. Thanks to her own timely goal, she got to bring her whole team with her too. Prater-Fahey scored the game-winning goal in triple-overtime as the Sagehens earned the SCIAC championship with a 12-11 win over Redlands, earning a bid to the NCAA Tournament, hosted by San Diego State.

The Sagehens drew No. 1-ranked Stanford in the first round. Prater-Fahey added another goal in that contest, and so did Sarah Westcott ’15, who grew up in Menlo Park, Calif., a few miles from Stanford’s campus. Pomona-Pitzer lost the match 17-5, but the five goals were the most the Cardinal allowed in the entire tournament on their way to the national championship. Another consolation: A Bay Area paper noted that top-ranked Stanford would be “facing their academic equals” in the opening round.

TRACK & FIELD

Champ Times Four

Anders Crabo ’12 capped his career by earning All-America honors in the 3000-meter steeplechase, finishing fifth at the NCAA Division III Track and Field Championships. Crabo also made the SCIAC record books by becom- ing only the second student-athlete to win four straight individual titles in the steeplechase in over 100 years of the SCIAC championships. The first four-time steeplechase champion was Occidental’s Phil Sweeney, whose son Luke Sweeney ’13 is a star running back in Sagehen football.

LACROSSE

Should We Bill Her For Some New Nets?

Martha Marich ’12 was named the SCIAC Women’s Lacrosse Player of the Year after end- ing her career with a remarkable 331 goals, despite missing half of her junior year with a knee injury. In one week of play, Marich led the Sagehens to four wins in five days in two cities (Claremont and Tacoma, Wash.), de- spite the team playing without any available substitutes due to injuries. In that span, Marich had 20 goals, including a game-winner with three seconds left in an 11-10 victory over Pacific (Oregon).

WOMEN’S TENNIS:

Battered, but Unbeaten

Sammy Chao ’14 was undefeated against Division III competition playing at No. 2 singles (15-0), despite battling a painful wrist injury for much of the year that required heavy taping before each match. Her only loss in singles all spring came against a nationally ranked Division II player from Cal State L.A. Chao’s efforts helped the Sagehens reach the NCAA Division III regional finals, and she was named to the All-SCIAC first team.

One of the most gallant performances of the spring came as Kara Wang ’13 fought for life in the NCAA West Regional finals. Late in the third set, and needing to win to keep her team’s hopes alive, Wang’s legs began severely cramping. After receiving all of the allowed medical attention, Wang fought on, serving underhanded and hitting high defensive lobs to allow herself time to get back into position and steal rest. Despite her exhaustion, Wang rallied from a 5-2 deficit and brought the match to a tiebreaker, fighting off seven match points in the process. She finally dropped the match 3-6, 7-5, 7-6 (7-2) as Claremont-Mudd- Scripps clinched the 5-3 win, but not without giving the fans a memorable display of toughness.

Mobile Home

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

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

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

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

Backroads scholar Dan Hickstein ’06 writes the guide to mountain biking in Colorado

During his Pomona College days, Dan Hickstein ’06 landed a prestigious Churchill Scholarship to study at Cambridge (where he earned his master’s in physics), co-authored articles for such publications as the Journal of the American Chemical Society and  completed two internships at the National Institutes of Health.

But Hickstein also knows how to let off some steam in the great outdoors, and he recently took a year off from pursuing his Ph.D. in chemical physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder to write The Mountain Biker’s Guide to Colorado, earning rave reviews on amazon. The result: 367 pages chock full o’ trail details and ratings, maps, photos and even tidbits on bike shops and places to eat from Fort Collins to Aspen.

As Hickstein told Colorado Daily:

“A week at a time I’d drive out to some part of Colorado and ride all the trails — and ride them all with a GPS. I wanted to have really good maps in the book. I would ride with digital camera and each time I got to a turn I’d make a point on the GPS and record the instructions as a little movie on my  camera. I spent hours going through the videos and GPS tracks. I really tried to be out there most every day, rain or shine, trying to get the trails ridden and get the research done.”

 

 

 

Susan Beilby Magee ’66 delves into the art and life of Holocaust survivor Kalman Aron

When Susan Beilby Magee ’66 was 6 years old, she posed for a portrait by Kalman Aron, a Holocaust survivor and fine artist who had come to Los Angeles after World War II and was barely eking out a living.

Fifty years later, Aron, a respected portrait and landscape artist, whose com- missioned subjects include Ronald Reagan, Henry Miller and André Previn, would ask Magee to write the story of his life.

The result, nearly 10 years in the making, is Into the Light: The Healing Art of Kalman Aron, co-published in October by Hard Press Editions and Posterity Press, Inc. in association with Hudson Hills Press. A compelling and graceful mix of first-person memoir, biography and commentary, the book is also a comprehensive retrospective of Aron’s work, encompassing 210 stunning color plates and 30 black-and-white images.

Aron and Magee saw each other only sporadically after her 1951 portrait sitting. Graduating in 1966 from Pomona with a B.A. in international relations, Magee became a leader in the women’s movement in Seattle. She was a White House Fellow, earned her M.B.A. at the Wharton School and held positions in domestic finance and economic development in the U.S. Treas- ury and Commerce departments during the Ford and Carter administrations.

“Pomona College,” Magee says, “gave me the foundation that a liberal arts education is supposed to give you. It was a springboard for me to explore and be curious about life.”

In the mid-1980s, Magee’s life took an unexpected turn. She became a certified hypnotherapist and meditation teacher, founded the Washington Circle of Master Healers and is involved with healing pro- grams at the Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage at the Washington National Cathedral.

Meditation would play a part, too, in Magee’s understanding of Aron’s story and how it informed his art. “If you ask Kalman, ‘Why did you paint that particular painting about that subject?,’ he’ll say, ‘I don’t know.’ His work is unconsciously done.

“Yet you can see in his work that he metabolized his experiences,” she says. “In Kalman’s early work, he was painting all of the desolation and lack of light and color that he saw. That was what was going on in- side him. As he regained texture and color in his life, his paintings exploded with it.

“I sat in silence for five months by myself with 10 groups of his paintings,” Magee says. “What was going on in his life at the time he painted them? What was he working out? What was the influence of the Holocaust? I depended on that quiet listening for the answers.”

It was during a mutual visit with Magee’s ailing mother that Aron asked Magee to write his story. (An interior decorator and art patron, Magee’s mother played a major role in Aron’s early success as a portrait painter. “She sent him all her clients,” Magee explains.)

Aron’s request came after seeing the 2002 film The Pianist. Based on a Jewish-Polish musician’s World War II memoir, the film, Magee says, had somehow given Aron the freedom to tell the story he had tried to forget.

“I wasn’t going to have anybody write it,” 88-year-old Aron says from his home in Los Angeles, “because I didn’t want to remember it.” Magee, he says, “did a good job.”

After an initial 18 hours of interviews, Magee’s research took her to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to Europe, where she visited the sites of Aron’s childhood home in Riga and the camps where he was incarcerated in Poland, Germany and then-Czechoslovakia. Among the records that she found was the transit paper marking Aron’s arrival at Buchenwald.

From Prague to Salzburg, Magee followed Aron’s post-liberation route as he fled Russian Army custody. She went to Vienna, where the artist and his first wife lived before emigrating to the United States in 1949, and where Aron attended the Vienna Fine Arts Academy on a full scholarship after the war.

At the site of the Rumbula massacre where Aron’s mother was among 25,000 Jewish Latvians killed over two days in 1941, Magee placed a memorial stone honoring both of Aron’s parents.

Aron, who refuses to go back to Latvia, was uneasy about the trip. “I didn’t want her to go,” he says. “It was brave of her.”

Magee, who is not Jewish, believes, however, that she could not have written the book if not for her own “deep healing journey” as a victim of child abuse. “People who know me know the history of what happened to me,” she adds, “but this is the first time that I’ve written it in print.”

For Magee, one of Aron’s most revelatory pieces is a small, dark painting from the early 1950s called “Kalman Marching in the Camp.” In it, Aron is the skeletal central figure, flanked by smaller faces that appear alternately “wise, sad or terrorized.”

“I realized that those were all aspects of Kalman in the camps,” she says. “But the one that survived is the one upfront and center, the one who is utterly determined to survive, even though he has had to let go of most of his light.

“That’s what he would reclaim,” Magee says. “He wanted to live so that he could see the world and paint it.”

Awkward!

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

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

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

Hen Hunter

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