Olenka Villarreal ’85 with the Magical Bridge playground in Palo Alto, Calif.

Photos By Robert Durell

Children crowd onto the wheelchair-accessible spinning dish at the Magical Bridge playground.

ON A SUNNY WINTER morning, Olenka Villarreal ’85 is appointing kindness ambassadors, handing out smiley-face stickers to children taking a break from spinning on a giant dish at the sprawling Magical Bridge in Palo Alto, the accessible, socially inclusive playground that she founded.

Boys and girls reach out their hands, exclaiming “I want blue!” “I want red!”

“Will you be extra kind on the playground today?” asks Villarreal. They nod, promising yes, yes. After weeks of rain and chill, the playground is packed with visitors of all ages: a beaming Asian grandmother swings on a disc, and a father shouts “3-2-1, blast-off!” and sends his son in a cardboard box down a slide.

When Villarreal’s 14-year-old daughter Ava arrives, she skips and claps. Though non-verbal, her joy and excitement are clear. Villarreal hugs her daughter, who stands taller than her, and strokes her soft, fine blonde hair.

Magical Bridge, which opened in 2015 at a cost of $4 million, is the only local playground where Ava can run—elsewhere, she trips over the sand or is too big to get onto the equipment sized for younger children. She loves dashing across the bridges that connect the playhouse to the slide mound. “At any other park, she towers over everybody, but when you design for everybody, no one stands out,” Villarreal says.

Now, after hearing from people in Taipei, Greece, and from across the country, she has her sights set on creating Magical Bridges around the world through her new foundation. “I was ready to take a break, but then I received an avalanche of emails and calls. I can’t physically get to everyone who asks questions, so my goal is to create a model that is far less expensive and easily replicable.”

Villarreal’s project has now become her calling, one that began when her daughter was born in 2003. As a baby, Ava struggled to sit up and stand and did not start walking until she was three years old. Eventually, at the advice of doctors, Villarreal started taking her daughter to expensive indoor occupational therapy sessions at a center located 45 minutes away, where Ava could work on improving her balance and coordination. The center was so booked she could only schedule a session for her daughter once a week, and she wanted to go somewhere daily where they lived, in her hometown of Palo Alto.

Families take advantage of a beautiful day at the Magical Bridge in Palo Alto.

At local playgrounds, she searched for swings, with their therapeutic vestibular w (back and forth) movement, but Ava lacked the strength to sit up in bucket seats or hold onto the swing chains. Frustrated, she met with the city’s director of parks and recreation, hoping he might be able to direct her to a playground that met the needs of Ava and children like her. She learned that the city’s playgrounds were all ADA compliant, but that the guidelines center around access for individuals in wheelchairs and other mobility issues, with ramps and paved walkways; they aren’t designed for children with impaired hearing and vision, developmental, sensory, cognitive or autism spectrum disorders.

Olenka Villarreal ’85 is joined at the playground by her two daughters, Ava (center) and Emma.

One in five Americans has a disability, and one in 45 is on the autism spectrum, which has led to a growing push for playgrounds designed for people of all abilities. As Villarreal soon discovered, parents have often led the charge, motivated by their child: Tatum’s Garden in Gilroy, Matteo’s Dream in Concord, and Shane’s Inspiration in Los Angeles.

The city struck a deal with Villarreal. If she raised money for the playground’s design and construction, the city would donate almost an acre of land in Mitchell Park. “I was grateful for the land. Around here, land is gold,” she says. “Maybe I was naïve, but I thought, we’re in Silicon Valley, how hard can it be to raise money? I didn’t know how much it would cost, or what it would entail.”

She launched her grassroots campaign, recruiting co-founders Jill Asher, to work on public and media relations, and Kris Loew, who designed the logo, flyers and other marketing materials. She also drew upon the support of her family: her husband, Robert, donated wines from his collection for her volunteer meetings—“You have to keep the board happy!” she says—and their older daughter, Emma, came up with the playground’s name while sitting in the back seat of the car, scrawling down ideas in her notebook. Anytime someone crosses over the bridge leading into the playground, they would find themselves in a magical place where barriers to play no longer existed, thus bridging the gap between those living with and without disabilities.

Because Villarreal knew donors might hesitate to write checks to a brand-new group, she joined the board of the Friends of the Palo Alto Parks, a trusted local nonprofit that acted as a fiscal sponsor to collect the contributions. “When the board saw the magnitude of my project, they thought I was a cockeyed optimist,” Villarreal says with a laugh. “But they were willing to stick it out, to see how far I could get.”

After a career in sales and marketing in Silicon Valley, she was returning to an interest in civic engagement first kindled at Pomona, where she had studied public policy and economics. As she embarked on fundraising, she deepened her research into inclusive playgrounds to incorporate into the design.

Physical access allows children to get around the playground and get into close proximity to play activities, while social access emphasizes how children can play together. “From a very young age, so much of play is a social experience,” says Keith M. Christensen, a play and accessibility specialist who advised Villarreal. “When you are participating equally, you are able to use your abilities and your strengths without the need for assistance or adaptations that might draw attention to differences rather than to similarities.”

Within two years, Villarreal and her volunteers raised about $600,000, but they lacked a detailed set of plans to win over bigger donors. When she despaired, she pictured returning the hundreds of individual donations if she gave up. She also knew people were counting on her. “As my husband said, ‘If we don’t get this park, we’ll have to move out of Palo Alto!’”

She was also dealing with the challenges of caring for Ava, who sometimes had seizures at school while Villarreal was hosting volunteer meetings. “I’d have to rush her to the ER, and I’d tell them to just to continue,” she recalls. “You know that stage when your child is one year old, when they’re getting up once or twice a night, they’re in diapers, and you’re feeding them? I’m still in that.”

Palo Alto stepped up with money to pay for plans and assigned a landscape architect, Peter Jensen, to help shepherd and advocate for the project. “That was a huge leap forward,” she says. After that, they hit their fundraising goal within a year and a half.

Villarreal brought a personal, passionate touch to her pitches, according to Asher, a co-founder. She asked a mother of a child with special needs to make chocolate chip cookies that they brought to every donor meeting.

“We leave them munching on cookies,” she told Asher. “Every time they put a cookie in their mouth, they’ll think of us.”

Added Loew, the other co-founder: “She’s hard to say ‘no’ to—she finds a job for you, and it feels really good to help. She makes everyone feel special.”

At the Magical Bridge, Villarreal makes visitors feel special, too, chatting with the helpful, bustling air of an innkeeper. “You like it here? Do you know the story of this place?” she asks a curly-haired dad leaning against a wall as his toddler rattles metal bells shaped like flowers that stand as tall as him

“It’s my first time here,” he says. “I read a little bit about it online. My son loves the bells.”

The playground is divided into seven play zones: swing and sway, slides, spin, music, tots, a kindness corner picnic area, and playhouse/ stage. Grouping the activities together helps visitors of all abilities navigate the Magical Bridge, which also stands apart from other playgrounds because of how it showcases innovative artists.

Jen Lewin’s interactive laser harp sculptures have been featured at Burning Man, the desert arts festival popular with tech workers. The sculpture—which senses user movement, speed and tempo—is irresistible, inviting people to twirl and hurl their limbs and their bodies under the arch.

“If it’s approachable to everyone, then it’s successful,” Lewin says. “My mission has been to make public art that engages the community.”

George Zisadis’s motion sensors trigger audio recordings: the squishy suck of mud, the slosh of puddles, crunch of autumn leaves, and quacking ducks. You can’t help but run through it again and again, trying to figure out how it works. “It’s been great seeing the installation become part of the daily experience of the playground,” he says, “offering moments of delight.”

Barbara Butler—a custom builder of luxury play structures, whose clients include actor Robert Redford and singer Bobby McFerrin—designed the whimsical, wheelchair-accessible, two-story playhouse and lookout built around a stony pine.

As Villarreal makes her way through the Magical Bridge, she greets friends and newcomers alike. “Many years from now, when we’re no longer here, I hope that people will know Ava’s story, and will say hello to her,” she says. “She loves when people say hello.”

For many families like Villarreal’s, Magical Bridge has become a welcome routine. Every week, a van transports medically-fragile children to the playground. A mother takes her 35-year-old son; in the past, she had to wait until night fell to bring him to playgrounds so people wouldn’t stare and ask questions. A girl in a tiara and a wheelchair—dubbed by Villarreal as the “Princess of the Playground”—is another regular.

Because not every family can get to the Magical Bridge, Villarreal is trying to bring it to them. She and her co-founders formed a nonprofit foundation to replicate two Magical Playgrounds in neighboring cities. If the city makes a financial commitment, the foundation will help raise the rest. Redwood City was the first to join forces with the foundation, and if fundraising stays on track, the next Magical Bridge will break ground late this year or in early 2018.

A wall around part of the playground bears messages of kindness and encouragement.

In late February, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted to set aside $10 million to go toward at least five inclusive, accessible playgrounds. Groups such as the Rotary Club and the Magical Bridge Foundation would raise matching funds. “It’s great not only for Santa Clara kids and families, but it also demonstrates to other parts of the nation that this is something people can do,” said Supervisor Joe Simitian, who co-sponsored the proposal.  “If we each take a little piece of responsibility, we can do something extraordinary. That fits very well with the Magical Bridge approach.”

With each playground, they gain expertise, Villarreal says, learning how to bring down costs, and exploring different equipment options. By the time the foundation finishes its third playground, she aims to sell packages of construction drawings and components that can be customized to work in a variety of terrains, spaces and budgets at parks and schools, spreading the magic of Magical Bridge. “This has been a transformative journey. Doing this type of work is so fulfilling,” she says. “We’re doing something for families. It makes me want to do more of it, to get out and leave our little mark on the planet.”

Winston Dickson 1904 (in bowler hat), Pomona’s first Black graduate, chats with members of the Class of 1906 football team. See “Strangers in a Strange Land,” page 30. (From the Boynton Collection of the Claremont Colleges Digital Library)

It begins with two alternating voices, each carefully modulated for audio recording:

“I’m Saahil Desai.”

“I’m Kevin Tidmarsh.”

“And this is ‘Hidden Pomona.’”

The podcast’s signature burst of electric piano music swells, then vamps in the background as Tidmarsh picks up the thread: “Hidden Pomona is a podcast about the forgotten, obscure and overlooked parts of Pomona College’s history. We’ll be releasing episodes every other Friday until the end of April. Stick with us as we uncover the hidden history of our school.”

The theme music fades, and the story begins…

Looking back, the two classmates and friends agree that the idea of a podcast first came to them in the fall of their senior year, in Professor Susan McWilliams’ class on W.E.B. Du Bois and his famous book, The Souls of Black Folk. McWilliams recalls that both Kevin Tidmarsh ’16 and Saahil Desai ’16 were excited about their final projects, which involved a journalistic approach that dovetailed with their career interests. For Tidmarsh, it was research into the history of the Black population of his hometown, South Bend, Ind. It was Desai’s project, however—digging deeply into the life of Pomona’s first Black student, Winston Dickson, Class of 1904—that would open their eyes to new possibilities.

As he uncovered lost details from Dickson’s time at Pomona and Harvard Law School and his subsequent career as an attorney in his segregated hometown of Houston, Texas, Desai was struck by the relevance of this little-known story to Pomona students today. “As a student of color at Pomona, it’s hard to feel like you have a stake in its history,” he explains. “It’s much easier, I think, to connect to your school and feel like you belong there when you see other people who have done that in past decades and past generations. So I think doing that research project made me really more connected to the school, but it also made me realize that I wish these stories were more accessible at a broader level.”

As the students discussed these ideas with McWilliams, a plan began to take form that would lead them in a new and wholly unexpected direction. “Somehow, we got to talking about how Pomona is a place where—especially compared to other elite institutions—we have very little written-down history,” McWilliams remembers. “And so, those casual conversations, as they do sometimes at a place like Pomona, became a formal proposal for them to do an independent study—where they would take what they learned in four years of politics classes and their education more generally and do this podcast about hidden episodes in Pomona’s history, especially those that had something to do with what we in political science would call the political development of the institution.”

And so, in the last semester of both students’ four years at Pomona, Hidden Pomona was born. Its purpose was simple—to tell obscure but relevant stories from Pomona’s past in the friendly style of radio journalism. “It’s almost like you’re sitting someone down in a coffee shop or in a bar or whatever and telling them the story—it’s just that you can’t see the other person,” Tidmarsh says. “You don’t know who the other person is, but you still want to try to capture that same sort of intimacy with the listener. So that was one hundred percent what we were trying to do—just tell stories.”

Their first episode grew directly out of Desai’s research paper, focusing on Pomona’s early students of color. The next two—on the bombing of the Politics Department in w Carnegie Hall in the late ’60s and the relationship between Pomona College’s founders and their Native American predecessors in the Claremont area—were topics that had long intrigued them both. The final two episodes—examining Pomona’s secret society known as Mufti and relating the story of the Japanese-American students at Pomona during the World War II-era internment—were developed on the fly.

“It wasn’t like we had a set-in-stone schedule from the beginning,” Tidmarsh recalls. “And it was great to have Professor McWilliams be so flexible with what we were trying to do. She was basically just like, ‘Hey, if you have a good idea, go out and do it.’” As a result, he says, they felt free to follow their own curiosity. “And we figured that, hey, if we’re wondering about this, there’s probably a good number of other people at Pomona who are wondering the same thing,” he adds.

McWilliams describes her own role in the process as a mix of sounding board and cheerleader.

“I’ll tell you what I told their parents at graduation,” she says with a laugh, “which is that in some ways, it was the easiest independent study ever to supervise. They would come to my office, sketch out this elaborate plan for an episode. I would ask a couple of questions, but they knew what they were doing, so mostly, I said, ‘Yep, sounds good to me.’ And they’d come back two weeks later with an episode and plans for the next one. It really was probably the most independent independent study I’ve ever supervised, which is really a tribute to how competent and talented they were.”

Hidden Pomona creators Kevin Tidmarsh ’16 (left) and Saahil Desai ’16

But if they made it look easy at the time, today they remember their struggles and failures as clearly as their triumphs. Though both had some journalistic experience, having written for the student newspaper, The Student Life, neither student had ever tackled anything so complex or demanding as a podcast. For each of the five episodes, there was in-depth research to be done, interviews to be conducted, scripts to be written and rewritten, music to be chosen, voice-overs to be perfected, final edits to be completed, deadlines to be met, and through it all, a range of new technical details to be mastered.

“There were definitely new skills we had to develop along the way,” Desai says. “When I’m listening to them now, I realize how the episodes progressed in quality. There was definitely a big learning curve that we had to overcome.”

“Yeah,” Tidmarsh agrees. “Right around episode three is when I can start listening to them and not feel totally ashamed of the editing.”

The high-water mark of their work that spring, they agree, was their fourth episode—focusing on Mufti, the decades-old secret society known for papering the campus late at night with small slips of glue-backed paper known as burgers, bearing succinct little messages full of double entendres, sly jokes and cryptic allusions to the most current campus controversies, from grade inflation to the difficulty of getting ice in the dining room.

“The research there was the most ambitious,” Desai says. “We definitely went into it having no idea whether it would all materialize. That was really scary at first, but everything came together. We put a lot of time into that, and it all really kind of came together at the last minute.” One of the things he learned from that episode, he says, was: Never stop hunting for new information. “I’m just glad that w we kept on researching through the entire process and didn’t give up at any point.”

In fact, they were about halfway through recording the episode when new information forced them to start all over. But as a result of their persistence, the finished product included the first-ever recorded interviews with members of the secret society itself, as well as a revealing discussion of the group’s eccentric induction process with Conor O’Rourke ’03, whose effort to join the group was ultimately interrupted by graduation.

After the episode aired, the secret group even acknowledged Hidden Pomona in one of its signature burgers, with the comment: “Mufti Saalutes Hidden Tidbits: Catch Us If You Conor!”

“That was great,” Tidmarsh recalls. “I never would’ve thought as a first-year I would’ve been name-checked by Mufti before I graduated.”

That burger may have been the oddest bit of feedback they received, but it was far from the first or last. “Initially, I wasn’t sure how many people on campus, how many students would be interested in it,” Desai recalls. “So it was satisfying that there were a lot of students that came up to us and told us that they really enjoyed listening to it, which was a nice thing to hear.”

They also heard from a number of alumni as the podcasts were passed from friend to friend on social media. “Our audience just kept getting bigger and bigger with each episode,” Tidmarsh says. “I think the biggest one was probably the Mufti episode.”

Looking back at what they learned during that frenetic final semester, the things that stand out in their minds aren’t the technical details they mastered, but less tangible lessons in project management and persistence. “I think the biggest thing that we learned,” Tidmarsh says, “was probably how to take a super ambitious project like Hidden Pomona and make it manageable—break it down into steps and processes that in the end lead to a finished product.”

The project also gave their fledgling careers an unexpected boost. After graduation, Desai was accepted for a highly competitive internship with the NPR news program Morning Edition, after which he moved on to his current job as an editor with the Washington Monthly, a political magazine in the nation’s capital. After taking some time off due to an illness in his family, Tidmarsh applied for and won the same NPR internship that Desai had just vacated.

“I think it’s definitely paid off way more than I thought it would, honestly,” Desai says. “I didn’t do this project for a semester with the idea that, ‘Oh, I’m going to do it just so I can get a job or it can lead to some career opportunities,’ but it’s been so helpful for that, I think, for both of us.”

Without Hidden Pomona, both students say, that sought-after internship would probably have gone to other applicants with more impressive résumés. “I had been editor of TSL but that only gets you so far,” Tidmarsh says. “And being able to say that you have experience putting together an ambitious audio project—that’s big. That definitely was something that I think they were looking for.”

For her part, McWilliams considers the project a perfect conclusion to a Pomona education. “I thought it was one of those projects that are a testament to liberal arts education—where the two of them, at the end of college, put a lot of things together that they’d learned and came up with this interesting and innovative project that made a serious contribution to their community. And so, I was very proud of them.”

Today, a year after the last of the five episodes was released, all five remain available to listeners online on the podcast-hosting site SoundCloud, as well as on iTunes and Google Play. They’ve also become an official part of Pomona history, in both the Pomona College Archives and the special collections of the Library of The Claremont Colleges, which also plans to offer them for download.

That kind of availability was exactly what Hidden Pomona’s creators had in mind.

“That was one hundred percent an intention of the project,” Tidmarsh says, “so that people 20, 30 years from now can use this for their own research and sort of work off the threads of what we have already done.”

It ends as it began, with vamping theme music and two calmly alternating voices.

“Thank you for listening.”

“I’m Saahil Desai.”

“And I’m Kevin Tidmarsh. And this is Hidden Pomona.”

To listen to any of the five podcasts, search for Hidden Pomona at soundcloud.com, iTunes or Google Play.