Blog Articles

Excerpt From Episode 5: Farewell to Pomona

Internment-Camp-and-OrderDesai: “… By now, we can accept as historical fact that the Japanese internment happened in the United States, and most people agree that it’s one of the darkest periods in American history. But the root causes of why the government so explicitly targeted Japanese Americans can be hard to parse out, so we talked to Pomona History Professor Samuel Yamashita. He said that the causes of the internment can be traced back to four distinct historical contexts, starting with the advance of European and American imperialism in the 19th century.”

Yamashita: “But in most of the colonial world, life was highly racialized, and a kind of caste system based on race was created. I’m a native of Hawaii, and I was born in 1946, when Hawaii was still a colony, and the public school system in Hawaii was segregated until 1947. And you may know that President Obama went to a certain private school in Honolulu—Punohou, what was known as Punohou College. Well, there were private schools for each of the major ethnic groups.”

Tidmarsh: “The next context was the nation of Japan’s aggression, starting in 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria. This led to international outcry and sentiments against Japaese people across the world.”

Desai: “The third context was the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment in the U.S., with bans on immigration and property ownership for Japanese-born individuals. …”

Yamashita: “Now the last and smallest context is what one might call the Japanese-American context, which found that young Japanese Americans who had college degrees could not get jobs along the West Coast or in Hawaii, and so a large number of them began to move to Japan. …”

Tidmarsh: “While all of this was happening, Pomona College had started admitting students of Japanese descent from Hawaii. Professor Yamashita’s mother was actually among the students who were encouraged to apply to Pomona, although she didn’t end up attending.”

Yamashita: “Pomona College began to get students from Hawaii in the 1920s, and they were mainly from McKinley High School, the same high school that my mother went to. And I think some of the educators at McKinley High School were from the West Coast, and they were progressive, and they knew about this place called Pomona College.”

Desai: “Almost all of the Japanese American students at Pomona during the 1940s came from one of two places. Either they were from Hawaii, and they were recruited to come out to school here, or they were natives of the Inland Empire, from places like Riverside or Upland. But in spite of these policies of recruiting Japanese students, especially from Hawaii prep schools, there were very few students of Japanese descent at Pomona—probably less than a dozen at any given time.”

Tidmarsh: “The Hisanaga siblings were among the few Japanese American students during the 1940s. There were three in all who ended up attending Pomona—brothers Kazuma and Kazuo, and their sister, Itsue. They each ended up graduating with a Pomona degree, a year apart from each other but under vastly different circumstances. …”

This entire episode is available for download at soundcloud.com, iTunes or Google Play.

Ocelot Country

Ocelot Country: In the endangered ocelot’s struggle for survival, the little cat’s best friend may be Hilary Swarts ’94.
Hilary Swarts ’94 on the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge

Hilary Swarts ’94 on the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge

Photos By Crystal Kelly

SURVIVAL CAN BE A REAL CAT FIGHT when you get squeezed out of your rightful home. When your food supply dwindles. When you are small and cute and easy to run down. Even though you are standoffish and try to keep to yourself.

In 22 countries, from Uruguay to south Texas, the ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), one of smallest and most secretive of all wild cat species, is facing this sad plight. Its habitat—thorn scrub, coastal marshes, tropical and pine-oak forests—has shrunk alarmingly, swaths destroyed by building and farming and other human activity. With diminished space in which to establish territories, find secure denning sites and forage for rodents, birds, snakes, lizards and other prey—plus the increased threat of becoming road kill as highway construction boomed in the 20th century—the ocelot has been in the fight of its life.

Back in the 1960s and early ’70s, ocelots were nearly loved to death. Laws then did not prohibit taking them for exotic pets or hunting them for their beautiful, dramatically marked fur. Babou, Salvador Dali’s frequent sidekick, may have been the most famous of captive ocelots.

In the U.S., as the wild population of these little cats became depleted under development pressures, the fashion industry turned to import, reaching a peak of 140,000 pelts from Central and South American countries in 1970. Toward the end of the century, all these human endeavors had chipped away at the historic U.S. ocelot range—which once stretched from Louisiana to Arizona—cornering the few known remaining individuals in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, where Texas meets the Mexican border and the Gulf of Mexico. Wildlife biologists, scientists, researchers, conservationists and other experts started running the numbers and saw that time was running out. Now, even after several decades of legal protection and some active conservation projects, only 55 or so known individual ocelots remain in the U.S.

Swarts with one of several “Ocelot Crossing” signs on the refuge

Swarts with one of several “Ocelot Crossing” signs on the refuge

There are few rays of sunshine in this grim picture, but one of the brightest landed at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge a little over three years ago in the form of wildlife biologist Hilary Swarts ’94.

Radio-collars are attached with breakable string. This one was dropped by a male bobcat.

Radio-collars are attached with breakable string. This one was dropped by a male bobcat.

CHARMED BY THE PROMISE of year-round Southern California sunshine, Swarts arrived at Pomona in 1990 from the four seasons of Greenwich, Conn., expecting college to be “a safe way to have an adventure.” She had no idea what that adventure would be or where it might lead, but she knew one thing for sure: “I always liked animals like crazy,” she says. “But it was two professors at Pomona who gave me the idea that you could have this kind of career—that jobs [with animals] other than veterinarian or zookeeper were possible.”

Swarts with one of several “Ocelot Crossing” signs on the refuge

Swarts listens to the signal from a radio-collar.

It was in Anthropology Professor James McKenna’s courses on biological anthropology and primate behavior that she first encountered the area of study that would become her path into the world. “Animal behavior!” she says, “I was hooked.”

Another mentor, Biology Professor Rachel Levin, introduced her to the kind of research that would become her life’s work. Assisting Levin in her study of songbirds—including an eventual trip to Panama to study the communication behaviors of bay wrens in their natural habitat—fed Swarts’ enthusiasm and left her convinced that she was on the right track. And at a time when men still dominated the sciences, Levin also gave her confidence that she could succeed. “She showed me how women scientists work,” Swarts recalls. “I got amazing support from her.”

In her senior year, Swarts threw herself straight into fieldwork, flying to Tanzania to spend her study-abroad semester in a wildlife conservation program there. However, midway through the semester, her plan to be immersed in chimpanzee communities took a bad turn: “I broke my ankle, had surgery in Nairobi [Kenya] and spent four weeks at Lake Manyara National Park designing exhibits for the Arusha Natural History Museum.” Instead of taking a planned hike up Mt. Kilimanjaro, she hobbled around on crutches for the rest of her stay.

Despite these disappointments, she returned to Pomona and forged ahead. Since the College had no major in animal behavior, Swarts designed her own, combining the fields of her mentors to create a major in “biological anthropology.”

After graduation, she spent seven years project-hopping—from black howler monkeys in Belize to the famous mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s Parc National des Volcans. “Each work experience was confirmation that I’m doing the right thing,” she says. “I’d see something shiny and think, ‘That’s worth checking out.’ I’ve stumbled into some pretty amazing situations.”

If she had to pick a favorite, she says, it would be the time she spent in Suriname, monitoring a troop of capuchin and squirrel monkeys. “I lived in a hut with no electricity. The wildlife was mind-blowing. You’d stand still for five minutes, and all around you would come alive. Life was work and reading books and planning what to have for dinner and socializing with the locals.” She built up her explorer skill set by wielding a machete to cut trails and map sections of unexplored rain forest.

But eventually, despite all the “cool stuff” she was doing, Swarts began to wonder if she was missing the bigger picture. As an undergraduate, she had felt certain about two things: “I would not go to graduate school, and I would never work for the government.” Now, however, those vows were beginning to feel limiting. “I missed education and being surrounded by people who are curious and informed. I was ready to get into more academics.”

Entering the ecology program at the University of California, Davis, she earned a Ph.D. in ecology with an emphasis on conservation. Then, shrugging off that “never working for the government” notion, she took a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, working on regulatory projects involving endangered species. “Regulatory work is so important,” she emphasizes. But after a while, the day-to-day responsibilities of what she terms “desk biology” began to wear. “It’s soul-crushing work,” she explains. “You know exactly what each day, a month ahead, will be.”

So, when a job opening in the wilds of south Texas popped up in her email for a wildlife biologist charged with leading the hands-on effort to save the ocelot in the U.S., she leapt at the challenge.

THE LAGUNA ATASCOSA National Wildlife Refuge is a flat, sunbaked remnant of coastal prairie mixed with thorn bush, bordering on a vast hypersaline lagoon across from South Padre Island. Its dense thicket of low scrub is home to—at last count—15 of the remaining ocelots still living in the U.S., and for Swarts, it’s where the fight to save them from extinction is being waged.

Meeting with her here can feel like a bracing seminar in All Things Ocelot. For starters, she’ll whip her refuge pickup into her driveway (on Ocelot Road, of course) and say, pointing at the license plate  on her 2000 Buick LeSabre, “Look!” The plate says “OCELOT” (of course), and the vanity fee collected by the State of Texas goes to Friends of Laguna Atascosa for outreach programs.

More important, it quickly becomes clear that she’s a walking compendium of information about the species she’s working to rescue. “We think that these Texas ocelots may have developed great fidelity to thick underbrush because of pursuit by hunters back in the 1960s,” she explains. More facts come tumbling out: Two-thirds of births are single, after a gestation of 79 to 82 days. Kittens stay with their mothers, to learn survival and hunting skills, for up to two years. “Although,” she adds, “I’m beginning to think it may be closer to a year and a half, if the teaching goes well and there is a reliable prey base. And the past two winters have been super wet, so there’s been prey out the wazoo.”

Swarts visits a wildlife underpass under construction. Though currently flooded, it will be dry when complete.

Swarts visits a wildlife underpass under construction. Though currently flooded, it will be dry when complete.

The first confirmed ocelot kitten at the refuge in 20 years. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo)

The first confirmed ocelot kitten at the refuge in 20 years.
(U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo)

Swarts holds a sedated ocelot, who was then given a radio collar and released. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo)

Swarts holds a sedated ocelot, who was then given a radio collar and released. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service photo)

Working with ocelots, because they stay so well hidden, is different from her previous fieldwork, when she could watch the animals she was studying in their own environment (such as following gorillas around as they nosed about on their daily routines, which she describes as “total soap opera”). In fact, the only time Swarts and her small staff of interns actually see ocelots in the flesh is during trapping season, from October to May, when the little cats are lured by caged pigeons posing as an easy meal, then sedated long enough for blood and genetic samples to be taken. After a quick exam and insertion of a microchip, they are photographed, fitted with a GPS collar, given reversal drugs and released.

“With the ocelots, I’m essentially doing detective work,” she explains. Across the refuge, there are more than 50 cameras tucked into the thorn scrub, monitoring animal activity night and day. Using cameras and GPS collars may not be as immediately satisfying as shadowing gorillas, but it’s the only way she can keep tabs on the elusive little creatures she’s trying to save.

For instance, last year, on March 25, 2016, a heavily pregnant female was captured for routine data collection and then released. On the following two days, GPS signals from her collar indicated that she was staying put, likely in a den. After a few weeks, GPS showed more activity—she was almost certainly leaving the den for water, repeat behavior that is usual for a lactating female. “On April 15, when we knew she was away and couldn’t detect us, we found the little kitten, tucked under some Spartina. A male, healthy, weighing less than a pound, with his eyes just opened.” Swarts, who took hair samples, DNA swabs and his baby picture (below), was ecstatic to document and report this first confirmed ocelot den at the refuge in 20 years.

“From my perspective they are doing their job—reproducing,” she says. “And ecologically we are in great shape.” However, she has grave concerns that the confirmed refuge population of 15, including kittens, may be approaching capacity. Home range for a female varies from one to nine square miles, depending on the availability of water and prey. For a male, figure four to 25 square miles.

That brings us to exhibit one for the three top threats to survival of the species—habitat loss. Hemmed in by agriculture, highways and industry, the refuge itself can’t be greatly expanded. The other Texas ocelots, about 40 individuals, live on limited private lands in neighboring Willacy County, with no safe passage connecting the populations.

And that leads directly to the second threat—vehicular mortality, which stands at an astounding 40 percent. Swarts cites the ugly statistics that piled up between June 2015 and April 2016, when seven ocelots, including six males, were killed by vehicles on roads adjacent to fragile ocelot territory.

Which brings us to the third item on Swarts’ list of top threats to the ocelot’s long-term survival: in-breeding, which occurs when populations are so isolated that no new genes can get into the mix. Even before her arrival in Texas, efforts to freshen the gene pool by bringing in a female ocelot from Tamaulipas, Mexico, had started and stopped several times, partly due to cartel violence. Still, she remains optimistic that, with research and negotiation, a female from Mexico will eventually be allowed to cross the border.

Progress is agonizingly slow—as Swarts stoically puts it, “Conservation is often two steps forward and one step back.” However, she has begun to see encouraging signs. The refuge has cranked up an aggressive habitat restoration project—planting ocelot corridors, extensions of the habitat that ocelots are known to use, with the low-growing, bushy native species they prefer. As a precaution against vehicular mortality, the refuge has closed some of its roads and plans to relocate its entrance. Most heartening, the Texas Department of Transportation is installing 12 new underpasses specifically designed for ocelots at known hot spots on two highways where there have been multiple incidents of road kill. “And now it seems likely they will put wildlife crossings into new road design from the start,” she adds. “This is a sea change—and for this state agency to come around bodes so well for the state and its environmental future.”

The work is hard, sometimes tricky and frequently thankless. However, it also has its rewards. “I love the element of variety in my job,” she says. “The nuts and bolts. Speaking the legalese. Ocelot outreach. Hearing people’s questions. I get fired up; they get fired up.”
Best of all, there are the little discoveries, the aha moments that move her work forward. That den discovered in April? “It was a surprise to find it in an open area, not in super dense brush,” she explains. It’s new ocelot information, the kind that can drive new policy and practice. In this case, it may lead to a new prescribed burn protocol designed to leave a protective margin outside the brush.

For Swarts, as always, it’s about rethinking the ongoing help this little cat needs, using clues from her ongoing research, then doing whatever it takes. “I want to do everything I can to give these cats the best chance to survive.”

Zoot Suit Reboot

Zoot Suit Reboot: Rose Portillo ’75 relives her Zoot Suit dream 40 years later.
Rose Portillo ’75 and co-star Daniel Valdez in a 1978 rehearsal of Zoot Suit and reunited in 2016 for the famous play’s revival.

Rose Portillo ’75 and co-star Daniel Valdez in a 1978 rehearsal of Zoot Suit (below) and reunited in 2016 for the famous play’s revival (above).

IN 1978, A YOUNG ACTOR fresh out of college got the role of her dreams. Rose Portillo ’75 was cast as Della Barrios in the then-new Chicano play Zoot Suit, written by one of her heroes, the father of Chicano theatre and founder of El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez.

Nearly four decades after her first audition for Zoot Suit, Portillo, now a lecturer in Pomona’s Theatre Department, found herself auditioning before Valdez one more time last year for the revival of this now-classic Chicano play, which ran from January to mid-March at the Mark Taper Forum.

“I auditioned in the same room I auditioned in 40 years ago with the same person I auditioned for 40 years ago and with the same person across the table from me from 40 years ago,” says Portillo. “So, you know, when I walked in the room, we just looked at each other and I said, ‘OK, I need to take a moment’—it’s very surreal.”

PCM-Spring2017web01_Page_23_Image_0002The play, written by Valdez, is based on the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riots that occurred in early 1940s Los Angeles. The play tells the story of Henry Reyna and the 38th Street gang, who were tried and found guilty of murder, and their subsequent journey to freedom.

Zoot Suit premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in April 1978, and sold out in two days. The play debuted on Broadway the following year, and was turned into a feature film in 1981. Portillo, who played Della Barrios, Reyna’s girlfriend, was in every production. In this current run of Zoot Suit, Portillo will play the role of Dolores, Reyna’s mother.

Portillo was first introduced to Chicano theatre as a theatre major here in the early 1970s. “While I was at Pomona, I saw ‘La Gran Carpa de los Rasquachis’ that had a weekend performance at the Mark Taper Forum. It was a Teatro Campesino play and it resonated so deeply with me—it was one of those moments that you don’t know what you’re missing until you see it. So, I got on a committee to bring Luis Valdez—to bring El Teatro Campesino—to campus.” Luckily for Portillo, the committee’s efforts were successful and Valdez paid a visit to Pomona soon after.

Portillo, who is also the director of Theatre for Young Audiences, a program of Pomona College’s Draper Center for Community Partnerships, started writing and performing plays while still in elementary school. She was cast in everything that was produced on campus—from Tennessee Williams to the Shakespeare canon. And Portillo’s parents, who lived in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood, came to see all of her performances.

It was at Pomona that Portillo first came to identify as a Chicana—a term her parents balked at in an era when the word had negative connotations for older generations like her parents, who rarely talked in-depth about their heritage. “On Parents Day, the Chicano Studies Department had a program and they read the poem ‘Yo Soy Joaquin’ and other Chicano poetry. I turned to my father, and he was weeping, and it was never an issue after that.”

Reclaiming her identity and finding her love for Chicano theatre helped Portillo as she built her career—giving her a voice when the roles for Latinas were nothing more than one-dimensional stereotypes.

When Portillo was cast for the role of Della in Zoot Suit, her agent let her know she wouldn’t be able to take the role because she had already committed to another project, a film.

Portillo’s response to her agent: “I told her, ‘That movie is a movie, and this is a dream. You’re not stepping on my dream. This is my dream. Make it happen.’ And she did.”

And her parents were right there beside her. Once the play moved to Broadway, her parents went to New York to accompany her, with her mother staying longer to soak in the city.

Fast forward to 2017, and Portillo’s mother will be there on opening night of the revival of Zoot Suit, nearly four decades after it first premiered in the same theatre in Los Angeles. “She’s 84. A lot of our parents are gone, but she’s still around. I think she would’ve killed Luis [Valdez] if I didn’t get the role.”

For Portillo, the opportunity to be part of Zoot Suit in 2017 is just as special as it was in 1978. “It’s very rare that you get to live a full circle within a play, but with such a piece of history—to be able to be part of that history again, there are just no words for it,” she says.

“It was timely when it happened. To see Mexicans on stage in original theatre doing a play about a Mexican-American story was earth-shattering and groundbreaking. We sold out before we opened, and to come back in this particular moment of our national history makes it all the more important again.”

“And personally, it’s so historic for me, to be able to be this age and, at this point in my career, to be able to physically and viscerally revisit this—wearing different shoes and being older and wiser, it’s just… It was a dream the first time; it’s a dream the second time.”

Fact or Myth

The Shakespeare Garden

Some of these old tales about Pomona are actually true. Others are sheer fabrications or exaggerations. Still others remain mysteries. Can you tell which ones are fact, which are fiction, and which are unknown?

Huns to Hens1. Huns to Hens

Legend has it that Pomona got its unique mascot, the Sagehen, because of a bit of century-old political correctness and some creative cost-avoidance. The original Pomona mascot was far more warlike than the current flightless bird—the Huns. However, that name lost its luster when the U.S. entered World War I in 1917 and the popular epithet for the enemy became you-know-what. The teams had already invested in uniforms bearing the word “HUNS,” so to save money, the “U” was changed to an “E” and they became the “HENS.”

 


The Shakespeare Garden2. The Shakespeare Garden

Almost every student has heard the story that the border of Marston Quad is home to a garden containing plants mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays—pansies, fennel, willows and rosemary from Hamlet, violets and thyme from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, daffodils from A Winter’s Tale, daisies from Love’s Labour’s Lost, and so on. According to the tale, every plant mentioned in the Bard’s body of work is to be found somewhere in the garden.

 


Things That Go Bump3. Things That Go Bump

There are several persistent tales of ghosts on the Pomona campus. There’s Walter, the worker who fell off the roof of Bridges Auditorium during its construction and has haunted the place ever since, playing pranks with the lights and appearing in shadowy passageways. There’s Gwendolyn, who died in the old Claremont Hotel before it became Sumner Hall and occasionally can be seen or heard in its lower level or bell tower. And there’s Nila, the ghost of a young woman who reportedly wanders the attic and hallways of Seaver House.

 


The Flying Sailboat4. The Flying Sailboat

A classic prank that has become Pomona legend happened in 1978. The place was Frary Hall, or rather, the rafters of Frary Hall. In a scene worthy of a Magritte painting, students arriving for breakfast one morning found a 13-foot sailboat suspended in space high above the tables, with sails set and framed in Pomona blue.

 

 


The Duke and the Madonna5. The Duke and the Madonna

Is that Little Bridges behind John Wayne and Charles Coburn in the movie Trouble Along the Way? That, at least, is the story, which includes Wayne coming to campus in 1952 as Pomona played the role of a small Catholic college in the film. That visit is also remembered for a double-take moment when the sculpture of the flutist in the fountain in Lebus Court was covered by a fake statue of the Madonna.


The Borg and the Borg6. The Borg and the Borg

The story goes that the Borg of TV fame—the swarming, half-cybernetic zombies from Star Trek: The Next Generation who lived in a cube with warrens of maze-like hallways—got its name from Pomona’s Borg—otherwise known as the Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages and International Relations, also known for its warrens of maze-like hallways.

 

 


7. Winner and Still Champion…

Winner and Still Champion...

The Men’s Glee Club of 1932 took first place in the Pacific Southwest Glee Club Championship in San Diego, then traveled to St. Louis to compete in the first-ever National Championship, which they won. And since the first National Glee Club Championship also turned out to be the last National Glee Club Championship, Pomona can still lay claim to being the reigning champ.

 


The Roosevelt Shovel and Oak8. The Roosevelt Shovel and Oak

According to legend, the shovel that Pomona presidents bring out to break ground for new buildings was used by President Theodore Roosevelt to plant a California live oak on campus during his visit in 1903. Arriving at the Claremont train station, Roosevelt was transported by carriage to campus where he spoke to a throng of 7,000 to 8,000 people from a rostrum in front of Pearsons, later planting the tree, which survives to this day.


All Numbers Equal 479. All Numbers Equal 47

The 47 craze at Pomona started in 1964 when Donald Bentley, then Professor of Statistics, presented a paradoxical proof with the title, ”Why all numbers are equal to 47.” Two students in a summer program, Laurens “Laurie” Mets ’68 and Bruce Elgin ’68, then embarked upon their own tongue-in-cheek experiment to determine whether the number 47 occurred more often in nature than other numbers, and the rest is history.

 

 


Fact or Myth Answers.

Fact or Myth: Answers

Back to Fact or Myth.

1. This is at least partially a myth. The nickname “Sage Hen” appeared in The Student Life as early as 1913, when sports editor E.H. Spoor 1915 wrote, “Once again the Oxy Tiger wanders from his lair and comes to peaceful, peaceful Claremont with intent to murder. The Sage Hen will fight—on the field. On the campus she is entirely amicable.” “Hen” and “Hun” were used interchangeably until around 1918, when the latter disappeared, possibly because of its wartime connotations.

2. This is a great story, but it’s also a complete fabrication. Students have passed the story down to other students for many years, but there has never been a Shakespeare Garden on Pomona’s campus. No one knows how the myth got started.

3. Myth? Probably. But there are those who say they’ve experienced strange things in these buildings and become reluctant believers, so let’s brand it unknown. Some of the facts behind the stories, at least, might be true. We have been told that a record exists in Big Bridges’ archives mentioning an unnamed worker who was killed during construction, and that the L.A. Times reported a death at the old hotel that became Sumner. However, we’ve been unable to confirm either claim.

4. This story is factual and describes one of the most inventive and challenging pranks ever performed on the Pomona campus. Michael Brazil ’79, who was interviewed by PCM in 2002, was one of a group of friends who conceived the daring plan and carried it out.

5. All of this is true, including the Madonna, for which there is also photographic evidence.

6. Only one person really knows if this is true, and he isn’t talking, so let’s call it unknown. Joe Menosky ’79 reportedly lived in Oldenborg during his college years and played a role in creating the Borg as a writer for Star Trek: The Next Generation. To our knowledge, however, he has never confirmed or denied this claim.

7. This is all true, though the “reigning champion” part is a humorous take on an odd situation, not a serious claim.

8. The story about the shovel, so far as we can tell, is completely factual. The shovel has an inscription on the front of the handle noting that it was a gift from the Class of 1898, and another on the back noting that it was used by President Roosevelt on May 3, 1903. However, the tree part is false. The original Roosevelt tree died shortly after planting and was quietly replaced.

9. Professor Bentley was, indeed, known on campus for this tongue-in-cheek, fallacious proof that all numbers equal 47 (or any other number), and Mets and Elgin did start the 47 hunt that has continued to this day.

The Right Side of History

History can be complicated, and institutions that span centuries are lucky if they don’t find themselves on the wrong side of it on occasion. So I suppose it should come as no surprise that a lot of American colleges and universities are struggling today with the moral implications of their complicated pasts.

In 1838, the priests who ran the Jesuit college that eventually became Georgetown University sold 272 slaves to sugar plantations in Louisiana for the modern equivalent of $3.3 million. That now-infamous sale—which saved the institution at the cost of condemning 272 enslaved men, women and children to even greater suffering—illustrates the conundrum institutional leaders face today as they look back at times when their predecessors failed to rise above the ethical blind spots and moral outrages of their times.

The history of institutional involvement in slavery is, perhaps, the most extreme example of this. In his 2013 book, Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder argues that in addition to church and state, America’s early colleges were “the third pillar of a civilization based on bondage.” In recent years, institutions like Harvard, Brown, Princeton and Emory have also investigated and publicly acknowledged their own historic ties to the slave trade.

Since you can’t change the past, institutions that find themselves on the wrong side of history have to find ways to atone for it today. Georgetown has announced a number of real and symbolic reparations, including a monument to the slaves who were sold, preferential admissions for their descendants and the renaming of buildings in their honor. Similarly, Yale recently decided to rename the residential college that has been, since its construction in 1933, named for John Calhoun, known as slavery’s most forceful political advocate.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from all this, it’s probably that it would be far better to avoid such situations to begin with. But how do you do that? It’s tempting to say: Just do the right thing, even when it’s hard. And in the final analysis, there’s probably no better advice to be found. But at the same time, you only have to look at today’s heated debates over a range of questions to see that culture and self-interest cloud our ethical vision, and people on both sides of an issue can feel morally righteous. Today, it’s almost impossible to imagine how anyone could have ever defended such a barbaric practice as slavery, and yet, we know that in the first half of the 19th century, the topic was angrily debated in this country and became so deeply divisive that it eventually led to civil war.

So what are the divisive issues of our own time that, at some point in the distant future, will seem so ethically obvious that people will wonder how on earth anyone could have gotten them wrong? And what will be the final verdict of history, once time has peeled away the layers of self-interest, political animosity and cultural bias that trouble our ethical sight today? These are questions we probably should all ask ourselves from time to time.

For my part, I think climate change is likely to top the list. Someday, I believe, when the disruptive realities of a warmer world are indisputable facts on the ground, the denial and inaction of many of today’s leaders will be viewed as criminal acts of willful blindness. Philosopher Miranda Fricker suggests that people of all eras should be judged according to “the best standards that were available to them at the time.” By that standard, I think climate deniers will have a lot to answer for someday.

My list doesn’t end there, however. It would also include such things as LGBT rights and the treatment of refugees and undocumented immigrants in this country—which I would argue are the civil rights issues of our time.

In all of these issues, I’m proud to say that the college that employs me to create this magazine puts its money and its people power where its values are. I feel confident that Pomona’s efforts to do the right thing—including its commitment to carbon neutrality by 2030, its sustained efforts on behalf of the LGBT community on our campus, and its leadership in the fight for the undocumented students known as “Dreamers”—will, on these issues, at least, put it very much on the right side of history.

Letter Box

Memories of Virginia Crosby

When our daughter Beatrice [Schraa ’06] was applying to college, she received a brochure saying Pomona professors often formed lifelong friendships with students. That was certainly true of Virginia. I took French 51 from her in the fall of 1968 and several classes after that, including a wonderful seminar on the French Revolution, co-taught with Burdette Poland. My wife, Louise [Schraa ’72], remembers her as one of the friendly and accessible professors whom everyone knew. We kept in touch after graduation, and I was working in Paris when she moved there and acquired the first in a series of tiny but exquisite and wonderfully located apartments. We saw her regularly after that, especially in Paris and then when we lived in Brussels.

For Beatrice, Virginia was literally a lifelong friend. Virginia was at her christening in Paris and, although she couldn’t attend Beatrice’s wedding earlier last year, we had lots of interested emails and calls with good wishes and requests for details and pictures. When she was only 95, Virginia was able to attend the wedding of our daughter Eugenia and spent the evening charming new people and dancing.

You might have thought she would be an honorary grandmother to our girls. Although they certainly knew her better than my mother, that was never the case. Rather, she was always, in the best professorial fashion, an adult friend, even when they were little tykes. Our whole family always looked forward to seeing Virginia, with her interest in all kinds of things, insightful conversation, good humor and fresh outlook, even in very old age. She avoided the old person’s tendency to reminisce, but very occasionally something would prompt a perfect anecdote, about the time she saw Hitler, about her one and only deer hunt, about her radio program with her husband, etc. Very occasionally, in the most discreet and subtle way, there came a nugget of advice or guidance as well. We traded articles, political comments and book recommendations with her until shortly before her death. I owed her a book report every year on the annual winner of the Prix Goncourt.

Everybody who knew Virginia remarks on what an extraordinary person she was and what a rich and varied path she had found through life. Louise, Eugenia, Beatrice and I all felt knowing her enriched our lives. We will miss her a great deal.

—David Schraa ’72

New York, N.Y.

***

Virginia and I articleI received my Pomona College Magazine yesterday, opened it this morning to the last page and came unglued to see Virginia Crosby’s beautiful smiling face.

All the memories of a long, wonderful friendship came flooding back. Virginia and I met when we were both completing our B.A. in French in the early ’60s. I was a single mom with two young sons and little money for a babysitter, so I would take them with me to Virginia’s house, and the two of us would study for exams—particularly those of our favorite professor, Leonard Pronko. I went on to earn a teaching credential in French at CGU, while Virginia got her Ph.D. and—as we all know—became a professor at Pomona.

We kept in contact over the many years, either in Claremont or Paris. In April of this year, I flew down to Ontario to visit friends and learned that Virginia had been diagnosed with brain cancer. I was able to visit her a few days before she died. As I was leaving after the second visit, I whispered good-bye in French. She whispered back in French, “I love you and am so proud of what you have done.” I will forever hold those last words in my memory, along with the many others of our 50-year friendship.

My thanks to Mary Schmich for her article.

—Réanne Hemingway-Douglass ’63

Anacortes, Wash.

***

Thank you to Mary Schmich ’75 for her article about Virginia Crosby, which I enjoyed and which inspired these memories.

In the fall of 1967, I tested into Mme. Crosby’s fourth-semester French class (French 62), which I survived with a generous B. However, I then had the audacity to sign up for her “Renaissance French Literature” class the next semester (spring ’68).  Here I was: (1) the only boy (as a callow 18-year-old, I wouldn’t say “man”); (2) the only non-language major (I did economics-math); (3) the least prepared student. However, it was obvious that I was there for the love of the subject, so again, she was generous with my grade.

Toward the end of the semester, an older student (I was still only 18) helped me buy a bottle of red wine, “La Bourgogne de Cucamonga.” I had a silver chalice; so to celebrate Rabelais, we brought this to class, quite against the rules. Mme. Crosby took us off campus across Harvard Ave. and we celebrated: one bottle for about 8 people didn’t get us too drunk. I know she got a chuckle out of the silver chalice.

A couple of years later, she invited my girlfriend and me to her home in Padua Hills to play our “Glory of Gabrieli” (E. Power Biggs) record on her husband’s state-of-the-art stereo system, and for a very pleasant afternoon on her deck overlooking the valley.

Around 1970, Zeta Chi Sigma voted Mme. Crosby as a member. Not a faculty advisor. Member. (At this same time, we also voted several women students as members.)  All of this was against the rules, but in the spirit of the times, we didn’t ask.

Did she share with you her story of how she got into writing radio soap-operas while living in a Chicago apartment with “a prostitute in the apartment above and an abortionist in the apartment below”?

I tried looking her up when I was in Claremont a few years ago, but was told that she wasn’t doing well.

Let me end with some verses from a poem we studied in her class (Ronsard: “A Cassandre”):

Las! voyez comme en peu d’espace,

Mignonne, elle a dessus la place

Las! las ses beautez laissé cheoir!

Ô vrayment marastre Nature,

Puis qu’une telle fleur ne dure

Que du matin jusques au soir!

Thank you for the article, and thanks for letting me share.

—Howard Hogan ’71

Owings, Md.

Anguished Father

I am an anguished father, white and privileged, who may lose his adopted, undocumented sons to deportation. My heart is shattered.

—David Lyman ’66

South Pasadena, Calif.

Shining Example

Thank you for the inspiring story in the summer 2016 PCM about Judge Halim Dhanidina, who has steadfastly exhibited the courage to promote the values and enforce the laws of our country in the face of the prejudice and fear engendered by the 9/11 attack on WTC. I’m sure I would not have his courage to do the same. He is a shining example of the values and vision we believe Pomona instills in all graduates. His life is (or should be) an inspiration to all Americans.

—Mike Hogan ‘69

Black Forest, Colo.

Another Cane

Another Cane“The Cane Mystery” article in the PCM summer 2016 issue was interesting and reminded me of the cane which I now have. The cane belonged to my father, Robert Boynton Dozier (1902–2001), Class of ’23.

The cane has the same dimensions as those mentioned in the article: 35 inches long, with a five-inch curved handle. Attached about 29 inches above the base is a 3/4–inch sterling band which is engraved: “R.B.D. ’23” (see photo at right).

As I recall the story my father told me many years ago, the freshmen class men beat the sophomore men in the Pole Rush competition. The challenge: Which team could have a man reach the top of the pole the quickest? He felt that the freshmen had done so well because they had a plan as to where the men would be positioned and who would climb where and when. The award was a cane. I do not know how many other men received and kept a cane.

My father really enjoyed having that cane as a special memento of Pomona College and kept it on the umbrella stand in his home. He also found it to be a useful walking aid when he was in his late 90s. I am pleased to have the cane in my living room, though I have not yet needed to use it.

—Bobbie Dozier Spurgin ’49

Carlsbad, Calif.

Memories of a Friend

I’m writing to share a few thoughts about the passing of my friend, Richard E. Persoff ‘49 (see Obits). These are perhaps of more interest to Pomona undergraduates than to alumni, partly because there are few of us left from the 1940s, and partly because the present students are now grappling with the same questions that Persoff faced in the aftermath of WWII: “Is liberal education, including the humanities, relevant to those who look forward to careers in technological fields?”

Persoff used his undergraduate work to learn how to think. And because of that, he was able to continue applying his mind in several areas. That luxury is as pertinent today as it was in the 1940s.

At Pomona, he studied hard and then played hard. Once, emerging from his books after midnight, he roared at me from across the room: “Andrews! Let’s go to the snow!” We then exited the world of academia temporarily for some improvised adventure, and then returned with renewed energy to our studies.

He could be critical, but outside his field, he was a champion of tolerance. He liked to strike up conversations with the immigrant workers of the local gravel pits and try to absorb their views on lives so different from ours. He befriended the college gardener, a family man who cared for the plants on campus with as much responsibility as an ancient shepherd might tend to his flock. Richard once visited the hobos who cooked their haphazard dinners on open fires in their “jungle” down by the railroad tracks. In our college days, the Great Depression and World War II were recent history. We knew songs from nations victimized by the war, as well as some older songs collected by the poet Carl Sandburg—songs that reflected man at odds with society, but whose protagonist could still recognize life’s gifts, for castaways often seek community in strange places.

One night, we decided to see what it was like to ride a freight train. We crouched by the tracks as locomotives came by. We felt the earth shake, heard the deafening mechanical sounds and felt the blast of the glowing firebox passing only a foot or so from us. We ran along next to the slow-moving train, hoping to grab hold somewhere and swing aloft into an empty box car. We quickly realized that if we leapt and missed, we might fall under the wheels, and we wisely postponed our plan indefinitely, but we never stopped searching for the answers of that odd life and the freedom that it symbolized

I was taken by surprise when good old Dick phoned me to say, “This is the last word you will have from me.” We had given each other the unqualified friendship that holds much of the world together. Thinking of him as I tried to adjust to the loss of his steadfast support, it occurred to me that Dick had finally gotten a grip on his freight train and was just riding off to another great adventure.

With appreciation of Pomona’s contributions, past and present…

—Chris Andrews ’50

Sequim, Wash.

Andrus Remembered

I was saddened to learn that my senior thesis advisor, Professor William Dewitt Andrus, had passed away (PCM fall 2016). Under his able direction, my thesis topic was a study of a unicellular algae, Dunaliella salina. This prepared me for my Ph.D. dissertation on photosynthesis at the University of Bern, Switzerland, in 1966. Prof. Andrus was a brilliant experimentalist and had a sense of humor.

—Katherine J. Jones ’61

Alpine, Calif.

Thank You

Last year a note in PCM suggested that we in the community that appreciate the quality and effort that this amazing publication delivers can say “thank you” by sending in a “voluntary subscription.” The latest example, featuring the Oxtoby years, is such a stunning keeper that I am finally moved to action. So, I wish to add my voice to the cheering throng—PCM is an enormous credit to Pomona. We are flattered and fortunate to be on the mailing list. Thank you!

—Joe Mygatt P’13

Stanford, Conn.

CORRECTION

Our apologies to Eric Myers ’80, whose name was misspelled in a class note in the fall 2016 issue of PCM. —Editor

Alumni, parents and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or “snail-mail” them to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters may be edited for length, style and clarity.

Staying Inspired

Sefa Aina

SEFA AINA IS UNABLE to sit still. When he thinks, he taps his fingers on his leg; when he listens, he nods along intently; when he speaks, his face breaks open in a smile as his hands paint vivid pictures in the air around him. Being around him is invigorating, but he asserts just the opposite: for Aina, being here, at Pomona College and surrounded by “students who actively want to take leftover dining hall food and feed it to people, or go mentor low-income kids, or spend their summer working for the PAYS program” is how he stays inspired.

A prominent activist and educator in the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, Aina came to Pomona from his alma mater, UCLA, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in history and went on to serve as both a counselor and instructor at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. He recalls his time at UCLA fondly, but remembers being taken aback as a new student by the beautiful buildings, nice statues, fancy food and proliferation of squirrels.

“It’s these sorts of things that make you feel a little awkward,” he explains. “You wonder whether or not you belong. [These universities are] beautiful, wonderful places, but some people aren’t going to feel comfortable or adjusted to the space. There’s privilege. There’s hummus! You don’t feel quite like you fit.”

It’s this feeling of not belonging that Aina sought to alleviate when he became Pomona’s director of the Asian American Resource Center (AARC), and that he continues to work against as the interim director of the Draper Center for Community Partnerships. Aina describes the space he sets out to create for students as one where they can step back from the pressures of school and society and just take a deep breath. “However, it’s important to me that we always become proactive,” he stresses.

Taking identity struggles and turning them into concrete action is at the core of Aina’s activism. During his time at UCLA, the AARC, and now the Draper Center, Aina has established and overseen countless outreach programs in the communities of both Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. In addition to his full-time work at the Draper Center, he also serves as the executive director of the research and advocacy nonprofit Empowering Pacific Islander Communities (EPIC), which breaks down the “AAPI” category and focuses on supporting Pacific Islanders specifically.

This may seem like a lot for one activist and educator to juggle, but it’s nothing for Aina. After all, he was selected from a pool of 25,000 candidates as one of 20 appointees to President Obama’s Advisory Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islanders, on which he served from 2010–2014. The experience, he says “was surreal. I’ve always considered myself someone who would stand outside the White House with a picket sign, and there I was eating the snacks,” he laughs.

At the same time as he was working with the AARC to support AAPI students and advance local social justice activism, Aina was also advising President Barack Obama on the ways his policies were impacting AAPI communities and how his administration could do better. “You have to be able to sustain yourself,” he admits—something he often reminds the budding student activists on Pomona’s campus.

Now that Donald Trump is in the White House, Aina asserts that our collective responsibility is to stay vigilant and active. “We need to understand that the things we do here impact the lives of people around the world,” he says with a firm gesture to the room at large. “The amount of waste and carbon pollution we emit here means that people on islands like Tuvalu, my people, are losing their homeland. They’re environmental refugees. We need to understand the connectedness of things, so that when policies come out, and you say, ‘Oh, that’s not relevant to me,’ you understand that it is. It’s you. It’s your neighbor. We have to always feel empathy and connection to people.”

And for Aina, there’s no better place to start than at home, in the communities. that surround Pomona’s campus. “I have always believed in the power and necessity of engagement, especially for college students. A lot of people applied to get into these desks and these seats,” he says.

Grinning, but eyes serious, he extends a pointing finger. “You got a seat. How are you going to make your seat matter for other people?”

Hidden Pomona

Hidden Pomona: Saahil Desai ’16 and Kevin Tidmarsh ’16 set out to shine a light on some important but little-known chapters in Pomona College’s past. The rest, as they say, is history.
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)

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…

Excerpt from Episode 1: Strangers in a Strange Land


Desai: “… For the next three months, we’ll be investigating the questions about our school that we’ve had since orientation. What were relations like between the College’s founders and the original inhabitants of the land?


Read more Excerpt from Episode 1.

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.”

Excerpt from Episode 2: When Carnegie Was Bombed


Tidmarsh: “… The bomb was placed in Government Professor Lee [’48] McDonald’s mailbox, which led some to question whether the bomber was targeting him directly. Claire McDonald, Lee’s wife and a Pomona alum from 1947, remembers how scary of a time it was for them.”


Read more Excerpt from Episode 2.

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

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.

Excerpt from Episode 3: The Place Below Snowy Mountain


Desai: “… By the time that some of the early founders of Pomona College arrived in Claremont, much of the Tongva population had been decimated by a major smallpox outbreak in 1862, a generation before the College’s founding. After the outbreak, the population of the Tongva in the area fell to around 4,000, a fraction of what it once was.


Read more Excerpt from Episode 3.

“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.

Excerpt from Episode 4: Catch Us If You Can


Tidmarsh: “… Joshua Tremblay, the editor of TSL in fall 2003 actually did a ride-along with two Mufti members for a night, and they told him that most of the 20-odd members at the time had either been approached by an active member or caught them in the act.


Read more Excerpt from Episode 4.

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.”

Excerpt from Episode 5: Farewell to Pomona


Desai: “… By now, we can accept as historical fact that the Japanese internment happened in the United States, and most people agree that it’s one of the darkest periods in American history.


Read more Excerpt from Episode 5.

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.

Excerpt From Episode 1: Strangers in a Strange Land

Pomona’s 1919 Debate Club, including Arthur Williams 1919 (front row, second from left). The College’s second Black graduate, Williams would go on to become a physician in White Plains, New York.

Pomona’s 1919 Debate Club, including Arthur Williams 1919 (front row, second from left). The College’s second Black graduate, Williams would go on to become a physician in White Plains, New York.

Desai: “… For the next three months, we’ll be investigating the questions about our school that we’ve had since orientation. What were relations like between the College’s founders and the original inhabitants of the land? How exactly did this decidedly New England-style liberal arts college get founded in the middle of Southern California? And what are the stories of the early students of color at the school?

“Let’s start with that last one. Right now we’re going to focus on the period between 1887, when Pomona was founded, and 1958, when the College accepted its first cohort of Black students. But for its first seven decades, the College was almost entirely white. That’s not to say that some students of color didn’t attend or even thrive at Pomona, however. …

“Winston M.C. Dickson arrived in Claremont in 1900 at a time when there probably weren’t any other African Americans in the Inland Empire, and only about 2,000 in the entire city of L.A. He was born to two freed slaves in 1872 in a farming community close to Crockett, Texas, which means he actually would have been almost 30 when he arrived at Pomona. There basically wasn’t any public education for Blacks in the South at the time, so it makes sense that it took him some time to get to Pomona. I’m really curious as to how Winston Dickson could have ended up here in 1900, especially considering that Claremont is more than 1,000 miles away from Houston and that Pomona was pretty much unknown at that point and had fewer than 100 students. Probably the only explanation that makes sense is that the Congregationalist Church played some role in getting him to Claremont. Both Pomona and Tillotson College, a small Black college where Winston Dickson studied before coming here, were founded by the Congregationalist Church. During his four years at Pomona, Winston Dickson seems to have thrived. I looked through all the yearbooks from his time on campus and was absolutely floored by how many clubs and organizations he was a part of—The Student Life, the Choral Union, the Literary Society and the Prohibition League…”

Tidmarsh: “Wow, he was all over, as Pomona students are wont to do.”

Desai: “So there’s a ton of photos of Winston Dickson from his time at Pomona, and he really seemed to be an integrated member of his class. In some pictures, he’s standing off to the side, and while he’s a member of an early frat on campus, he’s not pictured in most of their photos, for some reason.”

Tidmarsh: “It’s not hard to imagine why.”

Williams’ daughter, Eileen Williams ’50, the first Black woman to graduate from Pomona College.

Williams’ daughter, Eileen Williams ’50, the first Black woman to graduate from Pomona College.

Desai: “What’s really amazing to me is that Winston Dickson was the Class Day speaker for the Class of 1904, and an L.A. Times reporter who made the trek to Claremont for the event wrote that he had, quote, ‘the magnetic voice and manner of a trained orator.’ He was actually the first Black graduate of any college or university in Southern California. Then he got law degrees from Harvard and Boston University, and for the next half-century, he established himself as one of the most well respected Black attorneys in Houston, Texas. In 1915, there were just 19 Black attorneys in all of Houston, serving a Black population that had swelled to 30,000 people. Most of the cases he litigated were in the divorce or probate courts, which seemed kind of strange to me, but then I talked to a professor who studies the history of Black Houston, and he said that basically, this was all the work that Black lawyers could do at that point. It was such a difficult profession that many Black attorneys decided to leave it entirely. Over the course of his career, he became the president of the city’s Colored Bar Association and then later helped found the Houston Lawyers Association, a mentoring organization for Black attorneys that still exists today. From a son of freed slaves to a Pomona- and Harvard-educated lawyer in Houston, it’s hard not to think that Winston Dickson lived an absolutely remarkable life.”

Tidmarsh: “But to this day there’s nothing named after him on the campus—not yet, at least.”

Desai: “Right. Other schools have buildings and scholarships named after their first Black graduate, but I think it’s pretty surprising that Pomona doesn’t have anything, especially since he was the first Black grad of any college in Southern California. Anyway, after Winston Dickson graduated in 1904, it’s not like Black students suddenly became a frequent presence on campus. There wasn’t another Black student in Claremont for the next 11 years, when Arthur Williams enrolled at Pomona in 1915.

“Born in Houston in 1897 to an influential columnist for the Houston Informer, a powerful Black newspaper at the time, Arthur Williams grew up in Houston’s fourth ward, just a few miles southwest of where Winston Dickson lived in Houston. There weren’t that many African Americans in Houston in the early 1900s, so I have a hunch that it must have been Dickson who introduced Arthur Williams to Pomona and then played a role in his coming to the school. …”

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