Blog Articles

Sweet deal: O.J. flows from alumnus’ old grove

March 5, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

The O.J. flowing in campus dining halls these days doesn’t come from frozen concentrate, nor was it born thousands of miles away in Florida.

Instead, three times a week for much of the school year, John Adams ’66 sends to campus a load of 1,500 lbs. of Valencia oranges grown in his century-old family grove, the last of its kind in the city of Rialto, 25 miles east of Claremont.

For the College, the deal offers a chance to serve local produce and provide healthier food—previous juice concoctions contained corn syrup and food coloring. For Adams, it provides a stream of income to plant new trees.

So Adams is leaving some of the Valencias—typically picked in summer—on the trees longer and longer, which only adds to their sugar content. Then, it’s into the dining-hall juicers.

While the oranges Adams provides from his grove aren’t the prettiest-looking, they sure are sweet. “They’re so much better than the large, perfect oranges in the stores,” says Adams, who this spring is also growing veggies for the College.

Gone country

February 28, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Trees, Ph.D.s and … country? Claremont is a long way from Nashville, but this school year brings two country superstars to Bridges Auditorium, with new-fangled sensation Taylor Swift having performed in the fall and old-timer Willie Nelson here tonight. That inspired us to do some digging and discover that over the years, a surprising number of country crooners—from Larry Gatlin to Linda Ronstadt to Johnny Cash—have played Pomona. But the College’s greatest country-western moment so far brought two legends on the same day in 1973 when Kris Kristofferson ’58, accompanied by his good friend Cash, came to campus to receive an honorary doctor of fine arts degree.

Myrlie Evers-Williams at Pomona

January 9, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

With the announcement this week that Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68 will give the invocation at President Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 21, it’s worth taking a look back at her time in Claremont.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of her husband, civil rights activist Medgar Evers, who was shot in the back outside their Jackson, Miss., home on the morning of June 12, 1963, while Myrlie and their three children were inside.

The next year, Evers-Williams decided to move to Claremont, as she recounted in a 1965 piece for Ebony magazine titled “Why I Left Mississippi.” In that piece, she wrote that she found purpose in speaking engagements, but was like the “walking dead” when she returned to her house and the memories. Ultimately, it was the welfare of her children, particularly her oldest son who was nine at the time, that prompted the move:

“They were awake that terrible night, and heard the thunderous roar of the death shot. They saw their father lying in a scarlet pool of blood as his life ebbed away,” she wrote. “… So it was that in the spring of 1964, while on a speaking engagement in California, I asked friends to ‘look around’ for a house for me.”

She chose Claremont, Evers-Williams wrote, for the college town atmosphere, and more specifically because it was home to Pomona College, where she enrolled. Her time in Claremont received widespread media attention — in 1965 alone her life here was featured in Look, Good Housekeeping and in the Ebony magazine cover story, as the Claremont Courier noted in a story about the stories.

Evers-Williams told Look that she had to wake at 3 a.m. to juggle the demands of school, raising kids and writing down her memories of Medgar. “Someone asked me what I wanted for Christmas,” she told the magazine. “I told them: a secretary.”

While still a Pomona student, Evers-Williams wrote a book (with Peter Williams), For Us, the Living. After graduating in sociology in 1968, Evers worked for several years at The Claremont Colleges, starting at the new Center for Educational Opportunity. In 1970, she ran for Congress as a Democrat, losing in the largely Republican district that included Claremont.

She went on to work for ARCO as national director of community affairs, served as a commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works and, in 1995, she was elected chair of the NAACP’s national board of directors. The next year, Pomona College awarded her an honorary degree and she delivered the Commencement address in Bridges Auditorium, where she had graduated nearly three decades earlier.

Stray Thoughts: When Bad Things Happen

April 10, 2012 by Mark Wood Comments Off

It’s a famous truism that bad things happen to good people. What isn’t so clear, sometimes, is that bad things also happen to good institutions.

This thought came to me recently as I contemplated the black-on-black cover of the latest issue of the Penn State alumni magazine—about the terrible scandal that has rocked that university to its core—and thought about another, very painful situation closer to home: the work authorization dilemma that in recent months has left many here at Pomona feeling saddened, disillusioned or angry. (If you aren’t familiar with this situation, I suggest that you visit www.pomona.edu/work-documentation before reading on.) After a great deal of thought, we at PCM have decided not to try to cover these events hurriedly in this spring issue of the magazine, but to wait until the summer issue, which we plan to devote primarily to the issues surrounding immigration and borders here in the U.S. and around the world. However, as I was considering what I should do in this little introductory missive, my thoughts kept turning back to why bad things happen to good institutions.

Besides costing 17 longstanding Pomona employees their livelihoods, the chain of events unleashed by a complaint to the Board of Trustees last year has plunged us all into the midst of a divisive political issue, strained the College’s relationships with important segments of the College community, generated a range of conspiracy theories, threatened the College’s reputation for inclusivity, driven many to tears of sorrow or anger or frustration, and raised legal and moral questions to which there are no easy answers—or, at least, no answers that satisfy everyone. When must complaints be investigated? What do our immigration laws really require of us? Must we always obey those laws? Can anyone commit an entire institution to a path of civil disobedience? Who can we blame for the bad things that happen in our midst?

Few today take the Medieval view that bad things happen as a judgment from God. Still, when we hear about bad things happening to presumably good people, our sympathy is sometimes leavened with judgment. Lung cancer? Must have been a smoker. AIDS? Probably promiscuous. Auto accident? Careless driver. At heart, we may understand that sometimes bad things really do happen to people for no good reason, but it’s more comforting to think that they somehow invited it. It’s easier to sleep at night when you believe that character is synonymous with fate.

Maybe that’s why, when bad things happen to good institutions, we’re so quick to assume that maybe they weren’t quite as good as we thought. Or even that there was something sinister going on behind the scenes. An assumption of ill will simplifies matters. It makes it easier to believe that if we had been there making those decisions, things would have turned out differently. We would have been wiser, better, braver, more perceptive, more compassionate—more something.

It’s much less comfortable to imagine good, smart, caring, thoughtful people agonizing over intractable problems without the benefit of hindsight and making hard choices from a range of painful options, knowing full well that their actions will have a ripple of consequences only some of which they can predict but for which they will always be judged.

Memories of War

March 5, 2012 by Anna Miller '13 Comments Off

Students in Professor Tomás Summers Sandoval’s Latino Oral Histories class spent the fall semester interviewing Chicano Vietnam veterans as part of a project that will live on for posterity.

The histories will be added to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, which compiles first-hand accounts from U.S. veterans so that future generations may “better understand the realities of war.”

The number of histories in the collection from Vietnam veterans is growing, but Summers Sandoval notes that only a small minority of those histories are from Chicanos. Contrast that with estimates that Chicanos, who often served on the front lines in Vietnam, accounted for a disproportionately high percentage of U.S. casualties in comparison to their proportion of the U.S. population.

To Summers Sandoval, who grew up in Southern California, the stories he’s collecting hit close to home—his father, uncle, and “pretty much every male I knew growing up” were Vietnam veterans. “I approach it as a historian, but it also has a very personal connection for me,” he says. “It’s an endeavor to retrieve and start to analyze what is part of larger [Chicano] history.”

The project involves recruiting volunteers, recording their oral interviews and compiling the interviews in a digital format to eventually be posted online. To find participants, Summers Sandoval and his students first targeted alumni networks of 1960s grad classes from East Los Angeles high schools, and have collected about 25 oral histories so far—in a year, he hopes to have 100.

“They’re not just interviews about Vietnam, they’re life stories,” says Summers Sandoval, assistant professor of history and Chicano/Latino studies. “There’s a strong sense of the entire process of surviving— adapting and learning to be a veteran of this war, learning to be one of the ones who survived, learning to live with post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a culture of survival.”

The interview process isn’t always easy, dealing with subjects that can be hard to talk about, not to mention events that occurred 40 years in the past.

A Vietnamese American, Evyn Le Espiritu ’13 noted in her final reflection piece for the class that she had initially felt some wariness about how the veterans might view her. But her fears were not realized and the interviews were “intimate but not threatening.”

“I felt honored that the veterans shared their stories with me,” she wrote. “I was struck by their intimate association with death, by the fragile miracle of their survival, by the lasting effects of war on their psyche and well-being. I realized that there was a way to feel heartfelt respect and admiration for these veterans as individuals, without compromising my pacifist politics.”

Professor Summers Sandoval notes that after plenty of preparation, the students as a whole have been doing “very well.”

“It’s a very humbling thing to hear someone’s life story—I’m always very grateful that a stranger is willing to share that with another stranger,” says Summers Sandoval.

He has noticed a common thread among the veterans. “For a lot of them,” the professor says, “at times … it seems like they’ve found some kind of peace with the past.”

Richard M. Sheirich

March 5, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Richard M. Sheirich, emeritus professor of German, died from cardiac arrest at his home in Claremont on Dec. 11, 2011. He was 84 years old.

He was born in 1927 in Erie, Penn., and attended local schools through high school. As his parents felt 16 was too young to go to college, he spent an extra year at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, graduating in 1945. He attended Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., for part of his freshman year before enlisting in the U.S. Navy. After a year’s service at Williamsburg, Va., he was discharged and returned to Colgate to complete his undergraduate degree in 1949.

He earned a master’s degree in German from Northwestern University, and a Ph.D. in German from Harvard University in 1965. He also held a DAAD Fellowship at Universität Hamburg in 1957-58. After teaching at Colgate and UC Berkeley, he joined the Pomona faculty in 1965, and for 31 years taught courses in German language, literature and culture ranging from early tribal migrations to the Cold War and reunification. He also conducted research on Viennese poet, novelist and playwright Richard Beer-Hofmann, producing a number of articles as well as an edition of Beer-Hofmann’s correspondence, Der Briefwechsel mit Paula, 1896-1937. Most summers, Professor Sheirich spent time in Vienna, doing research.

In the 1990s he led a major grant-funded project, “German across the Curriculum,” to better integrate the study of German into non-language courses in the humanities and social sciences.The goal of the project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, was to improve foreign-language skills and to promote, among both faculty and students, a greater understanding of the complexities inherent in a foreign culture and of the relationship between language and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

He also served on the Alumni Council and, more recently, on the Emeriti Committee. Many in the college community will miss seeing him walk with his wife of 49 years, Perdita, class notes editor for PCM, to and from campus in the early evening.

Upon retiring, Professor Sheirich expressed his gratitude for the fact that “one becomes a part of college life, yes, but it works the other way, too. The College, and a surprising number of students, also become a part of our lives.”

Memorial contributions to a fund supporting research and travel for students in German may be made to Pomona College, in care of Don Pattison, Donor Relations, 550 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711.

Herbert B. Smith

March 5, 2012 by Don Pattison and Sam Yamashita Comments Off

Herbert B. Smith, emeritus professor of history, died Sept. 28, 2011, at his home in Mount San Antonio Gardens, Claremont, where he had lived since 1985. He was 93.

After obtaining his B.A. from the University of Iowa in 1940, he taught social studies for a year before he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was sent to Officer Candidate School. After graduation, he became the post chemical officer at Camp Butner, N.C., where, among other duties, he conducted countless drills against chemical attack for the units stationed there. He later was assigned to the information and education headquarters in Paris, helping to establish a post-hostilities education program for soldiers awaiting their return home.

After earning his M.A. degree in history at the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in history at UC Berkeley, Professor Smith came to Pomona College in 1952. He was hired to teach French history, which he did for many years, regularly offering such courses as Absolutism and the Enlightenment in Europe, The French Revolution and the European Response and the History of Russia, in addition to Western Civilization. Smith also served as associate director of admissions and director of financial aid during the 1960s, and it was on his watch that Pomona established a policy of “need-blind” admissions.

After a one-year, Fulbright-funded sabbatical at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, he returned to full-time teaching at Pomona in 1969. Besides offering a new course on Southeast Asia, Smith was one of the creators of the two-semester introductory Asian history sequence—Asian Traditions and Revolution and Social Change in Modern Asia—that is still taught today.

He loved to travel, and he and his wife Dorothy traveled in the way that adventurous people did in the 1950s and early 1960s—by freighter and local trains and buses—to countries in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa that did not see many American tourists in those days.

Smith retired in 1983 as the John Sutter Miner Professor of History after 31 years of teaching at Pomona. At the time, the College reported that he confessed to having had three serious loves in his life: his late wife, Dorothy, formerly a psychologist at Monsour Counseling Center; Clio, the muse of history; and the goddess Pomona. Shortly before he died, his fellow residents at Mount San Antonio Gardens made him the poet laureate of the Gardens.

World at her Feet

March 5, 2012 by Jeremy Kniffin and Brenda Bolinger Comments Off

As a high-school athlete in Singapore, Annie Lydens ’13 loved to run along the forested nature trails near MacRitchie Reservoir at the center of the urban island nation. The only drawback: monkeys. The place is full of them, and if the monkey-mobs think you are carrying food, “they’ll chase you and jump on your back. You have to be on your guard.”

There are no monkeys on her back here in Claremont: This fall, she won four straight individual races by wide margins. Lydens started the streak by winning the Pomona-Pitzer Invitational on Oct. 1 by nine seconds, the SCIAC Multi-Duals by 29 seconds, the SCIAC Championship by 25 seconds and finally the NCAA West Regionals by seven seconds.

Annie Lydens '13

In November, she went on to the NCAA Division III Women’s Cross Country National Championships in Oshkosh, Wis. Her personal-best time of 21:02 earned her third place, the highest finish in Pomona-Pitzer cross country history, whether men’s orwomen’s. Along the way, Lydens earned the SCIAC Athlete of the Year and the NCAA West Region Runner of the Year honors.

Lydens has been on the move for much of her life. Born in Japan and raised in Singapore, Lydens has visited a different country every year since age 13. She lived with a Maori tribe in New Zealand, taught in a Bhutan village, sailed around Thailand and worked for a nonprofit in Cambodia. Attending Pomona is her first time living in the U.S.

Fittingly, she is interested in pursuing a career in international diplomacy. This past summer, she was an intern at NATO headquarters in Brussels, taking press inquiries, posting to social media and working long hours for meetings of NATO defense ministers. “Those days, I don’t think I sat down more than 10 minutes, running back and forth, fielding calls,” says Lydens, a philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) major.

Back on the running track, her athletic accomplishments are made all the more impressive by the fact that Lydens is relatively new to distance running. Already a soccer player at her Singapore high school, Lydens tried out running at the suggestion of the track coach, and she went on to compete in a variety of races, helping her team rack up points at meets.

It wasn’t until she arrived at Pomona that she began running cross country, just to stay in shape for track season, and finished fifth on the team at the UC Riverside Invitational before shutting down for the fall with a foot injury. In the spring of freshman year, she settled on the 800 meters (leaving the distance events to senior All-American Alicia Freese ’10), finishing fifth in the SCIAC Championships.

But in her sophomore year, with Freese serving as a coach and helping to push her along in practice, she found her permanent niche in the distance events.

The pair became close friends, and started running together on weekends. Soon Lydens broke Freese’s school record as fastest woman in the 6K. Now she has her sights set on breaking records in the 5K and 1500 meters. “I’m a really competitive person so I love racing,” she says. “I just get a thrill out of chasing people down.”

2012 – 1887 = 125

March 5, 2012 by David Oxtoby, President Comments Off

Founders Day 2012 will mark the 125th anniversary of Pomona College’s incorporation. Like all such milestones, this will be a moment for both celebration and reflection. The observance of Pomona College’s Quasquicentennial—the awkward but proper term I feel obliged to use just once before returning to the more agreeable 125th—will be focused around Founders Day in October. There will be a variety of events and activities on campus—performances, open houses, a campus-wide party—involving not only Pomona students, faculty, staff, alumni and parents, but also the College’s extended community in Claremont and beyond. But while the October event will be the focal point, other initiatives, beginning in coming months and extending into 2013, will commemorate our history, celebrate our present, and project our future. That the 125th falls during the College’s Campaign Pomona: Daring Minds is auspicious, allowing us to set our future goals in their proper context, as a continuation of the long trajectory of our history.

The celebration of anniversaries is a near-universal human activity, one that answers a deeply felt need to mark the rhythms of our collective lives. For institutions, as for families, anniversaries remind us of the commonality of past and future. This anniversary offers us an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to the principles upon which this institution was founded; to recognize the progress made over the past 125 years; and to think about our future—about how to build on the College’s extraordinary accomplishments in the most productive ways for the benefit of future generations of Pomona students and the wider communities they will serve.

You will hear more about this subject both from me and from others in the months to come as planning continues for celebrating this milestone in Pomona College history.

Fellowship of the Ring

March 5, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Cyclists ride on Circulus during its stay in Portland, Ore. (Photo by Jeff Snyder.)

“…and the ring of power has a will of its own.”
—Prologue to the 2001 Lord of the Rings film

TOILING DAY AND NIGHT at the end of his senior year, Sam Starr ’10 set out to forge his own 50-foot-wide mini-velodrome, a seductive ring of ready-to-race-on wood he called Circulus. Fueled by artistic vision and caffeine, he machine-cut board after board, tightened bolts and sanded away rough spots until the 39 portable sections were ready to be connected with help from a crew of friends. Finally, the senior art project would come to life in the cavernous emptiness of the decommissioned Seeley-Mudd Science Library. As Sam pictured it, the contrast of the sterile, silent location with the blur of motion on the track would make an artistic statement. But first there had to be a test ride to see if his creation actually worked. “A leap of faith,” Sam calls that initial spin. “I had no idea if it would even hold up.”

Sam had faced doubts early on, as some faculty members were concerned that there just wasn’t enough time for him to pull off a project of this scale. But Sam had a habit of making his own path. Before coming to Pomona, he spent a year racing on an amateur cycling team in Spain, building his confidence and riding ability. At Pomona, the art major became fascinated with fungi—yes, fungi—after attending an environmental talk, and he took a year off to work in a science lab at the University of Minnesota back home. He returned to Pomona determined to meld art and science by crafting his own bike-driven mobile biology lab, which he did, eventually riding the 130-lb. “Velolab” to Los Angeles and back in a 50-mile trek. Simply put: Sam can. “We live for teaching Sam Starrs,” says Art Professor Michael O’Malley, who helped guide Sam along the way.

Sam Starr ’10 rides on Circulus in the decommissioned Seeley-Mudd library. (Photo by Lisa Anne Auerbach.)

But Circulus was bigger and more ambitious than any of his previous undertakings. While Sam was fairly certain he could get the velodrome built in time, he worried over whether it would actually be rideable in the tight circle required for it to fit in Seeley- Mudd. His 3-D computer design and scale model would help reduce the risk of failure, but this was no sure thing until he put tire rubber to wood. So there was joy and relief as he made the inaugural ride with friends gathered around to watch. Thanks to centrifugal force—or was it something more?—he had no trouble taking a spin on Circulus without taking a spill. “I just rode around yelling and screaming and everyone was dancing around the side of it,” recalls Sam, speaking in his halting, soft-spoken manner that suggests that even as he talks a portion of his mental RAM is still devoted to making plans or poring over diagrams.

Circulus took off, attracting attention far beyond Pomona’s greenery-and-sunshine campus after a video of the mini-velodrome went viral on the web. The unusual project had obvious appeal for bikers, who were itching to ride it, and Sam suspects the do-it-yourself aspect added to the interest, as people found a certain “romance about such a big … project undertaken by one person.” All the attention was fun, but Sam had his own plans. After graduation, he was off to France for a gig helping with upscale cycling tours for American recreational bikers. Circulus found a temporary home, protected with tarps, in the backyard of a friend’s place in Upland, with a section going for a time to Riverside for a museum exhibition on bike culture. “I was worried that it was going to end up going to the landfill eventually,” says Sam. “There was just no way for me to really be able to do anything with it.”

Sam knew he couldn’t hold onto Circulus. And when he decided to give up the ring, its power only grew.

DAN POWELL SPENT A CHUNK of his childhood amidst metal coffee cans full of bearings and axles as he worked on bikes with his old man. His dad had made a hobby of pulling jalopy bikes from the garbage and fixing them up. “No one stole your bike,” Powell recalls of those days. “Because they looked horrible.” But Powell caught the bike bug and went on to work at a series of bike shops and then at Planet Bike, a well-known bike accessories brand. For a time he lived out of his 1964 Ford Econoline van while working as an intern for Bike magazine in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. In 2008, he and business partner Erik Olson started their own bike-accessories business, Portland Design Works, in the cycling-crazed Oregon city.

Powell dates his fascination with velodromes back to around 1995, when a couple of guys he knew who had been bicycle messengers told him about an event in Toronto with an insane figure-eight velodrome, complete with elevated flyover, called the Human-Powered Roller Coaster. Powell was transfixed by the blurry video. “As a very impressionable 19 to 20-year-old cycling kid, it seemed like the most badass thing ever,” he says. From then on, Powell recalls, he carried hopes of having his own velodrome.

Fifteen years later, in 2010, he read in the Urban Velo blog that Sam Starr was trying to sell Circulus. Here was his chance. When Powell didn’t hear back from Sam, he figured someone had already swooped in and bought it. But Sam was still in France and just hard to reach, and Circulus remained in storage. When they finally connected, Powell recalled that Sam had mentioned online that he would be happy to get back half of the $3,000 that had gone into the project. Powell offered $1,600, which he had to borrow from friends, and the deal was sealed. In time, he boarded a plane for Southern California and rented a truck to bring Circulus to Oregon.

Buzz about the velodrome’s arrival built quickly in Portland, and Powell and company invited friends to ride at a gathering that fell on April Fool’s Day 2011. They planned for a bigger unveiling, with a big party set for summer. They shored up the track,—which, after all, had been intended as an art piece—adding bolts and wood reinforcement. But they tinkered too much by brushing on a coating of basketball court varnish, leaving the track too slippery to ride just before the party. “We were panicked,” recalls Powell. Some skateboarders saved the day by letting them in on a trick: coating the track with a solution of watered down Coca-Cola would give it more stick and less slick. On went the show, which included a deejay and drew about 400 people, a cross-section of the biking community— “road cyclists, track guys, BMX kids.” The success of the event “kind of validated buying it,” says Powell.

New video from Portland only added to Circulus’ reputation, drawing more views and blog posts on the web. Powell notes the contrasts in the “peaceful and contemplative” video of Sam riding Circulus in placid Seeley-Mudd with the “devil-may-care” footage from the kick-off party. Circulus had left the artsy world of wine and cheese for the sweaty realm of beer and Cheetos. And that was just fine with Sam, who had watched it all from afar, checking in online every few weeks: “I’m sure a lot more people saw it as a bike project after I had let go of it than saw it as an art project when I still had it.”

“It was an art installation because of its context in the library,” he says. “You’re taking something and putting it … where it doesn’t really belong.” Then he turns a tad mystical: When Circulus became part of the bike world, Sam says, “in a way it was going home again.” But Circulus wouldn’t find a permanent home in that Portland warehouse. The velodrome was going on the road.

Next stop: Las Vegas.

EACH FALL, INTERBIKE International Trade Expo pulls in thousands of visitors for what is billed as the largest bicycle trade show in the U.S. With so many big-name vendors attending, Powell and his partner’s company would be small-fry, able to afford only a slim space at the Sands Convention Center. But with crowd-drawing Circulus in their possession, they would get a sweet deal for more room—and plenty of attention. On the first day of the show, an apparel brand had arranged for Jeremy Powers and Tim Johnson, big names in the cycling world, to race each other on Circulus. “They promoted it like a heavyweight boxing match,” says Powell. “The guys came out wearing robes. They weighed in. … They talked smack to each other.”

Their first two races in the best-of-three event went just fine. Then came the final showdown, and near-disaster. Someone in the crowd surrounding Circulus held out a $20 bill and Powers reached out to grab the cash, missed and nearly wiped out. “He came within 10 inches of leaving the surface of the track. You could smell the burning rubber,” says Powell. “This is 40 minutes into the first day of the show where we were going to turn people loose on this thing. I was scared.”

The show went on and so did the races, sometimes strangely. One was between riders in Gumby and Pokey costumes, another costumed race pitted a hot dog against a squirrel. All in all, Circulus was a crowd-pleaser as expected. (Sam Starr had tried to make it back to the states to see Circulus in Vegas, but he just couldn’t pull it off.) Still, Powell, glad there were no mishaps, was relieved when the time came to disassemble Circulus.

The ring, in some ways, had become a burden. Sure, it had brought lots of publicity to his enterprise in Portland, but he and his partner also didn’t want to be known just as the guys with the velodrome. Practically speaking, Circulus took up a lot of space they needed in their warehouse, and set-up and tear-down to take it on the road took hours of crew work—six hours to put it together, four to take it apart.

“My wife was like, ‘It’s time for it to go.’ My partner was like, ‘It’s time for it to go.’ I knew it was time for it to go,” recalls Powell.

So Circulus would be passed along once again.
Powell had a good sense of who the ring should go to next.

POWELL HAD CRASHED at his buddy Jeff Frane’s place last year when he came to Minneapolis for the Frostbike trade show. Frane was one of the first people Powell told about buying the velodrome, and Frane had fanned interest by unveiling the news in his Bike Jerks blog and posting the original video. “That was the spark in the proverbial dry grass,” says Powell. Frane has organized a slew of races in Minneapolis, another bike-crazy metropolis, including the annual All City Championship. “In short,” Frane writes online of his cycling interest, “I am way into it.” Like Powell, Frane also lived out of his van for a time. That was after college, where he’d studied comparative religion and public relations. “Super useful,” Frane says.

Once again like Powell, Frane found a way to make his living in the bike business, in his case as the sales and marketing manager for All-City Cycles. The difference is that little All-City is owned by industry powerhouse Quality Bicycle Products. Circulus was handed off in hopes that a big enterprise would be able to do more with the bulky attraction. Frane talks of bringing Circulus to Midwestern cities such as Chicago or Milwaukee this summer. He’d like to take it back to Vegas for Interbike in the fall, and maybe add a twist, throwing out the idea of a circus tent or a fog machine: “I think there’s a number of ways we could take it.” But there are logistics to be worked out and expenses to be calculated, and, at the moment, Circulus is safely stowed away at QBP’s massive warehouse in Ogden, Utah. Says Frane: “It’s sitting there while we decide what the heck to do with the thing.” The ring rests—for now.

Its maker, though, is hard at work. Sam Starr finally made his way back to the states, landing in little Hudson, New York. With some inspiration from art professor O’Malley, he took up another audacious industrial undertaking. Sam set to work on building a brick pizza oven … in the back of a truck. “To a large extent it’s just another excuse to get myself wrapped up in another crazy fabrication project,” he says. He recently started selling pizza out of the oven-bearing behemoth. (The business is called Truck Pizza: http://www.truckpizza.net./) But Sam remains an avid cyclist. He is still fascinated with velodromes and continues to field inquiries from would-be imitators requesting copies of the 3-D design he used for Circulus, though nobody ever seems to follow through and build one. “Maybe I should go into the mini-velodrome business one day,” he muses. Yes, Sam is tempted by the thought of forging another ring. “It’s in the back of my mind for sure,’’ he says.

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