Blog Articles

Stellar Vision

Professor Choi with Will Morrison '12 and Daniel Contreras '13

Tucked away in the basement of the Andrew Science Building, Room 58 carries a light-hearted vibe as students trickle in after lunch, chatting and cracking jokes as music blares in the background.

Then, back to work. Alongside Astrophysics Professor Philip Choi, the students turn to the tiny instruments that are deliberately arranged on a large table in the center of the astrophysics lab. This has been their calling for the past two years.

In January 2010, Choi and his research team received a four-year, $637,138 National Science Foundation grant to build a groundbreaking adaptive optics system for the College’s Table Mountain Observatory one-meter telescope in Wrightwood, about a 45-minute drive from Claremont in the San Gabriel Mountains. The optics will correct for the distortion in the atmosphere that is manifested in the twinkle of stars. The result? Image quality rivaling that produced by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Choi explains that the turbulence in the atmosphere—a result of clashes in air density and temperature—causes the distortion of stars, planets and other astronomical bodies viewed through telescopes. This is analogous to ripples in a swimming pool blurring the image of a penny at the bottom of the pool. Adaptive optics systems solve this problem with deformable mirrors that bend beams of light back on track based on how much distortion has altered their paths.

First, wave front sensors measure the distortion of light from a reference star. The sensors then send signals via high-powered computers to flexible mirrors that compensate for the distortion by deforming ever so slightly, as though there are little fingers pushing and pulling them from behind. This must occur every 1,000th of a second to keep up with the ever-changing atmosphere. If the system has done its job, stars that are blurred due to the turbulent atmosphere instantly come to a sharp focus, with a factor of 10 improvement in image resolution.

The adaptive optics system is set to be integrated into the Table Mountain telescope by the end of 2013. Although the opacity of the atmosphere in some wavelengths will prevent adaptive optics telescopes from rendering space telescopes like the Hubble obsolete, Choi says that adaptive optics will allow scientists to “tailor the space missions to complement what we’re doing from the ground.”

Interestingly enough, Dr. Choi went into his undergraduate years planning on majoring in philosophy. A poor freshman enrollment time locked him out of philosophy seminars and opened up a slot for Astronomy 101. He came to realize that the natural sciences in general and astrophysics in particular would be the perfect avenue to allow him to continue exploring “the big questions…of why we’re here, how we got here, where we’re going.”

Choi’s research team includes Pomona Astronomy Professor Bryan Penprase, along with additional co-investigators and collaborators from Caltech, Harvey Mudd and Sonoma State. Add to that a crew of Pomona undergrads; among the most recent are Daniel Contreras ’13, Claire Dickey ’14, Anne Hedlund ’14, Lorcan McGonigle ’13, Will Morrison ’12 and Alex Rudy ’11.

Choi enjoys doing research with undergraduate students because they are “not jaded. They’re doing it for the enjoyment and for the love of it. … To be in that exploratory mode is the most exciting part of science, I think. And so to be working with students who are all in that mode is inspiring.”

For their part, the students like working on so many different aspects of the project, from software and programming to optical alignment and machining. Contreras notes the feeling of being “in the lab working on the code behind our instrument and just seeing everything work and everything just fit together so nicely. It’s really awesome.”

The research team also fits together well, with occasional In-N-Out runs when their work is done. As Morrison puts it, Professor Choi is “a fun person to be locked in a lab downstairs with for eight hours.”

 

Rockin’ History

Professor Kevin Dettmar

In today’s session of Flashpoints in Rock ‘n’ Roll History, Professor Kevin Dettmar recounts the 1980s rise of Irish rock band U2 to peak popularity with The Joshua Tree. The band becomes known for its sincerity and social consciousness, but Dettmar notes questions to consider regarding how U2 goes about promoting its causes.

The professor plays U.S. concert footage from U2’s 1988 Rattle and Hum documentary in which the band performs an extended version of its early anthem “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” about the conflict in Northern Ireland. Lead singer Bono interrupts the song with a fiery speech: “Irish Americans who haven’t been back to their country in 20 or 30 years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution. … What’s the glory in taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children? … No more!”

That sets off the classroom discussion, abridged and edited here. Does the midsong monologue undermine the music— and the message? Can Bono’s American concert audience even grasp what he’s talking about?

DETTMAR: So tell me what you saw …

WILLIE: Bono was very emotional throughout. That’s part of what makes him such a good performer. He was becoming really close with his audience, talking about the terrorism in his country.

LEE: The monologue in the middle just seems kind of over the top. If I had gone to see a band I really like I would mostly be going there to listen to their music, not to have them tell me about how I should change the world.

DETTMAR: I think that the band and Bono, they have the best of intentions. … But you can question their strategy. Part of the problem with these sermons in the middle of songs is they are implicitly saying the songs aren’t powerful enough to do the work that we want them to do: We don’t trust the song to carry the message.

SHERIDAN: The song keeps losing its momentum. All of a sudden Bono starts talking and preaching for two minutes. Then the song ends. Then they start playing again. They’re trading off the actual musical quality for the preachiness and the message.

SARAH: Maybe they don’t trust their songs to carry the message, but people in America do have a really big problem with not knowing what’s happening outside of the U.S. I think this is one of the ways, maybe, that they can get people’s attention.

DETTMAR: The problem is that if you don’t understand the political situation—if you don’t understand that they’re from Ireland and that the violence is actually in Ulster, for instance—then what he says is too telegraphic. You’re never going to understand it.

BEN: I find it interesting that people react against Bono being “preachy.” Without that preachy nature, what is U2?

The Professor: Kevin Dettmar

At Pomona since 2008, Kevin Dettmar is the W.M. Keck Professor of English and chair of the English Department. He splits his research and teaching between British and Irish modernism, with an emphasis on James Joyce, and contemporary popular music. He is the author of Is Rock Dead?, editor for Oxford University Press of the book series Modernist Literature & Culture and general editor of the Longman Anthology of British Literature.

The Class: Flashpoints in Rock ‘n Roll History

Rock ’n’ roll has both endured and enjoyed a rocky public reception since its earliest days: Bill Haley & the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” (1954) provoked riots across the country. We will trace the “scandalous” history of rock ’n’ roll through its public controversies. In such moments, we learn a great deal about what rock hopes to be, about its intrinsic contradictions and structural instability, and about the resistance it meets from its own fans.

Acting Globally

As a high school exchange student in Japan, Sam Holden ’12 developed a strong interest in international relations and Asian studies. At Pomona, he has twice conducted summer research in Japan, studied abroad in Germany and lived in Oldenborg’s language halls. He speaks four languages and is a mentor to two international students from Asia. A native of Colorado, Holden plans to pursue graduate study in Japan, with a focus on how that country’s shrinking population and economy inform new approaches to sustainable urbanism.

Digging Beneath the Surface: “The summer after my freshman year, I went to Japan to make a documentary about Brazilian immigrants. I taught myself some rudimentary Portuguese and made contacts with both Brazilian and Japanese organizations. Japan appears to be a homogenous and equal society, so it was a very eyeopening experience to go to a community where the majority of the people are foreigners and don’t speak Japanese, and to see the struggles they were going through.“

A New Frontier:“I’ve become very interested in the idea of post-economic growth society. In a country like Japan, where the population is declining and the economy has been stagnant, the question is: what does a society do when it can no longer count on growth to sustain the social systems we rely on? Post-economic growth theory is about the need to move from competitive to cooperative economies, to think creatively about building robust communities that use fewer resources.”

Community of Learners: “Oldenborg Center has been essential in helping me develop my language skills. I lived in Japanese Hall my sophomore year and in German Hall for a semester, and I still go to the language tables in the dining hall. Any time you’re in a community of learners like that—and this goes for Pomona College as a whole—it helps to reinforce what you’re doing in class.”

Pray for Japan: “I had the opportunity to translate a collection of Twitter messages that were sent after the March earthquake and tsunami. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, a 20-year-old Japanese college student created a website cata loguing some of those messages. The site went viral in the first week, and about 70 of the messages, along with photos of support from around the world, were turned into a book, with parallel pages in Japanese and English. Pray for Japan has sold 100,000 copies, with all the money going to disaster relief.“

Financial Aid: “It’s a gift that I think about every day. I’m grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to discover who it is I want to be and what I want to pursue. And to be able to do that free of financial concerns and the stress associated with student loans is extraordinarily important. I want to make the most of the opportunities I’ve had here, and then use my education to give something back to the community.”

No Time to Look Back

Cruz Reynoso ’53

Cruz Reynoso ’53 during his time on the California Supreme Court

Since the 2010 release of an award-winning documentary about his life, Cruz Reynoso ’53 has been appearing with producer- director Abby Ginzberg at high school, college and law school screenings around the country. But the 80-year-old, who led a ground-breaking fight in the ’60s for the rights of farm workers and served as the first Latino justice on the California Supreme Court, has not stopped for long to look back.

An emeritus law professor at UC Davis who still teaches one semester each year, Reynoso is spearheading two investigations— one into the death of a young farm worker shot by police and another into the pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis during a peaceful protest last fall.

“I’m too active,” says Reynoso with a laugh. “I’m also a member of the board of California Forward, a group that is trying to reform our dysfunctional state government. One of the things we are trying to do is get an initiative on the ballot this year to reform how the budget is put together. We realize how difficult it is to do anything, and we’re prepared for failure. But we have to try.”

That persistence is illustrated in the new documentary about his life. Shown on PBS stations nationwide and recently released on DVD, Cruz Reynoso: Sowing the Seeds of Justice (www.reynosofilm.org) combines archival footage and interviews with Reynoso and his contemporaries to tell the story of a turbulent time in California and U.S. history. “What makes biographies interesting to me is the historical period in which a person lived,” says Ginzberg, a former attorney who has been making documentary films for almost 20 years.

One of 11 children, Reynoso grew up in Southern California, working in the orange groves alongside his parents. At 16, he made what Ginzberg describes as the most pivotal decision in his life, when he chose to pursue an education, despite his mother’s wishes that he continue working. A scholarship brought him to Pomona College and, after serving in the military, he went to law school on the G.I. Bill at UC Berkeley, where he was the only Latino in his class.

After graduating, he started a small law practice and joined the Community Service Organization, where he met Cesar Chavez. It would be the first step in a life devoted to public service. “One needed to do something beyond simply having a job just to support your family,” says Reynoso in the film. “That was important. But the community and what was happening around you was always important to me.”

In 1966, he was named director of California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. (CRLA), the first legal aid program aimed at helping the rural poor. The success of CRLA drew the ire of agribusiness and Gov. Ronald Reagan, who vetoed funding for the program and accused it of undermining democracy. Reynoso led a successful three-year court battle to overturn Reagan’s veto and is credited for helping to save the organization. “I think the fact there is an institution still there defending workers is a testimony to the ability of people like Cruz to navigate the shoals when you have enemies like Gov. Reagan,” says Jerry Cohen, a former general counsel to the United Farm Workers Union who was interviewed for the documentary.

Ginzberg calls Reynoso an unsung hero of the legal profession and describes him as calm, focused and vigilant, even during the most trying periods of his career. ”He could rise to the temperature of the moment, but he never raised the temperature, and that really made a difference,” says Ginzberg.

Appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown to the state Supreme Court in 1981, Reynoso again became a political target, when supporters of the death penalty and business interests mounted a campaign for a statewide retention vote that ousted Chief Justice Rose Bird, Justice Joseph Grodin and Reynoso.

“With respect to the attacks on the court, I never took it personally because I knew the attacks were false,” says Reynoso. “Sad to say, those who were attacking the courts were very vigorous, and those defending the court had never been involved in that type of issue before, so they were in disarray. Most of what voters heard were attacks on the courts, particularly that we were not following the law. I told people if I believed what was being said, I’d vote against me.”

“Cruz was the first Latino on the California Supreme Court, which was one of the biggest honors you could have, and then he suffered one of the biggest defeats four years later,” says Ginzberg. “Neither one defined him. His attitude was: what can I do next? He didn’t sit around licking his wounds.”

In 2000, Reynoso was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton. The following year, as vice chair of the Civil Rights Commission, he led the only official investigation into voting irregularities in Florida in the Bush-Gore presidential election.

As a professor, Reynoso has become a role model to a new generation of idealistic young attorneys, says Ginzberg, who admits she too has been influenced by the subject of her film. “I’ve sort of adopted his view. He told me, ‘I’m an incurable optimist. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be able to do half the things I’ve done in my life.’ Cruz also says that you can’t think something is going to be easy, or because you win one battle you’re not going to have to fight another. Justice is a constant struggle and we have to keep fighting.”

Reynoso says he sees that same need to keep fighting reflected in the students he’s met as a professor and during his travels with Ginzberg. “My life is simply a continuum in terms of the many hundreds and thousands of people who’ve come before me, who have been struggling for human rights, for social justice,’’ he says. “I see it in the faces of those young people who will continue the struggle. It confirms my notion that things are never still; they’re always moving, and we have to be there to protect those who don’t have economic or political power.”

CRUZ REYNOSO ON:

THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT: “I have really been pleased to see the Occupy Movement because it came at just the right time to balance the political scene. The reality of the last 20 to 30 years is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is disappearing, and that is not a good thing for a democracy.”

EDUCATION: “Education is a key to doing well in society. I hate to use harsh terms, but we’ve practically become immoral by placing the financial burden for education on the people least able to pay—the students—instead of having us as taxpayers, who are working or who have retirement pay, carry that burden. It’s so different from what we’ve done in the past.”

JUSTICE: “As a youngster I had what I called my justice bone. When I saw something that was really unfair or unjust it hurt, and so I felt compelled to do something about it to relieve that hurt. And I think that is still true today. So in some ways, what I do is a selfish effort to not hurt by taking on some of those issues.”

GOVERNMENT: “We’re now having a debate about whether the government should be big or small. I’ve always thought in a democracy that government should do what people want it to do irrespective of those descriptions of large and big. In some instances, big programs might be good, in others, small programs might work.“

THE GOOD FIGHT: “I have always felt that even if you lose a good fight, you have gained something by helping educate people about the issue. So, hopefully, you win a number of the battles you’re in, but even when you lose, you’ve done some good. Those of us who feel strongly about those issues have a duty to continue fighting, and I find that invigorating.”

Taking the Baton

Sharon Paul ’78 may never have launched her career in choral conducting if the late William F. Russell, Pomona’s music director from 1951-82, hadn’t been tardy to choir practice. Paul serendipitously took the baton in his stead, unaware of her professor’s arrival.

“I think he watched from the back and thought, ‘Oh! That’s what Sharon should do with her life,’” Paul says. “He saw my abilities, felt I had strengths and nurtured them. I don’t think I would have found conducting if I went to any other school.”

Since then, Paul has carved out an illustrious career in choral conducting and, in February, will return to the Pomona campus as clinician of the 2012 Pacific Southwest Intercollegiate Choral Association (PSICA) Festival. Pomona, a founding member of the association in 1922, is hosting the festival for the first time in the College’s recorded history. Per tradition, the host school’s choral director selects the festival’s clinician. Donna Di Grazia, Pomona’s choral director and music professor, knew exactly who she wanted.

Sharon Paul '78

Di Grazia, who is coordinating the festival, points not only to Paul’s talent as a musician and choral conductor, but also to the fact that her “professional work serves as a terrific example of how a liberal arts education can set a foundation that can lead to a significant career in the performing arts.”

Paul, who entered Pomona at age 16, is equally pleased. “I’m so excited, I feel silly. I’m so happy to be coming back,” says Paul, who lives in Oregon with her husband of 16 years and their seventh-grade son. “I’m feeling very nostalgic about my time at Pomona, and the further I get in my career, the more I realize how seminal that time was. I can’t wait to walk the campus, be in the music building, just remember.”

Paul has directed choirs around the globe—Berlin, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Russia, Singapore and elsewhere. Holding an M.F.A from UCLA and a D.M.A. in choral conducting from Stanford University, Paul currently serves as professor of music, chair of vocal and choral studies and director of choral activities at the University of Oregon. For eight years prior, she was the artistic director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus (SFGC) and conductor of the organization’s acclaimed ensembles, Chorissima and Virtuose. Paul joined the SFGC following what she called a “quirky career move,” having left a tenured professor position at Chico State to do so.

As clinician of the 2012 festival, which will bring together about a dozen Southern California collegiate choirs to perform for each other, Paul will provide expert critiques of each choir’s performance, lead a two-hour master class comprised of eight singers from each ensemble and conduct these top vocalists in a performance. She also will coach student conductors during the master class. Visiting performers will find in Paul an engaging conductor and teacher, enduringly influenced by her former instructor, Leonard Pronko, a Pomona professor since 1957. “He was the most engaging educator I’d ever seen, and that stuck with me,” Paul says.

The PSICA festival will be held Feb. 25. Information: www.psica.org.

Top of Mind

In an impressive feat for Pomona, a pair of alumni will helm the nation’s 40,000-plus neuroscientists in back-to-back presidencies of the prestigious Society for Neuroscience.

Moses Chao ’73 has been in the lead since November 2011, and in October, President-elect Larry Swanson ’68 will take over. Both began their scientific careers in Claremont as the study of the brain and nervous system came of age.

Moses Chao '73

Moses Chao majored in biochemistry at Pomona, where he did research with Professor Corwin Hansch.

After a break from academics, working as a counselor in New York City, he returned to Southern California to earn a Ph.D. in biochemistry at UCLA. It was not until he started his own laboratory at the Cornell University Medical College in New York in 1984, that Chao turned his attention to something brain-related: a molecule called nerve growth factor, or NGF. He sought to identify the receptor that nerves use to grab onto NGF, like catching a baseball in a mitt.

Today, in his laboratory at New York University, Chao still works on growth factors including NGF and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). As their names suggest, these proteins promote nerve survival and growth, so they are crucial during early child development. But they continue to work in the adult brain, maintaining the connections between nerve cells. With aging, these growth factors often start to disappear, and the nerve connections begin to disintegrate. Too little BDNF, for example, might lead to Alzheimer’s disease, Chao says.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that scientists have tried providing growth factors as treatments for diseases of the nervous system such as Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease. But they have had little luck; the problem, Chao says, is that growth factors are large, sticky proteins that do not cross the blood-brain barrier and penetrate to the right location.

What if there was a better way? In 2001, Chao and colleagues reported, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on another option: a small molecule, adenosine, which mimicked the effects of growth factors on cells living in a dish. Adenosine has side effects in many tissues, such as the heart—but Chao says the paper proved that it should be possible to find small molecules that move through the body to the brain cells that need them. A decade later, his hunt goes on:

“We’re still plugging away and trying to identify drugs that have protective effects,” Chao says.

With the Society for Neuroscience, Chao served on various committees, as secretary, and as an editor of the Society’s Journal of Neuroscience before his presidency. In his current role, Chao is focused on science funding. “Everybody’s anxious about funding because of the gridlock in Washington,” he says.

Larry Swanson '68

Larry Swanson discovered his love for neuroscience before it was called “neuroscience.” While studying chemistry at Pomona, he took a course with Professor Clinton Trafton in what was then referred to as “physiological psychology.” Hooked on the study of the brain, he furthered his studies with a Ph.D. in neurobiology, from one of the nation’s first programs at Washington University in St. Louis. There, he was wowed by scientists studying how different chemicals controlled the appetites of rats: one treatment made the animals hungry, another made them thirsty. How did the nerves in the brain control these desires? Swanson is still trying to figure that out today as a professor at the University of Southern California.

Although neuroscientists have a good handle on the interactions between one nerve cell and another, they don’t have an overall picture of the brain’s circuitry, Swanson says. The brain has between 500 and 1,000 regions, and they talk to each other via a myriad of mostly-unknown connections.

Swanson is part of an effort to map how all the different parts of the brain interact. This unified wiring diagram is the “connectome,” so-called in a nod to the sum of all genetic codes called the genome. It’s the nervous system equivalent of the old skeleton song—“the leg-bone connected to the knee-bone,” and so on— but with an estimated 100,000 connections, the brain’s interactions are unlikely to be summarized with a simple ditty. Swanson’s team is developing computer programs to keep track of all the interactions.

The current lack of a brain map is stonewalling researchers trying to develop medicines for conditions like schizophrenia. “We’re almost at a dead end in terms of trying to get effective cures,” Swanson says. “We need to know how the brain works in order to fix it.” For example, he wants to suss out the parts of the brain that connect together to control appetite. If he knew which part of that circuit goes wrong in someone who is obese, for example, he might be able to repair the wiring, shutting down hunger.

Swanson attended the first Society for Neuroscience meeting in 1971 and has come back every year since. Like Chao, he served on committees, as secretary and as editor for the Journal of Neuroscience. During his tenure as president, Swanson hopes to boost international collaboration among neuroscientists.

Edward W. Malan

Emeritus Professor Edward W. Malan ’48, one of the most influential members in the history of the Pomona College Physical Education Department, died Sept. 6, 2011, at age 88.

Malan came to Pomona as a student in the early 1940s and was already active in athletics, playing football and earning a letter as a running tackle, when, in May 1943, he was among a contingent of men who left campus for the U.S. Army. After serving with distinction in Europe, he returned to Pomona, graduating in 1948 and joining the faculty as an instructor two years later. He went on to earn a master’s at the Claremont Graduate School as well as an Ed.D. from UCLA, and in 1960 was promoted to professor of physical education and named director of athletics, a role he filled through 1978. During this time the challenging yet rewarding process of equalizing men’s and women’s athletics was begun, and the number of intercollegiate competitive sports rose from seven to 17.

In addition to coaching several years of both varsity and frosh football (including an 8-0 season with the 1950 frosh football team in his first year), Professor Malan coached track and field until 1966 and golf later on in his career. He founded the department’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 1958, oversaw its induction ceremonies for 42 years and in 1989 was himself awarded an honorary induction. That same year, he also received the SCIAC Distinguished Service Award. Along with serving as the College’s NCAA representative, he was very active in the NCAA Council and was elected to the presidency for Division III.

As a resident of Claremont, he was elected to the City Council twice, for the 1962-66 term and again for 1968-72, during which time he was mayor from 1970-72. He retired from Pomona in 1989 but remained active with the College and, in 2001, received its Alumni Distinguished Service Award.

“Coach Malan was a class act and a wonderful person,” says Athletics Director Charles Katsiaficas. “We all looked up to him; he was a great role model and mentor to so many of us through the years. We are blessed for the many years he shared with us here at Pomona.”

Luke Sweeney ’13: How to Become the Nation’s Leading Rusher

Running back Luke Sweeney ’13 led all of NCAA Division III football in rushing this season, averaging 177.4 yards per game for Pomona-Pitzer and setting both single-game and single-season school records along the way. Featured in the Los Angeles Times and USA Today for his standout season, Sweeney’s path to Sagehen sports stardom began half a continent away in the suburbs of Tulsa.

 1) Grow up in Broken Arrow, Okla., in a sports-loving family. Look up to your dad who was a national champion in cross country and track during his college days at Occidental. Attend first football practice in seventh grade. Get hooked on the game so much that you decide to stick with football over other sports.

2) Dominate at the high school level at Holland Hall in Tulsa, despite being undersized for your position. Score six touchdowns in one game to earn the Tulsa World Player of the Week Award. Run for more than 1,000 yards as a senior to rank in the top 10 in the state.

3) Search for a college with good academics and that will allow you to continue to play football and not ride the bench. Remember the stories you’ve heard from your parents about their college days at Oxy in Southern California. Take a close look at schools on the West Coast. Decide that Pomona is the best fit after things click when you meet the football team.

4) Bide your time as a freshman behind senior running back Russell Oka PI ’10. Play fullback and return kickoffs to get some game experience. Become the starting tailback as a sophomore. Take advantage of getting the ball more. Rush for 824 yards on the year while senior quarterback Jake Caron PI ’11 and senior wide receiver R.J. Maki ’11 set school records.

5) Rush 176 yards in the first game of the 2011 season. Prove yourself worthy of carrying the ball 30-40 times a game. Spend lots of time in the training room every week to recover. Set a single-game school record with 265 rushing yards against Oxy. Earn some family bragging rights.

 6) Finish the season with a school-record 1,419 yards rushed. Earn postseason honors from SCIAC and D3football.com. Take a week or two to rest. Then hit the weight room to start preparing for senior year.

 

White Knuckles

white knuckles: tammy kaehler '92 just wanted to write about a racecar-driving sleuth, but before weaving her tale, she knew she'd have to get behind the wheel

I realized my mistake as I sat sweating and gasping for breath, knees trembling, body strapped into a bare-bones racecar with more horsepower than I wanted.

At the twirl of the instructor’s hand in the air, I flipped two of the six switches that comprised the entirety of the racecar’s dash controls. The vehicle rumbled to life, shaking and coughing at idle in a way that let you know it would only be happy going fast.

I hadn’t wanted to go to racing school. I’d rather not go fast, and I’m not the physically adventurous type. The only boundaries I like to push are how many books I can read in a week. But I’d had the idea to write a mystery series set in the car racing world after working in corporate marketing for a racing series sponsor. The fact that I’d never written a mystery—that I’d written fiction for the first time in my life only a few months prior—hadn’t stopped me from pitching my nascent idea to a published author. She encouraged me, with one caveat: My sleuth, who I’d seen as a woman in corporate marketing, had to be the racecar driver.

I needed the knowledge I’d get from being behind the wheel, and I wanted to have done it, even if doing it scared me to death. So there I was in the car at Road Atlanta, a road course in Georgia. Panicking.

We’d started the three-day course with classroom work, which is the kind of thing I’m good at, even if the topic was tire contact patches and the forces involved in cornering and braking. But then they put me in a car, and told me to forget everything I thought I knew about driving.

The first hands-on exercise was learning to brake, which should have been a no-brainer. What’s different about braking on the track, however, is that you don’t ease onto the brake and ease off, as you would in a street car rolling to a stop at a light. In broad strokes, racecar drivers want to be 100 percent on the throttle until they’re 100 percent on the brakes.

That meant barreling toward the brake markers at full acceleration—and then standing on the brake pedal with all my might, hoping to God I didn’t run into the gravel trap or, worse, the wall at the outer edge of the turn. Every fiber in my body screamed at me to brake sooner while my brain countered with “they said not to brake until the next marker.”

After braking, we learned how to heel-and-toe downshift. That’s using the right foot on two pedals at once, to both brake and blip the throttle (press the accelerator), which raises the engine revs so the car doesn’t lurch when I release the clutch. The point is to be as smooth as possible—“smooth is fast,” one driver told me—and maintain the connection of the tires to the ground at all times.

I kept telling myself that if I could tap dance (which I can), I could heel-and-toe downshift too, even if tap dancing doesn’t usually happen at 80 mph. I managed it only once the first day.

At this point in the instruction, I should have taken comfort in the fact that the other students were in the same boat, all beginners, all learning—except that they weren’t, because three of them were NASCAR drivers, young guns recently hired by one of the top NASCAR bosses through a televised reality show.

They were there to brush up on their road-racing skills, since their experience mostly ran to ovals. I’m sure intimidating an already scared writer was all in a day’s work for them.

Unlike me, the NASCAR boys had no trouble putting all the pieces together when it came time for a lead-follow around the track with an instructor showing us the correct line and braking points. They performed well; I floundered. It was the second day, and we were in groups of three cars (one student per car) following an instructor who was a professional driver. We were supposed to hit each apex correctly, upshift to the gearing they’d told us was correct, brake where they told us to brake and heeland- toe downshift.

Another attendee was frustrated with my pace and dogged my back bumper, which didn’t improve my skill. But I simply wasn’t ready to go as fast as the other two drivers in my group, and I stuck to my own comfort level, trying not be peer-pressured into a speed I wasn’t ready for. A good friend and professional driver had counseled me to take things at my own pace, and I repeated her words to myself as I struggled through our sessions.

Sooner than I wanted it to, the moment of truth arrived: my first solo laps. I sat waiting in the rumbling car, sweating and terrified, hoping my shaking legs would be able to work the clutch and throttle. I wondered again why I was doing this and why I hadn’t chosen something more normal and less violent to write about besides racing. Tea parties and embroidery, perhaps. And then they waved me out.

The change didn’t happen right away. As I lapped the track in short stints, punctuated by feedback from instructors stationed at different corners, I slowly began to enjoy myself. To find myself grinning under my helmet because I enjoyed the section of the track that curves left and right like the letter “S.” To think more about doing every corner right the next lap, not just three of 12. I got comfortable enough to relax, process more information and handle the speeds. I still wasn’t fast, relative to other students in the school. But I was doing 90 mph before braking for one corner, going 75-80 through another corner, and hitting 117 on the back straight. Best of all, by the start of the third day, the instructors were telling me I was doing everything right. That even if I wasn’t fast, I had the right skills. Going fast just takes more seat time, they assured me. I’ll take their word for it.

In the end, I learned enough to make my racecar driver sleuth, Kate Reilly, credible in the eyes of the racing world. Even if I can’t drive the way Kate can, I understand how she does it, and I can make her a character that the racing world believes in—in part, thanks to one of the instructors who later reviewed and blessed the driving scenes in my novel. I also faced down my fears and made it through one of the toughest challenges in my life.

But the truly eye-opening moment came near the end of the three-day course, when I rode in the racecar I’d been driving, with an instructor at the wheel. That’s when I understood how much more potential there was in the car and the track, and how much farther away the dge was. That two-lap ride gave me a glimpse of a different world, one of extreme speed and control and daring.

I know I’ll never personally inhabit that world, but at least now I can write about it.

 

ABOUT TAMMY KAEHLER ’92

She fell into the world of auto racing—and landed in the VIP suites. Kaehler had a freelance gig writing marketing copy for a mortgage lender during the housing boom of the early 2000s. When the lender decided to help sponsor the American Le Mans racing series, Kaehler saw a chance to travel and look inside another world, so she signed on to help with corporate hospitality work at the races.

Since she was working for the company putting up the cash, Kaehler got inside access at the track, riding in top-of-the-line Porsches and meeting “everyone and their uncle.” She became fascinated with auto racing: the money, the violence, the rock-star drivers.

Soon she was at work on a racing-themed murder-mystery book featuring a female racecar driver, Kate Reilly. After the mortgage company went bust, she kept at her writing and kept her toes inthe motorsports world, volunteering at races. When Dead Man’s Switch finally published last year, she launched the book at the American Le Mans Series at Connecticut’s Lime Rock Park, where the story is set.

Since then, her author events have continued to zigzag between conventional mystery book venues, where the racing aspect of the book stands out, and book-signings at racing events, where the mystery aspect is unique. “At each, people are totally fluent with one aspect of what I’m writing about,” she says.

Following this unusual course, Kaehler has found her audience. Publishers Weekly and Library Journal both praised the debut, and the second Kate Reilly mystery will be published next year.

Flight Toward the Fight (A Fuga Rumo À Luta)

flight toward the fight: a knock on the door drew kimball jones '60 into a race across northern spain with the end of an empire in the balance.

Our story begins with a long-ago knock on a door on a balmy June evening. The door is in France, at the apartment of a very young Kimball Jones, just a year out of Pomona where he was known as a nice guy who could often be found playing the grand piano in the lounge at Walker Hall or performing with his small jazz group for school dances.

But at this moment, Jones is simply an American in Paris. He is living the continental life thanks to the largesse of the French government, which awarded him a scholarship for this year following his 1960 college graduation. In return, three days a week he teaches conversational English at a lycée in suburban Paris. Much of the rest of his time he spends sitting on the iconic green chairs in the Jardin des Tuileries outside the Louvre. There, during an unusually warm February, he reads the entire works of Camus and Gide in French. In the evenings he goes to the cafés to drink good beer and better wine. He is living the life.

As befitting a young man living in the most romantic city in the world, he has fallen in love with a Swiss woman, Margrith. On this particular night in June, it is 10 o’clock. Jones and Margrith are engaged in the most ordinary of activities—cleaning the kitchen in his apartment from top to bottom. They have no way of imagining that, in a moment, the knock on the door will come, drawing Jones into a cascade of events that will change the balance of power in Africa.

Kimball Jones ’60 and Margrith in Paris.

Fifty years later, Jones is recounting this tale, sitting at the table of his sunny New York apartment with newspaper clippings and 8-by-10 black-and-white photographs spread out in front of him. Margrith brings in the worn brown leather diary he carried with him those many years ago and in which he kept an account of his remarkable experience that began on this one early-summer evening in Paris.

Down on the street in the Place d’Italie is a fellow by the name of Bill Nottingham whom Jones has met only once before, in an interview at the French refugee organization Cimade. Nottingham doesn’t know Jones’ exact address, so he stops people on the street, asking if they know where the tall American lives. Eventually, someone waves him in the direction of Jones’ apartment, where he interrupts their cleaning that night—along with their lives for a time.

Nottingham can’t discuss the urgent matter that has brought him there in front of Margrith, so he asks Jones to come down and talk to him in his car. Much later that night, Jones describes their conversation in his journal, crowding the words onto the pocket-sized pages:

I am almost hesitating to write this down, as it is very important and must be kept secret. Bill asked me if I could leave Paris tomorrow for a week. The story is as follows: There has been much trouble in Angola (Africa) recently. Out of 16 Methodist missionaries, 13 are dead or missing. There are many Angolese students in Lisbon, Portugal. The Portuguese government has taken their passports, immobilizing them. There is a good chance that a follow-up of the Angolese affair could occur in Lisbon, directed against these students. In fact, the possibility of a mass slaughter is not an exaggeration. These students are in hot water!

Before the month is over, Jones will end up in his own hot water, in the confines of a Spanish prison. But he’s not thinking about the possibility. Perhaps when Nottingham asks him to drive a car across Spain and back to clandestinely transport these fugitive students, he might have been wise to mull it over for a moment or two. But he is swept up in the drama and intrigue of it all. He answers in less time than it would have taken him to pick out a shirt to wear. He doesn’t think of himself as a hero. He doesn’t see himself playing a role in a historic moment. Truth be told, he sees it as an adventure, a great story to tell in years to come.

Clinging To Empire

Portugal had been a presence along the coast of Africa since the late 15th century as the first European nation to establish settlements and trading posts. The European colonization of Africa’s interior would begin in earnest at the grandiose behest of Belgium’s King Leopold II, who sat down with other European leaders in 1884 and blithely divvied up the continent not unlike the way the modern-day game of Risk begins. But while one after another African colony claimed its independence in the aftermath of World War II, Portugal, under the dictatorship of António Salazar, had held tightly to its holdings in Africa, including Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Principe.

Long-simmering tensions in Angola, on the western coast of Africa, had come to a head six months earlier when peasants who worked in the cotton fields protested their low wages and deplorable working conditions. The protest turned into a revolt. Portuguese traders were attacked. A month later in retaliation, the Portuguese military bombed villages, killing many thousands of the indigenous population.

The African students believed to be at risk in Portugal were among the first to complete a university education there. Salazar, fearing the political and intellectual leadership they might contribute to their homelands, had not only detained them by taking away their papers, but also had them tailed by his secret police, the PIDE (pronounced pee-day).

The leaders of the Methodist Board of Missions and World Council of Churches (WCC) had decided to secure false papers for these students and smuggle as many of them as they could across Spain—which had its own dictator—and into France where they would be given political asylum. Because of Cimade’s experience with this kind of endeavor, the WCC asked that organization to plan and carry out what would later become known as “the Fuga” (meaning escape or flight in Portuguese).

Jones will leave Paris in 24 hours. The first thing in the morning he procures his international driver’s license. It happens to be the final week of the school where he teaches, but under Nottingham’s advisement, Jones simply doesn’t show up. Later he is too embarrassed to go back and explain. For all the head of the lycée ever knew, he had fallen off the face of the earth.

To Margrith he confides only that he is going on a secret mission for Cimade. If anyone asks, he says, tell them I’ve gone off to Geneva for a conference. That cover story is so convincing that when he tells Mrs. Hauser, for whom he has been doing some house painting, she pulls out a Swiss watch that wasn’t working and asks him to get it repaired while he is there. He pockets it, not knowing what to do with it. Like so many other things, he’ll figure it out later.

Paris, France — June 14, 1961

The “big adventure,” as Jones calls it in his diary, gets underway that evening. Jones and two of the other drivers meet up for a relaxing dinner in the Latin Quarter. Dick Wyborg and Dave Pomeroy are students from Union Theological Seminary in New York who just happened to visit Cimade the day before and were pounced on by Bill Nottingham when he found out they had driver’s licenses and some free time.

That night, they all board an overnight train from Paris to Bayonne, a town north of the waistline border between France and Spain. Almost immediately, they get behind schedule. There are two trains to Bayonne that night—the express they are supposed to be on that arrives around 6 a.m. and another one that takes a more leisurely route, arriving at 11. When they disembark some five hours late, they find the gentleman from Hertz International who has waited for them the entire time.

During the next several days, Jones’ journal seems like something of a travelogue, as the drivers meander their way along the French coast. (Each of the four have their own rental cars, but they travel the route in tandem.) They are looking for a border crossing into Spain with few checkpoints, but not so small that they will stand out when they return with the African students. They settle on Hendaye, a resort town on France’s Atlantic coast. Then they begin their trek following secondary roads primarily along the Spanish coastline. The rendezvous near the Spain-Portugal border is 600 long and bumpy miles away. Cimade has encouraged them to look the part of tourists by staying at good hotels and eating fine meals. (In Spain, they can get an excellent meal for the equivalent of $2.) Jones, relishing the opportunity provided, has no trouble complying. He has a new 35 mm camera and enjoys taking photographs of the picturesque towns and sweeping coastline views. He buys some souvenirs as well—a leather bag for himself and a purse for Margrith—marveling at the inexpensive prices.

Towns along this route later become a litany to them—a tick for another leg of an endless journey. But on that first passage, when his heart isn’t pounding from moments like a near head-on with a truck on one of the hairpin curves through the mountains and his bottom isn’t aching from the long stretches of tremendous ruts on unpaved roads, Jones marvels at the sights, including the elaborately ornate cathedral in the city of Santiago, shown to them by a young Spanish hitchhiker. It doesn’t occur to them until later that picking up hitchhikers—they even picked up soldiers along the road—could compromise them. “They say that ignorance is bliss,” says Jones these many years later, as he speculates that his political naïveté may have kept him from a nervousness that might have given him away.

No matter how long the day behind the wheel, Jones still takes time every night to record observations:

Though today was a fatiguing day filled with much tension from trying to drive “as fast as possible,” it was also an enjoyable day—for we drove through some beautiful countryside. The people along the road are also very interesting. There were many places where we wanted to stop and take pictures or to watch something that was going on, but we couldn’t take the time. On one spot we saw a traditional funeral procession—women in black robes and veils, men with the casket on their shoulders, marching to the slow chimes of the little church.

After three days of traveling, and a final push of 60 miles, they arrive at their destination of Pontevedra, a town north of the Portuguese border. The next day their covert work will begin in earnest.

Spain-Portugal Border — June 18, 1961

While Jones and his fellow drivers have enjoyed something of a sojourn as they make that first run across Spain, the Portugal side of the operation has been fraught with tension and intrigue. Cimade officials Jacques Beaumont and Chuck Harper are coordinating that part of the escape, slipping African students out of Portugal, hopefully before the PIDE catches on. In one case, they spirit two young men away from a bar right under the noses of plainclothes PIDE, who have been tailing them for days. The men innocently get up to use the restroom where they jump out a small window, and are whisked away while the PIDE enjoy their wine.

Nineteen Africans are brought to the banks of the Minho River, which marks part of the northern border between Portugal and Spain. There, a notorious coffee smuggler with land on both sides of the border and family connections to Portuguese and Spanish customs police runs his well-oiled operation. The Fuga crew gave him the nickname “Edward G.” because of his gruff, no-nonsense manner, which reminded them of the gangsters portrayed by American actor, Edward G. Robinson. Beaumont and Harper wait with the students in the tall brush above the river until the first light when they slip and slide their way down to the water and clamber into a small rowboat three or four at a time.

The river has a treacherous current. At any time, it could have carried them around a bend and into view of the border patrol on either side. But the crossings turn out to be blessedly uneventful. Up above the steep riverbank on the Spanish side is a windowless barn where they will wait in stifling heat and in complete silence until the arranged pick-up at mid-day. “During that Spanish siesta time when ordinary Galicians, guards, dogs, every living thing and time stopped,” Harper wrote in a recollection, “four spacious automobiles, one after another, came to a stop in front of the barn door facing the dirt road, with their American drivers.”

Jones and Pomeroy get their first taste of the cloak-and-dagger maneuver when they pull up alongside the barn where the fugitives are hidden and five figures dart out, eyes blinking as they adjust from the radical darkness to full sunlight, faces filled with trepidation. As soon as they jump into the car, Jones gives them the papers with their false identities that have been supplied by the Senegalese and Congolese embassies in Paris. They are to immediately memorize the information in case they are stopped somewhere along the way.

The tension in the car is palpable. Jones drives many hours with barely a word uttered. Even had there been, he wouldn’t have understood much. The students, for the most part, speak Portuguese, Spanish and their native African languages. A few know a little French. They don’t plan to stop much as they hasten back towards San Sebastian, 600 miles away near the French border. But late that afternoon, the right rear axle slips out of joint on Jones’ car. It is a Sunday. They are in the mountains. Two of the students who know Spanish hitch a ride into the next town and, miracle of miracles, find mechanics—two brothers— who know how to fix Chevys. But to everyone’s consternation, when the students arrive back with the mechanics, they are accompanied by two guards ominously armed with machine guns— Franco’s men, says Jones in his diary, referring to Spain’s autocratic head of state, General Francisco Franco. To make matters worse, a student has left one of his documents where it can be seen through the window—and where it is duly noticed. “Oh,” says the mechanic off-handedly. “These are Angolese students from Portugal. You never know what these Americans will do for a thrill.” The comment is enough to raise the hairs on the back of everyone’s necks. But the policemen say nothing. They don’t even ask to see passports.

In the end, Jones saw this delay as a bonding moment. The mechanics fix the car enough to get it to town where they have to work on it for a few more hours. Meanwhile, they lead the group to a dirty stucco building across from the garage where they can get some dinner while they wait:

There we encountered “Pepita” who served us a wonderful meal of some wild bird. We had great time talking and laughing, kidding Pepita. For the first time, everyone really seemed to relax—and it was at this point that I really developed a warm feeling toward these fellows.

     Pepita’s place was like something out of the middle ages, yet we wouldn’t have found Maxim’s to be half so enjoyable. Outside her place was a little “place” where three pigs were running around loose, oinking. A little old lady was sitting there watching over them.

     This incident proved to be more a blessing than a hindrance for it served to loosen up everyone. We wouldn’t have missed this evening in Mondoñedo for anything.

Shortly before midnight, they get back on the road. In one of the sweeter moments, the students sing Angolese freedom songs. One in particular catches Jones’ fancy—the haunting Muxima, which is the name of an Angolan town. It means heart in Kimbundu, one of the native languages of Angola. Fifty years later, Jones can still sing it.

Northern Spain — June 19, 1961

The drive becomes a punishing exercise for an exhausted Jones, who nonetheless plows on through the night. In the mountains outside of Oviedo in northern Spain, they run into thick fog. By then, Jones is almost dreaming as he drives, he is so tired. On one curve he doesn’t leave enough room. When he slams on the brakes, the car spins around, nearly smashing into the side of the mountain. That is a wake-up call, so to speak. As soon as there is a place to stop, he pulls over and sleeps for an hour-and-a-half.

By now, dawn is almost breaking. The nap doesn’t do much for his fatigue, though. He stops to get some coffee, but he is still dangerously groggy. Further down the road, he starts seeing things. It is the only time in his life, he says now, that he ever hallucinated. Giant, animated rabbits hop across the road in front of him. He can’t think clearly. When he stops the car and gets out for a breath of fresh air, he can hardly stand up. He feels drunk. But still he continues the marathon. One hour fades indistinguishably into the next, until they finally arrive in San Sebastian. By then, another day has passed. It is 5 o’clock in the evening.

The next day the group approaches the Spanish border crossing. Bill Nottingham has to meet with the commissariat of police and explains that the group has been on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and is now returning to France. The Spanish official is nervous and suspicious, sensing that things are not what they seem. However, he allows them to cross.

Jubilation! The Africans will board the next train to Paris. As for the four chauffeurs, they return to their hotel for a celebratory meal and a good night’s rest before their own return to Paris the next day.

But that is not to be. While they are still enjoying their dinner, Nottingham is called to the phone. It is Jacques Beaumont in Portugal. He speaks in code, saying that the “picnic” went so well he wants them to return the next day. They are going to do it again.

This is not what Jones has expected. By now, the tedium of driving has replaced some, although not all, of the romance of the adventure. But he is more familiar with the roads, and has the greater wisdom to stop and sleep in the car for longer than a catnap when he gets tired. Still, it’s no picnic for him.

Spain-France Border — June 30, 1961

Two more trips across Spain and back deliver 41 additional Africans from the troubles in Portugal to the Spanish side of the border crossing with France. Because the original group had gotten over the border into France with no real trouble, Nottingham decides to expedite matters and take this much larger group of “pilgrims” across en masse. This time, though, things don’t go as hoped.

First of all, everyone, including, apparently, the commissariat, is celebrating at a huge festival. The streets are filled with music, parades and dancing. The anxious group sits at a café, watching the revelry and biding their time until Nottingham comes back with permission to cross the border. They wait through most of the day.

When the commissariat returns, it is a different official than the first one. The new commissariat wants to talk with each student individually, so he has them arrested and taken to the governor’s palace in San Sebastian. The students are searched and interrogated. Everyone manages to hide the papers from Cimade allowing them to seek political asylum in France—with the exception of one individual. That’s all it takes. The guard who is questioning this unfortunate soul runs out into the hallway, waving the paper and calling loudly to his comrades. Soon the students are all handcuffed and everyone, including Nottingham and Jones, are put in military vehicles and taken to the prison in San Sebastian. Amazingly, despite the exhausting reality of the past three weeks, Jones savors even this moment, which he records later:

I’ll never forget that ride, under armed guard, across San Sebastian in the back of a Land Rover.

     My attitude was perhaps a bit of a stupid one, for I was carried away (as was Dave) by the romantic conception of spending a night in a foreign prison.

     … Our cell had bars on the windows and door, a small crucifix on one wall. There was a room with several washbasins on the right-hand side of the door, and a room with several “Turkish-style” toilets on the left-handed side. Looking out the door you could see an enclosure which stretched around a square, with a long hall extending from the other side, and at the commencement of this hall was a statue of Mary, lit by candles. Our mattresses were very smelly (of sweat and dirt, probably hadn’t been washed for months!).

He manages to hang onto the feeling he is on an adventure even when dinner is served—a half loaf of thick bread with smelly cheese and unidentifiable brown glop. It is only when other prisoners come in the next morning with instructions to assemble 44 beds that Jones began to appreciate the serious ramifications of the circumstances in which he found himself.

The night before, the students had sung the Angolese freedom songs until well after midnight. But now spirits are so low that many of them simply lie back down and go to sleep to try to keep from worrying about what will come next.

For Jones, it is a moment of reckoning. Margrith and the plans he was making for the future loom large. Now he feels pinned in place while everyone else in his life is free to move forward. His three weeks on the road seem less the romantic adventure, and more the serious matter that it has always been. Would he have chosen to get involved had he known it would land him in prison in a foreign country? Probably, but that is little consolation at this moment.

And then, miracle of miracles, they are awakened late in the afternoon by a guard telling them to get their things and get out. They are leaving. Don’t ask questions. Don’t look back. Just get out of here, get out of Spain, and don’t come back.

Over the Years

Kimball Jones never has. He never returned as a tourist to the lovely coastal towns that had enchanted him. But several years after the operation—after Jones had married Margrith, attended Union Theological Seminary and become pastor of a church in Antwerp, Belgium—he was visited by a minister with ties to Africa. Melvin Blake, who oversaw the Methodist Church’s missionary work in Angola, had been the one to get the ball rolling on the Fuga. Blake let Jones in on the secret of how they were all sprung from prison, as reported to him in a debriefing from the CIA. When Portugal’s Salazar learned that 60 of his political de- tainees had slipped out of the country without the PIDE noticing, and that 41 of them were now being held in a Spanish prison, he demanded them returned immediately. Spain’s ruler, Francisco Franco, took offense at the request. Thus it was that after a few exchanges between the two countries, Franco settled it all by opening the prison gates and letting them all go.

Jones’ brief career as a secret operative was over—and not a moment too soon.

Over the years, Jones wondered what had become of the students. He got his answer last summer when, out of the blue, he was invited to a 50th reunion of the Fuga as guests of Pedro Pires, the president of Cape Verde, who had been in the Fuga.

Some of those students settled in France, others in Switzerland and Russia. They were physicians and engineers and, as Salazar had worried, political leaders who played roles in the liberation of Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and other nations. The reunion, Jones says, was a veritable Who’s Who of Portuguese- speaking Africa. Among the 60 African students that Cimade helped to rescue were three who would go on to be presidents of their newly independent countries, four prime ministers, five ministers of defense, a minister of health and a Methodist bishop.

Jones himself has spent close to 40 years as a pastoral psychotherapist with the Psychotherapy and Spirituality Institute in New York City. On the side, he is a gifted jazz pianist who has performed with his group at Birdland and other jazz clubs in New York. But one of his most recent gigs may stand out as the highlight of his career. At a nightclub one of the evenings in Praia, the capital of Cape Verde, he took a turn as a guest musician, playing an original jazz composition, which he renamed, in honor of the occasion, “Bossa de Fuga”—the music of the flight.

 


1) Cape Verde
2) Guinea-Bissau
3) Sao Tome and Principe
4) Angola
5) Mozambique

Flight into History

Last summer, Kimball Jones ’60 found himself on a plane heading for Africa—and 50 years into the past—after President Pedro Pires of the island nation of Cape Verde called a reunion of people who took part of the 1961 Fuga. The theme for the event was “The Flight toward the Fight” (“A Fuga Rumo à Luta”) in recognition of how many of the African students who escaped went on to be leaders in their countries’ struggles for independence from colonial rule.

On the flight from Lisbon to Praia, capital of Cape Verde, Jones was reunited with Joaquim Chissano, who was part of the Fuga and served as president of Mozambique from 1986 to 2005. Chissano, in first class, learned of Jones’ presence and came back to find him.

“Margrith and I were napping,” Jones remembers, “when Chissano suddenly took my hands in his and said, ‘Kim, Kim, do you realize what we achieved together, my friend?’” Reminded of the Angolese freedom songs they had sung together during the drive, Chissano began to sing a favorite, called “Muxima,” and Jones joined in. The photo above was taken right after they finished singing.

In all, three of the six original rescuers—Jones, Chuck Harper and Bill Nottingham—along with 16 of the original 60 escapees were able to attend. Among those were Pascoal Mocumbi, a medical doctor who was prime minister of Mozambique from 1994 to 2004; Manuel Boal, who led the World Health Organization in Africa; along with three others who served as prime minister of Angola. Along with sharing memories, participants reported to the group on the political development of their nations since the Fuga. The conference was well covered by African news media and drew film crews from Angola and Portugal, each working on documentaries about the Fuga.