Blog Articles

Pomona Rewind: 80 Years Ago

March 29, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

Four score years ago, the sciences were alive and well at Pomona, as evidenced by these brief stories from the mid-1930s.

20,000 Year-Old Sloth Poop

20,000 Year-Old Sloth Poop Pomona professors Jerome D. Laudermilk and Philip A. Munz made headlines after traveling to the Grand Canyon to study a rare find: 20,000-year-old giant-sloth dung. According to an article in the Sept. 20, 1937, issue of Life magazine, the dung covered the floor of a cave believed to be home to giant ground sloths, which waddled on two legs and could grow as large as elephants. Laudermilk and Munz hoped to uncover the sloths’ diet and what it might reveal about plant and climate conditions of the era.

Shark Embalming 101

Shark Embalming 101 As a Pomona student, the late Lee Potter ’38 had a simple plan to pay his way through college: sell his skills embalming animals. Potter, a pre-med student, had more than four years of embalming experience by the time the LA Times profiled him on June 1, 1937. He embalmed fish, frogs, rats, earthworms, crayfish and sharks and sold them to schools for anatomical study in their labs. His best seller: sharks—once, he sent an order of 200 embalmed sharks to a nearby college. His ultimate goal was to embalm an elephant.

Crime Lab Pomona

Crime Lab Pomona In August 1936, a Riverside woman named Ruth Muir was found brutally murdered in the San Diego woods, and the case ignited a media frenzy. A suspect claiming he “knows plenty” about Muir’s murder was found with 20 hairs that appeared to belong to a woman. In their rush to test whether the hairs were Muir’s, police turned to an unlikely source to conduct the analysis—Pomona College. Though the hairs do not seem to have matched Muir’s in the end, at least we can say: For a brief moment, Pomona operated a crime lab.

Stray Thoughts: Kitchen Window Community

March 23, 2018 by Mark Wood Comments Off

Rural America My favorite anecdote about growing up in the rural South is a childhood memory of sitting with my aunt and uncle at their red Formica kitchen table, which was strategically positioned in front of a double window looking out on the dirt road in front of their house. Each time a car or—more likely—a pickup would go by, leaving its plume of dust hanging in the air, both of them would stop whatever they were doing and crane their necks. Then one of them would offer an offhand comment like: “Looks like Ed and Georgia finally traded in that old Ford of theirs. It’s about time.” Or: “There’s that Johnson fellow who’s logging the Benton place. Wonder if he’s any kin to Dave Johnson.”

Inevitably, there would follow a speculative conversation about their neighbors’ personal and business affairs, about which they always seemed remarkably well informed. “Is her mom still in the hospital?” “I think they let her go home yesterday.” “Maybe we should take over some deviled eggs or something.”

For the most part, it was casual and benevolent. Though their nearest neighbors—my parents—lived half a mile away, beyond a screen of forest, they seemed to have a strong sense of being members of a real community where people knew each other well and looked out for one another.

Sometimes, though, a darker note would creep in. “There’s that Wheeler boy again. What’s he up to, do you reckon?” Then the conversation would turn to past misdeeds and present mistrust, accompanied by a disapproving shake of the head.

And on those rare occasions when they didn’t recognize the vehicle or driver at all, they would take special note. “Who in the world is that?” “Never saw him before.” “Wonder if he’s the fellow who bought the old Pearson place.” “What kind of truck is that?” Looking back, it seems to me now that there was always a strong note of suspicion in their voices at such moments. Here was an intruder, not to be trusted until clearly identified.

Over the years, I’ve found myself conflicted about the sense of belonging that memory evokes. There’s something compelling about that kind of attentive and caring community —something that I miss to this day. The old clichés were true—doors were never locked, and people really did show up unexpected with food when someone was sick.

But there was also something intrusive—even coercive—about it, and as I grew older, I began to understand just how closed and exclusive a community it was and how ruthlessly it enforced its unspoken rules of conformity and homogeneity.

I don’t think my parents ever felt completely a part of that community, though they lived there most of their lives. Neither did I, even as a kid. We didn’t go to church. We didn’t hunt or fish. We had strange political views. But we kept to ourselves. We didn’t make waves. And so we were accepted, if never quite assimilated.

Today, I’m a suburban Angeleno, but my roots will always be there. For years, whenever I went home to visit my parents, I was treated by the community as a prodigal son. A couple of my many cousins would drop by to ask how I was doing out there in California. The few neighbors who still knew me would wave hello as I drove by. Even though I always felt apart, I don’t suppose I’ll ever feel quite so completely at home anywhere else.

During the past year, there’s been a lot of talk about the growing cultural and political divide between urban and rural America. Despite my roots, I don’t feel qualified to comment beyond that little anecdote. The last time I visited that community was to finish preparing my parents’ house for sale. They’re both long gone, as are my aunt and uncle and almost everyone I knew as a child. I doubt I’ll ever go back. In any case, I’ve become an outsider, the kind of stranger whom people stare at from their kitchen windows and say, “Who in the world is that?”

Team Work

March 23, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

A Voice for Change

Alaina Woo ’17 onstage with NCAA President Mark Emmert

Alaina Woo ’17 stepped to the free-throw line hundreds of times during her basketball career with Pomona-Pitzer. But she had never stepped onto an athletic stage quite like the one at the NCAA Convention in January when she stood in front of nearly 3,000 of the movers and shakers of college sports for a one-on-one talk with association President Mark Emmert.

“It was a completely new experience for me,” says Woo, who appeared in her role as chair of the first NCAA Board of Governors’ Student-Athlete Engagement Committee, tasked with considering some of the crucial issues facing college sports—including the hot-button topic of how the NCAA addresses sexual violence.

“I felt prepared in the sense that I obviously was very familiar with the committee’s work and I had worked on the Commission to Combat Sexual Violence, which is why I was named chair,” Woo says. “But it’s completely different when you arrive in Indianapolis and see the giant place you’re going to be speaking. The NCAA helped me out by making it be more of a conversation with President Emmert, rather than me giving this giant speech looking out to a crowd.”

Among the points Woo made onstage: “I think it’s a rare opportunity for student-athletes to have that direct line to the Board of Governors. And like I said, I was a public policy major, and I’m surprised by how often people craft policies or make changes without engaging the people that they’re making the policies for.”

Woo’s role is seeking change from within the NCAA.

“There is so much more to be done,” she says. Citing recent news stories of mishandled cases of sexual violence in athletics and at NCAA institutions, Woo feels that athletics and higher education are a step behind. “Issues of sexual violence have plagued college campuses and athletics—both youth and collegiate—for years. It is imperative that the NCAA and other sport governing bodies continue to work on efforts to prevent sexual violence, support survivors and hold their memberships accountable.”

Basketball and Advocacy

Woo driving the baseline during a game

Now in her first season as an assistant basketball coach at Tufts University while simultaneously working as a research assistant at the Harvard Kennedy School, Woo was deeply active in NCAA issues while at Pomona, where she is the Sagehens’ career leader in three-pointers. She also is ninth on Pomona-Pitzer’s career scoring list and was the team’s leading scorer as a senior.

Woo was still a first-year student when a teammate took her to a meeting of Pomona-Pitzer’s NCAA Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. That friend and Lisa Beckett, a professor of physical education and associate athletic director, encouraged Woo to get involved.

“They said, ‘If you’re interested in making athletics something where you can make a difference off the court, interested in community service, interested in leadership, you should definitely check this out.’”

By Woo’s sophomore year, Beckett—“a wonderful mentor,” Woo says—suggested applying for the NCAA Division III national Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. Woo was selected and represented Pomona-Pitzer’s Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and the Northwest Conference for a three-year term that ended in January. Among other roles, she also served on the NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics for Divisions I, II and III.

“My interests really lie in women’s athletics and Title IX, advocacy for victims of sexual violence and underrepresented student athletes, so that was why I was chosen for those committees rather than a championship committee or something like that,” Woo says. “My interests were definitely inspired by being at Pomona, a liberal arts campus where there’s this sense to explore how something like athletics could make a difference.”

She hopes for further advances on sexual violence issues after the NCAA adopted a policy last year requiring coaches, athletes and administrators to complete education in sexual violence prevention each year.

The new sexual violence policy has been an opportunity for the NCAA to reflect on what its role is, she says.

“It seems ridiculous that someone who has a low GPA might not be eligible but someone who perpetrates sexual violence is eligible. These are the types of conversations we are now facilitating on a national level.”

Choosing a Goal

Woo’s work at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she is not enrolled as a graduate student but works part-time on a project called Participedia that seeks to crowdsource and map participatory political processes around the world, allows her to continue pursuing the policy interests she developed in her studies at Pomona with Politics Professor David Menefee-Libey.

At Tufts, a Division III women’s basketball power that has reached the NCAA title game the past two seasons, Woo got a foot in the door thanks to Pomona-Pitzer Coach Jill Pace, a former Tufts assistant coach.

Like a basketball player in position to pass, shoot or drive, Woo is something of a triple threat as she starts her career: She could continue coaching, pursue graduate work in public policy or possibly combine sports and advocacy as an athletic administrator.

“I’m still very on the fence,” she says.

“When I’m thinking about being a coach in college sports and mentoring young women, I’m thinking all about policies and politics and power and how to best advocate for my athletes or people in the athletic department who are struggling with things outside of athletics.

“It feels so connected. This work at the NCAA has really tied together my academic interests with my love and passion for the game of basketball.”

—Robyn Norwood

* * *

FOOTBALL: A Hail-Mary Memory

Sagehen Highlights

Here are a few highlights from the 2017–18 seasons of Pomona-Pitzer Athletics.

FOOTBALL: A Hail-Mary Memory

For most Pomona-Pitzer fans, the crowning achievement of the year in sports happened at the very end of football season, in early November 2017, when the Sagehens won the 60th edition of the “Battle of Sixth Street” against the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (CMS) Stags, 29–28. The game ended with an overtime, fourth-down, Hail-Mary pass from quarterback Karter Odermann ’20 that bounced off the helmet of a Stags defender before falling into the waiting arms of Kevin Masini ’18, followed by an equally heart-stopping two-point conversion reception by David Berkinsky ’19 to seal the victory. (In the photo above, Sagehen fans lift Berkinsky onto their shoulders.)

The football season was also marked by a series of team records. Aseal Birir ’18 set both the all-time career rushing record (3,859 yards) and the single-game rushing record (275 yards), and Evan Lloyd ’18 set an all-time record for career tackles with 275.

BASKETBALL

The men’s basketball team won 13 of their last 16 games to advance to the finals of the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) tournament before losing to CMS. For the women’s team, Emma Godfrey ’21 was named SCIAC Newcomer of the Year after tallying at least 30 points in six games.

SWIMMING & DIVING

Both the men’s and the women’s teams won SCIAC championships, the second in a row for the women and the first in program history for the men. Maddie Kauahi (PI ’19) won SCIAC Female Athlete of the Year; Mark Hallman ’18 was Male Athlete of the Year; and Lukas Menkhoff ’21 was Newcomer of the Year.

MEN’S WATER POLO

For the second straight season, the men’s water polo team claimed the SCIAC title both in the regular season and in the conference tournament. Daniel Diemer (PI’18) was SCIAC Player of the Year.

MEN’S CROSS COUNTRY

The men’s cross country team won its first SCIAC title since 2005 and finished sixth at the NCAA Championships.

THE SAGEHEN NIKE STORE

Sagehen apparel is now available from the Sagehen Nike Store.

Nike Store

Picture This

March 23, 2018 by Jeff Hing Comments Off

This dramatic image of the Stanley Academic Quadrangle in winter is a view you don’t see very often—unless, that is, you’re a drone.

Stanley Academic Quadrangle

—Photo by Jeff Hing

Ideas That Feel Alive

March 23, 2018 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

The author of 29 books for children, Mac Barnett ’04 is always looking for stories that elicit strong feelings.

Leo a Ghost Story Extra Yarn Sam & Dave Dig a Hole The Terrible Two Guess Again! The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse

New York Times–bestselling and award-winning children’s author Mac Barnett ’04 started reading at the age of 3. As he was growing up, it was just Barnett and his mom. They didn’t have a lot of money, but Barnett says it was important to her that they had books. So they bought all of Barnett’s books secondhand—or third? fourth?—at yard sales.

“I grew up with the generation of children’s books before me and the generation before that,” Barnett says, noting that his collection spanned the years from 1935 to 1975.

Barnett cites some favorite authors and books from his half-pint days: Margaret Wise Brown, James Marshall, Wanda Gág and “The Frog and Toad” series by Arnold Lobel.

Books like those became touchstones for him in his writing, he says, and still evoke a particular set of memories: reading aloud with his mom and telling inside jokes in their family. They found some books ridiculously absurd and others heartbreaking. The best books, he says, made them feel something.

Barnett says that’s what drives him today as a full-time writer: strong feeling. To him, writers aren’t any better at ideas than anyone else, “I just think we tend to hold onto ideas, cogitate on them, turn them into something. The trick for me at least is not how do I come up with something but knowing which ideas are worth chasing down, which ideas feel alive to me.”

For Barnett, there is no barrier between his work and the rest of his life. Those “alive” ideas can come from anywhere.

“I write about the things I care about. Everything I see, every bad book I see, every good book I see, everything I care about that elicits a strong emotion. It’s just experiencing the world and paying attention to the world. That’s the work. That’s the thing that makes your brain a receptive place to an idea.”

Barnett first started crafting children’s stories when he was in college during his summers. He worked at a summer camp, telling original stories to the camp kids. He’d make up stories about his life: adventure stories, espionage stories and more. In the telling is where he found his dream. Barnett spends a lot of time on the road, visiting elementary schools and reading out loud to children. They are who he keeps in mind when he’s building an imaginary world; he pictures himself standing in front of a big group of kids and holding their attention with a book.

When he first told his Pomona College mentor, the late Professor David Foster Wallace, that he wanted to write for children, Barnett says Wallace winced. He said he didn’t have any advice to offer Barnett on how to write for children. But Barnett replied that he already knew how to talk to kids. He needed to learn how to write. He says Wallace’s counsel to respect the reader and always consider his audience was huge in his development as a writer.

Develop he did. Barnett has been writing full-time for 13 years, and in that time, he’s written 29 books. But Barnett is modest when he’s complimented on being prolific. He describes his process as a mess. There are a lot of scraps. There’s a lot of sitting.

“My impression is it’s very lazy. There are so many days when you sit in front of your computer and you don’t write a single word. But obviously something’s happening because there are these books.”

Indeed, something is happening because Barnett is winning lots of recognition, and his books have sold over one million copies, been translated into more than 30 languages and racked up awards like the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award and (the icing on the cake for every children’s book) two Caldecott Honors. Barnett is quick to say that it’s actually the illustrator who gets the Caldecott award, not the author.

“They don’t even give me a certificate,” he says, laughing.

Still, even though it’s not technically his, seeing that Caldecott sticker on his books is very satisfying. He remembers that while growing up he was always attracted to books bearing that sticker. He remarks that it’s amazing that it means so much to readers even that young.

Meaning and memory are what make Barnett’s work, well, meaningful and memorable. Knee-high readers eventually become full-size readers. Barnett hears from college kids who grew up reading a series he wrote called “Brixton Brothers.”

“Some of them have told me that when they packed for college, they packed five books to take with them and ‘Brixton Brothers’ was one of those five. The books we read as children make up who we are… these kids are adults and they are deciding to bring those books with them in life. That is just overwhelming.”

Books and memories that young readers carry into adulthood are one day passed on to their own children, he says.

Barnett is keenly aware of the audience he’s working for. People will tell him kids love horses, kids love robots—but he thinks it’s both simpler and more complicated. Kids love a good story. And lots of different kinds of stories.

“Kids’ literary tastes are as widely varied as adults’ literary tastes. You’re just trying to tell something true that’s stylistically important for that truth. That’s what good art is for adults, too. It’s just a kid’s experience of the world is different from an adult’s experience of the world. Kids love all kinds of different things. Literature for all kids should be as diverse as kids are.”

Barnett’s three favorite books of his own are a motley collection themselves: Guess Again (2009); Leo: A Ghost Story (2015); and his most recent, The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse (2017). He loves Guess Again because it is the lightest in tone, full of jokes, and yet his most philosophical work. His affection for Leo is due to Christian Robinson’s illustrations and the subject matter, which is a paean to friendship. The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse is special to Barnett because it poses big questions about life, death and why bad things happen—questions he wrestles with and that children pose all the time.

It’s a tough audience, Barnett says. The good part: his crowd isn’t fanboying and fangirling over him the way grown-up audiences can do to their favorites. The kids are there because they care about the book; they’re not fawning over the author, he says. But because they care about the book, they keep it real. Really real.

“They will just tell you anything they don’t like about the book.” And Barnett says he takes all of the criticism seriously.

Kids offer other kinds of fun-size observations as well.

“I have a really big Adam’s apple, which I didn’t know until I started hanging around with kids, until they started asking, ‘What’s that on your neck, why is it so big?’ That changed the way I look at the mirror for the rest of my life. That’s all right though—they weren’t wrong. They weren’t wrong.”

How to Advance Mathematics By Asking the Right Questions

March 23, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

Elvis Kahoro ’20 (left) with Professor Stephan Garcia

One day last year, in Professor Stephan Garcia’s Number Theory and Cryptography class, the lesson took a surprising turn.

To make a point about the use of seemingly random patterns in cryptography, Garcia had just flashed onto the screen a chart of the first 100 prime numbers and all of their primitive roots. (It would take too long to explain what primitive roots are, so suffice to say that they’re important in modern cybersecurity applications.)

Looking at the chart, Elvis Kahoro ’20 noticed something interesting about pairs of primes known as “twins”—primes that differ by exactly two, such as 29 and 31. The smaller of the pair always seemed to have as many or more primitive roots than the larger of the two. He wondered if that was always true.

“So I just asked what I thought was a random question,” Kahoro recalls. It was the kind of curious question he was known for asking all through his school years, sometimes with unfortunate results. “Some teachers would get mad at me for asking so many questions that led us off the topic,” he remembers.

But Garcia took the first-year student’s question seriously. And the next day, the professor called Kahoro to his office, where he’d been doing some number-crunching on his computer.

“It turns out that Elvis’s conjecture is false, but in an astoundingly interesting way,” Garcia explains. “There are only two counter-examples below 10,000. And bigger number-crunching indicated that his conjecture seemed to be correct 98 percent of the time.”

Garcia and a frequent collaborator, Florian Luca, then found a theoretical explanation for the phenomenon, resulting in a paper titled “Primitive root bias for twin primes,” to be published in the journal Experimental Mathematics, with Kahoro listed as a co-author.

“What I’ve taken away from this,” Kahoro says, “is never to be afraid to ask questions in class, because you never know where they’ll lead.”

Come to the United States from Kenya at the age of 3 and grow up in Kennesaw, Georgia, about 30 miles north of Atlanta. Go to public schools and discover that (a) you love math and (b) you love finding patterns.

In seventh grade, play a video game based on the Japanese anime Naruto. Discover the source code for the game online and find yourself fascinated by the logic of its code. Decide you want to make computers your life’s work.

Choose to attend the STEM magnet program at Kennesaw Mountain High School because it offers lots of AP classes, including one in your #1 interest, computer science. Join lots of organizations, and do about a thousand hours of community service.

Learn about the QuestBridge program from another student, apply and get accepted. At a QuestBridge conference, learn about Pomona College from your group leader, recent Pomona alumna Ashley Land ’16, who urges you to apply.

Visit Pomona on Fly-in Weekend, meet a number of faculty who make you feel at home and discover that the College’s support for DACA students like you is the best in the country. Apply for early admission and get accepted.

During your first semester at Pomona, take a Linear Algebra course with Professor Stephan Garcia, whose problem-solving approach to teaching impresses you so much that you can’t wait to take another course with him second semester.

In Number Theory and Cryptography class during your second semester, look at a chart of prime numbers and notice something intriguing. Ask a question, and learn how just asking the right question can open unexplored frontiers of new knowledge.

Letter Box

March 23, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

Eclipse Memories

Close-up of the total eclipse. Photo by Tom and Judith Auchter, digitally enhanced by Lew Phelps ’65

Thanks to Chuck and Lew Phelps (both ’65) for the interesting article about the Pomona eclipse event in Wyoming in August. The opportunity to share the experience with Pomona friends and family was stunning, and the article captured the depth of the adventure. It is amazing that they had the foresight to plan two years in advance and to reserve one of the premier spots in the U.S. to view the spectacle. The twins worked tirelessly on every aspect of our time together, including housing, meals, a lecture series and guided stargazing, and they created a deeply memorable experience for everyone on the mountain.

Wishing to honor the Phelpses, attendees from the Class of ’65, as well as the Classes of ’64 and ’66, created a Pomona fund to celebrate our time together. At the final group lunch, we announced the Phelps Twins Eclipse Fund to support Pomona summer internships in science. The response was heartening: 86 donations came from Pomona alumni and friends who attended the event and from some who did not but who wanted to support the fund. The final figure was $52,242. The fund will support more than 10 summer internships for students in future years.

With appreciation to Chuck and Lew for making it happen.

—Ann Dunkle Thompson ’65, P’92
—Celia Williams Baron ’65
—Virginia Corlette Pollard ’65, P’93
—Jan Williams Hazlett ’65
—Peter Briggs ’64, P’93

Excelling Wisely

When I received the Fall 2017 edition of PCM, I was intrigued by the front cover’s puzzle shapes, where work and life fit together. As a creative writing and reading intervention teacher at STEM Prep High School in Nashville, TN, I wrestle with this question of how to fit life and work together without work consuming both pieces. I was absolutely delighted, upon opening to the article “Excelling Wisely,” to read these lines by the president of Pomona College: “We need to tell ourselves and each other that we can achieve and excel without taking every drop of energy from our reserves. That we all need to take some time to laugh.” And later President Starr adds, “Creativity requires freedom, space and room to grow. And achievement isn’t the only thing that adds meaning to our lives.”

This article hit home to me as I was struggling with just one more bout of sickness after a challenging but fulfilling semester of teaching. Its message needs to be heard in every corner of our world. Yes, achievement is important. But the quality of our lives as we accomplish our goals is also important. In my work environment at STEM Prep Academy, I am surrounded by motivated, hardworking, yet caring leaders who themselves are asking these questions. Students today are extremely stressed. Many of our students face particular language challenges, which further contributes to stress. How can we help to close the achievement gap and yet not become consumed by it?

STEM Prep High is intentionally trying to create balance this year by adding once-a-month Friday afternoon clubs. These clubs enable students to explore interests and to spend more relaxed time in a group of their choosing. I lead a sewing and knitting club, which has attracted a very “chill” group of students. I provide knitting needles, crochet hooks, yarn and other items, assisting as students explore these crafts. Other clubs include flag football, hiking, a Socrates club, games and yoga.

STEM Prep High has also created balance this year by offering elective classes such as Visual Arts and Imaginative Writing. My Imaginative Writing classroom is intentionally filled with creativity and fun, including a bookshelf full of children’s stories, teen books and adult novels. A stuffed Cat in the Hat and a Cheshire Cat lounge on top of the bookshelves. Plants adorn the top of the filing cabinet near the window, creating a homey, relaxed atmosphere. During the month of November my students and I participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). This provided students with an opportunity to creatively express their own life stories or stories that they had made up.

And what about teachers? How can we create a tenuous balance between work and life? Certainly, our work is important, but so are our lives. I continue to wrestle with this question. One “solution” that my husband created was buying season tickets to the Nashville Predators games. This allows my husband and me to enjoy downtown Nashville and to spend time together. We also enjoy motorcycle trips on my husband’s Harley.

Most of us will continue to face this challenge of how to “excel wisely” throughout our lives. I was most grateful for this issue of PCM and the opportunity to reflect on ways in which I am trying to make this happen and ways in which I can continue to create a healthy balance between work and life.

—Wilma (Fisher) Lefler ‘90

Wow!

Wow! The recent issue of PCM is superb. Each story is meaty and unique and engaging. I’m one who usually reads an issue from cover to cover, and this one left me wanting to start at the beginning again with the suspicion that I’d surely missed important details along the way.

Thank you for the imagination, creativity and careful editing that you give in helping us feel connected and proud.

PS: I’m one of the trio who were the first exchange students from Swarthmore in spring 1962 at the invitation of Pomona. It pleases me that both colleges are currently led by African-American women.

—Betsy Crofts ‘63
Southampton, PA

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

Citrus Roots

March 23, 2018 by Michael Waters '20 Comments Off

A well-dressed Claremont citrus grower poses among his trees in this undated photo from the Boynton Collection of Early Claremont, Honnold-Mudd Library.

In 1888, the same year that an upstart college moved in, the town of Claremont planted its first citrus trees. At the time, gravel and shrubs dominated the unincorporated town in a region once inhabited by Native Americans of the Serrano tribe.

Twelve years later, Claremont’s 250 residents belonged to one of two camps—the College or the citrus industry.

Early 20th-century Claremont was a citrus boomtown, a battleground for countless brands and packinghouses. Until the mid-1930s, according to historian Richard Barker, citrus was one of California’s largest industries, second only to oil. Particularly in Claremont, “the economy was driven by citrus.” Once, Queen Victoria ordered a shipment of Claremont oranges for her birthday.

Citrus label image courtesy of the Claremont Heritage Archives

One packager, known as the College Heights Orange & Lemon Association, sold citrus under numerous names: “Athlete,” “College Heights,” “Umpire,” and “Collegiate.” A 1930s packing label for the Collegiate brand, pictured above, featured a vintage image of Pomona’s Mason Hall, along with the long-since demolished Harwood Hall for Botany, which once occupied the center of the Stanley Academic Quadrangle.

Many growers were members of the California Fruit Growers Exchange, founded in Claremont in 1893 under a different name. Membership soon exploded, and in 1952, the group formally adopted the name from their longtime advertising campaign—Sunkist.

In Memoriam: Professor Arden Reed

March 23, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

Arden Reed

Arden Reed, noted scholar, lecturer and Arthur M. and Fanny M. Dole Professor of English at Pomona College, passed away on Dec. 21, 2017, at the age of 70 from an aggressive form of cancer.

Born in 1947 in Denver, Colo., Reed was a boundary-crossing scholar—an expert on 19th-century English and French literature and visual art, including contemporary visual culture. His research covered the spectrum of English Romantic literature; 19th-century French painting and literature; modernism across the arts; relationships between painting and literature, image and text; contemporary art; and tableaux vivants. His most recent and seminal work, Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell, was published this past summer by the University of California Press.

Covering works from the Middle Ages to the present, Slow Art calls on everyday museum visitors to contemplate artwork and trust that their novice observations are just as meaningful as those of art experts. In its review, The Wall Street Journal called Reed “an enormously erudite writer,” and his book, “a lively ramble through high and low culture.”

Kurt Andersen, novelist and host of NPR’s Studio 360, reflected that “Arden Reed refused to stay in his lane: as a scholar and a human being, his extreme, gleeful curiosity about all kinds of ideas and art and people, and the connections among them, was positively infectious, and an inspiration to me.”

His past work includes Manet: Art, Words, Music (2014), Manet, Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism: Blurring Genre Boundaries (2003), Constance De Jong: Metal (2003) and Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire (1984). He was the editor of Romanticism and Language: A Collection of Critical Essays (1984) and had numerous articles published in Art in America. In 1983, he was awarded a First Book Prize from Brown University Press for Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire.

In 2006, Reed received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, which he used to pursue research that helped raise the deep questions that would animate Slow Art.

In addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship, Reed’s distinguished awards and honors include a Bellagio Study Center Residency in 2007 by the Rockefeller Foundation; a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2007; a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship at the Centro Studi Ligure per le Arti et le Lettere in 2007; and a fellowship at the Clark Art Institute in 2006.

Under the auspices of The Albert & Elaine Borchard Foundation, he was a scholar in residence at Château de la Bretesche in Missillac, France, from 1990 to 1991, and under the aegis of The Camargo Foundation, he served as a research fellow in Cassis, France, from 1994 to 1995. Through an award from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, he was a fellow at the University of Edinburgh, among other honors.

Reed came to Pomona as an assistant professor in 1979 and was named the Arthur M. Dole and Fanny M. Dole Professor in English in 2004. Before Pomona, he was an assistant professor at Wayne State University and a lecturer at The Johns Hopkins University.

Reed earned his bachelor of arts from Wesleyan University, and his master’s and doctoral degrees in comparative literature from The Johns Hopkins University.

He is survived by his partner of 35 years, Drury Sherrod of Pasadena and Santa Fe; his beloved son, Jonathan Reed and husband, Jeffrey Dodd, of New York; his former wife, Anita Comtois of New York; as well as a brother, Edward Reed of Denver; a sister, Susan Reed of Sedona; an uncle, Stanley Ely of New York; and cousins Elissa Ely of Boston and Marcia Ely of New York.

Reed’s family has requested that those who wish to honor his memory do so through the Arden Reed Summer Undergraduate Endowed Research Fund at Pomona, which will support the student research he found so essential to a liberal arts education.

Volcanic Venus

March 23, 2018 by Carla Guerrero '06 Comments Off

Volcanic Venus

For Professor of Geology Eric Grosfils, the scorching planet Venus is a “volcanologist’s playground,” where interpreting well-preserved geological records could help lead to better understanding of volcanoes here on Earth.

Now, a $425,000 NASA research grant will allow Grosfils—the Minnie B. Cairns Memorial Professor of Geology at Pomona—and his research colleague, Pat McGovern from the Lunar and Planetary Institute, to push forward with their efforts to better understand the evolution of stresses within and beneath a volcano as it grows.

The grant proposal, “Breaking the barriers: Time-dependent, stress-controlled growth of large volcanoes on Venus and implications for the mechanics of magma ascent, storage and emplacement,” is a continuation of ongoing research started in 2006 by McGovern and Grosfils.

Their latest grant, awarded by NASA’s Solar System Workings division, provides funding for three years of research and will include a range of new opportunities for student involvement. For instance, students who are just starting their geology education can help perform GIS mapping and analysis of Magellan radar data—work that will help the research team “evaluate the sequence of eruptive events, as well as what structures were forming when, at several large volcanoes on Venus.” More advanced undergraduates can take on more challenging tasks, such as numerical modeling.

In his research as a physical volcanologist, Grosfils investigates the mechanics of magma reservoirs—bodies of potentially eruptible molten rock within the subsurface—and what causes them to destabilize. The question is an important one because knowing when and how a reservoir destabilizes and ruptures is critical to efforts to understand whether escaping magma is likely to move toward the surface and erupt.

“When a magma reservoir destabilizes and feeds materials toward the surface, it can produce an eruption, and persistent eruptions gradually build a load—a volcano—sitting at the surface. The addition of that load over time flexes the crust, however, and changes the stresses around the magma reservoir. This can either enhance the ongoing eruption or shut it down,” explains Grosfils, “and we’re striving to decipher what controls how this mechanical process will play out.”

What makes Venus, the closest planet to the sun, a “volcanologist’s playground”?

“Volcanoes on Earth get affected by a lot of different processes: our atmosphere, oceans, erosion, humans, landslides, plate tectonics … but on Venus, the geological record is in essence not compromised by any of those factors—no plate tectonics, minimal erosion, w no water, no liquid—so when something happens at the surface on Venus, the record is much more likely to be preserved for the long haul.”

The scientists will use observations derived from radar data and topography of Venus to construct numerical models they will use to examine the evolution of stresses within the crust and uppermost mantle as a volcano is growing.

Their research will add to our knowledge about the formation and evolution of the Venusian surface, which in turn helps scientists apply those findings to better understand the long-term evolution of volcanoes on Earth and the hazards they present to surrounding populations.

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