Blog Articles

Bookmarks Summer 2022

July 25, 2022 by Staff Comments Off

John’s Turn

In this children’s book, Mac Barnett ’04 celebrates individuality through the story of a kid who finds the courage to show others his talent for dancing.

True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Clayton Butler ’10 investigates the lives of white Unionists in three Confederate states who enlisted in the U.S. Army, shedding light on the complex story of the Civil War era.

Swimming to Syria

This chapbook by Sandy Feinstein ’74 is a collection of poems reflecting her experiences teaching at the University of Aleppo and traveling throughout Syria.

Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay

Liz Fosslien ’09 and Mollie West Duffy weave science with personal stories and original illustrations to examine uncomfortable feelings and lay out strategies for managing them.

Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi ’13 examines a question: What happens when refugees encounter Indigenous sovereignty struggles in the countries of their resettlement?

She Came from Mariupol

Alfred Kueppers ’93 has translated Natascha Wodin’s homage to her mother’s story of leaving Ukraine for Germany as part of the Nazi forced labor program during World War II.

Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Eastern California: Second Edition

In a revised, full-color edition of this popular book, Allen Glazner ’76 and Arthur Sylvester ’59 guide readers through some of California’s most spectacular and scenic geology.

Hunting Nature: Ivan Turgenev and the Organic World

Thomas P. Hodge ’84 explores Ivan Turgenev’s relationship to nature through his passion for hunting, making a case that hunting profoundly influenced his writing.

Saving Ryan

Physician-scientist Emil Kakkis ’82 writes about his 30-year journey to develop a treatment for mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS), an ultra-rare genetic disease, and the young patient it saved.

Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake: Rice, Water, Earth

In this guide with 300 color photos, Nancy Matsumoto ’80 and Michael Tremblay invite the reader into the story of sake, offering histories, current trends and recommendations.

The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan

Paul Roquet ’03 takes a critical look at virtual reality, uncovering how the technology is reshaping the politics of labor, gender, home and nation in Japan.

Yours Always

Henry Scott ’78 tells the story of his great-grandparents, a Southern man and a Northern woman, through their nearly 1,500 letters, their diaries and related historical accounts.

Garrett Hongo ’73: An Honored Poet in Search of the Perfect Stereo Sound

July 25, 2022 by Lorraine Harry Comments Off

This spring, Garrett Hongo ’73 received the 2022 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, an annual prize presented to a writer who has had a substantial and distinguished career. Past winners of the award, presented by the Sewanee Review each year since 1987, include Howard Nemerov, Gwendolyn Brooks, Wendell Berry, Louise Glück and Billy Collins.

Both a poet and a memoirist, Hongo draws heavily upon his memories of growing up on the North Shore of O‘ahu and in Los Angeles. His time at Pomona also figures prominently in his recollections, and his poem “Under the Oaks at Holmes Hall, Overtaken by Rain” is inscribed on a plaque in the Smith Campus Center. Now a Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon, Hongo’s collections of poetry include The River of Heaven, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1989.

Shortly after Hongo visited campus for a reading this spring, PCM’s Lorraine Wu Harry ’97 talked with him about his recently published book, The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo, in which he delivers a personal memoir of his life as a poet vis-à-vis his decade-long quest for the ideal stereo setup. The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

PCM: You have such a strong memory for things that happened even long ago.

Garrett Hongo: People have told me that. Things are very vivid in my mind. I remember easily, as it were. The phrase from William Wordsworth that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility”—I need to do it or else I’m unhappy. It’s how I create who I am, in a way. It’s not just to write but to be. I live in remembrance, and it’s something I need to do.

PCM: It seems like nostalgia also plays a strong role in your writing.

Hongo: I think it’s often characterized as nostalgia, but it’s a little different than that for me. Having been uprooted and moved to South Central L.A., it was something about living in a feeling that was no longer present in my life in L.A. that I had as a child in Hawai‘i. The German philosopher Friedrich Schiller talks about naive and sentimental poetry. The naive poet would be the poet who lives in emotions, and the sentimental poet is a poet who longs for the emotion previously lived. In that characterization, I would be a sentimental poet. However, I’m a sentimental poet in the sense that the emotion was not fully lived. It takes the activity of the recollection and that instigation of longing in order to complete the mental experience.

PCM: You talk about writing being for yourself. Do you did you find that this book met that need?

Hongo: People always question my obsession with hi-fi. They thought it was insanity. I didn’t even know it myself, but it was a way for me to meditate.

I really loved writing the book. I loved learning how to write the book because I didn’t know how to do it. I had all this conflict of memoir and I want to know about audio. How do you make it all work together? It was only after almost 10 years of not knowing what the hell I was doing, all of a sudden, I figured it out, and then the book came like that—boom. I’d written pieces of it. I basically wrote the whole book in a couple years, but it took eight years of not figuring it out. That seems to be my pattern for every book I write. What the hell am I doing? What is all this? I’m so awful. And I go through a lot of self-hate and castigation, and all of a sudden it breaks through.

PCM: Did you have experiences of remembering things you had forgotten?

Hongo: That’s what the book is. It’s about revelation and realization. As they say in self-help, it’s self-actualization in writing. My adoration of vacuum tubes is the same. I didn’t understand why I was so attracted to them. When I saw an amp online, I thought, “I gotta have a vacuum tube amp.” I said, “Well, I suppose that will reproduce the human voice better than transistor amps.” But what I was really doing was remembering my father. And I didn’t really realize that until I started fooling around with tube amps myself, and I remembered all those evenings with him, when he would solder together these kits and his vacuum tube amplifiers. It was also a kind of fulfillment because I would hear all the music that he could not in his losing his hearing.

As a poet, you feel confirmed in these kinds of emotions. You seek confirmation, blessing as it were, in the memories, and their pursuit gives you that. This is the way you build, as they say in psychology, personality. This is how you create subjectivity. But this is also the way ultimately you create lineage, ancestry and continuity of goodwill.

Like I say in the end of the book, my friend, Mahealani Pai, who I spent a couple of days with on the Big Island at Kaloko-Honokahau, I asked him why he was chanting or what he was chanting. He said he was chanting the names of his ancestors. I said, “Why you do that?” And he said, “So I will know them and they will know me.” And I said, “Oh, for what?” And he said, “So that when I make a decision and I chant, I will make a decision or choice in harmony with their spirits.”

It stayed in my mind. And it made sense for myself in terms of writing this book when I realized that I’m fulfilling something for my father in my own quest, and it was also a quest to become his heir, his scion, his descendant in this life, to be truly a son. So the book is a kind of Telemacheia in that sense.

PCM: What feedback have you gotten from readers? You write very much about your own experience as a Japanese American, but so many people feel a resonance with your stories.

Hongo: I think people come through the different layers of hegemonic discourse and then they respond to the work because it allows them to come through those layers. Because what they are told about identity, ethnicity, even common humanity obstructs what they feel because it puts them in positions that in fact blind and silence them to their own emotional resonances with their own lives. Poetry, not just mine, but a lot of poetry gives them the opportunity to break through those things in a way that refreshes their own affections or what has been silenced in their own histories or microhistories. I think there is a kind of intuitive connection that they feel that emerges, and I’m grateful for that.

PCM: How do you feel your time at Pomona shaped your writing and who you are now?

Hongo: I write with fondness of my time at Pomona in several episodes of my book. The liberal arts education itself afforded me a different kind of consciousness with which to engage the world. A liberal arts education gives you more freedom, allows you to be more free, allows you to be more self-creative. We’re not looking to fit. We’re looking to create.

Scholars and Fellows

July 25, 2022 by Staff Comments Off

Each year, Pomona graduates and undergraduates are awarded prestigious scholarships and fellowships for study in various places around the world. Downing Scholars and Gates Cambridge Scholars head to the University of Cambridge in England for graduate work. Fulbright Scholars and Watson Fellows travel to an array of international locations. Rangel Fellows train for careers in the U.S. Foreign Service. Knight-Hennessy Scholars pursue graduate studies at Stanford University. Goldwater Scholarships are awarded to undergraduates studying sciences, mathematics and engineering. Beckman Scholars earn mentored undergraduate research experiences in chemistry, biological sciences and related areas.

Beckman Scholars

Louie Kulber ‘23
Daniela Pierro ‘23

Downing Scholars

Kate Aris ’22
Jacinta Chen ’21
Calla Li ’22
Paul McKinley ’22

Fulbright Scholars

Kristine Chow ’22
Kelly Ho ’22
Brady Huang ’22
Steven Osorio ’22
Sayde Perry ’22
Nathan Shankar ’22
Ruby Simon ’22

Gates Cambridge Scholar

Sofia Dartnell ’22

Goldwater Scholars

Hannah Caris ’23
Jonathan Elisabeth ’23

Knight-Hennessy Scholar

Isaac Cui ’20

Rangel Fellow

Salamata Bah ’20

Watson Fellows

Xiao Jiang ’22
Mark Diaz ’22

2022 Wig Awards

July 25, 2022 by Staff Comments Off

Close relationships with professors are one of the special qualities of a Pomona College education. Each year, juniors and seniors vote for the Wig Awards, the highest honor bestowed on Pomona faculty, in recognition of exceptional teaching, concern for students and service to the College and community. This year, as in-person learning returned after more than a year of Zoom, seven professors were selected and confirmed by a committee of trustees, faculty and students.

2022 Wig Award recipients, from left; Assistant Professor of Media Studies Ryan Engley, Associate Professor of Politics Amanda Hollis-Brusky, H. Russell Smith Professor of International Relations and Professor of Politics Pierre Englebert, Professor of Computer Science Tzu-Yi Chen, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology Nina Karnovsky, Assistant Professor of Economics Malte Dold and Associate Professor of English Jordan Kirk

A New Dean of the College

July 25, 2022 by Staff Comments Off

Professor of Computer Science Yuqing Melanie Wu, an expert in data management and query optimization whose love for teaching drew her to the liberal arts, became Pomona’s new vice president for academic affairs and dean of the College on July 1.

Melanie Wu

“I’m struck by her openness, transparency and eagerness to get input from across the College,” says Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr. “I know Melanie will be a key partner in supporting our talented faculty, promoting a compelling liberal arts curriculum for our students and elevating Pomona’s unique role in creating opportunity in American higher education.”

Wu arrived at Pomona in 2014 as a visiting associate professor and was hired as a tenured associate professor the following year. Her desire to devote more time to teaching led her to Pomona after serving as a faculty member at research institutions. That pursuit of excellence in the classroom was recognized in 2021 when Wu received the Wig Award for teaching, the highest honor faculty members can receive at Pomona.

Her leadership experience includes numerous Pomona faculty and academic committees and consortium-wide task
forces for computer science. She chaired Pomona’s Computer Science Department from 2017 to 2020. She recently completed a 2021-22 fellowship with the American Council on Education (ACE), a comprehensive and rigorous leadership program in higher education.

At Pomona, she is a member of the Global Pomona Project steering committee, a group tasked with shaping Pomona’s role in the world for decades to come. As a first-generation immigrant and a woman of color in the field of computer science, Wu notes that she “is keenly aware of the challenges people with diverse backgrounds face. It’s important to recognize that pursuing diversity, equity and inclusion is a journey of lifelong learning for all.”

Wu earned her B.S. and M.S. in computer science from Peking University in China. She went on to receive an M.S. from Indiana University Bloomington and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

She succeeds Professor of Geology Robert Gaines, who has served as dean of the College since 2019.

View Dean Wu’s video message to the Pomona community at pomona.edu/deanwu.

Prof. Jorge Moreno Leads Research Into Galaxies Lacking Dark Matter

July 25, 2022 by Alexa Block and Marilyn Thomsen Comments Off

The discovery of galaxies with little or no dark matter is perplexing to scientists and challenges existing notions of how galaxies form. In a paper published in Nature Astronomy in February, a team of researchers led by Jorge Moreno, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, shared evidence they have found that may explain this baffling observation. Scientific American featured Moreno in a podcast about the work in April.

“For 40 years, astrophysicists have believed that all galaxies have dark matter,” Moreno explains in a campus interview.

That hypothesis was challenged in 2018, when Shany Danieli at Princeton University, who is the second author of the new paper, and Pieter van Dokkum of Yale published their finding of a galaxy in the real universe that lacked dark matter. A second such galaxy was reported in 2019. Astronomers use the term “real universe” to differentiate between what is seen in physical observation and what is found through computer simulation.

“Their discovery posed a huge challenge to the dark matter model of galaxies,” Moreno continues. “Many astrophysicists were suggesting that maybe we need to get rid of the idea of dark matter. Maybe we even need to modify the laws of gravity.”

Moreno took a sabbatical leave in 2020-21 to dig deeper into the challenge posed by these galaxies that lacked dark matter. He drew on his expertise in creating galaxy simulations and using supercomputers to model galaxy formation. Joining in the worldwide effort were astrophysicists from Princeton, UC Irvine, Caltech, the University of Zurich and other institutions.

The simulation modeled evolution over billions of years in a swath of the universe that was 60 million light years across. In it, the researchers identified seven galaxies lacking dark matter.

Researchers employed a cosmological simulation (FIREbox) to re-create numerical analogues (and explain the existence) of the two observed dark-matter deficient galaxies.

“What we found is that these galaxies initially had a lot of dark matter, and they had a lot of gas,” says Moreno. “But they fell into bigger systems. What we discover is that to become a galaxy without dark matter, it must interact with a galaxy that is a thousand times bigger than it is.”

Moreno drew on his identification with Indigenous peoples to name the galaxies found in the simulation. With the help of Doug Ingram, a Cherokee who teaches in physics and astronomy at Texas Christian University, Moreno obtained the permission of Cherokee leaders to give the galaxies the names of seven Cherokee clans: Bird, Blue, Deer, Long Hair, Paint, Wild Potato and Wolf.

“I’ve identified with these galaxies,” Moreno says. “These galaxies are not supposed to exist. They were supposed to be destroyed as they battled with massive galaxies, but they survived.”

Moreno finds a parallel in his Indigenous ancestry. Growing up in Mexico and the United States with a blossoming interest in mathematics, he didn’t see many scientists of color with whom he could identify, and navigating the power structures of academia was often challenging.

Sometimes Moreno felt excluded, and more than once he was mistaken for a janitor rather than a physicist. But, he says, “I had many mentors who believed in me. Sometimes they were warm, and sometimes they were harsh. But both were helpful in my growth to be the best version of myself, not to give up.”

As a theoretical astrophysicist and professor, Moreno honors his roots by investing in the success of the next generation of scientists of color. “I don’t want them to learn science,” Moreno says. “I want them to become scientists.”

While Moreno challenges all of his students to grow academically, he is invested in helping them find more than answers to questions in physics. He aims to help them discover, as he has, their place in the world of science. “For me, the scientific endeavor has been one of the most joyful things,” he says. “The message I want to send to my students is one of hope: ‘You belong.’”

How To Become a Scientific Illustrator

July 25, 2022 by Staff Comments Off

A May graduate with a degree in biology—and one of Pomona’s Commencement speakers as senior class president—Andreah Pierre ’22 has been interested in marine science and conservation for as long as she can remember. After earning a Posse Foundation scholarship followed by a prestigious summer fellowship, she will combine her STEM background with a rediscovered love of art to pursue a career as a scientific illustrator.

Make your entrance near the ocean. Born in Miami, Pierre had an early affinity for the nearby Atlantic. “The best part was swimming with my sister,” she remembers. “Fish would pass by us, and we were like, ‘What are they?’”
Stay curious. Nurture an interest in coral reefs, sea turtles and the effects of pollution as a student at South Broward High School, a marine science magnet school in Hollywood, Florida.
Take an Advanced Placement art class and learn to paint. “The funny thing is, after sophomore year I never picked up another paint brush,” Pierre says. “My whole life was very much, you’ve got to do science, you’ve got to get a good job, and art did not seem like an option to me in terms of getting a good job.”
Find your posse. Learn about the Posse Foundation, a program that selects talented students from the same city to attend an elite out-of-state college together on full-tuition scholarships, acting as each other’s support systems. Earn a Miami STEM Posse scholarship to Pomona, where biology students go whale watching on the Pacific.
Apply for the prestigious Doris Duke Conservation Scholars program at the University of Washington, which provides two summers of experiential learning in the Pacific Northwest. For your second-year summer internship, join The Whale Museum staff in Washington’s San Juan Islands.
Tasked with entering data on whale sightings reported to the museum, follow a mentor’s suggestion to develop an illustrated field guide to whales and other marine mammals to help the public tell a gray whale from a humpback. In the process, rediscover your love of art.
Download a $10 app. After starting with a free paintbrush program, discover more sophisticated computer graphic tools that help you produce detailed images pointing out key features such as fins, flukes and surface behaviors. “What makes my field guide different from any other book you grab about whales is that the book will tell you all about the whale, versus my image is literally meant to only point out the things that you’d see if you were on the water,” Pierre says.
Turn your summer project into your senior thesis, testing whether your field guides help people correctly identify types of whales and other marine mammals with the tips and images you provide. (The answer is yes.)
Learn about Cal State Monterey Bay’s post-baccalaureate program in scientific illustration. Apply and get accepted for a one-year graduate certificate that starts in September, with courses such as botanical illustration, zoological illustration and professional practices for science illustrators, followed by a 10-week internship.
Stop to watch the elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Park on a trip along the California coast and realize that state and national park signage needs science illustrations too. “A lot of them are old, the paint’s chipped and there is new information from the last 10 or 20 years that should be on there,” Pierre says. Build your portfolio as you look to follow other graduates of the Monterey Bay program, whose work can be found in such places as the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History, National Geographic and Scientific American magazines, and at zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens across the country.

Notice Board

July 25, 2022 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Alumni Weekend Back on Campus!

Pomona excitedly welcomed over 1,400 alumni and guests back to Claremont for our first Alumni Weekend on campus in three years. Sagehens spent a fun-filled weekend engaging in activities, attending presentations, celebrating class reunions, and reconnecting and reCHIRPing with classmates, faculty and other members of the campus community. The weekend featured 147 events, including Ideas@Pomona talks featuring Blaisdell Award winners, A Taste of Pomona featuring alumni vintner wine tastings, the All-Class Dinner with President Starr, the Party at the Wash and many other fun activities and programs.

For a closer look at Alumni Weekend 2022, watch this short video at pomona.edu/2022-alumni-weekend-video and check out the online photo album at pomona.edu/2022-alumni-weekend-photos.

Thank You from National Chair of Annual Giving Nathan Dean ’10

My fellow Sagehens,

The return to life on campus would not have been as strong or well supported without your extraordinary generosity. From outdoor classrooms and academic supplies to internship, research and extracurricular opportunities, your gifts of time and funds helped to make this past year possible. And if you haven’t yet made your Sagehen impact, I encourage you to give to the departments, programs or resources that are most meaningful to you. Every gift of every amount changes student lives for the better.

Thank you for your care and support of our Sagehen community!

With gratitude,

Nathan Dean ’10
National Chair of Annual Giving

Congratulations to our 2022 Blaisdell and Distinguished Service Alumni Award Recipients

A committee of past presidents from the Pomona College Alumni Association Board has selected the 2022 Alumni Award recipients.

Four alumni received the Blaisdell Distinguished Alumni Award, which recognizes alumni for high achievement in professions or community service: Mike Budenholzer ’92, Colleen Hartman ’77, Bret Price ’72 and John Roth ’62. These alumni have carried the spirit of the College into the world and embodied the inscription on the College Gates: “They only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind.”

To learn more about the Blaisdell Distinguished Alumni Award honorees, visit pomona.edu/2022-blaisdell-awards.

For their selfless commitment and ongoing volunteer service to the College, the Alumni Distinguished Service Award was presented to Georgia Ritchie McManigal ’54, Marty Jannol ’77 and Penny McManigal ’58. The Alumni Distinguished Service Award was established in 1991.

To learn more about this year’s Alumni Distinguished Service Award honorees, visit pomona.edu/2022-alumni-service-awards.

Welcome to Our New Sagehen Families!

We are excited to welcome our new Pomona families of the incoming members of the Class of 2026 and transfer students! To help you get better acquainted with the Sagehen family community and meet other parents and family members, there are many touchpoints planned for the summer and the fall. Please watch your inbox and mailbox for information on regional Summer Welcome gatherings, virtual and in-person Sagehen Family Orientation events in August, and other helpful details and resources. We look forward to meeting you, and again, welcome to the Sagehen community!

Be sure to ask your student to complete the Family Information Form on the Through the Gates platform to ensure that we have your current email and mailing address for parent and family communications. For questions, please reach out to Director of Alumni and Family Engagement Alisa Fishbach at alisa.fishbach@pomona.edu or families@pomona.edu or Director of Family Giving Iram Hasan at iram.hasan@pomona.edu.

Annual Giving Impact Report

Learn about the incredible impact made by Pomona alumni and family donors in the 2020–2021 academic year. Thanks to their generosity, students, faculty and staff received crucial support for tools, resources, supplies and much more during the College’s year of distance learning. Read the full report at pomona.edu/annual-giving-impact-report.

A Special Message from Alumni Association Board President Don Swan ’15

Dear Sagehen Alumni,

It was such a thrill to have Alumni Weekend back on campus this year—our first since 2019. I’m grateful to have had this opportunity for our alumni community to reconnect and reCHIRP after the long pandemic pause and thoroughly enjoyed spending time with fellow Sagehens in person from across the generations. What a magical weekend!

I’d also like to congratulate the Class of 2022 on their Commencement—another important event to return to in-person on campus—and officially welcome them to the Pomona College Alumni Association! And as there was a special Commencement Celebration Weekend held on campus for the Classes of 2020 and 2021 in May, I want to take a moment to remind them we are so pleased to have them join the alumni community as well.

As of June 30, my two-year term as president of the Alumni Association Board ends. Working with Pomona’s Alumni Board members these past two years has been such an important opportunity to make a meaningful impact on our campus and broader Sagehen community. It’s been a tremendous honor to serve with such a remarkable group of dedicated and passionate alumni who strive to strengthen and support our community. Alfredo Romero ’91 will step into the role of president next. I wish him all the best as he begins his term.

Chirp! Chirp!

Don Swan ’15
Alumni Association Board President

The Exponential Power of Mentorship

July 25, 2022 by Robyn Norwood Comments Off

As we set out to write about pairs of Pomona people whose lives or work are intertwined in this issue of PCM, we weren’t thinking so much about mentorship. Yet it emerged as a subtext, and not only in cases of an older person guiding a younger one. Sometimes, the roles seemed almost interchangeable, and it struck me that mentoring is a very natural outcome of the Pomona experience.

One of the best examples of Pomona’s mentoring efforts for the community returned to campus this summer for the first time since 2019. The Draper Center’s Pomona College Academy for Youth Success (PAYS)—a multi-year program to prepare area high school students from low-income or traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to enter selective colleges and universities—was back in classrooms and residence halls for the core four-week summer experience after two years online because of the pandemic.

Pomona students serving as PAYS teaching assistants include, from left: Gerardo Hurtado ’24, Jose Sanchez Mara ’24 and Katherine Rivas ’25, who is a PAYS alumna. David Diaz, in green, is a PAYS alumnus attending Swarthmore whose younger brother is now in PAYS.

What unfolds during those campus stays can be astounding. As Biology Professor Sara Olson mentioned while introducing Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna ’85 at the Class of 2022 Commencement in May, the revolutionary gene-editing technology Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier pioneered is something even teenagers can learn.

“CRISPR is fast, easy and accessible, allowing even our high school PAYS students to use and understand this technology,” says Olson, who dedicates part of her summers to the program.

The first year Olson incorporated CRISPR was 2019, the last time PAYS was on campus. Students designed edits for a C. elegans worm eggshell project, with each student assigned one gene to delete to explore whether it was important in forming the eggshell. The students designed and created DNA plasmids that would then be injected into the worm to carry out the CRISPR edit. They nearly made it through the plasmid construction stage but didn’t quite make it to the injection stage before the summer session ended.

In 2020, the necessity of being online limited the scope of the work, but students worked to design a theoretical CRISPR-based treatment for COVID-19. “They ended up narrowing in on the same target that some antiviral therapies are now targeting, without even knowing anything about it beforehand,” Olson says.

Among those who worked on that 2020 project was Khadi Diallo ’25, then a student at Ontario’s Colony High and now a rising sophomore at Pomona. She works in Olson’s lab and is a teaching assistant for this year’s PAYS program.

“It’s neat to see her come full circle and be a mentor for them,” Olson says.

It’s the Pomona way. We hope you enjoy the issue.

Letter Box

July 25, 2022 by Staff Comments Off

“At the Hop,” released by Danny and the Juniors in 1957.

’At the Coop’

A popular song at the time I was at Pomona was “Let’s Go to the Hop,” which had a catchy tune and a recitation of all the current dance fads; the chorus consisted of “Let’s go to the hop,” sung five times. At Pomona of course it turned into “Let’s go to the Coop.” After 59 years, I can’t get it out of my head (“The Coop Reinvented,” Spring 2022).

—Carolyn Hunt ’63
Livermore, California

About Those Beanies

Archivist Sean Stanley (“Our Bird’s Beginnings,” Spring 2022) may have told you about blue-and-white freshman beanies, but they were green in the 1950s. See mine. Love reading the Pomona College Magazine and attending reunions. Chirp.

—Frances DuBose Johnson ’54
Newbury Park, California

Remembering Francisco Gonzalez ’75

Last year, another Pomona College classmate, Bradford Berge ’75 (Santa Fe, NM) and I were reminiscing and decided to find Francisco Gonzalez ’75 or “Frank” (as we knew him back in the day). I started with the Alumni Office but it had no record of his whereabouts. Brad and I then embarked on our own mad search dubbed Finding Frank Gonzalez.

Francisco Gonzalez

After a few weeks of online searching in December 2021, following obscure lead after obscure lead, we (mainly Brad) finally found Frank in Kansas. Frank’s wife, Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez, is a professor at Kansas State University. On December 23, 2021, Brad and I had a long phone call with Frank. Although he was dealing with Crohn’s disease, he sounded like the same ol’ energetic, life-loving guy we met and fell in love with 51 years ago in Claremont. Frank was a product of the streets of East Los Angeles and a gregarious, kind, intelligent and musically talented force of nature. (He gave us permission to call him “Frank” because that is how we knew him at Pomona College).

Part of our obsession to find Frank was because Brad and I are musicians (with a very small “m”). When we met Frank at Pomona College, we were amazed at how he could channel music from Boyle Heights, singing Chicano songs and playing guitar with reckless abandon. I will never forget how he sang and played “Malagueñas” from his guts, almost in a trance.

In the ’70s we lost track of Frank when he left Pomona College early to pursue his music career as one of the founders of the iconic band Los Lobos. Brad and I were not aware of his connection with Los Lobos until our search a few months ago.

At the end of our call, we wished each other happy holidays and agreed to do it again “soon” as is always said at the end of a phone call but that was not to be. (Obituaries, p. 60). Pomona College is fortunate to have Francisco “Frank” Gonzalez as part of its legacy and we are blessed to have met him and rediscovered him. I would say “may he rest in peace” but knowing Frank, he’s still rockin’ and rollin’ somewhere and causing those around him to say what we said when we met him: “Who the hell is that guy?”

We extend to his wife, son and his vast universe of friends our prayers for the loss of Francisco “Frank” Gonzalez.

—Bruce L. Ishimatsu ’75
Marina del Rey, California

On the Court with Darlene Hard

I was saddened to learn of the death of professional women’s tennis player Darlene Hard ’61 (“In Memoriam,” Spring 2022).

Darlene Hard

In 1958, Darlene and I were both sophomores at Pomona. One day I was down near the campus tennis courts, hitting balls against the backstop and there she was—Darlene Hard, practicing her serve. After a bit, I got up my nerve and approached her. We engaged in a little small talk and then she smiled at me and said, “You want to hit a few balls with me?”

She stood there, bouncing the ball up and down a few times, and said, “Do you want me to hit shots you can return?” I had played on my high school tennis team and thought I could surely return any shot she could hit. I was 18 years old and felt generally invincible in all areas of life, including tennis.

She bounced the ball once and hit a forehand shot to my forehand side that cleared the net by about half an inch. The ball screamed into my side of the court and hit about six feet in front of me. Then, instead of bouncing like it should have, it literally skidded, never getting more than two or three inches off the ground. I missed it by a foot. “Do that again!” I said. She did. Same result.

At that point, we swapped a few shots that I could return and then my tennis session with Darlene Hard came to an end. I have never forgotten that wonderful encounter and how totally gracious she was the entire time. To this day, I can picture in my mind the way that ball hit and skidded a foot under my racquet as I swung mightily at nothing but air.

—Michael R. Coghlan ’61
South Pasadena, California

Meeting Virginia Prince

Monsieur d’Eon is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade

I so enjoyed reading about Virginia Prince ’35 in the excellent piece by Michael Waters ’20 (“Crossing Boundaries,” Spring 2022).

In the early 1990s I interviewed Virginia Prince at a West Hollywood café for a book I wrote on the 18th-century transgender pioneer and diplomat, the Chevalière d’Eon. In some respects Virginia modeled her life on d’Eon’s. I will never forget how Virginia embodied the spirit of d’Eon, who like Virginia, lived the second half of her long life as a woman, after living 50 years as a man (see Monsieur d’Eon is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade). As Virginia shook my hand with a hard grip, she theatrically bolted out: “So you are writing a book about the Chevalière d’Eon!?! What can you possibly tell me about her that I don’t already know?” And there began a two-hour conversation that I will never forget. Virginia was amazing: intelligent, articulate, with a rich sense of irony and a great sense of humor.

When, a decade later, I moved to Claremont as Pomona’s dean of the College, I visited her in a nursing home, after learning that she had moved back to the Claremont area.

Thanks so much for drawing our attention to this very special alumna.

—Gary Kates
H. Russell Smith Foundation Chair in the Social Sciences and Professor of History
Pomona College

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