It’s unusual for a U.S. Embassy to have even a single Sagehen, but for three years in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, the entire Cultural Section was schooled in the arts of 47. 

Erik Black ’95 and Doug Morrow ’01, both career diplomats, arrived together in the summer of 2018. Black, the new cultural affairs officer, had studied in Russia and served two years at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv following Ukraine’s 2004-05 Orange Revolution. He arrived in Prague fresh from six years at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Morrow, his new deputy, had previously lived in Moscow and worked for two years at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv shortly before Ukraine overthrew pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

This is their perspective on the work of diplomacy.

 The first time either of us realized we had both gone to Pomona was before we even arrived in the Czech Republic. Doug was still in Iraq and had just received his onward assignment to Prague. “Naturally, I cyberstalked my future boss—then in Beijing—and was both shocked and delighted to learn he was a fellow Sagehen,” he recalls. “Fortunately, I was able to travel a few months later on vacation to China, where we met up for lunch, and I was gratified to discover how much I enjoyed Erik as a person.”

Diplomats don’t have to be serious all the time. Doug Morrow ’01 imitates the bird depicted on the building behind him.

Later, as Russian speakers, we were grouped together in our 10-month Czech language class in Northern Virginia, where we had even more of an opportunity to get to know one another. We had a lot more in common than Claremont; we both had spent time in Russia and Ukraine before the Russian invasion.

“Ukraine was my first assignment in the Foreign Service,” Erik says. “I have fond memories of Kyiv and the wonderful Ukrainian people I was privileged to know. Watching the news each day about the unnecessary destruction in places where I lived, worked, or visited breaks my heart.”

Doug has even closer ties.

“It’s been horrifying to see what’s happening to my friends and colleagues in Ukraine,” he says. “Even though I left in 2013, I’ve been back to visit almost every year since, and have remained close friends with the Ukrainian staff at the embassy. They’ve all had to flee Kyiv, some to Western Ukraine, others to various countries in Europe.”

Erik Black, right, during an embassy function while serving as the U.S. cultural affairs officer in the Czech Republic.

What we didn’t realize when we arrived in the Czech Republic—a member of NATO since 1999 and of the European Union since 2004, but once part of the Warsaw Pact—was that most of our time would be spent blunting the impact of Russian and Chinese propaganda and disinformation campaigns. Erik was well attuned to China’s international influence efforts through its Belt and Road Initiative and network of Confucius Centers from his experience in Beijing. Doug was versed in Russian methods from his time in Moscow. 

“I thought coming to the heart of Europe would mean a break from China issues after my back-to-back tours in Beijing,” Erik says.

Doug had similar expectations.

“Honestly, I thought this was going to be sort of a break after heading the public affairs section in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region during the middle of the ISIS war, but it was anything but,” he says.

Leading a team of three Czech nationals that included some of the most talented and experienced staff at the embassy, Erik was charged with engaging Czech opinion leaders in a variety of fields: the arts, journalism, higher education, business and civil society.

“Our goal was to better explain American government and society and help strengthen our shared democratic values and ideals among Czechs who have significant influence,” he says. 

Doug’s team of four Czechs focused on the nation’s young people ages 14-30, the first generation of voters and workers in that country to have grown up without any memory of authoritarianism. 

“The concern was that this lack of direct experience might weaken their resolve to maintain their 32-year-old democracy,” he says. “Before COVID, we started making the rounds to high schools and universities to engage students in discussions on why democracy matters. Polling bore out our concerns: Among the 38 countries that are members of the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development], young Czech adults report by far the lowest interest in politics.”

That might have been part of the reason the Czech Republic’s president, who regularly praised authoritarian Russia and China, was re-elected with a comfortable majority in 2018. 

We both agreed it was important to have a conversation with Czechs about why our shared democratic values still mattered.

The China Problem

At the time, China had already begun a major influence campaign in the Czech Republic. The Czech president had declared his hope it would become an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for Chinese investment into the European Union. 

A series of state visits, the opening of new Czech-Chinese institutes and Confucius Centers, and attempts to lure Czech students to study in China all created concern in the embassy about long-term Czech commitments to our shared democratic values, as did increasingly favorable poll numbers for China. In response, the cultural team crafted a multi-year campaign to highlight Chinese human rights abuses and the dangers of increasing reliance on Chinese information technology.

The Chinese government did itself no favors. When the progressive mayor of Prague spoke out in favor of Taiwan and Tibet in 2019, the Chinese government retaliated by canceling planned cultural tours by any musical groups that happened to have “Prague” in their name. (In the Czech Republic, high art and classical music are sacrosanct: Don’t Mess with Dvorak.) 

Erik Black ’95, holding instrument at left, organized a concert by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra at the ambassador’s official residence, upper right, to counter tour cancellations by the Chinese related to the Prague mayor’s support for Taiwan and Tibet.

Erik’s team capitalized by inviting one orchestra blocked by China to perform at the Petschek Villa, the ambassador’s official residence—which happens to be across the street from the Chinese Embassy. To broaden the impact, we arranged for the concert to be broadcast live on national radio. One Czech journalist described the concert as “a totally badass move by the U.S. Embassy.” Combined with other programs, including expert speakers and a nationally touring public photo exhibition documenting abuses against the Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang and remembrances of the Tiananmen Square massacre, our teams succeeded in getting Czechs across the country talking about the values gap with China and questioning how close they really wanted to be.

The Russia Problem 

Meanwhile, publicly available polling data showed that the far east of the Czech Republic had the highest levels of support for political parties on the extreme left and right wings, groups whose commitment to democratic ideals was questionable.

Ostrava, the largest city in the east, is a rust-belt metropolis suffering from relatively high unemployment and ethnic tension. A flashy Russian Consulate sits on the high street, and a giant Russian tank—a World War II memorial—holds prominent ground downtown on the river. Support for the Communist party was higher there than in any other part of the country. 

Situated three hours from the embassy, Ostrava’s residents had previously been difficult to reach, so Doug’s team launched a new American cultural center there as a platform for American speakers, media and other engagement. We found willing partners in the city and region’s leadership, who—with distinct memories of life under a Communist autocracy—understood the risks of ongoing economic stagnation and cultural isolation.

Ambassador Stephen King meets with Embassy Youth Council members at the new U.S. cultural center in Ostrava.

We recruited high school students from the region and across the country to spend a year in the United States with host families so that they could effectively serve as informal ambassadors upon their return, explaining U.S. politics, society and culture in towns and cities unlikely to see a real-life diplomat. In addition, we established a partnership with the local (and impressive) children’s science museum to develop a critical-thinking exhibit to help local children better challenge Russian state disinformation campaigns. 

To address the Russia problem with another important audience, Erik’s team worked with Czech alumni of U.S. government exchange programs in 2019 to organize a two-day regional workshop titled “Propaganda and Its Tools in the Post-Soviet Bloc: How to Fight It.” Experts from seven Central and Eastern European countries gathered with fellow European alumni of U.S. government programs in Prague to discuss Russian propaganda, disinformation campaigns and cyber operations, as well as best practices and successful strategies to counter them. The conference attendees, many of whom are in positions of influence within their respective countries, recommitted themselves to working collectively to counter Russian disinformation.

Just as it did with everything else, the COVID-19 pandemic created challenges to traditional public diplomacy efforts, which typically traffic in face-to-face engagement. We had to adapt our programs, turning to Zoom and other tools to reach virtual audiences. When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited the Czech Republic during a COVID lull in August 2020—the first high-level official U.S. visit in eight years—we helped coordinate media coverage and engagements with the traveling U.S. press, as well as with the Czech and international media reporting on the trip. 

Secretary Pompeo’s visit included a public speech on NATO and European security under growing Russian threats at the “Thank You, America!” monument in Pilsen, which commemorates the U.S. soldiers who liberated Western Bohemia from the Nazis. He also made a major policy speech in the historic Czech Senate chambers calling for greater Western unity in countering growing Chinese influence in Central and Eastern Europe. It was a proud moment for us at the Czech Senate when Secretary Pompeo referenced our effective cultural work in the Czech Republic to influence public attitudes towards China.

By the summer of 2021, our productive three-year Prague assignments—a typical stint in the U.S. Foreign Service—were over. Erik went on to serve a one-year tour as the Cultural Affairs Officer in Kabul, Afghanistan, which included surviving the August evacuation of the U.S. Embassy as Kabul fell.

“I was in Kabul when Taliban forces entered the capital and I evacuated on the last available commercial flight out, escorted by Black Hawk helicopters. The final apocalyptic hours in Afghanistan are seared in my memory,” Erik says. “To save Afghan lives, we rushed boxes of program files to large burning dumpsters behind the U.S. Embassy and destroyed the name placards on every Afghan staff cubicle.” 

Evacuated first to Washington, and later to Doha, Qatar, Erik helped with Afghan staff evacuation and U.S. resettlement efforts, registered thousands of Afghan refugees into the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, convinced Washington to provide funding to cover 120 new graduate scholarships for Afghan female students, and built a new platform in Doha for conducting public diplomacy in Afghanistan. He returns to Washington this summer to work on the China desk for two years as an embedded public diplomacy adviser. 

 Doug returned to the U.S. for a one-year master’s program in War, Diplomacy, and Society at Chapman University, not too far down the road from Pomona, after which he’ll be returning to Iraqi Kurdistan for a two-year stint. We became close friends during our three years in Prague, and we were grateful for the opportunity to serve our country together in such a beautiful and historic city, on such pivotal issues. On our last day together last summer, we ascended the hillside behind the U.S. Embassy with our Czech staff for pictures at the Glorietta pavilion that overlooks the Vltava River and Prague’s famous Charles Bridge and stands across from Prague Castle. We will miss our amazing team and this beautiful place. 

Like most alumni, we know the words on the College Gates almost by heart. We feel gratitude that Pomona opened our minds to new possibilities and put us on the path to diplomatic careers in the U.S. Foreign Service, where we continue to “bear our added riches” for people not only in the U.S., but around the world. 

It’s around lunchtime on a weekday when two friends meet up in the Smith Campus Center’s courtyard. A dozen or more outdoor tables are buzzing with Pomona College students as they chat, eat and work under umbrellas protecting them from the high-noon sun. In the middle of the courtyard, recycled water endlessly cascades from a spout in the iconic Smith Campus Center fountain. For Anaa Jibicho ’23, the fountain is a reminder of his mission.

At a small table, Jibicho sits with his best friend and business partner Brian Bishop ’22 as they await the lunch they’ve ordered from the Coop. Together with a third partner, Lamah Bility, they run Didomi—a social enterprise named for the ancient Greek word for giving and founded on the principle of helping the nearly a billion people around the world who don’t have access to clean, safe water near their homes. They do this by donating a portion of the profits from sales of their fashionable, reusable water bottles to WaterIsLife, a nonprofit that provides filtration systems, pumps and drilling to help people access clean and safe water. The ventures also work to spread awareness of the crisis across the world.

“Water here is an aesthetic,” Jibicho says as he points to the fountain. “To have a basic necessity so readily available, we don’t think twice about it.”

REFUGEE ORIGINS

Anaa Jibicho ’23, left; Jibicho and Brian Bishop ’22 on the slopes, right; Jibicho and Bishop canoeing below.

Jibicho, an economics major, started Didomi in 2019 with Bility in Minnesota, where they had separately arrived as refugees from Africa at ages 7 and 11. As a young child in Ethiopia, Jibicho suffered the ill effects of drinking unsafe water. He and his family, members of the persecuted Oromo people, were forced to drink the only available water–which was not just unsafe but lethal. Before Jibicho’s birth, his mother had already suffered the unthinkable: Two of her children had fallen ill and died after ingesting unsafe water. When 2-year-old Jibicho became sick as well, she was determined not to lose another son. They fled to Kenya, and as refugees, she secured medical care that saved her youngest child’s life.

During his Orientation Adventure as a first-year student, Jibicho opened up and told his story to others in the group. Bishop, a sophomore leader on the trip who grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was staggered. “The numbers also blew me away,” says the math and media studies major. As Jibicho explains: “Nearly a billion people lack access to safe water, and unsafe water kills more people than war.”

The two students connected further as the year went on, but it was another outdoor experience that cemented their burgeoning friendship. An avid outdoorsman, Bishop invited Jibicho to the annual Ski-Beach Day, traditionally held in the spring semester. At a cost of $5 dollars per person, the trip takes a busload of 100 Pomona students to Mountain High resort in nearby Wrightwood for an early day of skiing followed by a same-day drive to the Pacific Ocean for an afternoon of fun in the sand. The trip always sells out. To secure a spot, students begin lining up early in the morning at the Associated Students of Pomona College office in a line that stretches around the second floor of the Smith Campus Center. Luckily for Bishop and Jibicho, they secured ticket numbers 98 and 99.

Jibicho and Brian Bishop ’22 on the slopes

Bishop, a member of the five-college ski and snowboard team that competes nationally, taught Jibicho to ski. He says it took a lot of convincing to drag Jibicho to the slopes. But now, skiing is one of Jibicho’s joys.

Conventional wisdom says that friendship and business don’t mix. Bishop says that opportunities like Pomona’s Orientation Adventure and Ski-Beach Day were instrumental in building a strong and holistic relationship between the two of them. “If you have those types of relationships, you’re more able to work together,” he says.

During spring break in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning, Jibicho saw an opportunity to grow Didomi’s potential. Staying with Bishop in New Mexico for the week, Jibicho pitched him an idea: Join Didomi and be a part of something bigger than both of them. Bishop had been looking into summer internships where he could use his media studies and creative skills and learn from experts.

It took a lot of persuasion, says Jibicho, to steer his friend away from a traditional internship and to take a leap of faith with Didomi instead: “I pitched him to create his own opportunity at Didomi and to learn by doing.”

Today, Bishop laughs remembering how much his friend had to do to get him to say yes—probably almost as much as he had to do to convince Jibicho to join him on those early ski trips.

SEEKING CHANGE

By the summer of 2020, Bishop had moved in with Jibicho and Bility in their hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, to develop brand guidelines for the reusable water bottle company.

Brian Bishop ’22

Bishop’s arrival in the Twin Cities coincided with the George Floyd protests rocking the Minneapolis area. Floyd’s death under the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin was captured on camera, sparking public outrage and unrest across the U.S.

Before even going to their apartment, Jibicho, Bility and Bishop attended the protests, with Bishop’s luggage still in the trunk. The energy on the streets inspired the three young Black men, and before long they took turns on the microphone sharing about their own experiences.

The energy of that historic summer continued to fuel the trio as they drew out Didomi’s vision, mission statement and brand guidelines. They got down to the finer details, including approved fonts, color schemes and what types of brands and companies they wanted to work with.

“Be the drop that makes ripples throughout the world.”

Refined that summer, this quote graces Didomi’s stainless steel bottles. Their logo is a drop of water that flows into two fingers drawn in a symbol meant to represent hope. Each bottle retails for $28, and half of the profits from a single bottle provides 10 years of access to safe water to one person in need in Africa.

Anaa Jibicho ’23, co-founder Lamah Bility and Brian Bishop ’22, right.

Bishop took a semester off during the 2020-2021 school year, which was marked by remote classes and uncertainty caused by COVID-19. Back home in New Mexico, he continued working on Didomi while auditing a social entrepreneurship course at Claremont McKenna College. Jibicho was enrolled in the same class, and both came out of it with tangible skills they would immediately put to the test.

Their hard work has led to large-scale partnerships with several institutions, including the University of New Mexico, Boys & Girls Clubs of America and the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. In Claremont, they have partnered with the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity (known as the Hive) and the Pomona College Office of Advancement.

The latest partnership they secured in January is with George Washington University. Jibicho says they beat out larger reusable water bottle companies for the contract to supply the university with nearly 30,000 Didomi bottles that will be given to the students, faculty and staff to help nudge the community away from single-use plastic bottles. The partnership will allow Didomi to provide water access to almost 30,000 people in Ghana, Guinea and Uganda for the next decade.

Being an entrepreneur, says Jibicho, has made his coursework at Pomona seem easier. “I’m using my education as a means to make tangible change for people around the world. I’ve been pushed to follow my passion here and use my education for good.”

Last summer, Didomi provided drinking water and reusable bottles for New Mexico’s first Juneteenth festival, helping spread awareness of the water crisis. During the three-day event, Didomi partnered with the arts production company Meow Wolf and the New Mexico United soccer team to give attendees custom-made water bottles, helping make an impact on the water crisis in Africa and reduce plastic waste in America.

To date, Jibicho and Bishop say, Didomi has helped 50,000 people in Africa. The future is full of opportunity for the young entrepreneurs, who have no plans to stop. Jibicho has one more year at Pomona. Bishop, a senior who took a semester off during the pandemic, is graduating at the end of 2022 and plans to focus on Didomi’s social media presence and the stories of the company’s impact that will inspire people. Bility, who already graduated from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, is boots-on-the-ground in West Africa, managing Didomi’s impact firsthand. Their hope is to see that one day everyone in the world will have access to all the clean, safe water they need.

“Lots of people have invested in our mission but no one is more invested than us,” Jibicho says. “We are committed to the work.” 

It’s midday at the Colorado Rockies’ Coors Field, still hours before first pitch. A couple of groundskeepers are busy mowing the grass with practiced precision, and another is spraying the infield dirt with a fine mist before the evening’s game.

High above the field, Linda Alvarado ’73 and Emily Glass ’15 sit in a quiet stadium lounge that soon will be buzzing with fans. They have little and yet worlds in common.

Alvarado is a self-made construction mogul with a net worth Forbes estimates at $230 million. The founder, president and CEO of Alvarado Construction, a large commercial general contractor, she became the first Latino owner in Major League Baseball history—and a woman who didn’t inherit her stake at that—as part of the ownership group that won an expansion bid for a new National League team in 1991 and brought the Colorado Rockies to Denver in 1993.

Glass is a new employee, only months on the job, digging her fingernails deeper into a career in baseball after being hired as the Rockies’ first female scout last November. Like Alvarado, she has gotten where she is with intelligence, a clever knack for finding her way around obstacles and a sense of humor that has served both women well in male-dominated fields. Besides the Rockies and a love for baseball, they have one other thing in common: Pomona College.

“What dorm did you live in?” Glass asks.

“I think I lived in Mudd,” Alvarado says, reaching back over the years.

“I lived in Mudd too!” Glass says.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Mudd 2 back. Did you go up the stairs?”

“I think so.”

“Mudd 2! Let’s go!” Glass says as they exchange one of the fist bumps that punctuate their conversation.

Though Alvarado learned about Glass’s baseball background during the scouting search and from former Rockies manager Clint Hurdle before she was hired, the pair didn’t discover their Pomona connection until well after Glass had started working for Marc Gustafson, the Rockies’ senior director of scouting operations, and been featured in the Denver Post.

Rockies co-owner Linda Alvarado ’73, left,
and scout Emily Glass ’15 in the stands at Coors Field.

Glass isn’t the only woman working as a scout for a major league team, and the so-called glass ceiling in baseball’s front offices already has been broken by Miami Marlins General Manager Kim Ng, who became MLB’s first female GM in 2020. But Glass, who serves as the Rockies’ scouting operations administrator in addition to scouring Colorado and beyond for amateur talent, is still part of the early wave of women in baseball. She’s someone with a “very bright future” as Gustafson told the Post after Glass emerged as one of the standouts from the MLB Diversity Pipeline Scout Development Program in Arizona last fall.

Alvarado and Glass followed very different paths to Pomona and had very different experiences.

Growing up in New Mexico, Alvarado shared a two-room adobe home with her parents and five brothers. “Not two bedrooms,” she says. “Two rooms.” The captain of her high school softball team, she turned down an opportunity to play college ball in the Midwest to attend Pomona on an academic scholarship.

Glass grew up in Northern California in what she describes as a University of California family. Her parents and brother earned degrees at various UCs, and her parents met in Berkeley. She played softball for two years at Pomona before quitting to play hardball with the guys in a beer league.

“A beer league? How come they didn’t have that when I was there?” Alvarado says. “My era was free love, you know. Burn your bras, and I was there when they first had Earth Day.”

MLB’s First Latino Owner

Alvarado’s girlhood was steeped in sports. “My parents didn’t embrace conventional thinking, particularly for Hispanic families, to let this girl be out there playing baseball with the boys, getting dirty, getting punched,” says Alvarado, born Linda Martinez. Her father was a catcher in summer baseball leagues, so she played catcher like him. “He would let me go clean the plate between innings—which is still the only plate I know how to clean,” she says with characteristic wit.

Throw in the fact that Alvarado’s first date with her future husband, Robert Alvarado, was at Dodger Stadium, and it’s clear that bringing an MLB team to Denver was more than an investment decision, though it has been a good one for Alvarado, the only woman in the ownership group that acquired the team for a $95 million expansion fee and startup costs. Today, Forbes values the Rockies at $1.385 billion, with majority owners Dick and Charlie Monfort helming a current group of four limited partners, including Alvarado.

Her involvement began with a phone call from then-Gov. Roy Romer in the early 1990s, asking her to meet him for breakfast at the Brown Palace, Denver’s iconic downtown hotel. “He didn’t call my husband,” Alvarado makes it clear, even though Robert is her partner in Palo Alto, Inc., a separate empire that operates more than 250 YUM! Brands franchise restaurants, many of them Taco Bells.

“I thought Gov. Romer was going to ask me for a political contribution,” she says. Instead he was asking her, as an entrepreneur, to consider joining a group of men working to put together a viable bid for a new MLB team. “There was no major league team between Kansas City and Los Angeles,” she says. “Colorado had been trying to get a team for years and years and years.”

Getting Alvarado on board strengthened the bid with her business experience, active involvement in civic and community leadership, and because Bill White, the National League president at the time, and MLB had emphasized diversity in ownership as an important factor. Besides writing a big check, the effort required determination and persistence, two qualities Alvarado has in abundance, and a willingness to take a big risk.

“It’s not like when you put a deposit down on a car, you don’t get the car, you get your money back,” she says. “Putting together a proposal like this is very challenging and costly. A lot of the questions they’re going to have before you even get considered for the short list: Are you committed? Are you aligned with the City? Are you going to be able to deliver success on the field and fill the stands, or is this an investment so you can be on the front page?”

A critical selection requirement was building a major league stadium, and the ownership group campaigned hard to pass a six-county sales tax referendum to fund construction of a new stadium. As the classic brick facade of Coors Field rose above a poor and dilapidated downtown warehouse district, it transformed that part of the city. Restaurants, retail, grocery stores, bars and other businesses moved in, rehabilitating vacant old buildings. New condominium towers rose along with high-rise offices, creating new jobs. Alvarado, walking around the stadium’s upper deck, points to a skyline still crowded with construction cranes today. “For many decades, this had been an abandoned area in Denver,” she says. “There was really nothing. Maybe just a few prairie dogs and some people who were homeless. Picking this site really has had a huge economic impact for the city.”

The Rockies were an immediate hit when they made their debut in 1993, drawing more than 80,000 in their first home game at the Denver Broncos’ old Mile High Stadium, playing on a converted football field that accommodated baseball by using a mechanical system to temporarily move a massive section of the stands. The team set an MLB attendance record by drawing nearly 4½ million fans its first season. Coors Field opened two years later in 1995, and with a group of Rockies sluggers known as the Blake Street Bombers for the stadium’s location at 20^th and Blake streets, the club made the playoffs in only its third season. The Rockies have hosted the MLB All-Star Game twice, and in 2007, they  reached the World Series against the Boston Red Sox but didn’t win.

‘Girls Do Food Service’

Alvarado’s success in whatever field she chose might have been inevitable. But her gravitation toward construction began with helping her father pour a concrete sidewalk at their little adobe, and accelerated at Pomona. Coming from New Mexico, “I was a little challenged, because I didn’t know what broccoli was, or brussels sprouts. I grew up with beans, rice and chiles,” Alvarado says. “But Pomona was great. Really game-changing in widening my knowledge and perspectives in economics, data analytics, risk-taking, strategic planning and motivation. The culture also held you accountable for participation in your classes, learning experiences, getting better grades, and not only being productive but also being proactive and collaborative with others in utilizing this knowledge to make a difference.”

Her parents, she says, were living week to week, so Alvarado sought a student job on campus. “You could do food service, library or groundskeeping,” she says. “I don’t know how to cook, so I applied for groundskeeper and went to go find the supervisor. He said, ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you understand? Girls do food service. Boys do groundskeeper.’”

She soon returned and told him, “‘I didn’t see on the posting it was only for boys.’ He said, ‘You can’t wear those shoes. You’re going to have to wear Levi’s to work. You’re going to be doing all this heavy lifting. You’re going to be in the sun and working with all these men!’

“I thought to myself, I don’t have to wear these painful women’s shoes. I can wear Levi’s to work, I don’t have to go to the gym, and I can get a tan. And I don’t pay you, you pay me to work with all these single guys? I was hired but I think he thought I would quit or whatever. In reality, I was more comfortable in that kind of environment.”

When a single parent in her family passed away leaving five kids with no resources while Alvarado was at Pomona, “I made a very difficult decision that I had to find a full-time job to provide some desperately needed financial support for these children,” she says.

Alvarado’s coworkers told her about other landscaping and commercial construction projects, and in 1972 she left Pomona to put her economics studies to practical purposes, working in commercial real estate development on financial planning, staging and procurement, and then on the construction side to the project completion. “But I had to use my initials when I applied, because what if I used my first name? It would have been not only no, but hell no,” she says.

Glass, who has been listening closely, nods in recognition.

“Rachel Balkovec did that,” she says, referring to the woman who this season became the first female to manage an MLB-affiliated minor league team as skipper of the New York Yankees’ Tampa Tarpons. Frustrated by lack of responses as she applied for baseball jobs earlier in her career, Balkovec changed the name on her resume to “Rae,” and the phone started ringing.

Alvarado had wedged a heel in the door, but was not universally accepted. Most jarringly, when she used the portable toilets on a job site, “There’d be pictures of me drawn in markers in various stages of undress,” she says. “Now that I’m more experienced in construction, I know that the mechanical companies use a different color marker than the electrical companies on projects and I could have tracked down who was doing it.” The crude graffiti was a shock, one she defrays with typical humor. “I didn’t know you could do so many things wearing only a hardhat—but at least they knew I was OSHA compliant, because I was always wearing a hardhat in the drawings.”

Undeterred, Alvarado picked up classes in estimating and computerized scheduling at Cal State Los Angeles. Construction was changing, with the work done with pencil and paper shifting to computers. “That was the point of differentiation because most men did not have that skill. I then got this really crazy idea that I could be a construction contractor,” she says.

Linda Alvarado ‘73 is founder, president and CEO of Alvarado Construction, a large commercial general contractor.

In 1976, she started Alvarado Construction, installing curbs, gutters and sidewalks. Having seen the estimates, bids, purchase orders, invoices and payments during her earlier position as an on-site contract administrator, she found ways to make up for her limited cash.

“I’d say, ‘Look, if you pay for the concrete, you will save the 20 percent markup that every subcontractor charges on the material. And it will assure you two-fold. It gets paid. I don’t have to pay for it. And you get a 20 percent reduction in materials.’ And that’s how I started moving forward to break the ‘concrete ceiling’ building small bus shelters.”

Today, Alvarado Construction is a large commercial contractor and development company that builds multimillion-dollar projects across the U.S. and internationally, and served as the general contractor for the Denver Broncos’ Empower Field stadium. 

Alvarado has served on the boards of 3M Co., Pitney Bowes International, the Pepsi Bottling Group, United Banks of Colorado and Lennox International. But those early days were not easy.

“I needed cash to grow, applied for loans, and was turned down by six banks,” she recalls. “Without talking to me, my parents took out a double-digit interest loan on their two-room adobe house for $2,500. It was terrifying, but it was also a serious motivator because they would lose everything if I didn’t succeed. I paid the loan back, but I’ll never be able to repay them.”

Becoming a Scout

By late afternoon Glass is sitting in the metal stands at a school whose name she couldn’t resist: Pomona High in the Denver suburb of Arvada. She’s as incognito among the parents and fans as one can be with a stopwatch in her hand and a radar gun in the black bag she carries. But even the Rockies-purple puff jacket she wears on a changeable Colorado spring day doesn’t betray that she is someone who could help a diamond in the rough get drafted—or downgrade a hot prospect with high hopes.

Finding talent in Colorado, where the season starts late and is often interrupted by snow, can be a challenge. But it happens. “High risk, high reward,” Glass says. “It’s not like Texas, California or Florida.” But there are players to be found, and the state has produced some standout pitchers. “Roy Halladay, Kyle Freeland,” she says, referring to the late Hall of Famer and a current Rockies left-hander.

When a player she is there to see comes to the plate, Glass readies her stopwatch.

“You don’t want to see a hitter swing and not make contact. You can’t swing and miss and be a pro prospect,” she says. He hits a ground ball, and she clicks her stopwatch to see how fast he runs from home to first. “Average-plus speed,” she says, consulting a Rockies rating chart she carries with her.

The other team comes to the plate, and a batter hits a sharp grounder to the infielder she is there to see. He can’t handle it. “That ate him up,” she says. She knows it is just one play in a season, but it’s the one she saw.

That’s part of what makes scouting so challenging, the happenstance of it. “And there are so many intangibles, things you can’t predict,” she says, like a player’s personal drive, whether they’re done growing or just starting, what kind of teammate they’ll be. So many things in analyzing prospects make Glass think back to things she heard at Pomona, ideas like cost-benefit analysis and another particular refrain from Professor of Politics David J. Menefee-Libey.

“Like DML always says, policy analysis and evaluation depend on what type of data can be collected and analyzed,” she says. “We know what we can see or evaluate. We don’t know what we can’t see or what is missing. Player evaluation is a lot like that.”

Glass didn’t set out to become a scout, but has kept building a career in baseball almost like a sailor tacking, catching whatever wind she can and then finding another way to move forward when it shifts.

Her first semester at Pomona, she chose a Critical Inquiry seminar called Baseball in America, taught by Lorn Foster, now an emeritus professor. She studied abroad in Spain to hone the Spanish skills that helped her break into baseball. Her senior year, she wrote her thesis in public policy analysis on a renowned program for disadvantaged youth called Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities (RBI). From there, Glass won a coveted Watson Fellowship, which provides a stipend—now up to $40,000—for a new graduate to engage in a year of independent research abroad. Glass studied international baseball while traveling to seven countries, including the Dominican Republic, Japan and Australia.

With the help of Ng—the Marlins’ GM she has long admired—Glass landed an MLB internship in the Dominican, working with youth development and education programs. It still took almost two years of applying and interviewing while working elsewhere to get hired by a major league organization, but in 2018 the Marlins named her the education coordinator on the player development staff. She worked in that role for more than 3½ years, helping Spanish-speaking players learn English and skills for life in the U.S. while promoting Spanish-language skills among English-speakers to build team camaraderie. When the position was eliminated, at first Glass didn’t know where to turn.

“I always knew I had a passion for player evaluation. I didn’t know if I’d be able to break into it,” she says.

Emily Glass ’15 scouts high school talent at a game in the Denver area.

In a stroke of good luck, MLB was launching a Diversity Pipeline Scouting Development program last fall, and Glass was one of about 30 people selected for the intensive weeklong camp, half of them women. Working in a small group led by Jalal Leach, a pro scout she had known with the Marlins, Glass stood out. Danny Montgomery, the Rockies’ assistant general manager of scouting, heard about her. So did General Manager Bill Schmidt, who had drafted Leach out of college and been a mentor to him. As usual, Glass impressed people with her ability, drive and organizational skills everywhere she went, just as she had  impressed Hurdle, the former major league player and manager, when they met.

Her battles have been fewer than Alvarado faced in an era when sexism was unfettered by company policies and social expectations. There is a group of women in scouting and other baseball roles Glass checks in with frequently. But baseball is still a male world.

“I think kind of like what Linda is saying, I’m just an ‘actions speak louder than words’ person,” she says. “Trust takes time to build. It’s a process, like baseball. You keep at it every day, and over time it grows. I’ve been very much welcomed overall. You can focus on the bright side or not. I wouldn’t be here without the opportunities I’ve been given by the Rockies and prior to this. I’m very grateful for that.”

Alvarado nods.

“We’re very proud of what she’s doing,” she says.

They are two of the more visible women with the Rockies, but far from the only ones. Sue Ann McClaren is vice president of ticket sales, operations and services. Kim Molina is VP of human resources. And there are other women executives in communications, sales, marketing, corporate sponsorships, client services, engineering and facilities. Yet another is the manager of baseball research, which is a data analytics role, and two women, Jenny Cavnar and Kelsey Wingert, are part of the Rockies broadcast team for AT&T SportsNet.

Alvarado is intent on promoting talented women, but says being the first matters most because it usually means there will also be a second.

“I have sometimes been the first. But I do not want to be the only or the last,” Alvarado says. “Every time another woman succeeds, it opens doors.”  

Another rowdy standing-room only crowd at Haldeman Pool, another USA Water Polo Division III National Championship.

This time it was the Pomona-Pitzer women who took a celebratory leap into the pool after their 8-6 win over Whittier College in May gave them the national title. That completed a Sagehen sweep of the men’s and women’s Division III polo titles as some of the men’s players who won the title in December cheered on the women’s team from the packed stands.

“The crowd at Haldeman was part of what made this experience really special for our team,” says attacker Lucie Abele ’22. “We love hearing students, friends and family cheering us on and having fun, and that support makes games really fun and is super motivating.”

Combined with the men’s cross country team’s NCAA Division III championship in November, Sagehen Athletics teams have claimed an unprecedented three national titles this academic year. 

For years, top Division III water polo teams advanced to the NCAA’s single-division water polo tournaments only to be quickly eliminated by Division I powers. The sport’s national governing body decided in 2019 to create an alternative to the NCAA tournament, a final four for Division III.

“I thank USA Water Polo,” says Alex Rodriguez, professor of physical education and leader of a staff that coaches both the men’s and women’s teams. “I’ve been pretty fortunate to have a long list of amazing women play for me and carry me to these moments. This championship is different. A national championship is different. It feels amazing. It doesn’t feel like it used to feel to win conference and go to the NCAAs against Division I teams.

“I was surprised on the men’s side how much love we got for winning the D-III championship, and I expected the same thing,” says Rodriguez, whose resume also includes two trips to the Olympics as an assistant men’s coach. “I am truly touched with this opportunity.”

The Sagehen women were No. 1 in the preseason Division III national rankings, and they were No. 1 at the end. But the title felt like a long time coming for the team’s five seniors: Abele, Nadia Paquin ’22, Allison Sullivan Wu ’22, Katherine Cullen PZ ’22 and Jessy Nesbit PZ ’22.

The seniors credited determination as well as the contributions of freshman and sophomores, all playing their first college seasons. An underclassman came up big in the final, as Namlhun Jachung PZ ’24 scored two goals and added four assists for the Sagehens. The SCIAC Newcomer of the Year, Jachung also was selected as national player of the year. 

Abele, the Sagehens’ leading goal-scorer during the regular season, and Abigail Wiesenthal ’24 each also scored two goals in the title game. Goalkeeper Zosia Amberger ’25, the SCIAC defensive athlete of the year, held off the Poets’ attempts to come back in the second half.

“This win felt really big for the seniors, especially after losing one-and-a-half years of water polo to the pandemic,” Abele says. “That was definitely a motivator for us, knowing that we had less time than other [classes] to make an impact and win a title. Winning D-III champs feels even more momentous to us because it’s four years in the making and a culmination of all our hard work.”

Ukraine’s Maria Lyven ’22 Persists Despite War at Home

Maria Lyven ’22

The road from Kyiv, Ukraine, to her senior year at Pomona College was paved with challenges for Maria “Masha” Lyven ’22. She arrived in a new country at 17 only to contend with a pandemic and then watch a war unfold at home. Despite those obstacles, she displayed remarkable resilience and became the SCIAC athlete of the year in women’s tennis.

NCAA singles finalist Angie Zhou ’25

“Masha is one of the hardest-working people I know,” says Melisha Dogra PZ ’22, co-captain with Lyven of the Pomona-Pitzer women’s tennis team, which reached the Elite Eight of the NCAA Division III tournament. Though Lyven’s postseason run was curtailed by illness, teammate Angie Zhou ’25 rallied to a strong finish as national runner-up in the NCAA Division III Singles Championship. (See photo.)

When Lyven arrived at Pomona from Kyiv, she only recently had begun learning English. Studying at Pomona meant writing her papers in Ukrainian first, then translating them. She also had to interpret a new culture.

The women’s tennis team was her foothold. “It was really fun to be part of the team and be part of a group where everyone is committed to the same goal,” Lyven says. Her first year, she qualified for the NCAA singles tournament, and the team finished fifth in the country.

The following year, the season was cut short by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lyven couldn’t return home due to travel restrictions, so she stayed with a Pomona classmate for two months. Eventually she was able to return to Ukraine, but had to fly from Texas to Atlanta to Amsterdam to Belarus and then drive an entire day to Kyiv.

Maria Lyven on the court.

Lyven returned to Pomona last fall, only to injure her back and be sidelined until spring. But she “overcame that and really got herself going in a good place coming back,” says Mike Morgan, head women’s tennis coach and associate professor of physical education. At a national tournament in March, Lyven was serving “about half underhand, half overhand,” says Morgan. and “still winning.” “She has a level of quiet grit about her that you just don’t see every day.”

That tournament took place about a week after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Lyven’s teammates wore yellow and blue ribbons to show their support, and later helped her organize a fundraiser for the Ukraine Global Crisis Relief Fund. By selling cupcakes, flowers and Ukrainian candies, Lyven raised about $1,600.

“The war has definitely affected me negatively,” she said this spring. “I’m constantly anxious about my family. I don’t know when I’m going to see my parents. It’s very scary, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m very angry, sad, frustrated and anxious about not being able to be there.”

Her parents, who live in the suburbs of Kyiv, were faring OK, she says. This summer, Lyven, a computer science major, has an internship at Lyft in New York City before returning for her final semester at Pomona. The offer came as a tremendous relief, because she couldn’t return home due to the unsafe conditions. She is interested in UX (user experience) and product design as a career, combining the skills in creative thinking and problem solving that she has gained at Pomona.

—Lorraine Wu Harry ’97

An Undefeated Regular Season, A Bright Future

Not only did Pomona-Pitzer women’s lacrosse sweep through the regular season and the SCIAC tournament undefeated, but the team also welcomed a new star: Shoshi Henderson ’25.

The Sagehens finished with the best record in the program’s history at 18-1, marred only by a postseason loss in the NCAA Division III Sweet 16 to Tufts, the eventual national runner-up, on the Jumbos’ home field.

Henderson quickly proved herself a game-changing player in her first season, breaking the NCAA Division III record for assists in a season with 90. She also set Sagehen records for points in a season with 132 and single-game assists with 13.

“Shoshi’s just a natural feeder, and she sees the field really well and works really well with her teammates,” says Coach Sarah Queener. “You can tell if you watch our games that when Shoshi gets the ball, you see everyone looking to cut. And that’s for a reason.”

Shoshi Henderson ’25, left, celebrates after scoring the winning goal in overtime against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps.

Kate Immergluck ’22, a “super-senior” who took a pandemic gap year to have the opportunity to play a final season, agrees.

“Shoshi has vision like nobody else,”
says Immergluck, a third-team All-American midfielder and the SCIAC Defensive Player of the Year. “I feel like when I’m playing offense and Shoshi’s feeding, she feeds the ball before I even know that I’m cutting. She knows the route before it’s even there. She can just anticipate the movement of the offense and I think that’s really special. It facilitates—well you can look at the stats, but it facilitates the way that our offense has developed.”

Popovich Raises the Bar in NBA

Pomona’s disproportionate influence on the NBA coaching ranks continued this season as Gregg Popovich, coach of Pomona-Pitzer’s Sagehens for eight seasons early in his career, set the NBA record for career victories as a coach. The San Antonio Spurs coach finished his 26th season with 1,344 regular-season wins in his career. Popovich also has won five NBA championships as a head coach, tied for third in NBA history—and a lofty goal for Mike Budenholzer ’92, the former Sagehen player who is coach of the Milwaukee Bucks and won his first NBA title in 2021. Finally, both coaches in the 2022 NBA Finals—the Golden State Warriors’ Steve Kerr and the Boston Celtics’ Ime Udoka—played for Popovich and later served as his assistant coaches, Udoka with the Spurs and Kerr at the Tokyo Olympics.

Watch Sagehen Sports Online—with Students as the Broadcast Crew

Before the pandemic, online broadcasts of Sagehen Athletics were a straightforward stream of the game. Now broadcasts might include multiple camera angles, instant replays, graphic overlays and play-by-play commentary.

The secret weapon behind these improvements? Student workers.

It’s a win-win situation. Those watching—including far-away family and friends of the athletes—have a vastly enhanced viewing experience, and students at Pomona gain valuable work opportunities.

Director of Athletics Communications Sam Porter, who oversees the broadcasts along with Assistant Director Aaron Gray, likes for students to work every position, in case the crews are short a person at any given game.

Maya Nitschke-Alonso ’23 didn’t have any prior camera experience. But she has settled into the role of “camera two,” which she explains “is the one that will zoom in on the player who’s taking free throws or backpedaling after a shot, the coach getting hyped up, all that fun stuff.”

Alex Chun ’24 hopes to make a career of sports commentary and is gaining plenty of experience.

“I’ve always found a profound passion for not only playing sports but also commentating and writing about sports or speaking about sports,” he says.

All home events are broadcast, with the exception of cross country, golf, and track and field, which are more difficult to film.

To watch live and previously recorded broadcasts, go to sciacnetwork.com/sagehens/.

—Lorraine Wu Harry ’97

Almost 50 years after they met as students at Pitzer and shared a house on Indian Hill Boulevard, Pomona College professors Gary Kates and Char Miller revel in a friendship that remained tight as they crisscrossed the country for graduate school and teaching jobs. They reunited in the 1980s as professors at Trinity University in Texas before Kates left for Pomona in 2001. In 2007, Miller followed. Back together in Claremont, they have offices two doors down from each other in Mason Hall. As Miller wrote in dedicating a book to Kates, his wife and their two children, their families’ bonds have become as thickly intertwined as the gnarled live oaks arching over the streets where they have lived. Kates and Miller recently sat down to reminisce with PCM in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity. 

Gary Kates: I think we remember when we met, but we may remember the remembering more than anything, because it was so long ago. It was in Huntley Bookstore of The Claremont Colleges, probably around the history books, and we stood a long time talking to each other.

Char Miller: Judi, now my wife of 45 years, introduced us. Gary had been her RA. I’ve said this to Gary before: It was like I met my brother, which I don’t have, but he has become that.

GK: It was September of 1973. Char and Judi were living in a home in South Claremont. Lynne, now my wife of 44 years, and I were living at 545 Indian Hill with John Moskowitz, who remains a close friend. John felt a little like a third wheel living with a couple, which was understandable, so midyear he moved out.

CM: And Judi and I moved in. The house was really funky, and that might also have driven John crazy. It’s been heavily fixed up since then. It was old Claremont; there was no insulation in the house and any wind went right through its very thin walls. But it was cheap, and it was close to the colleges.

GK: Char was much more hippie-looking then.

CM: Much more hair.

GK: Char’s hair flowed down to his shoulders and at times needed a band be pulled back. My hair looked longer than it was because it was kind of curly and kinky in those days, but never as classical ’60s as Char.

CM: I was going for the classical ’60s. To come to California, like for many at that time, was a chance to remake yourself. It did work in the sense that it gave me a life that I couldn’t have imagined before I got here and a chance to meet people that I wouldn’t have met had I not arrived—especially Judi!

I had dropped out of NYU and worked for a while but after about six weeks, I thought, this working stuff is hard, so the next fall I transferred to Pitzer. On my way to Claremont my car broke down in Bridgeport, California, in the Eastern Sierra. I had to hitchhike to Pitzer and got a ride from a guy in an 18-wheeler who took me all the way down Highway 395 through the Cajon Pass and dropped me off at Exit 47.

Another thing about Claremont in those days, the air quality was such that there were many days when you did not go outdoors. There was what we used to call the “smell of the ick” from the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana, and then all the cars. The air quality was so horrific that riding a bicycle from 545 Indian Hill to Pitzer College, you felt like you’d been running a marathon. There were days when I was just like, I’m not going to school. This is crazy. And obviously we didn’t have Zoom.

GK: It was so smoggy that there were maybe 100 days out of the year that you couldn’t see the mountains from Claremont. Maybe today there are five or 10 of those days.

CM: But you know, what was so much fun in that house was that it was very communal, not just between the four of us, but also lots of friends. Gary was teaching religious school at Temple Beth Israel, where we all belong still, and he would bring his students over. There would be songs and singing and Gary would be playing guitar.

GK: We listened to a lot of Phil Ochs in those days, who is not well known today but was a Dylan-esque protest singer who tragically committed suicide in 1976. But 1972 to 1974 was his heyday, and we listened to a lot of other folk music like that. Peter, Paul and Mary certainly. That was also your first year of baking bread, Char.

CM: Every Friday night we would bake challah and we got really good at it. I still get comments from people who had dinner in our house in ’73 and they say, “I remember that bread.”

GK: The housing stock in Claremont was much less upscale than it is today. Today, I think it would be hard for any student to rent out a full house in Claremont. They might be able to get a back home or a garage apartment. In the early ’70s, it didn’t feel unusual at all for college seniors to rent a home.

CM: A ceramist at Pitzer, Dennis Parks, owned the house, and a series of our friends had gone to work in his studio up in Nevada. One day, he turned to one of them and said, “Who is this Judi Lipsett? She keeps sending me checks.” He didn’t realize we were paying him something like 300 bucks a month, a cost that was cheaper than the dorm.

GK: It was a four-bedroom house, but we had changed two of the bedrooms into studies. For the studies, I was with Judi, and Char was with Lynne.

CM: It was also a kind of professionalized thing, that we were committed to doing this pretty early on. Part of what was so great was I had this incredible friend who was an historian who in that semester was finishing his senior thesis—on his electric typewriter. But it was so much fun to watch Gary go through this process, because I was going to try to replicate it the next year. Gary’s been my guide in a lot of things, but it started that spring.

GK: I don’t think it occurred to us until years later that it was actually very rare at that time for a Pitzer undergraduate to go to history graduate school. Pitzer [founded in 1963] wasn’t very old at that time.

CM: The faculty of Pitzer were fantastic and really helped me understand why I should do what I wanted to do. It was kind of a heady time.

GK: All the colleges were smaller, and certainly Pitzer being so new was under-resourced and more dependent on the other colleges. Both of us had mentors at other colleges too. Today each of the colleges is better, a little bigger and stronger than they were then.

CM: Every one of them is so strong now. I feel so lucky being back here.

The other thing we did at 545 was we had a garden in the backyard, which was problematic, I now think in retrospect. The professor had a kiln back there, and there was all sorts of debris and I suspect toxicity in the soil, which might have explained why things didn’t grow very well. But it was part of the back-to-the-land movement. Trying to grow your own food was consistent with trying to make your own bread. We’d have these big sumptuous meals that spread across the table with 10 to 12 people sitting in totally mismatched chairs.

GK: The thing I remember about that era that I think is still true with college students today, and I hope it is, I’m sure it is, is that we constantly talked about our classes and what we were reading and learning. And there’s a way in which five years later, I wasn’t sure if I took that class or if Judi took that class and I just listened to it and learned through osmosis because she was talking about it. It all kind of merged and the education you got was as much through one another and their experience of a class being reported daily, as if you actually took it.

CM: That’s what we always say as teachers now, that you learn surely as much outside the classroom as you do inside and that was a beautiful example of that, in part because the readings that we had were just dynamite. Absolutely fantastic and challenging, and because we were living with people who loved to talk about books and still do.

Judi is a writer and editor—she has edited most if not all of Gary’s books. Lynne went to medical school in Chicago and Gary went to graduate school at the University of Chicago. Then I went to Johns Hopkins for graduate work. When we were in Baltimore and they were in Chicago, we deliberately flew through Chicago so that Gary and Lynne could come out to the gate and we could see them, back when you could do such things. I remember we were once standing there and Gary’s looking very nervous and, finally, he said, “That’s Carl Wilson over there,” of the Beach Boys. Gary said, “I’ve got to go talk to him, but I’m not going to.” Judi said, “What can he say? Go over there.” Gary went over and introduced himself, and it was like this moment of great joy, in part because we could watch it happen in real time.

GK: When Judi and Char got married in the spring of 1977, I was in Paris doing research for my dissertation. Lynne went to the wedding and I didn’t. Today people would hop on a plane and make the transatlantic trip, but in those days you didn’t do that. You thought of it as a world away. But Lynne went to their wedding, and when I got back to Chicago where Lynne was in medical school, she announced to me that, well, they got married; we’re getting married. And it really was just like that, and so we got married the next year because they did.

CM: I mean there are worse reasons to get married.

GK: Well, it’s still working.

CM: After Pitzer, we were all in graduate programs in one form or another. We were going across the country, and whether by car or airplane, we were connecting with one another. Then I was teaching in Miami in the fall of 1980 when a position opened up at Trinity University in San Antonio. It was advertised in January right when our son [Ben Miller ’03] was born. And Gary was already in Texas at Trinity. There was a phone call, and he said, “This job is coming; put your hat in the ring.” I was on a visitor position at Miami, learning how to be a teacher, learning how to be a father, learning how to do all these things in temperatures that were very hot and astonishingly humid. It was at the time that the Mariel Boatlift occurred when Castro released lots of people, including many prisoners, and Miami became a shooting gallery. Literally down one block from our house, a drug raid happened with snipers stationed on our roof. I applied.

GK: Char was an unusual candidate in those days, because he had already had his dissertation accepted by a press and about to be published. As a kind of newbie pre-assistant professor, it made his CV stand out and made him a distinctive candidate for a tenure-track position. I think that’s one reason why Trinity wanted him. The other is Char and I were part of a more general effort to move Trinity from a good regional university to what might be called today a national liberal arts college. I think Char caught the wind of those sails, and it all just seemed to work out. It was magical. We couldn’t have made it work out. I was an assistant professor and junior. It took the seniors and the administrators wanting to do that.

CM: And then, like now, we lived half a mile away from each other in San Antonio. In part because Gary and Lynne put the earnest money down on a house and said, “You’re gonna like it.”

That experience of Gary with the guitar and his students and Phil Ochs, we would replicate at Trinity together. When I was teaching my U.S. in the 20th Century class, Gary would come and we’d go outside, sit under a spreading oak tree and we would teach them the songs. The song leader part of him came roaring back out. You’d get these 18-year-old, 19-year-old Texas kids singing antiwar songs. Then we would sit and talk about what they meant and what the motifs were, and why Phil Ochs and others like him were so invaluable as cultural markers. Twenty years later, they had become a way to talk about the Vietnam War and protest politics, a lot of which was born in the house at 545.

GK: This may be idealization and romanticism, but a lot of people sang more then, because we didn’t have these things in our ear. We didn’t have Spotify. We didn’t have anything really; we had radio. But the privatization of music into one’s ear is something recent, and you don’t hear college kids singing as much as you did then, excepting in a cappella groups and other organized singing.

CM: And I had that kazoo, if you call that music.

GK: I’d forgotten that.

CM: That might have been the next year, but 545, as it had been the previous spring with Gary and Lynne, was a hub for a lot of folks who have gone on to have really interesting lives. I feel very lucky to have had that year-and-half in that house. There was a maturation involved in the process. We weren’t living in a dorm. We had to figure out how to get food. Gary would go down to the Alta Dena Dairy and come back with chunks of cheese that no one in their life could finish eating. But it was cheap, like, why wouldn’t you buy it? And leeks when none of us knew what to do with a leek, but we would chop it up and put it in the soup. And those were the ways that you recognized you could probably survive this life.

GK: Char, don’t forget about the 89-cent Algerian wine.

CM: Oh God, yes. Couldn’t get enough of that. But 89 cents in the ’70s it would be a lot more now, more than Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s. It was not any better than Two Buck Chuck.

GK: Two Buck Chuck’s a lot better.

So by the early 1980s, there we are in San Antonio, not living in the same house anymore but we’re living literally two blocks away, and so our families grew up together. We’re the closest of friends, all of us. That’s the way it was for 20 years, and then I came out to Pomona to become dean of the College.

When I got to Pomona, the environmental analysis program was in dire need of more staff, and I went to the founder of the program, Rick Hazlett, and I said, “Look, I don’t want to impose anybody on you, but if you need someone ….” I told him about Char, who by then had migrated from a more conventional U.S. historian to one who specialized in issues of environmental justice and environmental studies more generally. Rick interrupted me and said, “I’ve read things by Char Miller. Are you saying you could get Char Miller here for a year?” With his blessing, we were able to get Char into a visiting position.

Then Char stayed for another year. I always felt funny about it, because on the one hand Char was a great help. I knew he would be: He was then as he is now a dynamic professor, so he was getting his own following of students. But at the same time, I felt very sensitive to issues of whether I was bringing in my friends to take faculty positions that at Pomona College anyone in the country would like to have. I was very set, OK, a two-year visitor. But then, like it or not, Char needs to head back to Trinity.

We had a new president at Pomona, David Oxtoby, and he was trying to understand the needs of environmental analysis. He said, “Well, what about Char Miller?” I basically told him I was worried about nepotism. And David said the strangest thing to me that I will never forget. He said, “Gary, you can’t allow your friendship with Char Miller to get in the way of what is in the best interest of Pomona College.”

At that point, I simply turned the issue over to my associate dean Ken Wolf, and I said, “Look, if there’s a way that you and President Oxtoby want to keep Char Miller, you put this together. I’m backing off.” And that’s how Char became a permanent member of the Pomona faculty.

CM: From my son’s point of view, there’s never been a job that I’ve gotten that Gary wasn’t somehow involved in. Outside of Miami, that’s actually true.

GK: Our kids, Emily and Max, are very good friends with Char’s kids, Ben and Rebecca. They’re about the same age, give or take a year.

CM: My son Ben works in Washington now, and Gary’s son Max works at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and every summer they spend at least a day together hanging out by the pool with their wives and children. We get these photographs of the next generations interacting in a really cool way. It’s fun that our various grandchildren know each other. And it started in the bookstore, and was nurtured at 545. I was walking by the house this morning. I pass it frequently and those memories pop up all the time.

GK: We live only a few blocks from each other now.

CM: And every time Gary’s out of town, he forgets to stop his L.A. Times, and either Judi or I stroll over to their house, pick it up and hide it. 

The feeling Elisa (Mawer) Louizos ’96 noticed in her chest was odd but not entirely unfamiliar. It wasn’t quite pain—more a tightness, a bit like heartburn but not as sharp. “Bummer,” she thought to herself as she started the car and headed out with her ninth-grade son to pick up his books for virtual school. “Maybe I’m getting a flu kinda thing.” And maybe, she thought, it will just go away.

On the way home, though, Louizos had to pull over to the side of the road, violently ill. Composing herself, she made it into the house, stretched out on the sofa and tried to eat some of the ramen noodles her son brought her. The nausea passed, but the tightness in her chest remained, along with lightheadedness and a dull ache mid-back. She fell into a fitful sleep.

“When I woke up in the morning,” Louizos recalls, “I didn’t know what it was, but I had the sense that ‘something’s a bit off.’” Her doctor’s office told her to go to a local emergency room, where she was sure she’d be “wasting people’s time” and that “it was going to be a pain in the butt,” all the while surrounded by people with COVID-19.

Medical personnel who attended to Louizos ran some tests and blood work, then turned their attention to other patients. “Everything was coming back negative, negative, negative,” she remembers. “And then the final test was for a cardiac enzyme, troponin.” In an instant, Louizos’ life changed. “The doctor looked at me and said, ‘Well, it looks like you’ve had a heart attack. Where is your husband? I need to talk to him.’”

Elisa (Mawer) Louizos ’96

A second surprise lay ahead. Louizos—a therapist who was just 46, healthy, and with no family history of heart disease—had not experienced the typical heart attack caused by plaque in the arteries. Rather, she had survived spontaneous coronary artery dissection—SCAD—a tear in a cardiac blood vessel that disrupts blood flow to the heart. The condition was viewed as so uncommon that it was considered too rare to get research funding, according to Katherine K. Leon, who founded the nonprofit SCAD Alliance in 2013 to change that. Leon herself experienced a SCAD in 2003. Through grassroots fundraising, the organization supports research and the iSCAD Registry, the only such multicenter SCAD registry in the country.

Cardiologist Sahar Naderi, director of Women’s Heart Health at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco, is one of a small but growing number of SCAD specialists. In her practice she sees two to three SCAD patients a week, and she is a part of Louizos’ treatment team. Nearly all of her SCAD patients—98%—are women, mostly in their late 40s to early 50s. Naderi says those studying the condition believe it may be the leading cause of heart attacks in women under 50, as well as during pregnancy.

“We still don’t really understand the condition,” Naderi says. “There seems to be some perfect storm of hormonal changes that happen toward menopause that perhaps triggers, or at least is associated with, these events. We also know that mental and physical stressors long-term seem to play a role.”

Roxanne (Ruzicka) Maas ’94

Eighteen months before Louizos’ SCAD, Roxanne (Ruzicka) Maas ’94 was taking a morning shower on the last day of vacation with her in-laws near Detroit when she began to experience chest pain. “I need to see my father-in-law,”’ she recalls thinking. (He is a retired physician.) Maas quickly dressed and gingerly went downstairs, hanging on to the banister to steady herself. “I couldn’t breathe,” she says. “I was sweating. I was dizzy and nauseous. I remember saying, ‘Maybe you should give me some aspirin.’”

As Maas was heading out the door on the way to the hospital, she suddenly vomited. She still doesn’t understand why, but after that, for whatever reason, “the pain and all the symptoms, like 95% went away. I was almost all better.” She went to the hospital anyway.

Maas was 47, healthy and active. Like Louizos, she had a husband and three children, along with a career as a genetic counselor. Nothing in her health profile would point to cardiac risk. But just as with Louizos, a series of tests showed elevated troponin. She had experienced a heart attack. After cardiac catheterization, her doctors concluded she had experienced a spontaneous coronary artery dissection, SCAD. The artery involved, says Maas, “looked like a frayed knot.” She flew home to California the next day, with the approval of her doctors, scared to death it might recur in mid-air.

A Strange Coincidence

When asked how it might be that two Pomona alumnae who sang in Glee Club together in the 1990s could both experience the same very rare heart attack just 18 months apart, Pomona Economics Professor Gary Smith suggests selective recall coincidence. Smith is the author of What the Luck: The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives. “Selective recall in general means that you remember selectively, often because it supports your prior beliefs, but also because it is so striking,” Smith explains. “Like a baby born at 7:11 on 7/11 weighing 7 pounds 11 ounces. If you predict, ahead of time, that a woman’s baby will be born at that time on that day with that weight, it would be astonishing if it came true. If you, instead, look at the birth records of the millions of babies born in the United States every year, it is utterly unsurprising that you will find a baby with an amusing combination of birth statistics. In any large set of data there are lots of coincidences that are memorable but meaningless.”

So it is likely that the two women’s experiences with SCAD might have remained as isolated, individual rare events were it not for a third Sagehen and mutual friend, Tori (Ashe) Erslovas ’95. “Last January I got a text message from Elisa. ‘I’m ok, but I had a mild heart attack,’” Erslovas relates. “When I talked to her and she told me what it was, I said, ‘That’s so weird. I know someone else that happened to—it’s Roxanne from Glee Club. Can I connect you?’”

Louizos says she dialed Maas’ number with “a mix of hopefulness and anxiety.” She was just a few days past her SCAD heart attack. “I was so scared. So scared. And I had so, so many questions.”

There was much for Louizos and Maas to discuss. Maas “was great,” says Louizos. “She had already been through that initial shock and was able to keep me grounded and provide hope.” Maas talked about how her life had, for the most part, kept on as it had been, minus rollercoasters and scuba diving, and she walks now more than she runs.

The current standard of care favors conservative treatment whenever possible, as SCADs often heal on their own, and that was the route Maas and Louizos took. Both women take a couple of medications and have instructions to keep their heart rate within certain safety parameters and to focus on mild to moderate cardiovascular exercise rather than activities such as weightlifting. “We were both glad we didn’t have babies or toddlers to lift anymore,” says Louizos.

Elisa (Mawer) Louizos ’96 with Tori (Ashe) Erslovas ’95 during a 1990s Glee Club trip. Erslovas made the connection between Louizos and Roxanne (Ruzicka) Maas ’94 after each experienced a SCAD.

Having a heart attack in the prime of life, especially one that was so atypical, has left Louizos and Maas eager to make people aware of SCAD. Elisa is part of the SCAD Alliance’s iSCAD Registry. Both have sent their medical records to the Mayo Clinic for a virtual SCAD registry and are part of a supportive SCAD Facebook group.

Fear of a recurrence has not completely disappeared. The literature indicates that 20-30% of SCAD survivors, as veterans of SCAD often call themselves, experience a subsequent episode. “I might go weeks and even months without thinking of it, and then it’ll just sort of occur to me,” says Louizos.

“The scariest thing about this is that it came out of the blue,” Maas adds. “It’s not like ‘As long as I don’t run a marathon, I’ll be fine.’ It could totally happen again.”

‘Listen to your body’

Today, Maas and Louizos continue to be sources of support for each other. They now consider themselves “SCAD sisters.” Says Maas, “This unfortunate experience deepened a friendship we started 20-some years ago at Pomona College.”

Encouraging everyone, especially women, not to discount health warnings is important to them both. As Maas learned, there are different types of heart attacks that can occur even in people whose arteries are, as her cardiologist described hers, “crystal clear.” She emphasizes that “you really don’t want to ignore symptoms or think ‘That can’t possibly be a heart attack.’”

In January, Louizos posted a message to her friends on Facebook: “Today is the one year anniversary of my heart attack. I am feeling incredibly blessed by the support I have felt and so grateful that it was mild and the effects have been minimal.” And, she continued, “Just a reminder to listen to your body and take what it tells you seriously. Even if you are healthy these things can happen. And slow down once in a while and enjoy life. Stress does not serve us well!”

Maas fights back tears as she talks about two friends recently claimed by cancer. “The message I want to get out is enjoy your life. Appreciate your health and all the good things in your life. That’s what matters.”

Louizos, drawing on her own SCAD experience, concurs. “There’s an expiration date, for sure,” she says about each of our lives. “[Let’s] do all we can to make our experience on Earth as rich as we can. Take our health seriously. Listen to our bodies. And believe in each other.”