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Growing up in Claremont, Mary Lois Seifert ’67 heard a lot about Pomona College. “The small class size, sense of community, and high quality of faculty appealed to me,” she says—but going to college in her hometown did not. And that’s what led her to discover Occidental. After graduating with a degree in religion, she did her master’s in social work at the University of Chicago, which led to a career in the medical field. “Toward the end, I was a social worker in a home hospice setting,” says Mary Lois, who retired in 2008 and lives with her husband of nearly 43 years, Lynn Comeskey, in Santa Cruz. Lynn graduated from Pomona in 1960—he and Mary Lois later met in Palo Alto—and served two years in the Army before attending Stanford Business School. After a career as a general contractor and commercial real estate investor, he now volunteers on a building crew for Habitat for Humanity. Mary Lois and Lynn love to travel, especially in Europe, so History of Civilization “provided a foundation for appreciating the many threads that weave together throughout history,” she says. Singing Bach’s B-Minor Mass in College choir along with the Glee Club and orchestra under conductor Howard Swan set “a high bar for any choir I sang with after that,” she adds. The Comeskeys have two grandkids, ages 11 and 14, and “We expect they will go to a small liberal arts college, as did their parents and grandparents,” Mary Lois notes. In that spirit, the couple has designated a planned gift to the College’s general scholarship endowment: “We both place a high value on liberal arts education.”
ExplOring l.A. WiTh TOm CArrOll ’08 /// nO JusTiCE, nO pEAs: insidE ThE Oxy FOOd COnFErEnCE
High on the Liberal Arts
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“Thanks to alumni such as Mary Lois Comeskey, whose legacy gift will support endowed scholarships, Occidental will be able to provide our students with access and opportunity for generations to come,” says President Jonathan Veitch. Mary Lois and Lynn concur: “Our hope is that more young people will have access to quality colleges such as Oxy to prepare them as citizens of the world.” oxy.edu/magazine
Occidental College Office of Gift Planning M-36 | 1600 Campus Road Los Angeles CA 90041-3314 | Phone: 323-259-2644 Email: giftplanning@oxy.edu | oxy.edu/giftplanning | facebook.com/BenCulleySociety
The origins, anxieties, and caffeinated outcomes of an Oxy institution