‰ march 2019
FROM HERE TO THERE
Bike, drone, or spacecraft: Reedies are revolutionizing transportation.
R E D I S C O V E R A L L T H AT YO U LOVE ABOUT REED!
06-09
JUNE
2019
JUNE 6–9, 2019 Timely, engaging panels and discussions Stop Making Sense Front lawn sun and sprawl Canyon rambles Gathering in the SU for games and conversation Fireworks, dance parties, and more Registration now open! reunions.reed.edu
‰ march 2019
Departments 4
Eliot Circular Hisstory of Paideia Chalk it Up Cooley Gallery Shows Photos by Rubenfien Bio Prof Will Trace Cancer’s Mixed Signals Reedie Appointed To Oregon Supreme Court
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Advocates of the Griffin Referendum Results Nominations and Slate Call for Reunions Volunteers EU Chapter Reboot
30 Reediana
Books, Films, and Music by Reedies
34 Class Notes
40 In Memoriam
features 10
News from our classmates.
Black Student, White City
Honoring classmates, professors, and friends who have died.
48 Object of Study
In 1948, she was the only African American student at Reed. Then a racist incident at a cocktail bar sparked a citywide boycott.
What we’re looking at in class
by john sheehy ’82
FROM HERE TO THERE Bike, drone, or spacecraft: Reedies are revolutionizing transportation. 14
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WHAT’S WRONG WITH BIKE LANES?
Riding the streets of Southern California, urban anthropologist Adonia Lugo ’05 realized that bicycle advocacy has an equity problem.
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MEDICINE FROM THE SKY How do you deliver vaccines to remote areas where there are no roads? Sheldon Yett ’86 is trying out one idea. By Romel Hernandez
FOUR BILLION MILES AND COUNTING
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Olwen Morgan’s engines power NASA’s space fleet to the outer reaches of the solar system—and beyond.
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CHANGING HOW WE GET THERE
Ten Reedies changing the future of transportation.
By Maureen O’Hagan
by Tessa Hulls ’07 Cover illustration by Mike Lemanski
march 2019 Reed Magazine 1
Mailbox reed.magazine@reed.edu
Write to us! We love getting mail from readers. Letters should be about Reed or Reed Magazine and run no more than 300 words; subsequent replies may only run half the length of their predecessors. Our decision to print a letter does not imply any endorsement. Letters are subject to editing. (Beware the editor’s hatchet.) Read more letters and commentary at www.reed.edu/reed-magazine.
Winds of Change Reed Magazine features a cover story [“Rising,” December 2018] relating to the effects of climate change while the board of trustees continues to refuse to divest from the fossil fuel industry— how ironic! Allan Cate ’71 La Crescenta, California
General Remarks I return your “Salute to the generalists” [From the Editor, December 2018]. As I have previously noted (in my commencement speech of 2005), I am the very model of a modern major generalist. A Reed education at its best can be likened to a thumbtack—a wide general knowledge on the surface, accompanied by a deep expertise in a topic of one’s own interest. This has several advantages. First, one can communicate with a wide range of people with different expertise. Second, having obtained expertise in one domain, it is not as hard to obtain it in a different domain if one wishes to change (think of this as akin to learning multiple foreign languages). Third, one gains some humility with the realization that no important problem can be addressed by any single discipline. And fourth, it is easy to make adjustments to pursue those important problems with like-minded people who come from different disciplines. Jim Kahan ’64 Portland
Is the Alumni Board Too Big? Having served on numerous boards and committees, including the St. Vincent Hospital Medical Staff Executive Committee and the Board of Trustees of Warner Pacific College, I am surprised that the alumni constitution and
bylaws weren’t changed years ago. Judging from the details in the article about this, the alumni board, to say the least, was dysfunctional. Once you get the constituency of a board above 10 or 12 members, the more difficult it is for the board to function in an efficient manner. John W. Thompson, MD ’55 Lake Oswego, Oregon
Drag Queen Is a Drag Regarding your piece “Constructing Gender” [September 2018], I can hardly believe I need to say this, but: It is not possible to be, simultaneously, (a) a radical feminist and (b) a man who calls himself LaWhore Vagistan. Wake up. Karla Youngers ’96 Seattle, Washington
Spider God I live in San Francisco and I have been very much enjoying Reed Magazine, particularly the article about Gary Rogowski ’72 [“Philosopher of Sawdust,” March 2018]. After our time together at Reed, Prof. Jim Webb [English 1965–71] came to be an important and close friend to me. I am sorry he is no longer with us on this planet that is bleaker for his absence. I had the good fortune to visit Jim many times at his home in Anthony, New Mexico: tell the author of the article that, yes, Jim indeed did have a peyote plant growing on his property there—it was his parents’ place to which he retired after his time at Reed; it was from there that he ran his “College in Exile.” Roderick Iverson ’72 San Francisco, California
The House of Names
Quirk of Space and Time
I have recently become fixated on discovering the name—I feel sure there was one—for a Reed house from the ’60s–’70s. It was a yellow Victorian on the north side of Woodstock at approximately SE 52nd Avenue, with a large cherry tree in the front yard, and a side-to-side second-story porch on the front of the second story. As you may know, there was a tradition of naming Reed houses from time to time. I lived in several named houses: the Faucet (6008 SE 55th Ave); Caravanserei (5501 SE 38th Ave); the Consulate (4711 SE 28th Ave). There are others that I did not live in: e.g., the Fridge (SE corner of 39th and Woodstock); Orthanc (south side of SE Division at approximately 22nd); Toad Hall; others. I would have thought that Reed Magazine might have devoted an article to this phenomenon at some point. Might be fun. Robert Weppner ’72 Portland, Oregon
Thank you so much for your excellent article on the legendary Mason Gaffney ’48! [“A Fertile Mind,” December 2018] It has been my pleasure to know Mason and benefit from his insights, thoughtfulness, and feedback over the years. I thought that the article by Mamie Stevenson ’12 was also very fair and well written, appreciating his struggles against opponents from both sides and at the same time explaining that he is really on to something. An amazing number of Nobel Prize winners in economics agree with Gaffney and recognize the importance of Henry George's framework for creating a fair and just society. Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman made the comment: “In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many many years ago.” Unfortunately Friedman didn't mention this when he spoke to us at Reed in 1968. Oregon may owe its lack of sales tax to these ideas as well as the public ownership of all beach property. More importantly, the idea of generating more public revenue from land and natural resources has benefited many regions. This may be fertile ground for others to carry the torch in a thesis or other investigations. Our Foundation for Economic Justice, of which Mason Gaffney was a board member. may be able to help. Alan Ridley ’70 Chula Vista, California
From the Editor: Great idea. From time to time we’ve contemplated a feature along these lines, but have been overwhelmed by the scope of the project. Reedies have inhabited scores, if not hundreds, of houses over the years, with fluid and fleeting names, and an astonishing assortment of art projects, epic pranks, and dubious undertakings. Even basic facts, such as the address, can be surprisingly elusive. Still, it’s tempting. In the meanwhile, does anyone remember this house?
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Letter from the editor Lauren LaBarre
‰ March 2019
www.reed.edu/reed-magazine 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202 503/777-7591 Volume 98, No. 1 REED MAGAZINE editor
Chris Lydgate ’90 503/777-7596 chris.lydgate@reed.edu writer/In Memoriam editor
Randall S. Barton 503/517-5544 bartonr@reed.edu writer/reediana editor
Katie Pelletier ’03 503/777-7727 pelletic@reed.edu class notes editor
Henry Gottslich ’22 creates a hand-drawn alphabet to digitize in a Paideia class taught by Sumner Stone ’67.
Joanne Hossack ’82 joanne@reed.edu art director
Paideia and the Community of Seekers
Tom Humphrey tom.humphrey@reed.edu grammatical kapeLlmeister
A crash course in ham radio. A class on the birds of Costa Rica. And a determined effort to create the world’s biggest stick of chalk. Scanning through the course list for Paideia 2019, I was struck once more by the incredible creativity—and energy—that Reedies bring to the enterprise of education. Paideia, as most readers know, is Reed’s annual festival of learning. For a week in January, students, alumni, professors, and staff lead workshops in some of their favorite subjects. Born in the 1960s, the tradition has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years as Reed students have embraced the chance to share their expertise with others. Some presentations, like the class on Steely Dan, are over in an hour. Others, such as wilderness emergency medicine, are multi-day immersive experiences. But it’s not just the intellectual variety that makes Paideia come alive. It’s the sense that Reed is a community of seekers who have embarked on a pilgrimage of discovery together. Crossing the Blue Bridge over 2
Reed Magazine march 2019
the Canyon one brisk morning, I ran into immigrant defense lawyer Peter Hill ’79 hauling a sheaf of printouts on his way to teach a course on Basic Removal Defense for Non-Lawyers. He drove all the way from Seattle to teach the course. Renowned typographer Sumner Stone ’67 flew in from California to lead master workshops in letterforms and digital typeface design. On my way back home, I stuck my head into a classroom in Eliot Hall, where physics major Tyler Bortel ’21 was leading a class on neckties (“Tying One On”) and debating the relative merits of the fullWindsor and the Eldredge knot. Every Reedie knows that education is a lifelong path. What I love about Paideia is the reminder that it is also a two-way street. If knowledge is power, to paraphrase Robert Noyce, then knowledge shared is power multiplied. Let’s multiply our power—by teaching and by learning together.
—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90
Virginia O. Hancock ’62 REED COLLEGE Acting president
Hugh Porter director, communications & public affairs
Mandy Heaton Reed College is an institution of higher education in the liberal arts and sciences devoted to the intrinsic value of intellectual pursuit and governed by the highest standards of scholarly practice, critical thought, and creativity. Reed Magazine provides news of interest to the Reed community. Views expressed in the magazine belong to their authors and do not necessarily represent officers, trustees, faculty, alumni, students, administrators, or anyone else at Reed, all of whom are eminently capable of articulating their own beliefs. Reed Magazine (ISSN 0895-8564) is published quarterly by the Office of Public Affairs at Reed College. Periodicals postage paid at Portland, Oregon. Postmaster: Send address changes to Reed Magazine 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland OR 97202-8138
Eliot Circular news from campus
Hisstory of Paideia Meet Athena, the ball python; Vanessa, the carpet python; and Tarrare, the veiled chameleon. They were the stars of the show at the Paideia workshop titled Reptiles 101: Hisstory, Husbandry, and Ethics, led by political science major Sadie Bell ’22 and bio major Sasha Chang ’22. Paideia 2019 featured more than 200 classes taught by students, alumni, faculty, and staff. Check out more details on page 2.
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Loralee Bandy ’20
Lauren LaBarre
Chalk It Up A band of students raced frantically against the clock over Paideia to break the record for the world’s largest stick of chalk. Their monumental creation, which measures six feet tall and weighs upwards of 1,000 pounds, is currently drying in a construction sonotube in the basement of Prexy. Led by Lorenzo Barrar ’20, Patrick Bedard ’19, Trevor Schlack ’19, and Alex King ’19, two dozen students created the behemoth under a tight schedule dictated by chemistry. Plaster and water sets in 25 minutes; anything added after that could jeopardize the stick’s structural integrity. Prexy buzzed with energy as the project got underway. “World record attempt number one,” Alex said at 1:52 p.m, as the first fivegallon bucket of plaster and water tumbled into the sonotube, roaring like a waterfall that echoed and rumbled through the room. By 2:19 p.m., the 25-minute mark, the mixture had reached a height of five feet— just a foot shy of the goal—but only six buckets of plaster remained. Ten minutes later, with three and a half inches to fill and the slurry beginning to harden, the plaster ran out. As the seconds ticked away, a small team dashed up Woodstock Boulevard to buy more bags of plaster from the hardware store. “Clear the way fast, we need to hurry!” Lorenzo exclaimed as the car returned twelve minutes later. With the last bucket, the sonotube overflowed, spilling onto the floor in a vivid demonstration that the chalk had indeed reached a height of six feet. The creation will take a month to dry before witnesses can perform official measurements, but the students are hopeful that it will prove to be the world’s biggest. The current record of 270 pounds was set by high school students in Pittsburgh in 2010. Meanwhile, the Reedies hope the chalky goliath will go on display somewhere on campus. —LORALEE BANDY ’20
march 2019 Reed Magazine
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Eliot Circular
A Cherry Blossom Party in a Grove, Miyajima, Japan, 1982, by Leo Rubinfien ’74.
Cooley Gallery Shows Photos by Rubenfien Eyehold to Eyehold is an immersive exhibition by renowned American photographer Leo Rubinfien ’74. Curated by Cooley Gallery director Stephanie Snyder ’91, it focuses on the artist’s extensive archive of pictures made across Asia between 1979 and the present. Several of the photographs in
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Eyehold to Eyehold have, until now, never been published or exhibited. Leo grew up in Japan, and came to Reed from Tokyo in 1970, traveling back and forth on school holidays. As a young Westerner immersed in Asian life, he developed a strong awareness of the cultural hybridity of postwar
Japan, the connections between Japan and America seeming as vivid to him as their differences. What their two cultures merged to produce was new and indescribable, yet graspable through sight and sensation. The exhibition runs through April 28. For details, check out reed.edu/gallery.
leah nash
The National Science Foundation has awarded $930,000 to support Prof. Anna Ritz’s [biology 2015–] research into the way cells send signals—potentially leading to future discoveries about why cells go haywire in complex diseases such as cancer. Prof. Ritz is an expert in computational biology, a field that was barely in its infancy just 20 years ago. Her research focuses on designing algorithms to analyze signaling pathways, the process by which proteins interact to control the functions of a cell. Data science holds incredible promise for biology. For example, researchers have amassed vast databases of information related to signaling pathways. Now they need tools to understand what the data actually means. Ritz, the first computational biologist at Reed, sees herself as a conduit between frontline biology researchers and computer scientists. “There’s a gap between biologists doing this great work computer scientists don’t know about, and computer scientists developing these great tools biologists don’t know about,” she says. “As science gets more data heavy, we need sophisticated tools and communication to study the data.” The project promises to have broader applications in cellular and developmental biology. “It’s exciting to do something on a computer that you can then take back to the lab,” says Miriam Bern ’19, a biology major who has worked as Ritz’s research assistant. “This field is about taking a biological problem and putting it in terms of a computational problem to solve.”
nina johnson ’99
C o u r t e s y o f t h e a r t i s t a n d S t e v e n K a s h e r G a l l e r y, N e w Y o r k
Bio Prof Will Trace Cancer’s Mixed Signals
—ROMEL HERNANDEZ
Reed Grad Appointed To Oregon Supreme Court Gover nor K ate B rown appointed appellate judge Chris Garrett ’96 to the Oregon Supreme Court in December, hailing his collegial style and incisive intellect. “Judge Garrett is a talented, thoughtful, and even-keeled jurist who is passionate about Oregon’s courts and the rule of law,” Gov. Brown said. “He brings to our high court the experience of a respected civil litigator, an effective state legislator, and a productive appellate judge. His brilliant mind and collegial style will be tremendous assets to the court and the people of Oregon.” Intellectual rigor and public service are the hallmarks of Garrett’s career. He grew up in Portland, the son of two music teachers. His father taught organ at Lewis & Clark. His mother, Bonnie Garrett, ran Reed’s private music program for many years. He spent his freshman year at Willamette University in Salem, but transferred to Reed driven by a desire for “something different” and drawn by the school’s reputation for intellectual rigor. “Reed was a place where you could be anything you
wanted, and that atmosphere of openness and nonconformity was really attractive.” Garrett majored in political science and wrote his thesis on Oregon’s ballot measure system with Prof. Claire Curtis [political science 1994– 98]. After graduating from Reed, he went on to earn a JD at the University of Chicago, then returned to Oregon, where he worked as an attorney and political aide before winning election to the statehouse as a Democrat in 2008. Tapped with the perilous mission of redrawing Oregon’s legislative and congressional boundaries based on new census data, he drew up a plan that won strong support from Democrats and Republicans. He also championed the Justice Reinvestment Act, which funds alternatives to incarceration. In 2014, he was appointed to the Oregon Court of Appeals. Garrett will serve alongside Reed trustee Justice Adrienne Nelson on the state’s highest bench. Other Reedies who have served as supreme court justices include Jacob Tanzer ’56 and Hans Linde ’47. —CHRIS LYDGATE ’90
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Advocates of the Griffin
News of the alumni association • Connecting Reed alumni around the globe Edited by Katie Ramsey ’04 • kramsey@reed.edu
BOSTON BEANS. The Boston Alumni Chapter put on its annual holiday open house in December, drawing a robust crowd of alumni from around the Bay State.
Referendum Results
It’s official! The results of the grand referendum have been tallied. By a vote of 743 to 582, alumni chose to approve the amendments to the constitution and bylaws of the alumni association. Find more information at alumni.reed. edu. Thank you to all who voted.
Nominations and Slate
The nominating committee of the board of directors of the alumni association proposes the following nominees to serve terms on the alumni board beginning July 1, 2019: Nominee for Alumni Trustee: Aravind Sankar ’91 President: Jinyoung Park ’11 Vice President: Melissa Osborne ’13 Nominee for Secretary: alea adigweme ’06 Nominees for At-Large Director: Jonathan Bates ’67, David Messner ’90, Rennie Meyers ’15, Shabab Mirza ’13, and Govind Nair ’83. Nominees for Nominating Committee for 2019–20: Lisa Saldana ’94 (past president, chair), Jinyoung Park ’11 (president), Steve Halpern ’85, Melissa Lewis ’13, and Andrew Schpak ’01.
Call for Reunions Volunteers
Calling all 4s and 9s! Does your class year end in a 4 or a 9? Or do you identify with a class that ends in a 4 or a 9? Then it’s a quinquennial celebration for you this year! Volunteer for your class committee and help plan your class event at Reunions 2019. Do you want a low-key get together? A classsponsored dance party? A lively panel on the state of [fill in the blank here]? Some other crazy idea? The options are endless, and volunteering is super easy, fun, and gives you an excuse to contact Reedie friends. Join the party this summer, June 6–9. Email alumni@reed.edu to get involved!
EU Chapter Reboot
Greetings from Leiden, Netherlands! After a hiatus, the European Chapter is reforming and relaunching. We’re currently forming a chapter steering committee and planning as many small gatherings as we can. We already had two events in November—a pub gathering in London as well as a visit to the new Atelier des Lumières in Paris. We are planning on another beer in Britain sometime soon, and will definitely go back to see the upcoming Van Gogh and Japan exhibits at the Atelier des Lumières. You can find us on Facebook at EU+ Reedies. Please email me if you have ideas for a good Reedie gathering or would like to join the steering committee . Don’t live in Europe but want to stay informed? Simply email alumni@reed.edu to get on our chapter email list. —JOHANNA COLGROVE ’92, jbjohannac@gmail.com
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Connect with Reed! COME TO AN EVENT.
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Mentor a student. Organize an event. Share your wisdom. Check out alumni.reed.edu/volunteer. GIVE TO REED.
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A WORKFORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH Reedies are skilled synthesizers, critics, analysts, and storytellers in a wide range of fields, making them great interns and employees. Look to Reed when seeking excellent future talent for your institution. Questions? Email Brooke Hunter, Assistant Director of Employer Relations & Strategic Partnerships, at hunterb@reed.edu. Post a job or internship: reed.edu/beyond-reed > For Employers.
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BLACK STUDENT, WHITE CITY
In 1948, she was the only African American student at Reed. Then a racist incident at a cocktail bar sparked a citywide boycott. BY JOHN SHEEHY ’82
photo courtesy of Regina Guienze Tinti
It was Saturday night, and the Mil-bee Club was packed. A popular college hangout—especially for World War II veterans attending Reed on the GI Bill—the cocktail lounge at the corner of Milwaukie and Bybee Avenues was a swanky alternative to the workingman’s Lutz Tavern. Although Oregon’s official minimum drinking age was 21, underage coeds were allowed into the Mil-bee if they were accompanied by an older vet. Twenty-year-old Inez Freeman ’48 walked into the club that evening with her friend Bud Ward ’49. A psychology major, outgoing and popular, Inez was Reed’s sole African American student. She was taking a break that evening from her senior thesis, a case study exploring the psychological impact of racial discrimination on black adolescents in Vanport, a shipbuilding town eight miles north of downtown Portland. But as the pair made their way through the crowded bar, they noticed the waitresses “watching us intently.” No sooner had they found a seat with their friends when the Mil-bee’s manager approached them and told them they would not be served—not because of their age, but because of Inez’s race. Stung but not surprised, Inez and Bud stormed out of the club. Minutes later, the rest of the Reedies followed them out the door, and they didn’t come back. The incident galvanized the Reed campus. Students boycotted the Mil-bee and joined students from nine other Portland schools to campaign for a civil rights ordinance
that would ban discrimination. Adopting the name “Fair Rose”—a play on Portland’s nickname, the “City of Roses”—the students asked local businesses to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, or creed. Businesses who made the pledge received a decal to post in their windows. Those who refused faced a potential boycott. Heated columns appeared in the Quest endorsing the boycott and excoriating students who professed their belief in racial equality but continued to sip highballs at the Mil-bee. For Inez, the episode was simply the latest example of the deep prejudice she had faced in the Pacific Northwest. Her parents, James and Victoria, were among the first black residents of Longview, Washington, a mill town on the Columbia River. Her father worked for the railroad. Her mother served as a nurse and midwife to the local African American community, and also became Longview’s leading civil rights activist after forcing the town to integrate her children into its all-white public schools in 1924.
Growing up in Longview with four siblings, Inez had access to the movie theater and a handful of stores, but was barred from many restaurants and the local ice cream parlor. When she took a part-time job as a bookkeeper in a women’s clothing store, she was forced to work in a closet with a curtain drawn across the door to hide her from white customers. Driven by an unquenchable thirst for learning, she excelled in the newly integrated high school before enrolling at Lower Columbia Junior College, where she graduated summa cum laude and was elected to the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society. An accomplished violinist, she decided to transfer into Reed after attending a piano recital on campus in 1946. Her tuition was covered by the Negro Scholarship, an annual award provided by an anonymous alumnus in New York City. After enrolling at Reed, she told her family that for the first time in her life she felt like she was seen as a person in her own right, not merely by the color of her skin. To give her Reed friends a sense of the discrimination she had experienced in Longview, Inez invited them to visit her there. Bill Wolfe ’51 recalled stopping at a gas station in Longview to ask for directions to Inez’s house. “You don’t want to go there,” the man working at the station told him, “that’s N— Town.” When Bill and his friends reached Inez’s neighborhood, they found a small cluster of small houses and a white church, segregated in the middle of a large field outside of town. Portland at the time was not much different. Racial discrimination extended back to the exclusion laws enacted at the founding of the Oregon Territory in 1844. The need for laborers to work in the coal mines and railroad in the late 19th century
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photo courtesy of Regina Guienze Tinti
1948 griffin yearbook
Inez Freeman wasn’t just the only African American student in her dorm—she was the only one in the entire student body. Here she is with her Anna Mann dormmates Monna Sheller, Lois Baker, Phiz Mezey, and Carol Hasson.
eased exclusion laws, yet the laws officially remained in the state’s constitution until 1927. They were removed, ironically, at a time when the Oregon chapter of the Ku Klux Klan—the group’s largest chapter west of the Mississippi—exerted powerful political and economic presence throughout the state. Systemic and institutional racism succeeded in limiting Portland’s black population up through 1940 to fewer than 2,000 residents, below 1% of the population. World War II brought radical racial change to the city when more than 20,000 African Americans were hired from the South to work at Henry Kaiser’s shipyard in Vanport. Upon arrival, they were greeted with signs that read “White Trade Only” and “We don’t serve Negroes, Jews, and Dogs.” Refused housing in Portland, they moved into segregated, temporary housing in Vanport. By the time Inez transferred into Reed in 1946, Portland’s African American population had decreased to 9,500, as white supremacy and racism—detailed in a 1945 report commissioned by the Portland City Club titled “The Negro in Portland”— restricted local employment opportunities for blacks after the shipyard closed. As a result of redlining, two-thirds of the black population remained in Vanport, while the rest were crammed into the Albina neighborhood of Northeast Portland. Inez set out with her senior thesis to determine if “growing up as a Negro” presented
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children with discernable psychological trauma stemming from discrimination. She selected as her subjects five students from Vanport’s integrated junior high school, all of whom had spent their early youth in segregated communities in the South and who were classified by school officials as “maladjusted” in their social behavior. The case study provided Inez with an illuminating view into race relations, but she was not able to validate her thesis that race created the sort of psychological struggles she and her friends had experienced growing up in Longview. She surmised that the South’s deeply ingrained segregation had instilled in her subjects a belief that blacks and whites were inherently different, hindering any expectations of integration. Inez graduated in May 1948, becoming Reed’s second black graduate on record (Geraldine Turner ’32 was the first). A few weeks later, on Memorial Day, a dike along the Columbia River ruptured, flooding Vanport and sending inhabitants to higher ground. Black residents were forced to move into the overcrowded Albina neighborhood—or leave. It wasn’t until 1953 that a collaboration of the Fair Rose coalition, the NAACP, the Portland City Club, and the local Urban League (of which Reed’s president E.B. MacNaughton [1948–52] was a prominent member) persuaded Oregon legislators to pass the state’s first civil rights bill, providing equality in public accommodations.
But discrimination continued to flourish, restricting black residents to less than 1% of Portland’s population well into the 1960s. After Reed, Inez pursued graduate studies at San Francisco State, but became sidelined by the first of many serious illnesses. She returned to the Northwest, where she worked as a school teacher and social worker while continuing her studies at Lewis and Clark College and Eastern Washington State College. After marrying, she moved with her husband and two small children to Chicago in the early 1960s, where she continued her studies at the University of Chicago while working as a journalist for the groundbreaking Negro Digest from the Johnson Publishing Company, which also published Ebony and Jet magazines. There, she covered the politics, social action, and economic health of the black world. In one article, written after the 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham that became an inflection point for the civil rights movement, she ironically described the evolving social etiquette of a white suburban mother, whose young son pointed to a black person boarding the bus and referred to the woman using the N-word. His mother, red-faced, pulled the boy’s arm down and gently replied, “Yes, and don’t point!” Inez Freeman passed away in 1967 in Tacoma, Washington, at the age of 39 after a long struggle with colon cancer. John Sheehy ’82 is the author of Comrades of the Quest, An Oral History of Reed College.
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Charitable gift annuities are subject to age minimums and are not available in some states.
FROM HERE TO THERE Commuting, touring, trekking, exploring, seeking, serving: Reedies are changing the way we move around the earth and go beyond. ILLUSTRATONS BY MIKE LEMANSKI
FROM HERE TO THERE
WHAT’S WRONG WITH BIKE LANES?
Riding the streets of Southern California, urban anthropologist Adonia Lugo ’05 realized that bicycle advocacy has an equity problem. BY TESSA HULLS ’07
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kendrick brinson
When Adonia Lugo ’05 inherited an old Schwinn bicycle from her freshman-year roommate, she had no idea she was riding towards a career as an activist for mobility justice. “Mostly, I just remember it being really heavy,” she laughs in a phone interview. Those first pedal strokes were the beginning of a journey that led her to become a leading voice on racial justice in bicycling. If you are asking yourself what race has to do with bicycling, you are not alone: this question has been lobbed at Adonia at every level of her career as a professor, activist, anthropologist, and author. In her groundbreaking new memoir, Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, and Resistance, she tackles this question head on. Her answer begins in her Southern Califor nia hometown of San Juan Capistrano, where a Latinx cyclist was biking on the sidewalk on his way home from work at Denny’s when he was killed by a drunk driver. The mainstream responses to his death made Adonia begin to examine how “this wasn’t just a matter of vehicle choice, bikes versus cars. Race and class hierarchy were mixed up in how we traveled and whose safety mattered.” Growing up as someone who did not fit neatly into the binaries of racial divides made her highly attuned to nuances of race and power. At Reed, after taking a class on urban anthropology, she became fascinated by the rogue space between how cities are planned and how they end up being used. “The experts on space want to control people,” she explains, “but human elements like poverty and creativity respond to pressure in unpredictable, uncontrollable ways.” For her thesis, which she wrote with Prof. Marko
Zivkovic [Anthropology 2001–6] she wrote about the region she’s from and told the history of successive waves of outsiders who came in and “dictated how space should be used, and how people should be arranged in space.” After she graduated, Adonia stayed in Portland and realized her trusty Schwinn cruiser would never work for commuting— so she got a $10 bike at the bins. “I rode it up Steele towards 39th and remember thinking, ‘This is hard!’” But it wasn’t long before she found herself biking from Southeast Portland to her job at a fabric store in Milwaukie. She laughs and notes that as someone who had never been athletic or coordinated, biking felt like a reclamation of her body’s right to take up space. “I felt powerful, I felt graceful.” In 2007, she moved back to Southern California to start graduate school at UC Irvine. Having grown used to riding a bike in Portland, she was surprised when people treated her as crazy for using a bicycle as her main form of transportation. “I hadn’t anticipated that being a bike commuter would renew my old sense of being an outsider in Orange County,” she writes. She found herself thinking back on her time in Portland, where discussions about what made it a “bike-friendly city” focused almost solely on infrastructure. “I had a Reedie friend from Texas, and we would joke about how Portland drivers would all yield at four-way intersections,” she reminisces. “But no one was talking about that.” As Adonia became increasingly involved in Los Angeles bicycle advocacy, she discovered that existing conversations again focused almost solely on infrastructure. With her training as a cultural anthropologist, she found this approach incomplete. “If we want to improve the ways in which
people use streets,” she explains, “we must begin by asking: who uses the streets?” This line of inquiry led her to investigating “how street contempt continued racism and classism,” which became the seeds of her doctoral thesis, “Body-City-Machines: Human Infrastructure for Bicycling in Los Angeles.” She finished her PhD in 2013 and was eager to work advocating for sustainable transportation while dismantling racism. She managed the Equity Initiative at the League of American Bicyclists (formerly the League of American Wheelmen, the nation’s oldest bicycle advocacy organization), but
Adonia Lugo ’05 in Southern California, where the death of a Latinx bicyclist lead her to ask why some bicyclists are seen as low-status and others as environmental heros.
by 2015 she was burned out and disillusioned. “My work there was supposed to be creating the infrastructure so that new ideas and people could be part of the bike advocacy establishment,” she writes in Bicycle/Race. “Instead, I was being asked to equitywash this new silver bullet that fit the same old mold: Northern European origins, pushed through via political capital rather than grassroots organizing, emergent from within the closed network of advocacy organizations.” While Adonia
was regrouping and contemplating next moves, Elly Blue ’05 of Microcosm Publishing approached her about writing a memoir. “[Adonia] has a unique point of view,” Elly explains. “She puts herself out there, saying what needs to be said . . . pointing out truths nobody wants to hear: for instance, that systemic racism exists and that it affects our movements.” After years of feeling that her voice and perspective had been silenced, Adonia welcomed the opportunity to write about
mobility justice through an intersectional lens. The shift to memoir was both welcome and intimidating. “I didn’t expect it to feel so scary to let go of citations,” she jokes. “Coming from academia, just making assertions was like taking the training wheels off.” She hopes that Bicycle/Race will encourage readers to approach mobility justice through a racial lens. “There are always dominant narratives,” she explains, “and if we don’t have a multiracial panel looking at these problems, we will reproduce the same narrative gaps. I want my readers to consider that there are always more possibilities.”
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FROM HERE TO THERE
MEDICINE FROM THE SKY
How do you deliver vaccines to remote areas where there are no roads? Sheldon Yett ’86 is trying out one idea. BY ROMEL HERNANDEZ
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©unicef
As UNICEF’s representative in the Pacific Islands, Sheldon Yett manages mind-boggling work travel as part of his daily duties. His vast territory encompasses 10.7 million square miles of ocean (nearly three times the size of the United States), including 14 sovereign nations, each with its own distinct culture and history, spread across hundreds of tropical islands and atolls. However, the figure that matters most to him is 1.2 million—the number of children under 18 in the region, many of them struggling with poverty and its attendant woes. UNICEF partners with governments to support children’s health, education, and welfare, as well as providing emergency relief in a part of the globe frequently buffeted by cyclones and earthquakes. Much of his work involves figuring out how to deliver aid wherever it is needed, no matter how remote. Based in Fiji, he has braved jeep rides over rugged mountain terrain, tiny turboprop-plane flights through squally weather, and “banana boat” rides on choppy seas. “These vast distances make getting ‘here to there’ extremely difficult and expensive,” he says. “Often the challenge is how to get those vaccines and medicines that extra mile.” His work recently made news headlines when UNICEF partnered with the government of Vanuatu on an innovative solution to going that extra distance. Vanuatu is a nation spread across 83 volcanic islands, where about 20% of its 35,000 children under age 5 are not getting recommended vaccinations. Among the leading causes of deaths of young children in the region are diarrhea and pneumonia—diseases preventable through basic health care.
While Westerners might romanticize the South Pacific as a tropical paradise, he notes, “If you’re the mother of a child who needs a vaccine, you’re not thinking about beautiful beaches.” Last year UNICEF coordinated a trial program to deploy drones to transport vaccines to remote parts of Vanuatu. Carrying vaccines for up to 50 children, the drones make the deliveries to health centers deep in the mountains and jungles quicker, safer, and cheaper. “It’s been very successful,” he says, noting that UNICEF plans to expand the effort. The liberal arts education he got at Reed prepared him for the challenges of a career that has taken him to hot spots across the globe. His college experiences helped hone his ability to adapt to change and new environments, to come up with novel approaches to entrenched problems, and to dedicate himself to helping others in need. The 14 countries in UNICEF’s Pacific region are remarkably diverse, each with its own challenges. Some, such as the Cook Islands, are relatively strong and stable with a strong GDP, while others, such as the Solomon Islands, are struggling. The area is also critically vulnerable to the impacts of climate change—natural disasters, changes to farming and fishing. Because UNICEF depends on strong partnerships with individual governments and nongovernmental organizations, he has to be nimble, resourceful, and pragmatic in his approach. “It’s quite a complex mix—you have to understand the drivers of social change, where the tensions are, who’s in charge,” he says. “You learn the most important thing to do is to listen.” Sheldon was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised by parents who served as
diplomats overseas (his father worked for the U.S. Information Agency, his mother for the State Department). He attended elementary school in the former Yugoslavia and high school in Kenya. He chose Reed because it seemed different from other small liberal arts colleges. “Reed taught me to question, to challenge,” he says. “I learned how to drill down to fundamental issues, how to think things through and find connections that might not be obvious.” With sights set on his future career, he majored in international relations because the interdisciplinary blend of political science, sociology, and economics appealed to
UNICEF’s Joseph Hing and Rebecca Olul demonstrate a drone to children in the remote village of Epi in Vanuatu, a nation spread out across 83 volcanic islands.
©unicef
his wide-ranging sensibility. Prof. Edward Segel [history 1973–2011] oversaw his thesis on international food aid and foreign policy. Prof. Segel pointed him towards the Peace Corps, where he spent two years in Niger. After returning to the States, he earned a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins. Over the course of his career, he has found himself posted in the middle of major international conflicts and crises in Africa and Eastern Europe. He has provided food aid in violence-ravaged Rwanda, responded to the Ebola virus epidemic in Liberia, and raised awareness about child abuse in Macedonia. While in Somalia in 2001 to coordinate efforts amid a cholera out-
Sheldon launched UNICEF’s pilot project to use drones to deliver vaccines in Vanuatu.
break, he was kidnapped by militia and briefly held hostage before negotiations secured his release. Sheldon has worked with UNICEF since 2005. He moved from Liberia when he was tapped to lead the organization in the Pacific (while also raising two daughters with his wife, Sharon). “Here I don’t have to worry about warlords,” he says. “I worry about volcanoes and cyclones.” He expects to stay in Fiji until 2020; his next stop is anybody’s guess. “I can’t imagine staying in one place forever,” he says. “I enjoy the challenge of going from Country A to Country B. “
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FROM HERE TO THERE
FOUR BILLION MILES AND COUNTING Olwen Morgan’s engines power NASA’s space fleet to the outer reaches of the solar system—and beyond. BY MAUREEN O’HAGAN
i m a g e b y N A S A / J o h n s H o p k i n s U n i v e r s i t y A p p l i e d P h y s i c s L a b o r at o r y/ S o u t h w e s t R e s e a r c h I n s t i t u t e
Artist’s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft approaching Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, in 2015. New Horizons relies on hydrazine thrusters designed by Olwen Morgan’s team at Aerojet Rocketdyne. In January, the ship flew past the enigmatic object Ultima Thule, which inhabits the outer solar system roughly 4 billion miles from Eartth.
In 1610, Galileo pointed his homemade telescope skyward and was astonished to discover that Saturn seemed to have “two companions,” one on either side, looking almost like ears. It was the first observation of Saturn’s rings. Four centuries later, a spacecraft named Cassini reached the distant planet. Olwen Morgan ’76 sat awestruck as she saw the first clear pictures of those rings. “When those images started to come in,” she said, “they were just gorgeous.” Her work helped Cassini make the 2.1-billion-mile trip. In a four-decade career at a company called Aerojet Rocketdyne, in Redmond, Washington, she specialized in monopropellant hydrazine thrusters that guide NASA’s rockets through space. These engines—her babies, really—have helped spacecraft reach every planet in the solar system, including Pluto and Ultima Thule. Her knowledge is so encyclopedic that the crew at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sometimes ring her up for guidance, even as the spaceships are hurtling through space and she’s, say, grocery shopping. “She has this huge knowledge base,” says retired executive Jon Schierberl, who worked with her for decades. Her stature in the field is all the more impressive considering she started her career as an utter anomaly. “She had to break some really thick ice,” he adds. Olwen wouldn’t have gotten there without a strong scientific background, of course. But if you ask what’s really behind her success, she won’t talk about chemistry or physics or math, the things that usually come to mind when you think of rocket science. Instead, she’ll talk about words.
Growing up in Seattle, Olwen wanted to become a zoologist, but abandoned that dream when her father, a metallurgist, said no. So she came to Reed, majored in chemistry, and graduated at a time when big Northwest employers such as Boeing and Weyerhaeuser weren’t doing a lot of hiring. After a stint in a chem lab, she landed in 1978 at what was then called Rocket Research (now Aerojet Rocketdyne). The company supplies rocket hardware to NASA, the military, and the private sector, which uses it for
GPS and weather satellites. She was the first woman hired in an engineering role at the company—this despite the fact that she was a chemist, not an engineer. “I’m pretty sure I got my job because I was a woman,” she says. Like all the newbies, she spent her days following orders, performing tests, and taking notes, hopping on a company bike to pedal from one building to another. She soon became fascinated with hydrazine thrusters. Hydrazine is a chemical fuel. When it comes in contact with a catalyst, it decomposes, unleashing a plume of exhaust. Imagine blowing up a balloon and pinching the opening closed. “Now open it and you’ll have yourself a little rocket engine that’s zipping all over your office.” It flies, she says, “because it’s pushing against its own plume.” In space, the thrusters are fired in short bursts, shifting the trajectory of the spacecraft ever so slightly. A burst that’s one millisecond too long can put the ship thousands of miles off track over the course of a long mission. Her first year on the job, a unique opportunity arose. A senior engineer was supposed to write a lengthy report, but he balked. “The engineers will do just about anything to get out of writing,” she says. When he dragged his feet long enough, she stepped up. Supervisors were dubious, but she knew she had the chops: she earned them working on her Reed thesis with Prof. John Hancock [chemistry 1955–89]. “He was oldschool,” she recalls; he demanded clean, clear, well-reasoned papers. She also gives credit to Prof. Marsh Cronyn ’40 [chemistry 1952–89] and Prof. Tom Dunne [chemistry 1963–95]. The ability to write, she says, “was my ticket to ride.” With her command of technical detail, she was able to provide the clear, precise documentation that is vital to an enterprise like space exploration, which involves thousands of people working for scores of organizations. Of course, there were challenges. Schierberl and Olwen remember working on a project with scientists from Japan. When the Japanese learned they were partnered with a woman, “they were sure they’d been insulted,” she says. The Japanese men directed questions only to Schierberl, even though she had the technical expertise. But eventually they came to rely on her. “She had gained such credibility they would ask
A WORLD WITHIN. Pioneer captured dramatic but blurry images of Venus in 1978 (left), but the true nature of its fiery surface was not revealed until 1990, when Magellan beamed back stunning imagery of volcanoes and craters.
me to bring her in when critical decisions were being made,” Schierberl says. Olwen retired in 2016, but Aerojet Rocketdyne has brought her back for shortterm contracts, most recently for a stretch in December. As she wound down her last week of work, she reflected on the NASA missions in which her work played a role. Pathfinder. Insight. Cassini. The list goes on. She spoke of her friends at JPL, who watch readings coming in from billions of miles away, and sometimes call for her help interpreting it. There was the time, on Black Friday 2011, that JPL worried the Mars Curiosity engines might be overheating. They called her while she was shopping at Costco. Olwen pulled her cart to a quiet corner, asked some questions, and was able to reassure the engineer that the engines were fine. Then, she thought about Magellan, which reached Venus in 1990 using a complicated array of hydrazine thrusters she helped engineer. Tapping on her keyboard, she pulled up two photos of Venus, one from the Pioneer mission in 1978, and the other from Magellan. Pioneer’s photo is a watercolor blur— a circle filled with smudges. Magellan’s is a fiery orange, revealing Venus as a fantastic world mottled with light and dark whorls, with bubbles and flares and long, clear lines. Volcanoes, lava plains, craters, ridges—Magellan showed it all. This—“exploring worlds beyond our own, learning things, seeing things we’d never be able to see,” Olwen said, smiling—this is what her work is about.
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FROM HERE TO THERE
CHANGING HOW WE GET THERE FLYING CARS
Aerospace startup Joby Aviation, where Evan Peairs ’16 is an electromechanical engineer, is working on a fully electric personal airplane. Faster and quieter than a helicopter, with vertical takeoff and landing, the vehicle has been described as a cross between a drone and a small plane.
IT’S ELECTRIC
Danny Kim ’02, CEO of Lit Motors, has been building cars since 2003, when he redesigned and built two biodiesel SUVs. He didn’t stop there. Most recently he invented a gyroscopic electric motorcycle called the C-1. A fully enclosed twowheeled vehicle, the C-1 is designed to be as safe as a car, and to alleviate traffic congestion and the environmental impact of single-occupant vehicles.
PEDALS TO THE PEOPLE
Lifelong bike commuter Kasandra Griffin ’95 is increasing access to bicycling in Portland, Oregon, as the executive director of the Community Cycling Center, an organization which began with the mission to get bicycles to kids in low-income areas as well as the skills and resources necessary to maintain them.
GO BY BUS
Senior Operations Analyst (and former bicycle racer) Miles Crumley ’07 keeps Portland metro’s bus systems on time and running smoothly with the power of data. Once a bus operator himself, Miles now finds ways to use information such as GPS data to improve city bus operations.He’ll get to the bottom of any delays, whether caused by bus mechanics, pedestrian crossing, or traffic signals.
illustration by mike lemanski
RKSK TO RIDESHARE
Ezra Goldman ’03 began working on the share economy when he masterminded the RKSK (Reed College Shit Kollective) mini-bike share—a collection of kids’ bicycles distributed around campus to help students get to where they were going, faster. Now, he is the founder of Upshift cars, a San Francisco-based startup that delivers a Prius to you with a text message, via a car concierge who bikes away afterward.
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LIBERATING HYDROGEN
Prof. Miriam Bowring [chemistry] and her students are working on catalysts that speed the production of hydrogen through a poorly understood mechanism known as quantum tunnelling. The potential implications of using hydrogen as a fuel are huge. Pound for pound, hydrogen contains three times the energy of gasoline and burns clean—its only exhaust product is water.
KEEL OVER
By day Bernard Smith ’48 was a rocket scientist and weapons expert for the US Navy. But his true passion was designing sailboats. In 1963, he published The Forty-Knot Sailboat, in which he set out a revolutionary design for a high-speed sailboat. Almost 50 years later the Vestas Sailrocket, which was based on his ideas, smashed the world speed sailing record, clocking well over 75 miles per hour.
TRIP CHECK
When you consult your department of transportation for news about road conditions and traffic, you might be saving yourself a trip down a closed highway thanks to Kristin Virshbo ’98, CEO of Castle Rock Associates. The company‘s software platform CARS is used by many transportation agencies to capture and share information about the roads for which they are responsible.
TWO-WHEEL REVOLUTION
Writer, producer, and feminist book publisher Elly Blue ’04 gets the word out about all things bicycle in her quarterly zine Taking the Lane; in her many books like Bikeonomics and Pedal Zombies; and in a video project called Groundswell about amazing people using bicycling to improve their communities. She co-owns Microcosm Publishing, which published Bicycle/Race by Adonia Lugo ’06.
APPY TRAVELS
In 2015 Knock CEO Will Henderson ‘08 realized that apps like Waze and Google maps were wreaking havoc on city transportation systems, clogging arterial streets and overrunning bike thoroughfares. Cities needed a way to ensure these technologies did not overtax local systems. His answer was Ride Report, a bike commuting app that helps commuters and delivers crucial bike data to the cities they ride in for improving conditions. march 2019 Reed Magazine 23
Reediana
BOOKS. MUSIC. FILM. SEND US YOUR WORK! Edited by Katie Pelletier • reed.magazine@reed.edu
Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field (OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018) Prof. Mark Burford examines the tension between devotion and emotion in a new book on gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. On September 12, 1947, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson went into a studio in Chicago and recorded four songs for Apollo Records, her second session for the label. Jackson was already a superstar in the world of gospel singing and a major figure in the National Baptist Convention, but she was not yet well known to the broader American listening public. All that was about to change, as her epic six-minute rendition of W. Herbert Brewster’s “Move On Up a Little Higher” would make her a household name. But mainstream popularity revealed tensions within gospel, as Prof. Mark Burford [music 2007–] argues in his new biography, Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field. Black gospel was well situated to achieve mainstream success, both as an African American form at a time when so-called race records were booming and as a religious music during the early Cold War’s revival of American religiosity. But popularity also brought with it challenges of unscrupulous record industry figures who exploited black artists for their own gain, as well as questions about whether commercial success was compatible with authentic religious sentiment. On the latter point, Burford notes that the black gospel field was always in dialogue with the blues industry. Thomas Dorsey, one of the widely hailed originators of black
gospel, had previously performed blues under the stage name “Georgia Tom,” while Jackson herself was sometimes criticized for singing in a style that was more blues inflected than was appropriate for the sacred music she sang. (Gospel singer Georgia Peach contrasted her style with Jackson’s, explaining, “My inspiration comes strictly from the hymn . . . My inspiration comes from no blues.”) While Burford clearly has great affection for Jackson’s music, he refuses to dismiss the religious critiques of her singing style. This is one of the great strengths of Burford’s argument: rather than try to resolve these historical tensions into a coherent linear narrative, he recognizes that the field of black gospel was broad and varied. The eventual popular success of Jackson’s charismatic style was not preordained, but rather was but one product of the complex web of social factors and positions in gospel and the broader musical cultures around it. The hit single “Move On Up a Little Higher,” her appearance on Ed Sullivan’s show in 1952, her eventual move to Columbia Records, where Burford’s narrative
The Brittle Gods: Ancient Themes Rethought
For his second book of poems, Terence Kuch ’59 found inspiration in the collision of the ancient and modern worlds while on a visit to Thebes and Greece. (Loyola University/Apprentice House Press, 2018.)
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ends—each of these historical moments contains more nuance and depth than has previously been understood, and Burford’s treatment of Jackson represents an important step forward. Burford is exhaustive in his presentation and analysis of documentary evidence about Jackson, but the greatest value of his book lies in his powerful advocacy for the deep study of black music at a time when black identity is under attack from within and outside the academy. Burford points to the stream of thought in musicology (represented by musicologist Stephen Shearon) that would subsume the study of black gospel music into a much broader study of gospel singing throughout American history. Burford’s opposition highlights the implicit racism of such an argument: “Black gospel matters, some say? All gospel matters, Shearon seems to counter.” Thus, Burford’s core question in constructing his book demands deeper and more sensitive consideration from scholars and American society at large: “Under what conditions can black culture and black bodies be recognized?” —GREGORY WEINSTEIN See Reed Magazine online for a Mahalia Jackson playlist.
Gambling on War: Confidence, Fear, and the Tragedy of the First World War
The First World War left a legacy of chaos that is still with us a century later. Why did European leaders resort to war and why did they not end it sooner? Roger Ransom ’59 sheds new light by employing insights from prospect theory and notions of risk and uncertainty. Ultimately, he shows that the outcome of the war rested as much on the ability of the Allied powers to muster their superior economic resources to continue the fight as it did on success on the battlefield. (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
The Chunta A documentary by Genevieve Roudané ’08
An Anthropology of Academic Governance and Institutional Democracy: The Community of Scholars in America
The opening scenes of a striking new documentary film, The Chunta, by Genevieve Roudané ’08, show the midJanuary streets of Chiapa de Corzo, Mexico, crisscrossed by bright, polychrome banners of papel picado (“pecked paper”). The film, which had its U.S. premiere at the Portland Film Festival in October, provides a glimpse into the world of the Fiesta Grande de Enero (the Great January Feast), a festival honoring, among other figures, St. Sebastian, the patron saint of the LGBTQ community. Roudané, a filmmaker who has lived in Mexico for eight years, attends every year with about one million other people. The festival traditionally features female characters known as Chuntas (meaning “maids”), performed by men who dress in costumes including handcrafted garments, floral garlands, and makeup, and dance through the streets of Chiapas. There are several different Chunta gangs in Chiapas, and Roudané’s documentary focuses on the dynamics between two of them. One is strictly traditionalist, allowing only cisgender, heterosexual members to join (known as Jerry’s gang), and the other is a dissident gang, lead by “Auntie” Esther Noriega,
who allows people of any gender or sexual orientation. The Chunta character has its roots in Chiapa’s precolonial history, and has been alive in the collective consciousness of Chiapa since its resurrection 36 years ago. Since the revival, Esther’s and Jerry’s gangs have argued vehemently over the meaning and “identity” of the Chunta character. Jerry claims that the Chunta is a “symbolic manifestation of the world turned upside down” and so the Chunta character must be played by a straight, cis-gender man who dresses in “women’s” clothing. One of his gang members asserts, “Those men who dress as women are crossdressers, but we are Chuntas.” Auntie’s gang views the Chunta as a vehicle for realizing what the Chiapas community wants the future to look like. Isauro Vidal, a member of Auntie’s gang, says, “The Chunta represents how the world should be; we all help each other.” Auntie’s inclusive approach is gaining traction. She points out that “even if the other [gangs] say I don’t exist,” her gang is famous. Roudané’s documentary dramatizes Auntie Noriega’s legacy as a living patron saint of her local LGBTQ community. —SEBASTIAN ZINN ’18
Murray Leaf ’61 has published an anthropological study of university governance organizations, which aims to describe the principles of effective faculty governance organizations and shared governance; to help mobilize opposition to a large and extremely well-funded system of political attacks aimed at destroying faculty governance organizations; to demonstrate the value of the theory of human social organizations; and to enable universities to become more effective in generating the intellectual advances we must make in order to solve the current global crisis of sustainability and political instability. The book includes descriptions of four institutions with effective academic governance, including Reed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
African History Videos
Attorney and historian Andre S. Wooten ’70 has produced a series of African history videos available at africanhistoryvideos.com. In this multi-part series, he aims to present artifacts and factual information about African history so that viewers learn and draw their own conclusions about the forces of world history.
Facing Forward: Schooling for Learning in Africa
Marlaine Lockheed ’64 and her World Bank colleagues lay out a range of policy and implementation actions that are needed for countries in sub-Saharan Africa to improve learning while expanding access to and completion of basic education for all. The book underscores the importance of aligning the education system to be relentlessly focused on learning outcomes and to ensuring that all children have access to good schools, good learning materials, and good teachers. (World Bank Publications, 2018)
Sanctuary: The Melding of the Creatures
In the latest work of science fiction by Julie O’Toole ’71, five school friends from genetically engineered tribes embark on their last adventure before manhood and adult responsibilities. A terrible murder changes their trajectory and brings them into contact with unengineered tribes and women outside their carefully crafted mate selection. When an astonishing plot is uncovered, everything they knew and believed to be true is called into doubt. (Independently published, 2018) march 2019 Reed Magazine 25
Reediana
Country Gone Missing: Nightmares in the Time of Trump
Louise Steinman ’73 edited a limited-edition chapbook as a benefit for SwingLeft’s grassroots efforts to take back the House. The book is a volume of illustrated dreams that reveal a collective angst and fear of losing our democracy, growing will to resist, and emerging ideas for healing and action. Stay tuned for the 2020 edition! Write those nightmares down!
High on the Saddle: An Intergenerational Adventure into the Mountains of Oregon
Elecia Beebe ’74 (née Judy Simons) illustrated a children’s book about an adventurous grandma and her nature-loving grandchild, who embark on a strenuous hike to the summit of Saddle Mountain in the Oregon Coast Range. (Paloma Books, 2018)
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State of the City
In a much-anticipated sequel to Playing with Fire by Scott Lazenby ’77, Trillium, Oregon, and its city manager face a new and even more formidable adversary. Ben Cromarty is caught in the crossfire, trying to protect his staff from a vindictive council member as the city faces a series of attacks mounted by powerful interest groups and a state government eager to do their bidding. (Create Space, 2017)
The Five-Ton Life: Carbon, America, and the Culture That May Save Us
Susan Subak ’82 uses previously untapped sources to discover and explore various lowcarbon locations. In Washington DC, Chicago suburbs, lower Manhattan, and Amish settlements in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, she examines the built and social environment to discern the characteristics that contribute to lower
greenhouse gas emissions. The most decisive factors that decrease energy use are a commitment to small interiors and social cohesion, although each example exhibits its own dynamics and offers its own lessons for the rest of the country. (University of Nebraska Press, 2018)
The Sun: A Mystery (The Sun Ranch Saga, Volume 1) A former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist, Courtney White ’82 has a new mystery novel based on his experience working with ranchers and conservationists in the Southwest. Without warning, Bryce Miller, a young doctor in Boston, inherits a large, historic ranch in northern New Mexico from a wealthy uncle she barely knew. She flies out to sell it to the highest bidder, but things get complicated when a body is found murdered on the ranch. (Early Hour Press, 2018)
Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene
Julie Reiss ’84 has edited an anthology of the growing literature on artistic responses to global climate change and its consequences. With multiple perspectives and a range of methodological approaches, it contains essays by art historians, art critics, curators, artists, and educators, and offers different frameworks for talking about visual representation and the current environmental crisis. (Vernon Press Series in Art, 2019)
Once and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction and Fantasy
Benjamin Eldon Stevens ’98 and Brett M. Rogers ’99 coedited a new collection of essays on sci-fi and fantasy that explores how these genres draw on materials from ancient Greece and Rome, “displacing” them from their original settings
in time and space (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). This is the fourth essay collection they have published in the past four years and the second volume this year: Frankenstein and Its Classics (Bloomsbury Academic) was released in August 2018.
For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State
In his recent book, Noah Salomon ’99, associate professor of religion at Carleton College, looks at the Republic of Sudan’s 25 year experiment with Islamic statehood. This careful ethnography examines the lasting effects of state Islamization on Sudanese society through a study of the individuals and organizations working in its midst. (Princeton University Press, 2016)
Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May ’68
The Evening Pink by Ethan Rafal ’07
Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories
Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri Sean B. Franzel ’00 has translated from the German the work of Reinhart Koselleck, a prominent historian and theorist of history. The volume features the most important essays not previously available in English, several of them essential to his theory of history. (Stanford University Press, 2018)
The Evening Pink
Ethan Rafal ’07 has been working on a psychedelic (anti-) Western, consisting of photographs and film-based works, shot at the twilight of climate fallout, created in landscapes severely affected by drought, fire, flood. An intentional encounter with the Western genre, the project recasts climate change as the looming violence on the western frontier. (Independently published, 2019)
True Mirror by Near Northeast.
Guitarist Avy Mallik ’07 and his DC-based band, “a guitar-bass-drumviolin outfit” have a new album, which I have greatly enjoyed listening to while putting together this edition of Reediana. A mix of melodic, ambient, folky-rock sounds, the album can be streamed on Spotify or purchased on Bandcamp.
A new book by Prof. Kate Bredeson [theater 2009–] tells the story of student and worker uprisings in France through the lens of theater history, and the story of French theater through the lens of May ’68. Based on detailed archival research and original translations, close readings of plays and historical documents, and a rigorous assessment of avant-garde theater history and theory, Occupying the Stage proposes that the French theater of 1959– 71 forms a stand-alone paradigm called “The Theater of May ’68.” The book shows how French theater artists during this period used a strategy of occupation—occupying buildings, streets, language, words, traditions, and artistic processes—as their central tactic of protest and transformation. It
further proposes that the Theater of May ’68 has left imprints on contemporary artists and activists, and that this theater offers a scaffolding on which to build a meaningful analysis of contemporary protest and performance in France, North America, and beyond. At the book’s heart is an inquiry into how artists of the period used theater as a way to engage in political work and, concurrently, questioned and overhauled traditional theater practices so their art would better reflect the way they wanted the world to be. Occupying the Stage embraces the utopic vision of May ’68 while probing the period’s many contradictions. It thus affirms the vital role theater can play in the ongoing work of social change. (Northwestern University Press, 2018)
Political Judgment Prof. Peter Steinberger [political science 1977–] has published a new guide to the literature on political judgment as part of Polity’s Key Concepts in Political Theory series. Politics is the process by which communities collectively decide to pursue certain courses of action. It is, as such, always a matter of judgment. Courses of action are chosen at least in part because they are somehow adjudged better than the alternatives, and this has given rise to a great deal of speculation about the ways in which we determine the relative merits of proposed laws and policies. What exactly is good judgment in politics? What are the
characteristics of people who judge especially well? How is good judgment acquired, and how can we recognize it in others? Prof. Steinberger addresses such questions by considering a variety of important developments in the history of political thought— ancient, modern, and contemporary—introducing readers to important and ongoing debates about the idea of prudence or practical wisdom as it functions, or should function, in the realm of public affairs. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of political theory, the history of political thought, and political ethics. (Polity, 2018) march 2019 Reed Magazine 27
In Memoriam Edited by Randall S. Barton • bartonr@reed.edu
Minimalist on Maximum Overdrive Robert Morris ’58
November 28, 2018, in Kingston, New York, of pneumonia.
A key innovator of the minimalist and conceptual art movements, Robert Morris was one of the most influential artists of the ’60s and ’70s, redefining the concept of “artist” with a career that also included dance, performance art, and earthworks. In a 1968 article titled “Mastery of Mystery,” Time magazine postulated that museumgoers might think there were several Robert Morrises: “There is the one whose grey Fiberglas L shapes won a prize at the Chicago Art Institute in 1966, and the one whose knifeedged I-beams starred in the Guggenheim Museum’s sculpture show last year. Then there is the Robert Morris who electrified Buffalonians at the 1965 Festival of the Arts by a ‘dance’ in which he and a female partner inched across the stage, locked in embrace and clad only in mineral oil. All these adventures were, in fact initiated by the same Robert Morris, a Buster Keaton-faced Kansas Citian.” He grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri, where his father worked in the livestock business and his mother was a devout Christian Scientist. When he was an adult, she remarked to him, “Well, Bobby, we all believe in something. I believe in God and you believe in nothing.” It wasn’t that he believed in nothing—he was a minimalist and he practiced at the altar of art. An early artwork was a knot board he made in Cub Scouts. Oval in design, it featured basic knots tied in three-eighths-inch hemp rope, carefully tacked to a shellacked board. He looked forward to advancing to splices and double sheet bends in the Boy Scouts at Graceland Grade School, but this was not to be. During the second meeting he attended, the older scouts mutinied and threw Mr. Garrett, the scoutmaster, down a flight of stairs and out into the schoolyard. The scout troop was dissolved. Shortly after Robert finished high school, his mother revealed that she had chucked his Cub Scout knot board while cleaning out the chicken house. He started college at the University of Kansas City, studying anthropology, biology, and Russian history while concurrently taking preengineering and writing courses at the Junior College of Kansas City and art classes 36 Reed Magazine march 2019
Robert Morris with Box for Standing, 1961.
at the Kansas City Art Institute. In those days, he went to school night and day. Moving to San Francisco, he studied at the California School of Fine Arts until he interrupted his studies to serve with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Korea. In 1954 he moved into a houseboat under the Ross Island Bridge and began taking classes in philosophy and psychology at Reed. Prof. Leslie Squier [psychology 1953–88] was his advisor, but it was Prof. Marvin Levich [philosophy 1953–94] who made the biggest impression. “A nonstop talker and chainsmoker who taught logic and aesthetics, Dr. Levich gesticulated and paced constantly in class,” Robert remembered. “With a cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips, he scrawled wildly on the blackboard, into which he occasionally bumped, dusting his dark, three-piece suit with chalk spots. I once saw him, while lecturing on Aristotle in his usual flailing
manner, swallow the butt end of his cigarette without so much as a pause in his machinegun delivery. I wasn’t sure he even noticed.” Robert withdrew from Reed the next year and returned to San Francisco, where he resumed painting and had two solo exhibitions of his abstract expressionist works. He married Simone Forti, a dancer who would go on to be a leading choreographer and teacher of modern dance. They moved to New York City in 1959, joining a downtown scene made up of avant-garde painters, musicians, dancers, and performance artists. He earned a master’s degree in art history from Hunter College. He and Simone divorced in 1962. By this time, many New York artists were disavowing the art of the ’40s and ’50s, which they considered senescent and academic. Those decades had been dominated by abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning , whose monumental works seemed to reflect their individual psyches. Robert’s work helped pioneer the language of minimalism, which avoided emotional content and emphasized anonymity over the egoic excesses of abstract expressionism. Attention was called instead to the materiality of the works and the way perception changed as the viewer moved around the sculpture, subverting the separation between art and reality and emphasizing how space joined a work of art and the viewer. He made two versions of Untitled (Ring with Light), a sculpture consisting of two large, gray, semicircular halves joined by a narrow strip of light to form a ring. Fluorescent bulbs inside the sculpture created a bridge of light between the halves, making it appear as an unbroken unit. One version was painted plywood; the other was fabricated in fiberglass. “I did the first fiberglass works myself in a loft on Greene Street,” he told writer Pepe Karmel. “I built an isolated room inside the loft and worked there wearing a rubber suit and complete face mask that had air pumped in from outside. It was miserable work. I sweated off about five pounds every time I laminated a work. In order to get through it I would work for 15 minutes, go out and take a big shot of whiskey, work for another 15 minutes, etc. At the end of the day I was lighter but dead drunk.”
Overturned Assumptions About Men and Women Even if the minimalist sculptures and conceptual art he produced in the early ’60s had been all he created, he would have secured his place in the pantheon of American art. But in the years that followed, he continued to experiment with making sculptures in semitransparent materials, building labyrinths, and creating wall hangings of thick felt. Experimenting with what he termed “anti form,” he moved away from the modular construction of his earlier sculpture and began making works in materials such as felt, thread waste, and steam. He stacked, draped, folded, hung, and cut pieces of industrial felt into towering forms that sometimes took on the appearance of alien beings. A single work held the potential to take a different shape every time it was presented, based on the arbitrary behavior of the materials from which it was composed. He shuttered his 1970 Whitney Museum exhibition to, as he put it, “underscore the need I and others feel to shift priorities at this time from art making and viewing to unified action within the art community against the intensifying conditions of repression, war, and racism in this country.” He produced a series of monumental abstract canvases that resembled blasts from a nuclear war. Testing the limits of what we think sculpture can be, he also worked with dirt, detritus, and other materials to create a series of land art pieces. He designed projects sculpting large expanses of land, including a long hillside piece in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the Observatorium (1977), a massive circular form carved into the land in Lelystad, the Netherlands, which he termed “a modern Stonehenge.” He was one of eight artists selected by Washington State’s King County Arts Commission to propose designs reclaiming land wasted by industry. He transformed a former gravel pit in SeaTac, Washington, into a four-acre land sculpture, Johnson Pit #30 (1979), earning him accolades as a pioneer of earth sculpture. In the early ’60s, he created works for the Judson Dance Theater in New York in which he occasionally performed. He was an acerbic critic, publishing essays on sculptural theory and the output of other artists. He is survived by his wife, Lucille Michels Morris.
Eleanor Emmons Maccoby ’39 December 11, 2018, in Palo Alto, California, at the age of 101, of pneumonia.
One of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, Eleanor was renowned for research showing that—in most respects—the minds of men and women do not differ, overturning centuries of dubious assumptions. She made key contributions to understanding differences in development between girls and boys, infants’ emotional attachments, and how divorce and child custody affect children. The second of four daughters born to Eugene and Viva Emmons, Eleanor spent her early years on the shores of Day Island and in Tacoma, Washington. She contracted encephalitis as a child and was comatose for a time. The tomboy of the family, she went by the name of Bobby and had extensive conversations with her imaginary playmates, a married couple named Mr. and Mrs. Suddenly and their young son, Tumor. An overachiever in grade and high school, Eleanor was awarded a one-year scholarship at Reed. It was a game changer; it became apparent that many of her classmates were just as accustomed to being the smartest kid in class. Used to knowing all the answers in grade and high school, Eleanor was taken aback when asked to provide evidence supporting her assertions in class. “I began to realize that some of the things I thought I knew were really only opinions,” she said. She sweated over her term paper in hopes of being chosen for evenings of discussion at the home of Prof. Rex Arragon [history 1923– 74], and years later acknowledged using his methods in her own teaching career. When the one-year scholarship ended, Eleanor’s father told her he couldn’t afford Reed tuition. She took the year off, attended secretarial school, and then got a job in her father’s factory so she could earn money for another year at Reed, which commenced in the fall of 1936. She was elected to the student council and took a psychology class from Prof. Monte Griffith [psychology 1926–54], which turned out to be profoundly important for the subsequent course of her life. Remembering Griffith as a gargantuan man—six feet, three inches tall and weighing nearly 300 pounds—who had earned his college tuition as a professional prizefighter, Eleanor
termed him “a dyed-in-the-wool behaviorist.” Having only recently spun off from philosophy, the field of psychology was still not taught as a separate discipline in some colleges. “The mission of the new discipline,” Eleanor wrote in her memoir, “was to understand why humans behave the way they do. Most behaviorists adopted the assumption that a newborn infant was a tabula rasa who gradually learned an expanding set of behavioral habits.” By the spring of her sophomore year, Eleanor had fallen into a deep, existential depression. Writing doom-laden poetry and feeling purposeless, she wondered whether life could really be nothing more than automatically following a path determined by events over which one has no control? “From a sophomore’s perspective, the takeaway message from Monty’s teachings was that we have no free will,” she later reflected. “Later in my career as a psychologist, I came to see behaviorism as an intellectual straitjacket. Indeed, I, along with the whole field of psychology, have morphed toward a much deeper analysis of human behavior as a function of environmental inputs and genetic characteristics, as these feed into emotional, cognitive, and self-regulating processes—all connected to brain development and functioning.” She stopped working on term papers, skipped meals, and hid from friends. In those days, Reed had about 400 students and the person considered the most qualified to counsel emotionally distressed students was the sole psychologist on the faculty—Prof. Griffith. Eleanor dropped out of school. Over the summer she recovered and applied to the University of Washington. She wanted a full psychology department and was eager to march 2019 Reed Magazine 37
In Memoriam study with Prof. Edwin Guthrie, the man who had taught Griffith. Her Reed boyfriend, Ben Barzman ’38, came to Seattle and introduced her to his friend Nathan (Mac) Maccoby ’33, a teaching fellow at UW. Mac showed Eleanor around the psychology department and they began playing tennis together. At the beginning of her senior year, they married. After getting her bachelor’s degree, Eleanor followed Mac to Oregon, where he taught undergraduate psychology at Oregon State, and enrolled for graduate classes at the University of Oregon. At the end of the school year, the couple returned to Portland to work with Prof. Griffith. That fall, war began in Europe and Max took a job with the U.S. Civil Service Commission in Washington, D.C. Eleanor got a job with the Division of Program Surveys in the Department of Agriculture. After the war, she entered a PhD program in experimental psychology at the University of Michigan. When Mac got a professorship at Boston University, she worked on her dissertation with psychologist B.F. Skinner at Harvard. Hired to teach and do research in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, Eleanor participated in large-scale studies investigating whether certain parental practices were related to children’s personality characteristics, which resulted in the influential book Patterns of Child Rearing (Sears, Maccoby, & Levin, 1957). Both Maccobys were offered positions at Stanford University in 1958, Nathan in the communication department and Eleanor in the psychology department. To raise their three children, she worked part time, pursuing her academic research late into the evening to preserve family time. She was elected to the governing council of the Social Science Research Council and was asked to organize a group to study how the two sexes both differed—and did not—in their development. Eleanor drew
on Stanford colleagues and scholars spending sabbatical years at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a national think tank adjoining the Stanford campus. This led to a book published in 1966, The Development of Sex Differences, which she edited and for which she wrote a chapter. At once both the first half-time tenured professor and the first woman to serve as chair of Stanford’s psychology department, Eleanor authored or coauthored 11 books (including her 2017 memoir) and published nearly 100 papers. Her most influential book was The Psychology of Sex Differences (1974), one of the first in the field of gender studies. The book cast doubt on widely held assumptions about innate abilities among girls and boys. Writing of her approach with her research partner, postdoc appointment Carol Jacklin, Eleanor said, “We were both indignant over the glib generalizations about sex differences that we kept encountering: ‘men are from Mars, women from Venus,’ ‘men are naturally more active, women more passive,’ ‘women just can’t do math,’ etc. We both thought it would be useful to do a careful review of evidence for and against such generalizations.” A team of student assistants conducted the first large-scale review of the literature on gender differences in an effort to determine which accepted beliefs were based in fact. Maccoby and Jacklin discussed major theories of how sex differentiation occurs, arguing that, in addition to being influenced by their biology and social environment, children engaged in what they called “self-socialization.” The book cast doubt on widely held assumptions about innate abilities among girls and boys, influenced a generation of scholars, and lent momentum to the tide of second-wave feminism then sweeping the nation. In 1992, she published Dividing the Child: Social and Legal Dilemmas of Custody, about one of the largest studies on the effect of divorce on children. Following nearly 1,000 families who
began divorce proceedings in 1984–85, Eleanor found that even four years after divorce, fathers stayed substantially involved with their children even though mothers remained the primary caretakers. That involvement was higher than shown in earlier national studies, and the book was awarded the William J. Goode Award by the American Sociological Association for the most outstanding book on family scholarship. In 1998, she wrote The Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming Together, which explored the paradox that despite being separated from one another through much of their childhood, most boys and girls form heterosexual unions as adults. Eleanor explored ways in which gender shapes lives in families, schools, relationships, and the workplace. She was honored for her work with many awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychology Foundation and Stanford’s Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. The American Psychological Association created the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology in her honor and listed her as one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Eleanor’s love of music began in her youth, when she joined her mother and sisters in a professional group with its own radio program. As an adult, she sang in various choral groups, and on her 100th birthday she belted out a jazz song from the 1930s. Reflecting back on her two years at Reed, Eleanor said, “I took two science courses at Reed—one in physics and one in biology. In retrospect, I think they were important because they taught me about scientific objectivity, and what it means to go through the painstaking process of assembling evidence for or against a hypothesis. That’s basically what I’ve been doing for all my professional life.” Nathan Maccoby died in 1992. Eleanor is survived by her three children, Janice Carmichael, Sarah Maccoby Blunt, and Mark Maccoby.
Liberated Concentration Camp in WWII James B. Thayer
September 16, 2018, in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
A Reed trustee for 19 years, James lived an extraordinary life as a military hero, successful businessman, and renowned civic leader. Born to parents who divorced when he was four, Jim was raised by his maternal grandparents on a farm in Carlton, Oregon. He edited the high school newspaper and won a scholarship at the University of Oregon, but his education was cut short following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Jim joined the army, was commissioned a 38 Reed Magazine march 2019
second lieutenant, and was assigned to a frontline antitank company in the 71st Infantry Division. He arrived in Le Havre, France, in February 1945 with the Germans in retreat. As platoon commander, Jim led his unit across France and into Germany, clearing minefields along the Maginot Line. In April, his platoon engaged an SS regiment occupying the Austrian town of Hörbach. “Their battalion commander told me he wasn’t allowed to surrender unless he killed me and killed himself too,” Jim said. “It was tough. I thought I was going to die.”
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With the help of a sergeant who spoke German, Jim kept the commander talking long enough for his battalion to advance from the rear and defuse the situation. Days later, his platoon was hunting for German ammunition dumps near Wels, Austria, when they came upon dead, dying, and emaciated people lining a remote forest road. Nearing the end of the road, they were overwhelmed by the smell of the Gunskirchen Lager concentration camp, part of the Mauthausen-Gusen complex. “Of all the horrors of the place, the smell, perhaps, was the most startling of all,” wrote Captain J. D. Pletcher of the 71st. “It was a smell made up of all kinds of odors... all mixed together in a heavy dank atmosphere, in a thick, muddy woods, where little breeze would go. The ground was pulpy throughout the camp, churned to a consistency of warm putty by the milling of thousands of feet, mud mixed with feces and urine. The smell of Gunskirchen nauseated many of the Americans who went
there. It was a smell I’ll never forget, completely different from anything I’ve ever encountered. It could almost be seen and hung over the camp like a fog of death.” Liberating the camp, Jim and his men saved the lives of more than 15,000 Hungarian Jewish refugees. He received both the Silver Star and the Bronze Star for his service in the U.S. Army during World War II. Years later, Jim was at the airport in Vienna when a Jewish man identified him and said he was 14 when the Americans arrived at Gunskirchen. He told Jim he would have been dead if they had come 24 hours later. “That changed my life,” Jim said. Jim returned to the University of Oregon after the war and graduated in 1947 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. He met his future wife, Patricia Cunningham, in The Dalles; they were married in 1954 and settled in Beaverton. In addition to starting a family, together they founded the J. Thayer Company, selling office products, furniture, stationery and fine gifts. The store won the Geyer Award as the top small retailer in America. Jim served as president of the Oregon Historical Society, the Port of Portland Commission, and the Beaverton Chamber of Commerce. He chaired the Tuality Community Hospital board and Gov. Vic Atiyeh’s Lower Columbia River Task Force. In addition to sitting on Reed’s board of trustees, he served on the boards of GTE Northwest, the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, the Knappton Corp., the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commission, the Evergreen Aviation Museum, Boys & Girls Aid of Portland, and the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. Retiring from the U.S. Army Reserves as a full colonel in 1982, he was promoted to brigadier general and commander of the Oregon State Defense Force and became Oregon’s Civilian Aide to the Secretary of the Army. After 50 years in Beaverton, Jim and Pat sold their home in 2008 and moved to the Stafford Retirement Community in Lake Oswego to enjoy a simpler lifestyle together. Patricia passed in 2014 and Jim had a heart attack two days later. At the age of 96, Jim passed away peacefully with his family at his side. He is survived by his sons, Jim, John, Tommy, and Mike. Tommy, who is lead guitarist in the rock band Kiss, said of his father, “First and foremost, he was a great family man and great father, but had a great military, business, and civilian career. He liked to help people and organizations that needed help.” When it opens in 2020, the Brigadier General James B. Thayer Oregon Military Museum at Camp Withycombe in Clackamas will be a fitting tribute to him. The $20 million museum and historic park will honor all Oregon veterans and citizen soldiers past, present, and future.
Wade Cornwell ’36
October 13, 2018, in Portland, at the age of 104.
It was the Great Depression and Wade could only scrape together enough money to attend Reed for one year. Nonetheless, that year remained one of his fondest memories, making him feel like he’d gotten a higher education. “After one year at Reed, I went to mine gold near Prairie City in eastern Oregon,” Wade recalled. “My parents were partners. The government pegged the price of gold at $35 an ounce, and there was no profit in it after a lot of hard work. After luckily escaping a mine blast, some other way of life seemed desirable.” Returning to Portland, he attended Northwestern School of Commerce and worked for five years as an office manager at the Hoody Peanut Company. In 1941, Wade went to work at Bonneville Power Administration in the materials testing laboratory at Ross Substation. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Union Carbide Corporation opened a plant in St. Johns, Oregon, to make carbide and alloys for the steel industry. Wade was employed as purchasing agent and later as its office manager. He left in 1963 after 21 years. In 1955, five men who met at the Rose City Yacht Club—Tom Green, Merle Starr ’33, Jarvis Gould, Henry Morton, and Wade— contracted to build five boats using a new material called fiberglass. A sample of the new material was tested by shooting bullets at it from a 10-foot range. A wooden plug was made and a fiberglass mold was completed in early September. The group selected “Chinook” as
march 2019 Reed Magazine 39
In Memoriam the name of the class for this new type of hull. They produced five 34-foot fiberglass sailboats, one for each of the partners. Two years later, all five boats were sailing and the yachting community began to take notice. The new boats began winning many races, and a threepage spread about them in Yachting magazine brought a lot of inquiries. Other people wanted hulls from the mold, and three of the partners continued the business as a sideline for six years until setting up Yacht Constructors, Inc. Over the years they produced 23�, 27�, 29�, 36�, 42�, and 43� models under the Cascade brand. Wade retired in 2005 after having made nearly 800 world-cruising-class fiberglass sailboats. While skiing on Mt. Hood, Wade met his wife, Katy. They married in 1951 and had a daughter, Mary. Katy died in 1977. In addition to sailing, Wade’s passions included skiing and anything related to the mountains. He climbed Mt. Hood many times, bragging that he once climbed it in his tennis shoes. He traveled extensively after retiring at the age of 91, including a sailing trip to the British Virgin Islands. Wade is survived by his daughter, Mary Cornwell Jacob.
Jerry Kelley ’44
October 14, 2018, in Lacey, Washington.
Born in Spokane, Washington, Jerry moved with his family to West Seattle and graduated from West Seattle High School. His mother, Norma Golden Rule Kelley, had finished 10th grade and his father, Albert, graduated from high school, but Jerry was the first in his family to go to college. In the third grade, he was given the assignment of writing a Christmas story and wrote a poem about the birth of Christ. The work must have seemed accomplished beyond the ability of so young a scribe. “He couldn’t possibly have written that poem,” his teacher told his parents. The experience devastated Jerry and he didn’t write another poem until long after college. Later in life, he’d compose poems to commemorate occasions like funerals and weddings, and writing poetry became very important to him. He was a rapid learner and was allowed to skip grades. By the time he finished with high school, Jerry was a scrawny kid almost two years younger than his classmates. “I was so far behind physically and socially that I wanted to stay out of school and work for at least a year, to catch up,” he remembered. The summer of 1939, and for the following three summers, he worked in a salmon cannery in southeast Alaska. “I was thrown in with the big, tough, strong, rough guys,” he said, “and I was a wide-eyed 40 Reed Magazine march 2019
kid.” When he was 83 years old, he wrote a book about the experience, Reaching for Manhood at Steamboat Bay. Jerry returned to Seattle, began working in a warehouse, and started looking for better jobs. At the Washington State Employment Service, he completed a series of tests. A counselor at the service, who was a part-time instructor at the University of Washington, asked Jerry, “Why are you not in college? You should not even go to the University of Washington; you won’t be challenged. Do you know anything about Reed College? Go to Reed.” Jerry started at Reed when he was 17 years old, and while he admitted he didn’t come to Reed with a developed discipline in the world of books and discussion, he said, “It was a wonderful, absolutely marvelous experience for me.” One professor he remembered fondly was Prof. Dorothy Johansen ’33 [history 1934– 84]. “Dorothy Jo was absolutely wonderful,” he remembered. “We were her ‘little cabbages’ and she was just marvelous.” After his sophomore year, he got a job managing the student union building and lived upstairs in the building. Fred Shorter ’44 comanaged the building with him, and they were the only two students in an advanced economics class with Prof. William Blair Stewart [economics 1925–49]. “As so often happened at Reed, with the whole honor system and the kind of trust and the approach that was used to learning, a great deal was left up to us,” Jerry recalled. “The final exam was just a single-question exam that involved developing a whole theory as a way of answering the question. It was a takehome exam and Fred and I decided to take it at the same time. We sat virtually back-to-back for a couple of hours in this little room at our desks in the student union building and wrote the papers. When we got them back, it turned out that we had gone in totally divergent directions with our answers. But each of us had used the material that we had been exposed to over the course of the year and developed a theory which was tenable, well maintained, and well presented. We both got high commendation for entirely different answers. “That was the most singularly memorable experience that I had connected with the academic part of Reed. There’s a real value placed on problem solving, using oneself and using it honorably, within the context of advancement of whatever the subject matter is.” Jerry wrote his thesis, “The Tariff and the Lumber Industry of the Pacific Northwest,” with Prof. Stewart advising. After Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in a program that would take him into active service in two years. By going to summer school, he was able to graduate before being called to duty in the navy in March 1944.
Jerry once said that his career actually started at Reed, with an alleged break in the honor system. A student who had been caught cheating in her written work denied it. The student council asked Jerry to counsel the student, help her face up to what was happening, and thus face a less harsh penalty. Over the next week he took walks with her and the two talked. Jerry recalled, “At the end of that time, I can’t tell you what I did, except that somehow I was empathic enough, reassuring enough, and realistic enough that she did say, ‘Yes, I did cheat, and I’m sorry. I want to face up to it.’ I don’t remember what the penalty was, but that was my first inclination that I had some aptitude in the human relations realm.” While he was in the navy, one of his former Reed roommates put Jerry in touch with a relative who was a prominent social worker. “As far as I was concerned, social work was a basketful of goodies that you carried to poor people and so as a profession, I had never even thought of it,” Jerry said. But he began reading books by the great psychologists of the 20th century and putting together a career plan. To become a psychiatrist would mean starting over, getting a science education and then on to medical school. Being a psychologist would require getting a PhD, and Jerry didn’t want to go to school that long. He could complete a master’s in social work in two years. After earning a master’s in social work from the University of Chicago, he met his wife, Vivian, while working in Chicago. They lived in the area for about 14 years and had three sons. Jerry was a social worker in New York for two and a half years, and then was recruited as a professor at the University of Washington. He and Vivian raised their boys in Bellevue. Jerry loved teaching, and when he was 52, he found a new love—playing soccer. But after his leg got clobbered in a game, Vivian suggested, “Why don’t you take up refereeing?” He was the oldest active soccer referee in the state when he began at the age of 54 and refereed into his 70s. He was a wordsmith who enjoyed writing; he liked puns, wine making, singing, and serving martinis at 5 p.m. Eight years after becoming legally blind, he wrote and published the memoirs of his summers spent in rough-’n’tough Alaska. “The experience at Reed helped me become, I hope, a thoughtful, analytic, adult male,” Jerry said. “It developed an appreciation of that learning system that is deep in me, that I would fight for. The little money that we have, we give way more to Reed than to any other source, because of that. And Vivian, bless her heart, goes along with me on that.” Jerry is survived by his wife, Vivian, and his sons, Mark and Mike.
Alice Rigby Carlson ’46 October 19, 2018, in Blue Ridge, Georgia, following a brief illness.
Alice was the eldest child of five born to Donald and Fern Rigby in Everett, Washington. After graduating from Everett High School, she attended Reed but transferred to the University of Maryland School of Nursing. Before finishing her degree, she met Arthur Carlson in Seattle, and they married in 1945 during his wartime service in the U.S. Navy. Following the war, they made their home in Anacortes, Washington, where they had three children. Arthur’s work in the building products industry moved the family to Rock Hill, South Carolina; New York City; and Marietta, Georgia. Following years of volunteer work, Alice joined Harr y Norman Realtors in Marietta, where she worked until her retirement at the age of 80. She was a member of the P.E.O. Sisterhood and served as president of the Georgia chapter. Her commitment to her family, church, and work exemplified her ability to successfully blend her varied interests and passions for living a full life. Alice is survived by her daughter, Janice Glascock, and her siblings, Enid Sherman, Iris Broad, and Jim Rigby.
Charles Conrad Carter ’46
September 17, 2018, in Portland.
In high school, Conrad spent his summers washing dishes at a Washington camp where Reed Prof. Harold Sproul [music 1938–43] taught folk music to campers. Conrad dreamed of becoming a doctor and shared a tent with a Reed student, Charles Edward Carter ’41 (no relation), who had just been accepted into a prestigious medical school back East. Conrad was impressed that the medical school would be interested in a student from faraway Reed. After graduating from high school, he went to Alaska to fish for the summer. Though he wanted to be a doctor, he hadn’t applied to any college. “In those days, he said, “the idea was that you had to be pretty brainy to get into medical school, and I wasn’t really terribly impressed with my academic capabilities.” He conferred with his friend John Siemens ’46, who planned to go to Reed. John volunteered to call Reed’s admission office, and arrangements were made for Conrad to take the entrance examination with one of his high school teachers. “Looking back on it,” he ruminated, “I think that Reed and all the other colleges were concerned about the lack of a student body. The males were all going off to war. Reed probably assumed that I’d be going to war before the year was over, in the first place, and in the second place, they had the room.” At Reed, Conrad played football on what he joked was the only football team in the country that would have him. They were not in a league, but the coach would arrange for games with
Pacific College (now George Fox University), the University of Portland, and the Oregon College of Education in Monmouth. The female students at Reed—dressed in bobby socks and saddle shoes with ribbons in their hair— reminded Conrad of high school. But unlike high school, the academics were demanding. “In those days,” he recalled, “there was a mixing of age groups in the dorms. The older students were used to studying or they wouldn’t be where they were; so there was no fooling around after dinner. You kept quiet or the big boys would come after you and see to it that you kept quiet. I began to study very hard, on Saturday mornings and all day on Sunday. I developed this self-control and was able to deny some of those enjoyments that I had when I was in high school for the sake of making it.” Students who weren’t succeeding academically would get a white slip in their mailbox, and it was always a time of tension when the white slips came out. “I never had a white slip,” Conrad said. “It’s interesting that there were four of us from my high school who started Reed together. The other three had been on the Honor Society, but I was the only one of the four who graduated from Reed. I think that the other three were very dependent upon positive feedback for their academic commitment—their teachers, their parents. At Reed, you didn’t get academic feedback. Teachers weren’t patting you on the back, because if you did very well you were expected to do very well.” As the war progressed, fewer and fewer males were left on campus. Conrad joined the navy air force, but he wore glasses and didn’t pass the physical. The army encouraged him to enlist; they wanted educated officers, would let him finish his education, and enlisting would keep him free of the draft board. Six months later, the army started calling people up from this enlisted reserve corps. “It kind of went by your academic major,”
Conrad remembered. “The sociologists, literature majors, psychologists and so forth all went first. The last to go were the physics majors and the premed students. Then the physics majors were called. Prof. Frank Hurley [chemistry 1942–51], the dean of men, had great foresight. He went to the University of Oregon Medical School here in Portland and convinced them to admit the 8 to 12 Reed premed students.” Those students began classes at the medical school in the fall of 1942. Two weeks later, those premed students who weren’t admitted were called into active service. Premed students were required to take summer classes for two years and at the end of the second summer, they started medical school. In the end, Conrad went to Reed for 24 months, the equivalent of three years. He was eligible for a bachelor’s degree after the satisfactory completion of two years of graduate school, and medical school was considered a graduate school. Consequently, Conrad never wrote a senior thesis, which he regretted. At medical school he roomed with his buddy, John Siemens. Conrad did a residency in psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. But after a year there, he decided he didn’t want to practice psychiatry the rest of his life. “I had this great education at Reed in the sciences,” he said, “and this great education in medical school, and the way psychiatry was expected to be practiced in those days, you just talked to people. You didn’t even examine them.” He returned to Portland and was hired to examine patients for a doctor. The Korean War was being fought, and any doctor who had not served 24 months of active duty in the service was subject to the draft. Conrad had not been in the service, felt guilty about it, and thought it would be a great adventure. He enlisted in the air force. While he was waiting to be called up, he went to work for a doctor who helped him become a neurologist. By the time he began serving in the air force, he knew more about neurology than any other doctor on the base, ,and in the 24 months he was in the service, he did a lot of neurology. The doctor he had worked with in Portland decided to write a book on a part of the brain called the cerebellum, and he wanted Conrad to take over his practice. “There were other doctors in the office,” Conrad explained, “a neurosurgeon and another neurologist. I did a lot of examinations for the neurosurgeon. I’d examine the patient and then I’d present the workout to him. So here I had another year of neurology, and I decided I wanted to go take a residency.” He completed a residency in neurology at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis in 1956. “I’m very appreciative of what Reed did for me,” Conrad said. “Reed’s reputation was a surprise to me. When I went to Washington University for my specialty training, everybody seemed to know march 2019 Reed Magazine 41
In Memoriam that I had gone to Reed. Evidently its reputation gave me a little bit of a place in society back there. In fact, medical school was easy after Reed. At Reed, you couldn’t get by just by passing examinations. They knew what you were doing because you were in groups of eight or ten, two or three times a week. You could not get through with just rote memorization. In medical school, you could.” From there, he taught and practiced neurolog y at the University of Oregon Medical School in Portland. Though he sometimes worked in private practice, Conrad’s career included being a clinical professor at the OHSU department of neurology and chief of neurology at the Veterans Administration hospital in Roseburg, Oregon. In addition to football, fishing, and mountain climbing, his interests included skiing, camping, and backpacking. His wife, Marylu, and a son, John, predeceased him. Conrad is survived by his sons, Charles Conrad Carter Jr., Christopher Carter, and Ronald Carter.
Earl Roger Hibbard ’49
January 21, 2015, in Olympia, Washington.
Roger was born in Medford, Oregon, and grew up in southern Oregon and California during the Great Depression. He joined the navy in 1946 and became a radar instructor, launching his electronics engineering career. After leaving the navy, he attended Reed for two years, and then married Suzanne Barry; they raised five children in the Bay Area. They moved to Berkeley, where they helped raise Laura and Alicia Jaffe. Family was important to Roger, and for many years he lived in Arroyo Grande with his third wife, Jo Ann Dotario, and raised Curtis Weddington, whose youthful influence and gentle spirit added to the enjoyment of Roger’s later years. Roger worked for more than 50 years in the electronics industry, helping to pioneer early electronic readings, machinery, and much of the technology that runs the movie theater sound industry. One of his career highlights was receiving an Academy Award in 1998 for his lifetime contribution to the film industry. He was a man of many interests, including photography, the wilderness, genealogy, art, and archeology. Roger was also a man of precision; what he did, he did well, and what he built was made to last. After he retired, he and Jo Ann moved to the Seattle area to be closer to family. He spent the last 18 months of his life at Capital Place in Olympia, where he was an active member of the community, mentoring young people, starting a chess club, and befriending many of his fellow residents. He was preceded in death by his first wife, Suzanne, and his second wife, Joyce. His wife, Jo Ann, survives him, as do his children, Steven, Susan, Mary, Meg, Anita, Curtis, Alice, and Laura. 42 Reed Magazine march 2019
Mary Teal Garland ’49
September 11, 2018, in Hancock, New Hampshire, on her way to vote.
The last steps Mary took in life were towards the voting booth. Nothing could have been more appropriate, because throughout her 90 years, she modeled what it meant to be an active citizen. She grew up in a rarefied world of movers and shakers in Greenwich, Connecticut, and attended her mother’s school, Mrs. Teal’s Classes, housed in the family’s Belle Haven home. After studying at Greenwich Academy and Smith College, she attended Reed for postgraduate study in dance. An early love of dance and theatre led Mary to study with such dance greats as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. But after meeting Peter Garland, she abandoned her pursuit of dance. The couple knew each other for only three days before they married and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Peter finished his graduate work at Harvard Graduate School of Design and Mary ran the interiors department of the Architects Collaborative under Walter Gropius, which transitioned to Design Research with Ben Thompson. A two-year Fulbright scholarship took Peter and Mary to Italy, where Peter worked for renowned architect Gio Ponti and Mary established a network of Scandinavian and Italian furniture designers and manufacturers for Design Research. While they were in Italy, Peter contracted tuberculosis, forcing them to return to the United States for his recovery. For the next two years, Mary joined Peter in the Wallingford, Connecticut, Sanatorium with what she referred to as her “sympathetic” case of TB. Together they ran the craft school and newspaper while they planned the rest of their lives. Emerging from the sanatorium with a doctor’s advisory to live a quiet life, they retired to the countryside in Hancock, New Hampshire. But life was anything but retiring or quiet. In 1956, they welcomed the first of what would be five children born in five years. This period marked the beginning of Mary’s lifelong commitment to and involvement with her community. Over the next 62 years, Mary served on committees and boards, including the Monadnock Community Foundation, the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, ITHAKA,
the Hancock School Board, the Contoocook Valley School Board, the Harris Center, and the MacDowell Colony. She was a Hancock Library trustee and treasurer, and a volunteer, organizer, and canvasser with the New Hampshire Democratic Party. Her energy was critical to the founding of the Well School, the Peterborough Indoor Tennis Courts, and Monadnock Music. She was honored in 2017 as Grand Marshal of Hancock’s Old Home Day, and the organizers noted: “Besides her tall and elegant stature, her warm and huge heart, together with her wisdom, have led her to give of herself in ways that go above and beyond time and again. She quietly models for us all what it is to be a citizen— informed, active, and kind beyond words, dedicated and committed to our town and world.” Mary’s sense of community went beyond the structured service of boards and committees. If a friend or townsperson had a loss or experienced difficulties, it was not unusual for them to find a care package on their doorstep or know that Mary was by their side to help. When there was a particular issue that she felt strongly about, she wrote letters, collected signatures, lent her time, her voice, and her passion. Even so, she found time for adventure. In 1969, Mary and Peter took a year’s sabbatical with their five children, camping across Europe and living in Istanbul, Turkey. In Turkey, Mary worked as a volunteer with displaced women, helping them develop products to be sold in tourist markets by adapting traditional designs to modern materials. When she returned from Turkey, she set up an interior design business with Carol Gebhardt, designing interiors and furniture for a range of private and commercial projects, including designing truck stops along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. In the 1980s, after 32 years of marriage and following her husband’s death, Mary refocused her energies on craft design and went to work at Aid to Artisans in collaboration with Save the Children. Working in remote villages— often with refugees in the Middle East, the South Pacific, Asia, and Africa—she helped craftspeople design products to expand their markets. She kept her design skills sharpened with a steady flow of continuing educational courses at the Sharon Arts Center, Eastern Connecticut State College, Haystack Mountain, the New England School of Art, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and needlework workshops with Erica Wilson and Elsa Williams. In her final years, Mary turned her attention to the social and political well-being of her nation. She spent quiet hours writing letters, exercising her rights and what she considered her responsibility as a citizen. She lived her life with enormous joy, humor, thoughtfulness, and gratitude. The sound of a Viennese waltz sent her twirling into the arms of whoever was nearby. Beautiful days rarely passed without a hike or picnic. She sang with her children on road trips, donned elegant costumes for croquet
matches and scary ones for Halloween, and connected people with her delectable dinners and spontaneous dances. Mary is survived by her children: Tara Garland-Dalton, Aaron Garland, Brahma (ne Daniel) Garland, Natasha Garland, and Sarah Garland-Hoch.
William Jennings Baker ’50 November 7, 2018, in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
Bill Baker and Rosemary Berleman
Bill Baker was born in Virginia and at the age of five was left at an orphanage—the Southern Christian Children’s Home in Atlanta, Georgia. From there, he spent his high school years in a home for teenage boys. He came of age just in time to be drafted for World War II. Bill took part in the Normandy invasion and saw heavy action in France, in Italy, and deeply into Germany. After the war, two of his best buddies, Bill Kirsch ’50 and Gene Overstreet ’49, urged him to use his GI Bill at Reed College along with them. At Reed, he was able to expand his lifelong love of literature (the poet Yeats being his first and favorite). At Reed, he met and married Carol Brown ’52, and they became a part of the group that included Gary Snyder ’51, Phil Whalen ’51, Lew Welch ’50, and many others, eventually all living in one house in Sellwood—the 1414 Lambert Street group, where friendships and education bloomed and flourished. They had two children, Catherine and Piers. For many years Bill worked as a city planner for Multnomah County, and there he met a coworker and his second wife, Doris Bruner. There were together for many years, and after her death, when he was in his 80s, Bill and an ex-Reedie (and also an old 1414 Lambert Street tenant), Rosemary Berleman ’48, formed a lifelong partnership. Bill wrote his memoir, Leaving Lila, which was published in 2016, and he immediately began another, Misfortune’s Children, on which he was working at the time of his death. During their time together, he and Rosemary enjoyed many delicious home-cooked meals at the house of Richard Blickle ’49, along with old friends, including many old Reedies. There were memorable times when someone would burst into song or recitations from old Reed productions. Toward the end of his life, when asked how
he hoped to be remembered, Bill said, “Tell then he was a pretty good writer.” —CONTRIBUTED BY ROSEMARY LAPHAM THOMPSON BERLEMAN ’48
Sylvia Wells Baldwin ’50
August 17, 2018, in Honolulu, Hawaii, from a ruptured aorta.
Born in Seattle, Washington, Sylvia began Reed at 17, supporting herself as a waitress and majoring in literature and languages. After three years at Reed, she transferred to the University of Washington, where she earned a bachelor’s degree. She married J. Allen Johnson ’50 and moved to Alaska and back to Portland before moving to Hawaii in 1959. Sylvia focused on raising her four children when they were young, and then, after she divorced, she worked a variety of jobs to support them, including secretary, encyclopedia salesperson, substitute teacher, and tutor. She always wrote, whether it was unpublished novellas and short stories, correspondence with Reed friends, or penning columns in local publications and professional outlets. At the age of 62, she became a U.S. immigration inspector at Honolulu International Airport and worked there for 11 years before retiring. She took trips to Egypt, Machu Picchu, the Galapagos, and an around-the-world marathon, and to the end maintained an active interest in the world and in politics. Survivors include her four children: Branden Johnson, Hunter Johnson, Morgan Johnson, and Melissa Johnson.
Nancy Fry Houghton ’50 October 10, 2018, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
Born in Chicago to Kenneth and Margaret Fry, Nancy attended George Washington University and Reed before graduating from Antioch College. She went on to earn a graduate degree from Teachers College at Columbia University. Nancy was married to Joseph Moran and then to Oliver Houghton. She worked at Bell Labs in New York, the New York Life Insurance Company, and DuPont. She was co-owner of the Bohemia River Marina in Chesapeake City, Maryland. Her career in education included teaching at Murray Avenue School in Larchmont, New York; public schools in Cecil County, Maryland; the Pan American School of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil; the International School of Turin in Turin, Italy; Pace University; and Westchester Community College. Nancy taught well into her late 80s; and continued to volunteer tutor until this year. She was a fierce advocate for math competence and improved math instruction, and a passionate world traveler. She is survived by her sons, Douglas and Clifford Moran.
Mark Lee Woodbury ’50
John Brownlee ’50
September 13, 2018, in Oakland, California, on his 93rd birthday.
John was born in Billings, Montana, and attended high school in Stanford, Montana, where he enjoyed playing basketball. He attended Reed before transferring to the University of Montana, where he earned a degree in accounting and business administration. He served with distinction in the U.S. Air Force with the Fourth Fighter-Interceptor Wing in Korea. In 1957, he married Helen (Shelly) Moore in Helena, Montana, where they raised three sons. John was a partner with the accounting firm of Galusha, Higgins, and Galusha for 33 years; was an active member in the First Baptist Church, where he served as treasurer; and served as board member and president of the Lewis & Clark County Cancer Committee. Upon retiring, John and Shelly enjoyed doing volunteer service for 11 years with the Mobile Missionary Assistance Program, an interdenominational organization of retired Christian RVers working throughout the United Stated for various Christian organizations. They also volunteered for several summers for the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service, which included manning fire lookouts. In Salmon, they were active in the Meals on Wheels program. Survivors include his wife, Shelly; his sons Michael and Kirk; and his sisters Jill Sievers and Bonnie Croy.
Mark was born in Schenectady, New York, and grew up in Hingham, Massachusetts. Even as a boy, Mark had a love of wild places. He was smitten by the White Mountains of New Hampshire and Maine, and voyaged on the Saint Lawrence Seaway and to the Caribbean islands with his parents. After serving in the navy during World War II, he attended Reed, where he roomed with beat poets Gary Snyder ’51 and Philip Whalen ’51. He climbed and skied in the Grand Tetons with Martin Louis Murie ’50. Years later, Mark remembered that he was very uncertain of both himself and his future during his Reed years. He worked for Henry
October 30, 2018, in Salmon, Idaho.
march 2019 Reed Magazine 43
In Memoriam Wallace, the 1948 presidential candidate for the revived Progressive Party, and enjoyed singing in the dining hall on Saturday nights. He remembered one Saturday night when a group of Reedies drinking beer on Shakespeare Island were approached by a cop who asked, “Are there any minors in the crowd?” “We were all playing Botticelli,” Mark recalled, “an elaborate game where you got to show off your Reed College erudition. Without a moment’s hesitation Emmy Hammond ’51 piped up, ‘I’m a minor poet of the 19th century.’” He also remembered Prof. Ed Garlan [philosophy 1946–73] explaining that philosophy was “a seamless web,” and that Prof. Bill Alderson [English 1943–64] would remove a match from a book of matches and continue to gesture and lecture for 15 minutes before lighting his cigarette. After moving to Berkeley in the ’50s, he worked as a laborer and a salesman. He explored the many hiking trails of the Bay Area with the Sierra Club, sang in a folk group, and formed lifelong friendships strengthened by a shared commitment to civil rights and environmentalism. Mark met the like-minded Marda Liggett at Unitarian Singles, and they married in 1956. In 1962, he completed his bachelor’s degree in English at UC Berkeley, and then taught English at De Anza and El Sobrante high schools. In later years, he branched out to teach a popular comedy class and a class called Western Days and Ways, enriched by his sabbatical trip rafting the Colorado River. Though they divorced in 1966, Mark and Marda continued to be collegial friends. Mark was a devoted father, leading his children, Brian and Heather, on extraordinary backpacking and camping journeys to the Olympic Mountains, Yosemite, and Alaska. In addition to being an avid outdoorsman who led Sierra Club hikes, he was active in local environmental efforts, including the cleanup of Lake Merritt and protecting the Bay. An eclectic songster, he sang in the Contra Costa Chorale, cofounded the Eclectic Songsters, and sang in the choir at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley. Mark loved words, justice, and humor and led a current affairs discussion group into his late 80s. Mark is survived by his companion for the past 25 years, Dolores Gruenewald; his son, Brian; his daughter, Heather Woodbury; and his stepson, Mark Evans.
Virginia Shirley Wright ’52 May 24, 2017, in Shell Beach, California.
A Portland native, Virginia graduated from Franklin High School before starting at Reed as a music major. She was a private student of prominent clarinetist A. Owen Sanders, and played principal clarinet with the Portland (now Oregon) Symphony Orchestra from 1950 to 1953. While playing in the radio station orchestra at KOIN 44 Reed Magazine march 2019
in Portland—broadcast from the Heathman Hotel—she met Mr. Wr ig ht . A clar ine tist and profession jazz saxophonist, Marshall Wright played alongside Virginia in the orchestra. They married, had two children, and in 1960 moved to California’s central coast, settling in Shell Beach. Virginia joined the San Luis Obispo Symphony orchestra in 1971 and continued until she retired in 2011. Her solo performances included the Première rhapsodie by Claude Debussy, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, and Copland’s Clarinet Concerto. Virginia joined the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo music faculty part time in 1968, teaching woodwind instrument ensemble classes. She gave private lessons on clarinet, flute, and saxophone in her home, and her students were consistently chosen to perform in the annual State Honor Band and Honor Orchestra, as well as in the San Luis Obispo Youth Symphony. Many went on to pursue successful careers as professional musicians and educators. A member of the San Luis Obispo Festival Orchestra since its inception, Virginia was a founding member of Trio Vivo and the Pacific Woodwind Quintet, chamber ensembles that performed frequently throughout the country. As an indication of her versatility, Virginia played saxophone with the Cuesta Jazz Ensemble, under Warren Balfour, at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1976 and 1990. Virginia approached life with optimism, grace, and humor. She is survived by her daughter, Tracy Wright; her son, Jeffrey Wright; and her brother, Jim Shirley.
Hans Grunbaum ’53
September 23, 2018, in Sherwood, Oregon, following a stroke 11 months earlier.
After escaping Nazi Germany with his family, Hans settled in Portland in 1937. He graduated from Lincoln Hig h School and then started at Reed, finishing his bachelor’s degree in biology at Washington State University, where he also earned a doctorate in veterinary medicine. Hans served as an officer in the coast guard before beginning a veterinary practice that spanned 50 years. He was known for his unwavering compassion— particularly if you had four legs and a tail. In the summer of ’63, Hans met Marilyn Klein, who was visiting from Los Angeles. Quickly smitten, they married four months later and raised two sons. Tragically, the youngest, Michael, was killed at the age of nine by a drunk driver.
Hans and Marilyn built a home on a beautiful property on Sherwood’s Chehalem Mountains, where they bred thoroughbred horses and planted an expansive vineyard of pinot noir and pinot gris grapes. Hans took great pleasure in maintaining the land, tending his garden, and being outdoors, and his love for physical activity included skiing with his family and playing tennis, squash, and handball with his good friends at the Multnomah Athletic Club. He was an outgoing and opinionated conversationalist, and could often be found in the club’s fitness room socializing with pals. Hans and Marilyn traveled extensively but returned to their favorite spots every year, basking in the sun in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho. Generously contributing to his community, Hans served on many boards, including those of the Oregon Zoo, the Oregon Veterinary Medical Association, the Portland Veterinary Medical Association, the Washington County Board of Health, and DoveLewis Emergency Veterinary Hospital, of which he was a founding benefactor. He practiced his faith at Congregation Beth Israel. Hans is survived by his wife, Marilyn, and his son, Eric.
M. Joyce Hyman MacGregor ’53
September 30, 2018, in Renton, Washington, of breast cancer.
The only child of Roger and Charlotte Hyman, Joyce grew up in the Wallingford area of Seattle and forged a circle of friends in kindergarten that lasted a lifetime. After graduating from Lincoln High School, she headed to Portland to attend Reed, where she met her true love, Duncan MacGregor ’51. The diminutive Joyce (4�11��) had a big, fun-loving personality—the perfect foil to Duncan’s measured, academic, and serious nature. It was a match made in heaven, and they married in 1951. They raised three children and moved to Italy in 1972 with their youngest daughter in tow. This marked the beginning of four years of travel, adventure, new food, new friends, and some hilarious hijinks. After Duncan’s death in 2010, Joyce was active in family life until a recurrence of breast cancer in January, following a 20-year remission. To the end, she remained a person of grace, and slipped away quietly after a three-day hospitalization. Her children Jamie Deak and Roger MacGregor survive her.
Mary Jo Moore Kitz ’54
September 2, 2018, in Boise, Idaho.
Hailed as an eco-warrior, Jo dedicated her life to working for environmental causes. “What I’m doing is really a passion because I believe in saving the land as it is,” she said. “We have this incredible diversity and we’re on the verge of losing it.” Jo was born in the British West Indies and moved with her family to Portland during World War II. She loved spending time in the forests around Mt. Hood. The family later
moved to Louisiana, where Jo started at Louisiana State University. A year after getting her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Reed, she married navy pilot Bill Kitz. They settled in California’s San Fernando Valley, where Jo resided for 60 years and raised two children, her daughter, Jamie, and her son, Kevin. She began a career as an elementary school teacher, but in her early 30s she discovered her true passion when she began volunteering for the Sierra Club Task Force. Since childhood, Jo had always been at ease in the mountains. But after meeting city kids who were afraid of bugs and wild critters, she realized that finding joy in nature is not necessarily a given. Jo become a founding member of the California Invasive Plant Council and led countless land-restoration volunteers—students, at-risk children, church and youth groups—in the removal of invasive weeds, replacing them with plants native to California in oak groves and woodland areas. Having earned the sobriquet “the Intrepid Weed Warrior,” she was named a fellow of the California Native Plant Society, the highest honor bestowed upon its members. “There is such a peacefulness and harmony when the plants are native,” she said. “When I see a field of mustard, it’s a death scene. Nothing survives there.” Jo instituted “Sundays in the Santa Monicas,” a program offering residents the opportunity to enjoy the Santa Monica Mountains in their natural state via walks and hikes led by Sierra Club leaders, volunteers, and park rangers. Jo thrived as an outdoor educator for city dwellers. “They thanked me as if they had been to the most marvelous party ever!” she said. She became program director for the Mountains Restoration Trust, which works to preserve and enhance the natural resources of the Santa Monica Mountains through land acquisition, conservation easements, habitat preservation, restoration, research, and education. Working tirelessly to introduce the Santa Monica Mountains to the people of Los Angeles, Jo helped raise their awareness of its beauty and benefits. Her efforts resulted in the area becoming the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, part of the National Park Service. “It was never my grand plan to become an advocate for the Santa Monica Mountains, but one thing led to another,” she said. As a board member for the Santa Monica Moutains Trails Council, she helped create the annual Santa Monica Trail Days. One day while standing beneath a valley oak tree in Malibu Creek State Park, she had a revelation. Once both plentiful and important, valley oaks had been harvested by early settlers for farmland, fuel, and timber. Now only a handful remained. Jo had the notion that this needed to be remedied and convinced the park superintendent. In 1992, she started a program called Commemorative Oaks to help restore the oak woodlands
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of Malibu Creek State Park. Under her leadership, countless volunteers planted more than 2,000 native oak trees and dedicated thousands of hours to keeping them alive. At the age of 80, she retired after 26 years with the Mountains Restoration Trust and was honored with accolades and awards that recognized her work and contributions. In 2004, California Assembly Member Fran Pavley named Jo Woman of the Year for her district at the California State Capitol. Jo also received awards for her contributions to the National Park Service, the California State Parks, and the Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council. “Our successes keep me going, but it’s more than that,” Jo said. “It’s going out and leading a group of people and seeing the ‘Ah-ha!’ experience that they get and the sense of whatever it is that draws people to the outdoors and provides this nameless thing to people, to see how they appreciate just being there, to integrate with our natural world.” Jo is survived by her daughter, Jamie Kitz, and her son, Kevin Kitz. Her life’s work lives on, continued by the many she inspired and mentored.
Ruth Seitlin Grinspoon ’55 September 4, 2018, in Aspen, Colorado.
Ruth was born in Vienna, Austria, to American parents who were working to defeat General Francisco Franco. Raised in Greenwich Village in New York City, she attended the Little Red School House. She started her college education at Reed, but finished at UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s in anthropology. In 1973, she earned her master’s in library science at Pratt Institute.
The Reed travel programs are designed as small The Reed travel programs group adventures are designed as small that work as mobile group adventures classrooms, offering thatthe work as mobile you chance to learn classrooms, about places offering and cultures you the chance toand learn alongside curious about places and cultures interesting companions. alongside curious and interesting Learn more companions. at reed.edu/alumni/travel. Learn more at reed.edu/alumni/travel.
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In Memoriam She married Kenneth Grinspoon and they had two daughters, Elizabeth and Jennifer. Ruth later said, “It was not a successful marriage.” She worked first as a teacher and then as a librarian for the New York City Board of Education, always in Manhattan. Going to the Aspen Music Festival durinwwg her sabbatical 27 years ago, she could often only afford to stand outside the tent. In more recent and secure times, she wouldn’t miss concerts from her seat inside. Ruth split her retirement between her Chelsea apartment, Aspen, and traveling. She never purchased an Aspen property, staying at the Holland House, the St. Moritz, and finally at the Hearthstone. At all of these residences she met dear friends and earned her uncounted flyer miles pursuing them, especially in Australia. She loved to ski, and scuba diving was a passion.
Ramon Shoen ’56
November 17, 2018, in Eagle, Idaho, of cancer.
Ramon was born in a farmhouse in Turner, Oregon, the youngest of seven children. After graduating from Reed, he earned a medical degree from the University of Oregon Medical School. He was working as a physician for Douglas Aircraft in Southern California when he met his wife, Elissa Dudley. They were married in 1964 in Hollywood, California, and later moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where they had two sons, Jay and Jon. In 1978, the family moved to Las Vegas, where Ramon worked as a physician for the Nevada Test Site before deciding to specialize in emergency medicine. He worked as an ER physician in Las Vegas until his retirement in 1995. During retirement, he enjoyed skiing and fishing with his family. When Elissa died in 2006, Ramon moved to Boise, Idaho, to be near his son, Jay. In Boise, he met his dear friend WenHua Hawkins, with whom he enjoyed dining out and playing ping pong at Boise State University. Ramon is survived by his two sons, Jay and Jon.
Stephen Tellman ’57 October 21, 2018, in Tucson, Arizona.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Steve grew up in an air force family that traveled around the country before settling in Sacramento, California, when he was a teenager. At Reed, he wrote his thesis, “An Elementary Approach to Fermat’s Last Theorem,” with Prof. Jack Dudman [math and dean of students 1953–85] advising. He went on to get a PhD in mathematics from the University of Washington and taught briefly at Pomona College. In 1965, he joined the math department at the University of Arizona where he remained on the faculty for 33 years. Steve introduced thousands of students to the joys and sorrows of calculus, linear algebra, and statistics before retiring in 1998. He had an impressive ability to overcome 46 Reed Magazine march 2019
obstacles and remain positive in the face of difficulties. As a teenager, he battled back from polio, and he showed a similar determination and optimism in his later years as he faced decreasing mobility and other medical issues. After retiring, Steve continued to study and write. In addition to his love of math, he enjoyed classical music and had a daunting collection of CDs and LPs, ranging from Josquin des Prez to Iannis Xenakis. Steve is survived by his wife, Jen; his son, Edwin; his daughter, Carol; and his stepdaughter, Ginette.
Lawrence Weeks ’57
October 25, 2018, in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
A physicist and pioneering technical manager on aerospace projects, Lawrence was known for groundbreaking efforts in rocketry and satellite payloads at Bell Labs, the Aerospace Corporation, and the U.S. Air Force. He was born in Portland, and, his studies led to degrees from Reed and Stevens Institute of Technology. He is survived by his wife, Dorothy; his daughter Carolyn; his son, John; and his sister, Barbara.
David Ambrose Potts ’62
September 2, 2018, in Seattle, of lung cancer.
David grew up in the foothills of Mount Rainier, the eldest of nine children born to Ambrose and Mary Potts. He was a brilliant student, graduating from Seattle’s Eatonville High School at the age of 16. David attended Reed on a National Merit Scholarship. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics, writing his thesis with Prof. Arthur Leigh [economics 1946–88]. David married fellow alum Edith Skip Wolff ’62 and moved to Seattle to begin working on a master’s degree at the University of Washington, where he fell in love with photography. He was hired by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as a photographer in 1966, and in his 12 years with the newspaper he photographed the Beatles, Richard Nixon, Bobby Kennedy, the maiden flight of the Boeing 747, and much more. With the birth of their children, Michael and Cory Lynne, David and Skip became a family, but they divorced in 1972. David bought a tiny house in Ballard and met Mary Catherine (Mary Kay) Rohwer, whom he married in 1982. In the late ’70s, David began working for Delta Marine building fishing boats. When he was in his 40s, he worked in construction and eventually started his own business restoring and renovating homes as well as working on major improvements at the University of Washington and Woodland Park Zoo. Active throughout his life, in his youth David enjoyed mountain climbing, sailing, motorcycling, skiing, and scuba diving. In his later years, he graduated to hiking, fly fishing, and golf, and he and his friends were avid participants in the Lake Union Duck Dodge sailboat races for many years. He approached life with
astonishing vigor, considering that from age 39 on he was a cardiac patient who endured countless bypass and stent procedures, and, in his late 60s, had a kidney removed. One year ago, he was thrilled that he was still able to hike the Pinnacle Peak Trail at Mount Rainier with several of his high school friends. He possessed a lifelong appetite for learning, was an avid reader, and loved taking courses on astronomy, geology, fly fishing, music, sumi-e Japanese ink wash painting, and frettedinstrument construction. In his later years, he mastered the art of building and repairing ukuleles and guitars with the encouragement of the staff at Dusty Strings and members of the Seattle Ukulele Players Association. David had a keen sense of humor and irony, was a good, patient listener, and was generous with his time and experience. He had a knack for letting people talk through their own problems, but also called out BS where he saw it. He is survived by his wife, Mary Kay; his son, Michael; and his daughter, Cory.
Gary L. Brooks ’72
September 2, 2018, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, of cancer.
The son of an air force officer, Gary grew up in Europe, Asia, and many places from the east to the west coast of the United States. After graduating from high school in Virginia, he came to Reed, but, unnerved by the Portland rain, he transferred to the University of Oklahoma. He majored in letters and religion, paying his way through college by buying, remodeling, and flipping houses. Upon graduating from law school in 1975, Gary put up a shingle on Main Street in Norman, Oklahoma, and began practicing law. He devoted much of his career to representing those harmed by the negligence of others and helping ordinary people take on corporations and powerful interests. He made a difference in the lives of countless clients who could not afford to hire a lawyer by the hour and was always willing to use his time and resources to improve the lives of those around him, even when the caller did not have a viable case but just needed to talk with someone who cared. Gary began a mission of promoting board certification for attorneys and hoped that one day lawyers, like doctors, would be certified specialists. He founded the American College of Board Certified Attorneys, served as the president of the Oklahoma Trial Lawyers Association, and was appointed to the Oklahoma Board of Medical Licensure by Governor Brad Henry. In his later years, Gary traded in the designer suits and custom cowboy boots he wore as a successful attorney for jeans and loafers. Most days he could be found walking his Westies in the parks of Nichols Hills. He was at peace with his destiny after being diagnosed with cancer and shared with his family that he had accomplished all he had set out to do. Gary was pleased that his legacy would endure with his son Michael
carrying on the law firm he had built with Ann. He felt he had truly lived the American dream. He is survived by his wife, Ann, with whom he traveled the globe; his sons Michael and Reid; his father, Col. Glenn L. Brooks; and his brother, Spencer.
Garry Whyte ’73
August 14, 2018, in Aurora, Oregon.
Garry was admitted to Reed at the age of 15, but deferred his enrollment for seven years. In that time, he was a ski instructor and did two tours of duty in Vietnam. He entered Reed in 1969, leaving in 1972 to complete his degree at UC Berkeley. As a mechanical engineer, Gary worked building machines for agriculture and for cleaning up oil spills. He founded two companies: PrivateCode, which specialized in private transactions via the web and other commerce, and 1-800-CHARITY, the first national system to deliver contributions from donors to any charity without cost to the charity. Gary is survived by his daughter, Hallie Whyte: his son, Jeremy Whyte; his sister Sue Schaefer; and his love, Kathy Grant.
Lisa Hess ’86
October 31, 2018, in Iowa City, Iowa, of breast cancer.
Lisa was born in Chicago and grew up in Minnesota. At Reed, she majored in biology and wrote her thesis on lymphocyte homing with Prof. Laurens Ruben [biology 1955–92]. She met her husband, Rob Piper ’85, on campus, and, after graduating, worked as a cell biology researcher and nuclear medicine technologist.
Lisa earned a medical degree at Oregon Health Sciences University Medical School and afterwards trained in Indianapolis and Iowa City as an obgyn. For two decades, she was a partner in OB-GYN Associates in Cedar Rapids and treasured caring for her patients of all ages and walks of life. Lisa was a compassionate, curious, and knowledgeable physician who advocated for the rights of the women she cared for. While a resident at the University of Iowa, she became the mother of twins and enjoyed the challenges and joys of raising a family. She was true to her principles, steadfast in her integrity, and humane in her quirky sense of humor. She is survived by her husband, Rob; her sons, Sam and Max Piper ’22; her brother, Demian Hess; her mother, Valerie Lee; and her father, Jeffrey Hess.
Martin Van Pelt ’86
September 9, 2019, in Cavtat, Croatia.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Martin spent most of his life in Boulder, Colorado. He attended Reed for two years and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado in Boulder. Martin worked at Picosecond Pulse Labs in Boulder, where he was vice president, chief engineer, and part owner. Passionate about engineering, solving problems, and documentation, he loved his work. He enjoyed getting to know his coworkers and sharing his kind and gentle way with others. Engineering, backcountry skiing, cycling, hiking, and sailing were life passions for Martin.
He knew all the best ski tours and hikes in the Colorado mountains and spent countless happy days sharing them with family and friends. He spent last winter exploring the ski slopes and villages of the European Alps. In 2015, he and his wife, Sarah, began spending summers sailing in France and the Mediterranean. Sailing was a perfect choice for Martin; in addition to the adventure, there were many systems for him to learn about, optimize (Martinize), and document. The cause of death was likely food poisoning suffered while living on his sailboat with his wife, Sarah. She survives him, as do his parents, Richard and Marianne Van Pelt; his siblings Stefanie and Tom; his stepmother, Caroline Van Pelt; and his step-brothers, David and Robb Duff. A number of these memorialized were members of Reed’s Eliot Society and included a gift to the college in their estates. We are grateful for their contributions to the world and to the college.
Pending
Fred Leitz ’40, Edward L. Bennett ’43, Phyllis Church ’43, Alan Holtzman ’43, Billy Joe Storseth ’44, Marian Whitehead ’44, Elaine Mitchell Attias ’45, Robert Greensfelder ’50, Connie Hart ’51, William Macbeth ’51, Nancy Meigs Brandriss ’52, William McDonald ’53, Marshall Nechtow ’59, Jane Shell Raymond ’59, Caroline Locher-Stein ’67, Henri Montandon ’69, Richard Atwater ’72, Stephen A. Marder ’75, Otavio Rodrigues Lima ’76, Aida Bogas Metzenberg ’77, Stan Metzenberg ’80, Marie O’Shea ’81, and Mark Redhead ’90.
REED COLLEGE MASTER OF ARTS IN LIBERAL STUDIES
“My work in technology is professionally rewarding but also intellectually one-dimensional. I was hungry for a deeper engagement with the broader world of ideas and a guiding structure within which to do so. Participating in the MALS program has given me the opportunity to engage in the free exchange of ideas in a supportive, structured community of like-minded individuals. In my time at Reed I have experienced personal growth and significant scholarly development, and this is due in no small part to the academic excellence and attentiveness of the teaching staff, the dynamic dialectic of the class conference, and the diversity of course work.” —DEREK FINN MALS ’20
Learn more at reed.edu/MALS.
Object of Study
What they’re looking at in class
Migration Story Follow the footprints across this Aztec codex, and you’ll encounter a place with no name, where a tree, encircled by human arms, is toppling over. What is the significance of this sign and how do we read the event recounted here? For the first time in Reed’s history, students in Humanities 110 are studying texts from the Americas. A module on Mexico City began in January with a lecture by Prof. Nathalia King [English 1987–] on an Aztec text known as the Tira de la Peregrinación. This document,
48 Reed Magazine march 2019
composed ca. 1530 on a long strip of bark paper, tells the origin story of the Mexica people: a two-hundred-year migration from Aztlán to an island on Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico, where they would build the extraordinary city of Tenochtitlan. The city would become one of the largest in the world, remarkable for its beauty and feats of engineering. The Nahuatl writing system uses four different types of signs and students study the varying deployment of these in Mexica imperial
stories. In this detail, we can see examples of hiero- (or sound) glyphs, icons, and pictographs. The footprints might represent the Mexica people’s movement across space (and elsewhere in the codex, when used with a calendrical glyph, across time). Simple lines tether people and places to identifying hieroglyphs, in which a symbol stands for a syllable in a word. A small scroll next to a person’s mouth indicates speech. And the god Huitzilopochtli is represented by the hummingbird/human head atop a temple.
0 0 0 , 1
ADVENTUROUS SPIRIT
O R S N O D
LOVE OF LEARNING
TIMELESS SENSE OF FASHION
QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE
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MEET ME AT INFINITY: Louis Webb ’12 uses a basketball to illustrate the mind-bending world of non-Euclidean geometry at Paideia 2019.
Reed  march 2019
Volume 98, No. 1