Reed College Magazine June 2015

‰ june 2015

REDISCOVERING A MASTER Prof. Sarah Wagner-McCoy unearths new manuscripts that cast fresh light on the first African American novelist

cheating heisenberg | portland on the take | reed’s first computer

Most Reed alumni would agree that our years at Reed leave an indelible imprint, a sort of intellectual tattoo we carry with us for the rest of our lives.

Don’t let the ink fade away.

The monetary goal for the Annual Fund this year is to raise a whopping $4,370,000—an audacious target that reflects an astonishing degree of generosity from alumni, friends, and admirers.

But the Annual Fund also has a second goal, which to my mind is even more important— to earn support from at least 4,400 alumni.

pete delahanty

Features 14

Into the Unknown

President’s Summer Fellows circle the globe

‰ June 2015

www.reed.edu/reed_magazine 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202 503/777-7591

By Chris Lydgate ’90

Volume 94, No. 2 MAGAZINE editor Chris Lydgate ’90 503/777-7596 chris.lydgate@reed.edu

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class notes editor Laurie Lindquist 503/777-7591 reed.magazine@reed.edu

Life Beyond Reed

Art director Tom Humphrey 503/459-4632 tom.humphrey@reed.edu

Our occasional series on the careers of recent grads dina avila

REED COLLEGE RELATIONS vice president, college relations Hugh Porter Executive director, communications & public affairs Mandy Heaton

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Portland on the Take Benji Fisher ’94 probes Stumptown’s seedy past

By Katelyn Best ’13

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Cheating Heisenberg

Physicist Kater Murch ’02 pushes uncertainty to new limits

By William Abernathy ’88

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Woman for All Seasons

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Rediscovering a Master Prof. Sarah Wagner-McCoy unearths new manuscripts by the first African-American novelist

Caroline Miller ’59, MAT ’65, dusts off script after a dramatic pause lasting 40 years

By Bill Donahue

By Laurie Lindquist 20

Inside Job

Reed student gets an education about life behind bars

By Maddy Wagar ’16

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Brilliant Surgeon, Tragic Accident The quicksilver life of Dr. Arthur McLean ’21

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DEPARTMENTS 3

Letters

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Eliot Circular

12 Empire of the Griffin

Connecting Reed alumni around the globe

34 Reediana

Books, films, and music by Reedies

38 Class Notes

By Karen Lea Anderson Peterson

44 In Memoriam

sarah wagner-mccoy cover photo by natalie behring

56 Apocrypha DIMWIT and Dr. John

Reed magazine june 2015

director, alumni relations Mike Teskey director, development Jan Kurtz Reed College is a private, independent, non-sectarian four-year college of liberal arts and sciences. Reed provides news of interest to alumni, parents, and friends. 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 (ISSN 0895-8564) is published quarterly, in March, June, September, and December, by the Office of Public Affairs at Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202.

Periodicals postage paid at Portland, Oregon.

Postmaster: Send address changes to Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., Portland OR 97202-8138.

Letters to Reed Write to us! We love getting mail from readers. Letters should be about Reed (and its alumni) or Reed (and its contents) 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.) For contact information, look to your left. Read more letters and commentary at www.reed.edu/reed_magazine.

The Art and Science of Reed

In “Reed Declares New Majors” (March 2015), you asked, “Are computers really compatible with Reed’s emphasis on the humanities?” You answered your own question with a “resounding Yes,” but the real question you should have asked is, “Why did it take so long for Reed to develop a computer science major given Reed’s emphasis on the sciences?”

Every student at the college takes Hum 110.

It plays a central role in socializing and orienting students to Reed. During the strategic planning process, faculty, students, staff, and alumni reiterated our commitment to the course.

However, Reed’s national reputation has been largely built on its teaching and scholarship in the natural and physical sciences, particularly the historical success of these programs in producing PhD students. While every student’s career starts with Hum 110, every student’s academic career ends with the senior thesis. Many alumni will tell you that the thesis was the most important part of their Reed education. If you look at theses, it is quite clear that Reed College emphasizes the natural and physical sciences, mathematics, psychology, English, and the social sciences.

In 2014, more than half (54% or 173) of Reed seniors graduated with degrees in MNS and HSS. Add to this total those seniors with degrees in linguistics, psychology, or interdisciplinary degrees in MNS, HSS, and environmental studies, and you’ve covered 70% of Reed seniors. (All data taken from Reed’s institutional research page.)

The staffing requirements for Hum 110 mean that Reed has always had and will continue to have a strong foothold in the humanities. The new comparative literature major is a wonderful addition to our curriculum, welcome to many because it may start to rebalance disparities

in upper division enrollments and theses. But it is long overdue that we recognize that the majority of Reed students after their first year take classes, take quals, and write theses in the sciences, mathematics, and the social and behavioral sciences. This is our emphasis. Our self-understanding as a community, even when it comes to tongue-in-cheek sentences in the magazine, should reflect this fact.

—Prof. Paul Gronke [political science] Portland, Oregon

Out of the Shadows

Thank you, Paula Scott ’85 and Chris Lydgate ’90, for taking the trouble to write and to publish the letter “Out of the Shadows” in the March 2015 issue of Reed. I have been grousing about Reed mullahs and hope the following comments add something useful to considerations of gender and justice.

The closely defined personal roles of my 1966 cohort and the contemporary culture of rape

here by the boatload” pointed me, finally, to the nearest Y. Twenty years of training alongside accomplished athletes and street-smart Ave rats opened my eyes to my own fouls as well as to the many cheap shots I did not know how to identify when I was younger.

I find it most interesting to evaluate considerations of social justice by considering education and personhood rather than gender or race. It may be helpful to remember that, as I understand it, late-19th-century clergy were debating the very existence of women’s souls. The current campaign for an animal bill of rights is promising: the first successful child abuse prosecution was brought in New York City under animal cruelty law. Next summer’s alumni college discussion of diversity promises to be as fruitful as last summer’s look at religion.

—Chris Emerson ’66 Seattle, Washington

“ I find it most interesting to evaluate considerations of social justice by considering education and personhood rather than gender or race.” —Chris Emerson ’66 make it difficult to hold the college accountable for faculty expectations of female students. I did have a keen sense of being a designated breeder. A faculty member stressed the importance of raising children at a time when I was sustaining an abusive relationship with a fellow undergraduate and not even close to recovering from earlier and all too common misuse.

I did not know how to protect my body, my time, or my energies. Acquiring an engagement ring was as important as collecting a diploma. I will not list the dorm mates who sobbed about their unadorned third left fingers on graduation day. Female students paid the same fees as males. Whether they received equal value is worth questioning.

The long march since commencement has been punctuated by its share of outrages, a few of which I was lucky to survive. The details aren’t important, but the culture binding is. It might as well be binding feet, not to mention gagging the mouth. I prefer a fair contest. Title IX and Prof. Lloyd Reynolds’ [English & art 1929–69] 1973 advice to look to sports for enlightenment and ignore “these gurus who are coming over

I was at Reed during the mid to late ’50s, and was romantically (sexually) involved with two professors. At the time I did not know that these relationships were as common as later they were characterized to have been. I knew of no other examples than my own. I thought of them as I thought of my relationships with other students. I was not traumatized, nor did I feel exploited. I never felt that the relationships were in any way connected with my academic achievements, but that they were in an entirely separate realm.

I see these ’80s women as attempting to rewrite history, from a time before many of them were born. I consider myself a feminist and I am fully in agreement with many of the more activist feminists’ positions. But I stop short of imputing motives to people that they didn’t have. I, myself, am a rape victim, if that matters. I was raped by a stranger who climbed into my bedroom window in the middle of the night, woke me up, robbed me of $13, and proceeded to beat and rape me for about two hours, until he heard a police siren (not an uncommon sound in a city) and left. This was true rape, and June 2015 Reed magazine

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Letters to Reed left me in bad shape physically for over a week and psychologically for the rest of my life. But many actions called “harassment” and therefore “as bad as” rape are not.

—Barbara Adams Bernhardt ’58 Lowville, NY

Prime Exponent

How apt is Prof. Joe Roberts’ description of his Math 11 as a cultural course, introducing students to the language and conceptions of mathematics (Reed, September 2014). When I began Reed in 1956, Math 11 both overwhelmed and inspired. Beginning with the logical calculus of Whitehead and Russell, proceeding to the axioms on succession by Peano, we created the number system as guided by H. A. Thurston in his terse work used as text on the very year of its publication. The aesthetic and logical coherence of that course was stunning. Math 11 remained my most favorite of all my courses through four years at Reed. But, I must add, I had as well the guidance of Prof.

John Leadley [1956–93] leading our study group, who added that systematic sanity of an algebraist to complement the maverick genius of a number theorist such as Roberts, who gloried in the ingenuity of a proof. We must add the name of Prof. Lloyd Williams ’35 [mathematics 1947–81] to the duo, Leadley and Roberts. Roberts may have initiated that course, as pointed out in “Prime Exponent,” but that year Williams was the lecturer, to whom we listened three times a week before we attended our separate discussion groups, where I joined Prof.

Leadley. In my junior year I attended Roberts’ Modern Algebra course, but after months of satisfactory performance, I decided I needed to drop it. To this day, I wished I had forced my way in Leadley’s Modern Algebra class, but I was arbitrarily assigned to Roberts and was not allowed to switch sessions. My comments about the difference between an algebraist and a number theorist are heartfelt. Blessed be both their endeavors. So captivated by such systems of thought, I became a philosophy–anthropology major at Reed, then, as an anthropologist studying Rajasthan, India, was inspired to analyze a natural number system on the base four in an article, “Gold Medallions: The Arithmetic Computations of an Illiterate” (Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Volume 15, 1984). The revered work of Thurston guided the task.

—R. Thomas Rosin ’60 Berkeley, California

The Pacific Menace

The article by Raymond Rendleman ’06, “The Pacifist Menace” (March 2015), was a most excellent and informative piece of writing. The article was especially interesting to me, though I do not have a degree from Reed. I was among the soldiers in the premeteorology program

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Reed magazine June 2015

in 1943–44 for training in another world war, incubated by the first, as notably predicted by President W.T. Foster [1910–19]. That year at Reed made me supremely aware of the excellence of Reed’s faculty in the courses they taught and the contribution Reed was making to the intellectual and moral strength of another generation of soldiers in training. After serving in World War II as a B-29 radar communications officer, I went to Stanford for graduate studies, where David Starr Jordan was of course also a familiar name. I was on the Reed campus only one time after leaving in 1944, to visit my former fellow company officer at TIAA-CREF, Paul Bragdon [1971–88], another remarkable Reed president.

—Francis P. King ’44 New York, NY 10021

A Tale from the Slopes

I was saddened to read of the passing of Terry Chase ’59 in the March 2015 issue of Reed magazine. Beyond his academic background and professional accomplishments and recognitions, there is another side to his talents, which I shared with him, including an interesting tale that, to my knowledge, has never been documented.

We both were avid skiers, and Terry was excellent at it. In spring of 1958 a West Coast Intercollegiate Ski Meet was held up at Mount Hood, with teams from major regional universi-

Terry Chase ’59 and family.

run—the same for both as is done in current ski racing rules. Skiers raced for their individual times, but team scores were calculated using the top four combined slalom and downhill times of that team’s members.

Terry, Eric Terzaghi ’58 (I believe he organized Reed’s team and got us entered), and I had three of Reed’s combined times that counted for team scoring. I regret that I can’t remember

Roger Moment ’59 recalls the West Coast Intercollegiate Ski Meet held at Mount Hood in 1958, when Reed skiiers beat out the “biggies” and returned with the winner’s trophy. ties such as Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, Washington State, and (I believe) also perhaps Cal and Stanford. Besides the “biggies,” Portland State was represented and some other small colleges, including Reed.

The two-day meet was held up at Timberline Lodge and consisted of two events, slalom and downhill. The slalom course was set alongside a new chairlift that started about 3000 feet below the upper parking lot just in front of Timberline Lodge and ended just west of the lodge. (The bottom of the lift was near the start of the Alpine Trail, which people could ski down to Government Camp.) In those days racing gates were bamboo poles with sequential gates topped with colored red, blue, and yellow flags in this repetitive order. The downhill began about one-half mile above the lodge (to reach the start you took the Magic Mile chairlift to Silcox Hut and skied down to it) and ended near the bottom of the lower lift.

The format for the competition was that each racer had to complete two runs on the slalom course to get a time; downhill was just a single

who the fourth member was whose time also counted, or the names of other members of our team (I think there were six or more in total).

When the dust (snow) had settled, it turned out that enough of the faster racers from the larger schools had disqualified (for missing a gate, most likely in the slalom event) that when team scores were calculated Reed came out in first place! The trophy was an ornate silver tray, about 24 inches in diameter, with the names of winning school teams from prior years engraved on it (I think the regional meet had been held for three or more years prior).

Sadly, there is no record of this small triumph recorded in the ’58 Gryphon. Anyhow, I believe that Reed College 1958 would be found inscribed on the plate to verify this tale (wherever the plate may be residing today). Some 58 years later I suspect this original trophy plate has been filled up and a subsequent one added.

But regardless, this was one happy occasion putting Reed into the record books, so to say.

—Roger Moment ’59 Longmont, Colorado

Reedite Deplores “Reedie”

I guess I am an old intolerant troglodyte as the current March Reed magazine would seem to indicate, but when I find myself and other alumni, including elegant Italian Emilio Pucci MA ’37, lumped lumped page after page as a “Reedie,” I have to comment. On page 8, I read, “Reedies are extraordinarily good at problem solving,” but this is a trend that I do not know how to solve. My classmates did not use this diminutive or think of President Dexter Keezer [1934–42] as “prexy,” though we did have some less polite names for him. I learned and worked and played and enjoyed my time at Reed, as did my husband, but this cutesy quality makes going to a holiday party with “more than 200 Reedies” (page 11) a hard fit.

—Rosina Corbett Morgan ’41 Lake Oswego, Oregon

Etching on Mount Neahkahnie

Regarding the letter from Vince Kelly in the September 2014 issue of Reed, T.S. and M.E. Eliot (Theodore S. Eliot ’21 and Mignon Eliot Eliot ’22) were my parents. My older brother was born in November 1924, and I was born in December 1925, so the description found

by Vince must have been done between our births. My grandparents did have a house on the beach at Neahkahnie, which I was fortunate to spend the summer of 1933 in from our home in Tennessee. Quite an experience for a Mississippi River boy!

—Warner A. Eliot ’46 Winchester, Virginia

Dunning Divestment

On the occasion of my 50th reunion at Reed, I had planned to give a larger-than-usual gift to the college. Because of the trustees’ decision not to divest from fossil fuels, I am sending a check for $2 to Reed as a reminder of my loyal status as a contributor, and I am sending the balance to the Multi-School Fossil Fuel Divestment Fund (divestfund.org) in hopes that it will help persuade Reed of the seriousness with which some of its loyal alumni view this matter.

I am very disappointed not only in the decision not to divest but also in the mealymouthed defense of that position, as described in a recent Reed magazine. The pressure on the leadership of Reed College to divest from fossil fuel corporations does not present the same kind of question of academic freedom as the persecution of real or alleged Communists in the ’50s. I can tell the difference between the vilification and persecution of an individual for his or her political beliefs and a principled stand based on extensive scientific analysis.

On the one hand, the action is taken by the powerful against individuals expressing their beliefs. On the other, it is against the powerful fossil fuel corporations that have been

enriching themselves for centuries through the raping and polluting of the land, air, and water of this earth on which we all rely for our well-being and that of all future generations of the living environment.

—Cynthia Brodine Snow ’65 Brookline, Massachusetts

‰ march 2015

INTERSTELLAR ODYSSE Y

Two Reed grads hunt for the classical roots of science fiction.

Editor responds: Every time I write about divestment, I hear the distant echo of of a fresh batch of outraged correspondents sharpening their pencils. Nonetheless, I’ll point out that Reed launched a $5.4 million project in 2013 to save energy and water and cut CO2 emissions by more than two million pounds a year. See www.reed. edu/sustainability.

Dance and Trisha Brown

I am very pleased to read that Reed will be strengthening its dance program and adding a major, thanks to a grant from the Mellon Foundation. I wonder how many still in campus vicinity remember that Trisha Brown of the renowned Trisha Brown Dance Company began her teaching career at Reed? Trisha came to Reed immediately following graduation from Mills College in 1958. She offered a beginning dance class to faculty women and wives. We signed up, hired a Reed student to babysit our preschoolers, and came for oncea-week workouts. We were all pretty out of shape and never got to any artistic semblance of dance, but Trisha certainly knew how to make us move! She was a remarkable teacher, knew how to explain and expect what she wanted. She taught us a routine of warm-up exercises, which I still follow—well, most days.

We were sorry to see her leave after two years, but were glad for her to have the opportunity to go to New York to dance with Merce Cunningham and others, then to found her own Trisha Brown Company, which still performs in New York and tours the world. I have followed her career with fondness.

—Bernice Livingston Youtz, honorary alumna ’68 Tacoma, Washington

Interstellar Odyssey

Many thanks to D.K. Holm for putting together your March cover story “Interstellar Odyssey,” complete with book review, analysis, email interview (“knowledge fiction” and “foreign countries” were particularly insightful), and the surprise bonus of comments from the artist. I did not read the book (yet) but I was surprised to find important themes completely absent from Holm’s article, even though they appear to be anticipated by classical motifs such as the water of oblivion/forgetfulness.

The modern prototype of the identity theme in SF is Body Snatchers, a thinly veiled expression of ’50s anti-commie hysteria (losing one’s individuality to the insipid group

Conquering the number plane

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the science of theatre

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revenge of the mantis shrimp

that claims to bring a peaceful world), which can also be viewed as adolescent angst about conforming to the mainstream. A more recent exploration of the critical question “who am I?” can be found in Total Recall (both the original and its mundane remake), which initially presents another eternal theme, “is this all just a dream?”

The latter theme is common in fantasy or morality tales, where a fantastical adventure teaches important lessons before the protagonist returns back to the starting point, as if nothing had happened. This is the theme of Jumanji and its quasi-sequel Zathura, as well as The Wizard of Oz, and, a century before that, The Saragossa Manuscript. However, modern psychology has brought the dream/reality conundrum into SF in films such as Flatliners, Matrix, Vanilla Sky, and Inception. Identity and the real/unreal duality have taken on an additional flavor with the advent of robots: Bicentennial Man, A.I., Transcendence, etc.

The Time Machine was presented by H.G. Wells as an exploration of “did it really happen?” with the flower at the end as affirmation.

(And Borges once speculated whether Wells took that literary device from Coleridge, who was in turn modifying a passage from Jean Paul’s Geist.) With a nod to Sontag, it’s hard to avoid saying that time travel seems to have been reduced to a motif of remorse, ranging from personal regret (the 2002 remake of Time Machine, as well as the convoluted Predestination) to “the world took a wrong turn” (Star Trek IV, A Sound of Thunder, MIB 3), or both (Time Cop, Deja Vu, Loopers).

Kudos to Chris for highlighting the work of Brett and Benjamin.

—Martin Schell MAT ’77 Klaten, Central Java

June 2015 Reed magazine

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news from campus

Sphere of Influence Students loft a mondo beach ball on the Great Lawn at Renn Fayre, whose theme was “Miami Boom Boom.” Highlights included Prof. Samia Bashir [creative writing 2012–] reading from A Tempest by Aime Cesaire and—yes—a bug-eating contest.

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Reed magazine June 2015

photos by leah nash

Eliot Circular

leah nash

Prez Gets Owl Fever A furious fight erupted in the Quad in March as scores of students struggled for possession of the Doyle Owl in an exuberant melee that eventually engulfed President John Kroger.

As rival student factions vied for victory, Kroger dodged elbows, copies of the Iliad, and overzealous rugby players to plant a hand on this 300-pound slab of Reed history.

The chaos began when students discovered an owl near the Reed reactor. A frantic scrum took place as contenders wrestled for ownership until word filtered through that the object at the center of the mayhem was actually a decoy—one of two fakes planted to maximize confusion.

Cole Sprague

President Kroger catches owl fever during epic struggle in the Quad.

In fact, the “genuine” owl was lying in the Quad, where hordes of students converged in an ecstasy of guile and sweat as they attempted to secure the mascot. Eventually, two rival factions emerged, each attempting to drag the owl into the trunk of their own vehicle and speed away.

The Doyle Owl was originally snatched from an Eastmoreland lawn in the ’20s by a group of intrepid students from House F, later Doyle, and soon achieved the status of an icon. Since then it (or a replica) has been dangled from a bridge, been photographed in swimming pools, visited the New York World’s Fair, been taken to Disneyland, and been frozen in a block of ice.

The fracas in the Quad dragged on for several hours until the owl was finally captured. Its current roost remains unknown.

—LAUREN COOPER ’16

THEY GOT RHYTHM. Prof. Erik Zornik and students investigate mechanisms of rhythm generation in frogs.

Bio Prof Wins $444K Grant from NIH Prof. Erik Zornik [biology 2012–] has been awarded a $444,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to support his research on mechanisms in the brain that generate rhythmic behavior—with the goal of finding new treatments for neurological disorders.

Prof. Zornik is interested in how behavioral variation is encoded in neural circuits. His research inves-

Because many neurological disorders involve disruptions of normal rhythms, the overarching goal of the research, he says, “is to discover novel mechanisms that underlie rhythm generation, potentially leading to novel treatments.”

The grant was awarded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, which is part of the NIH.

It turns out that the croaking of frogs can tell you a lot about the neural basis of behavior. tigates a hindbrain central pattern generator that generates the courtship vocal behaviors of African clawed frogs, Xenopus laevis.

“Adults of this species exhibit a rich vocal repertoire of at least seven call types that range from rhythmically simple to temporally complex,” Zornik explains.

“Xenopus vocalizations are sexually differentiated; males and females produce calls with distinct temporal characteristics that are regulated by s te ro i d h o r m o n e s d u r i n g development and in adulthood. This makes their vocal behaviors an ideal subject for understanding the neural basis of behavior and behavioral plasticity.”

Reed faculty members currently have 7 multiyear awards totaling $2.6 million from NIH and 22 multiyear grants and fellowships totaling $4.6 million from other funders. The other funders include 3ie, the American Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. Air Force, the Comparative and International Education Society, Fulbright, the D e fe n s e A d v a n c e d R e s e a rc h Projects Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Ford Family Foundation, the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

—RANDALL S. BARTON

June 2015 Reed magazine

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Eliot Circular Class of ’14 Begins Quest for World Domination Like wildflower seeds on the wind, the class of 2014 has dispersed to the far reaches of the globe in search of work and opportunity.

According to a survey conducted by the Center for Life Beyond Reed (CLBR) six months after graduation, of those who responded that finding a job was their primary destination, 76% had found fulltime or part-time employment, 10% were in grad school, and 4% were doing service work such as AmeriCorps.

Their activities span everything from monitoring human rights in Mexico, to working in the district attorney’s office in Portland, to promoting sustainable textiles in Tibet. More than 30 are doing research of one kind or another and about two dozen are teaching or tutoring.

Physics major Prakher Bajpai ’14 is now employed as a first-year analyst in the risk department at Pacific Alternative Asset Management Company (PAAMCO) in Irvine, California, and is tickled to have

landed a rewarding first job.

Prakher’s job is no coincidence. An international student from Nepal, he was hellbent on going to graduate school in physics.

But in his sophomore year he began to ask whether he might be more suited to a career in finance or engineering. A career counselor at CLBR encouraged him to reach out to alumni. He contacted Reed trustee Jane Buchan, CEO and managing director of PAAMCO, which specializes in constructing diversified portfolios for institutional investors.

“Jane was instrumental in turning me towards finance,” Prakher says. During his junior year, Prakher was one of eight students who traveled to New York City on a Financial Services Fellowship arranged and sponsored by Buchan. Students met with financial journalists, sales and trading analysts, hedge fund managers, and other industry professionals.

Whether they start their careers as

snowboarding instructors, radio reporters, or motorcycle salespeople, we look forward to watching the class of ’14 take root—and blossom. —RANDALL S. BARTON

Reed Class of ’14 Six Months Later

PT Work 15%

Seeking work Service Seeking Ed Other

Grad School 10% 4% 4% 3% 3%

FT Work 61% Snapshot of the class of ’ 14 six months after graduation, based on a study by the Center for Life Beyond Reed. The knowledge rate for the survey is 85%; in other words, the destinations of 15% of the class remain unknown.

Tango Masters Tear It Up with Reed Orchestra

—BRITTNEY CORRIGAN-MCELROY ’94

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Reed magazine June 2015

alex krafcik ’15

When the soundcheck wrapped up and the doors swung open, hundreds of music lovers swarmed inside, packing Kaul Auditorium for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Astillero, an influential band on the cutting edge of Argentina’s tango vanguard, spent a week at Reed visiting classes and rehearsing with the student orchestra, culminating in a performance of Soundtrack Buenos Aires on February 20. Led by pianist Julián Peralta, the band delivered their revolutionary original music— urgent, aggressive, and bursting with rhythmic energy. By the end of the concert, the crowd was on their feet, cheering for more.

The event was presented by Tango for Musicians, North America’s leading tango workshop for musicians. Led by Prof. Morgan Luker [music 2010–], the workshop takes place at Reed each June and attracts musicians from across the globe.

This year’s workshop (June 21–28) features several public events, including a concert with Chamber Music Northwest on Saturday, June 27. Find more at reed.edu/tango.

Our Brilliant Students

PHOTOS BY CHRIS LYDGATE

Two Seniors Nab Watsons

Reed students Rennie Meyers and Sasha Peters won Watson Fellowships to pursue a year of independent study after graduation.

Two Reed seniors have won Thomas J. Watson Fellowships for purposeful, independent study outside the United States.

Environmental studies–history major Rennie Meyers ’15 will look at the formation of artificial coral reefs and history/literature major Sasha Peters ’15 will explore abandoned cities in the Soviet sphere through the medium of radio.

Coral Reefs Rennie’s project is titled Deep Water, Horizons: Artificial Reef Communities, Above and Below the Water Line, and she will pursue it in the Canary Islands, Fiji, Brunei, and Japan.

“From oil rigs to submerged eco-art to coral farms, coral growth occurs at the hands of humans with or without their intent,” she wrote. “By exploring interactions between human and nonhuman communities above and below artificial coral habitats in four island nations, I will engage artificial or anthropogenic reef habitats and the humans who have (sometimes accidentally) created and lived with them. I hope to better understand the ways in which humans continue to alter the marine landscape, to photo document those landscapes, and to consult with the human communities responsible for these new habitats in the face of global climate change.”

Rennie wrote her senior thesis on the development of marine ecology in Monterey

Bay with Prof. Josh Howe [history 2012– ]. “I am completely off the walls about this fellowship,” she says. “There is a deep sense of promise and adventure for my time after Reed, even with the road bumps that I know lie ahead. I am honored and ecstatic and bewildered that I get to share this experience with Sasha, who has grown so much with me at Reed. Reed’s influence is so present in my project—studying environmental history taught me to find the human narrative and agency in stories of global climate change.

I am so deeply indebted to Josh Howe for his persistent mentorship, the efforts of all the faculty and staff that helped me through this project and process, and family support along the way.”

Radio in Ruins Sasha’s project is titled Radio in the Ruins and will take her to Latvia, Czech Republic, Poland, Norway, Bulgaria, and Germany.

“The Soviet Union and its influence produced an impressive array of buildings, monuments, and sites that embodied communist ideology,” she wrote. “After the Soviet Union’s fall, many of these places became inessential or unsupportable and were abandoned. Some of those places, decaying as they are, remain today. For my Watson year, I will travel to ruins in the Soviet sphere and make radio pieces about each of them. I aim to encapsulate the rich histories and eerie beauty of

these ruins with sound.”

Sasha wrote her senior thesis on the connection between Soviet environmental history and Russian nationalism and how it was reflected in literature with advisers Prof. Marat Grinberg [Russian 2006– ] and Prof. Josh Howe. Her first reaction to the news, she says, was “temporary blindness, followed by cold sweat, and then excitement. I want to thank Josh Howe, Prof. Zhenya Bershtein [Russian 1999–], the Watson Committee, and my mentors at Rendered, the podcast I work for. I’m so grateful to Rennie, one of my closest friends at Reed, for worrying and talking and sharing with me, and to Meagan Harris ’15, my constant editor and motivator.”

The Watson year provides fellows with an opportunity to test their aspirations, abilities, and perseverance through personal projects on an international scale. The program offers a stipend of $30,000 to 50 fellows to pursue an independent study of something they are passionate about in a country that is not their own.

Since the program began in 1968, Reed students have won a total of 67 Watson Fellowships, including Cole Perkinson ’13, who won a Watson to go to Africa and research Zimbabwean music.

June 2015 Reed magazine

9

Eliot Circular Academic Freedom in a Learning Community christopher onstott

Editor’s Note . In March, a Reed student named Jeremiah True ’16 launched a public campaign to get himself reinstated into his freshman humanities conference after Prof.

Pancho Savery had excluded him for disruptive behavior. Jeremiah contended that he had been excluded for questioning the commonly cited (but controversial) statistic that one in five female college students are sexually assaulted in U.S. colleges. Prof. Savery, a noted free speech advocate, said he banned Jeremiah from the conference because of a pattern of disruption, but offered to hold private sessions with Jeremiah (which Jeremiah declined). Jeremiah has since withdrawn from the college, but the episode prompted Prof. Nigel Nicholson, the dean of the faculty, to reflect on academic freedom.

Dear Reed community, Most of you are aware that a situation involving one of our students prompted a heated debate on campus before spring break. The discourse has precipitated public attention from obscure social media sites as well as the mainstream media, and the situation has continued to evolve on campus.

In accordance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), Reed cannot comment on disciplinary actions regarding students. We respect and support the goals of FERPA; it is especially important that we seek to preserve the privacy of students in such situations.

I will, however, take this opportunity to reflect upon Reed’s commitment both to academic freedom and to creating and maintaining a productive learning community.

Reed’s mission statement commits us to being “an institution of higher education in the liberal arts devoted to the intrinsic value of intellectual pursuit and governed by the highest standards of scholarly practice, critical thought, and creativity,” and the college’s stated operating principles rightly note that Reed’s educational mission “requires the freest exchange and most open discussion of ideas.” A motion approved by the community senate, faculty and board of trustees in 1969, and reaffirmed by the faculty in 1986, states that dissent is “fundamental” to Reed’s “life as an academic community,” and pledges

10 Reed magazine June 2015

that “the exercise of the right of dissent is not something to be grudgingly tolerated, but actively encouraged.” Such principles continue and must continue to be central to our practice.

At the same time, dissent and the exchange of ideas must adhere to certain standards of conduct. Immediately after noting that our educational mission “requires the freest exchange and most open discussion of ideas,” the operating principles note that “the use of censorship or intimidation is intolerable” in a community dedicated to such exchange. The same 1969 motion declares that dissent is encouraged “as long as neither force nor the credible threat of force is used, and so long as the orderly processes of the College are not deliberately obstructed.” But, perhaps most pertinently, the Honor Principle demands that members of the community treat each other with respect and honor the right of others to hold, express and defend their ideas even as one holds, expresses and defends one’s own; it enjoins upon us all a respect for, and a responsibility to maintain and generate, a productive learning environment for all members of the community.

It is, then, incumbent on us all to recognize that the free exchange of ideas is indeed an exchange. One can express one’s own ideas in such a way that one prevents others from expressing their ideas, and such

expression undermines the free exchange upon which education depends. We bear the responsibility, and must learn to bear the responsibility, to listen as well as to speak, to foster dialogue as well as to express our own opinions.

Equally, we bear the responsibility to listen respectfully to and engage with ideas that we may dislike or find offensive. Reed seeks to make its campus safe from physical violence and threats of physical violence. That said, while it may seek to support students as they address ideas, it does not seek to protect them from those ideas, even if they are upsetting or discomforting. What makes us uncomfortable does not automatically render us unsafe, and there is a tremendous onus upon us to labor to distinguish between what makes us uncomfortable and what makes us unsafe.

Finally, we all bear the responsibility of helping each other find ways to create a productive dialogue. The Honor Principle enjoins us to engage with those of us who may seem to us to be violating its spirit, and to find a way forward that is appropriate for such a community before resorting to judicial processes.

We are a learning community and have the responsibility to help each other learn.

—Nigel Nicholson Dean of the Faculty Walter Mintz Professor of Classics

leah nash

Two Professors Earn Tenure

BY RANDALL S. BARTON

The trustees have granted tenure to two professors who teach in theatre, political science, and environmental studies.

Prof. Chris Koski [political science and environmental studies 2011–] came to Reed from James Madison University in Virginia where he was an assistant professor in 2007–11.

“Chris is an exciting teacher with a long and impressively varied list of scholarly achievements,” says Prof. Nigel Nicholson, dean of the faculty. “With particular interests in environmental politics, local policy making, and homeland security, his work binds him into the numerous current hotbutton issues, and his students love how he immerses them in ongoing policy debates.”

In addition to his environmental studies classes, Prof. Koski taught a popular new class on food politics spring semester.

But his intro class in public policy seems to spur the biggest evolution in student understanding.

“Each person enters the class with an idea of something they find very important about

so we’ve got to figure out what the world is going to look like.”

The environmental studies program has become a potent part of Reed’s academic arsenal, he says, because the faculty has been methodical about building the program.

“As a joint appointment in political science and environmental studies, Chris brings distinction to both programs,” Dean Nicholson says.

Koski earned a BA in political science from Carroll College in Montana, and an MA and PhD at the University of Washington.

Prof. Kate Bredeson [theatre 2009–] was also granted tenure.

“Kate is a passionate advocate of theatre at Reed and beyond, and her students respond to her teaching, directing and mentoring with equal enthusiasm and commitment,” says Dean Nicholson. “As a scholar of French avant-garde theatre, she is especially drawn to the events and ramifications of the student revolution of 1968, and shares her love of French theatre with her students, in class, in her writing and on the stage.”

Prof. Koski’s research is multifaceted, but his current focus is on the role local governments have to play in addressing climate change—and specifically how to integrate policy with science. the world,” he says. “They’re interested in education policy or environmental policy, what have you. But they emerge with an understanding of the substantive areas that are important and also the theories of how we get from an idea to a policy.”

Koski’s research is multifaceted, but his current focus is on the role local governments have to play in addressing climate change—and specifically how to integrate policy with science.

“How are we going to adapt to climate change?” he asks. “It’s clear we’re not moving fast enough to stop it from happening,

A theatre historian, director, and dramaturg, Prof. Bredeson says that Reed’s theatre department allows her to be both scholar and artist—to teach theory and history, but also to use that information “to make things with our bodies in space.”

Bredeson researches and writes about experimental French theatre in the ’60s; particularly how theatre innovations in this period reflect politics, culture, and society.

She teaches classes in theatre history, playwriting, dramaturgy, translation, and adaptation. But Gender and Theatre is by far her most popular class.

“That class has become a great way to foster interdisciplinary conversation,” Bredeson says. “It’s a rigorous investigation of gender performance in historical context, allowing students to explore gender theory through the lens of performance. We also have a week where we investigate drag and do a drag performance.”

In 2014 she directed a production of the Thornton Wilder play Our Town, casting a female student in a male role and two men as female characters.

“I try to find ways for whatever I’m doing on my stages to be in dialogue with larger investigations on campus,” Bredeson says. “I directed Glass Menagerie when Prof. Pancho Savery [English 1995–] was teaching a class on Tennessee Williams. Now I’m directing The Bald Soprano by Ionesco, which is read in French classes here.”

As a professional dramaturg, Bredeson has worked with theatres such as the Guthrie, Yale Repertory Theatre, the Portland Playhouse, and Hand2Mouth. She currently chairs the theatre department, and holds an MFA and a doctorate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the Yale School of Drama.

She previously taught at Dalhousie University, Yale University, and was a visiting associate professor of playwriting in the Hollins University MFA Playwriting program.

June 2015 Reed magazine 11

Empire of the Griffin Connecting Reed alumni across the globe

Reedies Unite to Honor Chemistry Prof When beloved Prof. Maggie Geselbracht [chemistry 1993–2014] passed away in September 2014 after a hard-fought battle with lymphoma, her husband Tom Armstrong decided to make a gift in her name.

Since then, there has been an outpouring of love and support from her colleagues, students, alumni, and friends. So far, a total of 139 donors have raised more than $140,000 for the Maggie Geselbracht Women in Chemistry Fund.

The fund underwrites summer research for women chemistry students and provides money for traveling to conferences to present their research.

“Maggie’s signature contribution to student development was that she really wanted them engaged in research,” Armstrong explains. “It was a big deal for her to have students go to national meetings of the American Chemical Society to present posters and research.”

Prof. Geselbracht joined the chemistry department in 1993 and became its first tenured female professor. Her legacy has inspired

gifts from a remarkable range of people—former students who want to honor her influence on their education and career, parents of former students who appreciate the way she mentored their students, colleagues, friends, and family.

“Maggie seemed to be at the center of the web,” says her friend and colleague Prof. Arthur Glasfeld [chemistry 1989–]. “She was often the first chemist that our students got to know because she taught the fall semester of our intro chemistry sequence and had her finger on the pulse of every movement of their lives as they moved through the chemistry curriculum.”

Chantal Sudbrack ’97, a materials scientist with NASA, chose chemistry as a major because Prof. Geselbracht made it approachable. “Maggie was a phenomenal instructor,” Chantal says, “brash, full of zeal and passion, with a trademark smile that made her instantly likeable. She not only believed in us, but she also had the uncanny ability to inspire us to believe in ourselves. Make no mistake, she was demanding, but we rose to the occasion believing that we could excel.”

Chantal supported the fellowship because

DIGITAL DIRIGIBLISTS. Portland high-tech firm Urban Airship boasts no fewer than 12 Reed grads. Back row: Jesse Grillo ’14, Andrei Stephens ’08, Russell Mayhew ’10, Michael Richardson ’07, Andrew Winterman ’11, and Mele Sax-Barnett ’05. Front row: Connor Wallace ’13, Ross Donaldson ’06, David Jackson ’09, Zach Brown ’13, Max Del Giudice ’14, and Lennon Day-Reynolds ’03.

12 Reed magazine June 2015

it opens doors for young women in science, providing opportunities not only to develop connections, but to gain a sense of direction in what area of science to pursue.

Natalie Keehan ’15 and Eve Mozur ’15 were the first women to receive Geselbracht scholarships, which allowed them to attend the national ACS meeting and exposition in Denver.

“Maggie was a huge inspiration to me,” says Natalie. “Her intro inorganic course was one of the major reasons I wanted to be a chemistry major. Whenever I write about chemistry, I am constantly thinking about whether or not it would be something that I would be proud to show Maggie.”

“Maggie’s boundless energy for teaching chemistry convinced me that I could spend my life thinking about the problems she presented to me,” says Eve, who is starting a PhD program next year. “I hope that I can emulate some of her enthusiasm for her subject, her incredible ability to mentor—and her ability to pull off cowboy boots and d-orbital earrings.”

Honor Maggie with a gift to the Maggie Geselbracht Women in Chemistry Fund at reed.edu/givingtoreed/ profmaggie.

MOBILE MEMORIAL. Friends, family, colleagues, and classmates gathered to honor Paul Sikora ’70 at a memorial exhibition of his art in Washington, D.C. Paul died unexpectedly in January; his medium of choice was the mobile. (See In Memoriam, page 53.)

Rallying the Troops English major takes helm of alumni fundraising

BY RANDALL S. BARTON

Five years after graduation, Michael Stapleton ’10 is still just as passionate about Reed as he was as a student. But he is also ready to put his money where his mouth is.

In July, Michael becomes the chair of Alumni Fundraising for Reed (AFR), a group of alumni volunteers who solicit donations from alumni for the Annual Fund. The unrestricted money given to the Annual Fund provides immediate support for financial aid, student services, and resources for faculty and the library. These funds are the mainstay of the budget, allowing Reed to meet its most pressing needs.

Michael has been an active supporter of the Annual Fund since his senior year, when the New York Times published an article about how the recession forced Reed to scale back its spending on financial aid. “I listened to a lot of ivory-tower conversations around campus about the injustice of Reed not being need blind,” he remembers. “And thought, ‘Why don’t we do something about this instead of just talking about it?’”

Michael and several other students founded Reedies for Reed, a student group dedicated to building awareness of—and raising money for—the Annual Fund.

The AFR was founded in 2009 when its first chair, Konrad Alt ’81, brought together a group of alumni to discuss how to augment the college’s resources for uncompromising academic excellence. Since then, the AFR has matured into an affiliation of more than 130 volunteers, with an established steering committee and several working groups.

The AFR chair establishes targets on a number of fronts, including growing the base of alumni donors and volunteers, spearheading young alumni giving, and encouraging more alumni donations at the leadership level ($1,000 or more per year).

A few months after Michael graduated, Konrad asked him to work with the young alumni working group of AFR. “On the young alumni side we try to make every outreach as warm as possible,” Michael explains. “Someone will say, ‘I know

that person. I’ll reach out to them.’ We try to make it relevant—someone who shares your major, is in your age group, or shares a personal connection. It’s important they realize they’re giving to people, not just to the college. Reaching Reedies who have a connection to that shared experience is a big deal.”

Michael did a marketing internship during his senior year at Reed, and took to the profession like a duck to water. He is now vice president of marketing at AnyPerk, a San Francisco company that provides perks that other companies can plug into without having to manage the relationships or negotiate for their employees. It also offers products designed to recognize employee achievements, spurring morale, productivity, and retention. Prior to AnyPerk, Michael was vice president of marketing at Gild.com.

“Reed taught me some very practical skills for my career,” he says. “I learned to communi-

“ Why don’t we do something about this instead of just talking about it?” cate clearly, argue to a point, and understand the human condition. Majoring in English pushed me to think about framing human experiences through stories, and that’s helped me better understand my audience.”

Michael thinks Reedies often misunderstand the concept of branding—at least as it applies to the college. “They think it’s way dirtier than it is,” he says. “A brand is literally a set of ideas and principles connected to form a distinct identity in the mind. Saying you’re against the brand of the college is like saying you don’t believe in its mission. Reed’s brand is its very core.”

Reedies tend to resonate with the ethos of the college, and Michael finds that alumni who don’t feel a natural urge to give back often have the most complaints.

“I tell them, ‘If you think there’s a bunch of things wrong with Reed, I guarantee you that having more resources will help address those things,’” he says.

Find out how you can support the Annual Fund at giving.reed.edu.

talia herman

Giving Back

Into the Unknown

President’s Summer Fellows circle the globe

BY CHRIS LYDGATE ’90 PHOTOS BY MADDIE WAGAR ’16

What if you could devote a whole summer to a project you had designed—a project that combined intellectual pursuit, imagination, adventure, personal transformation, and service to the greater good?

The President’s Summer Fellowship offers students a chance to do just that.

Inaugurated by President John R. Kroger, with generous support from trustee Dan Greenberg ’62 and his wife, Susan Steinhauser, the fellowship attracted scores of creative proposals this year. The winners get $5,000 to pursue their projects over the summer.

Art Therapy in Florence MARGARET MACLEAN ’16, STUDIO ART

Art has always been a huge part of how I see and interact with the world, but it wasn’t until I discovered art therapy that I realized how art can create a space of healing and connection. Inspired by my recent experience interning with a recreational therapist, I will spend the summer immersed in art in Florence, Italy, leading art classes for youth with intellectual and developmental challenges at the Cooperativa Barberi.

My goals are to assist young people in need, explore a career path in art therapy, develop my ideas as an artist, and strengthen my understanding of Italian language and culture.

Nanofluidics and Gene Mapping ABRAR ABIDI ’16, PHYSICS

The last half century has phenomenally advanced our scientific understanding of life. In the young field of biological physics, researchers employ the quantitative skills and experimental methods of the physicist to investigate problems traditionally in the biologist’s arena.

I will spend the summer in the lab of Prof. Walter Reisner ’00 at McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, where I will help develop a new nanofluidic technology based on the technique of nanoscale dielectrophoresis. The goal of this research will be to drastically improve a decade-old DNA confinement technology. Our technology would more easily allow researchers to rapidly map complete genomes from a single cell’s DNA, rather than relying on genomic material collected from the ensembles of tens of thousands of cells.

Building a Particle Model for Fluids QIAOYU YANG ’16, MATH

The study of fluid motivates an important branch of mathematics, computational fluid dynamics, a flourishing field that interests both mathematicians and physicists. There are several models describing the flow of fluid using differential

14 Reed magazine June 2015

equations. However, these models, which are based on the Navier-Stokes equation, cannot yield accurate result, when particle effect is strong.

My project this summer is to test the performance of a new particle model. I will spend the summer working with Professor Aleksandar Donev in the Courant Institute at New York University. We will use a method called DSMC to perform particle simulation of chemically reactive mixtures of gases, which is one of the cases where traditional models break down. To build up the new model, there are many theoretical difficulties. I will learn, think, and code a lot, which should deepen my understanding of the math involved and hone my mathematical modeling skills.

The Changing Landscape of Livy’s Rome HALEY TILT ’16, CLASSICS

The Roman historian Livy possessed a unique capacity for creating geographical spaces and populating those spaces with stories, but no one has really succeeded in making an interactive map of them.

To fill this gap, I will build a website that will let students experience Livy’s Rome by taking a virtual stroll through the monuments he describes. I will travel to Rome to photograph the monuments and their surroundings. Then I will return to Reed to design a opensource website integrating my photographs into an interactive map of ancient Rome. My project will provide a useful supplement to students in Hum 110, Roman history, and other classics courses, as well as anyone interested by the unique way ancient Romans interacted with monuments, space, and history.

Poetry, Past, and Now in the American Southwest NATHAN MARTIN ’16, ENGLISH

Salt Lake City, Utah, is my hometown. It’s also where I learned to call myself a poet and a writer. I carried a notebook with me everywhere, writing poems between customers at my grocery job, while backpacking in the desert, while sitting on the salt flats after attending my first funeral. I went to two open mics a week and hosted a monthly poetry slam in a basement jazz club. Poetry and words were my best connections to other people. I lived for them.

Then I moved to Portland and stopped.

Now, after seven years, the urge to poetry has resurfaced through study at Reed and I have some questions to explore. What does poetry mean to me now? Why did I drop it for seven years? And why was writing poetry so important to me, for so long? This project is about rewriting my connection to poetry, starting with SLC. I’m taking a road trip back to my hometown and into the desert to search through my roots and answer these questions. At the end, I’ll self-publish a small book of poetry from the trip.

million items (dating from pre-antiquity to modernity) within 10 buildings. This summer, I will explore the Hermitage’s collections by interning with the Hermitage Volunteer Service.

I will assist staff research, archival projects, and educational programs throughout the museum, particularly with the museum’s newly acquired contemporary collection. I will also develop a research project examining the curatorial, visual, and spatial organization of modern and contemporary exhibits. I want to document reception of controversial exhibits, such as Manifesta 10, which explored themes of queer gender and sexual identities. I am also interested to observe the Hermitage’s newly renovated General Staff Building, which houses the 19th21st-century collections within a space that marries 19th-century neoclassicism and Soviet classicism and contemporary minimalism, architecturally referencing the museum’s employment of new curatorial strategies.

Revealing Contemporary Armenia Through Poetry Translation KNAR HOVAKIMYAN ’16, LINGUISTICS

Contemporary Art in (Formerly) Imperial Space ORLA O’SULLIVAN ’16, RUSSIAN

The State Hermitage Museum, founded

by Catherine the Great in 1764, is an exemplar of global visual culture and its influences. The Saint Petersburgbased institution houses nearly three

My goal is to translate 10–20 contemporary poems from Armenian into English and publish the collection online. I want to do this in Armenia in order to have a chance to work directly with the poets during the translation process and to learn more about the culture and literary history. I recently translated two poems by an Armenian poet, Vahun Hovakimyan, who has agreed to work with me on this project and put me in touch with other poets.

Armenia has a rich literary history that comes from a unique perspective, and it would be valuable to have more of this

literature available to English speakers.

This project would be a way for me to begin introducing Armenian literature to English-speaking communities; in becoming involved with the Armenian literary community and gaining experience in translation, I would be equipped to do future projects like this one, eventually working on translations of classical Armenian works.

The Green’s Apartment ELIZABETH GROOMBRIDGE ’16, PSYCH/THEATRE

The Green’s place, a crappy college apartment, has some new summer tenants. Gary, Elena, and Tony are bored twenty-somethings spending the summer in Chicago, looking for some fun, or so Tony says anyway. They seem pretty weird to Phoebe, who lives across the hall, particularly Gary. That doesn’t stop him from being entirely too attractive.

I propose to create a queer, supernatural web series based on Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, which mocks the trend of English pastoralism and showcases the Shakespearean notion of the “Green World.”

Playing on this theory of the Green World and attempting to keep the court dynamics, all of the characters from the court are fae, and the Green World has become the modern human world. As You Like It also explores gender roles by having the female protagonist, Rosalind, disguise herself as a man, Ganymede, and then, as Ganymede, act the part of a woman. Unlike many of Shakespeare’s other gender-disguise plot lines, Rosalind fully embodies the male role, remaining in it even when around those who know her “true” gender. I will further explore this through a genderfluid Rosalind.

June 2015 Reed magazine 15

Life Beyond Reed Our recurring series explores how the liberal arts shape the careers of Reed grads. For more, check out www.reed.edu/beyond-reed.

Anaka Narayanan ’04

Founder, Brass Tacks Clothing, Chennai, India

After earning her degree in economics, Anaka took a job at a consulting firm in Manhattan, but her heart wasn’t in the work.

She returned to Chennai, moved in with her parents, set about learning the fashion business, and launched Brass Tacks, a line of women’s clothing with two dozen employees. She oversees every facet of the business, from designing the clothes to writing copy for her website. “I care about every detail,” she says. “But I also want to grow the business, so I’ve learned not to micromanage as much.”

Thesis: Does Civic Participation Affect School Quality? Adviser: Prof. Denise Hare [economics] Why fashion? I was really drawn to tailored silhouettes I would see women wearing when I lived in New York, but I missed the beautiful textiles from home. When I went back to visit Chennai, I would see these gorgeous fabrics but the silhouettes were so boxy—like pillowcases with holes cut out for the head and arms. I kept wondering, "Why isn’t anyone using traditional textiles to make more modern styles?"And my mother said to me, "Stop complaining and do it yourself."

Did you have any fashion experience when you got into the business? As a kid I would

go into my mother’s closet just to play with her saris—the smell of the cotton, the textures, the colors. I was surrounded by fashion, but I never studied how the garments were made or how to run a business.

So where did you start? I did a lot of R&D in the beginning, and I definitely attribute that approach to Reed. At one point I measured 100 women—family, friends, friends of friends—and realized the bust-to-hip ratio was completely different for Indian women than U.S. or European women. So I made my own size chart.

What’s your take on fashion at Reed? Functional. Reedies look

down on fashion. Actually caring about the way you look? Please.

How did Reed shape your approach to running a business? I like to go in-depth

when it comes to getting something done or thinking about an idea. That's something I got from Reed. I also have an ability to apply skills to a variety of scenarios, and I'm open to learning new skills that are outside my “core strengths.”

Handling the marketing, the PR, writing out my press kits . . . I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that well if it weren’t for Reed.

What’s your toughest challenge as an entrepreneur?

In the beginning I wanted to have a say in absolutely everything. But in order to grow the business, I can’t spend my day at the workshop or the store surrounded by employees asking me a million questions.

I have to find balance. And I’m too impatient. I want to work on something today and see the result tomorrow.

Any advice for budding entrepreneurs? Running a

kunal daswani

business on your own can be incredibly isolating. You know starting out it’s going to be hard work, but no one tells you it can be lonely, too. So my advice would be to go into business with a partner or partners with clearly defined roles—divide and conquer.

Angie Wang ’08

Cartoonist, Illustrator, Animator

Angie Wang is an in-demand cartoonist and editorial illustrator. Her day job is working for the animated series Steven Universe on the Cartoon Network in Los Angeles.

Born in Shanghai, Wang grew up in California, where she got hooked on Japanese manga and anime, still a major influence on her work, along with the Pre-Raphaelites and art nouveau.

After graduating from Reed, she decided to try making a living as an artist. One of her first jobs was an assignment for the New Yorker: “That’s when I realized I could make a living.”

Thesis: The Brave and the

Boldface: A Study of Prosody in Comic Books. Adviser: Prof.

Stephen Hibbard [linguistics] You majored in linguistics and never took an art class . . .

Why? To be honest, I wanted

to pick a major that wouldn’t make my parents mad, that would bridge humanities and the sciences. I really loved linguistics. As far as art goes, I’m 100% self-taught.

Was it a struggle to get started? I damaged my wrist

typing my senior thesis. The only thing I could do to earn money was draw because it didn’t aggravate my injury. So I researched how to become an illustrator. I drew a massive amount, and I started making connections. It was hard, but I had faith that this path would pan out. I did some work for Dark Horse about a year after graduation. The New Yorker was a game changer.

How would you describe your style? That’s a complicated

Do you go to the big comics conventions? Oh, yeah. That’s

how you network. I just cofounded a one-day festival for independent comics called Comic Arts LA. We’re making it an annual event . . . I’m really interested in encouraging the idea that the making of art is for everybody.

What’s the coolest thing to happen to you at a convention? At LA Zine Fest,

I was at a table drawing a picture of a woman with really tall hair, and this guy came up and asked me, “Can I buy this from you?” I said he could just have it, but he said he should give me something in trade.

So he started drawing Marge Simpson. I was like, “Who is this drawing me Simpsons fan art?” Then he signed it at the bottom: Matt Groening.

carlos quinteros

question. I have alter egos with very different styles.

I’m often hired for jobs that require a certain elegance . . . I do a lot of dancers. Also work that carries some emotion, particularly melancholy or mystery. So elegant and moody.

Do you get artist’s block? Not too much. I have a complicated relationship with people who say they’re artists but they don’t draw, or say they’re a writer but don’t write. I believe the more you work at your art, the better you get.

Woman for All Seasons

Playwright Caroline Miller ’59, MAT ’65, dusts off script after a dramatic pause lasting four decades

BY LAURIE LINDQUIST

A full house gathers at Portland’s Post5 Theatre during the 2015 Fertile Ground Festival to see Woman on the Scarlet Beast

by Caroline Miller ’59, MAT ’65.

When the lights come up, an aging hooker named Ruby is reclining on a sofa and her pimp is zipping up his pants in the living room of a ’60s-era Sellwood duplex. As he carries her to her wheelchair—draped with a cherry red sweater, it is the scarlet beast of the play’s title—they argue over her health. Barbs fly back and forth: he says she’s losing too much weight, she tells him it’s none of his business.

This is no nostalgic view of yesteryear Portland, nor is it an apocalyptic allegory.

Ruby; her daughter, a Carmelite novitiate; and her mother, a devout Roman Catholic and the widow of an abusive alcoholic, were Caroline’s neighbors while she was earning an MAT at Reed.

A decade after she left the Sellwood duplex they shared, Caroline endeavored to write about the women using the cryptic details overheard in conversations. “The plight of these women touched me and I wanted to honor their struggle,” says Caroline. “The hunger for love and acceptance is in all of us: if we don’t have love, we may do bad things.”

In her play, she took on the changing roles of women in the ’60s and the patriarchy of Roman Catholicism. She recalled the intensity that Ibsen used in his play Ghosts, tearing down the phony language used for manipulation and to mask insecurity. Writing a play was a challenge for Caroline, who is more comfortable with narrative style, but it was one she determined to master.

That mixture of determination and versatility is evident in her career, which included positions as teacher, president of a teacher’s union, councilor for Metro, commissioner for Multnomah County, arts advocate, artist, and author. Caroline earned a BA from Reed in literature and philosophy, writing the thesis “Mode of Perception and ‘Style’: Heinrich Wöfflin’s Principle of Art History” with her adviser, Prof. Marvin Levich [philosophy

18 Reed magazine June 2015

1953–94]. From Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, she received an MA in literature with distinction. She taught school for 18 years, beginning in England and Africa and ending in Portland, after which she led the Portland Federation of Teachers; helped found METRO, Portland’s regional planning agency; and was the first Hispanic to be elected to the Multnomah County Commission, where she served two terms.

A noted champion of the underserved, the working class, and the elderly, Caroline states that her primary values are compassion and truthfulness. “I honor compassion in people, so I try to harbor and nurture it in myself.”

In 1988, she left politics to concentrate on art and writing. Woman on the Scarlet Beast had undergone her edits in its first decade, but its capacity as performance art had yet to be realized. In the mid-’90s, she met with the late Bob Bidleman, who was then associated with the Columbia Theater Company. The two worked on the script to sharpen its theatrical potential and Bob gave it a stage reading. A second reading came during a Portland JAW Festival, where the play reached the semifinals.

Decades passed. Caroline published three novels and several short stories. She did silk screening and painting, opened the Parlor Gallery, and helped found the Bouand Dance Company. She created a website and the blog Write Away. Some of her writing was dramatized for radio, but her play was ignored and rebuffed as a woman’s play. “I was told to take it to a woman’s theatre group,” she says. At last, a meeting with the Post5 directors in 2014 put the play before an audience.

What defines a woman’s play? As an advocate for women’s rights and one who worked in the trenches for the ERA amendment, Caroline carefully considers the question as she sips her coffee. A woman’s play deals with how women use language to gain power, she replies. “Words, guilt, and manipulation are women’s tools.”

Woman on the Scarlet Beast takes its title from a verse in Apocalypse, “I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast, full of the names of blasphemy.” Ruby is seated on her

chariot, clawing like Medea, says Caroline, in an effort to gain acceptance from her mother and daughter. She is dark and menacing, she seethes with anger, but Caroline’s character doesn’t shout. It is a subtlety that could be lost in production.

Equally delicate is the final scene in the living room, when the women confront the lies that have defined their relationships with one another and where Ruby tells her mother and daughter that she has terminal cancer.

“Way to play the pity card,” the daughter replies.

One outcome for the women might be to leave them where they are at that

dina avila

Teacher, author, union leader, politician, and arts advocate Caroline Miller waited decades to produce Woman on the Scarlet Beast.

russell j. young

moment—in a hell not unlike Sartre’s No Exit—but Caroline chose otherwise.

It was in a class with Prof. Lloyd Reynolds [English & art 1929–69] that she first viewed Rembrandt’s painting The Return of the Prodigal Son. She was moved to tears, she recalls, and it was this image of reconciliation that came to her as she contemplated the play’s final scene. “Everyone bears the burden of some harm done to another,” she says. She would give the women what they needed most—forgiveness.

Three generations— Dulce, Ruby, and Jennifer—struggle with guilt and the outcome of their choices in Caroline Miller’s play.

go further booksbycarolinemiller.com

June 2015 Reed magazine 19

Adventures in the First Person

Inside Job Reed student gets an education about life behind bars

BY MADDY WAGAR ’16

There is barely a yard between where I was a moment ago and where I stand now, but in those short seconds I’ve crossed infinity.

With a single step, I’ve entered a new and forbidding domain.

Being inside a prison is as far as you can get from being outside.

The muggy afternoon is bright; the Virginia summer sun glares blindingly off the white walls of the turquoise-roofed buildings squatting around the edges of the open courtyard. Jagged coils of razor wire glint like shards of shattered glass atop the double row of metal fencing that encloses the Lunenburg Correctional Center. The environment seems built to scrutinize, the architecture itself making shadow or concealment impossible. And yet, the outside world is almost completely oblivious to what goes on inside here.

A harsh buzzing fills the air, broken by the loud mechanical click of the chain-link door smacking shut and autolocking behind me.

The inmates of the all-male level-two security institution roam cement trails from barrack to barrack, all dressed in the same prison-issue jeans and button-down shirts— the only clothes they are permitted to wear.

I make tentative eye contact with some of the men. In addition to their uniforms, they all share a certain heaviness in their gaze, a kind of quiet exhaustion. But even in the subdued expressions, I catch a flicker of curiosity.

Who am I? What am I doing in a men’s prison?

It’s my first day of school.

I’m here thanks to the Reed College President’s Summer Fellowship, a new grant awarded to students for a project that combines intellectual pursuit, imagination, adventure, personal transformation, and service to the greater good (See page 14). I chose to participate in an outreach program run

by Southside Virginia Community College known as Campus within Walls. The program provides college classes for inmates who are on track to be released; these

20 Reed magazine June 2015

inmates have the opportunity to earn a two-year associate’s degree. My mission is to assist teachers, attend classes, and document the students’ stories through photographs and interviews.

That first day, the narrow corridors, the fluorescent lights, the gaze of the guards, the sense of confinement—it all feels like an invisible force pressing down on me. The classroom is full when I enter. The group of around 20 men is about half Caucasian and half students of color. Their ages range from 20 to more than 60. Some of these men have been incarcerated since before they were legally adults.

I’m introduced as “Ms. Wagar.” First names are not to be used. In prison, every relationship is on some level about the construction of power. Information can be used against you. Familiarity can be an instrument of manipulation.

I stand in the back of the classroom, attempting to be as unobtrusive as possible.

I’m an intruder, after all. This is their turf. I’m utterly naïve about their rules, their codes, their lives. The warning words of the program’s

principal sound in my head. “There are bad men in there. You can’t trust anyone. They can be very charming, but don’t be fooled— they will take advantage of you if they can.”

Class began, and I remained standing. One of the students glanced up.

“Do you want to sit, Ms. Wagar?” He asked.

“Oh no, I’m fine!” I assured him, blushing at the attention.

“Here, take my chair.”

I tried to protest, but he insisted, standing up and pushing his empty chair over to me.

“There’s an open chair back here you can have, Ms. Wagar!” another student offered.

I obviously didn’t belong. Yet from my first minutes in the class, amongst those who are supposed to be society’s worst, I felt welcomed. And in the weeks to come, I found I was learning alongside those who are working to be their best.

That first day, I sat next to a young man—let’s call him MW—with a smoothly shaven scalp and tattooed arms. A pair of slim wire glasses rested between sharply narrowed eyebrows.

maddy wagar ’16

He lounged in the back row, reclined and hard faced. Parents would stamp this guy “bad influence” on sight.

The instructor asked the students to share something about themselves that couldn’t be discovered just by looking. MW tossed up his hand. “Alright, I’ll go. Somethin’ you couldn’t tell about me just by looking is . . . I’m white.”

He gestured to his pale face while he waited for laughter that never came. His prickly resistance to sharing even the smallest piece of his internal self was reflexive. In prison, honesty makes you vulnerable.

Like me, MW was new to Campus Within Walls. He slouched in the back row, arms crossed, leg tapping impatiently, muttering wisecracks as other students took turns sharing their invisible fact.

“I practice yoga.”

“I write stories, and my granddaughter illustrates them.”

“I was a dance instructor.”

“I’m a sucker for sappy movies.”

“Sissy!” MW hooted with a harsh laugh.

During the next several classes, MW seemed anxious to prove that he didn’t care

A harsh buzzing fills the air, broken by the click of the chain-link door smacking shut behind me. about this school thing. He worked, almost desperately, to be the funny guy. The tough guy.

But by the end of my five-week stint, I noticed that a remarkable change had taken place in MW. His eyes lit up during discussions of 12 Years a Slave, and he leaned forward in his seat, eager to participate. He wrote an eloquent essay responding to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” He cheered on his classmates as they read their work aloud. The instructor and I would exchange awed head shakes over his written reflections, which had been turned in to us along with an apology: “Sorry about any typos. I’m a little rusty; I haven’t touched a computer in six years.”

In class, MW spoke about the guilt he

carried coming back from Iraq, where he served as a sergeant in the army, while his best friend returned in a coffin. About the pain of losing those you love most deeply, and the agony of having to go on anyway.

“You’re struggling with PTSD. Get help,” he urged his younger self in a homework assignment prompting students to write a letter to their past self at a turning point.

MW accepted that he has a debt to pay to society. He also confided that when he is released, he wants to pursue an engineering degree.

He told me how much he loved the challenge of school. “In here, everybody’s pushing each other to do better. You want to succeed here, you really do. You can’t help but feel successful in here. Everybody participates, everybody has a voice.”

As I walked through the halls on my last day, I thought again about the monsters the principal warned me against. If only that were the case. If only I had found monsters.

If I had spent my summer with monsters, it wouldn’t hurt to see them locked up. It wouldn’t tear at my heart to hear it had been years, decades, since they had seen anything beyond the cold cement of their barracks and the razor wire of their courtyard.

If only I had listened to the stories of monsters. Then I wouldn’t have to lie awake and wonder what it feels like to watch your son grow up from afar, through glimpses during visiting hours. I wouldn’t have learned that drug dealers and embezzlers and murderers are also yogis and dancers and guys who love Jimi Hendrix.

I’m back at Reed now, and Lunenburg sometimes seem like a world away. But what I’ve learned is that despite the razor wire and the autolock doors, what separates the inside and the outside is still just a single step, and that those walls walls can be a cage—or a cocoon.

Maddy Wagar ’16 is a psychology major.

GO FURTHER Find out more about the President’s Summer Fellows at www.reed.edu/beyond-reed/special-programs /presidents_summer_fellowship/2015.html Find out more about Campus within Walls at southside .edu/campus-within-walls

June 2015 Reed magazine 21

The Lives They Led

Brilliant Surgeon, Tragic Accident The quicksilver life of Dr. Arthur McLean ’21, Portland’s first neurosurgeon

BY KAREN LEA ANDERSON PETERSON

Dr. Arthur McLean ’21 died on December 7, 1938 , when his car veered off a steep turn on Northwest Cornell Road in Portland’s West Hills, crashed through a guardrail, and came to rest on the edge of a cliff, its wheels hanging precariously over the canyon below.

Rescuers found his body 10 feet from the car, a handkerchief tied around a deep wound on his head. The engine was still running.

Just 44 years old, McLean was a controversial figure in medical circles. Portland’s first trained neurosurgeon, he had published more than two dozen medical articles on everything from paraphysical cysts to intractable pain.

Demanding perfection of himself and others, he frequently clashed with fellow physicians and resigned from the faculty at the University of Oregon Medical School not once but twice.

Some said that he had committed suicide; others insisted that he would never have taken his life. “McLean simply wasn’t the kind to kill himself,” one Portland physician told the Oregonian. “He was the sort who would want to stick around, just to prove that all he had said was right.”

Whatever the cause, there is no doubt that the accident cut short the life of one of Oregon’s most brilliant surgeons.

Arthur John McLean entered Reed in fall 1917 as a graduate of Franklin High School in Seattle. After his first semester, he was called up to serve in World War I with the 41st Division in France. He returned to the college in spring 1919 and quickly developed a reputation as a man in a hurry. “Edison has the sleeping sickness compared to Art,” noted editors of the 1921 Griffin. He was notably the “busiest man on campus,” said classmates; “unstintingly” supporting a wide range of campus causes and organizations.

He was the dominant tenor in the chorus, a feature writer for the Quest, a member of the literary club, the Quills, and a wrestler.

He also distinguished himself on stage as

22 Reed magazine June 2015

“one of the best actors Reed has ever known,” appearing as the lead in Reed Drama Club productions such as J.M. Barrie’s Pantaloon and Chekhov’s A Marriage Proposal.

Art served as a faculty and administrative student assistant, and was president and “papa” of House G, where he endeavored to teach fellow housemates “the beauty of knowledge.”

During his senior year, Art carried six subjects and wrote his thesis on “The Early History of the Primordial Germ Cells of the Chick” to earn his BA in biology.

After graduation, he went to Johns Hopkins and earned an MD in 1925. He then interned at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (Brigham and Women’s Hospital), where he studied with Harvey Cushing, the father of

modern neurosurgery. He also studied with the celebrated neurosurgeon Otfried Foerster in Breslau, Germany.

Art returned to Portland in 1931 as clinical instructor in surgery and neuropsychiatry at the University of Oregon Medical School (OHSU), later becoming an assistant professor of pathology and clinical associate in surgery and neuropsychiatry. He also maintained a private practice in Portland, opening an office in the Medical Arts Building.

From the McLean Collection at the OHSU archives, we know that he gave the impression of being brash, disrespectful, and hotheaded. But the record also portrays a man of reason, who could not stand dishonesty and hated stupidity. His fellow faculty members pronounced him a “brilliant” physician, his

O r e g o n H e a lt h & S c i e n c e U n i v e r s i t y, H i s t o r i c a l C o l l e c t i o n s & A r c h i v e s

teaching work “beautifully” organized, and that he was a “magnetic” person in the eyes of the medical students.

Dr. Cushing was always supportive of his work: in 1936 Cushing pronounced his paper on cerebral neuroepithelioma “ . . . a perfectly bang-up piece of work. We are delighted with it . . . it is certainly the best worked-up case in the literature.” Cushing encouraged him not to apologize for his youth. Foerster was equally confident and affectionate. He invited Art to contribute to his Handbuch der Neurologie in 1936. Art authored two chapters, “Intracranial Tumors” and “Pituitary Tumors.” Requests for reprints came from around the world.

Art’s operative record speaks well of his competence as a neurosurgeon. His

mortality rate in 55 operations over 6 years was 21.8% and compared well with other leaders in his field.

But Art fell into bitter disagreements with his colleagues. In November 1937, he delivered a scathing 80-minute report titled “Brain Tumors Always Die: A Satiric Parade,” before the Multnomah County Medical Society in which he lashed out at certain members of the medical profession. In this diatribe he denounced those who still believed that brain tumors represented a death sentence: “Among the enlightened places where one would expect not to find doddering adages

match the true greatness of so much of his character, his intellectual and spiritual stature might have been limitless. But he had very strong prejudices and feelings and had developed a deep prejudice . . . Dr. Arthur McLean leaves accomplishments, which will dwarf the best of his detractors. In the proper setting, with more wisdom and understanding on the part of his associates, he could, had he conquered his small bitternesses, have become a world figure.”

According to his attorney, his affairs were in order down to the smallest detail. His undated will was given national publicity:

Magnetic, mercurial, and misunderstood. still extant are hospitals. Yet the title of my paper, “Brain Tumors Always Die,” is the factual recording of a remark made preoperatively on three widely separated occasions to different patients of mine by the sisters in a Portland hospital. The first time it occurred I believed it was but a repetition of the 1890 adage; the second time I wondered if that was the sole reason; and after the third, I took my patients elsewhere, believing it useless to attempt cooperation for the patient’s benefit in such atmosphere . . .”

In 1937, he resigned from the medical school, but returned at the behest of his colleagues, continuing as assistant professor of pathology until 1938, when he once again resigned. He went on to teach, independently, a course for clinicians in neurological diagnosis and neurological surgery at Good Samaritan Hospital.

In tribute to Art it was said that “No one, anywhere, ever exemplified a finer loyalty, a more loving nature, the kindliness of his contacts with his students and those who wanted to learn from him was at times emotional in its quality. No one will know, except those who were truly his apostles, how much of himself he gave to teaching. In it he was consumed not by an ideal of self-aggrandizement but by an unquenchable thirst for the truth behind all the didacticism . . . Could McLean have achieved a serenity of spirit to

“To 95% of Portland’s medical practitioners and their ethics, and the whole local organized medical profession, a lusty, rousing belch. To Portland’s thieving patients, the haphazard care they will receive for their chiseling tawdriness. I desire that there be no funeral service of any sort; that the eleventh stanza of Swinburn’s ‘Garden of Proserpine’ and the entire ‘Thanatopsis’ of Bryant be read aloud over my body by a lay person; that my cremated body’s ashes be strewn by a paid employee on the waters of the straits of San Juan de Fuca.”

And “To my name, oblivion,” Art declared in his last will and testament. The unexamined records of A.J. McLean have lain silent for nearly 70 years. There is little evidence to warrant censure or to condemn his name to oblivion, yet up until this point in time it appears to have been accomplished.

Art was survived by his wife, Gladys M. Bragg McLean, whom he married in Maryland in 1922, and his parents and two brothers.

GO FURTHER This article is adapted from a longer piece by Karen Lea Anderson Peterson, now retired archivist and assistant professor at OHSU, which appeared in Invention and Innovation: The Founders of Neuroscience in Oregon, with additional research by Laurie Lindquist. Peterson’s article is available at www.ohsu.edu/library/hom/exhibits /200704_mclean.shtml.

Read more about Reed and the medical arts in our feature Pathogenius at www.reed.edu/reed_magazine /march2013/articles/features/pathogenius.html

June 2015 Reed magazine 23

Portland on the Take Benji Fisher ’94 probes Stumptown’s seedy past

was self-proclaimed vice czar Jim Elkins, a heroin addict who blew in from Arizona and built an empire on slot machines, burglary, and dope. Thanks to Elkins’ deep conBY KATELYN BEST ’13 nections in city hall and the police bureau, straight-shooting cops who tried to shut him Late on the night of March 19, 1950, a down would find their efforts thwarted— young woman named Jo Ann Dewey was often by members of their own department. kidnapped from a street in Vancouver, “Graven left this whole trail,” Fisher says Washington, in broad view of several onlook- of the Dewey murder, but found that his ers. A week later, three fishermen discov- chief “literally was not filing these reports,” ered her body on the banks of the Wind preventing them from coming to light.

River near Carson.

Researching the extensive graft and corThe killing shocked the community. Two ruption that plagued the city for decades brothers, Utah and Turman involved sifting through piles Wilson, were convicted of of forgotten police reports, the murder and eventualletters, and journals, and ly hanged—but not before Fisher credits Reed with Clark County Sheriff Earl instilling in him a “curiosity Anderson had quietly startthat . . . translates into a rigor ed making recordings of about research” into the “nitthe brothers in their jail cell. ty-gritty and historical conSheriff Anderson and Walter text” that he would need Graven, a retired Multnomah for this project. He cites his County detective he recruitthesis adviser Prof. Robert ed for the case, soon realized Knapp [English 1974–] as a that this was not a random mentor. “He was really open killing. In fact, Dewey’s mur- Portland on the Take: to letting me take the initiader provided a glimpse into tive and be independent, and Mid-Century Crime Bosses, Civic Corruption & Forgotten an intricate web of organized that was something I really Murders crime that would turn out hadn’t encountered before.”

By JB “Benji” Fisher ’94 and to be intimately connected After Reed, Fisher went JD Chandler with the police department on to earn a PhD in English The History Press, 2014 and the highest levels of city from the University of government.

Washington, and landed Due to the very corruption they threat- a job teaching early modern literature at ened to expose, Graven and Anderson’s Wingate University in North Carolina. In findings wouldn’t see the light of day for 2011, he and his wife, Catherine McClellan more than 60 years, with the publication ’97, came back to Reed for Centennial of Portland on the Take: Mid-Century Crime Reunions, where Gary Snyder ’51 gave Bosses, Civic Corruption, & Forgotten Murders the keynote address. Although the couple

by JB “Benji” Fisher ’94 and JD Chandler. was already thinking about moving back to For much of its history, Portland was Oregon, Snyder’s speech, which centered known as a “wide-open” town where gam- on the question of “how to be” in an everbling and prostitution flourished. Although changing world, gave them the inspiration ordinary Portlanders kept the industry to take the leap. afloat, everyday horse-racing enthusiBack in Oregon, Fisher was teaching asts and nightclub patrons generally only writing at Chemeketa Community College brushed the surface of a criminal under- when he came across a stack of copies of the world whose influence reached all the way Oregon Journal from 1958. A series of artiup to the mayor’s office. Central to the action cles about a family that disappeared in the

24 Reed magazine June 2015

Columbia Gorge caught his eye. He started researching the case—in the process getting in touch with his coauthor, JD Chandler— and discovered a treasure trove of unsolved cases in Graven’s papers. Among these papers was a file on Jo Ann Dewey containing notes about a potential link between her and two other murder victims. At that point, Fisher says, he and Chandler “realized we really had a story to tell.”

While the central narrative revolves around Dewey, the authors were also eager to tell the story of Jim Elkins, whose shadow loomed large over Portland in the ’40s and ’50s. Though some of the story will be familiar to readers of Phil Stanford’s Portland Confidential or Robert C. Donnelly’s Dark Rose, many connections had never been fully explored.

So what was the real significance of Dewey’s murder? In short, she knew too

Robert delahanty

he brought her on several occasions to a well-known Reed house he owned at 1414 Southeast Lambert.

Chandler is adamant that operations like those of Jim Elkins weren’t just permitted by government; they were actually a function of it. Police on the overworked vice squad—who were badly paid and generally couldn’t make a living without a little graft money—benefited from only having to enforce the law against nonapproved operations. And although Oregon voters passed Prohibition six years before the federal law went into effect, the mayor and his retinue kept right on drinking, using the evidence room in the central precinct as their liquor cabinet. Despite scattered efforts at reform, this system of corruption persisted for decades, keeping honest cops from connecting the dots on crimes like the Dewey case.

Going forward, Fisher is working on a book about the 1958 disappearance that originally sparked his interest. Meanwhile, he and Chandler are polishing a screenplay based on Portland on the Take.

As for Elkins, the beginning of the end came in 1956, when a number of promimuch. She and her friends liked to hang around Burnside late into the night, in many of the same spots frequented by Elkins and his gang. One night, she let slip that she’d heard what happened to Roman Podlas, a merchant seaman who had been killed for getting on the wrong side of the Duncans, a powerful, well-connected Portland crime family.

Though Elkins may not have been directly involved in Dewey’s murder, he was likely responsible for getting the Wilson brothers collared for the crime: Utah and Turman had stolen around $3000 in nickels from Portland slot machines, which probably belonged to him as the slot machine kingpin. It was an associate of Elkins in the Portland police department, William “Big Bill” Browne, who told Vancouver police to pick them up.

Despite the drama of the Dewey

For much of its history, Portland was known as a “wide-open” town where gambling and prostitution flourished. story—Fisher conceives of her as “something of a Juliet figure”—both authors are clear that they are not interested in sensationalism, and use this narrative as a jumping-off point for a broader historical survey.

They don’t shy away from the Rose City’s ugly side: the brutal labor crackdown that pitted unions against each other, or the fact that Portland was the only West Coast city where “white customers only” signs were hung in restaurants. There turns out to be a Reed connection, as well: Dewey was allegedly having an affair with a preacher in Camas, Washington, and the Clark County sheriff’s office apparently received a tip that

nent Portlanders, including Mayor Terry Schrunk, were hauled off to Washington to testify for a corruption investigation headed by Robert Kennedy that destroyed numerous political careers. Elkins’ own testimony sowed the seeds of his undoing.

With his key lieutenants under indictment, his power evaporated and the kingpin slid into mental and physical decline, deepened by his heroin addiction. He was arrested numerous times, mostly for petty offenses like drinking and driving, and finally died of unknown causes in 1968, his empire nothing but a bitter memory.

June 2015 Reed magazine 25

CHEATING HEISENBERG

Physicist Kater Murch ’02 pushes uncertainty to new limits—and poses deep questions about time’s arrow at the quantum level.

BY WILLIAM ABERNATHY ’88

It takes seven layers of wallboard and a thousand-pound door to quell the racket from the pumps that drive the pulse-tube refrigerator unit, an icy behemoth that drives the temperature down to 2.8 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. Then the dilution refrigerator kicks in, cooling the chamber to a mere 8 millikelvins, or eight thousandths of a degree above absolute zero.

“Pretty chilly,” says Kater Murch ’02 of his test apparatus.

It’s definitely the coldest spot in St. Louis— colder, in fact, than outer space. There are several reasons why Murch’s experiment takes place at the brink of absolute zero. First, at this temperature, electrons run free, utterly unrestrained by electrical resistance. More important, the cold dampens all the electromagnetic “noise” from the system. This is crucial, because Murch is investigating a quantum superposition—a state of existence at the outer boundaries of human understanding.

His test subject is a quantum bit, an “artificial atom” that is in two separate states at the same time. Mathematically, and for all practical understanding, it is in both an excited and an unexcited “ground” state simultaneously. It’s both heads and tails. Murch’s experiments on this most ephemeral state of existence have forced quantum scientists to question anew the nature of time itself.

One of the pillars of modern physics, quantum theory deals with things that are very small, interacting in ways that would give Alice in Wonderland a migraine. To those of us raised on the straightforward, intuitive world of classical mechanics (read: everyone), quantum mechanics offers paradoxes that only make sense if you do the math—and the math is notoriously, irreducibly difficult.

One key tenet of quantum mechanics, called the “observer effect,” holds that any act

26 Reed magazine June 2015

of measurement inevitably disturbs the quantum superposition. You can measure a quantum system to learn its state, but the answer you get back won’t be of a quantum system: because you measured it, you get an answer, but prying an answer out of it knocks it out of superposition. The answer you get can be summed up as: heads . . . or tails, but you can’t catch it being both. This effect is an analogue of the German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, which holds that you can measure an elementary particle’s location or its momentum, but never both at once.

The observer effect received a theoretical challenge in 1988 by peripatetic Israeli physicist Yakir Aharonov, who proposed that weak measurements could be taken of a quantum system that would provide incomplete information about the quantum bit (qubit) without disturbing its superposition. By Aharonov’s suggestion, one might be able to interrogate the qubit slyly, with subtle hints of a measurement, rather than spoiling the mood by coming right out and measuring it directly.

Aharonov proposed weak quantum measurements to advance “two-state vector formalism,” a quantum theory he posited in 1964, which asserts time symmetry in quantum systems. Time symmetry is the suggestion that in a quantum system, time runs in two directions, rather than the single direction we all know and lament. Under the two-state vector formalism, to understand a quantum system fully, one must take into account all available information. Half of the information contained in a quantum system comes from before it is measured.

The rest, his math suggested, must come from the future.

For obvious reasons, many scientists found this conjecture a bit hard to stomach.

“There was an intense dislike for Aharonov and his ideas.” Murch says. “Physical Review wouldn’t publish his papers, because they didn’t want to give him any credence. There

was sort of a refusal to accept these things.”

Being impossible to verify through conventional experimentation made two-state vector formalism easy to ignore. When he was originally taught quantum mechanics, Murch was counseled to “stay away from those weird, crazy people” doing weak measurements. Yet, he says, “I always wanted to understand weak measurements, and I said, ‘Someday I’ll do an experiment . . .’ ” Little did he know that his results would one day generate headlines around the world.

Murch’s fascination with the quantum world came in part from his studies with Prof. Nicholas Wheeler ’55 [physics 1963– 2010], whose musings on quantum systems

jennifer silverberg

Other quantum researchers warned Murch to stay away from those “weird, crazy people” doing so-called “weak” measurements.

often took philosophical turns. Prof. Wheeler would sometimes ask students to ponder the meaning of the concept of measurement itself.

“Back in those days,” Murch says, “I didn’t realize I’d end up devoting my whole career to understanding the measurement of quantum systems.” His Reed thesis, “The Classical Mechanics of Hoses,” addressed the theoretical underpinnings of hoses recoiling from water shooting out of a nozzle. Even today, Prof. Wheeler characterizes it as a “difficult problem” and recalls Murch’s effort as “heroic, but inconclusive.”

In addition to his physics work, Murch was an avid art student at Reed, and credits Prof.

Michael Knutson [art 1982–] as “probably the most inspiring art teacher I ever had at Reed, just because he made me love abstract art.” He

also worked with Prof. Gerri Ondrizek [art 1994–], whose book arts instruction helped him understand information design. “I am continually grateful for the artistic and design skills that I got,” Murch says. “Art not only guides how you design the experiment, but how you process it and show it to make the most convincing argument possible. My visual thinking, from all those art classes through the years, has been really valuable.”

Despite his largely theoretical Reed thesis, Murch’s career moved steadily away from theory and towards experimentation. This led him through doctoral and postdoctoral work with the UC Berkeley Ultracold Atomic Physics group, where he helped develop the techniques he puts to work today as an assistant professor at

Washington University in St. Louis. While at Berkeley, he enjoyed a lifestyle not usually associated with quantum physics, playing cello and mandolin in local rock bands, including one that Murch classifies as an “anarchist Scottish hip-hop band.”

“We called him the ‘Swiss army knife of men,’” says Todd Snyderman, a drummer who played with Murch in two bands. “He just throws himself into everything, and he devours it, and does it better than anybody else can.” Murch also volunteered his time to teach algebra to prisoners at San Quentin State Prison with the Prison University Project. “It was the best teaching experience you can possibly imagine,” Murch says of the men’s maximum security penitentiary. “They were the most engaged,

June 2015 Reed magazine 27

CHEATING HEISENBERG nice students . . . really nice guys. It was kinda surprising.”

With son West nearing school age, the time to put down roots arrived for Murch and his wife, Rebecca Bart ’03. A rare opportunity opened up in 2014, when she secured a position as a principal investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, while Murch found a perch at Washington University. (Bart is

MEASURING UNCERTAINTY

T

Weak measurements before T suggest possible outcomes for T.

dosed with just enough power, the system springs into a stable quantum state, becoming a qubit, an artificial atom that offers the advantage of not jumping around when superposed. The chamber itself is a highly tuned microwave sensor that can pick up infinitesimal changes in the electrical field surrounding the qubit. The detector can sense a fluctuation in the qubit’s electric field of 10–16 watts—about a hundred-trillionth of the energy a butterfly uses to flap its wings.

In action, the experiment weakly measures the qubit every 20 billionths of a sec-

Time T: a strong measurement collapses the superposition and gives a result, which is stored separately from the weak measurements.

Weak measurements after T suggest what T might have been.

Microwave radiation

In Murch’s experiment, a superconducting qubit is held in quantum superposition in a sensitive microwave detector. Each small wave represents a “weak” measurement. The sharp peak at time T represents a “strong” measurement that measures (and collapses) the qubit’s state. Murch found that the weak measurements—if taken before and after T— could predict the qubit’s state at T with 90% accuracy.

an expert in plant genomics, having studied with Pamela Ronald ’82 at UC Davis.

At the Danforth Center, she specializes in bacterial diseases of cassava and cotton.)

Murch’s most recent paper, “Prediction and Retrodiction in a Continuously Monitored Superconducting Qubit,” to be published soon as an Editor’s Suggestion in Physical Review Letters, uses weak measurements to put the two-state vector formalism to experimental proof. In his ultracold experimental chamber is a Josephson junction— a tiny wafer of aluminum oxide sandwiched between two layers of aluminum. Cooled to within a whisper of absolute zero, damped with just the right amount of capacitance, and

28 Reed magazine June 2015

ond. These measurements are so small they give back very little information about the quantum state, like a sputtering candle casting faint shadows in a dark cave. While these measurements yield little useful data, they’re so weak than they don’t disturb the quantum state either. After about a hundred weak measurements over a millionth of a second, the experiment “turns on the lights” for an instant, taking a strong measurement that annihilates the quantum superposition and measures the qubit. It records the result: heads or tails. Then, weak measurements continue every 20 nanoseconds for another microsecond after the strong measurement.

Using two-state vector formalism and

without peeking at the results of the strong measurements, Murch found that he could analyze the before-and-after weak measurements, each no better than a random guess, and correctly guess the strong measurement 90% of the time. The observer effect says that’s not supposed to happen. Weirder still, the calculations only work when weak measurements before and after the quantum collapse are taken into account. The obvious interpretation: as Aharonov predicted, information about the quantum collapse leaks into the strong measurement from both the past and the future.

The experiment provoked international attention in the media—intense, hyperbolic, and often just plain wrong. “Can the Past be Changed by the FUTURE? Bizarre Quantum Experiment Suggests Time Can Run Backwards,” exclaimed the London Daily Mail. Blogs as far away as Pakistan proclaimed the invention of time travel. For his part, Murch is considerably more restrained.

“When you read the paper, we’re very careful about what we say,” Murch says. “We don’t claim ‘the future affects the past’ in PRL.” “I’m not sure I’m really in favor of reverse causation,” Murch sighs. “You can do all of this without some sort of fancy time-symmetric approach. In fact, normally . . . we have operators called ‘positive operator value’ measures that [can] deal with the measurement in a rigorous way.”

“That’s true of many interpretations of quantum mechanics,” notes coauthor Andrew Jordan, of the University of Rochester. “For example, the ‘many worlds’ interpretation or the Bohmian interpretation or any other of a half a dozen interpretations—they all agree on the answers, but disagree on how you think about it.”

“It’s just a different way of looking at the math,” Murch says. “It does lend itself to some more intuitive ways to approach the problem, and that’s sort of the two-state vector formalism.” In other words, information could be leaking back in time . . . unless you explain the system using different, much more convoluted math.

The 13th-century philosopher William of Occam famously proposed that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

Whether information leaking backward in time is a simpler explanation than linear time (with much hairier math) is open to discussion. No instrument yet invented can detect what Occam would make of it all.

REDISCOVERING A MASTER natalie behring

30 Reed magazine  June 2015

BY BILL DONAHUE

Death is, generally speaking, a bad career move for writers of fiction. As their graves grow moss, their work often gathers dust, and we’re left with only a vague, cartoonish notion of what they wrote and who they were.

The nation’s first African American novelist, Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932), is now mostly remembered as the author of The Conjure Woman, an 1899 collection of short stories in which a sardonic ex-slave, Uncle Julius, obliquely comments on race relations in antebellum North Carolina by telling clever supernatural tales in dialect. In “The Goophered Grapevine,” Julius speaks of one slave who ate some betwitched scuppernong. The man is caught and returned to a cursed life wherein he becomes a weird, animate farm tool who sprouts new hair and

explore Chesnutt’s work. Armed with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she ventured to Fisk University, in Tennessee, to the Charles Chesnutt collection. On her first day there, she made an astonishing discovery. Archival box number 10 contained three previously unknown manuscripts, with corrections penned in Chesnutt’s neat cursive. In another box, she found a black notebook containing 11 handwritten drafts of stories. Digging into Chesnutt’s financial ledger, she located pay receipts for two early, long-forgotten stories—“Train Boy,” which earned Chesnutt $10 from the Detroit Free Press in 1888 and “The Fabric of a Vision,” a 1897 story that was likely never published.

“I was insanely excited,” she says. “I ran into the curator’s office and said, ‘Do you

Myth was the only vessel big enough to contain everything Chesnutt wanted to say about race. youthful muscles each spring before withering each fall and beginning “ter draw up wid de rheumatiz.”

The critic William Dean Howells, Chesnutt’s contemporary, praised the book for its “wild, indigenous poetry,” but the seven tales in The Conjure Woman represent just a sliver of Chesnutt’s massive oeuvre (Chesnutt wrote nine novels and over 80 other stories) and they scarcely convey the power and mastery of their enigmatic author—a mixed-race grocer’s son from North Carolina who taught himself Latin and Greek, and became a lawyer, a teacher, and a civil rights activist, and whose literary voice ranged from sober and restrained to utterly outraged.

Last summer, Prof. Sarah WagnerMcCoy [English 2011–] set out to to

know what you have here?’ I couldn’t believe scholars had never done anything with this material.”

It’s not clear why the manuscripts escaped notice for so long. Back in 1974, a scholar named Sylvia Lyon Render published The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt, a compendium of 74 stories, but did not include the typescripts Prof. Wagner-McCoy found. Had Render never seen Box 10? Did she deem its contents unfinished or perhaps too political?

It’s impossible to be sure, as Render, a curator at the Library of Congress, died decades ago. But as Wagner-McCoy read one of the newly found tales, “John Pettifer’s Ghost,” on a sweltering afternoon, its relevance sang out to her. “It was mid-August,” she says, “the same week that Michael

fa y e t t e v i l l s tat e u n i v e r s i t y c h a r l e s w. c h e s n u t t l i b r a r y a r c h i v e s

Prof. Sarah Wagner-McCoy unearths new manuscripts that cast fresh light on the first African-American novelist

Author, lawyer, and activist, Chesnutt vowed to “show to the world that a man may spring from a race of slaves, and yet far excel many of the boasted ruling race.”

Brown was shot in Ferguson, and in the story a white man shoots a free black man in the street, in broad daylight, and goes unpunished.”

Delving into the notebook, she found that for one unpublished conjure tale Chesnutt wrote a frame narrative introducing Uncle Julius—and then this scrawled edit note: “Insert here that story from the newspaper story about bewitched pigs.” In another draft, Chesnutt made a nod to a fellow novelist, a lion of literary realism, as he gave his story a subtitle, “À La Henry James.”

For Wagner-McCoy, it was a delight to glimpse Chesnutt’s creative process. She’d fallen hard for the writer in grad school, entranced by his use of fiction to consider the horrors of slavery. “In his time,” she explains, “slave narratives were always true stories. Even Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel, was printed with a note saying it was based on reality. Chesnutt asked, ‘How do you represent something so unrepresentable as the buying and selling of human property? And how to bring to life the age of lynching that followed slavery?’ Chesnutt decided you do that best through myth.”

Perhaps myth was the only vessel big enough to contain everything that Chesnutt wanted to say about race. The writer was raised by freed blacks. His parents were the owners of a struggling grocery store in

June 2015 Reed magazine 31

REDISCOVERING A MASTER

It’s an argument Wagner-McCoy knows all too well. Her father was an English professor, and she grew up reading voraciously.

Still, in the summer before her freshman year at Columbia University, she groaned when she was asked to read Homer’s Iliad.

“I was really turned off by it,” she says. “I didn’t want to read about these big battles between ancient soldiers, and I wondered, ‘What’s the relevance of all this?’”

This spring, when she gave a lecture titled “Allusion and Epic” to a couple hundred Hum 110 students, she confessed that she had brought her disdain for the classics to Columbia. “One of my most vivid memories of my own first day of college,” she said, “is walking to the subway with my father and asking him, ‘Is it too late to transfer?’”

Soon, though, she became enchanted with Virgil, the Roman poet whose own

32 Reed magazine June 2015

fi s k uni vers i ty, john hope a nd a urel i a e. fra nk l i n l i bra ry, S pecial Collections, charles chesnutt collection, john pettiford’s ghost, box 10, file 13, p.1

Fayetteville, North Carolina, and his father helped to establish a school for freed blacks.

Still, he once wrote that he was “seven-eighths white.” He was pale skinned and his grandfather was a slave owner. Amid strangers, he could easily pass as white. But he could not deny his blackness, for his world was African American and he believed in racial uplift.

When Chesnutt was 14, he began teaching at the Howard School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he had been a star pupil. He wanted to pursue his own education, but his mother had just died and the grocery had failed. His family was poor, so he elected to study Greek and Latin on his own at night, after correcting papers, when, he wrote, “my body is fatigued, my eyes tired [and] my mind anything but clear.” He assigned himself essays on Homer and Virgil—and in so doing threw himself into the midst of a heated debate among black activists of his day.

Some blacks, such as the author W.E.B. Du Bois, believed that the “talented tenth” of all Negros should pursue an education in the humanities, in order to “guide the Mass [of blacks] away from the contamination and death of the Worst.” The educator Booker T. Washington, meanwhile, dismissed the “craze for Greek and Latin learning,” lobbying instead for industrial and agricultural training. His critique was of course prelude to the shrill battle that still rages over the value of a liberal arts education today.

epic, the Aeneid, was written 700 years after Homer’s death and reimagines Homer’s tale to deliver its own rendition of the Trojan War. In her view, Virgil’s poem “adapted the epic to critique the politics of ancient Rome.” His work is, she feels, a “reading” of Homer—and, by extension, a rallying cry for smart reading in all contexts. “He analyzes the complexities in everything he reads,” she told the Hum 110 fledglings, “and then

he uses the tensions he finds to frame his representation of his own cultural moment.

He does what we do. He digs deep to make the material new again.”

Virgil’s politics sang to her at Columbia because she was then active in issues of social justice. As a student, she started an after-school tutoring program for homeless kids. “I thought that was going to be my career,” she says.

PAGE OF HISTORY. The first page of the typescript of “John Pettifer’s Ghost,” an unpublished short story by Charles Chesnutt, inotroduces Abel Galloway, a white businessman who makes his fortune from mortgages on slaves.

Galloway and Pettifer, a free mixed-race farmer, both court a poor white woman.

The interracial love triangle—especially when the white woman prefers the black man to his white rival— counters typical nineteenthcentury representations of gender and ra ce. Later in the story, Galloway shoots Pettifer in the back of the head at a crossroads, knowing that, without white witnesses, no grand jury will ever indict him. Prof. Wagner found the story the same week that black teenager Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri.

It was Chesnutt who tugged her toward her other passion, literature. The writer was also a lawyer and social activist who, in writing for the NAACP’s magazine, the Crisis, argued for blacks’ voting rights and equal access to education. He saw the presence of injustice all around him,” she says, “and he fought it. For him, literature was not just a belletrist enterprise.”

At Harvard, she wrote one chapter of her

Prof. Wagner-McCoy made an astonishing discovery on her first trip to the Chesnutt collection: three previously unknown manuscripts, with corrections penned in Chesnutt’s neat cursive.

doctoral thesis on Chesnutt and how he read Virgil’s first two epics—the Eclogues and the Georgics, both agricultural poems— to arrive at his own critique of pastoral nostalgia in the antebellum South. In the years since, she’s reveled in the range of Chesnutt’s meditation on race. Some of his novels—Evelyn’s Husband, for instance— are parodies of white society. In one story called “The Wife of His Youth,” Chesnutt considers racial stratification within the black community, by introducing us to the fictional “Blue Vein Society,” reserved for African Americans “white enough to show blue veins.”

“He was representing America from every angle,” she says, “and telling the story of a complicated moment in race relations.”

“I’m fascinated by the connections between Chesnutt’s period and our own,” she continues. “Racial injustice and violent terrorism, debates about who should have access to education and whether they should study the humanities, a widening income gap fueled by the myth of meritocracy, the re-enslavement of black men that would lead to the current system of mass incarceration today, a nation sharply split by partisanship and denying the people whose labor kept it running franchise and basic rights of citizenship. This is a period when fiction—imaginary stories—shaped

the history of this country more than politics, economics, even war.”

At Fisk, she decided that her discoveries could form the backbone for a larger project. Last year, she and Stephanie Browner, a literary scholar and dean at the New School, in New York, met to discuss working together on The Complete Charles W. Chesnutt, a projected seven-volume resource that will include nearly everything that Chesnutt ever wrote—fiction, sketches, poems, journals, letters, his one play, and a biography on the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The archival material that can’t be squeezed into print will go online, into a digital archive.

Last summer, with two Reed students, Michael Ojeda ’15 and Luis Valenzuela ’17, Wagner-McCoy took the first concrete steps to launch the project, setting up an online database of all currently available Chesnutt stories, and also wrote footnotes for Chesnutt’s work. It’s a matter of intense reading, really. “I spent most of last summer annotating three stories,” she says.

But there are still over 70 stories to go.

The project may take several years to complete, but will be a critical step in reaching a deep understanding of this complex black author and the legacy of his race.

Special thanks to Aisha Johnson and Chantel Clark and the staff at the Fisk University Special Collections and Archives.

June 2015 Reed magazine 33

Reediana Books by Reedies

Goodhouse By Peyton Marshall ’96

Public Memory in Early China Prof. Ken Brashier

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Harvard University Asia Center, 2014

Toward the end of the 21st century in a suburb of Ione, California, 17-year old boy named James chops wood and bites his lip as a gaggle of high-society women pepper him with intrusive questions. It is his first community day, when James and his fellow Goodhouse students are bussed to local communities to spend time with ordinary citizens. James is desperate to prove to the women that he is a hardworking young man, not a subhuman monster.

The stakes and dystopian, classist tension are thus set in Peyton Marshall’s critically acclaimed first novel Goodhouse, loosely based on California’s notorious Preston School of Industry, a now-shuttered reform school for orphans and juvenile offenders. In Peyton’s novel, children identified as having the genetic marker for criminality are taken from their families and sent to Goodhouses—part prison and part reform school—in order to be taught right-thinking and how to repress their darkest desires and deviant impulses. The boys are even given the surname Goodhouse to blot out their past and individuality.

We follow James, the book’s protagonist, as he navigates his final year in his Goodhouse.

A year prior to the book’s events, he witnessed a terrible fire that destroyed his home in LaPine, Oregon, and killed many of his friends. Reliving the memory, James wonders if he has escaped danger as he meets the school’s nefarious director of medical studies and Bethany, a smart and mischievous girl with a mysterious interest him. He learns of a prison bordering the school and a radical religious fringe group that wants to destroy the Goodhouses and the boys who live in them. As the novel reaches its thrilling conclusion, neither James nor the reader can be certain whether his experiences are random, confusing happenstance or signs of a world order on the brink of collapse.

In early imperial China, the dead were remembered by stereotyping them, by relating them to the existing public memory, and not by vaunting what made each person individually distinct and extraordinary in his or her lifetime. In Public Memory, Prof. Ken Brashier [religion 1998–] examines the phenomenon of postmortem remembrance, a process of pouring new ancestors into prefabricated molds or stamping them with rigid cookie cutters. He treats three definitive parameters of identity—name, age, and kinship—as ways of negotiating a person’s relative position within the collective consciousness, and examines both the tangible and intangible media responsible for keeping that defined identity welded into the infrastructure of Han public memory.

—AMANDA WALDROUPE ’07

34 Reed magazine June 2015

This is the second of two books Brashier has written for the Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series. The first, Ancestral Memory in Early China, won honorable mention for the Levenson Prize in 2011. “It is an astoundingly powerful and erudite study that also makes for an enjoyable reading experience,” reports Carla Nappi, who interviewed Prof. Brashier for New Books in East Asian Studies.

The book provides a history of the early Chinese ancestral cult, particularly its cognitive aspects. Ancestor worship was an idea system that aroused serious debates about the nature of postmortem existence, he says. It served as the religious backbone to Confucianism and may even have been the forerunner of Daoist and Buddhist meditation practices. —RIDDY ANNA

The Zen of Fulbright: The Unofficial Guide to Making the Most of Your U.S. Fulbright Scholarship By Thomas Burns ’98 Don Davis Publishing, 2014

The Zen of Fulbright is extraordinarily well researched and presents a comprehensive overview of the Fulbright program—an impressive feat in that the Fulbright program is offered with slightly different parameters in each of the 150 countries in which it is active, and is notoriously difficult to describe. The book showcases collections of quotes providing a range of voices, perspectives and experiences—which sometimes are contradictory, but by disagreeing, demonstrate the range of experiences that the program can encompass.

The first half of the book provides an overview of the program, discussions of what makes successful candidates and applications, and how the application process works. The book then addresses

pre-departure considerations, how to get the most out of the program while on the ground, and how to handle the challenges of returning home. The appendix offers a collection of application essays that prospective applicants can use as models.

Of the many quotes in the book, the one that I plan to post on the wall of my office is attributed to Wayne Gretzky: “You will always miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” With this, Burns reminds us that you can’t succeed without first taking the risk of trying—a lesson that can be applied both to the initial application itself as well as the daily experience of the program. —MICHELLE JOHNSON, FELLOWSHIPS ADVISER, CENTER FOR LIFE BEYOND REED

Reediana in brief Want to see your creation listed here? Send description and high-resolution images to reed.magazine@reed.edu.

The Mandolin Player’s Pastime: A Collection of Reels, Hornpipes, Jigs, and Other Dance Tunes for Mandolin,

by Philip L. Williams ’58 (Voyager Recordings &Publications). Phil’s book contains 140 traditional fiddle tunes that play well on the mandolin—most from the northern tradition—set in standard music notation with mandolin tablature. The book contains tips on playing these tunes on the mandolin. Also available is a companion CD of 57 tunes from the book, played by Phil on a 1914 Gibson F4 mandolin, backed up by Vivian Tomlinson Williams ’59 on her 1965 Gibson L0 guitar. (See Class Notes.)

The John Neilson Music Book: A Manuscript of Scottish Fiddle Music from Cuilhill, Scotland, 1875,

by Vivian Tomlinson Williams ’59 (Voyager Recordings & Publications).

Vivian’s book has reintroduced many forgotten fiddle dance tunes into the traditional fiddle music of Scotland. This manuscript of Scottish dance music was written out by fiddlers around the Scottish mining town of Cuilhill, which no longer exists. It contains 120 tunes—reels, hornpipes, jigs, waltzes, marches, polkas, quadrilles, strathspeys, and country dances—set in standard music notation by Vivian. Most of the tunes require no familiarity with Scottish fiddle styles, though knowledge of Scottish violin would be handy for the strathspeys and hornpipes. This is a real glimpse into the popular dance music of Victorian Scotland.

(See Class Notes.)

111 Shops in New York That You Must Not Miss, by Mark Gabor ’60, coauthor (Emons Verlag, 2014). Mark’s book, written with partner Susan Lusk and part of an ongoing, illustrated series already covering 60 major European cities, is now in its second printing. First released in both English and German, the book has sold unexpectedly well—not just to visitors and tourists of the Big Apple, but to diehard New Yorkers as well,

36 Reed magazine June 2015

says Mark. “Shops included in the book (Strand among them) are especially appropriate for Reedies because they’re all off the beaten track– quirky, obscure, curious, and at times outrageous.”

The Anthropology of Eastern Religions and The Anthropology of Western Religions, by Murray Leaf ’61 (Lexington, 2014). The world’s great religions depend on traditions of serious scholarship, dedicated to preserving their key texts but also to understanding them and, therefore, to debating what understanding itself is and how best to do it. These two volumes use the theory of social organization Murray described previously in Human Organizations and Social Theory to lay out the elements of each religious tradition and the organizations through which it is perpetuated. “Leaf offers a careful, useful, and balanced study of the anthropology of Eastern and Western religions,” wrote a reviewer for Choice. “Rather than focusing on the philosophy or theology of religion, these volumes discuss religious traditions’ ideas about organized human life; the institutions, strategies, and organizations they create to facilitate community; and their constituencies.”

their long-term involvement with water development programs. “We have worked as a team for many years now, doing field visits to all parts of Bangladesh,” Suzanne writes. The studies have been done on behalf of international development organizations such as UNICEF, WaterAid, CARE, and the World Bank. Focusing on WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) strategies, domestic supply issues, and perceptions of water’s qualities and powers, the authors reveal new ways to engage with the social and cultural context of a development project.

The First Interview, fourth edition, by James Morrison ’62 (Guilford, 2014). Every clinical relationship begins with an initial interview. The First Interview contains material designed to help clinicians in training as well as those who have had lots of experience with mental health patients. It is based primarily on research material gathered over the course of years in the United States and the United Kingdom. James has published two additional books with Guilford, DSM-5 Made Easy and Diagnosis Made Easier. “It’s cheaper than medical school,” he writes, “but I don’t award a degree.” More at JamesMorrisonMD.org.

The short story “Mourners” by Peter Silverman ’65 was published in East Coast Literary Review (Winter 2015).

Reculer pour Mieux Sauter: The Complete Work (volumes 1–12), by Anne-Marie Levine ’61 (Project Projects, 2015). Poet and artist Anne-Marie has published a mixed-genre nonfiction work, reconstructing a complex family history in recovered scraps. Assembling photographs, documents, newspaper clippings, emails, quotations, and original text, the book is a searching project about memory and narrative, where the immensely personal is confronted by the forceful hand of history.

As Anne-Marie traces the course of several lives in the fragments that remain, the many traumas of the time find their voice in the poetic detail of a stream-of-consciousness scrapbook.

Water Culture in South Asia: Bangladesh Perspectives,

by Suzanne Hanchett ’62, senior author (Development Resources Press, 2014). Suzanne’s book is based on the work of five researchers and

Huihui: Navigating Art and Literature in the Pacific, by Jeff Carroll ’72, coeditor (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015). This groundbreaking anthology of Pacific writing was coedited with two of Jeff’s colleagues at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and is the first collection to navigate the interconnections between the rhetorics and aesthetics of the Pacific. The name huihui, a metaphor for the bright cluster of stars known also as the Pleiades or Seven Sisters, showcases a variety of genres and cross-genre forms, including critical essays, poetry, short fiction, speeches, photography, and personal reflections, which explore a wide range of subjects, with contributions by authors representing several island and continental nations. (See Class Notes.)

Buffalotarrak: An Anthology of the Basques of Buffalo, Wyoming, by David Romtvedt ’72, coeditor (Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, 2011).

Beginning with the arrival of one shepherd from the French Basque town of Baigorri, Basques migrated to the small town of Buffalo in increasing numbers throughout the 20th century, staking their claims to the land in order to raise sheep. This collection provides readers with an opportunity to learn their stories. David teaches in the MFA program for writers at the University of Wyoming, and has a new novel coming out soon.

Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States, by Rebecca Gordon ’75 (Oxford University Press, 2014). The terrorist attacks in 2001 reopened what many people in the U.S. had long assumed was a settled ethical question: is torture ever morally permissible? Rebecca’s book is about how the national consensus against torture broke down after 9/11, replaced with the widespread view that “whatever it takes” is the only moral standard we need to apply to questions of national “security.” Folks can find more information at mainstreamingtorture.org. Rebecca, who teaches philosophy and ethics at the University of San Francisco, is also a regular contributor on TomDispatch.com.

The Outskirts of Hope, by Jo Kruger Ivester ’77 (She Writes Press, 2015). Jo’s first book is a memoir based on her family’s experience in the South during the height of the civil rights movement.

With a degree in public health in 1967, Jo’s father engaged in the War on Poverty by moving his family from a Boston suburb to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where he opened a pediatric clinic. Jo’s mother taught high school, and both she and Jo kept journals of those years that formed the basis of this book. Writes Bob Flanagan, professor emeritus at Stanford, “This engaging book offers a rare and moving narrative of the power of seemingly modest personal activities in delivering the durable social change promised by laws and policy.”

“Arguing A Post-Alice ‘Abstract Idea’ Rejection At USPTO,” an article by Christopher Hall ’78, was published under Expert Analysis in Law360 (www .law360.com/ip) in February 2015. Christopher has been a patent agent for six years and has worked for Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice in Cupertino, California, for two years.

Beyond the Page: Poetry and Performance in Spanish America, by Jill Kuhnheim ’79 (University of Arizona Press, 2014). Poetry began as a spoken art and remains one to this day, and readers tend to view the poem on the page as an impenetrable artifact. Jill’s book demonstrates how far off the page poetry can travel, exploring a range of performances from early 20th-century recitations to 21st-century film, CDs, and internet renditions. Beyond the Page offers analytic tools to chart poetry beyond printed texts.

The book includes noteworthy poets and artists such as José Martí, Luis Palés Matos, Eusebia Cosme, Nicomedes Santa Cruz, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Nicolás Guillén. Jill has served as director of Latin American & Caribbean Studies at the University of Kansas.

The Art of Peter Mars, by Peter Mars ’82 (Mars Gallery, 2014). Peter has been a leader of Chicago’s Avant Pop movement for more than 20 years and is known for his colorful, quirky artworks that disrupt predictable interpretation, tickle the senses, and delight the child inside. This book features more than 50 full-color images of his original art and contains a written introduction to Peter’s career. His works provide a commentary on American popular culture on topics ranging from Bob Dylan to Batman and provide an unexpected look at the images and cultural icons we see around us every day. Available through the Mars Gallery (www.marsgallery.com).

Surviving with Dignity: Hausa Communities of Niamey, Niger,

by Scott Youngstedt ’85 (Lexington Books, 2012).

Based on more than 20 years of fieldwork examining the experiences of first- and second-generation migrant Hausa men in Niger, Scott explores three key interconnected themes in his book: structural violence, suffering, and surviving with dignity. Reviewer Paul Stoller of West Chester University describes the work as a deeply humanistic and moving portrait, describing “without sentimentality the challenges of daily life in a space of deep and intractable poverty.” Scott is a professor of anthropology at Saginaw Valley State University. (See Class Notes.)

“Anxiety’s Gift,” an essay by Daniel Harris-McCoy ’02, was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (January 12, 2015). Daniel’s essay begins with a reflection on creating and crafting papers during his years at Reed and concludes with an unforeseen outcome, that of self-awareness and compassion. “The development of those capacities is one of the greatest gifts of academic life.”

Daniel is an assistant professor of classics at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Finding Success in Failure: True Confessions from 10 Years of Startup Mistakes, by Lucas Carlson ’05 (Craftsman Founder, 2015). After graduating from Reed with a degree in physics, Lucas attempted (and failed) many startup ideas until one finally raised $10M and was acquired in 2013. This personal book talks about what worked and—more importantly—what didn’t work and how to avoid those common pitfalls. “If you are serious about building a company, this is where to start,.” says author and entrepreneur Tucker Max. (See Class Notes.)

“Accountability without Democracy: Lessons from African Famines in the 1980s,” by Danny Sellers ’13, was the Peter and Katherine Tomassi Essay in the spring 2014 issue of the Columbia University Journal of Politics & Society. Danny gives credit for the publication of his thesis to his adviser Prof.

Mariela Szwarcberg [poli sci 2012–]. “Needless to say, it’s pretty exciting seeing my name on the journal site, and I couldn’t have done it without her and the rest of the orals board.” (Thanks, Danny.)

June 2015 Reed magazine 37

In Memoriam Kinetic Sculptor Prof. Judith Tyle Massee [dance 1968–98]

December 27, 2014, in Portland.

BY JOHN VERGIN ’78

At the beginning there was music.

Born into a household filled with it, Judy Massee, as a young girl, assumed that all fathers were jazz drummers who rehearsed in the living room late into the night, and all mothers played the piano and sang the songs of their youth.

Interest in dance came early. She begged for tap lessons. She was given ballet. She learned the former from friends, the latter from study, and loved both.

During her sophomore year at Portland’s Grant High School, she saw a flyer announcing a master class at Reed with Charles Weidman, the father of American modern dance. Curious, the young ballerina decided to attend. Weidman strode in, class began, and Judy soon found herself executing expansive stretches and enormous leaps across the floor. She had entered a new world of movement that she instantly loved.

Three days later, the class presented Weidman’s seminal work Lynchtown, which tells the dark story of a lynching that Weidman witnessed as a boy in rural Nebraska. Judy was given an important role in which the violent act offstage (Weidman knew his Greek drama) was echoed onstage. It was a life-determining moment. At 17, she was on her way.

Judy majored in education at Portland State University, where she put herself through college by teaching dance. She also worked as choreographer for Prof. Herb Gladstone [music 1946– 80], who was expanding his well-known Gilbert and Sullivan productions. In 1960, she bought a rattletrap ’55 Chevy, drove to New York City, and grandly entered the city going the wrong direction down a one-way Harlem street before her audition at the Martha Graham dance school.

The Graham school was intense. At first she could barely keep up. Over time, her body gradually accepted the rigors of Graham’s demanding technique. But one day, while she was executing a difficult movement, a student teacher took her arm and unexpectedly torqued her body hard in the opposing direction. Initially she felt no pain, but later that day she could barely walk. A disc in her lower back had been badly ruptured; the pain 44 Reed magazine June 2015

and physical limitation would remain for life.

She remained in New York, successfully altering her focus toward theatre, as the classic triple-threat actor-singer-dancer.

In 1968, her younger sister, Shari (Tyle House ’68), called to tell her about an opening for dance instructor at Reed. Judy was interviewed on the phone by President Victor Rosenblum [1968–70] on a Thursday, flew to

Portland on Sunday, and taught her first Reed class on Monday. It went well. She told herself, “This is what I want to be doing now.”

It was the beginning of a remarkable, fruitful, difficult relationship between institute and instructor. For the next 30 years Judy would labor for the legitimacy of dance in the curriculum, and for respect for her position. Through it all she taught with clarity, passion, vision, and

unflagging devotion to dance and to her students.

At Reed Judy truly came into her own. Her predecessors, Trisha Brown [physical education 1958–60] and Elfi Hosman [dance 1963– 68], had managed to extract dance from the P.E. department to be included in the Division of the Arts. With Judy, Dance 110 and 210 (and 310, which she added) grew and grew. Soon the dance studio (in the new sports center built after the demise of Botsford Hall) was full to bursting.

By the early ’70s the larger dance classes had to be moved to gym II. Dance enrollment continued to increase. Dance 110 had to be split into three sections, each section having as many as 30 students; Dance 210 needed two sections.

Dance 310 grew also. Judy taught them all.

Dance 110 was her favorite. She loved working with beginning students, and she was extraordinarily good at it. Her association with Weidman (they had become friends) gave her boldness, humor, compassion; from Graham she borrowed the mantra technique, discipline, freedom.

Sometime in the mid-’70s, Prof. Allen Neuringer [psychology 1970–2008], having heard so many students praise Judy’s teaching, decided to sign up for one of her classes himself. Later he would comment, “In a class of 40, Judy consistently made each student feel valued and heeded as she led them through complex rhythms and movements. The physical and cognitive demands of the class shaped feelings of competence and joy.”

Judy petitioned for help. She was overburdened with teaching and the resulting physical strain. In 1975 Prof. Pat Wong [1975–2009] was hired to share the load. For her, Judy was the best of colleagues, “unfailingly generous, imaginative, kind, and helpful.” She points out Judy’s insistence on live music to accompany classes. This had been the norm until the advent of the record player. But recorded music cannot respond. A live accompanist can accommodate to the mood and moment.

Judy brought a battered upright into gym II and trained many a young pianist in the intricacies of dance accompaniment.

Keith Martin ’73, as a sophomore, discovered his love of dance through Judy. A fine pianist, he was encouraged by Judy to play for class, and he eventually went to New York, danced for Weidman, and became a staff accompanist at the Graham school.

Debra Porter ’75, a deeply musical and original young musician, was taught by Judy to accompany on both the piano and the drum.

Debra knew Judy as the finest teacher she had ever met, who responded positively to every student as an individual and possessed an innate talent for collaboration.

Judy thought there should be no division between disciplines. There was so much connectedness and richness of experience to be gained by learning from one another. She believed that the mind and body were one. She taught her students

to explore, inquire, to not accept the obvious.

With Prof. Larry Oliver [theatre 1972–77] she established the dance-theatre major. She advised many interdisciplinary theses, enjoying the intense work with student and faculty.

Aixe Djelal ’93, a dance–literature major, recalls that Judy’s classes created a world in which anyone could dance. Each student was encouraged as an individual to fulfill his or her own potential. But Judy never advised a pure dance major. Dance, though part of the Division of the Arts, did not have a major.

When Judy arrived at Reed she became aware of the struggle in the performing arts departments to be respected as worthy members of the liberal arts family. Some among the faculty were openly derisive of dance; “nothing from the neck up,” they said.

In a 1993 article by Martha Ullman West in Reed, Judy is quoted thus: “The process of making a dance is no different from what occurs in the chem lab. Either it works or it doesn’t. The learning process is the same as in any other discipline, involving inquiry, investigation, coming

total number of Reedies Judy taught at 3,800.

In the early ’80s, Virginia Gurley ’82, a dance–psychology major, advised by Judy and Prof. Neuringer, devised an experiment to test the thesis that dance, which engages both body and mind, is beneficial to academic performance.

Students were asked to evaluate their moods upon arrival and departure from a sports activity, a dance class, or a seminar. Dance led the field in elevating feelings of happiness and wellbeing. And, as Judy had observed, students who participated in dance seemed to have an academic edge over those who did not.

Many former students will tell you that Judy’s dance class changed their lives. José Brown ’71 and Keith Martin went on to found their own dance companies. Steve Jobs famously cited Judy’s class as the source of his learning to think creatively. Conrad Skinner ’74 injects “what Judy taught about kinesthetic awareness into my architectural work . . .” Prof. Carla Mann ’81 [dance 1995–] says, “I wouldn’t be where I am today . . . without Judy’s encouragement and support. I would not be the teacher or human

The physical and cognitive demands of Judy’s class shaped feelings of competence and joy, says Prof. Allen Neuringer. to a conclusion, and proving a theory. Choreographers solve problems.”

When Judy proposed that dance history be added to the curriculum, one professor compared the idea to teaching underwater basket weaving.

“It was just a lack of knowledge,” Judy said later. How could an art form thousands of years old not have a history?

Enough of the faculty were with Judy, however, to pass the proposal, and Dance 320 was born. The faculty later approved her proposals for Dance 330 (Theory and Criticism), and Dance 420 (Special Topics in Choreography).

One professor certainly needed no convincing. Prof. Dick Tron [classics 1961–2003] had been on sabbatical during Judy’s first year at Reed.

Upon his return, Bernice Peachy, wife of Dick’s colleague Prof. Fred Peachy [classics 1956–82], indulged in a bit of matchmaking by introducing Dick to Judy. They became the faculty romance of 1970, and were married thereafter. Dick was unfailingly supportive. As Judy said, “What is Greek drama without the dancing chorus?”

By nature, Judy was not a fighter. But she was strong and willing to take risks. She persevered in championing the performing arts at Reed.

She never backed down, but persisted steadily to teach and convince all around her that to study, practice, choreograph, and perform dance was a skill of the highest order. Reed’s brightest and best took Judy’s classes. In the early ’90s it was estimated that 15% of the Reed student body took dance. A conservative estimate puts the

being I am today without having known her.”

It is good to note that with all her dogged determination, Judy’s calling card as a choreographer was humor. She created wickedly funny dances—she was adept at spoofing the serious— and once created a dance movement titled La Vache Morte (The Dead Cow).

Judy built Reed’s dance program through years of unstinting effort, along the way gently, surely empowering young people to live better lives.

In 2011, Reed broke ground on the new Performing Arts Building, for which Judy and many others lobbied for decades. During its construction Judy would drive through the parking lot to observe the progress. To see such an imposing edifice arise in service of the arts was an answer to her hopes for Reed.

The dance studio is a jewel. And thanks to a petition circulated by Prof. Kathleen Worley [theatre 1978–2014], the performance lab bears Judy’s name.

Central to the building is the atrium, an enormous space of air and gentle light. All around one can sense the music, the theatre, the dance;,while of itself, the atrium is calm.

Rather like Judy, who with compassion, empathy, acumen, and skill inspired so much to happen around her.

On retirement Judy found time for an old love, poetry. She became quite involved, learning herself, and helping others with their work; fixing, adjusting, making things go right, as she had always been wont to do.

June 2015 Reed magazine 45

Cross-Canyon Architect Neil Farnham ’40

September 17, 2014, in Redmond, Oregon.

An architect whose residential and commercial designs demonstrated a keen respect for the natural landscape, Neil left an indelible mark on the Pacific Northwest and at Reed, where his projects ranged from residence to reactor.

Neil grew up in central Oregon and engaged early on with the great outdoors—fishing, camping, and adventuring. He worked with the forest service and in lumber mills before attending Reed, where he focused on mathematics and physics, before transferring to the University of Oregon, where he completed a BS in architecture. Out of school, he was employed as a draftsman for the Bonneville Power Administration, and in 1942– 46 served with the U.S. Army Engineer Amphibious unit in Far East. He returned to military duty with the 434 Engineer Construction Battalion during the Korean War. During his 50-year career, Neil created spaces that were open, naturally lit, and imbued with functionality and a modern aesthetic. He was the first alumnus chosen to design a building for the

Reed campus, when longtime trustee E.B. MacNaughton [president 1948–52] recruited him in the ’50s to build four new dorms for Reed’s swelling student body. A History of the Reed College Campus and its Buildings (1990) records that MacNaughton told Neil and his partner, “You fellows are young, and I know you’ll break your necks to do the best possible job for us.” Of three proposed sites, Reed students approved one across the canyon, a space somewhat isolated and considered conducive to studying. Neil recommended 46 Reed magazine June 2015

using durable materials such as masonry and steel rather than wood, as MacNaughton proposed. He placed the dorms in an informal arrangement, with most rooms facing south toward the canyon. Each had three split-levels, with a continuous deck outside the upper level. Named in honor of longtime professors, Coleman, Chittick, Ackerman, and Sisson were dedicated in 1959 and featured in “Glass Houses for Clear Thinkers” in Progressive Architecture in 1961. Neil designed three more dorms the following year: Griffin, McKinley, and Woodbridge. Landscape architect Robert Hale Ellis Jr. ’37 added his own designs to the space.

Neil completed a number of other projects for Reed, including a cross-canyon bridge, Vollum College Center, the Physical Plant shop, a remodel project for Eliot Hall, and the research reactor. “Reed has been good to me and for me,” he remarked at his 50th class reunion.

Among his prominent designs was an awardwinning addition to Timberline Lodge in 1976.

He was a member of the American Institute of Architects and served as president and board member of the Portland chapter. He also volunteered with the Reed alumni association and was on the board of governors for the City Club.

A fitness devotee, Neil skied until age 95; sailed on the Columbia River and on the Pacific Ocean; biked in several Cycle Oregon tours, often as the oldest participant; swam; played volleyball and handball; and ran master’slevel track and field.

Neil married artist Mary G. Siemer in 1950; they had a daughter and four sons.

He met his second wife, Marie-Eve “Ev” Takla, at the Multnomah Athletic Club; they were together for three decades and enjoyed traveling abroad and in the U.S. “His endearing manner, encyclopedic recall and modest principled lifestyle ensured numerous enduring personal friendships, professional alliances, and stimulating conversations on a wide range of topics,” says his family.

Neil and Ev moved to Redmond in 2002, living in a home that he designed and built. The home overlooked a dry canyon with an unobstructed view of eight mountains in the Cascade Range.

“We love it here,” he wrote to Reed.

Survivors include his wife and children, a stepdaughter and a stepson, 11 grandchildren, and a sister.

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Joseph Francis Gunterman ’34

December 4, 2014, in Sacramento, California. He was 101.

Joe spent his early years in Calexico, California, where his father, a German immigrant, worked at the German Bank. Perhaps to take advantage of the high standards of culture and education available in Germany in the mid-’20s, Joe and his two older brothers were sent to live with their paternal grandparents in Kassel for three years, he told Jacque London Ensign ’53 and Eloise Rippin Bodine ’58 in an interview in 2000. He graduated from high school in Santa Barbara, and came to Reed after studying at Pomona and Santa Barbara State Teachers College (where an instructor encouraged him to consider Reed). Joe roomed with Franz Baumann ’35, whom he had met at school in Germany. (Joe came up with funding sources to assist Franz in emigrating from Germany, and years later Franz became a pediatrician and cared for Joe’s children.)

Joe was interested in journalism and became editor of the Quest. He also did hashing in commons and yard work in Eastmoreland. He earned a BA from Reed in general literature, and went on to UC Berkeley, where he audited classes before moving to New York City. There he reconnected with Reed friends who were at the Bank Street School for Teachers. He completed certification at Bank Street and spent two years as a teacher at the Greenwich Country Day School before returning to California to await the draft.

A Quaker who supported social and political justice throughout his life, Joe connected with the Los Angeles Socialists. In this setting, he met Emma (Emmy) Hartog, whom he married in 1942. Joe was a conscientious objector during World War II, and spent more than three years working for the U.S. Forest Service in Oregon, Michigan, and California. Their daughter Karen A. Gunterman ’64 was born in Portland, where Emmy worked for the Oregon Health Department.

After the war, Joe and Emmy moved to

in death by his wife, Winiford “Winnie” Ohlegschlager. Both he and Winnie were members of the National Grange for more than 80 years.

Also preceding him in death were daughters Nancy and Julia; brother Don W. Bailey ’38; and a sister. He is survived by his daughter Sally, son Jack, 6 grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren, 1 great-great-grandchild, and a brother.

Elizabeth Adeline Bomber Baltzell ’39

January 26, 2015, in McMinnville, Oregon.

Gridley, California, where they built a home on five acres. Joe became a reporter for the Chico Enterprise-Record and moonlighted for several other papers, including the Cascade Labor News and the Inland Empire Labor Review. He also worked as a lobbyist for the Friends Committee on Legislation on issues such as free breakfast and lunch for children, the Rumford Fair Housing Act, the creation of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board alongside the United Farm Workers (UFW), and the protection of prisoners’ civil rights.

Joe and Emmy eventually moved to Sacramento, where Joe continued to lobby for the Friends. In retirement, he took college classes, volunteered for the Friends, the California Tax Reform Association, and the American Civil Liberties Union, and did freelance editing and writing. Following Emmy’s death in 2014, Arturo S. Rodriguez, UFW president, and Paul F. Chavez, president of the Cesar Chavez Foundation, wrote to Joe, “Cesar Chavez used to distinguish between those who are of service and those who are servants. Many decent men and women engage in daily acts of altruism or charity. But a relative few become servants, totally dedicating themselves to the most needy among us. By that definition, Emma Gunterman was a genuine servant. So are you.”

Joe was predeceased by his son, Stanley, and his sister, Cecilia (Tete) Gunterman Wollman ’37. Survivors include three children, Karen, Joan, and Tom; four grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; one great-great-grandchild; and a brother.

Jack R. Bailey ’36 December 4, 2014, in Portland.

Jack was born in the Philippines, where his father was a teacher, and the family returned to The Dalles, Oregon, when he was five years old. He attended Reed for one year (1934–35) and earned a BS from Oregon State College in 1949. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps as a flight instrument instructor.

Jack was postmaster of Scio, Oregon, and president of the National League of Postmasters. He worked with the city of Scio in several capacities, helping to modernize the city water system and establish a library. He also loved growing things and farmed for many years. Jack was preceded

Betty earned a BA from Reed in history, writing the thesis “A History of Oregon City from 1829 to 1849” with Prof. Rex Arragon [history 1923– 74]. After graduation she taught at the high school in Enterprise, Oregon. During World War II, she served with the Red Cross in Washington D.C., and the U.S. Marines in Maui, Hawaii. She met her husband Charles Baltzell at a square dance gathering in Corvallis. They married in 1952 and moved to a farm in McMinnville. The couple and their three children (Sumner, Sherry, and Steve) enjoyed scouting, 4-H and FFA, and community activities, and Betty was active in the McMinnville Presbyterian Church. When the children were older, Betty returned to school, earning primary education teaching credentials from Portland State (University) and then taught grade school for many years at Dayton, Oregon. After she and Charles retired, they enjoyed making trips to Europe, the Middle East, and many of the 50 states, and were glad of the opportunity to visit friends and family. Betty lived and worked on the farm after Charles died in 1994, and she continued to travel to Europe and around the country. She moved into town in 2012. Survivors include her sons, grandchildren, and extended family.

Gregg Donald Wood ’39 January 8, 2015, in West Linn, Oregon, following a bout with pneumonia.

Gregg grew up in Portand and went to Washington High School before coming to Reed, where he distinguished himself as both a scholar and a sportsman, playing badminton, Ping Pong, and first baseman for the Reed baseball team. He made friends with Howard Vollum ’36, who used to throw pebbles at Gregg’s window in Winch when he wanted to meet up. In the winter of his freshman year, Gregg and some buddies attempted to distract

news crews who had come to campus to film Emilio Pucci ’37 and his ski uniforms by jumping naked into the Canyon swimming pool.

(Unfortunately, the ruse failed.)

Gregg graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed with a BA in biology, writing his thesis with Prof.

L.E. Griffin [biology 1920–45] on the embryonic development of dogfish. He earned an MD from the University of Oregon Medical School in 1943 and did an internship at Ancker Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota. During World War II, he served as captain of the Army Medical Corps.

After the war, he completed a general surgery residency at the U.S. Veterans Administration Hospital in Portland. Gregg practiced general medicine and surgery for more than 50 years at the Lovejoy Medical Clinic in Portland. He also worked in private practice in Lake Oswego, during which time he was quoted in news stories regarding concerns about the future of family doctors in the U.S. medical system being increasingly centrally controlled. He also served as staff physician at Reed in 1955–65, and at Lewis & Clark and Marylhurst colleges.

Gregg was the physician for sports teams at Jesuit High School for 9 years and at Lake Oswego High School for 17 years. He was on the medical staff at St. Vincent Hospital until 1975 and was the Union Pacific Railroad’s Northwest Regional Medical Director from 1951 to 1986.

As a charter member of Meridian Park Hospital, Gregg was elected president of the medical staff in 1984; he also served as secretary-treasurer. Active in the hospital’s cancer program, he served as associate fellow of its cancer division.

As a board member for the Oregon Cancer Control Program, he helped develop innovations in cancer treatment of national significance and gave public lectures on health concerns.

Though legally blind in retirement due to macular degeneration, Gregg continued to volunteer at homeless health clinics, including Old Town Clinic, through the 2000s, and was medical director for INACT, a program in Portland that served people suffering from mental illness and substance abuse. He served several years at the Lake Oswego Adult Community Center as low-vision program coordinator.

He was a fervent fan of the Portland Trail Blazers, a member of the Flyfishers’ Club of Oregon, and he taught fly fishing to children at OMSI. He fished at every opportunity, often on the Willamette River from his boat moored in Sellwood, usually with flies he tied himself.

Gregg also was an accomplished musician.

He played piano for Dixie Docs in the ’60s, and for the Dixieland jazz band Graham’s Crackers, which regularly played benefit concerts in the ’70s and ’80s. He also performed as a soloist at the Lake Oswego Adult Community Center and at the Lake Oswego Arts Festival. (He squeezed in a round of golf, too, when time allowed.)

Gregg had an abundance of zest for life.

He never met a stranger—seeing something June 2015 Reed magazine 47

In Memoriam of interest in every human. After retirement, he began daily swimming at the Lake Oswego High School pool. He played in Portland Scrabble Club 308 until 2009, using specialized lighting and large-letter tiles. He and his wife, Elizabeth Thompson, whom he married in 1973, traveled to Scrabble tourneys from coast to coast for 22 years.

Survivors include Elizabeth, three sons and a daughter; two stepsons; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by a stepson. (Many thanks to Raymond Rendleman ’06 for writing this memorial.)

Irene Josephine Carson ’41 December 3, 2014, in Milwaukie, Oregon.

Irene earned a BA from Reed in biology, writing her thesis, “The Anatomy of Lepas Fascicul a r i s ,” w i t h P r o f .

Demorest Davenport [biology 1938–44]. She made her career as the head chemist for the Hercules Powder Company (now, the Ashland Company), and she was a consistent and generous donor to Reed. Survivors include her loving godchildren.

Nancy Clark Martin ’41

December 26, 2014, in Rockville, Maryland.

Nancy grew up on a pear orchard in Medford, Oregon, and spent two years at Reed, an experience that taught her to think, she wrote later.

She served in the WAVES as an aircraft mechanic during World War II and then moved to New York City, where she met and married George R. Martin Jr. in 1953. The couple lived in Bronxville, where they raised three daughters. In retirement, Nancy and George moved to Easton, Maryland.

Survivors include their daughters, seven grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. Nancy is remembered for her good humor, generosity, and loving nature.

Prof. Robert Martin ’41 [physics 1956-62]

December 23, 2014, in Milwaukie, Oregon.

Robert grew up in Oregon and Washington, graduated from Renton High School, and attended Reed on a scholarship.

He earned a BA in physics, writing his thesis “Growth of Ionic Crystals” with Prof. A .A .

Knowlton [physics 1915–48]. After graduation, he worked as a teaching fellow at the University of Washington and as a graduate assistant at Iowa State College.

48 Reed magazine June 2015

During World War II, he served as a conscientious objector, working on a land reclamation project near Trenton, North Dakota. Following this service, he resumed physics at the University of Michigan, where he earned an MA and a PhD. His thesis concerned theory and experiments about photographic latent image formation.

Robert taught physics at Reed from 1956 until 1962, then taught at Lewis & Clark College until 1985. In retirement, he continued to work on properties of metal in a vacuum with Prof.

Jean Delord [physics 1950–88] at Reed and at the Oregon Graduate Center. Robert and Roberta Pruitt met in Seattle in 1936, were married in 1946, and raised a family of four. The couple moved to Willamette View Manor in Milwaukie in 1981, and Roberta died in 2005. Robert was an accomplished musician, beginning his study of the B♭ clarinet and tenor saxophone early in life and later performing tenor vocals in local musicals, operas, and choral groups. Music was important to both Robert and Roberta and was central to their family. Survivors include three sons and a daughter and four grandchildren.

Dudley Nelson Lapham ’43

December 13, 2014, from complications related to old age.

Dudley “Six” was born in Stockett, Montana, to Pearl Beatrice Mann and Ray L. Lapham ’19.

Before his first birthday, the family moved to a tiny town called Crane, in the wilds of Eastern Oregon, where Ray ran a school district consisting mainly of the kids from distant sheep farms. One night, in the winter of 1925, Dudley remembers being hauled out of bed and deposited into the front seat of the family’s Model T, while his mother was helped into the back. His dad cajoled and scolded his four-year-old son to advance throttle and retard spark levers while he spun the crank on the outside. They bumped their way for 30 miles through a blustery January night on the high plateaus to the nearest doctor’s house in the town of Burns where Dudley’s little sister Rosemary (Lapham Berleman ’48) was born.

The next stop for the family was in Walla Walla, Washington, where Dudley’s dad taught English literature at Whitman College. The Great Depression meant that more often than not, there were promissory notes from Whitman rather than paychecks. But the two Lapham kids were resilient. Rosie remembers Dudley delivering telegrams to the penitentiary, picking huckleberries, mowing lawns, pulling weeds, and selling newspapers, with plenty of time to play baseball and goof around with her.

The family later moved to Portland, where Dudley played football in high school, acquiring a jersey with a big yellow “6” on it. This he wore up into the Mount Jefferson wilderness on a camping trip with fellow freshmen Reedies, and thereby earned the nickname that would stick to him for the rest of his life. Six went to Reed as a daydodger, earning his tuition with a paper route and various campus chores. He stashed

his lunch in one of the window seats in Winch each day. Favorite professors included F.L. Griffin [mathematics 1911–56] and Lloyd Reynolds [English & art 1929–69], both of whom, he later observed, “could have taught those Pomona professors a thing or two.”

World War II interrupted his and everyone else’s time at Reed. Along with many fellow students, he enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, becoming a second army lieutenant by the end of his service. He and Constance Sumner ’43 married in 1943 at All Saints Episcopal church on Woodstock Boulevard. She worked as a switchboard operator at Reed in 1945–46.

They lived in Georgia, where he was stationed, and traveled back to Portland with Fishy the cat, whom they had adopted. Connie and his frequent asthma attacks persuaded him to try California weather over the Pacific Northwest and he went back to college, earning a BA from Pomona College in political science in 1947.

Six went into city administration, helping to run many California municipalities, and always making sure their libraries were in better shape than when he had arrived. Along the way, he and Connie had two children, Roseamber and Roger, and every summer, he would pack the whole family up and head north for the mountains and the rivers and the trees. He made sure everyone knew how to handle a gold pan and a fishing pole. Quoting a poem he penned for a writer’s group he formed in his ’80s, “Raised a son and daughter as proper card-carrying Greenies.”

After his last city manager job in Seaside, California, he worked part time for the federal government helping to clean up Monterey Bay. During this time he participated in an innovative program for irrigating the extensive artichoke fields near Castroville with treated sewage. He enjoyed this job, as instead of being under the supervision of city councils, he was now in a position to bring about change by mandating to the cities what was expected of them from the federal laws governing environmental clean up. Six gleefully observed, “After all the years of s . . . t I took from elected city officials, now I get to tell them how to deal with it.”

He also loved his volunteer work at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where he trained to be a docent and led schoolchildren on tours. He often rode his bike there, down Cannery Row with its memories of Doc Ricketts and John Steinbeck. Both he and Connie relished living in this area, steeped in arts and literature, as well as the beauty of the Big Sur coastline. They were involved in gardening and wrote articles for the local paper. They corresponded with gardeners in Europe as well, comparing rose and fuchsia varieties. They tore out every inch of grassy lawn on their property and replaced it with roses, succulents and other native flowers.

Six would volunteer as campground host for a different state park each season so he could continue to get his hit of the outdoors.

After Connie suffered a series of strokes in 1990, they returned to the Pacific Northwest, living in Marysville, Friday Harbor, and Stanwood; wherever the nursing homes seemed best suited to Connie’s needs. Six was a tireless companion during those years, foregoing his beloved camping trips, but taking Connie out on long car rambles every day. She died in June 2001; they had been happily married for 58 years. Despite Connie’s decline, their marriage had that quality of an ongoing fascinating conversation, interrupted occasionally by life’s events, but always picked up again as soon as they were reunited. The beginning of that lively exchange started at Reed.

Six continued to give life all he could, starting writing groups wherever he lived, meeting new friends, endearing himself by his kindness and wit. He was always willing to listen and think about whatever was important to those around him. Getting out into the woods was a continuing joy. He would have friendly competitions as to who could pick the best and most beautiful place to have a picnic. He discovered yoga in his last decade. He moved to an adult family home on Lopez Island in 2009. There he rapidly became part of the community, getting out every day he could to take a walk, where he would run into others and make friends. He inspired people with his spunk and willingness, his readiness always to get the joke, to see the other side, to find the grain of truth and beauty in all situations. He loved the young people, many of whom would visit the hamlet where he lived, to play music, do interviews for school, or do chores for community service. He wanted to know what they were interested in, “what made them tick” and he was never so happy as when exchanging ideas with others.

His last vacation off island was to visit his beloved Reed campus during its gala centennial celebration. He gamely walked all over campus, with his O.R.G.Y. button prominently displayed, attending as many events as possible, despite needing a walker and an oxygen tank to do it.

Commons was out of commission that year, and meals were served in the gym, upstairs. Six was game, starting out early from his room in MacNaughton, and winding his way toward the gym in his signature tan Dockers with striped suspenders, a ball cap on his head, looking for Reedies to visit and share with. In the evenings, there were quite a few cocktail hours with old and new friends in his tiny dorm room, ringing with laughter as topics were bandied about in time honored Reed tradition. (A favorite quote from Pogo: “Don’t take life so serious, son. It ain’t nohow permanent.”)

Six’s room on Lopez Island boasted the framed centennial Reed poster and an old black and white photo of downtown Portland, circa 1928. He died peacefully, with the look of a man well content with life, despite its vagaries and imperfections. He loved his life, and he was well loved by his family and community. He

is survived by his daughter, Roseamber Rain Sumner ’73, who composed this memorial, and his son, Roger; three grandchildren, Andrew, Kiba, and Madrona Sumner Murphy ’02; and one great-granddaughter, Manhattan. Memorial donations may be made to Reed College.

Robert Maurice Fristrom ’43 November 14, 2014, in Rockville, Maryland.

prize from Germany’s Humboldt Foundation.

Bob lectured around the world and was a visiting professor at universities in the U.S. and in Germany. Retirement in 1995 gave Bob and Gerrie the opportunity to travel and to split their time at homes in Maryland and Florida. Gerrie died in 2007. Their son, Rob, and his family became the primary support for Bob thereafter.

Survivors include Rob, five grandchildren, and two great grandchildren. “Bob gave friendship, wisdom, and happiness to all that knew him.

He was loved by many and will be missed by all.”

Elizabeth Ann Havely Golding ’45 October 6, 2014, in Portland.

Bob transferred to Reed from Albany College (Lewis & Clark College) and earned a BA in chemistry, working with Prof. Frederick Ayres [chemistr y 1940–70] to write the thesis “An Investigation of Phase Equilibria in the Ternary System: Ethanolamine-Water-Potassium Carbonate.” Reflecting on his years at the college, Bob wrote later: “My experience at Reed provided me with a broad, well grounded education and the confidence that I could hold my own in science or any other intellectual field. These are the tools one would hope to get from an education. The remaining requirements for success in science are a willingness to work, imagination, and some ability to get along with people.” He earned an MA with honors from the University of Oregon and served two years in the navy during World War II. After the war, he earned a PhD in physical chemistry from Stanford University, did a postdoctoral research fellowship at Harvard, and joined the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, where he met his future wife, Geraldine (Gerrie).

Bob worked a scientist at the laboratory for 44 years, pursuing research in combustion, propulsion, microwave spectroscopy, molecular beams, and chemical kinetics. He published three books and more than 100 research papers.

He also won the Hildebrand Award for brilliant experimental investigations and interpretations of high temperature processes in the chemistry and physics of flames, the Combustion Institute Silver Medal, and the Alexander von Humboldt

Betty was a lifelong resident of Portland and at age 10 was selected to be a Junior Rose Festival Princess. She spent 12 summers as a bugler and camp counselor at Camp Namanu—established by the Camp Fire Girls organization on the Sandy River. On a counselors’ retreat at Boy Scout Camp Meriwether in 1941, she met Thomas L. Golding, whom she married in Reed’s Eliot Hall chapel in 1946. (During their courtship, Tom was stationed in Europe with the army medical corps during World War II, and they affirmed their connection through an exchange of hundreds of letters.) Betty earned a BA from Reed in sociology and history Her thesis, “A Study of the Relationship between Attitudes and Information about the Japanese in America,” was written with Prof. Gwynne Nettler [sociology 1944–45].

Betty and Tom had a son and two daughters and enjoyed camping trips together in the summer and skiing in the winter. They provided a home centered in love, joy, and encouragement. In the ’60s, Betty returned to school to earn a teaching certificate. She taught social studies at Wilson High School in Portland for 17 years, and prepared students for participation in Youth Legislature, Model UN, and mock trial competitions.

She led students on American Heritage trips to the East Coast and to Europe. She volunteered with the League of Women Voters throughout her adult life, and also supported the Audubon Society, Portland area Camp Fire, the Mount Hood Ski Patrol, and CASA. She enjoyed time with grandchildren, duplicate bridge, bird watching, quilting, and the luxury of working in her garden on a warm spring day. Tom died in 2002 and a daughter died in 2007. Survivors include a son and daughter, four grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandson. Betty’s aunt, Elizabeth Havely Williston ’17, also graduated from Reed.

Ruth Suzanne Blum Nace ’45 September 7, 2013, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Sue studied at Reed for two years, leaving to work in San Francisco as a store manager. A renewed her friendship with Margaret Nace (Mitter) ’43 there led to her marriage to Margaret’s brother George W. Nace ’43 in 1946. The June 2015 Reed magazine 49

In Memoriam year before, Sue completed a BA in political science and journalism at the University of Oregon.

George attended graduate school in biology Los Angeles and San Francisco and did postdoctoral study in Brussels, Belgium, and Washington, D.C. He taught at Duke University and joined the faculty at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1956. During these years, Sue raised their four children, volunteered for remedial reading programs in public school classrooms, and worked with the International Neighbors program. When her were children grown, Sue became a substitute teacher and a proofreader for the book manufacturer Braun & Brumfield.

“As a lifeguard in her youth, she developed a lifelong avocation for physical exercise,” her family reported. “She was a stickler for the proper use of words and grammar, an advocate for gracious living and sharing of ideas across cultures, and, as she described herself to the end, ‘fat and sassy.’” Sue enjoyed baking and stocked the kitchen pantry with homemade bread, rolls, pastries, and pies, as well as homemade preserves, jams, and pickles. Sue once reported to Reed, “My life is full, and like many others, I deplore the paucity of hours in the day to fulfill all my goals, but I feel blessed that I have sufficient health and alertness to achieve most of them.” George died in 1987. Survivors include two daughters and two sons, and four grandchildren.

Nathalie Elizabeth Georgia Sato ’45

September 2, 2014, in the Highlands, North Carolina.

Nathalie was born in Ithaca, New York, where her parents, Frederick R. Georgia and Lolita Healey Georgia, lived while teaching at Cornell University. Her father was one of the founders of Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1933, and Nathalie resided in the Highlands in 1931–32 when her father bought the Flat Mountain one-room schoolhouse and converted it into the family’s summer home. She earned a BA in political science from Reed, writing the thesis “The Political Activities of Wendell Willkie” with Prof. Charles McKinley [political science 1918–60]. “The intellectual environment of Reed may have been overpowering,” she wrote later, “but my social and political beliefs had their beginnings at Reed.”

Nathalie went on to study political science and city planning, and received an MA from Cornell and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She worked as a planner in state and local government, beginning her career as the chief urban planner for Chicago area transportation studies, and, at the time of her retirement in 1983, she was a planning analyst for the Pennsylvania state planning and development office in Harrisburg. In retirement, she returned to the family’s summer home in the Highlands. “When not walking the dogs in 50 Reed magazine June 2015

the woods, I do get out for new and old hobbies, and for volunteer work.” Nathalie hiked, gardened, and also did weaving on the loom that her father had built at Black Mountain.

She served as docent at the Highlands Historical Museum and helped catalog the archives of the Highlands Historical Society. She was preceded in death by her son, who died in an accident in 2006, and her brother.

Jane Foulke Leedom Byrne ’48 October 6, 2014, in Cannon Beach, Oregon.

A Portland native, Jane earned a BA from Reed in psychology. Her thesis, “Personality Test Results and Delinquency,” was written with Prof. Monte Griffith [psychology 1926–54].

“Reed opened horizons I would never have come in contact with, and exposed my mind to great ideas. I learned how to defend my views in argumentation in a rational, positive, and scientific manner and developed self-esteem from this. My life in general was greatly enhanced by finding a husband at Reed with a very sharp mind.” We read that when John Richard Byrne ’47 spotted Jane in commons, he reported to a friend, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry.” They did marry in 1948, and Jane went with him to the University of Washington, where Dick earned a PhD in mathematics.

At the university, Jane completed a teaching certificate in primary education, and she taught school for several years. The couple lived in San Jose, California, and then returned to Portland, where Dick joined the faculty at Portland State University and taught mathematics for 37 years.

Their marriage was a happy one. Jane was occupied with the work of raising their daughters, Suzanne and Diana, and volunteering with the PTA and as a girls’ club leader; she also opened a nursery school. She loved travel, including trips to Disneyland, and summer stays at Cannon Beach. When Dick retired in 1992, the couple moved to a 30-acre farm outside Corvallis, where Jane thrived, deriving a great deal of pleasure in caring for lost and homeless animals.

She remained on the farm following Dick’s death in 1996. Survivors include her daughters and three grandchildren.

Walter F. Berns Jr., special postbaccalaureate student in 1948–49 January 10, 2015, in Bethesda, Maryland.

Noted academic and constitutional scholar Walter Berns served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and came to Reed as a postbaccalaureate student. After earning a BS from the University of Iowa and a PhD from the University of Chicago, he taught at Louisiana State University and

at Yale. He joined the faculty at Cornell University in 1959, leaving a decade later after faculty granted amnesty to campus militants who had threatened them with violence during a civil rights takeover. Walter later reflected, “Tyranny is the natural and inevitable mode of government for the shameless and self-indulgent who have carried liberty beyond any restraint, natural, and conventional.”

He went on to the University of Toronto and then to Georgetown University, where he was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Walter’s focus was on political philosophy and constitutional law, and he wrote about democracy, the Constitution, and patriotism, including a collection of essays, Democracy and the Constitution (2006). He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2005. His choice to pursue an academic—rather than literary—career was attributed to his meeting Frieda Lawrence, widow of D.H. Lawrence, while he was a waiter in Taos, New Mexico, after the war. Survivors include his wife, Irene Lyons, whom he married in 1951; two daughters and a son; and six grandchildren.

Kenneth Lynn Hall ’49

January 23, 2015, in San Rafael, California.

Lynn had a well-rounded experience at Reed.

“As a science major, Reed’s liberal arts course made for the ‘good life,’” he wrote. He learned to think independently and objectively, and enjoyed evening readings of humanities assignments at the home of Prof. Ruth Graybill Collier ’32, MA ’38 [English 1933–52], and lectures by Prof.

Richard Jones [history 1941–86] and Prof.

Frank Hurley [chemistry 1942–51]. He recalled with pleasure dancing the Viennese Waltz in the student union and discovering Dixieland music; he played trombone in the pit orchestra for college musicals. Lynn was student body president, SU manager, a member of the student education policy committee, and he played football.

He completed a BA from Reed in chemistry; his thesis, “A Study of the Adsorption of Mercury Vapor on Silver Surfaces using Radioactive Mercury II,” was advised by Prof. Arthur Scott [chemistry 1923–79]. He then earned an MS from UC Berkeley in nuclear chemistry, studying with Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg, and he earned a PhD in physical and inorganic chemistry from the University of Michigan. For more than three decades, he was a research associate at the Chevron Research Company, primarily investigating radiation; he retired in 1987. His love of music never waned. He founded the Jubilee Jazz Band in 1969 and also played in a 17-piece ’40s-style band. He did hiking, studied European history, traveled, and was an active member of the

Presbyterian Church. Lynn and Jacqueline Tucker were married in 1952. He is survived by their two sons and a daughter.

Henry William Von Holt Jr. ’49 October 13, 2014, in Columbia, Missouri.

Henry grew up in Portland and enlisted in the ar my air cor ps and trained as a pilot during World War II. He came to Reed on the G.I. Bill and received a BA in psychology, working with Prof.

Frederick Courts [psychology 1945–69] to complete the thesis “A Study of the Concept of Direction in Lewin’s Vector Psychology.” Henry went on to earn an MA at the University of Oregon and a PhD from Clark University in psychology. He taught at the University of Oregon and at Western Michigan University before joining the faculty in psychology at Stephens College in Columbia. Henry and Lael H. Powers married in 1954 and raised three sons.

His family remembers his kindness, compassion, and wit; his enthusiasm as a fan of the Missouri Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals; and the remarkable friendship he had with many dogs throughout his lifetime. Survivors include his wife, sons, and three granddaughters.

Ernest Martin Scheuer ’51 September 16, 2014, in Los Angeles, California.

Ernie was born in Germany and received a BA from Reed in mathematics. Prof. Frank Griffin [mathematics 1911–56] served as his adviser for the thesis “Calculus of Variations.” Following graduation, he worked for the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station in Pasadena (1951–58) with gaps in his employment while attending grad school. He earned an MS in mathematical statistics from the University of Washington and a PhD in mathematics from UCLA and worked as a mathematical statistician in the aerospace and defense industry in Southern California.

He joined the faculty at California State University, Northridge, in 1970 and became profe s s o r o f m a n a g e m e n t s e r v i c e s a n d mathematics, retiring in 1991. He also held visiting appointments at UCLA and at the City University in London. In retirement, he was a consultant at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ernie was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association and was coauthor of Programmed Statistics. He and Mary J. Arlington, professor of finance at California State University, were married in 1972.

Don Crowson ’55 in Hawaii.

Annie Laurie Malarkey Rahr ’53 December 8, 2014, Long Lake, Minnesota, following a brief illness.

Laurie was the daughter of Susan Tucker Malarkey ’25 and Thomas B. Malarkey ’23. Her brother John T. Malarkey ’52 also attended Reed. Laurie earned a BA from Reed in general literature. Her thesis, “Lawrence’s Theory of the Novel: An Examination of Women in Love,” was completed with Prof. Robert Hivnor [English 1952–53]. She went on to earn an MA in comparative literature at the University of Washington. At the university she met Guido R. Rahr Jr. They married and lived in Portland; Guido served on Reed’s board of trustees in 1959–65. In 1971, they moved to Minnesota with their family of five children. Laurie had a vast knowledge of literature, music, theatre, and art. She also painted throughout her life. She was passionate about the environment and supported and served on the boards of numerous organizations, including the Children’s Theatre Company and the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library. Other family members with a Reed connection included her cousin Stoddard Malarkey ’55, his wife, Deirdre Malarkey ’57, and their two sons, Gordon Malarkey ’84 and Peter Malarkey ’86. Laurie’s uncle Henry Cabell also served on Reed’s board of trustees and Laurie was married briefly to Prof. Stanley W. Moore [philosophy 1948–54]. “Of all the schools our large family has attended, Reed’s performance is the best,” Laurie stated. “This kind of education made me a lifetime student.” Survivors include three daughters and two sons and 11 grandchildren. Guido died in 2005.

David A. Ross ’53

November 22, 2014, in Astoria, Oregon.

David came to Reed in 1949—his studies interrupted by service in the Oregon National Guard during the Korean War. Following the war, he returned to the college and then went on to earn a degree in degree in civil and structural engineering at Purdue University. He also completed a master’s degree at the University of Washington. We read that David enjoyed a varied and interesting career with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, working on many large projects including the Lost Creek Dam and Fish Hatchery in Southern Oregon. He and Dorinne Rupprecht were married in 1955; they had four children, and later divorced. David volunteered as a leader for his sons’ Boy Scout troops and he taught his children a full range of home-remodeling skills.

He also was a master gardener. David and Sharron Emery married in 1979 and lived in Forest Grove, Oregon, for more than 35 years, moving to Astoria in 2012. Survivors include Sharron, a daughter and three sons, eight grandchildren, and a sister.

Don Pieratt Crowson ’55 January 15, 2015, in Salem, Oregon.

Born in Arkansas, Don attended high school in California and began his undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley. He transferred to Reed and earned a BA in education and psychology, though was interrupted in this process by service in the army during the Korean War. His thesis, written with Prof. Robert Wilson [psychology 1953–57], was “A Study of Intelligence and Achievement Test Scores in Relation to Socio-Economic Status.” Don savored the experience at Reed: philosophizing, enjoying a beer at the Lutz Tavern, skiing, sailing, and mountaineering, and spending time with Gloria Spencer—a nurse in the college’s infirmary whom he married in 1952. During summers, June 2015 Reed magazine 51

In Memoriam Don worked for the U.S. Forest Service, manning a remote fire lookout on Indian Mountain in the Mount Hood National Forest. After graduation, he accepted a position with the RAND Corporation in Massachusetts.

In his nearly four-decade career as a software designer and developer, Don was instrumental in pioneering computer science. That career carried Don and his growing family to all corners of the country, infusing the five children with their father’s adventurous curiosity, notes his family. Don spent the last five years of his career as the technical adviser for the U.S. Air Force delegation to a NATO working group on communication standards, and was recognized by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe for enduring contributions to international security. “It was interesting and lots of fun roaming about Europe,” Don wrote to Reed.

In retirement, he returned to college to study history. “I take literally that old contention that education is a lifelong process.” He earned a BA from Christopher Newport University (in 1998) and earned an MA from Old Dominion University (in 2006) in history. After living in Virginia for 35 years, Don and Gloria, moved to Salem, where Gloria had extended family and Don planned to enroll at Willamette University in order to begin a study of modern languages.

(Instead he enrolled at Western Washington University, and was on track to earn a degree in political science this year!)

Accompanied by their daughter Gretchen, Don and Gloria visited Reed in 2008, and Don enjoyed another beer at the Lutz. Survivors include Gloria, and their daughters Gretchen, Anna, Heidi, and Grace, and son Mark; 11 grandchildren; and 2 great-grandchildren. Don’s older brother, musician Lamar Crowson ’48, also attended Reed.

Peter Riffle Gilpin ’55

December 22, 2014, in Honolulu, Hawai’i, following a long struggle with congestive heart failure.

A California native and longtime resident of Honolulu, Peter was born and raised in Los Angeles, where he graduated from University High School in 1950. He came to Reed in 1951 and made many lifelong friends there, including his future wife Louise Palmer Gerity ’55.

The young couple spent a year in New York City, where Peter attended art school while Louise completed graduate training in librarianship.

After their return to the islands, Peter and Louise divorced. Peter completed his bachelor’s degree earned a master’s degree in sociology at the University of Hawaii, working as a teaching assistant and becoming very active in the cultural life of the university. He next went to 52 Reed magazine June 2015

California, where he spent some years as a clinical social worker in the San Francisco Bay Area, before returning in the late ’60s to Hawai’i. He worked for many years as a photographer, both freelance and at the Bishop Museum.

Peter was known as an inveterate collector, and possessed a remarkable array of artifacts, from porcine masks, figurines, and graphics to beer steins, calligraphic equipment, and Japanese prints. He continued throughout his life to practice the calligraphy to which he had first been introduced at Reed.

An independent scholar, raconteur, and keen cultural observer and commentator, and always interested in politics, he was very active in the campaign of his old friend Neil Abercrombie, congressman and governor of Hawaii, 2010–14.

A random sample of Peter’s style, from a letter a few years back in which he described the renewal of his driver’s license: “The giggling of this old geezer is occasioned by some salubrious events which were rather unexpected and most welcome! My new driver’s license—known in Hawai’i as a ‘Driver License,’ you’ll note—is today in my actual physical possession . . . . Trepidation accrued unusually to this process because my vision of late has deteriorated substantially. Thus, fears of failing the eye test were foremost in my mind. But not to worry! As I utterly failed the first level required on the chart in the machine, the kindly woman switched over to a larger format, which I was able to correctly read! My heart had flipped up into my throat in the meantime, but I was redeemed!

I was given a 20/40 rating. On to the ‘Question and Answer Section,’ I assumed, as has always been the case in renewals. Amazement! Disbelief! They shunted me right over into the ‘Photograph’ line where, after a short wait, I was photo’d and fingerprinted, and paid, and within 10 minutes the actual finished plastic product was in my hand. And now, I’m a licensed driver once more!”

His eyes went on to fail, as did, ultimately, his heart. But his wit and humor accompanied him to the very end. He is survived by his sister Kate Gilpin, as well as many friends and colleagues who remember him as a true original.

This memorial was composed by Peter’s sister Kate Gilpin.

Sacvan Bercovitch ’57

December 9, 2014, in Brookline, Massachusetts, from cancer.

Prominent author and literary scholar Sacvan Bercovitch came to Reed from the New School for Social Research in New York, leaving the college after a year to join a kibbutz as a dairy farmer in Israel. “He was an amazing scholar and a very kind human being,” writes Prof. Laura Arnold Leibman [English 1995–]. He has been called “his generation’s foremost scholar of Puritan America and of the cultural echoes that puritanism bequeathed to modernity,” as well as “the last of the great American studies scholars.”

Sacvan was born in Montreal, the son of

socialist immigrants from the Ukraine—his mother had been wounded while serving with the Red Army—and his name was chosen to honor Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. After time spent in the kibbutz, Sacvan returned to Montreal with his first wife, and worked at a grocery to fund night school classes at Sir George Williams College (University).

He completed an undergraduate degree in 1961 and earned a PhD from Claremont Graduate School in English in 1965. He taught at Columbia, Brandeis, and UC San Diego before joining the faculty at Harvard College.

From 1983 until his retirement in 2000, Sacvan was the Charles H. Carswell Professor of English and American Literature and Language.

He also held a parallel appointment in comparative literature, recognizing his work as a translator and champion of Yiddish literature.

He retired as the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Emeritus.

He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, president of the American Studies Association, and general editor of The Cambridge History of American Literature. He received the 2007 Bode-Pearson Prize for outstanding contributions to American studies. The author of numerous books and essays, his book The Puritan Origins of the American Self is considered his most influential work.

Survivors include his wife of 26 years, Susan L. Mizruchi; two sons and two sisters.

David Sidney Mesirow ’61 November 21, 2014, in Portland, Oregon, from an accident at home.

As a student at Van Nuys High School in California, David was recognized for his excellence in both academics and athletics— it was a balance he maintained throughout his life. At Reed, he earned a BA in history, writing the thesis “Thomas Jefferson and a Naval Armament” with adviser Prof. Dorothy Johansen ’33 [history 1934–84]. Classes with Johansen, Prof. Richard Jones [history 1941–86], Prof.

John Pock [sociology 1955–98], and Prof.

Owen Ulph [history 1944–79] helped prepare him for his future success, he said, as did his association with Mary McCabe [commons and dorms director 1955–78]. David and Margaret Strawn ’62 met at Reed and were married in 1962. That same year, he earned a master’s in teaching at Harvard, and the couple settled in Portland.

David began his career teaching social studies at Marshall High School, and moved to the newly opened Adams High School in 1969.

He developed the school-within-a-school model at Adams, and also helped to develop

TeacherWorks, a national exchange for teacherdesigned curriculum materials. Of critical importance to him—and ultimately to high school students at risk—was the alternative educational program, Portland Night School, which David helped to create in that setting. From 1980 to 1998, he served as both the director of the school and one of its instructors. “The work is endlessly challenging,” he wrote. “Both my colleagues and the students keep the action creative and varied; ‘boring’ is the only forbidden word, usually because there is no need to use it.”

The “wildest, most elusive” students found their match in David, wrote Oregonian columnist Steve Duin. “At the late, great Portland Night School, he often caught them at their worst, then released them into a different understanding of possibility and self-reliance.” David was passionate about core mission of the night school: to help at-risk youth complete their secondary education. He was awarded the Rosie Bareis Award for lifetime service to alternative education.

David took an active role in the American and Portland Federation of Teachers, and served with Education Testing Service as a test development consultant and with the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education as a site evaluator. He advised and served on many public boards and commissions, including the Oregon State Scholarship Commission, later the Oregon Student Assistance Commission, the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission, the Fair Dismissal Appeals Board, the Governor’s Task Force on College Access, the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, the Oregon Commission on Public Broadcasting, and the Mt. Hood Jazz Festival.

In addition, he supported PlayWrite, founded by Bruce Livingston ’65, and participated in the ASPIRE Program. In 2002, David established the Mesirow Family Scholarship Fund at the Oregon Community Foundation to help former and current students of the Portland Night High School pursue postsecondary education. David considered himself “a political irritant in the cause of education” in his unflagging devotion to making education accessible to all students, but the outcome of his labor is immeasurable—he helped to improve the lives of hundreds of individuals.

Retirement made time for other endeavors, such as restoring the Rockery and landscape at Menucha in the Columbia Gorge, fishing on the Deschutes and McKenzie Rivers, gardening, calligraphy and paper marbling, and time spent with his two grandsons. He also participated in several Oregon Bike Ride and Cycle Oregon events, and made time for his many friends.

His friend Caroline Miller ’59, MAT ’65, who notified the college of David’s death, says that the two met during his freshman year and David worked with her in 1957, when she was editor of the Griffin. Among his hobbies were

bookbinding and woodworking, both of which he did beautifully, she says. “He was a skilled craftsman with an eye to detail. He also mastered the art of pie making later in life.” Caroline recalls that David played a “mean game of Monopoly” while at Reed. “He should have gone into banking if the number of times he took my Park Place and left me with Boardwalk was an indication of anything.” David was a “masterful teacher,” she adds, and she observed him in the classroom on several occasions. “He could be tough when fighting for solid educational standards, but he was soft on kids and they loved him for it. They followed him around as if he were the pied piper.”

Survivors include Margaret; daughter Catherine; son Nicholas and his wife and sons; and a sister.

Paul Elliott Sikora ’70 January 17, 2015, in Washington, D.C.

Paul came to Reed from California and earned a BA in art, working primarily in sculpture and painting. His thesis, “The Reed Campus: Conglomeration, Continuity and Harmony,” was written with adviser Prof. William Lipke [art history 1969–70]. His four years at the college were “very difficult but wonderfully rich,” he wrote later. Paul defined his early career as an aspirant writer and he enjoyed travel. “I would program computers for awhile, then use the savings to travel or to hole up in a cheap place in Seattle writing fiction. I traveled mainly by thumb. One of my journeys led to digging wells in Upper Volta. I published none of the fiction.”

In the late ’70s, Paul entered law school at Lewis & Clark. During this time, he served as associate editor of Environmental Law; he also sailed, wrote fiction, and learned to make mobiles.

His introduction to mobiles came in 1966 in New York City, when he was en route to Europe following high school graduation. “The Guggenheim Museum had an eight-meter-tall mobile of white circles by Alexander Calder, who invented the art form in the ’30s,” Paul later wrote, referring to himself in the third-person. “As I climbed the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright spiral, I spent as much time looking in wonder on the changing perspectives of Calder’s mobile as I did at the rest of the museum’s art.”

In law school, he rented the ground floor of disintegrating old wooden Victorian house with a 3.5-meter ceiling that needed mobiles to express its space, he wrote. “One Friday after classes, I checked out four books about Alexander Calder from the Portland Public Library and, on the way home, stopped by an art supply store and a hardware store. That weekend was magical, figuring out how Mr. Calder developed two fundamental principles of balance into an art form unique to the world.” He earned a JD in 1979 and joined the firm of Diamond & Sylvester in Seattle in 1987, practicing land use, energy, and environmental law. He sailed on a

small sloop on Lake Washington and chartered a larger boat in order to sail in the San Juan and Gulf Islands. He also began teaching land use, part time, at the University of Washington, and served as chair of the Seattle mayor’s task force on downtown and housing.

During this exuberant period of his life, Paul experienced a near fatal flare up of a genetic disorder, systemic lupus. He recovered and enrolled at the University of Washington, earning an MA in urban planning in 1994. He taught land use law and environmental law on behalf of the Washington Department of Ecology, served as trustee of the Allied Arts of Seattle, and was a member of the Seattle Comprehensive Plan Housing Task Force. Paul went on to Columbia University, where he earned an LLM in 1998 and was named a James Kent Scholar. Following that, he taught land use law, environmental law, and legal rhetoric at Samara State University in Samara, Russia. “Life is too short to be dull,” he remarked.

Paul moved to Washington, D.C., in 2002 to write and analyze proposed legislation for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And at this time, he decided to become a professional artist, intending to retire from law in 2014, in order to practice his art full time. He received his first commission to make mobiles for the Madera Hotel in D.C. and sold his work at the Eastern Market in D.C. for several years. He began exhibiting his work, and in 2011 Paul showed 10 of his distinctive lightspace mobiles at the exhibition Balance, Space and Time, presented for World Philosophy Day at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. While he had not planned to sell any of his work, he reported that he sold half of his mobiles—“the only time I left Paris with more money in my pocket than when I arrived.” Survivors include his mother, Jean Sikora; sister Catherine Darby, brother Mikael, and extended family.

David Young U Kim ’74

October 29, 2014, in Los Angeles, California, from complications of cancer.

David was born in Hawaii, and joined the family of Dr. Walter C. Griggs in New Hampshire in June 2015 Reed magazine 53

In Memoriam

Staff, Faculty, and Friends

Takeshi “Tak” Fujino December 18, 2014, in Portland.

1968. He graduated from Hanover High School, where he lettered in soccer and baseball. At Reed, he earned a BA in American studies, writing the thesis “Irish Families in Portland, Oregon, 1860–1880.” He received a JD from the University of Oregon, and served as president of the Korean American Bar Association of Southern California and as a judge pro tem for the Los Angeles County Superior Court. He published many papers, predominantly on immigration law. “Through his work he had considerable success in keeping immigrant family groups intact in the United States.” He was an elder in the Presbyterian Church and coached youth basketball. “As a tribute to David, please value the immigrants with whom you come in contact in your family, at school, at work, and in your community.” Survivors include his wife, Jane, and their three sons.

A California resident of Japanese ancestry, Tak was interned during World War II and completed his high school education in Arkansas. After the war, he moved to Spokane, Washington, and in 1947, he married Sumiko (Sue) Kawasaki, who was studying to be a pharmacist. The couple made their home in Portland, sharing the same house for 66 years, raising their three children, and operating the Franklin Grocery Store in southeast Portland. In 1984, together with their son Gregg, they opened Woodstock Wine & Deli—now in its 29th year. The deli soon became a mainstay for Reed students, faculty, and staff who enjoyed its famous sandwiches, handmade cookies, and convivial setting. Reed regulars have included members of the mathematics department, the alumni office, and the computing staff. Tak initiated the deli’s anniversary bash, which boasts wallto-wall wine vendors, an immense communal bottle of champagne, and oysters shucked to order. Crowds flocked to the deli for evening jazz shows and weekend barbecues. The deli provided part-time work for scores of Reed students over the years. Rabeca Reese MALS ’86, computer store manager at Reed, remarked: “Tak was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known.

He had an extraordinary memory for faces and names and for making people feel welcome and remembered. He really cared about friends and customers and almost always had a kind word or thought to pass along.” Sue died in May 2014.

Survivors include children Gregg, Donna, and Gary; six grandchildren; a great-granddaughter; and Tak’s brother and sister.

Dorothy Blosser Whitehead January 16, 2015, in Milwaukie, Oregon.

Michael Allen Schoenbeck ’92 November 2, 2014, in Arlington, Virginia.

Mike (“Doc”) earned a BA in math-economics, and wrote “An analysis on the Credit Card Market: The Implications of Interest-Rate Rigidity,” with Prof. Jeffrey Parker [economics 1988–].

After graduation, Mike worked as a research assistant with the Federal Reserve Board and spent the next 19 years at Freddie Mac, in the Office of the Chief Economist.

54 Reed magazine June 2015

Honorary Reed alumna Dorothy Whitehead had a distinguished career as a teacher and trainer in the field of learning disability.

She was raised in Berkeley, California, where her father worked for Standard Oil and her mother taught mathematics and language. The family was a musical one and Dorothy loved singing and had the gift of perfect pitch.

An athletic and an outdoor person, Dorothy joined the Sierra Club when she was 17.

She roller skated across the Golden Gate Bridge when it first opened and made her last downhill ski run at 80. Her family notes that Dorothy was “equally comfortable sipping coffee next to a struggling fire in the rain forests of Washington to dining next to Burt Lancaster at a Reed College dinner.” She and her family camped and ran the rapids of Oregon rivers.

She sailed on the fjords of Norway to the Arctic Ocean and walked onto the ice of Antarctica. She traveled to the mountains of Tibet and loved the ancient shores of the Mediterranean.

During World War II, Reed professor Robert Rosenbaum [mathematics 1939–53], serving as a navigator in San Francisco and needing a place to stay with his wife Prof. Louise Johnson Rosenbaum [mathematics 1940–53] and their son while in the Bay Area, connected with Dorothy’s mother—then a widow— who welcomed the Rosenbaums into her home.

Through Robert, Dorothy met Carleton T. Whitehead ’41. While Carleton served in the navy in the South Pacific during World War II, he and Dorothy corresponded and Dorothy completed an undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley in psychology and elementary education. They were married when he returned from the war. In the early years of their marriage, Carleton worked for the Civil Aviation Authority as a flight control officer, and then an offer from Reed president Duncan Ballantine [1952–54] led the family to Reed. Dorothy and Carleton, along with their three-year-old daughter Cynthia [Whitehead ’71], moved into faculty housing. Reed had a “very warm, friendly atmosphere,” Dorothy told Michael O’Rourke ’66 in an interview in 2010. During the years 1952 to 1983, Carleton served as alumni director and secretary of the college.

Lisa [Whitehead Peacock ’75] and Eric were born during those years and Dorothy was busy with the care of the family, but she was also drawn into a wide range of activities on campus. She served as president of the faculty women’s club and was a member of the Reed Women’s Club. She worked with Prof.

Herb Gladstone [music 1946–80] to make costumes for Gilbert and Sullivan’s productions, and helped to refurbish everything from dorms to college offices. “Whatever needed to be done, we were always making the college a better place.”

“Reed was such a community,” writes Eric.

As a “Reed brat,” Eric remembers being babysat and having overnights in both faculty and staff homes during his years on campus. “That kind of trust builds great friendships.” There were no divisions within the community and all were afforded respect, said Dorothy. “It just made for a very warm, friendly atmosphere.” Dorothy maintained friendships with many she met during that time, and their children, including the Delords, Goldschmidts, Gwilliams, Hamiltons, Reynoldses, Rhynes, Rubens, and Scotts. Other friendships formed then and cherished were with Virginia Oglesby Hancock ’62, and Martha Darling ’66.

One critical intersection in Dorothy’s life came about with the arrival at Reed of Dee Tyack and her husband, Prof. David Tyack [education and history 1959–69]. Educated in teaching reading to children with dyslexia, Dee offered to train interested members of the Reed Faculty Women’s club in her method.

“This ignited a passion in Dorothy that would leave an indelible mark on the world,” writes her

family. Working with a dozen volunteers, Dorothy created Language Skills Therapy, a tutoring program, in 1966. She enrolled at Portland State University, where she earned an MS in special education in 1968, and later served as an instructor at the university and at Lewis & Clark College. She also was the learning disabilities specialist at Barnes School in Beaverton.

“Dorothy was a quiet yet persistent force in the field of dyslexia for over 50 years,” says her family. “She was adamant about what worked and continued to fight the reoccurring battles over what didn’t.” She served as a board member of the Orton Dyslexia Society (International Dyslexia Association), helped form the Oregon branch of the Association for Children with Learning Disabilities, and was a member of the Council for Exceptional Children and International Reading Association’s Division of Children with Learning Disabilities.

An expert in training and teaching, Dorothy founded the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators, a select national group that established high standards for the professional certification of tutors and instructors. She also began the Blosser Center for Dyslexia Resources to continue her training program using the academy standards and curriculum. She is the author of the manual Unlocking the Power of Print, which is used worldwide by tutors who assist students with dyslexia in learning to read.

A lobby at the Oregon Health and Science University is named for Dorothy and her name is engraved on a plaque in the Sylvia Richardson Hall of the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) headquarters in Maryland. In 1991, the IDA presented Dorothy with the Samuel T. Orton award, their highest honor, to recognize her contribution to a critical field of special education. “She has salvaged the hopes of countless children; she has encouraged their parents; she has educated their teachers; she has modeled exemplary teaching to their tutors.”

Survivors include her children and her granddaughter and grandson, Laurel and Colin Peacock.

and Chamber Music Northwest present PIAZZOLLA AND AFTER— ARGENTINE TANGO TODAY

Saturday, June 27, 2015 7 p.m., Kaul Auditorium

The world-renowned artistic faculty of Tango for Musicians at Reed College, North America’s leading tango workshop for musicians, comes straight from Buenos Aires and joins Chamber Music Northwest festival artists for a celebration of the urgently expressive music that is contemporary tango. The concert features both classic works by Piazzolla and original tango compositions by these remarkable artists.

reed.edu/tango

Pending

As Reed went to press, we learned of the deaths of the following people: Derrol Pennington ’37, David Ernst ’42, Dorothy Robinson Ainslie ’46, Ruth Hahnel Watson ’43, Arthur Soderberg AMP ’44, Estelle Asher Wertheimer ’46, Dario Raschio MA ’49, Evelyn Boese Dostal ’50, Ulrich Jacobsohn ’50, William Howell ’51, Alfred Hughes ’51, Bonnie Mentzer ’53, Dean St. Dennis ’53, Clyde Van Cleve ’55, Allen Silverthorne ’56, Paul Mockett ’59, Kent Johnston ’60, Marilyn Campbell Holsinger MAT ’65, Carol Smith Taylor ’65, Franklin Faulkner MAT ’66, Elizabeth Lindsay MAT ’66, Michael Mercy ’86, Peter Hall ’68, Connie Crooker ’69, Elizabeth Andrew ’72, Ed Coolidge ’90; Prof. Betty Bernhard, Prof. Gretchen Icenogle, and staff member Jack Levine.

Tickets available at cmnw.org.

apocrypha t r a d i t i o n • m y t h • l e g e n d

DIMWIT and Doctor John Prof. John Hancock [chemistry 1955-89] arrived at Reed in 1955, the same year I transferred in as a junior in mathematics. He was an Englishman and a bachelor, and lived in the New Men’s Dorm (now Foster-Scholz), where he fit right into our fun and games, such as the “music wars” between his madrigals and our rock ‘n’ roll.

John was fascinated with pipe organs, and fancied building one out of beer cans. He opened the door to his room one morning to find the entire doorframe blocked by empty cans, with a “Good morning John” note attached. Nearly every Sunday he would fill his car with students and visit a local church to check out the pipe organ. He never failed to sign the guest register with a flamboyant imitation of the famous signature on the Declaration of Independence.

John’s favorite research project was the quest to synthesize dodecahedrane, a hydrocarbon which featured 20 carbon atoms in the shape of a dodecahedron (one of the five Platonic solids), with a hydrogen atom bonded to each carbon atom.

We kept in touch after I graduated and went on to Oregon State University. One day he told me that he had been wondering what would happen if some of the hydrogen atoms on this hypothetical molecule were replaced with chlorine atoms, which led to the question: “How many different ways are there to do this?”

John passed that question onto me, since I had access to a computer at OSU. (It would be several years until Reed purchased its first commercial computer, an IBM 1620 that was installed in the basement of Eliot Hall.)

I wrote a program to enumerate the answer, which took about a hundred hours to run on OSU’s gigantic vacuum-tube ALWAC computer. The result was a printout of 17,000 unique solutions. Each of these was a “canonical” value representing 120 different rotations and reflections of the same shape, due to the symmetric nature of the dodecahedron.

This led to another question: “What if I make one of these compounds, and the value I find for it is not on the list?” That called for another program to rotate the value he found into the corresponding one in the list.

This only took a few seconds to run, but there was a problem—Reed had no computer.

56 Reed magazine June 2015

DIGITAL PIONEERS. Prof. John Hancock headed up the team that built Reed’s first computer, DIMWIT.

John came up with a fiendish idea. Pinball was then illegal, and the county sheriff had a warehouse full of confiscated machines. He couldn’t sell them, but he could donate them in the name of science. Pinball machines are full of relays, and John suspected we could make a primitive computer out of them. After looking over the available parts, we decided to give it a shot.

I designed and programmed the machine, Reed students put it together, and John named it DIMWIT for Dodecahedrane Isomer Machine With Internal Translation.

It worked—sort of. It took about 5 minutes to get an answer, which was correct about 10% of the time. This was not quite satisfactory, but John had another ace up his sleeve.

It turned out that the telephone company was upgrading some of its machinery and was willing to give us a few tons of older parts.

Telephone relays are much more reliable than pinball relays—after all, customers get upset when their calls don’t get through.

Using telephone relays, DIMWIT-II got

the correct answer 90% of the time—not too bad, considering that the occasional wrong answer was easy to pick out. It did take a long time to produce a result, so John had one final request: “Can we have it turn on the coffee maker when it has finished the calculation?” Unfortunately, this was not programmed into DIMWIT-II. The quest for dodecahedrane was finally achieved in 1982 by a team at Ohio State.

By then, of course, the most basic programmable pocket calculator could complete our calculations in an instant. Nonetheless, I have always been proud of DIMWIT, and so, I think, was John. He died of a heart attack in 1989, and I still miss him.

—DAVID W. DIGBY ’57 David Digby worked in computer engineering, design, and genetic analysis. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and is currently a professor at the (imaginary) University of the Dancing Mind.

Reed is seeking alumni to help us develop a computer science program. Find out more at http://bit.ly/1AgCd47 or email Gaynor Hills ’95 at hillsg@reed.edu.

Join our Parliament of Owls*

2015 Leadership Summit September 18 & 19 Gather and galvanize with community leaders and volunteers to shape the future of Reed.

Leadership Summit is an opportunity to discuss real issues facing Reed and liberal arts colleges, inform institutional planning, and contribute to strengthening Reed’s values, traditions, and distinctive place in higher education.

Join us at Leadership Summit—we need your wisdom. *Owls have come to symbolize wisdom, intelligence, and protection.

At Reed, a “parliament of owls” describes our vision for this assemblage of diverse community members.

reed.edu/leadership_summit Questions: 503/777-7589 or alumni@reed.edu

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leah nash

Prof. Sarah Wagner-McCoy [English 2011–] and students in English 205, Intro to Fiction, discuss Netherland by Joseph O’Neill.