Reed College Magazine March 2016

‰ march 2016

P

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P F O

R E W O

How fashion reveals the hidden hierarchies of society

Defining Success in College | Math Prof Closes Loop | the borderline geographer

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march 2016

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FEATURES 10

Life After Reed

Our ongoing series showing how the liberal arts shape the careers of Reed grads.

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The Geometry of Quilting

Prof. Irena Swanson ’87 adds a new twist to a mathematical artform

By Katelyn Best ’12

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The Borderline Geographer

Chris Roth ’90 explores the surreal territory of imaginary nations, microstates, and separatist movements.

By Angie Jabine ’79 16

Loosen Up. Festoon.

New biography reveals the Zen of Philip Whalen ’51

By John Sheehy ’82

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Sculptor of the Surreal, Whacker of Flowerpots The high-wire life of Xenia Kashevaroff Cage ’35

By John Sheehy ’82

20 18 6

What is a Successful College Education?

Thoughts for Reed Parents

By President John R. Kroger 24

Patterns of Power

How fashion reveals—and enforces— the hidden hierarchies of society

By Randall S. Barton

DEPARTMENTS 4 Eliot Circular Zero Project turns gallery into airplane hangar Physics major builds a better brick Students nibble at “hunger hormone.”

Giant pumpkin attacks president’s office.

32 Class Notes 38 In Memoriam 48 Talkback Email got you down? Here’s how to fight back.

Cover photo by Matt D’Annunzio

march 2014 Reed magazine

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‰

Letter from the editor

The Birth of a Galaxy

march 2016

leah nash

www.reed.edu/reed_magazine 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202 503/777-7591 Volume 95, No. 1 MAGAZINE editor

Chris Lydgate ’90 503/777-7596 chris.lydgate@reed.edu class notes editor

Robin M. Tovey ’97 503/777-7598 reed.magazine@reed.edu In Memoriam editor

Randall S. Barton 503/517-5544 bartonr@reed.edu art director

Tom Humphrey 503/459-4632 tom.humphrey@reed.edu REED COLLEGE RELATIONS vice president, college relations

Hugh Porter director, communications & public affairs

Ideas being discussed, discarded, and developed at warp speed.

Mandy Heaton

It was a short email peeking out from my groaning inbox, with the innocuous subject “Alum news.” A classmate by the name of Harry Selker ’74 mentioned that he’s still working at Tufts, where he is dean of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

There was something about the phrase “translational science” that I couldn’t resist. I looked it up in Wikipedia (the dilettante’s crutch), where I learned that it has to do with taking insights from the orderly realm of medical research and applying them to the life-anddeath, blood-and-guts reality of patients in hospital corridors.

Digging deeper, I discovered that Harry is a researcher of international stature. A couple years ago, he made headlines with a groundbreaking study showing that paramedics can dramatically improve the outcomes of heart attacks by administering a mixture of glucose, insulin, and potassium. He also pioneered the “time-insensitive predictive instrument,” which is essentially an algorithm to help doctors in the field figure out if a patient is having a heart attack, a stroke, and so on. Devices like these are now standard-issue on heart monitors, and have helped millions of people around the world

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get the care they need.

Harry didn’t bring any of that up, of course.

He was mostly writing to say hello and let us know about himself and his family.

His note reminds me of what I love about Reed. On any given day, I might find myself grappling with the hormone that makes you hungry (see page A), the history of trousers (see page 22), or the concept of time (wait til next issue). The math professor who’s come up with a new idea for quilting (see page 12), the anthropologist who wrote a book about breakaway nations (see page 14) and the outdoor guide who wrote one on reinventing language (see page 22).

The best part about this galaxy of thinkers, writers, artists, and innovators? It’s still being born, right here on campus, every single day, thanks to Reed’s amazing students, brilliant professors, and inimitable alumni.

Especially the ones who take the time, now and again, to drop us a line.

—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

director, alumni & parent 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 islands, and all I could find was a huge pile of blackberry brambles in what I think was the same location. I briefly doubted that those days ever happened, seeing as how far off center I was back then.

—Bob Querry ’88 Nipomo, California

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.

Elemental Farce

Cartoon by Mateo Burtch ’82

Learning from Each Other

It was nice to read in the September 2014 issue of Reed that Reed ranked #1 for best professors in the nation. The recent President Diver, the new President Kroger, the faculty themselves, and many others, have done a fine job.

In the late 1960s, when I earned a degree in Physics, it was a little different. The environment was sink-or-swim, unfortunately matched with some dull profs. In the big freshman Math lectures, half the class simply stopped showing up after a few weeks. My personal worst moment was when I made the mistake of knocking on a Math prof’s door, and was then barked at for 3 minutes and dismissed. The guy was around for about forty more years. Yikes. Is tenure is over-rated?

But, there are certainly great professors at Reed now. Prof. Dan Reisberg [psych 1986–] lectured at the Alumni School in 2005, regarding how memory works in the human brain. He was really something. On a brief look-in, even the Physics Department looked like it had risen from the dead.

There was a good article in the New York Times on Dec. 26, 2014: “Colleges Reinvent Classes to Keep More Students in Science.” It describes an interactive way of teaching, and is well worth a read.

For me, the best part about Reed was the students, who were, mostly, fascinating and remarkable: in academics, in the art of life, and in being true to themselves. There was not a general fixation on the pursuit of wealth, fame or glory, but there was one on excellence. It was important to find a rewarding and interesting path in life, maybe an unconventional

one. Finally, that Honor Principle was the bedrock of an intellectual honesty that I have done my best to live up to ever since.

—Will Darken ’70 Edwards, Colorado

Remembering David Mason ’58

I was surprised to read about the passing of David Mason ’58. Many years before entering Reed, I began my college education at Western Washington State College, now Western Washington University, in 1966. (FYI: Tuition was $75 a quarter!) That was a very good year for many things, but not for the beginning of my post-high school education in responsibility.

I went in as an honors student, which created many opportunities to pursue adventures outside of my curriculum.

One of them was hanging out at the house of a popular hippie biology prof. The house was located at the end of a dirt road off Chuckanut Drive, across from a secluded beach on Bellingham Bay, many miles south of town. The owner was associated with the fledgling environmental programs at Western, known as Fairhaven from the fact that they were first located in the Fairhaven women’s dorm on campus. As environmental awareness was very important to many of the young students, Dr Mason’s house was very popular, for both its intellectual and recreational opportunities. While others were pulling all-nighters in their rooms, his parties were raging into the sunrise almost every Friday night.

I went back many years later, about 1992, in a fit of nostalgia for those days because I lived and worked in the nearby San Juan

Ava Gadro and Iodine were dining in Cerium’s the other night when she remarked, “Manganese, oh manganese, will you look over there at that silicon gallium?” Iodine glanced across the fluorine at this gallium; she was slightly hydrogen, and talking to her was this cadmium who tried to cesium her.

Ava said, “That would beryllium more than Iodine could barium. Water boron! Should we call a copper and prevent a scandium?”

“No,” said Iodine, “let her sulfur. She brought it on erbiumself. Uranium too tender. And besides, if we call the coppers, they’ll radium the place.”

But Ava is a Good Samarium, so she took matters into her own hands. She stepped up to the cadmium and said, ”Listen, you big oxygen, uranium leave that gallium alone!”

With that, the cadmium turned quite palladium and replied, “Why don’t you mind your own bismuth?”

Without another word, Ava krypton him on the chin, and down went the cadmium to the fluorine… out gold! Ava, you know, is quite strontium. Then Ava said, “Stannup, you big gypsum!”

Need Iodine tellurium that we got out of there in a hurry and called our carbon. We rhodium around for a while. Finally, Ava said, “Just a mineral. When that cadmium fell on his acetylene, he must have bit his tungsten....” But Iodine was gadolinium that the whole phosphorus was over, sodium Iodine counted tin and then said, “Erg,” and that was the end of it.

—Michael Lamm ’58 Editor’s Note: Mike reports that he flunked out of Reed in 1957, partly because he wasted time on riffs like this. A lifelong car nut, he became managing editor of Motor Trend and, in 1978, started his own automotive publishing company.

Mike and his family live in Northern California.

march 2016 Reed magazine

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Eliot Circular news from campus

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Reed magazine  march 2016

daniel cronin

Zeroing In on the Plane of Existence It’s an airplane. It’s a sculpture. It’s a puzzle.

It’s a work of art.

The monumental Zero Project occupied Reed’s Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Gallery in December and January, transforming the gallery into a surreal “hangar” and turning students into crewmembers who took a hands-on role in constructing the project, painstakingly stitching more than 25,000 individual photographs into a single gargantuan image.

Eschewing mimesis for collaborative assembly, Zero Project is the brainchild of artist Katsushige Nakahashi. As a boy, he played with a plastic scale model of the aircraft flown by Imperial Japanese Navy kamikaze pilots during WWII—the Mitsubishi A6M Zero warplane.

“After assembling the model I would run with it, imagining that I was the pilot,” he says.

“In the course of playing with it, the plastic airplane would slowly break apart and in the

end I burned it, because in reality most of the Zero airplanes actually burned. I could imagine the airplane falling to the ground and bursting into flames.”

Zero Project was initially a response to his experience of Japanese denial about the country’s actions in World War II. But the project is also about trauma and sacrifice in general, he says, serving as a vehicle for communal memory.

To make his sculpture, Nakahashi used a

Evan La Londe

Students nab prize for work on “hunger hormone”

The Zero is assembled into a three-dimensional sculpture before being moved to a site for ritual burning.

Zero Project continued micro lens to take thousands of photographs of a scale model of a Zero.

Joining the color enlargements with tape, he was able to fashion the twodimensional prints into a three-dimensional sculpture, supported only by its surface.

Beginning in 1999, Nakahashi constructed a total of 19 Zero sculptures in Japan, the United States, and Australia. In 2009, he retired as the maker of the sculpture but transformed the work into a set of photos with instructions with the intention that the collective activity of making the Zero would inspire cooperation and reflection.

As a sculpture, Zero Project is neither precious nor permanent. At the close of each project, the Zero must be carried to a destruction site and burned. Nakahashi describes the ritual burning of the plane as a “return to zero.”

“While war is obviously a big theme in the project, I also like to think about how to bring peace,” Nakahashi said when he visited the gallery in January. “By building these airplanes with the people who used

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to be the enemy, there’s a communication that goes beyond language.

There is a shared sense of pleasure in the building, which involves patience.

After it’s exhibited and burned, those involved share the experience of losing it. The work is completed only at

“ The work is completed only at the point when it is reduced to ashes.”

—Katsushige Nakahashi the point when it is reduced to ashes, but when the ashes are taken up by the wind, and the scorched grass begins to regrow, these processes are also all part of the artwork.”

Zero Project was part of a gift to Reed from the collection of Peter Norton ’65, and part of a group of donations to college art museums across the country with a focus on supporting programs that highlight education, creative museum practice, and the use of contemporary art to engage diverse audiences. —RANDALL S. BARTON

A trio of Reed psych majors won a prize at a scientific conference last year for their research into ghrelin—sometimes known as the “hunger hormone.”

Biochem major Eliotte Garling ’18, bio-psych major Lia Zallar ’16, and psych major Hannah Baumgartner ’16 won the Neuroscience/Psychology Poster Prize at the 24th annual Murdock College Science Research Conference held in Vancouver, Washington, for their research into the mechanisms by which ghrelin affects appetite, metabolism, stress, and reward signaling.

Working with Prof. Paul Currie [psych 2007–], the students performed a series of experiments on rats to investigate the effects of ghrelin when injected into different parts of the brain.

“Ghrelin is interesting because it seems to play a role in a lot of different pathways— stress and anxiety, metabolism, eating behavior, reward, and drug-seeking behavior,” says Lia. “With our research, we’re trying to parse out these individual circuits and what part ghrelin plays in them.”

They found that injecting ghrelin into one area of the brain made the rats ravenous. They also found that injecting ghrelin into a different area of the brain made them crave alcohol. Aside from triggering episodes of gluttony, binge-drinking, and remorse in rodents, the research suggests that ghrelin plays a different role in the brain depending on its location.

The students’ project was titled “BrainCannula Mapping Investigations of Acyl Ghrelin in Metabolic, Limbic, and Reward Signaling” and is supported by the MJ Murdock Charitable Trust.

—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

The criminal justice system often relies on the testimony of eyewitnesses to get convictions. Yet more and more, psychological science demonstrates how unreliable eyewitness reports can be.

Moreover, jurors have all kinds of cognitive biases and unconscious influences, and they rely on dubious folk psychological theories when assessing evidence.

So, how should psychological science be used to improve our justice system?

Is there a way to figure out whether a particular eyewitness report is reliable? Or for

Your Lying Eyes

darryl james

a truly just system, must we forbid all testimony that depends on the capricious faculty of memory?

The NPR show Philosophy Talk came to Reed last year to pose these questions to Prof. Daniel Reisberg [psycholog y 1986–], a nationally-recognized expert on eyewitness testimony and author of The Science of Perception and Memory: A Pragmatic Guide for the Justice System and scores of other scholarly books and articles. Check out the broadcast at www. philosophytalk.org.

Childcare Center Opens at Reed tom humphrey

To the merry sound of shrieks and giggles, a childcare center opened on the Reed campus last semester, serving about 50 kids from infants to preschoolers, spread over five classrooms.

Located in the northwest corner of campus (near the site of the former Eastmoreland Hospital), the new center is operated by Growing Seeds, an independent provider that runs two other centers in Portland, and employs several Reed students as part-time teachers.

Professors, staff, and students have long lamented the shortage of affordable childcare in the neighborhood. In fact, the center is the result of almost 20 years of planning, led by a faculty/staff committee that included Prof. Gail Berkeley Sherman [English 1981–], Prof. Jennifer Corpus [psych 2000–], Prof. Elizabeth Drumm [Spanish 1995–], Prof. Kathryn Oleson [psych 1995–], Prof. Paul Silverstein [anthro 2000–], communications guru Stacey Kim, and stats master Mike Tamada.

“This started 20 years ago as a women’s issue,” says Vice President and Treasurer Lorraine Arvin. “It’s now a young parents’ issue.”

Children of faculty, staff, and students account for roughly half the center’s enrollment—the rest are drawn from the local neighborhood.

Psychology major Jacob Badger ’16 is currently writing a thesis on child development, specifically in regards to autonomous, intrinsically motivated learning. “Working in an environment where that is at the core of their philosophy is an invaluable experience,” he says.

Anthro major Natalie Allen ’16 also

finds working at Growing Seeds valuable.

“The world I experience at Growing Seeds is radically different from my world at Reed, which is very refreshing,” she says. “It’s a reminder that there are a lot of important things going on outside, a provocation to consider how I might contribute to the world in a meaningful way.” —LAUREN COOPER ’16

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Eliot Circular Physics major builds a better brick

A Reed physics major hopes to curb the devastation caused by floods in Bangladesh with a new twist on one of humanity’s most durable inventions—the humble brick.

Aiman Absar ’19 and two Bangladeshi friends have created a startup to manufacture a new kind of brick that is both cheap and environmentally sustainable.

With a population of 156 million people packed into an area the size of Iowa, Bangladesh has the highest population density in the world. During the monsoon season, heavy rain combined with poor drainage causes the rivers to flood their banks, inundating the countryside

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and destroying the makeshift houses of the impoverished rural population. When the waters subside, the farmers and fishermen begin the Sisyphean task of fashioning new abodes from sheets of corrugated steel, mud, and thatch.

Brick houses would withstand the deluge, but many Bangladeshis cannot afford them.

Growing up in Dhaka, Aiman loved physics and math. But when he graduated from high school, he decided it was time to go beyond his comfort zone. He took two gap years and began attending classes at a business school, where he became friends with Sabira Mehrin Saba and

Parashar Saha. The three challenged themselves to figure out how to make a brick that was strong, green, and cheap.

To lend the clay strength, they experimented with a variety of fibers, including jute and thatch. Their eureka moment came when they learned about a technique used in Brazil and Thailand based on sugarcane bagasse—the pulpy residue left after the extraction of juice from sugarcane.

Bangladesh is one of the largest sugarcane-producing countries in the world, and bagasse is everywhere. Sugar factories burn it to fuel their generators, producing huge volumes of

nonbiodegradable ash, which is then dumped into rivers or fields. Both bagasse and the ash are hydrophobic, or insoluble in water. Not only does the ash clog water channels, it kills the fish when it gets into their gills, and renders the soil water-resistant, leaving fields barren.

By using bagasse and ash, the partners realized that they could recycle a major waste product and also make the bricks impervious to rain.

To cut costs, they decided to dry their bricks in the sun, rather than baking them in a furnace. Although this approach limits production to months with sunshine, it means the

alex kracik

bricks can be sold for 80% less than traditional bricks.

They named their company Bhitti, a Bengali word meaning “foundation.” For their pilot project, they constructed animal shelters using the Bhitti brick to see if it would withstand the monsoon, which didn’t materialize that year.

But having used up all their own money, they needed more cash to test and produce bricks. In 2014, they presented their brick at the Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition at the University of Washington. The trip to Seattle was the first time Aiman had ever been out of Bangladesh. “It was an amazing experience,” he says.

“I got to meet a lot of people and hear what they are doing. I realized I should come back to the United States and study physics.”

He chatted about physics with competitors from around the world, and kept hearing that Reed offered the best undergraduate physics program in the country.

Bhitti won the second prize of $10,000, enough seed money to hire engineers and build a warehouse. And Aiman decided to apply to Reed, which offered him generous financial aid. He is thriving at Reed, with its culture of learning for learning’s sake, and would one day like to be an inventor, like his hero, Nikola Tesla.

“I come from Asia, where schools are very job-centered,” he says. “But as a physicist I’m interested in finding solutions to problems that plague the world.”

While his partners in Bangladesh continue to refine the process of building better bricks, he pursues his studies at Reed and reviews lab reports from Bhitti’s engineers.

The next step? Await the monsoons and see how well the bricks hold up.

—RANDALL S. BARTON

Dance/music major Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies ’16 (center) won the Jim Kahan Performing Arts Fellowship.

Performers Win Kahan Fellowship Dance/music major Hannah MacKenzieMargulies ’16 and art/dance major Grace Poetzinger ’16 are first-ever winners of Reed’s new Jim Kahan Performing Arts Fellowship.

The purpose of the fellowship is to provide students with the means to be able to spend their summer working on a music, dance, or theater project, which is performed at Reed during the following year.

Both students took creative risks with their projects. Grace travelled to Vienna to study an obscure but influential modern dance movement. Hannah, a talented dancer, spent the summer learning the clarinet. They performed a joint concert (or was it a Kahan-cert?) of music and dance in October.

The fellowship is supported by the Kahan Performing Arts Fund, started by Jim Kahan ’64 out of a desire to give back to the college and to help students pursue their passions in the performing arts.

Jim and Prof. Virginia Hancock ’62 [music], who leads the selection committee, stress both the performance and thinking aspects of the fellowship. “One of the things that struck me about Reed is that the students aren’t just performing, they’re really thinking about what they’re doing,” Jim says. “That’s what this place is about.” In addition to the performance, recipients must host an informal ’talkback’ discussion with the audience about what they just did immediately afterwards.

—LAUREN COOPER ’16

Pumpkin Lands in Kroger’s Office An enormous pumpkin materialized in the office of President John R. Kroger in December, courtesy of a fleet-footed band of students who wheeled the gargantuan gourd in on a handcart, deposited it on the presidential coffee table, and promptly abstracted themselves from view. Details of the shadowy operation remain

unclear, but it seems that the stupendous squash— which weighed well over

100 pounds—was raised on the Flamingo Ridge Far m and resided in Commons for some time before its great migration to Eliot Hall. Students penned messages of holiday cheer on the colossal cucurbit, which graced the president’s office for several weeks before rejoining the nitrogen cycle.

—ANNA MANN

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

Nicole Wiswell ’02

Engineer Officer/Platoon Leader, U.S. Army

Nicole always dreamed of serving her country, but the old policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” barred gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military. So she came to Reed and majored in religion. After graduation, she worked in a residential treatment center before switching gears and studying law at the University of Minnesota. Then she got a part-time gig at Apple showing people how to use their computers that turned into a full-time job training Apple employees. When “don’t ask, don’t tell” was finally repealed, she signed up for the National Guard, where she is now a lieutenant leading a platoon of vertical engineers.

Thesis: Recreation, Race, and

Lynching: Toward a New Theory in the Study of Southern Religion.

Advisor: Prof. Arthur McCalla [religion 1999-2005].

How would you describe yourself? I’m just your average

liberal, queer, feminist Quaker who also happens to be an Army officer.

Why did you choose to major in religion? Having

been exposed to math and physics—the immutable laws of nature—I was interested in the man-made laws, belief systems, and orders. Like law, religion is an ordering system in people’s lives.

What is a vertical engineer?

Vertical engineers are the builders. My unit builds hospitals, schools, and helicopter pads. When the Dakotas have flooding, we help shore up the riverbanks. I spent six months in the Ozarks learning everything engineers do from demolition and route clearance to formulas for calculating how much tonnage a bridge can handle. It’s a lot of math, but it’s fun.

Isn’t military service an unusual choice for a Reedie?

The U.S. has always had a weird relationship with its citizens who are in the military. On one hand they’re revered as heroes, the people who defend freedom—whatever that means—and yet they’re seen as apart. My dad was a doctor in the army for 25 years and as a kid I wanted to go to West Point and be a soldier, or maybe an astronaut. Some of our first conversations in Hum 110 were about civic responsibility and the citizen-soldier in Plato’s ideal city. Serving in the military is one way to protect the ideals you believe in.

What career advice do you have for Reedies?

Be open to whatever is out there. Don’t worry if the first two—or seven—things you do after college aren’t what you thought you’d be doing.

It doesn’t have to be your dream job—just find value in it and see how you develop as a person. That night job at a treatment center might give you the time to write the great American novel, apply to grad schools, or study for law exams.

photo by jamey guy

Life Beyond Reed

Psychology researcher, University of Virginia

Kosta was born just prior to the end of communism in a small town in the southern mountains of Bulgaria. He recalls a hardscrabble childhood in which bananas were an extravagance and video games were beyond a young boy’s reach, if not his imagination. Yet he was happy. “We never thought of ourselves as deprived,” he says.

Today he studies happiness—more specifically, how factors like technology, money, and parenthood can influence personal well-being. (See his article about email on page 48.) He has authored or coauthored several scholarly articles on the subject and tweets using the Twitter handle “@HappyScholar.”

Thesis: The More You Want,

the Less You Get: The Effect of Maximizing, Number of Choices, and Mindfulness on Purchasing Decisions in Americans and Bulgarians. Adviser: Prof. Dan Reisberg [psychology 1986–] What was your first impression of America? The

tomatoes. Although we were poor in Bulgaria, we had some very good tomatoes, sweet and juicy. I was surprised that the tomatoes in Reed’s cafeteria were completely bland, with no flavor at all.

Was it a difficult transition? I experienced two culture shocks.

First was just being in a new country. And then being in this bizarre place where people would go around chasing owls!

But I’m a pretty gregarious person, so I made friends quickly. I was known as the crazy Bulgarian in Steele.

Why did you choose to major in psychology? I have always

been someone people could talk to, even in high school.

I wanted to do something that would ultimately help people. At first I wanted to be a therapist, but at Reed I realized I could be a researcher.

My senior thesis was a wonderful experience!

What can you tell us about the impact of technology on happiness? Our cell phones

are meant to connect, but they can also disconnect.

If a person is on a phone answering email or playing games, they’re not going to have a sense of connectedness with the people physically present with them. But there are many factors involved in the question—technology can also make us happy. Prof.

Reisberg would always say to us, “The answer depends on…”

When you really ask “Why?” there are no simple answers.

What's a specific example?

We found, for example, that people today don’t need to ask directions so much because a cell phone can tell you how to get where you are going. So technology in that instance is obviating the need to interact with friendly strangers. We found that the people who actually stopped and asked another person for directions generally felt more socially connected and, ultimately, happier.

What’s next? I hope to stay

in the academic community for a while—I like the independence. But companies like Google and Microsoft have research units, so that might be interesting some day.

Ultimately I want my research to have a direct impact on the design of new technologies to maximize well-being and minimize the negative effects.

photo by casey templeton

Kostadin Kushlev ’08

GATLIN NEWHOUSE ’19 FOR THE QUEST

The Geometry of Quilting

Prof. Irena Swanson ’87 adds a new twist to a mathematical art form

BY KATELYN BEST ’13

Grids of zigzaggy diamonds in blues and greens. Furrows of autumnal squares.

Triangles like a cubist pumpkin patch. Quilts of every description cover practically every surface of the home of Prof. Irena Swanson ’87 [math 2005–], immersing the visitor in a dizzying wash of color and pattern.

Before you explore, however, you had better take off your shoes—this is a shoe-free house, she explains, handing me a pair of buckskin moccasins. It’s a fitting introduction to a professor who seems always to be engaging both halves of her brain, the logical and the creative, the orderly and the chaotic.

Prof. Swanson’s professional life revolves around ideas in higher mathematics such as binomial ideals, Frobenius numbers, and hypermatrices. But she is also passionate

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about quilting, and has spent the last several years developing an innovative technique called tube piecing. In short, tube piecing is a method of assembling rows of geometric shapes—rectangles, parallelograms, or triangles—that’s drastically more efficient and precise than the standard technique of cutting up pieces of fabric and sewing them together individually. “For triangles, traditional piecing uses at least four times as many seams as my method,” she explains.

The basic idea is simple. She sews together strips of fabric in alternating light and dark colors, slightly offset so that they form a parallelogram with vertical stripes. She then sews the long edges of the parallelogram together to make a tube. Next, the tube is cut into rings, perpendicular to the seams, forming a series of quadrilaterals. These rings are then rotated and resewn so that each light

quadrilateral is positioned above a dark one.

Armed with this technique—building a tube, cutting it into sections, and reassembling the sections—the quilter can construct an astonishing variety of patterns. If you choose your colors right, you can produce triangles, hexagons, zigzags, or swirls. Swanson has sewn one quilt composed of rows of dazzling blue parallelograms at varying angles, giving the impression of ocean waves.

Conceptually, tube piecing is an extension of strip piecing, a technique developed by Ernest Haight in the 1960s and ’70s. While strip piecing is a vast improvement over traditional piecing, tube piecing is still more efficient, with fewer seams and less waste. If strip piecing is the printing press, tube piecing is the laser printer.

The idea for tube piecing was born of frustration. Swanson was making a baby quilt

Fifty, soft-spoken with a gentle accent, Swanson grew up on a farm in Yugoslavia, in what would become Slovenia. Her parents, born a decade before World War II tore their country apart, didn’t get a good education, but Irena describes them as whipsmart nonetheless, saying, “My mother can compute a lot of things in her head that I would reach out for a pencil or paper to do.”

Her father taught her to play chess, and she became a formidable and unpredictable player. “I won many games,” she says, “because my theoretically prepared opponents were not prepared for spontaneous, thought-outin-the-moment moves.”

In high school, she spent a year in Utah, where she made her first quilt. Her host mother’s daughter, Willa Goodfellow ’75, had gone to Reed, and the family spotted in Irena that unique hunger for learning that defines all Reedies. They encouraged her to apply.

“It was the first time in my life,” Irena recalls of arriving at Reed, “that I didn’t have to hide the fact I actually did some reading.”

She majored in math and has fond memories of Math 200 with Prof. Hugh Chrestenson [math 1957–90]—also her thesis advisor— and of the legendary Prof. Joe Roberts [math 1952–2014], who taught advanced topics in analysis as a problem-solving class.

“Sometimes we were stuck on some problems for weeks,” she remembers cheerfully. “But true to form, he wouldn’t step to the blackboard and fill it in. He made us suffer!”

But her most eye-opening classes may have been American labor history and American intellectual history with Prof.

Casey Blake [history 1984–87]. “Growing up in Yugoslavia, it was all memorization and ideology. So this was the first time I’d seen that the study of history isn’t just memorization, but discovery, and that it can change societies.”

Irena couldn’t have gone to Reed without financial aid—“my parents couldn’t afford anything,” she says—and had to support herself. She spent one summer working for Prof.

Neal Nelson [math 1984–87], Reed’s first computer science professor. Her team built a

network for the Apple Macintosh, which had just arrived on campus. It was on Nelson’s team that she got to know her future husband, Steve Swanson ’84.

After graduation, she went to Purdue to get a PhD and taught at New Mexico State University before coming back to teach at Reed. She has written or edited three books and almost 50 papers, most of them focused on commutative algebra, a branch of abstract algebra that deals with mathematical objects that produce the same result when multiplied in any order. For example, you can put on your belt and then your watch, or your watch and then your belt—either way you get the same result. (That’s commutative.)

But if you put on your shoes and then your socks, you get a different result than if you reverse the order. (That’s noncommutative.)

After her eureka moment with the checkerboard quilt, Swanson spent countless hours refining the technique. For several years, she believed that she was the first to discover it.

Then last year, she stumbled across an obscure book published in 2003 by Rita Hutchens that outlines the same idea, albeit without the rigorous trigonometry Swanson employs.

Tube piecing isn’t her only quilting innovation. In 2011, she authored a chapter in the book Crafting by Concepts laying out the math behind semiregular tessellations—repeating patterns of more than one regular polygon— and giving a unique, characteristically efficient method for reproducing them in fabric.

Swanson is working on a book about tube piecing, a 435-page behemoth that forced her to get a new laptop because it kept crashing her old computer. As we scroll through it, I ask if she’s worried if some of her fellow quilters will be intimidated by the math. “I do, yes,” she admits. “I’ve had to simplify and hide some of it.”

But little by little, the idea is catching on.

Local quilters rave about it. “The method isn’t just accurate and fast. It’s also pretty much foolproof,” says Jolene Knight of the Northwest Quilters Guild. “I think it’s just a matter of people understanding it. Once they get it, they’re going to be all over it.”

Foolproof or not, there’s undeniably a spark of brilliance behind the technique. It’s the same spark that spelled doom for her chess opponents, and that makes her such an inspiring teacher—that unpredictable combination of logic and creativity, order and chaos.

QUILT PHOTOS BY ALEX KRAFCIK ‘15

consisting of a checkerboard pattern rotated 45°. “It was so much cutting and sewing, and there was so much waste at the end,” she says. “I just thought, ‘I could do this better.’”

march 2016 Reed magazine 13

The Borderline Geographer Chris Roth ’90 surveys the surreal territory of imaginary nations, microstates, and separatist movements.

BY ANGIE JABINE ’79

It’s the Fourth of July weekend. While anthropology. At Reed, he worked as a stumost Americans celebrate the Declaration dent researcher for his mentor Prof. David of Independence with a backyard barbecue, French ’39 [anthro 1947–88] and graduChris Roth ’90 has chosen to ated with a degree in cultural attend a conference in the Free anthropology and linguistics Republic of Alcatraz, hobnob(thesis topic: “Verbal Aspect bing with heads of state such as in Black English”). He earned Queen Carolyn of Ladonia; Niels his PhD at the University of Vermeersch, the Grand Duke Chicago and published an of Flandrensis; and a couple ethnography in 2008 titled of French crown princes in full Becoming Tsimshian: The Social regalia. Roth asked whether any Life of Names. But he wanted of them maintained diplomatic to broaden his scope. relations with the Independent “One of the reasons I wrote Kingdom of Talossa. “I won’t Let’s Split! A Complete Let’s Split was that it was a deal with those people,” he was Guide to Separatist book that I wanted to read,” Movements and Aspirant told. “They are hostile and nasty.” Nations, from Abkhazia says Roth, who may well be In case you can’t quite place to Zanzibar the premier practitioner of a these countries: the Republic of By Chris Roth ’90 discipline he has tentatively Alcatraz is a 500-acre parcel near Litwin Books, 2015 dubbed “schismo-geopolitics.”

Perugia in Central Italy. Ladonia An informal Reed network is located somewhere off the southwest helped him find a publisher. Eve Müller coast of Sweden. Flandrensis claims a group ’89 put Roth in touch with another former of uninhabited islands in West Antarctica.

Talossa is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Roth lives with his wife Deadly conflicts in Kashmir and Crimea, longshot and three children. They are all “micronations” and most of them exist primarily in aspirations in the Duchy of Cornwall, and extravagant the minds of their mildly eccentric founders. decrees in the Kingdom of North Dumpling.

The conference, on the other hand, was entirely real. It was the Third International Conference on Micronations, and Roth had been invited to share his expertise on aspir- classmate, Rory Litwin ’89, who attend- seething sectarian nightmare that has driving nations. Roth’s three years of immersion ed Reed for two years and later went into en millions of refugees out of Syria. (Cruelly, in global geopolitics have culminated in an library science before starting his own pub- around 10,000 of those refugees have almanac like no other. His massive, lively, lishing house. applied for passports from the imaginary and completely irresistible book Let’s Split! A Despite its often light-hearted tone, Let’s nation of Liberland, a libertarian redoubt Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Split serves as an insightful primer for any- sandwiched between Serbia and Croatia, Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar one who has ever despaired of sorting out which is in no way equipped to welcome surveys virtually every aspiring country in the players in the world’s deadliest conflicts, desperate, fleeing families. For details, see the world today. from the powder keg of Kashmir, wedged Roth’s blog, Springtime of Nations.)

Roth’s first intellectual love was between Pakistan, India, and China, to the The book also includes entries on longshot

14 Reed magazine march 2016

Cascadia: Is it for Real?

separatist claims, such as the movement for an independent Cornwall—the feisty British duchy that was absorbed into England around the time of Edward the Confessor (and has been muttering about autonomy ever since.)

Before the internet, Roth says, he could never have undertaken a project of this scope. In addition to thousands of news sources (he scans hundreds of Google email alerts each week), the web offers instant access to highly accurate satellite data via Google Earth, a mainstay of current cartography. Google Translate is another godsend.

Despite its imperfections, he says, “it has totally transformed research.”

Weighing in at 625 pages, with 46 maps and no fewer than 554 flag illustrations (vexillologists, rejoice!), the book is truly epic in

scope. “The project turned out to be much bigger than I anticipated,” Litwin notes. “We were concerned about some of the material in the book being superseded by news events, so Chris actually rewrote parts of it to keep it up to date.”

Roth is currently setting his sights on a book that traces the family trees of the world’s deposed, exiled, and disestablished royal families—including impostors.

As with Let’s Split, says Roth, “It’s a zone where serious geopolitical and legal questions intersect with wildly colorful stories of real people.” It’s also a tall order in terms of research. “One of my problems is not picking small topics,” he admits, “only omnivorously expansive ones.”

Historically, most secessionist or nationalist movements have been based on a shared cultural, linguistic, or religious identity. Then came the American Revolution, which was founded on broad democratic principles that inspire independence movements to this very day.

But the imaginary nation of Cascadia has a very different organizing principle: bioregionalism. Its proposed borders vary, but most adherents envision a country that takes its outlines from the Cascade Range watershed, including Oregon, Washington, Idaho, western British Columbia, western Montana, and southeast Alaska.

Roth’s assessment of Cascadia’s prospects? Nil. “My take on it is, it’s actually a very insubstantial movement,” says Roth, who thinks the Cascadians are hopelessly out of touch with the status quo, not to mention various white separatist movements east of the Cascades. He does note that some advocates would restrict Cascadia to just the Pacific drainage. “This makes more sense than including Idaho, eastern Washington, and eastern Oregon,” he says.

“If anything, those people want to join Idaho.” Nonetheless, you can see the Cascadia flag, with its distinctive Douglas fir, next time you go to a major league soccer game in Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver, British Columbia, where fans have created an unofficial Cascadia Cup.

march 2016 Reed magazine 15

Loosen Up. Festoon.

New biography reveals the Zen of Philip Whalen ’51

BY JOHN SHEEHY ’82

The image of the iconoclastic outsider has cut a deep archetypal vein through the Reed consciousness ever since President William T. Foster, at the ripe old age of 31, set out to upend higher education with the launch of Reed College. Almost nine decades later, Apple Computer’s famous television ad known as “Crazy Ones,” might as well have been a toast from Steve Jobs ’76 to fellow Reedies past, present, and future: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things.”

Aside from Jobs, arguably the three brightest stars in Reed’s constellation of cultural disruptors over the past half century have been the trio of Beat Generation poets, Gary Snyder ’51, Lew Welch ’50, and Philip Whalen ’51. While students at Reed in the late forties they formed the literary nucleus of 1414 Lambert Street, the legendary first off-campus student-run house. There, with a shared passion for jazz, Lead Belly, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Asian studies, they fermented a subculture hotbed of intellectual and countercultural bohemianism before setting off to forge their own paths through buttoned-up, conservative, post-war America.

Drawn into the transgressive energy of the San Francisco Renaissance literary scene, the trio became major figures, along with such east coast writers as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, in forging a new social mythology of American freedom, one drawing from Thoreau and Whitman with a

16 Reed magazine march 2016

sprinkling of Zen Buddhism, that became known as the Beat Movement. What Snyder, Welch, and Whalen contributed to the west coast chapter of the movement were three distinct but compelling writing styles distinguished by subtle intelligence, a love of nature, and a keenly felt spiritual reality.

While Snyder headed off for many years to study Zen in Japan, and Welch began a short-lived career at a Chicago advertising firm, Whalen stayed largely in the Bay Area, where, undaunted by the impoverished career path of a poet, he courageously pursued a life

of the mind. As we learn in Crowded Beauty: The Life and Zen of Poet Philip Whalen, the engaging new biography by David Schneider ’73, the mind at work was in fact the evolving focus of Whalen’s poetry and later study as a Zen monk.

Born in 1923 in Portland, Oregon, Whalen grew up in the small Columbia River town of The Dalles. He attended Reed College on the G.I. Bill, where, under the mentorship of Lloyd Reynolds, professor of creative writing and calligraphy, he determined to become an accomplished writer. Witty and

C O U R T E S Y O F S P E C I A L C O L L E C T I O N S , E R I C V. H A U S E R M E M O R I A L L I B R A R Y, R E E D C O L L E G E

erudite—although prone to grumpiness and temper tantrums—Whalen built much of his life around a relationship to language. A voluminous reader, Whalen had digested a fair amount of the canon of English literature as well as a number of Asian texts of philosophy and literature before finishing college. Like Snyder and Welch, he was strongly influenced by the poet William Carlos Williams, who spent time with the young poets during a visit to Reed in 1950.

Whalen’s discovery of Williams’ poetry opened up for him the possibility of freedom

from an “academy” notion of a poem, which he The latter part of Schneider’s biography viewed as narration of subject matter bound explores Whalen’s last thirty years spent as a up in a preconceived ordering sequence. He Zen monk, and in particular his relationship realized that a level of reordering could take with his teacher and patron, Richard Baker. place not only in the line on the page but also In between, during much of the 1960s, we in the sound structure of the language itself. find Whalen in something of a wanderingMuch like Gertrude Stein, another early influ- in-the-wilderness period, cast about in penence, he began setting up certain dramatic ury, mooching off friends, teaching English expectations in his poems that he continu- in Japan, picking up one menial job after ally challenged and deconstructed. His primary another as he struggles to devote his time concerns were with the nature of mind and and focus to his craft as a poet. perception, which he displayed in associative Indeed, it is during this stretch of homeleaps from particular details of observation lessness and joblessness that Whalen is at and experience to echoes and ephemera of his his most productive, generating some of his distant memory, all conveyed with best work, as reflected by his first a comedic ear for puns and bon major collection of poetry, On mots, and punctuated by sensiBear’s Head, which was shorttive attention to the workings of listed for a National Book Award his own alert mind. in 1970. Yet we hear relatively The approach is perhaps best little about the poetry itself, expressed by one of Whalen’s nor how it evolves over time, own lines from his epic poem, in Schneider’s biography. His “Scenes of Life at the Capital,” as interest is more in Whalen’s life “Loosen up. Festoon.” And fesexperiences, and particularly his tooning is what Whalen does. spiritual evolution.

Like many of the Beats, there’s Crowded by Beauty: The Here, Schneider, who moved a wild energy released in his work. Life and Zen of Poet Philip to the San Francisco Zen Center Whalen He takes to a poem like a brilliant after dropping out of Reed in

by David Schneider ’73 jazz artist, riffing on almost any 1972—shortly after Whalen University of relation of form passing through California Press, 2015 himself first moved into the his mind and perception. As litercenter—is on solid ground. ary critic Paul Christensen describes it, “this is Ordained himself as a Zen priest in 1977, Imagism gone to Vaudeville, gag lines thrown Schneider writes with personal familiarity in with a rimshot on the punchlines.” and authority about Whalen’s initiation as Despite a lifelong aversion self-publicity, a Zen monk, intimately guiding us through Whalen occupies two premier roles as a cul- the spiritual transformation he undergoes at tural disruptor in the twentieth century: first, Tassajara, the Zen Center’s remote monastery as a poet’s poet of the Beat movement, and in the mountains east of Big Sur. second, as a key figure in the early transmisAs Whalen’s study of the nature of mind sion of Zen Buddhism to the West. shifts from literature to Buddhism, his orienIn his keenly observed but compassionate tation moves from the philosophical to the biography, Schneider explores in depth both experiential. His poetry, which dramatically story lines. Dispensing with the tradition decreases in both length and output, turns cradle-to-grave biographical arc, Schneider more reflective and quizzical, as he transistructures the first half of the book around tions from being a poet with a meditation Whalen’s relationships with five major char- habit to a monk with a writing habit. acters of the Beat movement: Allen Ginsberg, Yet, within the reserved, Japanese-styled Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, mannerisms of the monastery, Whalen and Michael McClure. Drawing largely from remains ever the disruptor, talking theatpersonal journals, letters, and interviews, he rically, humming, scat-singing, dancing on steers clear of rehashing oft-told heroic tales tip toes through the silent meditation hall, of the Beats, instead offering with these set “fat where most everyone else was trim, loud pieces a fresh and humanizing behind-the- where everyone else was quiet . . . older, crascenes view of the Beats’ inner circle as the zier, funnier.” movement unfolds.

In other words, still festooning.

march 2016 Reed magazine 17

Sculptor of the Surreal, Whacker of Flowerpots The high-wire life of Xenia Kashevaroff Cage ’35

BY JOHN SHEEHY ’82

The party began as many others had for Xenia Kashevaroff Cage ’35—with a hint of chance, of wild possibility, in the air. The year was 1943 and the artist and her husband, musician John Cage, were attending a small gathering of writers, actors, musicians, and artists—a number of them refugees from wartorn Europe—at Hale House, the Beekman Place mansion of art collector Peggy Guggenheim.

A crossroads for the wartime New York art world, Hale House hosted a steady stream of intellectuals, and Guggenheim’s parties were known for being fast and loose. Tonight was to be no exception.

Xenia and John had arrived in New York City a few months earlier with only 25 cents between them. They spent a nickel at the bus station to call Max Ernst, the surrealist artist they had met at the Chicago School of Design, who was married to Guggenheim. Weeks later, having worn out their welcome, the Cages began couchsurfing around Greenwich Village, camping out for a time with the mythologist Joseph Campbell and his wife, dancer Jean Erdman. Xenia had first met Campbell ten years before while summering at an uncle’s cabin in Sitka, Alaska, after her freshman year at Reed College.

Sunning topless on the beach

18 Reed magazine march 2016

one day, she heard a splash.

Suddenly, she wrote, out of the sea “came this heavenly, naked Joseph Campbell, glistening with cold icy water.”

Now, a decade later in New York City, Campbell and the Cages stood on the threshold

“Percussionist Cage, 30, is firmly convinced that percussive noise poems will bulk large in the musical future. . . . His steadfast fellow percussionist is his blonde wife Xenia Cage, surrealist sculptress, daughter of a Russian Orthodox priest.

Xenia and John had catapulted into the national spotlight thanks to their eyeopening performance at the MoMA of fame. Campbell had just published his first book on the hero myths of the Navajo. Xenia and John had catapulted into the national spotlight thanks to their eye-opening performance at the Museum of Modern Art. With John conducting, Xenia and twelve other percussionists beat on 125 instruments, ranging from hand drums to snare drums, brake drums, Chinese gongs, cymbals, woodblocks, cowbells, a thundersheet, a washtub, tom-toms, and bongos.

The group had previously toured colleges in the Pacific Northwest, including Reed, where student critic and future Portland conductor Jacob Avshalomov ’43 panned their performance in the Quest as “better heard than seen.”

Time magazine was somewhat more generous in covering their wacky New York appearance:

She helps Cage find his instruments of ‘unsuspected beauty’ in junkyards and hardware stores.

He considers her the deftest of all living flowerpot and gong whackers.”

The youngest of six talented, striking, and volatile sisters, Xenia was born in Juneau, Alaska. Her father, Andrew Petrovich Kashevaroff, was the archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church of Alaska.

His father, a Russian sea captain, had married a native Alaskan, making Xenia onequarter Alutiiq, or Sugpiaq.

During high school she went to live with two older sisters in Carmel, California, falling in with their free-spirited social circle that included writer John Steinbeck, photographer Edward Weston, and pioneer ecologist Ed Ricketts—the

model for the character “Doc” in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Xenia became sexually involved with Ricketts (who was married) while she was still in high school. She also formed a liaison with Weston, who introduced her to sexual trios, while she was a student

Xenia was photographed by Edward Weston in 1931. This portrait is now in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

at Reed. Weston’s iconic portraits of Xenia, including a number of nudes, hang today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Courting unorthodoxy came naturally to Xenia, who relished chance and experimentation both in her life and in her work as an avant-garde painter and

sculptor. That was evident from her first encounter with Cage in 1934, when she walked into the arts and crafts shop in Los Angeles where he was working.

She had recently moved to the city after dropping out of Reed to continue her studies at the nearby Chouinard Art Institute.

John had just returned from a grand tour of Europe after having dropped out of Pomona College. He was immediately drawn to Xenia’s exotic complexity and “barby” wit, and asked her out to dinner. That same evening he proposed marriage. A year later they were wed at dawn in the Arizona desert.

The atmosphere of intrigue mounted as the guests arrived: artist Marcel Duchamp, writer William Saroyan, and striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee. When Guggenheim suggested that Lee use some of John’s music in her act, Lee, who had been stripping for nine years to the pop song “Frankie and Johnny,” said that she wasn’t interested in changing something tried and true.

Not so Xenia. After Lee and most of the other guests departed, she decided to don a costume. Raiding Guggenheim’s closet, she found a pair of chartreuse-and-purple lounging pajamas, cut low in the back. When she re-emerged at the party, Duchamp and Max Ernst teased her that she had the outfit on backward. Accepting their dare, she reversed the pajama top, turning the revealing low-cut back around to the front. What followed was a group dash to the bedroom.

The madcap evening exemplified Xenia’s adventurous spirit.

It also illustrated the thrills, but not the dangers, of living life as a high-wire act. Within a year of the party, Xenia would lose John to the dancer Merce Cunningham in an affair that began as a friendly ménage a trois.

Cage and Cunningham would go on to great fame as artistic and romantic partners in the postwar avant-garde.

Xenia, meanwhile, began gaining notice in New York as a painter and sculptor in her own right. Artist Penelope

Xenia with one of her wood-frame and rice-paper mobiles, circa 1943.

Rosemont describes her as being on the “cutting edge of surrealism in sculpture.” Her elegant, fragile mobiles of balsa wood and rice paper were featured in Exhibition by 31 Women at the Guggenheim Museum, in a one-woman show at New York’s prestigious Julien Levy Gallery, and in exhibits alongside artists such as Dorothea Tanning, Marcel Duchamp, Kay Sage, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Motherwell.

Bookbinding, an art she learned from the legendary Hazel Dreis, not only helped pay the bills but also led to collaborations with Duchamp on his Boîte-en-valise and Ernst in designing a modernist table bench for his famous chess set. She designed costumes for Erdman and acted in experimental films by the director Maya Deren.

By the fifties however, Xenia disappeared from public view, along with her art. She supported herself by working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum, and, beginning in 1968, as a longtime cataloguer and conservator at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

When she died in 1995 at age 82, she was not a forgotten artist, but tragically, an unknown one. Virtually none of her artwork has survived. Her ashes were carried back to the family plot in Juneau. Jean Erdman, her fellow flowerpot and gong whacker, paid for her funeral.

John Sheehy ’82 is the editor of Comrades of the Quest: An Oral History of Reed College.

march 2016 Reed magazine 19

WHAT IS A SUCCESSFUL COLLEGE EDUCATION? THOUGHTS FOR REED PARENTS

ADAPTED FROM A TALK THAT PRESIDENT JOHN R. KROGER GAVE TO REED PARENTS IN NOVEMBER, 2015.

There is a passage in Aristotle’s book The Nicomachean Ethics that has always struck me as profound. Aristotle says that if you are an archer, you’re unlikely to hit your target if you don’t know what you are aiming for. In the same way, Aristotle suggests, you can’t achieve your goals unless you know what they are.

That idea is highly relevant to the subject I want to talk about—what it means to succeed in college.

In the United States, we spend a massive amount of time and energy figuring out where our kids should go to college. We start worrying about it their sophomore year of high school and never really stop until we write the first tuition checks. We read guidebooks, consult counselors, pay for test prep, visit campuses, and even—in extreme cases— hire college search consultants.

But after all this effort to find the perfect college, we spend virtually no time talking about what students should do once they get there. We equip them with bows and arrows but identify no targets.

I think we should spend more time thinking about the purpose of college. You can decide this for yourselves, but I would like to suggest that a successful college education consists of five fundamental elements: • learning a set of core intellectual capabilities • developing character • pursuing rich positive experiences • self-definition • preparing for the future.

20 Reed magazine march 2016

INTELLECTUAL CAPABILITIES

CHARACTER The second element is the development of certain character dispositions. This suggestion is, I think, a bit controversial today. When colleges were first founded in the United States, starting with Harvard in 1636, they were explicitly Christian institutions. Their primary goal, at least up until the 1880s, was to promote a certain model of Christian character. Reed was founded in 1908, at the beginning of a different era, when people wanted to offer a secular education open to all kinds

ways of looking at the world, of interacting with other people, get fixed early in life. For the most part, adults are recognizably the people they were when they turned 25 or 26.

At Reed, we do not engage in ethical indoctrination. But we do, I think, teach students to value certain things. One is usually portrayed as an intellectual value: a belief in rigor, precision, and excellence. Reedies learn to approach problems in a comprehensive and aggressive fashion. Don’t read one article— read 27 articles. Don’t just parrot back the

knowledge more important than character.

This seems to me a dangerous trend. Most students are between 18 and 22 years old.

They are in a critical developmental phase.

Their brains remain, for a relatively brief period of time, in a plastic state. In a few years, that window will close. This is why it’s so critical that we throw all this difficult intellectual material at them now.

But this is true in the sphere of ethics as well. Your students’ characters are taking shape. The habits and values they develop in college—their sense of what is important in life, what kind of person they want to be, and how they will treat other people—are likely to stay with them for a long time. This is, in short, a critical period not just intellectually, but ethically.

Of course, people continue to evolve over the course of their lives. We can improve. We can learn from our mistakes. We can work to make ourselves better. But certain core

assignment—figure out what’s wrong with those articles, develop your own hypothesis, imagine what you could do to test out your ideas. Don’t be satisfied with incomplete data—go back to the lab, try something different, develop a better foundation for your thinking.

But this way of looking at the world has profound ethical dimensions. It implies a commitment to getting it right, to being precise in your thought and language, to mean what you say. It produces graduates who carry these values out into the world. That makes Reedies a force for change and innovation.

Another value I want to talk about is kindness. I don’t think we have a very kind society. We often treat each other atrociously. At Reed, the Honor Principle forces us to reflect concretely about how we interact with other people, what kind of an impression or impact we’re making on the people around us, and what we can add to the community. Honor

leah nash

The most important thing that should happen in college is the development of core intellectual capabilities. I’ll list a few. Thinking critically. Learning to read quickly, carefully, and efficiently. Learning how to write—not just to write well, but to write with confidence, to write with joy. Speaking effectively, clearly, and persuasively when you’re in a group of your peers. Learning how to experiment in a lab. Speaking a foreign language.

Knowing how to make art, and having the courage to make art. Learning to criticize art: to know what kind of art you love, and what kind you do not. Analyzing problems quantitatively and statistically. Thinking algorithmically. Working effectively within teams of diverse individuals. And finally, developing a deep appreciation for the diversity of human practices and values across time and place.

Does a student need to have all twelve skills? No. Indeed, you might want to think of this list of intellectual capabilities as a flexible menu of options. It might be better if they can do six of these things really well than if they can do all twelve in a cursory fashion.

Your students will graduate into a radically changing world. They will be better prepared to face that world if they have these skills.

These capabilities are also the key to leading a life of meaning and purpose. They give students the ability to think critically about the world we live in and to imagine how that world could be better. They are the tools we need to narrow that gap between the world as it exists and the world as we want it to be.

of faiths, backgrounds, and beliefs. These new institutions decided not to focus on character, but on knowledge: on the creation and transmission of knowledge and the development of those intellectual capabilities I outlined a moment ago. That was a powerful idea, and it was adopted by practically every college in America.

Unfortunately, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. When colleges stopped promoting Christian values, they stopped promoting any ethical values. We made

march 2016 Reed magazine 21

you’ve never skied, try skiing. If you’ve never rock climbed, go rock climbing. If you’ve never gone hiking before, go hiking. Travel overseas.

Act in a play. Paint a landscape. Play the mandolin. Operate a nuclear reactor. Do things that are fun, that are rewarding, that offer pleasure and satisfy curiosity.

I hope all of your students have one positive experience that is unique to college—the chance to fall in love with an intellectual discipline. I would encourage students and their parents not to think about this decision instrumentally. Students should not major in a field because they imagine it will be useful. They should major in a subject they love. This is in part because

take time when they’re in college to think about what’s truly important to them. Do they believe in God? What kind of God? If they don’t believe in God, what provides the foundation of their values? What are the values that they want to pursue and espouse for the rest of their lives? What aesthetic and personal style do they want to present to the outside world? If they fail to ask and answer these questions, as least provisionally, they will be societally programmed robots, not human beings.

This self-definition—the moment a young person says, “I’m going to be a human being who cares about this set of things, and who chooses to live in this manner,” is

you’re more likely to work hard at something you enjoy. But I also believe that in life, people who have the courage to do what they love ultimately have the most success. That’s why I think it’s so important to get students into the habit of taking a risk and doing what they love, not what they think is safe.

important and powerful. There is not, however, much social discourse about it. That is one of the things that makes a liberal arts education so important. The texts that students read in Hum 110 require them to think critically about the values of classical society and, more importantly, about how their own personal values relate to those of others. The class requires them to engage intellectually over fundamental questions of aesthetic, ethical, and political values with peers who come from radically different backgrounds. That ability to listen to other people, to think about what they believe, to compare that to their own values, and then potentially to modify their own beliefs because of these interactions with others, is something only a great college education can instill. And if that education is successful, your students will emerge with a set of values and a sense of self that is uniquely and truly theirs.

nina johnson

is not just a list of things Reedies cannot do, but a permanent and affirmative obligation to think constantly about what they can do to help their fellow Reedies and build a stronger community. That, in the end, is a very powerful tool of ethical development.

A third virtue we promote here at Reed is the ability of students to challenge themselves. Education is not about being comfortable. It is not about being easy. It is about challenging yourself by taking on intellectual and artistic projects that are probably beyond your capability. You see this most clearly at Reed in the senior thesis. In some ways, the ideal thesis is one where the student selects a problem that is so important, so complex, so difficult, that it requires them to stretch and struggle. That ability to challenge oneself, to be willing to try and fail, is something that our society does not actively promote. It is one of the things a student really needs to develop while she or he is in college.

I am sure you can imagine a long list of character traits that you want your students to develop in college. I won’t try to suggest today what that list should be. Every student, every family, should develop its own list. I do, however, believe that developing character is a vital part of a successful education.

POSITIVE EXPERIENCES The third element of a successful education is often overlooked, and that is rich and positive personal experiences. These are experiences that we value as humans, not because they have some instrumental purpose that we can employ to our benefit later in life, but things that are good in themselves in the moment. College is a huge percentage of your kid’s life. They are going to spend four, maybe five, years here. That’s at least five percent of their entire life, if they are fortunate enough to live to age eighty. It is even more, when viewed from the students’ perspective. College will be a third of their conscious life to date! For this reason, it is important that their days be filled with rich experiences that are valuable in themselves.

What kind of things really matter? You can make your own list. Learning to have a healthy relationship with yourself and with other people. Making friends. Falling in love.

Getting your heart broken. Learning how to get in and out of a relationship responsibly and ethically. Playing a sport. Trying something athletic or artistic you’ve never tried. If

22 Reed magazine march 2016

SELF-DEFINITION Fourth, college students have to learn to define themselves in the world. As you know, teenagers are highly impressionable. They arrive at college with an amorphous and plastic sense of self that has been shaped heavily to date by their families, their high schools, their peers, the media, and the internet.

It is critical, during the years from 18 to 22, that students begin to evolve into adults with their own sets of values, beliefs, and style—ones that they have chosen for themselves, not ones that have been inherited or received from others. They need to

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rics

TRIM LINE DO NOT PRI

PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE

Finally, a successful college education should help students build for the future. A place like Reed should be like a trampoline. You jump on it, and there’s a little bit of resistance, and it’s difficult. After four years, however, it MUSIC should blow you out into orbit with a sense of power to live a life of meaning and purpose.

There’s a lot of talk in America about how college should prepare you for your first job.

This seems incredibly short-sighted to me.

College should not prepare you for your first alifornia job, but for the rest of your life.

I would prefer us to take one step back and HEN I GOT TO REED to ask students do more than just find a job. to be an anthropologist whoto played toclass identify, while they are in colside. I took Ia want musicthem theory lege, thewith kindmy ofviolin life of meaning and purpose hought it would help that they would like to pursue. This requires next semester I switched majors. more than seeking employment. It forces them DID to identify a long-term professional trajectoevery libraryry jobthat a student canthem have.the I kinds of rewards will offer n in the Reed and Orchestra and in they chamber experiences desire. We are going to and my stringspend trio would play a lot occasionally of our lives working.

So, students n the middle of commons during lunch. should ask themselves: What kind of work will sustain me? What kinds of rewards do I D want?

What etty generous.

It gave mekinds more of financial, personal, and societal goals y other school I applied to. will give my life value?

Thinking creatively about the future is not enough.

Students need to take some proactive HANGED ME steps to prepare for life hat I actually love doing, and had theafter Reed as well. Let work on projects that actively interested me suggest that students me. should leave Reed me a more confident, person. with fourarticulate interesting things on their résumé that they can talk about when applying for work. These might include a compelling sumaphic Examination of Ideology in mer job or internship, a particular academic Music Education Program” distinction, or a valuable skill like the ability to write code or speak a foreign language. You want to leave Reed with four things that you can talk about. As long as you pile up one of those things a year, you’re doing fine.

T So that concludes my sermon. I have given ouston as anthis AmeriCorps Teaching topic a great deal of thought, but I don’t Citizen Schools, a nonprofit that want to suggest that this is the only way to underserved middle schools. define success. You may have other goals in mind for your students—and they may have goals that are radically different from yours. I am certain, however, that the students who take the time to identify goals are the ones who get the most out of their education— and, like Aristotle’s archers, the ones most likely to hit their targets.

President John R. Kroger majored in philosophy, served in the Marine Corps, worked as a federal prosecutor, authored the award-winning book Convictions: A Prosecutor’s Battles against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves, and was attorney general of Oregon.

Achievement after Reed.

Quantified.

THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE Where do Reed students go +6 months after graduation?

71%

Employed

9%

Graduate School

9%

Volunteer Programs

FELLOWSHIPS & AWARDS

3 31 156

MacArthur Fellows

89

Fulbright Students

Rhodes Scholars

67

Thomas J. Watson Fellows

National Science Foundation Fellows

ALUMNI CAREER PATHS

28 %

Business

5%

Government

25%

Education

5%

Medicine

19%

Self-employed

5%

Law

REED IS A TOP INSTITUTION FOR PRODUCING GRADUATES WHO EARN PhDs

4

Overall

#

3

Humanities & Arts

3

Science & Mathematics

#

6

Social Sciences

# #

Source: National Science Foundation and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System

Please note: Because we have not included all categories of response, percentages do not add up to 100.

S N R E T T PA O W E R P F O How fashion reveals—and enforces—the hidden hierarchies of society

BY RANDALL S. BARTON

Miley Cyrus is wearing silver thigh-high boots.

A high belt supports a loincloth of chains and cascading crystals. Gleaming leather straps streak across her breasts, inviting imminent wardrobe malfunction. Nicki Minaj sports a sheer, embroidered gown with a mermaid tail and a neckline that plunges to the belly-button. Justin Bieber shows off in skintight, distressed jeans, rough-out boots, and a black leather jacket—rather like something Bruce Springsteen might have worn in his glory days.

Millions of viewers around the globe tune into the Video Music Awards to gorge themselves on glamor, glitz, and gossip. But the students gathered around the conference table today are not here for entertainment. They are taking Theatre 220, History of Clothing in Society and Performance, and they have come to deconstruct the fashions on display at the award show.

“Miley’s outfit was very in-your-face,” a student comments. “It was revealing in a way that was meant to make you feel uncomfortable and question why it was revealing. The accessories she wore were equally as loud as the outfit.”

Prof. Chloe Chapin [theatre 2015–] pauses. “What does the word ‘loud’ mean?”

“Attention-grabbing?” the student ventures.

“That’s great,” Prof. Chapin offers. “Break it down for us so we understand what it is you’re talking about. What is she wearing?”

“An apron with straps,” comes the reply.

“It reminded me of suspenders, or lederhosen,” says another.

“Yes,” Chapin says. “It’s sort of like

24 Reed magazine march 2016

p h o t o s b y m at t d ’a n n u n z i o

march 2016  Reed magazine 25

PATTERNS OF POWER

continued

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

FINE AND DANDY The French Revolution gave rise to a dramatic transformation in men’s fashion known as the Great Masculine Renunciation.

BEFORE the Revolution Elegant wig

Silks and velvets

Embroidery Rings lace cuffs

Culottes (breeches to you!)

High heels make me manly.

AFTER the Revolution Those hideous wigs are sooo yesterday

Plain woolens No gaudy rings No frilly cuffs

illustrations allen crawford

19th-century Germany meets The Jetsons.”

It’s something of a paradox. Outfits like the ones on display at the VMA show are designed to grab attention, but fashion in general has not traditionally attracted the same kind of attention that scholars have paid to theatre, art, or literature. This is a shame, according to Chapin. Clothing, she argues, represents an extraordinarily rich field of study, weaving together a fascinating tapestry of history, economics, politics, anthropology, and art. Clothing may conceal, but it can also reveal how people in various eras and cultures have chosen to project elements of their identity.

“Fashion is one of the great pillars of being human,” Chapin says. “If the things we need are food, shelter, and clothing, how can we talk about society and culture without talking about clothing?”

Professor, artist, costume designer, and fashion historian, Chapin has designed for theater, opera, and dance. She has a BFA in performance production from Cornish College of the Arts, an MFA in Costume Design from the Yale School of Drama, and an MA in Fashion and Textile Studies from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She taught fashion history at FIT for nine years, and has lectured at Yale, NYU, Barnard, and Stockholm University. She was a 2012 MacDowell Fellow and a 2014 Fulbright Scholar. She was interviewed for a recent Freakonomics episode about why suspenders went out of style. She has also taught several classes at Paideia, including one on the history of hairstyles and another on James Bond and the tuxedo.

The professor’s tailored trousers and blazer reflect her interest in the history of men’s suits. Her hair was cut by the barber who advised hairdressers on Boardwalk Empire how to capture the look of a man’s haircut from the early 1920s.

“It’s interesting teaching at Reed, where the students are so smart and interested in

looking at things through an academic lens,” Chapin says. “They want more reading and more challenging theory.”

Sociology major Sierra Swann ’17 took the course to learn the role that fashion plays in capitalism. “Fashion is integral to how societies and cultures conduct themselves,” she says. “People relate to each other based on what they look like and what they’re wearing.”

Chapin’s class offers a lively tour of trends and fashions through the ages. Students travel back to a time when people lived in caves and draped their bodies with animal skins.

They learn the difference between patterns, fibers, and weaves. (Wool is a fiber, flannel is a weave, and plaid is a pattern.) They discover that some of the first laws in colonial America were sartorial laws regulating dress.

A woman could be arrested for having gold trim on her bodice, for example, because it was forbidden to wear clothes above your station. In 1660, Virginia colonists were forbidden to import “silke stuffe in garments or in peeces except for whoods or scarfs, nor silver nor gold lace, nor bone lace of silk or threads, nor ribbands wrought with gold or silver in them.”

They also ask how fashion reveals—and sometimes reinforces—patterns of power in society.

Take, for example, the Great Masculine Renunciation, a tectonic shift in the presentation of menswear following the American and French Revolutions. Before the 1790s, men in Europe typically dressed with the same goals as women. Power dressing was all about ostentation, draping the body with extravagant silks, velvets, and embroidery.

Men wore perfume, powdered wigs, high heels, lace cuffs, and jewelry. Picture the Sun King and his court at Versailles. But after the French Revolution, aristocratic finery was suddenly seen as horribly outdated. The culottes (knee breeches) of the royal court became such a powerful symbol of the despised ancien régime that working-class partisans of the Revolution were known as the sansculottes (without breeches) because they

Trousers, sir.

Only boys wear breeches.

High heels?

Surely you jest!

Boots make me manly.

BEAUTIFUL

ROMANTIC

CHARMING

QUAINT

150 years after its time

100 years after its time

70 years after its time

50 years after its time.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y A L L E N C R AW F O R D

In 1937, renowned fashion historian James Laver created a timeline, often referred to as Laver’s Law, to describe how we experience fashion, based on the observer’s distance from the costume in question. Fashion, he said, is: 26 Reed magazine march 2016

ability to transcend intellectual disciplines; to take insights from psychology and apply them to King Lear, or use dance steps to explain Brownian motion. That philosophy certainly applies to the theatre department, which offers courses on improvisation, race and identity, and performance and activism in South Africa, in addition to more traditional courses like acting, directing, playwriting, and dramaturgy.

During one classroom exercise, Chapin asks the students to work as a group, placing 18 fashion silhouettes in chronological order.

The puzzle prompts a discussion about the evolution of the bustle until all the pieces are correctly placed but one, an errant silhouette resembling Little Bo Peep, from the 1830s.

Every student works on a final project that relates to fashion and its subcultures. One student takes on the iconography of pizza.

Another covers non-binary-gendered fashion, while a third delves into the emerging “Health Goth” trend. (Yes, this is a thing. Look it up.) These projects give students practice in synthesizing huge amounts of information into a coherent narrative. They also sharpen the students’ ability to separate historical fact from media hype.

“In fashion journalism, they always want the origin story,” Chapin says. “So-and-so was the first person to invent this, which is usually not the case when it comes to fashion.

It’s not always very good writing and generally doesn’t have sources.”

In the final weeks of the class, the study turns to the 20th century, when the individuals who designed clothes often overshadowed the people who wore them. Students prepare presentations on specific designers, illustrating how their work continues to influence fashion today.

Having entered the sixth year of the ought-teens, it is interesting to ponder; will this year’s fashions be what people later remember about this decade? Ombréd hair and sleeve tattoos? Or has the internet accelerated the pace of what’s hot and what’s not so dramatically that categorizing fashion by

p h o t o s b y m at t d ’a n n u n z i o

wore trousers. Menswear became more practical. Instead of dressing like peacocks, men began to adopt sober woolens in shades of black, brown, gray, and blue. Boots replaced embroidered heels.

To ask, “Why did this happen?” is to plunge headlong into the theory of fashion, prompting discussion about the rise of humanism and neoclassicism, the shift from palace living to urban life, and the Anglomania that seized the Continent after the French Revolution. It also invites comparison with contemporary ideas about masculinity, male fashion, and the presentation of self.

“Fashion doesn’t happen on its own,” Chapin reminds her students. “It is always in context, always in response to what comes before it.”

After the horrifying devastation of World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic, for example, the ’20s witnessed new fashions that were widely considered outrageous: bobbed haircuts, dropped waists, and the shortest skirts seen on women’s clothing in thousands of years. “Panic and mania often contribute to big shifts,” she explains. “While there is rarely a clear case of cause and effect, you can argue that war, plague, and death often precede an explosion of self-expression that is reflected in lavishness in fashion. And then you have a reaction against this boyish garçon look in the more feminine styles of the ’30s, with longer hemline and draped, bias-cut gowns.”

While people typically use decades—the ’60s, the ’80s—as a kind of shorthand to refer to fashion trends, Chapin points out that the trends that later become “iconic” often aren’t popular until halfway through the decade.

Bell-bottom jeans and tie-dyed shirts, for example, the mainstays of any back-to-the’60s party, didn’t catch on until 1966 or so.

Getting her master’s degree at the Yale School of Drama, Chapin says, “was like getting a degree in English, except instead of using words, I used costumes. It was literary analysis put up on its feet.”

One hallmark of a Reed education is the

TOP: Prof. Chapin looks at the evolution of hairstyles and the tuxedo for insight into deeper historical forces. BOTTOM: Students deconstruct Britney Spears’s outfit at a glitzy glamor event.

decade no longer makes sense?

Back in class, the screen displays a photo of a bronzed Britney Spears at the Video Music Awards clad in a shimmering skintight minidress spangled with gold and silver sequins, her hair pulled high.

The students issue a collective groan. And the discussion begins in earnest.

Go Further

Learn more about the theatre department at reed.edu/theatre.

AMUSING

HIDEOUS

DOWDY

SMART

OUTRÉ

SHAMELESS

30 years after its time

10 years after its time

1 year after its time

Today

1 year before its time

5 years before its time

INDECENT

10 years before its time

march 2016 Reed magazine 27

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Reediana

Books. Music. Film. Send us your work!

Email reed.magazine@reed.edu

Language Making Nature

By David Lukas ’93

The Long Haul

As David Lukas sees it, the language we use to describe the natural world has not evolved a whit in the 160 years since Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden. We still rely on the stodgy, male-dominated International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature to ratify and officialize animal names. There are thousands of musical nature words that we almost never deploy (for instance, cumulonimbus, a Latinate term for a towering rain cloud), and meanwhile we have all but surrendered word making to the stultifying corporate powers who’ve given us Xanax, Prozac, WhatsApp, and Uber.

In his daring and inventive new book, Language Making Nature, David, a Portland-based wilderness guide, calls for a linguistic renaissance—for a recognition that “beneath the veneer of modernity the English language is potent with ancient magic-making power.” At once a handbook and a manifesto, Language Making Nature delivers 76 quick lyrical riffs that provide wild suggestions and historical background to students, poets, and anyone else who aims to “awaken language.”

In one piece, David rhapsodizes over how the western Apache Indians have long imbued place names with a pictorial resonance—consider the Apache name that translates to “Circular Clearing with Slender Cottonwood Trees.” He doesn’t offer place names of his own. His impulse is not to show off, but rather to provoke readers’ imaginations. In other essays he argues that the names of animals should be capitalized and that we should savor the emotional and linguistic depth contained in the squawking cries of the raven: kor, krep, kri. Throughout, he insists that we can only be free if we transcend our current clipped parlance—“the language of the conquerors,” he calls it—and embrace

This final collection by the late Vern Rutsala is a stunning testament to his incisive sensitivity and his lyrical voice, which commands nostalgic tones while constructing vignettes of middle-class life. His enduring emphasis on the West—particularly Oregon—serves as a striking backdrop. While the narrative is intentionally placed in time and space, the reader senses a profound timelessness as Vern chronicles the cyclical nature of life. “That foolishness matures in us / now as the map forgets the route / as we eke our way over all/those years between reliving / all the lost discoveries/that mint themselves new again.”

By Vern Rutsala ’56

language play as “something profoundly creative and freeing. It’s about dissent,” he writes.

The book is in some ways a lament.

It mourns the forgotten age when British peasants sidled up to the beorsetl (Old English for “beer settle”) and rues the disappearance of the pugme, a unit of measure that the ancient Greeks defined as the distance from elbow to knuckles. But Language Making Nature is at bottom crazily hopeful. At one point, David implores us to take linguistic inspiration from Tibetan monks, who once carved prayers on wooden blocks and then stamped these blocks on the surfaces of flowing rivers, to imprint their hopes on the world. “The world is stamping its language on us in the same way,” David writes. “Listen for the language of the animals, of trees, rocks, and clouds.”

Early on, David concedes that many word experiments “will (and should) fall by the wayside.” He’s right, of course: Most of the ideas that he sparks to life will in time fade away, like so many fluffs of dandelion riding the wind. But before they disappear, Language Making Nature will open our eyes. This book is a wonder, an invitation, and a challenge to which we can only assent with solemn awe: kor, krep, kri. —BILL DONAHUE

—SYLVIA RANDALL-MUÑOZ ’15

Missionaries from Outer Space

By Don Schuman ’57 (CreateSpace, 2015) Aliens from the planet Durva land on earth and announce their love and good intentions toward the “Earthlings.” Are they spiritual emissaries or invaders? Keniston, a Durvan missionary, warns President Subornable: “If you reject our suggestions and it turns out we’re right, you’re facing total ecological collapse. The consequences of our position are all to the good, while the consequences of rejecting our position are absolutely devastating.” Clever allusions to “Donald Rump” and “Faux News” pepper Don’s fictive universe as both Durvans and Earthlings question the Earth’s future, and ultimately, its fate. —SRM

Jon Meets Yoshiko

By Jon Appleton ’61

(Phoenicia, 2015)

Jon’s latest CD is a recording of neoclassical and neoromantic piano compositions, performed by the exciting and expressive Japanese-American pianist Yoshiko Kline.

Known for his innovations in electro-acoustic music, Jon has performed and taught music around the world, and was part of the team that developed the Synclavier, the first commercial digital synthesizer.

march 2016 Reed magazine 29

Reediana Life after Death at Ipsambul

By Lin Sten ’67

Set in ancient Greece, this imaginative novel follows Arion, a boy who enjoys a safe, privileged childhood on Lesbos. His life changes drastically when he and his merchant father set sail across the Aegean Sea. On their journey, the boy and his father encounter extreme horror that forces Arion to consider his place in such a world. Arion likens their journey to Homer’s Odyssey. Lin’s prose is highly detailed, and he constructs a striking portrait of the time. Ipsambul is the first book in a forthcoming series titled “Arion’s Odyssey.” —SRM

Wherever Love’s Camel Goes

By Alan Mussell ’68 (iUniverse, 2015) Alan’s second novel is a sequel to The Last Crusade.

Alan again constructs a complex portrayal of medieval Europe, as we find Maurice working in the royal palace of Frederick II as an illuminator and translator. In his work, Maurice encounters an unusual Sufi manuscript.

He later attends a meditation group with his friend Rashid which compels him to consider his values and place in the world. Simultaneously, several of Maurice’s Catharist friends from his previous journey in The Last Crusade find themselves confronted with the Inquisition. Alan weaves a complex historical narrative with a sense of immediacy that explores issues of friendship and loyalty. —SRM

Une vie pour être soi

By William Cornell ’69

(Payot & Rivages, 2015)

Bill discusses his groundbreaking research in the post-Freudian psychological field of transactional analysis, and its functional consequences for the therapeutic relationship. A practicing therapist and consultant, Bill has published numerous articles and book chapters, as well as edited several books discussing bodycentered and transactional approaches to psychotherapy. He is the editor of The Script and coeditor of Transactional Analysis Journal.

30 Reed magazine march 2016

From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography

By Jeremy D. Popkin ’70 (Oxford University Press) This book offers a concise yet comprehensive account of the many ways in which history has been studied and recounted, from the ancient world to the new universe of the internet. It shows how the same issues that historians debate today were already recognized in past centuries, and how the efforts of historians in the past remain relevant today. Jeremy holds the William T. Bryan Chair of History at the University of Kentucky. Among other things, this project made him reread the battered copies of Herodotus and Thucydides he used in Hum 110 back in 1966.

(See Class Notes).

Figure to Field: The Art of Jacqueline Barnett

By Matthew Kangas ’71 (Museum of Northwest Art, 2016) The dynamic work of Jacqueline Barnett emerges from abstract expressionism and organic metaphor.

Matthew has written many books and serves as contributing editor for a number of publications, including Art in America, Sculpture, Art Guide Northwest, and Visual Art Source, an online weekly newsletter. (See Class Notes).

Continental Divide

By Maurice Isserman ’73 (Norton, 2016) Invoking a cast of characters that includes Gary Snyder ’51, Jack Kerouac, Thoreau, Emerson, and John Muir, Maurice’s history of American mountaineering explores the rivalries that developed between daring, upstart climbers from the West, especially the Sierra Club, and their more traditional, upper-class eastern counterparts. Maurice dedicates his work to “those Oregon friends in whose company, in younger days, I first encountered mountains.”

The Fortunes of Olaf Shorthand

By Thomas Owen ’73 (CreateSpace, 2015) Olaf Shorthand, the Jarl of Boknfjord, is a Viking lord— rich, powerful, favored by the weavers of men’s fates, the Norns. But all that changes on a frigid winter’s night. Now Olaf and his followers must battle a black nemesis, a beast that cannot be wounded. Blood will be shed. Men will die. Everything Olaf loves may be destroyed. This short story was originally published in Fiction in 1974. Thomas also wrote Sherlock Holmes and the Modern Cinderella; Little Bit; and My “New Yorker” Stories. A longtime resident of Boston, he has helped edit several magazines and worked at the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop.

A Sense of the Oregon Constitution

By Bradley Nicholson ’83 (Vandeplas, 2015) An analytical and scholarly treatment of some of the Oregon Constitution’s most important provisions, this exhaustively researched work offers novel insights into the document, frequently leading to revelatory conclusions that are at odds with opinions issued by the Oregon Supreme Court. Since graduating from Reed, Bradley completed his J.D. at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and has authored several articles on the subjects of legal history and intellectual property.

Night of the Victorian Dead Book One: Welcome to Romero Park

By Amber Michelle Cook ’92 (Unchangeling Press, 2014) The unwitting attendees of a country ball are all too busy hiding secrets and making matches to notice the foreboding signs that the dead are rising, until it’s almost too late! Amber’s love of period pieces and great literature shines through in this whimsical 19th-century fantasy. Amber lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she produces art and photography, leads improv writing tables, and heads National Novel Editing Month.

ariel zambelich

Bitterman’s Field Guide to Bitters & Amari

By Mark Bitterman ’95 (Andrews McMeel, 2015) The most comprehensive handbook available on selecting, understanding, mixing, and, cooking with bitters. Complete with tasting notes, profiles of important makers, and brand photography, the guide gives everyone from pro bartenders to home cooks a solid foundation for buying and using these concoctions. Mark, who won a James Beard Award for his first book, Salted, has traveled the globe relentlessly in search of culinary and personal inspiration, including a multiyear motorcycle tour roaming the European countryside and its local markets.

Inside the Machine

By Megan Shaw Prelinger ’90

(Norton, 2015)

Megan’s new book focuses on the hidden history of the 20th century’s brilliant innovations, as seen through art and images of electronics that fed the dreams of millions and our collective visions of the future.

The history of electronics in the 20th century is not only one of scientific discoveries carried out in laboratories across America, she argues, but also a story shaped by a generation of artists, designers, and creative thinkers who gave imaginative form to the most elusive matter of all: electrons and their revolutionary powers. As inventors learned to channel the flow of electrons, starting revolutions in automation, bionics, and cybernetics, generations of commercial artists moved through the traditions of futurism, Bauhaus, modernism, and conceptual art, finding ways to link art and technology as never before. Megan, an archivist and cultural historian, is cofounder of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco and author of Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957–1962. —SAM SMITH ’13

Megan Shaw Prelinger ’90, co-founder of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, is the author of Inside the Machine.

The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty

By Erica Kohl-Arenas ’91 (UC Press, 2015) Can philanthropy alleviate inequality? Do antipoverty programs work on the ground? This eye-opening analysis bores deeply into how these issues play out in California’s Central Valley, which is one of the wealthiest agricultural production regions in the world and also home to the poorest people in the United States.

Through the lens of a provocative set of case studies, The Self-Help Myth reveals how philanthropy maintains systems of inequality by attracting attention to the behavior of poor people while shifting the focus away from structural inequities and relationships of power that produce poverty.

Erica is an assistant professor at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy and is the first recipient of the New School award in Outstanding Achievements in Diversity and Social Justice Teaching. —SS

Valley Files

By Paul Koubek ’96 (Rock and Ice Magazine, October 2015) Paul’s thoughtful series of profiles on “lifers” in the Yosemite Valley climbing scene documents an eclectic ensemble of characters, each of whom has made elemental contributions to the valley’s legacy as a global hub for the climbing community.

Paul, a U.S. Antarctic Program Lead Mountaineer, worked alongside photographer Yuri Shibuya to produce the feature. As Paul tells it, “members of the class of ’96 may appreciate that all climbing ‘lifers’ featured in the article are 40 or above.”

Le Poète innombrable: Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob

By Alexander Dickow ’02 (Hermann, 2015) Emphasizing questions of authorship and identity, Alex’s new French-language book critiques three influential 19th century poets, thought to have shaped the work of contemporaries ranging from Walt Whitman to Henry Miller. An associate professor at Virginia Tech, Alex has published poetry, translations, and scholarship in dozens of journals abroad and in the U.S., and is author of a bilingual collection of poems titled Caramboles.

“Honey Bunny”

By Julianne Pachico ’08

(The New Yorker, November 2015).

A young Colombian woman meets a man in a New York nightclub, telling him, “I’ve got some goodies, if you’re interested.” We soon learn that the “goodies” consist of cocaine, the culturally and politically loaded fulcrum around which this work of short fiction turns. A thought-provoking meditation on urban diasporic identity, “Honey Bunny” is part of Julianne’s forthcoming collection The Lucky Ones, which explores the social, personal, and political ramifications of the Colombian drug trade. Julianne, who left Colombia when she was eighteen to attend Reed, began writing the collection in 2012 while pursuing her master’s in creative writing in England. —SS

march 2016 Reed magazine 31

In Memoriam We welcome your contributions on behalf of alumni, faculty, staff, and friends of Reed.

Please send obituaries and remembrances to us at by email (reed.magazine@reed. edu) or by mail to Reed magazine, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland OR 97202.

Photos are welcome, as are digital images at 300 dpi. In Memoriam is now online: www.reed.edu/reed_magazine

Harris Dusenbery ’36 Oct. 4, 2015, Portland, stroke

Author, veteran, traveler, philanthropist, and iconic Reed alumnus Harris Dusenbery—familiar to many alumni as the “last man” in the reunions parade—died at the age of 101.

Born in Roundup, Montana, in 1914, Harris moved to Portland with his family when he was 12 years old. He graduated from Grant High School in 1932 and went to Reed in the depths of the Depression, when tuition was $200 a year.

Harris majored in political science, studying fascism, Nazism, and communism with Prof.

George Bernard Noble [political science 1922– 47], and wrote his thesis on the international control of aviation. On weekends he often recreated with the Outing Club, joining classmates on hiking and skiing excursions. Indeed, Harris had a high-level introduction to his wife, Evelyn Shields ’37, as he paused to apply zinc oxide at the 9,000-foot level of a group climb of Mt. Hood. Their marriage lasted 67 years, until Evelyn’s death in 2008.

After doing graduate work at Stanford, Harris went to work for the newly minted Social Security Administration in Salem, Oregon. When the United States entered the Second World War, he served in the famed 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army. A quarter of the division’s soldiers were killed or wounded as they fought to liberate Italy. Harris won a Bronze Star during the Po Valley campaign, and later wrote three books about his war experiences.

After the war, he returned to the Social Security Administration, becoming district manager in Vancouver, Washington, where he worked until his retirement in 1969.

Harris and Evelyn raised two children and then fulfilld their dreams of seeing the world.

They eventually made 52 trips abroad, visiting 38 Reed magazine march 2016

82 countries.

“Travel teaches tolerance and respect for other people, for their heritage, and the practices,” Harris said. “It made me realize that humanity is really one community on the surface of the earth, and it’s a community of equals, at least in terms of who we are as human beings.”

To fund their travels, Evelyn and Harris lived modestly. But that didn’t prevent them from being generous benefactors throughout their lives. Harris adopted Evelyn’s philosophy, “It is important to live frugally and to give generously.”

“Our society has gotten the idea that it’s important to live the big life, the affluent life,” Harris said a few years ago. “The really important thing is to live the good life.”

In 2012, the Community Foundation for Southwest Washington honored his years of philanthropic generosity by according him its first Lifetime of Giving Award. Giving made him feel good, Harris explained, and he gave to his alma mater that he might keep illuminated “the liberal light that is Reed.”

This college was a central part of Harris’s life. Both of his children, David Dusenbery ’64, and Diane Waggoner ’68 (married to Jim Waggoner ’68), are alumni, as were his brother, Dallas Dusenbery ’34, and sister-in-law Helen Dusenbery ’37. Harris and Evelyn established the Verne and Elizabeth Dusenbery Memorial Scholarship and funded the Harris and Evelyn Dusenbery Gift Annuity. The Dusenberys eventually gave Reed more than $150,000, and Harris named Reed as a beneficiary of his estate.

His children David and Diane survive him, as do two grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Memorial gifts may be given to the Dusenbery Fund for Environmental Education and Research at Reed College.

Kate Rogers McCarthy ’39

November 3, 2015, Parkdale, Oregon, natural causes

Environmentalist Kate McCarthy, who successfully fought to protect Mount Hood’s fragile ecosystem from development, was always connected to the land she grew up on.

Born to Homer and Elizabeth Smith Rogers in 1917, Kate spent much of her youth on the family’s property four miles south of Parkdale, Oregon, in the shadow of Mount Hood, where she spent countless hours hiking and riding horses through the meadows and forests.

She went to high school at Miss Catlin’s School for Girls (now known as Catlin Gabel) and ran a summer camp for girls with her sister, Betty, on their family’s land.

Kate majored in biology at Reed and wrote her thesis on angiosperms of the Mt. Hood region with Prof. Una Davies [biology 193952]. She went on to the Yale School of Nursing and graduate school at the University of Oregon Medical School. In 1942, she married Gerald McCarthy; the couple raised four sons, Stephen McCarthy ’65, Timothy, Kermit, and Michael.

In 1964, the couple purchased the Sutton ranch next to the family property in Parkdale where they lived after Gerald retired as manager from Umpqua Plywood in Roseburg.

“McCarthy’s farm sits picture-postcard-perfect in the frame of Mount Hood,” the Oregonian columnist Jonathan Nicholas wrote in 1987. “In the mid-1970s, plans for a major resort development on the north side of Mount Hood were derailed when (Kate) McCarthy and others objected to having their land turned into ‘a playground for the rich of Oregon and the world.’”

Fired by her lifelong passion for the land and its wildlife, Kate devoted herself to protecting and preserving it for the future enjoyment of others. She and her Parkdale neighbors

encouraged county leaders to hold an advisory vote on zoning options, which was influential in creating the present predominantly agricultural zoning in the upper valley. When a large destination resort was proposed south of Parkdale, Kate and friends founded the Hood River Valley Residents Committee to lobby opposition. The committee grew to 1,200 members and the Hood River County Planning Commission ultimately denied the resort proposal. The Hood River Valley Residents Committee remains active today working to keep Hood River County a special place to live.

Kate lobbied to have the Columbia Gorge officially declared a scenic area and was appointed by Oregon governor Bob Straub to serve on the commission to advise how the gorge should be managed. The turning point came when President Reagan signed the act creating the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area in 1986.

Kate was active in other groups, including the Oregon Natural Resources Council (now Oregon Wild), the board of the Oregon Environmental Council, and was a charter member of 1000 Friends of Oregon. She devoted 30 years to working with the Forest Service and the Oregon congressional delegation to set aside more land for wilderness and protect wetlands, mountain meadows, and other special places from development.

In 2002, she was awarded honorary membership in the Mazamas for her tireless efforts.

Kate is survived by her four sons, seven grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

Elizabeth Lamb Tate ’39

September 22, 2015, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Elizabeth’s father quit school as a boy to work in the cotton fields of Texas. It was his heart’s desire that his daughter attend Reed.

She was born after the Lambs moved to Portland’s Montavilla neighborhood and graduated from Washington High School. The country was still in the throes of the Great Depression when she went to Reed as a “day-dodger.”

“People around us were losing their real estate, and all of their savings,” Elizabeth remembered.

“The banks closed and savings and loans went down the drain.”

Stung by the cliquishness of high school, she rejoiced at the absence of fraternities and sororities at Reed. She majored in literature, and, at the suggestion of her thesis adviser, Prof. Barry Cerf [English 1921-48], wrote a thesis comparing Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra with historical sources. The experience taught her to do research, cite sources, and write well.

After Reed she worked at the Multnomah County Central Library, got a bachelor’s in library science from the Pratt Institute Library School in Brooklyn, and in 1942 began working at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. She later earned a PhD at the Graduate Library School, University of Chicago. Starting in 1964,

Elizabeth worked first as assistant chief librarian and then as library director for the National Bureau of Standards. In 1973, she took over the descriptive cataloging division of the Library of Congress. She retired after more than 33 years of federal service, but stayed active editing Library Resources and Technical Services, a publication of the American Library Association, and tutoring for the Literacy Council in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Elizabeth met her husband, Douglas Tate ’35, while she was working at the Library of Congress. Though both were Reed graduates, they never met on campus. She was a friend of Ellen Knowlton Johnson ’39. Douglas’s boss at the National Bureau of Standards was married to Ellen’s sister Kathleen Knowlton Wilson ’32. Douglas and Elizabeth met when they were invited to the Wilson’s home for Christmas dinner. They married in 1943. Douglas was a physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He passed away in 2004.

The couple lived for years in Rockville, Maryland, before moving to a retirement community in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Through the years they were extremely generous with their support of Reed. They established the Elizabeth and Douglas Tate Scholarship, with preference given to students majoring in physics, mathematics or other scientific disciplines.

“Our Reed experience was very important to us,” said. “Both of us having the Reed background meant that we approached problems with the scientific method. We both ended up with the same attitudes towards a lot of important problems.”

Margaret Selling Labby ’40 November 22, 2015, Portland, Oregon

In keeping with the way she lived, Margaret Labby died with her family around her. An avid reader, enthusiastic cook, curious traveler, and beloved teacher, she was first and foremost the openhearted, supportive center of her family.

Every year Margaret gathered them around her at the house in Seaview, Washington, where she had spent summers as a child.

She was born into a Jewish family that included her grandfather, Oregon state senator and philanthropist Ben Selling, and her father, Laurence Selling, a founder of the Portland Clinic.

She met her future husband, Dr. Daniel H. Labby ’35 at Lincoln High School. Their six-year courtship was prelude to a 75-year marriage.

Margaret spent all but the last three months of her married life with Daniel at her side. He died in 2015.

At Reed, Margaret majored in political science and wrote her thesis, Effect of the Social

Security Act on Public Health Activities in Oregon with Prof. Charles McKinley [political science 1918-60]. When her youngest child was nine years old, Margaret set aside her Great Books collection and League of Women Voters activities and returned to Reed to earn an MAT. Her years as an English teacher at Lincoln High School were among her favorites.

After retiring in the early 1970s, she earned a master’s in social work from Portland State University, and enjoyed a new career as a social worker.

Her children, Joan Labby and son-in-law Tom Nickel of San Francisco, Dr. David Labby ’66 and daughter-in-law Dr. Sarah Slaughter of Portland, and daughter Louise Labby Carrol and son-in-law Richard Carroll of Lake Oswego; her brother Ben; five grandchildren and three greatgrandchildren survive Margaret.

Rosina Corbett Morgan ’41 November 12, 2015, Portland, Oregon

She was born in 1919 on Ulysses Grant’s birthday to one of Oregon’s most prominent families.

The daughter of Henry Ladd Corbett, her mother was the former Gretchen Hoyt, daughter of a philanthropic New York family. Rosina’s grandfather, William Ladd, was mayor of Portland and founder of Oregon’s first bank. Known as Ena to her family, she grew up in a historic home in Dunthorpe.

In 1927 Charles Lindbergh visited Portland to dedicate the airport on Swan Island, and the Corbett family attended the parade. Eight-yearold Rosina disappeared, and following a frantic search, the family spotted her in the parade, walking hand-in-hand with Lindbergh. She had wanted to see who deserved all this attention and had gone to find him. It was emblematic of the curiosity that moved her through life.

When the time came to select a college, Rosina selected Reed, starting in 1937 with a major in general literature.

At Reed, she met her future husband, Howard Morgan ’40. The Corbett family disapproved of the relationship and prevailed upon her to transfer to Radcliffe. Nonetheless the two married in 1940. Howard was called to active duty during World War II and served in the Office of Defense Transportation before being assigned to the Naval Air Transport Service. When the Navy transferred him to Brazil, Rosina moved back to Portland with their two children and re-enrolled at Reed. At the march 2016 Reed magazine 39

In Memoriam time, she was one of four mothers attending the college, an occurrence rare enough to prompt the Oregonian to feature her in a story. In 1945, she completed her thesis on Stephen Crane with Prof.

Victor Chittick [English 1921-48].

Starting in 1948, the couple operated a sheep farm near Monmouth, Oregon. During the 1960s, they divided their time between their home in Portland and a 577-acre cattle ranch in the Deschutes area of central Oregon known as Black Butte Ranch. Howard was elected to the Oregon Legislature, served as chairman of the Oregon Democratic Party, was a public utility commissioner, and was appointed by President Kennedy to the Federal Power Commission. Following Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, he resigned his position and the couple returned to Oregon, where Howard became secretary-treasurer of the Pioneer Construction Company. Rosina, artistic and inquisitive, was an artist, a weaver, and a board member at the Arts and Crafts Society. She taught at Catlin Gabel School and later served as executive president of its parent-faculty association.

A fierce optimist, having seen the humor and tragedy that is life, she sought beauty in the details. In 1967, the youngest of her four children, Thomas, was killed in a shooting accident. Shortly thereafter, Rosina and Howard sold their house and moved onto a houseboat.

“We faced the fact that we were not ever going to farm again, and didn’t want to pretend that we were,” she said. Her husband’s long-dormant longing for the water and boats was given free rein, and they moored their tiny houseboat on a channel of the Willamette River. In the fall of 1971, they purchased a 34-foot Islander sloop and headed out to explore the world.

“Maybe two people in their fifties setting off for the first time in a 34-foot sailboat to explore some of the world is ‘far out,’” she wrote, “but it didn’t seem that way to us. It seemed rather logical.”

The only crew they took with them were their two Welsh corgis, whom Rosina found to be, “rather good, stiff-upper-lip sailors.” For a time they lived as landless water people with oceans of time on their hands. Then in 1982 they bought an old house in Alicante, Spain, that they converted into two apartments. To satisfy their penchant for sailing, they purchased a smaller Dutch boat, suitable for river travel.

When they were ready to move back to the States they wanted to live in a town that had a university where they could walk to the grocery store. McMinnville, Oregon, fit the bill. By the time of her death, Rosina had moved to Lake Oswego, Oregon. Howard, her husband of 72 years, preceded her in death. She is survived by her children, Peter Morgan, Salem, Kate Morgan, Seattle, and Sarah Morgan, Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica; seven grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.

40 Reed magazine march 2016

Beatrice Twitchell Courtnage ’42

Francis Ann Hazen ’42

Born to teacher Helen Creegan and attorney Robert Twitchell, Beatrice spent her first years in Woodstock, Vermont. When Beatrice was 11, Helen moved with her children to Honolulu. Beatrice never saw her father again. She and her siblings were schooled at Punahou School, where Helen taught.

Beatrice left Hawaii to join her beloved older sister, Elizabeth T. Claus ’40, at Reed. Their younger sister, Barbara T. Lewis ’47, would follow years later.

At Reed, Beatrice met and married Clyde Courtnage ’41. While Clyde obtained his MBA from Harvard, Beatrice pursued her love of literature at Boston University. Following World War II, Beatrice and Clyde moved to Seattle, where their three sons were born. The family moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, in 1955, and lived there until they moved to Anchorage in 1963. Beatrice obtained a BA in education from the University of Alaska, and later a master’s from Alaska Methodist University (now Alaska Pacific University).

As as an elementary school teacher in Anchorage, she was instrumental in persuading the Anchorage School District to implement a program of testing to identify dyslexic students, and then to provide multisensory education— the Slingerland program—for these children.

She was a tireless advocate for additional funding to expand the program and coestablished the Slingerland Institute in Anchorage to train teachers in the method.

After retirement, Beatrice and Clyde volunteered regularly at the Food Bank of Alaska and other places providing food for those in need.

Beatrice also tutored adults acquiring English as a second language. She enjoyed reading and shared her love of literature with others by reading aloud to generations of offspring. In 1996, Beatrice and Clyde established the Clyde & Beatrice Courtnage Library Fund at Reed in support of the college’s outstanding rigorous academic program. Clyde died in 2006.

Her sisters Ethel and Barbara, three sons and their partners (Michael/Pam, John/Cheri, and Peter/Caroline), 7 grandchildren and 11 greatgrandchildren survive Beatrice.

A generous and thoughtful woman, Beatrice easily asserted her opinions, and was usually ahead of her time. She once reflected on her good fortune, saying, “How very different are the problems we all face—some with too much ego, others with not enough. We’re all wounded spirits that yearn for recognitions, acceptance, and love.”

She was “Ponchine” to her dad, and “Francie” to her mom, but for the year she attended Reed College, 1938-39, she was known as Ann. Forever at the hub of an extended family, Ann entertained her parents’ friends when she lived with them in their home on Myrtle Court. By working hard at Yours Truly Catering, she was able to buy a house, where as a single mom she raised three kids. Then she met Walter Davol, with whom she spent the next 30 years. Late in life, she rounded out her collection of names by marrying Ed Frances, becoming Francis Ann Frances.

A son, Howard Miller, predeceased Ann, and her children, Sue and Steve Miller, survive her.

October 19, 2015, Eugene, Oregon at the age of 96

September 19, 2015, Portland

Phyllis Bullington Riddell-Shapiro ’42 October 2, 2015, Portland, Oregon

The daughter of Frank and Sylvia Bullington, Phyllis was born on the first day of spring, March 21, 1919. The promise of spring blossomed into her irrepressible optimism and celebrated smile.

When she was two, the family moved from Portland, Oregon, to Kansas City. They were living in Los Angeles when her mother died in 1937, followed a year later by her father. Phyllis moved to Portland to study at Reed, majoring in literature. She did not graduate, marrying Robert Riddell in 1942. The couple had four children, and in 1988 Robert died. Phyllis married Robert Shapiro in 2004, and he died three years later.

Her companion, Joseph Bashlow, survives her, as well as her children, Stephen Riddell (Diane Chellis), James Riddell (Penny), Cathy Riddell (Diane Wells), and Susan Hill (Gary); six grandchildren; eleven great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild.

Ellen L. Talman ’42

September 9, 2015, Hillsboro, Oregon

Ellen was born in Baker C i t y, O re g o n . S h e majored in chemistry at Reed, writing her thesis with Prof. Leland H. Pence [chemistry 193945]. Delaying her graduate education, Ellen joined the World War II effort, serving with the U.S. Marine Corps as a noncommissioned officer in charge of a materials testing lab in North Carolina.

After the war, Ellen completed her MS and PhD degrees in biochemistry at the University of Oregon Medical School. She excelled in a profession that few women at the time considered an option. She worked in the departments of bacteriology, ophthalmology, and biochemistry at OHSU, where she also served as an instructor and assistant professor. She was

an assistant scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center in the 1960s and until her retirement in 1970 worked as a research associate, biochemist, for the OHSU department of surgery.

Ellen successfully balanced being an eminent scientist in a male-dominated field with family life, caring for her parents into their old age and fulfilling the role of a second mother to her nephew, Winslow “Wink” Brooks, and his family.

A gifted gardener, she canned and kept a freezer full of her famous homegrown raspberries. Her family was frequently treated to homemade bread or pancake breakfasts with raspberry preserves, served at the yellow breakfast nook in her kitchen. In the evenings she relaxed with her crocheting, watching favorite television shows such as the Lawrence Welk Show and Washington Week on OPB. Ellen kept herself informed about developments in science and current affairs and had a lifelong interest in the early history of the United States. Her nephew survives her.

Susan Sonia Grover Rumley ’43 November 5, 2015, Salem, Oregon

She was the youngest of seven children born to Abraham and Sadie Grover. With Abraham’s slender income as a carpenter, there was never enough food on the table, and Susan developed a lifelong interest in nutrition, food, and food preparation.

She never liked the name Sonia, and throughout grade school and high school went by “Sonie.”

In 1938, she started at Reed—attending for only one year. For the rest of her 96 years she would tout the value of a college diploma. She regretted not completing her college education, but maintained her own higher education had come through self-direction.

In 1942, she met and married the love of her life, a Portland bus driver named Lynn Rumley.

Daughter Linda was born the next year and the family moved to Boise, Idaho, where Lynn worked as a long haul truck driver. Three more children were born, Stephen, Stuart, and Nancy.

For 12 years Sonia made sure the family was comfortable in a house that seemed to be perpetually under construction. Linda married and in 1962 the family decided to move to greener pastures in California. San Jose held the promise of better job opportunities and affordable college educations for the kids. Sonia and Lynn were determined that their children would enjoy opportunities the two of them never had. That year, Sonia changed her name to Susan.

She had learned shorthand and medical transcription, and worked a succession of clerical jobs. But Susan harbored dreams of being a writer. One of her English professors at Reed submitted one of Susan’s stories to a national publisher who praised the work and asked for more submissions. Throughout life she was a voracious reader and wrote poems and limericks.

The family moved to Sacramento in 1970, where Susan worked as a clerk in the county welfare department. The Sacramento home Lynn built for her was the gathering site for years of family celebrations.

The couple moved to Salem, Oregon, in 1993, where Susan resided for the rest of her years.

Lynn preceded her in death, and she is survived by her children, Linda (Dennis) England, Steve (Wanda) Rumley, Stuart (Lorraine) Rumley, Abi Rumley Root; stepdaughter Etta Ruberg; sister Beth Rondone; and seven grandchildren.

Ena June Shrauger ’47 June 17, 2013, Aurora, Colorado

Born in 1916, Ena obtained her bachelor’s degree in biology from Reed. At the time of her death at age 97, she was living in Aurora ,Colorado; she was buried in the Pawnee City Cemetery in Pawnee City, Nebraska.

Donald Deardorff ’48 November 21, 2015, Salem, Oregon

Donald was born in 1926, in Seattle, Washington, to R alph and Mar y Deardorff. He earned a BA in physics and wrote his thesis, The Design, Construction, and Operation of a Grating Spectrograph, with his advisor, Prof. Raymond Ellickson [physics 1946-48]. He got a job with the U.S. Bureau of Mines in Albany, Oregon, at the Metallurgical Research Center and described his most important accomplishment as the determination of the melting point of hafnium and its solid-state crystal structure transformation temperature. He and his wife, Shirley, enjoyed camping, fishing, hiking, and rock hunting. Don was accomplished at lapidary work and produced many cabochons, spheres, and pyramids, which he gave to friends and family. Shirley preceded him in death. He is survived by children Mollie Bonson, Linda Young, Marcie Wolf, Pushpa Devi, and Jess Deardorff.

Rebecca Nace Koch ’48

August 5, 2015, Portland, Oregon, heart failure

Becky was the fifth child of Congregational missionaries Israel George Nace and Mary Rosa Keifer, born in the winter of 1927 in the small Japanese town of Akita. Mary was a marine biologist who passed her love of nature to her children. Becky’s childhood unfolded in Japan, then at an orphanage run by her grandfather in Greenville, Pennsylvania. Finally the family moved to Tillamook and then to Portland. Becky was a peripatetic little girl, traveling around the world by ship, and across the country by car.

Experiences at Bible camp, Girl Scout camps, and summer camps on the Oregon coast and at Mt. St. Helens fostered her love for the outdoors. She

even worked as a fire lookout in remote towers in the Mt. Hood National Forest. Becky’s interests also included knitting and sewing, playing the bass in the Portland Junior Symphony, and making friends.

Graduating from Grant High School at the age of 16, she followed her older siblings, Margaret Mitter ’39, George Nace ’43, and Robert Nace ’45 to Reed. She was particularly fond of reading sessions at the home of Prof.

Ruth Collier [English 1933-52]. Later, when Becky taught in Japan, she invited her students to potluck suppers at her home where they read aloud from their literature assignments.

She had the idea of teaching outdoors where she could combine her love of children and nature. Leaving Reed, she finished her bachelor’s degree at Springfield College in Massachusetts, in the first class of women admitted to the previously all-male college. But she always regretted leaving Reed and said, “There is no way to describe the extent of my Reed experience for it permeates all my activities of life.” She met her first husband, Bill Koch, at Springfield.

A natural leader and teacher, Becky’s early career revolved around teaching and directing a variety of summer camps, and she taught at the first outdoor school in the nation. She spent more than 30 years working in outdoor education, and with the developmentally disabled, criminal offenders and senior citizens.

Becky, Bill, and their five children lived in Texas, Phoenix, Chicago, New York City, and North Carolina, before establishing a long-term home in Madison, Wisconsin. They built their careers on helping people in tangible ways, working for civil rights, gay rights, desegregation, the war on poverty, and marginalized populations. They advocated for people with disabilities, and taught children to conserve nature and make a difference wherever they happened to be. When their marriage ended after 25 years, Becky moved back to Portland in 1978 and started her next chapter. She became an advocate and volunteer coordinator, recruiting foster grandparents for kids, advocating for people with disabilities, and spending time sharing her love of Oregon with her own children, relatives, and a handful of foreign exchange students.

A topnotch tennis player, she enjoyed games and puzzles of every kind. On weekends Becky worked at the ski lodge at Mt. Hood Meadows because she loved being at the mountain around interesting people. She also played in her church bell choirs for years.

When her last child went off to college, Becky taught at Kwassui Women’s College in Nagasaki, Japan, and then at the IEC Foreign Language Institute in Yatsushiro, where she chaired the English department.

She returned to Reed in the 1990s as a member of the Women’s Committee, and audited several classes. She particularly loved taking Hum again. In 1995, she traveled to Poland with a march 2016 Reed magazine 41

In Memoriam team of volunteers to teach English to children, most of who had never met an American.

“I didn’t go with the attitude that I would change the world overnight,” she said, “but every little bit helps.”

In retirement she volunteered at the Rhododendron Garden and ushered at the Performing Arts Center and Chamber Music Northwest. She moved to Terwilliger Plaza, and made it her responsibility to recruit and welcome new residents. At the age of 80, she shocked everyone when she fell in love with and married Peter Serrell, another resident at the Plaza. Peter died in 2008. Becky is survived by her children, Susan Keifer Gegenhuber, John Koch, Emily McGowan, Theodore Koch, and Sarah Koch, her stepdaughter Barbara Serrell Hansen ’62, and granddaughters Izzakate, Crystal, and Brittany.

be found. I shall always remember Dr. Arthur Scott’s [chemistry 1937-67] lecture demonstrations. Many didn’t work, but they were instructive and amusing. My worst experience at Reed was Saturday all-day Organic Lab session in the attic of Eliot Hall. The air would be blue with fumes.”

While at Reed she met and married Michael Robison ’49. The couple divorced in 1961.

Having never had a job, she didn’t know what to do. She called her old thesis adviser, Joe Bunnett, who was then on the faculty at Brown University, to discuss possibilities. He invited her to come work as his chemistry research assistant at Brown. She accepted his offer and spent the rest of her professional career at Brown, where she received her master’s degree in pharmacology.

She lived for more than 30 years in the historic district of Providence, Rhode Island, before moving into an assistant living facility on Blackstone Boulevard.

William G. Whitney ’48 October 21, 2015, Vancouver, Washington

Bill was born in Portland in 1927. The family relocated to Cleveland until the death of Bill’s father, and then returned to Portland. Bill’s education at Reed was interrupted by the Korean War. He joined the Marine Corps as a lieutenant and served with distinction, exiting the war as a captain. Availing himself of the benefits of the GI bill, he finished his science degree at Reed and then attended Willamette University Law School, where he received his master’s degree.

He spent years practicing law, often serving as a court appointed attorney for people who could not afford a lawyer. Bill had a great sense of humor and even told lawyer jokes to the judges. He is survived by his children, Doug (Kate), Fred, Beau (Joli), Michelle and Tina; 10 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His son George predeceased him.

Bonnie Robison ’49

October 19, 2015, Providence, Rhode Island

Fifty years after she graduated from Reed, Bonnie recalled, “Reed demanded that I stretch my mind and do my best. It was a pleasure to learn and that has always remained with me.”

Born in Portland, she was the daughter of William and Eda Souther. Hers was the first class to enter Reed after World War II, and she was in awe of her classmates who were veterans. Majoring in chemistry, she wrote her thesis, The preparation and identification of 1-chloro-2 methylnaphthalene with Prof. Josef Bunnett [chemistry 1946-52].

“It was a very serious and intense time,” she said of her Reed years, “but some fun could still 42 Reed magazine march 2016

Ann Volkmann Dick ’50

November 1, 2015, Salt Lake City, Utah, Alzheimer’s

Ann was born in Brussels, Belgium, on September 5, 1927, to an American couple, James and Mary Volkmann. Her father worked for American Radiator Company, with headquarters in various European cities, and the family lived in Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland. As the clouds of war gathered over Europe, the family returned to the United States. Ann was 10 years old and finished her elementary education at a private school in Deerfield, Massachusetts. As wartime gas rationing allowed, summers were spent in Castine, Maine, at her grandmother’s summerhouse.

She then went to a progressive boarding school in Putney, Vermont, where besides schoolwork her greatest interest was skiing.

“Skiing was the be all and end all,” she said, “and I did altogether too much when I was at Reed, to the detriment of my academics.”

It was important to Mr. and Mrs. Volkman, educated at Harvard and Vassar respectively, that all of their children receive a college education. A fellow student at Putney told Ann, “You know where you should go? You should go to Reed College.”

Ann took the train to Portland and settled into Anna Mann. Later she would retrieve her 1936 roadster from Vermont so she could get to the competitive ski events, and to insure that

she would have time to compete, her course load was spread over five years. The culmination of her ski career came when she was invited to the team trials for the 1948 US Winter Olympic Team in St. Moritz, but did not qualify.

“I could see the handwriting on the wall,” she said, “that this was not something I was going to be able to really succeed in when the pressure was on. And it was okay.”

She focused on her science courses in chemistry and biology and decided to major in chemistry.

During one of the chem labs on the top floor of Eliot Hall, students were given an unidentified powder in a test tube and asked to do a qualitative analysis of it. A practical joker friend of Ann’s, Frank Curtis ’48, got hold of her test tube before class and replaced the contents with ground glass.

“I was first supposed to figure out what this powder was soluble in,” Ann remembered. “I tried water, alkaline, acid, all those things and couldn’t get any results at all. I spent three lab periods, three hours each, on this before Frank finally came and said, ‘This is ground glass.’ I could have choked him.”

She wrote her thesis, The separation of glutathione and cysteine by paper chromatography, with Prof. Arthur Hamilton [chemistry 1948-65].

Ann served on Reed’s student council, square danced in the student union, sang in the madrigals, and once even performed in one of Prof.

Herb Gladstone’s [music 1946-80] Gilbert and Sullivan productions. She also met a man who shared her loved for the outdoors and music, Gale Dick ’50.

Ann left Reed with a dual degree in chemistry and botany and returned to Putney to teach.

She stayed in touch with Gale, who’d gone on to graduate school, and the two married in 1956.

She worked as a lab technician at Cornell for two years while Gale finished his PhD. Then they went to the University of Chicago for a few years before moving to Salt Lake City in 1959. Their eldest son, Timothy, had been born in Illinois, and daughter, Robin, and son, Stephen Dick ’79, were born in Utah.

Ann got her master’s degree in plant biology at the University of Utah, and started teaching again in 1973, this time fourth and fifth graders instead of high school students.

After she retired, Ann was a docent at the University of Utah’s Museum of Natural History, a few blocks from her home. She also volunteered many hours with organizations such as Save Our Canyons, Friends of the Great Salt Lake, and the Guadeloupe Center. She was a passionate tennis player, hiker, birdwatcher and longtime season ticket holder to the Utah Symphony and Opera. She loved the mountains, the deserts, the rivers, and the cultural life of Salt Lake City. The University of Utah provided a great social life and together Ann and Gale built a wonderful group of friends. Until the

end Ann maintained her warmth, charm, grace, and sense of humor.

Gale died last year. Ann’s sister, Betty Lou, and three children, Tim Dick (Jane), Robin Berg (Svenn) and Stephen Dick (Karen), seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren survive her.

Iris Lee Burton Holt ’50

September 12, 2105, Multnomah County, Oregon

Born in Portland in 1927, Iris was class valedictorian at Lincoln High School and won a scholarship to Reed. She attended for only one semester before transferring to the University of Oregon.

In 1950, she married Gordon Swan and had two children, Peter and Steven. She returned to college and graduated from Portland State University with a degree in mathematics and a teaching certificate. For the next 24 years she taught in the Parkrose School District at Fremont Junior High School, which she loved.

She married John Holt, who had been a classmate at Lincoln, in 1997, and they traveled, did genealogic research and enjoyed their dogs.

John survives her, as do sons Peter and Steven, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Roddy Daggett ’51

June 25, 2015, Portland, Oregon, cancer

A lifelong resident of Portland, Rod was born in 1925, when Calvin Coolidge was president.

He grew up near Northeast 72nd Avenue and Sandy Boulevard (then the outer edge of town) and attended Grant High School. To relax he played golf at the Rose City Golf Course or tennis with his father at Washington Park.

Rod always wondered why his parents gave him the middle name Muldoon.

Rod worked at Fred Meyer and in the shipyards until World War II, when he joined the Navy. After the war he came to Reed, where he majored in political science and wrote his thesis, A Civil Service Commission of Multnomah County, Oregon with Prof. Charles McKinley [political science 1918-60]. He got a master’s in social work at UC-Berkeley, and returned to Portland where he worked as a social worker with Portland Public Schools.

Rod was a treasured husband, father, grandfather and friend, and as an intrepid city walker and hiker was a pedestrian advocate. He was partial to Scrabble, word play, and Bull Run tap water from Portland’s uncovered reservoirs, and was a founding member of Portland Community College’s Senior Studies Institute.

His wife, Fran, son, Steve, and daughters, Robin Fouche and Lesley Jackson, survive Rod.

Kenneth Jacobsen ’51

August 21, 2015, Portland

Born in 1922, Ken was one of seven children of Norwegian immigrants, Karen and Christian Jacobson.

Ken attended Reed on the GI Bill, after serving as a reconnaissance staff sergeant for the 23rd Armored Division in Europe during WWII. He wrote his thesis, Post office department policies and employee unions, with Prof. Charles McKinley [political science 1918-60].

He worked as a management analyst for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and lived in various towns in Washington, Idaho and California before his retirement in 1981. Ken and his wife, Betty, moved back to Portland in 1982, where he became an enthusiastic walker and volunteer, involved with many local nonprofits, including several which provided services to disadvantaged women and children. He also tutored at Portland Community College and participated in many senior discussion groups.

His children, Alan Jacobsen and Carol Waitte, a granddaughter, and a brother, survive him.

Mary Jo Gillespie ’55

September 5, 2015, Portland, Oregon, cancer

Born in Lewiston, Idaho, Mary Jo moved to Portland, Oregon, as a child. After graduating from Lincoln High School, she started at Reed,, where she majored in mathematics, and would remember Hum 110 with great joy.

“Reed gave me not only the pleasure of learning,” she said, “but also the first experience of truly being treated as an adult among adults.”

At the beginning of her junior year, Mary Jo married classmate Robert Gillespie ’55. She finished her junior quals, but as money was short and Bob needed the student deferment, she put off her senior year and worked in the Reed business office during Bob’s senior year.

She finished her senior year in what was then San Diego State College (now University) and got a BS in mathematics in 1956. Early employment included two years as a programmer at Convair Astronomics in San Diego. In 1958, she and Bob moved to the Seattle area, where she devoted the next years of her life to raising her two sons, Peter and Scott. The family began making yearly treks to Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands in 1963. Always at home in the outdoors, Mary loved to backpack and hunt mushrooms.

In 1971, she returned to college life at the University of Washington and eventually earned an MS in biomathematics from the School of Public Health. During the last year of her studies she began working for the university as a biostatistician, ultimately becoming deputy director of the Coordinating Center for various

NIH randomized clinical trials in cardiology and hematology. While at the Coordinating Center, Mary Jo co-authored more than a dozen peerreviewed articles in science journals.

After retiring in 1990, she and Bob moved to the Pearl District in Portland to be near their sons, daughters-in-law and two grandchildren.

The couple celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2003, and enjoyed traveling, dining out, and spending time with family and friends.

Bob died in 2014 after a long struggle with Lewy body disease. In 2015, Mary Jo established the Gillespie Family Student Research Fund in memory of her husband and in honor of the family’s long relationship with Reed.

Last July, Mary Jo took her last Orcas Island trip with family and friends.

She spent her final days at home as she wanted to do, cared for by family, before succumbing to the ovarian cancer she had lived with for years. She is survived by her sons, Peter Barr-Gillespie and Scott Gillespie; daughtersin-law, Ann Barr-Gillespie and Nancy Gillespie; and grandchildren, Katie and Aidan Gillespie.

David Novogrodsky ’55 September 14, 2015, Berkeley, California

In the early Fifties when David was at Reed, a group of students founded a mythical island nation from which they issued satiric declarations about campus events.

“David was the Commissioner and after serving an apprenticeship I was elevated to the title of M. le Directeur,” Michael Munk ’56 remembers. “Well into our dotage we continued to address ourselves with those titles.

David was part of the posse that indoctrinated me into the culture and politics of Olde Reed.”

The two men shared a houseboat at the Max Weber Moorage on the Willamette River, which enjoyed some notoriety as a venue for Inquest fundraising parties.

“I responded eagerly to the speech, rhythms, and especially the humor of David’s Lower East Side accent, where one would ‘take’ a haircut and stand ‘on’ line,” Mike says. “But most important was his political radicalism.”

David majored in sociology and psychology at Reed, and wrote his thesis on contemporary American and Soviet Jewish communities with his advisors, Prof. Howard Jolly [sociology 194970] and Prof. Les Squier [psychology 1953-88].

David went on to earn a master’s in political science from the University of Oregon. Looking back, he noted, “Reed was good general preparation in that it encouraged a critical attitude.”

He was a fearless advocate for social justice and truth, and his radical background proved valuable in establishing a successful career as a labor march 2016 Reed magazine 43

In Memoriam union leader, organizer and visionary. Among his many accomplishments, David was the Executive Director of the Professional & Technical Engineers Local 21 and an Executive Board Member of the San Francisco Labor Council.

“On his retirement several years ago, I was impressed by the quality and quantity of the state and Bay Area labor leaders who came to express their appreciation of his work,” Mike says. “Listening to them on a sunny day at his Berkeley home, I was quietly proud of his influence on me at Reed, our houseboat, and grad study at Eugene.”

David was preceded in death by his first wife, Rene, and is survived by his wife, Karen Zullo Sherr, his children, Ellen and Seth, two grandchildren and two sisters.

Lyn McGuire ’57

July 29, 2015, Seattle, Washington

Lyn grew up in Altadena, California, an L.A. suburb near Pasadena. As a young girl she was fascinated by geography, history, and the natural world. She became the first woman in her family to earn a college degree, earning a BA in anthropology from Reed in 1957. Her time at Reed was liberating, transformative, and a source of growth for Lyn. She wrote her thesis, An analysis of Nez Perce political organization with Prof.

David French ’39 [anthropology 1947-1988].

Lyn had a passion for social justice and for all living creatures (as well as being a gifted cat whisperer). After time spent in Salem, Oregon, and the Southwest pursuing anthropology, she married and taught at University of WisconsinMadison during the civil rights era. In 1971, she received her MS in anthropology from UW. She participated in non-violent protests against segregation and supported the civil rights movement passionately. When her son, Erik, was born, she gave him the middle name Martin in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She moved back to the West coast, worked for the Bay Area chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and continued 44 Reed magazine march 2016

her interests in anthropology and archeology with time spent in El Salvador at dig sites and doing research. Unfortunately, her time in San Salvador coincided with a period of political upheaval, necessitating an early departure. Later, a travel agency opportunity offered her knowledge and information about the industry, and she explored widely, enjoying the Panama Canal, the Galapagos, seeing wildlife in Tanzania, spyhopping whales, and multiple trips with family in Hawaii and Mexico.

Lyn was defined and received joy through a lifelong love of books, history, knowledge, swimming, dancing, hiking, long walks on the beach, horticulture and gardening. Her son, Erik Martin Hanisch, who survives her says, “Mom really loved her time at Reed, and the experience was a highlight that shaped her life in so many ways.”

Robert McRae ’58

September 15, 2015, Portland, congestive heart failure

Bob was born in Portland, graduated from Franklin High School, and attended Reed as a day-dodger. He was an active sportsman, playing football, baseball, and basketball on intramural teams.

After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he began working at OECO, which designs and manufactures solutions for industries including commercial transportation, military, and aviation.

He then began a 22-year career at Tektronix in the oscilloscopes division.

Bob was a volunteer firefighter for fire departments in Milwaukie and Clackamas, Oregon, and enjoyed this immensely. He was also an active member of the Columbia Gorge Model Railroad Club, receiving numerous awards for his extensive volunteer work and contributions to the club.

He owned property on the Lewis River in Woodland, Washington, and loved to work on the grounds, building a shop and gazebo enjoyed by many during family gatherings. In 1972, Bob married Donna Adams Specht, who survives him, as do his stepson Jeffery Specht and wife, MaryAnn, of Scappoose, stepson Gregory Specht, wife Lori, and granddaughter Hailey of Gladstone.

Donald A. Schaefer ’58

October 1, 2015, Bettendorf, Iowa, passed away peacefully in his sleep

Born in 1928, Don grew up on a small farm in Klemme, Iowa, attending a one-room country school for the first eight grades. After high school, he was selected for the last Army Specialized Training Reser ve Program, an accelerated

program in pre-engineering and advanced military training at South Dakota State College, where he also excelled in boxing. After serving in the Army, he went to college at Upper Iowa University on the G.I. Bill, and earned his bachelor’s degree in math, physics, and philosophy in 1949. At Upper Iowa he met and married the college homecoming queen, Mary Freeman of McGregor, Iowa.

He always maintained it was the most important thing that ever happened to him. They married in 1948 and were together for nearly 59 years, until her death in 2007.

Don taught math and science at Iowa’s West Union High School from 1949–1956. The family then moved to Bettendorf, where he taught physics, chemistry, and advanced science until 1990. He was one of 50 U.S. math and science teachers selected for the first NSF-sponsored Academic Year Institute at the University of Wisconsin, and earned a master’s in science education in 1957. That same year he was selected as one of the first 50 physics teachers to develop the new Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) Physics course in U.S. high schools. Don did graduate work at various institutions from 1952 through 1985, including a graduate summer course at Reed in 1958.

Don was an instructor in NSF-sponsored programs for physics teachers and did research work in X-ray diffraction at Denver Research Institute. He and Prof. Byron Youtz [physics 1956-68] introduced the then-new PSSC physics course into Africa, teaching 85 science teachers in Rhodesia and Nyasaland. He helped introduce the new physics program into India as well, teaching physics teachers at North Bengal University and at Agra College.

In 1985, President Reagan presented Don with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Training. The Bettendorf Junior C hamber of Commerce gave him the Outstanding Educator Award, and he was accorded both the Excellence in Science Teaching and Excellence in Physics Teaching awards from the Iowa Academy of Science, where he was selected as a Fellow. He also received the Outstanding Educator Award from the University of Iowa.

He wrote a number of articles published in national publications and gave presentations at both regional and national science and physics teacher conventions. In 1959, the American Association of Physics Teachers selected Bettendorf High School as one of the top 10 high school physics department in the U.S. Don served as the first director of the planetarium at BHS from 1974 to 1990. The planetarium was named in his honor upon his retirement.

After retiring, Don served as a resident advocate volunteer for ManorCare Health Services and the Iowa Department on Aging to improve patient care in hospitals and to encourage communication between doctors and other medical people, which he believed could have saved his wife’s life.

As long as health permitted he and his son

Steve went fishing, and owned a bass boat for many years. Don is survived by his sons Craig (Judith) of Terre Haute, Indiana, Thomas of Carrolton, Texas, and Jeffrey (Monique) of Richardson, Texas. His sons Randall, Steve, and Mark preceded him in death. He and Mary had 13 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Frederick James Anderson ’59 September 21, 2015, Victorville, California

Born in in 1937 in L u c e r n e Va l l e y, California, Frederick majored in chemistry at Reed. He wrote his thesis, Synthetic Experiments in the Alicyclic Diazo Series, with Prof. John Hancock [chemistry 1955-89] and completed graduate work at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He married Catherine Deedy in 1962, and worked as a research chemist at the Carus Chemical Company in La Salle, Illinois. For many years he served as a respected science fair judge and occasional substitute teacher in math and chemistry.

Frederick’s interests included Scouting (he was a Scoutmaster and both of his sons are Eagle Scouts), camping, hiking, painting, photography, gardening, skiing, and woodworking.

In addition to his wife, Catherine, Frederick is survived by his children, Bruce W. Anderson of Millbury, Massachusetts, Jean O. Anderson of Chicago, Illinois, and John H. Anderson of Pepperell, Massachusetts; and grandchildren Elizabeth, Meredith, Emma, Michael, Kathryn, and Deidre.

management and business administration, including as associate professor at York University in Toronto, where he established a graduate program in urban economic studies; as assistant professor at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina; and as lecturer at Claremont Men’s College.

He also managed a number of businesses, including Mills Soft Water in Fullerton, California, where he served as president, and as vice president of Servisoft Water Service.

Bitten by the acting bug at an early age, he appeared in both plays and one of the Gilbert and Sullivan productions at Reed. He continued to tread the boards throughout his adult life, working as a freelance actor in theatre, film, and television. He was active with the Actors Repertory Theatre in Claremont, was in several musical productions in Riverside, California, and a Cabaret Repertory production of The Dresser.

Keith also appeared in the films Secret Admirer and Trial and Error, and played Judge Walter Green on television’s L.A. Law for six seasons.

Asked how Reed had prepared him for life in general, Keith answered, “I discovered that the ‘real world’ was really more like high school.”

He noted, “The intellectual elitist attitudes [Reed] inculcated proved a handicap in leading a normal life with regular people. Fortunately I married a Reed girl who understands me.”

Keith is survived by his wife Ann, his sons Michael (Drucilla) and James, and grandchildren.

Keith Mills ’60

September 13, 2015, Claremont, California, at the age of 79

“It was a wonderful place,” Keith Mills once said of Reed. “It spoiled me.” Circumstances forced him to finish his bachelor’s degree elsewhere, but the education and thinking of his Reed years stayed with him throughout life. It was here that he met his future wife and made lifelong friends.

Keith graduated from Anaheim Union High School and started at Reed on scholarship, beginning in 1953. Three years of Army service intervened, and he returned in 1957 as a sophomore. But finances dictated that he complete his bachelor’s degree at UC-Riverside.

He moved to California with his Reed-educated bride, Ann Arnquist Mills ’61. One of their two sons, Michael Mills ’82, is also a Reed alumnus.

Majoring in economics with a minor in sociology, Keith was active in the Reed theatre, chorus, student council, and the Quest. After receiving his BA in economics from UC-Riverside, he completed graduate work at Claremont Graduate School and earned a PhD in economics in 1967.

For years Keith taught in schools of

Beth Berry Barber ’63 and Paul Hoyer ’64 install new control console in KRRC

Elizabeth Berry Barber ’63 June 9, 2015, Tukwila, Washington, stroke

[The organ] is the pre-eminent instrument of music, since the greatest number of voice parts, as many as six or seven, may be controlled by one man. It is customarily used in churches for the praise of God, to facilitate choral singing, and to refresh human spirits and vexations. It is produced with great and heavy outlay and expense, and certainly through ignorance it is easily wasted, ruined, and all the cost may be vainly expended.

—Arnolt Schlick, Spiegel der Organisten und Orgelmacher; translation by Elizabeth Berry Barber.

Beth Berry grew up in Forest Grove, Oregon,

where her British parents made her a lifelong Anglophile. She arrived at Reed in 1958, and lived in the New Women’s Dorm (now MacNaughton) with Mary Klevjord Rothbart ’62. Mary remembers Beth’s astounding knowledge of and enthusiasm for the organ and for radio broadcasting. Beth introduced her to the Reed organ, with its pipes, reeds, exotic names, and the organist’s feet dancing on the pedals. It was clear that Beth didn’t just play the organ; she was a thoroughgoing scholar of the instrument.

Beth began taking organ lessons in high school and continued them at Reed with Valerian Fox. She was one of the heroic few, along with Prof. John Hancock [chemistry 1955-89] who attempted to keep the old Estey pipe organ in the chapel functional. (The battle to save the organ was eventually lost in the 1980s and the instrument was removed and sold.) Beth was also much involved with KRRC, where she valiantly supported the cause of classical music. Her thesis, The Pipe Organ in England: Tonal History from 1660 to 1914, was advised by Prof. Herb Gladstone [music 1946-80].

After Reed, Beth earned a master’s degree in music at the University of Oregon. For her thesis, she submitted a translation and commentary on the important 1511 treatise by Arnolt Schlick, Spiegel der Orgelmacher und Organisten, the first work published in German about organ design, building, and playing. Her translation, which was reprinted in 1980, is still the standard edition in English and is widely cited. She later completed a master’s degree in library science at the University of Washington, where she worked in the music library; she also worked for Olympic Organ Builders in Seattle, including assisting with the installation of the pipe organ in St. Mark’s Cathedral. She married Ted Barber, and together they pursued her interests in organ building and his in antique Cadillacs; they had one daughter, Christie.

[This obituary was provided by Prof. Virginia Oglesby Hancock ’62 with the valuable assistance of Mary Klevjord Rothbart ’62 and Gay Walker ’69.]

Ann Leo ’65

November 18, 2015, Champoeg, Oregon, natural causes

Journalist, teacher, and lifelong Oregonian, Ann was born in 1922 and raised on Clinton Street in Portland. She attended Hosford grade school and graduated from Franklin High School in 1940.

Ann began her 48-year marriage to Gene Leo Sr. on Christmas Eve of 1942. After graduating from the University of Oregon School of Journalism in 1944, Ann began working as a reporter for the Oregon Journal. She wrote children’s stories and served in public relations capacities for the Portland Zoo, Goodrich & Snyder, and the Portland Reporter.

In 1965, she earned a master of arts in teaching from Reed, after which she taught English and literature at Portland’s Washington and march 2016 Reed magazine 45

In Memoriam Roosevelt high schools. Ann always maintained, “I don’t teach English, I teach kids.” But she considered her greatest accomplishment was raising “three fine boys.” Gene “Geno” Jr. was executive director of the Portland Zoo and Rose Festival and tourism director for the Portland Oregon Visitors Association, Greg has an active career in community and public affairs, and Roger is a successful Portland attorney.

She was predeceased by her husband and son Gene Jr. Her sons Roger (daughter-in-law Joy) and Greg and her grandson, William, survive her.

Elizabeth M. Fink ’67 September 22, 2015, in Brooklyn, New York, from cardiac arrest

A prominent civil liberties attorney who won a stunning legal victory for the Attica inmates, Liz dedicated her career to seeking justice for the poor and disenfranchised. “Paying clients pay for the nonpaying clients,” she said.

She achieved celebrity in a case that came to her shortly after her degree from Brooklyn Law School, when inmates of New York’s Attica Prison who had been tortured and beaten following the infamous 1971 prison uprising filed a class action suit against the state. As their principal lawyer, Liz doggedly pursued the case for 27 years, until it was settled for $12 million, shared by the 400 surviving inmates.

Self-described as a “red-diaper baby,” Liz was brought up in a Brooklyn home where left-wing causes flourished. At Reed, she was student body president and chaired the student judicial board, once famously barring a student from the library for four years after he hid books on reserve to gain an advantage over classmates.

An English literature major, her thesis, Animals, Nature, Outsider, and Infirmity: Symbols as Evokers of D.H. Lawrence’s Vision of Life, was advised by Prof. Thomas Gillcrist [English 1962-2001]. In 2007, Liz credited her time at Reed for preparing her for success as a civil liberties attorney.

She was partial to cases where clients’ political choices had led to battles with the government, and fought to overturn the government’s repression of the Black Panther Party and for the human rights of women held in an experimental sensorydeprivation prison in Kentucky. Under pressure, the unit was closed down.

46 Reed magazine march 2016

Once accused of being politically correct, she answered, “I have no idea of what’s politically correct, but I know what’s wrong.” The prosecutor in the trial of Osama Awadallah, a San Diego State University student from Jordan accused of complicity in the 9/11 attacks, accused Elizabeth of jeopardizing the republic. “I think I’d like that on my tombstone,” she said.

Several of Liz’s Reed classmates and friends remembered her thus: Liz Fink was extreme. She was possibly the most extreme New Yorker of our class. New York City had, Liz gleefully assured us, not only the most people, the tallest skyscrapers, the best bagels, but also the worst traffic, the most crime, and the worst air pollution. “Before there was Beijing, there was Manhattan, with air the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day.”

Liz was undeniably large of body, Bella Abzugian without the hats, and also, and more importantly, she was large of élan, of generosity, of courage, of heart.

Liz returned our junior year with a battered gray Chevy station wagon. In that car she hauled us to late-night dinners at Hung Far Low or Flanagan’s. A friend of Liz’s came to visit from New York who’d never seen the Pacific. Liz took her and us on a spur-of-the moment trip to Seaside. By the end of our junior year, the car was missing its rear-seat floorboards. In all those trips I don’t remember Liz ever asking for gas money. I hope we were gracious enough to offer.

Liz loved dogs. She never failed to greet any dog whose path she crossed. Our junior year Liz adopted Sheldon, a black standard poodle.

After Reed and after Sheldon came Solomon, another poodle. In her last years, Liz switched from poodles to a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Sadie. However, Sheldon dominates our memories of Liz at Reed. He helped get the Chevy in shape, too, chewing out all the car’s door padding when first left alone in the car.

Liz was protective of her friends and loyal.

Our junior year, Liz got heavily into student government at Reed, and we knew she had our backs. She was elected student body president and was chair of the judicial board. Liz said her stint on the J-Board taught her the most important lesson of any judicial system: if they liked you, you’re OK; if they didn’t, you’re in trouble. Liz was housemates with the Lauras— Laura Stevens ’67 and Laura Tillem ’67; they remained close friends through the years.

Liz loved to read, had great recommendations for procrastinatory reading, i.e., mysteries and popular novels. She loved music, almost all of it, from classical to Dionne Warwick. In the which-sense-could-you-not-stand-losing discussion, Liz would have preferred blindness to deafness. In fact, worried about her poor eyesight, Liz had practiced Braille in high school.

Liz, like many in our class, had a love-hate relationship with Reed. The people and ideas she met at Reed she could love, the institution itself

she did not. She compared it to a Procrustean bed, one in which women particularly found themselves deformed or diminished.

Neither deformed nor diminished, Liz did well on the junior qual, putting a good end on an incredibly busy year, and senior year wrote a thesis on D.H. Lawrence.

After Reed, Liz, an unabashed leftist, practiced law in the service of her ideals. In her New York Times obituary one can find details of her tenacity in seeking justice for the Attica brothers, her most famous case. Liz also represented Dhoruba bin Wahad, a New York Black Panther leader who had been framed for the murder of a cop and did 19 years before Liz got him out. Liz also arranged a return to Italy for Silvia Baraldini. The Baraldini case got the attention of some filmmakers. They were aiming for a docudrama, and suggested Kathy Bates to play Liz. “No,” Liz shot back, “Susan Sarandon!”

Liz came to our 30th reunion and brought her friend and partner Frank Smith, also known as Big Black, one of the Attica brothers. Liz was radiant. She wore Joy perfume, and was irrepressibly herself. We will miss her.

Contributing to these notes were Laura Tillem ’67, Laura Stevens ’67, Amelia Hard ’67, Prof. Fred Hard [English 1962-70], Ron Sharrin ’67, and Anita Bigelow ’67.

James Bridges Nickson ’69 July 1, 2015, Grand Forks, North Dakota

Born in Chicago on March 22, 1945, Jay was the son of Dr. James Nickson and Dr. Margaret Hofrichter Nickson. He grew up in London and New York and attended college at Dartmouth, Reed, and the University of Alabama. Jay was a talented software designer and engineer, and began working for IBM in 1965. Subsequently he worked at Digital Equipment Corporation and other technology firms in the northeast United States. Several of the software products he designed won product of the year awards from industry magazines, and in 2014 he was awarded a patent for systems and methods for semantic URL handling that he invented. James was also a programmer at the School of Aerospace Sciences in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

He was a voracious reader dedicated to the study of philosophy, a motorcycle enthusiast, an avid swimmer, and a scuba diver. His brothers, Robert and Michael,;sister-in-law, Julie; and niece, Catherine, of Arlington, Virginia, survive him.

Penelope Frances Cofrin ’75 October 7, 2015, Bellingham, Washington

In 1971, Penelope arrived at Reed from Green Bay, Wisconsin, where her grandfather had founded the Fort Howard Paper Company. The following summer she traveled to Montana with a Reedie she was dating. Eventually the wheels came off the relationship with her Reed boyfriend, but Penny developed an abiding affection for the state of Montana.

“I came to Montana for a weekend and never left,” she said.

She was born on Flag Day, June 14, 1953, the youngest of John and Barbara Cofrin’s six children. Growing up, Penny played tennis and PingPong, and swam at the Green Bay Y. While attending high school at Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, she became a life master at bridge at the age of 17, one of her proudest accomplishments.

In fact, she met her first husband, Larry Little, while playing bridge in Havre, Montana. That marriage produced two daughters, Robyn Paige and Barbara Maureen; a third daughter, Sarah K. Savannah, was born after Penny married her second husband, Rick. Penny was a person who made lifelong friends, including both of her husbands. Her three daughters were her pride and joy, and her green eyes sparked when she watched them play sports.

Penny was a lifelong Cheesehead, that is to say a devoted fan of the Green Bay Packers. In 1989 she shared the Chancellor’s Award at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay for the commitment she and her siblings made to the development of the Cofrin Memorial Arboretum, which surrounds the campus. Over the years she donated to many organizations, including the Darby Elementary School in Montana, the University of Montana, and the YMCAs in Missoula and Green Bay. By nature boisterous and assured, she could work an ensemble made up of a bright muumuu, Converse sneakers, and sunglasses. She also had a keen eye for interior design and art.

Later in life she graduated with honors as a nontraditional student at Smith College, where she was an Ada Comstock Scholar—awarded to women whose education was interrupted earlier in their lives.

Her parents and her brothers, Douglas and Peter, preceded Penny in death. She is survived by her brothers, John and Andrew; sister Tish; daughters Robyn Patric (Ian), Barbara Fossen (Kurt), and Sarah; and grandchildren Patience Cofrin, Jayden Jackson, LaNayah Cofrin, Aubrey Fossen, and Logan Fossen.

Betty Kaplan Lakey MALS ’79

November 19, 2015, Milwaukie, Oregon, peacefully at home

Born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 2, 1933, Betty passed away two weeks after her 82nd birthday, with her husband of 63 years and her son, Bill, at her side.

Betty received her bachelor’s degree in home economics and teaching from the University of Wyoming in 1966 while raising five children. She taught middle school in Montana and began a new career in the food industry when they moved to Gladstone, Oregon, in 1974 after her husband,

Richard, retired from the Air Force. She received her master’s degree in liberal studies at Reed in 1979, and then earned her credentials as a registered dietician, working as a consultant in the food industry until her retirement in 1995. She and Dick then traveled through North America and Mexico in their RV, until they moved to Rose Villa in Milwaukie in 2000. They continued to travel the world for the next 10 years.

Her husband and children, Bill, Becky, and Casey (daughter-in-law Jenny), and seven grandchildren survive Betty.

Sean Marie Maloney ’86

October 3, 2015, Portland, after a long hospitalization

Sean was born in Torrejón de Ardoz, Spain, to Dr. Thomas R. Maloney III and Lila Lee Maloney.

She graduated from Clark High School in San Antonio, Texas, and attended Reed and Por tland State University. Witty and intelligent, Sean loved living in Portland and worked for many years at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center. Having a well-developed intellectual curiosity, she was a storehouse of information. Friends and family said, “Before there was Google, there was Sean.”

As an organ donor, Sean’s thoughtfulness and generosity continued after her death. Her mother and brother Thomas R. Maloney IV survive her.

Julia Bean ’05

August 20, 2015, Brooklyn, New York, melanoma

Free-spirited and creative, Julia was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1982 to Maria and L. Chapman Bean. She grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, and attended Xavier College Prep. At Reed, she majored in art. One of her favorite places was the photo studio in the art building, where she developed her black and white film, her creative style, and ultimately her thesis, Invisible Realities: An Approach to Psychological Portraiture with Prof. Ethan Jackson [art 2001-05].

One of her roommates at Reed, Kyndra Homuth Kennedy ’04, remembers, “Julia was

there for me through some of the hardest, best, and most ridiculous moments of my life. She had a magnetism about her that made people want to be around her and do whatever she was doing. Her love of life and adventuresome spirit will live on in all of our hearts.”

Julia drove to campus in the 1967 VW Beetle she often used for road trips through the Pacific Northwest. She was an ace pool player, loved the pool hall and the yearly pool formals, and had some favorite picks on the legendary jukebox.

She had a special regard for the canyon, and regularly joined the canyon crew helping to clear clematis vines, plant new trees, and build trails.

One of her best friends, Rebecca Weisman ’04, remembers that after her freshman year Julia moved out of the Old Dorm Block and into the “Krakhouse” with her best friends. “They threw some of the wildest parties we ever experienced as Reedies.”

Julia was active at KRRC, at Renn Fayre, and welding bikes with C.H.U.N.K. 666.

After Reed, she earned a master’s degree from Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan, Italy. With her husband, Mike Flynn, she founded a creative design and fabrication studio in Brooklyn called Outland Projects. In addition to her husband and parents, she is survived by her grandmother, Lee Bean, and her brother, Alex Bean ’04, who took the accompanying photo of her on top of her roof in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Justin Conner Radtke ’13

October 13, 2015, Durham, North Carolina, accident

Justin was struck by a street sweeper as he ran from the median of a North Carolina highway into the travel lanes.

Justin graduated from Durham Academy and attended Duke before transferring to Reed where he earned a degree in Russian Literature. He wrote his thesis, Vasily Zhukovsky’s Ballads: Their Themes and Christian-Spiritual Meanings, with his adviser, Prof. Evgenii Bershtein [Russian 1999–].

Justin had an enduring love of learning. After Reed, he continued to study languages and literature. He loved nature and the outdoors, where he felt closest to God. He is survived by his parents, Rodney and Sara Radtke; his sister, Lindsay Radtke; his brother; Tyler Radtke and wife, Spenser, of Durham; his maternal grandparents, Joe and Susie Hushion of Parkersburg, West Virginia, and his paternal grandmother, Catherine Radtke of Mendota, Illinois.

Pending

Nellie Brockway ’40, Richard Labby ’43, Ralph Leber ’44, Elizabeth Mahy ’45, Augustus Tanaka ’45, Patricia Drauch ’47, Jerome Stern ’48, Bernard Wolff ’48, Barbara Bauman Liveright ’51, Roger Miller ’52, Helen Perkins ’55, Deirdre Dexter Malarky ’57, Merritt Linn ’58, Richard Hopkins ’59, Norman Breslow ’62, Alene Biederman Cisney ’62, Judith Black Craise ’63, Billy Woods Hillman ’63, David Haley ’65, Philip Blumstein ’66, Theron Friedman ’66, John Grandine ’66, Joel Schiff ’68, Kurt Myers ’86, John William Redford ’89.

march 2016 Reed magazine 47

talkback s h a r e

insights with your classmates

Email Got You Down? Here’s How to Fight Back

BY KOSTADIN KUSHLEV ’08 casey templeton

Worldwide, more than 183 billion emails are sent and received… every single day. Indeed, most of us have little control over the barrage of emails hurled at us from every direction— whether from colleagues in the adjacent cubicle or from clients across the world.

But even if we can’t control how many emails we get, we can manage our inboxes better in order to feel less stressed out by the the tidal wave of electronic correspondence.

Here are some tricks to fight back.

Convert email back to snail mail. We use email for a reason—it’s useful. Constantly checking email, however, can make us feel scattered and stressed.

Fortunately, email isn’t a game of volleyball. Most of us don’t truly need to pass the ball along right away by responding to emails as soon as we receive them. So just like in the days of yore, when we checked our snail mail once a day, try managing your email by checking it once a day.

Too extreme? Then consider that even if you scale back to checking 3 to 5 times a day, rather than 3 to 5 times an hour, you may feel less stressed. Indeed, in my latest research, participants felt significantly less stressed when they were asked to check their email 3 times a day than when they were asked to check constantly. How much less stressed? People who scaled back on email reported about the same reduction in stress as people who undergo work training in relaxation techniques, such as breathing deeply and visualizing peaceful images.

Be the decider! Paraphrasing George Bush may not be the smartest way to give advice to Reedies, but you get the idea. I’ve tried to follow my own advice to check email 3 times a day. And, (no surprise), it’s hard. We feel drawn to peek inside our inboxes—too often.

According to a recent survey, about onethird of U.S. workers reply within 15 minutes of receiving a work email, and three-fourths reply within an hour. But there is hope!

One way to become the decider is to make it more difficult to get inadvertently sucked

48 Reed magazine march 2016

through the email wormhole (when all you meant to do is check the time). Consider deleting the email app from your phone.

Impractical? What if you hide it on the sixth screen of your phone back with all those apps you never use? And try switching off those bings that announce the ominous arrival of yet another message, thus annoying yourself and those around you less. My research suggests that such tricks can help you get unhooked and reduce stress.

Go back to Reed. If all else fails, quit your job and go back to Reed. You’ll reduce your exposure to email by working in the library while the rest of the world sleeps. And the reading load for Hum 110 gives you a builtin excuse for laggardly response.

Kosta Kushlev is a psychology researcher at the University of Virginia who examines the effect of technology, parenting, money, and other factors on personal well-being. See more on page 11. His email address is kushlevk@gmail.com.

J U N E 8 –1 2

Celebrating You Visit reunions.reed.edu to register, check out who’s coming, and see the latest schedule.

Reed College Reunions reed.edu/alumni alumni@reed.edu 503/777-7589

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The inimitable Cricket Parmalee ’67 recounts an epic Reed tale in the Winch-Capehart room over Paideia.