Reed College Magazine March 2021

‰ march 2021

Seeds of Hope

Our planet’s in trouble. Reedies are helping.

REMARKABLE REEDIES

ROBIN HARDWICK is a sociology major with a passion for restorative justice.

Because Reed provides need-based financial aid—not merit scholarships—all admitted students, regardless of their financial circumstances, are able to embark on the intellectual journey of their dreams. Reed awards more than $30 million in financial aid annually, bringing the most remarkable students to the classroom and, in turn, enhancing the college’s academic program.

Reedies are remarkable, and many can attend because of you.

If 1,000 alumni, parents, and friends give to Reed between March 17 and 31, a generous donor will give $100,000 to the college.

Visit reed.edu/remarkable or scan the code below to make a gift to financial aid.

ROBIN HARDWICK

Let’s Fix This

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Plant the Seeds of Change

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Build a Radically Better Battery

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Community gardens are a tool for social change.

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Get the Gunk out of the Couch

To ditch fossil fuels, we need a way to store vast quantities of energy.

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Arlene Blum ’66 led the fight against mutagenic flame retardants.

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Make Paper from Straw Don’t chop down trees to make paper. Use an agricultural waste product.

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Recycle Your Nitrogen

Composting toilets provide sanitation and fertilizer in one fell swoop.

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Crack a Joke

Try stand-up comedy to explain economic principles.

Grow an Appetite for Plastic

Reed biologists develop bacteria that can break down plastic pollution.

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America is drowning in old paint.

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Race, Heat, and Redlining

The Forest Needs People

Want to save the forests? Start with the people who live there.

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Puncture Indifference

Facts alone won’t change people’s minds. You also need a strategy of persuasion.

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Spread the Word

Check out some of the books Reedies have written about the climate crisis.

Make Better Rice

Pamela Ronald ’82 developed a strain of rice that can survive flooding.

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Paint the Town Green

Live Wild

Mardy Murie ’23 fought to create the Arctic National Wildlife Range

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Urban heat islands are often a legacy of racism. Cate Mingoya ’08 has ideas on how to fix that.

Happy Birthday, Environmental Studies!

Reed’s unique ES program celebrates its 10-year anniversary.

Departments

Cover photo by Matthew Johnson

PAPER TRAIL. This issue of Reed Magazine was printed on paper made from straw. Ben Rankin ’87 and his business partners buy straw from wheat farmers in eastern Washington and turn it into pulp, cardboard, and the beautiful paper you’re holding in your hands. See story on Page 15.

4 Eliot Circular News from Campus

10 Advocates of the Griffin

All Things Alumni

32 Reediana

Books, Films, and Music by Reedies

34 Class Notes

News from our classmates.

40 In Memoriam

Honoring classmates, professors, and friends who have died.

52 Object of Study

What Reed students are looking at in class

Reed Magazine march 2021

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This Must Be The Place

march 2021

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

Once in a Lifetime This decade is shaping up to be an era of rapid change. It started with a pandemic of unprecedented reach, and our sense of the ordinary has been disrupted on a regular basis. Here at Reed, as I write, and all over the Portland area, trees and debris from a snow and ice storm that left a path of destruction are being cleared. The roof over the Sports Center gyms collapsed, as did tents that we installed for socially distanced classrooms and dining. Power was out around the city for days.

As unpleasant as it was to be without electricity, seeing the lights come on brought instant relief. I have been delighting in flipping on switches that had, for almost a week, yielded nothing but meaningless clicks. What once was so normal as to go mostly unnoticed, for an interval at least, seemed magical.

On January 20 of this year, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, Amanda Gorman, dazzled the world with her poem in honor of President Joseph Biden’s inauguration. In “The Hill We Climb,” Gorman characterizes the United States as a nation, not “broken,” but “simply unfinished.” “We are striving,” she declares, “to forge our nation with purpose.”

Gorman’s inaugural poem, completed in the aftermath of the horrors of the January 6 Capitol insurrection, radiated hope and crystalized expectations for this country-inprocess to progress: “So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.”

Hers is a message of accountability. “While we have our eyes on the future,” she reminds us, “history has its eyes on us.” The poem opens and closes with references to the dawn, making the point that each day begins anew in brightness.

It was inspiring to see this amazing young Black woman illuminated in the spotlight of history at the presidential inauguration, celebrating, in addition to Biden’s presidency, the election of the first U.S. Black, South Asian American, and woman vice president.

After the many hardships and deprivations of the previous months, Gorman helped us

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Volume 100, No.1 REED MAGAZINE

once again imagine the possible. As I took in her flawless delivery and timing, the impact and energy of her words, I felt renewed. This is what artists do. They turn on the lights.

My metaphor for the joy of teaching has always been about turning on the lights.

When a classroom discussion comes to life and students lean forward in the moment, creating knowledge in our midst that previously did not exist. When a student feels seen and heard. The lights come on. It’s a kind of magic.

At times over the past year, it has seemed like we could not catch a break. We started classes in the fall, and the fires shut us down for a week; we began again in the spring, and

We have had to dig deep to find strength, again and again. For me, that strength always comes from my faith in Reed. got knocked down by falling branches and power outages. All the while, we have fought to keep one another safe against the virus.

We have had to dig deep to find strength, again and again. For me, that strength always comes from my faith in Reed, in the value of learning, in creativity, and in the constant renewal of striving and growth. Although the coronavirus pandemic is not over, we know that help is on the way in the form of vaccines and treatments. These previously unimaginable crises will pass. Under the watchful eyes of history, we will rebuild, and we will forge new paths. It is my hope that we will, in the words of Amanda Gorman, “lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.” The future looks bright.

Audrey Bilger President of Reed

editor

Chris Lydgate ’90 503/777-7596 chris.lydgate@reed.edu writer/In Memoriam editor

Randall S. Barton 503/517-5544 bartonr@reed.edu writer/reediana editor

Katie Pelletier ’03 503/777-7727 pelletic@reed.edu class notes editor

Joanne Hossack ’82 joanne@reed.edu art director

Tom Humphrey tom.humphrey@reed.edu grammatical kapeLlmeister

Virginia O. Hancock ’62 REED COLLEGE RELATIONS vice president, college relations

Hugh Porter director, communications & public affairs

Mandy Heaton Reed College is an institution of higher education in the liberal arts and sciences devoted to the intrinsic value of intellectual pursuit and governed by the highest standards of scholarly practice, critical thought, and creativity.

Reed Magazine provides news of interest to the Reed community. Views expressed in the magazine belong to their authors and do not necessarily represent officers, trustees, faculty, alumni, students, administrators, or anyone else at Reed, all of whom are eminently capable of articulating their own beliefs.

Reed Magazine (ISSN 0895-8564) is published quarterly by the Office of Public Affairs at Reed College.

Periodicals postage paid at Portland, Oregon.

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

Mailbox Write to us! We love getting mail from readers. Letters should be about Reed (and its alumni) or Reed Magazine (and its contents) and run no more than 300 words; subsequent replies may run only 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.

An Unknown Episode at Reed, and a Proposal

In spring 1959, in my freshman year, I recruited another freshman (I think his name was Dean) to join me in proposing that Reed also teach Chinese Civilization in the Humanities program: How can we know our own civilization without also knowing another? China’s is a great culture (a source of both beauty and power), and very different from ours. We met with Prof. Reginald Francis Arragon—the very one who brought the concept of the Humanities program to Reed from Harvard—and a younger faculty member.

Professor Arragon was not unfriendly, but not receptive. He was, in fact, defensive. To the best of my recollection, he spoke of unworkability, but didn’t address the pedagogical question. That was the end of it.

But I haven’t changed my mind. It is not a proposal for a Department of Chinese Studies (a good idea, now in being), but rather that Chinese culture should be a part of the Humanities requirement—at minimum, an additional semester.

China—first, because it is so very different: The good of the individual has a smaller place in Chinese culture relative to the collectivity; the Chinese language is built on different principles than Indo-European languages.

Second, Chinese culture because of its formative role throughout East Asia.

Now is the time for this initiative. Our constant provocations in the Baltic and South China Sea are scarcely reported in the press. The media build a fraudulent enemy image of China.

So let us work for a love of our own founding principles, and that entails “the love of the other,” as John Quincy Adams understood.

David Cherry ’62 Washington, D.C.

From the editor: Reed has offered a multidisciplinary Chinese Humanities program since 1995.

The yearlong course focuses on the Song renaissance (960-1279) and the Qin-Han unification and includes readings such as the Confucian Analects, the Dao de Jing, the Book of Changes, and Sima Qian’s Shi Jin. In addition, Reed offers courses in Chinese language, literature, religion, history, and film. To your point, however, none of these is required (except for students majoring in Chinese). The recent reshaping of Hum 110 to include units on the Harlem Renaissance and the construction of Mexico City may offer an example of how this could be accomplished in the future.

Remembering Paul Choban ’54

I was saddened to learn of the passing of Paul Choban ’54. (See In Memoriam, page 44.) Paul graduated from Reed 10 years before I did, but we met fortuitously in the Reed diaspora in the fall of 1964, when I had just started graduate school at Yale and rented a cottage in Woodmonton-the-Sound, a tiny borough of less than 1 square mile in the town of Milford, Connecticut.

Woodmont had a laundromat and a hardware store, where, I soon discovered, you could buy the Sunday New York Times. One Sunday the store’s owner was ringing me up when he commented, “There’s another fellow who buys the Times every Sunday and he’s from Oregon, too.” At just that moment, in walked that very person, who turned out to be Paul Choban.

Like many other Reedies who have met randomly on hiking trails or in open air markets of the diaspora, we quickly discovered our common Reed identity and became friends. Paul, who had just earned his M.S. degree in mathematics from Oregon State University, was teaching math in Connecticut. We saw each other often that year, enjoying good conversation and conviviality. After Paul and his wife Mona moved back to Oregon, we maintained contact by exchanging annual end-ofyear newsletters. Then in the fall of 1999, I took my daughter Rachel Kanouse ’04 to Portland to enter Reed as a freshman. My wife Kenlyn, Rachel, and I had a delightful pre-matriculation visit with Paul and Mona at their home in Forest Grove. He was as I remembered him—genial and ebullient, with a boyish grin. After Mona’s death from cancer in 2002, Paul moved to the Kona coast on the Big Island in Hawaii. Our correspondence continued into its sixth decade, but sadly, I never managed to get to Kailua-Kona to visit Paul and his partner, Sylvia Wheeler ’54.

David Kanouse ’64

Prof. Bill Wiest [psychology!] in 1973

(Mis)Disciplined, Again

I am probably one of many to point out the misprint in academic affiliations of Prof. Bill Wiest [psychology 1961–95] and Prof. Les Squier [psychology 1953–88] noted in the letter to the editor (Reed Magazine, December 2020).

They were both psychology (not chemistry) faculty. I remember class discussions with Bill about behavior and the brain and the role of what was later to be called neuroscience. They were both great guys but I doubt either one knew one end of a pipette from the other.

None of the psychology faculty seemed to be keen on the idea, and I ended up collecting my thesis data at the medical school across the river with neuroscientist Richard F. Thompson ’52, who was later elected a member of the National Academy of Science.

I also think you have incorrect service dates for these gentlemen. I graduated in 1963 and both had been around before then. It is possible that in printing Mr. Fenner’s letter you did not want to alter it, but an appropriately placed [sic] might have been in order.

On the other hand, you might say that who but an old, retired, self-quarantining Reed alumnus would have time for this.

Joel L. Davis ’63 Washington, D.C. From the Editor: Many thanks for your sharp eyes.

What happened was an editor’s nightmare. An accidental keystroke in the typesetting software caused the department and dates of Prof. Tom Dunne [chemistry 1963-95] to be mistakenly repeated for all the professors on that page— including Les Squier and Bill Wiest. Our apologies for the misprints.

Reed Magazine march 2021

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Eliot Circular news from campus

Love Is a Radical Act Perhaps you’ve seen them around campus: ceramic hearts, bright red, dangling from the arms of trees, glinting in the elusive sunlight. Reminders of love and loved ones that are perhaps more precious than ever right now as the global pandemic continues to disconnect us from one another.

The secret agents behind this festoonery? President Audrey Bilger and her wife, Cheryl Pawelski.

“Love is a superpower,” Bilger says. “Love connects, inspires, energizes, and comforts.

I am fortunate to be able to love what I do, to be in a loving marriage, to be surrounded and supported by a caring community, and, of course, to love Reed.”

Ten years ago, a friend and former student of Bilger’s named Sam MacKenzie embarked on an interactive art installation with her late wife, Kelly Keigwin, titled Love Is a Radical Act. They created small ceramic hearts that they hung up all around Vancouver, Washington. They called the activity “(he)art bombing” and soon began

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giving the hearts to friends and encouraging them to do “bombings” of their own.

When Bilger first learned about the hearts, she ordered some as gifts for friends and liked them so much that she got more.

Here at Reed, she has given one to each of her assistants, Dawn Thompson and Sierra Ellis Turpin, and she put one in her office near her desk.

Bilger regards the hearts as cheerful eye-catchers that remind her “of friends, loved ones, and our interconnectedness.”

Six months into the pandemic, she had a burst of inspiration. She and Cheryl surreptitiously hung a dozen hearts on trees around campus. She wanted to invoke those feelings of love and connection in the campus community and lift people’s spirits.

So if you spot a heart while walking around campus, take a moment to contemplate the radical act of love—and what it means for you. — JOSH COX ’18

photo by lauren labarre

Professor Shapes Tax Policy for Biden photo by nina johnson ’99

Prof. Kimberly Clausing, the Thormund A. Miller and Walter Mintz Professor of Economics at Reed, was sworn in last month as a deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Treasury Department, where she will lead the Office of Tax Analysis for the BidenHarris administration.

In this role, Prof. Clausing will be involved in the administration’s tax policy efforts to address the many challenges facing the country, including the pandemic, economic recovery, climate change, and societal inequities.

“The tax code reflects our values as a society,” Clausing said. “Under the Biden administration, I hope that we can modernize our tax code to be more true to our values, and to respond seriously to the challenges of income inequality, climate change, and the pressing need to create a more equitable, open global economy.”

Clausing is an expert on international trade, international finance, public finance, and corporate tax avoidance. She is the author of Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital and scores of scholarly papers and articles; major media outlets such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal often lean on her expertise to explain byzantine economic theory.

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“ Howl” Unleashed

P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F U S U S P E C I A L C O L L E C T I O N S , M E R R I L L- C A Z I E R L I B R A R Y

Eliot Circular

The raw, powerful, first-known recording of one of the most influential American poems of the late 20th century—Allen Ginsberg’s ”Howl”—will soon be available to the public, 65 years after Ginsberg read it before an awestruck audience at Reed College.

“Howl” is widely regarded as a seminal literary work with a profound influence on the Beat generation and the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s. “This poem is really important,” says Prof. Pancho Savery [English and humanities]. “Every few years, a new generation rediscovers it— and gets turned on by it.”

Its first public reading took place at San Francisco’s famous Six Gallery in October 1955. Along with Ginsberg, the evening included readings by Gary Snyder ’51, Philip Whalen ’51, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. Poet Kenneth Rexroth was the emcee; Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Neal Cassady were in the audience. Unfortunately, no one thought to record this historic moment. Ginsberg was recorded reading the poem at Berkeley a few months later in March 1956, and for many years literary historians thought that recording was the first.

But they were wrong. Earlier in 1956, Ginsberg and Snyder went hitchhiking “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...” Allen Ginsberg voiced the mood of the Beat Generation with his epic poem “Howl.” through the Pacific Northwest and arrived at Reed, where they decided to hold a poetry reading in the common room of the Anna Mann demonstrably true as we Reed President Audrey Bilger. They struck dormitory. On February hear Ginsberg drawing up a chance conversation on the sidelines 14, Ginsberg read the first in great breaths at the with Gregory MacNaughton ’89, the edusection of “Howl,” still very anaphoric head of every cation outreach coordinator of Reed’s Cooley much a work in progress. line. It’s a recording to be Gallery, who mentioned the tape.

And this time, someone breathed with as much as Pawelski, a Grammy Award-winning brought a tape recorder. listened to.” record producer, has long been interested “The Reed recording of The reel-to-reel tape in Ginsberg’s writing and performances. She February 1956 is superb, sat unnoticed in Reed’s obtained permission from Ginsberg’s estate faithful in pitch and supeHauser Library for more to release the recording, titled Allen Ginsberg Omnivore Recordings will release Allen rior in sound quality to any than 50 years until Suiter at Reed College—The First Recorded Reading Ginsberg At Reed College with liner notes presently known 1950s ver- by Prof. Pancho Savery and cover art by rediscovered it in 2008 of Howl & Other Poems.

Gregory MacNaughton ’89. sion,” writes historian John while researching a biogThe new release features extensive liner Suiter. “Allen is miked closeraphy of Snyder. This dis- notes written by Prof. Savery, an authorly, so his volume is even throughout. His covery made waves in scholarly and literary ity on Beat poets, with calligraphy by enunciation is clear, his timing perfect; he circles, but the recording itself remained MacNaughton featured on the cover. The never stumbles. His accent is classic North somewhat obscure. Then in 2019, Cheryl release date is April 2.

Jersey Jewish, intelligent and passion- Pawelski, cofounder of Omnivore Recordings, ate. The poet-as-saxman metaphor comes attended a Reed rugby match with her wife,

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WREATHED IN SEA-REED

We’re proud to announce a new Reed affinity group. Sea-Reed is a network meant to connect students and alumni working in, on, or around the ocean, or who are interested in careers in ocean sciences or policy. The group was launched by marine scientist Rennie Meyers ’15, who works at the National Science Foundation, and career advisor Julia Burrows at the Center for Life Beyond Reed.

More than 70 Reedies have already signed up; one of them is Sasha Vukasovich ’20 (above), who majored in biology and anthropology and studied the relationship between people and the ocean through the lens of climate change. Sasha now works teaching students, who are often new to sailing and life at sea, about ocean science, environmental management, nautical science, and maritime history from the deck of large sailing vessels on the open ocean.

Find out more at groups.google.com/a/ groups.reed.edu/g/seareed

STATS MAJOR WINS PRESTIGIOUS AWARD

Math-stats major Simon Couch ’21 won the John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award, honoring the development of computational tools for the statistical profession by a graduate or undergraduate student.

The competition is sponsored by the Statistical Computing and Statistical Graphics Sections of the American Statistical Association.

Simon won the award for Stacks, a software package which allows a user to build ensemble models using tidy data principles. Simon started Stacks while interning at RStudio PBC and finished the package as part of his Reed senior thesis.

To learn more about the power of Stacks, check out Simon’s blog at blog--simonpcouch. netlify.app

THIS PODCAST IS ON FIRE (DON’T WORRY—YOUR THESIS IS FINE)

Burn Your Draft, a podcast hosted by Frank Tangherlini ’22, engages Reed seniors and recent graduates in discussion about the thesis experience.

New episodes are released every few weeks. Available on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Burn Your Draft episodes: #1 “Land Pricing in Portland,” with Ryan Kobler ’20, economics/math #2 “Translating Ancient Chinese Jokes,” with Jake Buck ’20, Chinese #3 “UFOs and the People Who Love Them,” with Molly Johnson ’19, sociology #4 “China’s New Silk Road,” with Soha Ahmed ’20, economics #5 “Gender Pronoun Use at Reed,” with Jade Fung ’20, psychology #6 “Splitting Photons,” with Ely Eastman ’20, physics #7 “An Illusion of Spontaneity,” with Rosie Tabachnick ’19, theater #8 “Trauma and Stand-up Comedy,” with Ella Fisher ’20, English #9 “DNA Investigations of Tiny Crustaceans,” with Nick Thayer ’20, biology #10 “The Politics of Pat Robertson,” with Lewis Chapman ’19, political science #11 “Microfinance in Mexico,” with Alyse Cronk ’20, economics #12 “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” with Gerry Peña-Martinez ’20, art/economics

blogs.reed.edu/burn-your-draft

Burn Your Draft is made possible through generous funding from Seth Paskin ’90, podcast host of The Partially Examined Life. Seth’s vision and guidance is invaluable.

Thank you, Seth! Producer Nate Martin ’16 manages the podcast for the Center for Life Beyond Reed.

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photo by lauren labarre

Eliot Circular

Dean of the Faculty Pushes Back at Wall Street Journal Column on Grades Prof. Kathy Oleson, the dean of the faculty, forcefully defended Reed’s grading policy after it came under attack in a recent diatribe in the Wall Street Journal by columnist Andy Kessler.

Kessler, who pens the Inside View column in the Journal, threw shade at Reed and other liberal arts colleges for their supposed lax approach to grading. “Many schools, like Hampshire College, Antioch University and Reed College, don’t even bother with meaningful grades—feelings might get hurt,” he wrote. “Reed students do receive a looseygoosey grade-point average, but ‘papers and exams are generally returned to students with lengthy comments but without grades affixed.’”

He cited Reed’s grading policy to support his contention that equity initiatives threaten to promote mediocrity, undermine the concept of merit, and generally signal the downfall of America.

Prof. Oleson pushed back hard.

“This conjecture indicates a fundamental misunderstanding and mischaracterization of Reed’s approach to learning,” she said.

Kessler’s first mistake lay in suggesting that Reed subscribes to the everyonegets-a-trophy philosophy. In fact, Reed is renowned for academic rigor, exacting

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standards, and for defying the grade inflation that is rampant in higher education.

Standards at Reed are so demanding that a perfect 4.0 GPA is almost unheard of— fewer than 10 students have achieved this in the last 25 years.

More important—and more meaningful—than grades, however, is the ongoing feedback that students receive from their professors, a practice that Prof. Oleson noted “fosters content proficiency, more creativity and intellectual curiosity, and stronger outcomes.”

Prof. Oleson also rejected the column’s central premise. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives actually lead to a more meritocratic society by giving more students access to top-quality education,” she said.

Prof. Oleson is a social psychologist who has devoted much of her career to finding ways to make the classroom more inclusive—and more effective. She is the author of Promoting Inclusive Classroom Dynamics in Higher Education and has authored scores of scholarly articles on topics such as social identity theory, unconscious bias, uncertainty, self-doubt, self-handicapping, stereotyping, and even productive procrastination.

PROF. OLESON’S RESPONSE Andy Kessler’s commentary, “Mediocrity Is Now Mandatory” (WSJ February 2021), equates Reed’s grading philosophy, which measures academic achievement by intellectual growth, with fragility and claims that Reed’s faculty “don’t even bother with meaningful grades.” Kessler cites the grading policy at Reed as evidence that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives threaten to dethrone merit and promote a culture of mediocrity. This conjecture indicates a fundamental misunderstanding and mischaracterization of Reed’s approach to learning.

First, a conventional letter grade for each course is recorded for every student at Reed. In fact, Reed is renowned for an absence of grade inflation that reflects the rigor of our academic program and the high standards set by the faculty.

This being said, it is true that letter grades are not shared with students unless requested. Instead, students receive robust ongoing feedback on their work, including lengthy comments on papers and exams. This practice fosters content proficiency, more creativity and intellectual curiosity, and stronger outcomes. Furthermore, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives actually lead to a more meritocratic society by giving more students access to top-quality education.

Demonstrating the power of our approach, Reed ranks fourth in the nation among colleges and universities in the percentage of graduates who go on to earn doctoral degrees. (Source: National Science Foundation and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System data, based on doctoral degrees awarded 2005–2014.) Bottom line, we know that when meeting the challenges of “real life,” the grades you received in college don’t matter if you didn’t learn the material.

Kathryn C. Oleson Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Psychology Reed College

photo by lauren labarre

Diversity & Inclusion Affinity Networks Identity, Visibility, Community

DEVASTATION ON BOTSFORD DRIVE A vicious winter storm wrought havoc on the Portland area last month, flattening buildings, trees, and power lines, and hurling so much ice and snow at the Sports Center that the roof over Gym I and Gym II collapsed.

Fortunately the building’s electronic monitoring system sounded the alarm several hours before the cave-in and no one was injured.

“We were very fortunate,” says Steve Yeadon, director of facilities operations, who witnessed the collapse first hand. “It gave us warning. There was no one in the building. And no one got hurt.”

At approximately 7:59 a.m. on February 15, the roof gave way with a deafening roar, pulverizing the basketball court, the pingpong tables, the kickboxing zone, and the Covid-19 testing area.

“Both gyms are demolished,” says Michael Lombardo, director of athletics, fitness, and outdoor programs, who had been working in the area the night before, wiping down surfaces. “It’s heartbreaking to see the devastation.”

Resourceful staff from the Community Safety Office and the Phys Plant worked through the night to make sure no one was injured. Read more at www.reed.edu/ reed-magazine.

The Alumni Board Diversity & Inclusion Committee is launching three identitybased affinity networks. While the groups are identity-specific, they are also inherently intersectional, and alumni should join any and all groups with which they self-identify.

ALUMNI OF COLOR NETWORK

The Alumni of Color (AOC) Network seeks to enhance the alumni experience for Reedies from historically marginalized racial and ethnic communities.

FIRST- GEN ALUMNI NETWORK

The First-Gen Alumni Network seeks to enhance the alumni experience for Reedies from all backgrounds whose parents or legal guardians have not received a four-year bachelor’s degree.

LGBTQIA2 S+ ALUMNI NETWORK

The LGBTQIA2S+ Alumni Network seeks to enhance the alumni experience for Reedies who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, two spirit, or who claim any number of diverse sexualities or gender identities.

Ready to register? Scan this code to sign up.

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Advocates of the Griffin

News of the Alumni Association • Connecting Reed Alumni Around the Globe

EDITED BY KATIE RAMSEY ’04

VIRTUAL PROGRAMMING — JOIN US ONLINE!

Alumni College Goes Green In honor of the Environmental Studies program’s 10-year anniversary, Alumni College 2021 will focus on the environment. Alumni College will take place June 4–6 and will offer lectures by alumni and faculty who are working to fight the effects of global climate change via policy, research, technology and education. All sessions are free for alumni to attend and will offer time for alumni discussion (almost like a Hum conference!). Visit alumni.reed.edu for details.

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Reed Remote Talks is a series of virtual seminars hosted by Alumni Programs. We feature Reed alumni and faculty who share their knowledge and experience in an array of thought-provoking topics. Recent speakers include Sam Fromartz ’80, editor in chief of the Food & Environment Reporting Network; Acacia Parks ’03, chief science officer of Happify Health; and Pamela Ronald ’82, researcher of climate-resistant rice. To register for upcoming talks or to watch recordings of past talks, visit alumni.reed.edu/reed-remote.

Reed Remote Virtual Book Club is a great way to share the critical discourse you enjoyed from Reed conferences of yore. With the help of a professional book club facilitator, we are reviewing books from Hum 411 (Senior Symposium), and it’s not too late to join the discussion on our current book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr. The book club convenes on a user-friendly and private online forum where you can discuss the books on your own timeline. Join (it’s free!) on alumni.reed.edu/reed-remote.

above photo: bruce forster; left: tom humphrey

Virtual Reunions Owing to the uncertainty of the pandemic— and with the goal of safety for all—Reunions 2021 will be held virtually from June 7–13.

Last year’s Virtual Reunions and Alumni College were successful in drawing alumni together across the world, and we are looking forward to having a longer lead time this year to create an even better experience. Reunion planning committees are being formed for classes ending in 1s and 6s, but all alumni from all class years are encouraged to attend.

Email alumni@reed.edu to get involved in class gatherings, and visit alumni.reed.edu for general Reunions information.

The Foster-Scholz Club will host a virtual talk with Prof.

Derek Applewhite.

The Foster-Scholz Club will host a virtual talk with Prof. Derek Applewhite [biology] on Tuesday, April 6 at 3 p.m. (PST) on his research in microscopy and cell imaging. Prof.

Applewhite believes microscopy and cell imaging techniques have “revolutionized the field” of biology by allowing scientists to observe phenomena at a level of detail previously unimaginable even a few short decades ago.

All alumni whose preferred class year is 40 or more years ago are invited to attend this talk, which promises to be as fascinating as it is visually stimulating!

CARE PACKAGE THANK-YOU A big thank-you to the 51 alumni who sponsored care packages for students staying on campus between Thanksgiving and Paideia.

82 students each received a tote bag filled with goodies that included a month-long subscription to Headspace (a meditation app), a gift certificate to the Reed Bookstore, healthy snacks, tea, and some Reed branded swag. Thanks for giving our students a bit of alumni community support.

MARCH CAMPAIGN 1,000 FOR $100,000 FOR FINANCIAL AID This March 17–31, make a gift to financial aid and help us unlock $100,000 from a generous donor.

Member of the classes of 2011– 2020? Your gift will go directly to the Help a Reedie Out scholarship!

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Put your best foot forward with some new socks from the Reed College Bookstore. bookstore.reed.edu Reed Magazine march 2021 11

Let’s Fix This Our planet’s in trouble.

Here are some ideas on confronting the climate crisis, brought to you by Reed and Reedies.

Ten years ago, Reed launched its unique environmental studies program. To celebrate this milestone, we decided to highlight some of the ideas and solutions that Reedies come up with in the quest to save the planet. Some are so new they exist only on the blackboard—at least for now.

Some are decades, even centuries old, but getting a fresh look in this time of crisis. The vintage doesn’t really matter—because confronting this challenge will take everything we’ve got.

Chris Lydgate, Editor

12 Reed Magazine march 2021

photo by matthew johnson

DIG DEEP.

Sari Albornoz ’06 at the Adelphi Acre Community Garden in Austin, Texas.

Plant the Seeds of Change

Agriculture isn’t just about feeding people.

It can be a tool for social change.

To Sari Albornoz ’06, food is not a commodity. It is a dynamic force that shapes the destiny of cultures and economies. She knows that growing food is a potent means for connecting with natural cycles, weather patterns, and—perhaps most important of all—other people.

“If you’re growing food at a community garden or a school garden, you are essentially participating in an organization, building it, and maintaining it with other people,” she says. “You have an opportunity to work alongside people you otherwise wouldn’t ordinarily interact with—people outside your age group or outside your culture group.

I was a garden community member myself for five or six years, and it was really cool to meet people that I never would have talked to and spend time together doing projects and sharing an eggplant with my plot neighbor.”

Last summer, she and four friends founded Fruitful Commons, a nonprofit based in Austin, Texas, that helps people start cultivation projects, such as garden collectives, chicken coops, or food forests. They are putting together a “gathering of growers,” people who are interested in coming together to learn from each other.

“We recognize that neighborhood leaders are already pursuing projects like these and may simply lack some of the knowledge or resources necessary to bring their projects to fruition and to sustain them for the long haul,” she says.

A biology major at Reed, Sari led the Grow Local program at Austin’s Sustainable Food Center for 11 years, supporting community and school gardens, advocating for community agriculture, and launching the agency’s Equity Team. Now she’s working on a master’s degree in community and regional planning at the University of Texas at Austin, where her research is focused on Austin’s voluntary flood buyout program, in which the city helps residents relocate away from flood-prone areas by buying—and demolishing—their homes.

In one area, more than 800 homes near the creek were purchased and demolished, leaving fields of open space. Sari is exploring agricultural projects that might be viable in such spaces. Because of the high likelihood of flooding, a commercial farm dependent on the sale of crops probably wouldn’t be a good match—but a food forest might be. She is also examining what the land might look like if racial equity were prioritized.

The pandemic has underscored the value of collective agriculture, Sari points out. If a national emergency interrupts the food supply, a community garden can provide a low-cost alternative. Just as important, the experience of growing food together strengthens social ties and fosters a sense of community—a vital form of public health.

—RANDALL S. BARTON

photo by ariel zambelich

Let’s Fix This

Get the Gunk out of the Couch In the 1970s, chemist Arlene Blum ’66 brought to light the mutagenic properties of the flame retardant Tris (also known as 2-3-dibromopropyl phosphate) which was then routinely sprayed on children’s pajamas.

Her work spurred federal regulators to ban Tris from consumer products.

Three decades later, she was stunned to learn that Tris was back— this time in couches and sofas, because of a California law known as TB 117, which mandated that upholstered furniture be resistant to open flames.

California’s law had essentially become the national standard, requiring manufacturers to marinate their furniture in flame retardants. Knowing the toxic potential of Tris, Arlene set out to repeal TB 117, recruiting top experts in toxicology and fire safety.

14 Reed Magazine march 2021

Five bills on flame retardants were snuffed in the California legislature as chemical lobbyists spent over $23 million to protect TB 117. Finally, in 2013, the rule was killed by the same executive who gave it life in 1975— Gov. Jerry Brown.

This political upset shouldn’t have come as a total surprise. Arlene is also a world-class mountaineer, as chronicled in her book Annapurna: A Woman’s Place. The Guardian featured her as one of the world’s 100 most inspiring women, and the National Women’s History Project identified her as one of 100 “Women Taking the Lead to Save Our Planet.” She’s a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was honored with the Eliot Award from Reed in 2015.

photo by greg lehman

Make Paper from Straw

Ben Rankin ’87 has a new use for an agricultural waste product.

In the United States alone, about 44 million acres of cropland, an area roughly the size of Oklahoma, is sown with wheat. Wheat comes in dozens of varieties, and farmers who raise it employ many different techniques to plant and grow it. After harvesting the grain, however, they all have to deal with the same headache—what are they going to do with the straw?

Straw is the tough stalk that remains in the ground after the grain has been chopped off and harvested, and for most American farmers, a field of straw is a hassle. You can set the field on fire, but that creates gargantuan plumes of smoke and carbon emissions. You can plow the straw back into the ground, but that leads to erosion and interferes with replanting. You can bale the straw for sale as cattle bedding, but unfortunately, there’s little demand for baled straw. More often it’s burned or plowed under.

Ben Rankin ’87 has helped to realize a better idea. An English major at Reed, he worked in the Seattle theatre scene for many years after graduation before shifting into the field of recycling industrial materials. For example, wood-fired boilers that recover chemicals for pulp mills produce huge quantities of boiler ash, which is rich in silica—a key ingredient of cement. Then he heard about an intriguing project in eastern Washington and wondered if he could help.

Paper is usually manufactured from wood, of course, but over the centuries it has also been made out of papyrus, hemp, bamboo, bagasse, and even rags. Ben had contacts in the paper industry who were exploring a new process to make pulp—the precursor to paper—out of straw.

With Ben’s help, they raised $190 million in financing and built a brandnew mill near Starbuck, an agricultural community in rural Washington.

Columbia Pulp opened in 2019. It’s the first in the nation, and possibly the world, designed to make large quantities of high-quality pulp from straw instead of trees.

The lucky individual in charge of sourcing the straw? That would be Ben, who set up a supply company with a business partner. “I use my Reed education every day,” he says. “A project like this has a bunch of stakeholders, sometimes with competing interests. You’ve got to be able to communicate clearly, think fast, identify solutions, find common ground, and think analytically—that’s stuff I learned to do at Reed talking about Plato or Renaissance art.”

Fortunately, the local community has been very supportive. Before the mill came along, farmers there burned hundreds of thousands of acres of straw every year, generating 45,000 tons of atmospheric pollution.

“The growers are delighted to have a new option,” he says. Now they can earn extra revenue from the straw.

Columbia Pulp and its partners now turn straw into cardboard, towels, tissue, and paper—in fact, we

used their paper to print the magazine you are holding in your hands.

The pandemic, along with typical start-up challenges, has temporarily halted production, but Columbia’s executives expect the mill to reopen soon. In the meantime, Ben has stockpiled roughly 150,000 tons of straw bales, which are currently stacked 21 feet high on several hundred acres near the mill.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of room out there. —CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

march 2021 Reed Magazine 15

photography courtesy of Hadas

Let’s Fix This

Crack a Joke

Sasha Kramer ’99 (left), executive director of SOIL, and agronomist Jean Marie Noel plant sorghum in compost in Port au Prince, Haiti.

Recycle Your Nitrogen Of the many challenges confronting the developing world, sanitation is among the most stubborn. Take the nation of Haiti. With less than 1% of human waste effectively treated, the nation has the world’s highest incidence of childhood mortality due to diarrheal disease and suffered from the most virulent epidemic of cholera in recent history. Over 70% of the population lack access to safe sanitation, but the government simply doesn’t have enough money to pay for sewers and sewage treatment plants. Biologist Sasha Kramer ’99 came up with a better idea. Her nonprofit, SOIL, provides dry toilets that transform human waste into nutrient-rich compost that can be used in forestry and agriculture instead of chemical fertilizers. SOIL’s toilets are cheap to make and easy to service, require minimal water, and provide

16 Reed Magazine march 2021

safe and dignified access to sanitation. And the compost can be used to grow the trees and crops that are vital to the island’s future.

SOIL now treats more than 20,000 gallons of human waste per month; Sasha reckons that if half of Haiti’s waste could be turned into fertilizer, it would double the country’s crop yield. Her philosophy of “liberation ecology” has drawn awards and plaudits from the United Nations, the Nature Conservancy, and the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. She even coaxed the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to sniff a handful of compost harvested from a toilet. “Everybody poops,” she told the Huffington Post. “That’s a fact. So yes, we’re figuring out how to make that really profitable for Haitians.”

What do you get when you cross a supply-sider with a comedian? The answer is Yoram Bauman ’95, the world’s first and only stand-up economist, and one of the few people who can knock ’em flat with jokes about the Porter hypothesis.

Yoram majored in math at Reed, but his most influential class was environmental economics with Prof.

Noelwah Netusil. He went on to earn a PhD in environmental economics. Somewhere along the way, he got hooked on standup comedy and—improbable as it sounds—figured out how to combine these two seemingly irreconcilable disciplines into an unforgettable shtick.

Yoram doesn’t just make you smile.

He also makes you think. He has spent two decades investigating the economics of the carbon tax—an idea that has moved from the realm of science fiction into the mainstream of economic thought. He was the founder of the first carbon tax ballot measure in the U.S., Washington’s I-732, which reached the ballot in 2016 (but was ultimately shot down by voters).

Comedy, in his hands, is a tool for social change, a way to communicate vital ideas that too often come cloaked in footnotes and functions. “To some extent I do comedy so that I can talk to people about carbon pricing,” he says.

Yoram has also authored several books, including The Cartoon Introduction to Calculus, The Cartoon Introduction to Digital Ethics, The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change, and The Cartoon Introduction to Economics.

Build a Radically Better Battery

To wean the grid from fossil fuels, we need a way to store vast quantities of energy. illustration by klaus kremmerz, based on schematic by jeff koplow

Sunshine and wind both hold limitless potential as sources of energy, but there’s one glaring drawback— they blow hot and cold. This unpredictability is a major problem for the power grid, because despite decades of effort there’s no good way of storing energy on such a colossal scale.

Many cockamamie schemes have been proposed—everything from giant flywheels to compressing air into underground caverns—but what’s needed is a battery that can be built to scales never seen before.

Enter Jeff Koplow ’90, a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Lab in Livermore, California.

As part of the SunShot Initiative, an interagency project to accelerate the use of solar power, he’s been rethinking batteries. Rather than fine-tune existing technologies, Jeff stepped back and asked what a successful power grid battery would look like.

It would need to be massively scalable, built from cheap materials, and employ energy-dense liquid chemical reagents to store energy. It would need to be safe, relatively nontoxic, last for thirty years without maintenance, and decommission easily. With these constraints in mind, he reviewed earlier attempts at bat-

This schematic diagram shows the basic operating principle of the radical-ion flow battery in charging mode, NaNO2 (liquid) → Na (liquid) + NO2 (gas). The real-world implementation of such a battery would employ about a hundred electrochemical cells connected in series, stacked like a deck of cards.

KEEP YOUR ION THE PRIZE.

economic, manufacturing, and maintenance issues. He also guides the reader through his thought process, an approach that’s surprisingly rare in scientific publications.

“The multidisciplinary perspective,”

Since Reed, he’s used his peculiar combination of humility and ambition to reinvent fiber lasers, develop a new way to shed heat, and create a new generator that eliminates strategically vulnerable rare-earth magnets

Many cockamamie schemes have been proposed, but what’s needed is a battery that can be built to scales never seen before. teries, considering everything from their chemistry to the market forces that led to their invention and failure.

After years of research, he focused on an obscure chemical reaction involving sodium nitrite, nitrogen dioxide, and a molten sodium electrode. Put it all together and you get what he calls the “Radical Ion-Flow Battery.”

Jeff published a comprehensive report on the idea in 2018, showing how the invention works, identifying

he says, “enables you to cover a lot of ground very quickly.”

He can cover that ground thanks to an omnivorous approach to the physical sciences, backed up by an intellectual humility honed at Reed.

“I accept the fact that taking on such a difficult problem means failure may be unavoidable,” he says. “That’s okay, because it’s not about me. The bottom line is that we need to figure out grid storage technology.”

from wind turbines. His latest invention is a new transformer that can protect America’s vulnerable power grid from electromagnetic pulse attacks and coronal mass ejections.

His work on the Radical IonFlow Battery has already been cited by engineers at IBM who are developing next-generation batteries for electric vehicles and electric aircraft.

—WILLIAM ABERNATHY ’88

march 2021 Reed Magazine 17

Let’s Fix This

Reed biologists develop colonies of bacteria that can break down plastic pollution.

It’s tough, it’s cheap, and it’s every- bacteria on shards of water bottles; where. Polyethylene terephthalate most died, but some stubbornly clung (PET) is found in running shirts, car- to life. Since PET was its only source of pet fibers, curtains, solar panels, ten- nutrition, she reasoned, it had to be nis balls, microwavable containers, and digesting the plastic. (See “Bio Major bottles—about 500 billion bottles are Breeds Microbes That Eat Plastic,” manufactured out of PET every year. Reed Magazine, June 2018.)

But the very qualities that make PET Prof. Mellies was thrilled. PET so useful also make it an environmen- is notoriously nonbiodegradable. tal nightmare. Its incredible durabili- Chemically, it is a polymer, consisting ty means that it persists for decades, of long tough strands of ethylene glycol clogging rivers, beaches, forand terephthalic acid monoests, and waterways. Some 8 GO FURTHER mers, all tangled up togethmillion tons of plastic enters Roberts C, Edwards er. These strands lend PET its S, Vague M, Leónthe ocean every year, accord- Zayas durability; they also make it R, Scheffer H, ing to a 2015 paper in Science, Chan G, Swartz NA, virtually impervious to bioJL. 2020. fueling the infamous Pacific Mellies logical reaction. Yet somehow Environmental contrash vortex that is current- sortium containthe bacteria had figured out a ing Pseudomonas ly the size of Texas. way to break it down. and Bacillus speTo get a handle on this gar- cies synergistically With the support of a polyethgantuan problem, research- degrades grant from the National ylene terephthalate ers at Reed are recruiting an plastic. mSphere Science Foundation, Prof.

5:e01151-20. infinitesimal ally.

Mellies and a new crop of In a groundbreaking paper students delved deeper into published in mSphere, the open-source the phenomenon. They began by takjournal of the American Society for ing a closer look at the bacteria’s proMicrobiology, Prof. Jay Mellies and duction of hydrolases, enzymes that students at Reed reported on colonies bacteria (and other organisms) use to of bacteria that are capable of breaking digest food. down PET. Remarkably, the colonies do Hydrolases are the molecular equivnot consist of a single species—rath- alent of a pair of scissors, able to chop er, they are composed of a consortium long, complex molecules down to size of five different types of bacteria that so that the bacteria can absorb them. work synergistically to consume PET PET polymers are much longer and and convert it into a source of energy. tougher than any food source bacte“The novelty of our work is that we ria are likely to encounter in the natural are using a group of bacteria to bio- environment. But bacteria are highly degrade PET plastic, whereas most adaptive. Under the right conditions, efforts to date have focused on indi- could a colony boost production of vidual, isolated enzymes for this pur- extra-sharp enzymes and snip through pose,” says Prof. Mellies. the PET? After all, those chains teem The genesis for the project came with high-energy molecules that bacfrom bio major Morgan Vague ’18, teria can use as food. who studied the relationship between Working with 192 separate colobacteria and plastic for her thesis with nies of soil bacteria, the Reed team Prof. Mellies. She dug up samples of spent painstaking months culturing muck from around Galveston Bay in them on PET. The process was agoTexas to see if bacteria there might nizingly slow. But after an eight-week have evolved the ability to feed on trial, the Reed team discovered that hydrocarbons. She tried to culture the PET in one of their samples had

18 Reed Magazine march 2021

lost 3% of its mass. The bacteria had eaten it. Under the microscope, the students saw tiny holes where the microbes had chewed through the PET. More remarkable still, the successful sample contained five different strains of bacteria living cheek by jowl, with some strains breaking down the PET into components that other strains could digest, and so on.

“These bacteria are cooperating,” says Prof. Mellies. “It’s crazy, but they’re working together to degrade the polymers.”

The concept of microbial symbiosis isn’t exactly new, but it represents a new frontier in microbiology. Ever since 1876, when the German biologist Robert Koch established that the germ Bacillus anthracis was the cause of anthrax, researchers have tended to focus on isolating single organisms so as to pinpoint their properties. But different kinds of microorganisms are often found living together in the environment, and there is reason to think that they can evolve in tandem. Indeed, Prof. Mellies points to a 2001 paper by researchers in Japan who found symbiotic colonies of bacteria flourishing in wastewater. “That was a significant paper,” he says. “I was so grateful to find that.”

Having established that their consortium can indeed degrade PET, the Reed team is now focused on the next step: finding ways to make the process more efficient. The genetic pathways underlying hydrolase production and PET degradation are still not fully understood, but with new tools such as metagenomic sequencing, Prof. Mellies is convinced that Reed students can boost production of enzymes that break down PET and hasten the bacteria’s evolution. The potential upside is huge—not only for fighting pollution, but also for harnessing microbial symbiosis for other problems. —CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

Prof. Jay Mellies [biology] and his students at Reed have grown colonies containing several different types of bacteria that symbiotically degrade the notoriously tough PET polymer.

photo by lauren labarre

Grow an Appetite for Plastic

Power from the Sky Drones have huge potential in all kinds of fields, from agriculture to disaster relief to logistics. But they face a classic dilemma—to haul bigger payloads on longer flights, they require heavier and heavier batteries, which eats into precious cargo capacity. Entrepreneur Bill Kallman ’83 of Global Energy Transmission is working on an innovative solution: recharging drones midflight. GET has developed transmitters that can power up batteries within minutes—while the drone hovers in mid-air. Kallman envisions a future where drones cruise from one transmitter to the next, extending flight times indefinitely. The technology may be new, but the underlying concept isn’t—Nikola Tesla demonstrated remote power transmission more than 100 years ago.

Polish Your Specs Solar cells are only 21% efficient, because silicon can absorb energy only from a narrow band of the spectrum. Engineer Zach Holman ’05 and researchers at Arizona State University are working on a new type of cell based on laminating silicon with perovskite, a crystal that absorbs energy from a broader spectrum. The tandem cells boost efficiency to 26%, with major implications for the economics of solar panels. Zach is also working on selfcleaning surfaces for solar panels that repel water and dirt.

march 2021 Reed Magazine 19

Let’s Fix This

Live Wild

Mardy Murie ’23 fought to create the Arctic National Wildlife Range.

Widely regarded as the matriarch of America’s conservation movement, Margaret “Mardy” Murie lived a devoted life close to the land. Born in 1902, Mardy Thomas grew up when Alaska truly was a frontier; mail was delivered by horse-drawn sled and people traveled by dogsled, not snowmobile. She was raised to conserve and respect this beautiful land of berries and caribou, salmon, and endless night and day. And always, she was driven by her curiosity and the understanding that there is more to be learned by listening than by talking.

Mardy came to Reed in 1919 and spent two years on campus (one of her classmates was James Beard ’24). Later she returned to Alaska and was the first woman to graduate from what is now the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She married biologist Olaus Murie and embarked on a working honeymoon of adventure on the Koyukuk River. Traveling by riverboat and, after freeze-up, dogsled, they followed the caribou to the mouth of the river at the foot of the Brooks Range. Two years later they spent a summer canoeing and banding geese on the Old Crow River in the Yukon with their newborn son, the first of many adventures raising their children in wildlands.

Mardy and Olaus danced their life across Alaska. They danced for the joy of it, for the exhilaration of sharing in this ever-giving land. As she said, “In the midst of these difficult times... you have to know how to dance.” The same love that inspired her to dance gave her the courage to protect the wilderness she called home. Mardy understood that in preserving wilderness, we preserve the best of ourselves.

The Muries organized a scientific expedition to the Sheenjek River in 1956 as a key step in their campaign

20 Reed Magazine march 2021

Author and naturalist Mardy Murie fought for key legislation to protect wild spaces. Here she is in Bettles, Alaska, 1924.

to protect the northeastern part of Alaska. In 1962, Mardy published Two in the Far North, an influential memoir that generated crucial publicity.

Later she testified before Congress about the importance of protecting wild spaces and planted the seed of a profound idea—to preserve an entire biome within an intact ecosystem: a vast expanse of ocean and tundra, rivers and lakes, fowl and mammals, untouched by human greed.

The structural change she fought for resulted in broad success: designation of the Arctic National Wildlife Range (now Refuge) in 1960, passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, then

the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980. Oil was found at Prudhoe Bay in 1968 and this, too, kept her vigilant. She wrote several more books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998 by President Bill Clinton.

Mardy wanted her great-grandchildren to be able to stand on the tundra and witness the same land she so loved. She fought tirelessly for them, and for all of us, to have this legacy of wild spaces. The question Mardy asked of herself rings true today: What, after all, are the most precious things in a life?

—HEATHER MACFARL ANE ’15

p h o t o b y m o l ly m ata l o n , m i t t e c h n o l o g y r e v i e w, c o u r t e s y o f u c d av i s

Make Better Rice For billions of people around the globe, this gene into Swarna, a variety of rice rice is life. But rice is also exquisite- popular with farmers in India and ly vulnerable to flooding. Submerge Bangladesh. The results were astonrice plants under water for more than ishing. The Swarna-Sub1 can withthree days and they drown. stand prolonged submersion and As the planet gets warmer, this prob- yields more grain than conventional lem is bound to get worse, varieties. With the help of In India, Indonesia, especially as Himalayan gla- and Bangladesh, the Gates Foundation, Sub1 ciers melt and flood the river floods destroy as rice has now been distributmuch as 4 mildeltas of South and Southeast lion tons of rice— ed to 4.9 million farmers and Asia. Plant geneticist Pamela enough to feed 30 is being raised on 5 million million people— acres in seven nations. Sub1 Ronald ’82 and colleagues every single year. at UC Davis began to look at is particularly beneficial to Dhalputtia, an obscure strain of wild the very poorest farmers, since they rice shunned by farmers because of typically occupy the cropland that is its poor yield and unpleasant texture. most vulnerable to flooding. Pamela is Dhalputtia has one remarkable proper- a Fulbright fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, ty, however: it can withstand prolonged and was named by Scientific American flooding. After years of painstaking as one of the world’s 100 most influwork, Pamela and her team isolated ential people in biotechnology. She is Sub1, the gene responsible for flood also the author of Tomorrow’s Table (see tolerance, and successfully introduced page 27).

Rethink Your Values What is the value of a forest? What is the worth of wilderness? Economists from Adam Smith onwards thought of forests as vertical lumberyards—their value was defined by the timber that could be harvested from them. Then in 1967 came a landmark paper by John Krutilla ’49 that fundamentally altered the way economists think about wilderness by setting out a framework for calculating its value as a natural resource to be preserved, rather than a feedstock to be consumed.

“John Krutilla can fairly be said to have created or stimulated most of the agenda of modern environmental economics,” said Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow. “He pioneered in developing the idea later called ‘existence value,’ the value generated by the mere existence of an amenity, such as an unspoiled wilderness or species of animal or plants.”

A few years later, Lester Lave ’60 did the same thing with air pollution.

Until then, smog was considered an aesthetic issue—an unfortunate but inevitable industrial byproduct. Lester rethought the cost of pollution and found a way to quantify it. By showing how pollution in American cities was linked to an increase in death rates, he created the intellectual framework for environmental regulation. Writing in the New York Times, economists David Keith, Jay Apt, and Joule Bergerson hailed this as “a major advance at the junction of epidemiology, atmospheric chemistry and public policy.”

march 2021 Reed Magazine 21

Let’s Fix This

This HOLC map of Elizabeth, NJ, from 1939, shows neighborhoods graded by perceived lending risk (as judged by quality of housing stock and race and ethnicity of the residents). Green areas were graded the safest, followed by blue, yellow , and red (hence the term redlining.)

Race, Heat, and Redlining

Urban heat islands are often a legacy of racism.

Cate Mingoya ’08 has ideas on how to fix that.

Global warming doesn’t affect everyone the same way, especially in big cities. Some neighborhoods are far more vulnerable to extreme heat than others. Lower elevation makes them vulnerable to flooding. More pavement soaks up sunlight during the day and radiates heat like a furnace at night. Fewer trees mean less shade. During a heat wave these areas, known as urban heat islands, heat up faster and stay hot longer. In some cities, the temperature in a heat island may be as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than in other parts of the city, with devastating consequences for residents, who are often more likely to belong to marginalized communities.

As you might suspect, this is no accident.

22 Reed Magazine march 2021

No one understands this better than Cate Mingoya ’08. As director of capacity building for the nonprofit Groundwork USA, she leads an initiative dubbed Climate Safe Neighborhoods. Using satellite technology from NASA and NOAA, her team has compiled detailed maps of dozens of cities around the nation that track a host of variables such as temperature,

perpetuated segregation for decades.

On the HOLC maps, greenlined neighborhoods had top-quality houses and their residents were overwhelmingly white. Redlined neighborhoods had poorer quality homes and were populated by residents of color. (HOLC refused to back loans in redlined neighborhoods—often the only places where people of color were allowed to live— creating a vicious cycle.)

Set the HOLC maps and the climate maps side by side, and see for yourself.

“Once you see it on the map, you can’t unsee it.” tree cover, impermeable surfaces, and propensity for flooding.

But the most striking thing about the maps is how closely they line up with maps made almost 100 years ago—the infamous “redlining” maps drawn up in the 1930s by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation that

In Denver, Colorado, for example, the average summer temperature in the greenlined neighborhoods is 95° F. In the redlined neighborhoods, it’s 102° F. Impervious surfaces make up 28% of the greenlined neighborhoods but 60% of the redlined neighborhoods. Tree canopy covers 21% of the greenlined

HOLC NEIGHBORHOOD GRADES:

A - First Grade C - Third Grade

B - Second Grade D - Fourth Grade

MEDIAN LAND SURFACE TEMP (F):

72 111

This map shows the summer temperature in Elizabeth more than 75 years later. Data was calculated using Landsat 8 imagery on summer days (June, July, and August) between 2016 and 2018 with less than 10% cloud cover. The mean surface temperature for formerly redlined neighborhoods is 3.5° F hotter than the greenlined neighborhoods.

Suzy Renn. After Reed she did a stint with Teach for America in the Bronx, earned a degree in urban planning from MIT, and worked in public housing for the state of Massachusetts before joining Groundwork.

She began work on the project two years ago and has been heartened by its impact. “The maps have really transformed the minds of people who were skeptical of both structural racism and climate crisis,” she says. “It gives you energy and momentum to talk about changes in the future. Once you see it on the map, you can’t unsee it.”

Cate is working closely with residents in formerly redlined neighborhoods to press for change. For example, the maps showed that the Globeville neighborhood in Denver has only 1% tree canopy, compared to 23% in other neighborhoods—a figure that gave residents a concrete target to aim for. Now, thanks to neighborhood advocates, the

photo by Matthew Monteith • map s courtest y o f lawr en ce h offman

neighborhoods but only 4% of the redlined neighborhoods. And the pattern is repeated in city after city, more than 70 years after the maps were drawn up.

Of five cities in the study, the temperature in the redlined neighborhoods was 5 degrees hotter. They had 20% more impervious surfaces. And only a third as many trees.

“The consistency of this across the country lets you know this is no accident,” says Cate. “This is an intentional and insidious means of disadvantaging a group of people.”

Cate grew up in Queens, New York, in a neighborhood where “there was only one tree on the block, and every summer people used to fight for the shade.” At Reed she took courses in history from Prof. Jacqueline Dirks ’82 and religion from Prof. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri. She majored in biology and wrote her thesis on intraspecies recognition in cichlids with Prof.

Formerly redlined neighborhoods have roughly a third as many trees, but Cate Mingoya and Groundwork USA are changing this.

city has promised to plant 3,000 trees in Globeville. “Our goal is to help neighborhoods become more resilient to climate crisis,” she says. “But we also want to help them build capacity to advocate for themselves in the political system.”

GO FURTHER To see more maps, check out https:// groundworkusa. org/climate-safeneighborhoods/

—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

march 2021 Reed Magazine 23

left: photo by bryan watt

Let’s Fix This

Close the Energy Loop In 2018, voters in Portland made history by overwhelmingly passing the Portland Clean Energy Fund, which generates approximately $50 million a year for projects focused on clean energy, energy efficiency, and climate justice. The funding comes from a 1% surcharge on corporations that generate more than $1 billion in revenue. One of the chief petitioners for the fund was Adriana Voss-Andreae ’94, a longtime leader in Portland’s climate movement. She’s a cofounder and longtime chair of 350PDX, the local affiliate of 350.org.

Meat without Animals

Kinari Webb plants mangrove trees as part of a restoration project on the beach in Sukadana.

The Rain Forest Needs People As a junior at Reed, Kinari Webb ’95 trekked through the swamps of Borneo to study orangutans—and soon discovered that the vitality of the rain forest depends on the people who live in it. Villagers often cut down rare hardwood trees to pay for expensive and substandard health care. She shifted gears, became a doctor, and returned to the rain forest to start Health in Harmony, a nonprofit

24 Reed Magazine march 2021

dedicated to the notion that human and environmental health are essentially connected. Today HIH supports a medical center that treats thousands of patients every year and promotes the health of the forest through organic farming, chainsaw buybacks, and goats. The organization has grown to 100+ staff, impacted the lives of countless people, and protected thousands of acres from deforestation.

Biochemist Ron Shigeta ’86 is an entrepreneur in the future of food.

He has worked on several biotech startups that focus on meatless proteins such as plant-based seafood, eggs without chicken, and even vegan dog food. (The secret ingredient? Yeast.)

But his latest project may be the most radical idea yet: cell-based meat. That is to say, meat cultured from animal cells, rather than butchery. Raising and slaughtering animals is a notoriously wasteful way to produce protein and a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and soil degradation. Ron is convinced that new technology will make cell-based meat a realistic alternative. “Make no mistake,” he says. “Animal free, labgrown, cultured meat is coming sooner than you think.”

America is drowning in old paint. But it needn’t.

photo courtesy of metro

Paint the Town Green

You’ve probably disposed of a can of them into giant vats. Filter, recondiold paint. Maybe it was rusty, moldy, or tion, repackage, and reuse. Instead of hardened into a concrete cylinder. Or polluting the groundwater, the paint maybe it was usable but you just didn’t is born anew. need it any more. You aren’t The reality, of course, is EPA reckons that alone. The EPA reckons that The more complicated. “It took 10% of all paint in as much as 10% of all paint the United States— a long time for people to roughly 65 million in the United States goes to gallons accept recycled paint as a a year—goes waste every single year. viable product,” Jim says. to waste. That’s to fill a line of Chemist Jim Quinn enough Over the years, however, paint cans stretching Metro has proven its abil’83 has been working on from Portland to ways to recycle old paint Bucharest. ity to produce mediumsince the 1990s. At Reed, grade paint at an attractive he operated the nuclear reactor and price. “People from the coast, to the wrote his chemistry thesis on the valley, to eastern Oregon have all effects of nuclear decay. Now he had it on their homes for 10+ years runs the hazardous waste program and say it still looks good,” said a at Metro, Portland’s regional govern- longtime employee.

On a busy day, the 20-person ment charged with recycling and solid staff at Metro can process more waste disposal. The basic idea behind than 5,000 gallons of paint. One of MetroPaint is simple. Divert old cans the challenges is that certain colors of paint from the waste stream. Pour

are more popular than others. They often have to discard colors like dark brown and dark green because there is too little demand.

Jim believes other products should follow the same stewardship model.

He advocates legislation to require companies that manufacture hazardous materials to support similar recycling and disposal programs.

“It’s not about recovering money,” he says, “but about spending the money to process these materials responsibly.”

—SEBASTIAN ZINN ’18

Break the Wall of Indifference Global warming constitutes a grave threat, says social psychologist Cameron Brick ’04, but many people do not perceive it as a threat because the human brain evolved over millions of years to respond to problems that are local, experiential, and immediate—whereas climate change is global, invisible, and gradual. In a paper titled “Yawning at the Apocalypse,” Cam and coauthor Sander van der Linden discuss how climate change demonstrates the phenomenon known as the blamelessness of unintentional action. “In the absence of a clear potential villain, there’s nobody to blame except ourselves, and this can trigger a range of defensive biases,” they write. Based on

psychological research, they offer several suggestions to overcoming indifference, such as: • Reduce the psychological distance between the audience and the problem; highlight the concrete impact on their local surroundings.

• Connect to their values, not yours; when you’re talking to conservatives, focus on national security, not polar bears.

• Highlight the villains. “Heroes and villains are powerful tools to capture human imagination—climate change has both.”

• Avoid pairing desired behavior with unwanted identities—loggers don’t want to be seen as environmentalists. Support advocates across social and political boundaries. “Facts are almost worthless if the audience sees the communicator as part of a rival outgroup.”

• Emphasize the benefits of action, rather than the costs of inaction.

“Nobody likes losing, but most people enjoy winning.”

Cameron has done extensive research in the psychology of climate change and is an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Amsterdam.

march 2021 Reed Magazine 25

Let’s Fix This

Spread the Word

Reed grads have written an astonishing number of books about climate change and sustainability. Here’s a tiny sample.

Climate change manifests in many ways across North America, but few as dramatic as the attacks on our western pine forests. Daniel Mathews ’70 tells the urgent story of this loss, accompanying burn crews and ecologists as they study the myriad risk factors and refine techniques for saving the forests. He transports the reader from the aromatic haze of ponderosa and Jeffrey pine groves to the fantastic gnarls and whorls of fivethousand-year-old bristlecone pines, from genetic test nurseries where white pine seedlings are deliberately infected with their mortal enemy to the hottest megafire sites and neighborhoods leveled by fire tornadoes or ember blizzards. He explores the devastating ripple effects of climate change, introduces us to the people devoting their lives to saving our forests, and also offers hope: a new approach to managing western pine forests is underway. Daniel is the author of many books and lived for years in a forest cabin without electricity, heating with firewood and writing by kerosene lamp.

Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction.

In the late 19th century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born. Acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis ’96 traces the movement’s histor y: from early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale. She describes the vital role of scientists and activists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as well as lesser-known figures in conservation history; she reveals the origins of vital organizations like the Audubon 26 Reed Magazine march 2021

Society and the World Wildlife Fund; she explores current efforts to protect species such as the whooping crane and the black rhinoceros; and she confronts the darker side of conservation, long shadowed by racism and colonialism.

As the destruction of other species continues and the effects of climate change escalate, Beloved Beasts charts the ways conservation is becoming a movement for the protection of all species—including our own.

photo by gabriel mathews

Trees In Trouble: Wildfires, Infestations, and Climate Change.

The Truth about Denial: Bias and Self-Deception in Science, Politics, and Religion.

It is a striking—yet all too familiar—fact about human beings that our belief-forming processes can be so distorted by fears, desires, and prejudices that an otherwise sensible person may sincerely uphold false claims about the world in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Philosopher Adrian Bardon ’92 explains that when we describe someone as being “in denial,” we mean that they are personally threatened by some situation—and consequently have failed to assess the situation properly according to the evidence. People in denial engage in motivated reasoning about their situation: they argue and interpret evidence in light of a pre-established conclusion. When group interests, creeds, or dogmas are threatened by unwelcome factual information, biased thinking becomes ideological denialism, as seen in the denial of climate science.

Adrian, a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University, explores the phenomenon and examines ways to combat it.

Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore.

Rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States. Elizabeth Rush ’06 guides readers through some of the places where this change has been most dramatic. For many of the plants, animals, and humans in these places, the options

Daniel Mathews ’70

are stark: retreat or perish. We meet a Staten Islander who lost her father during Sandy; holdouts of a Native American community on a drowning Isle de Jean Charles; wildlife biologists, activists, and others both at risk and displaced.

Elizabeth is a writer who explores how humans adapt to changes enacted upon them by forces seemingly beyond their control. She teaches at Brown University.

The Five-Ton Life: Carbon, America, and the Culture That May Save Us.

At nearly 20 tons per person, American CO2 emissions are among the highest in the world. Not every American fits this statistic, however. Across the country, there are pockets of land that have drastically lower carbon footprints. These exceptional places, as it turns out, are neither “poor” nor technologically advanced. Their low emissions are due to culture. Susan Subak ’82 explores low-carbon locations in Washington DC, the suburbs of Chicago, Manhattan, and Amish settlements in Pennsylvania, to discern the characteristics that contribute to lower emissions. The most decisive factors are social cohesion and a commitment to small interiors, although each example exhibits its own dynamics and offers its own lessons for the rest of the country. The book won the Nautilus Book Award. Susan is an environmental scientist specializing in carbon footprints and climate change.

Sustainability: A Love Story

Adonia Lugo ’05

Thea Riofrancos ’06

Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance

century progresses—and they learn how organic farmers and geneticists address these problems. Pamela is a professor at the University of California, Davis.

This memoir paints an unforgettable picture of Los Angeles from the perspective of two wheels. This is a book of borderlands and intersections, a cautionary tale about the dangers of putting infrastructure before culture, and a coming-of-age story about power and identity. Anthropologist Adonia Lugo ’05 weaves the colonial history of southern California into her own story of growing up Chicana in Orange County, becoming a bicycle anthropologist, and co-founding Los Angeles’s hallmark open streets cycling event, CicLAvia, along the way. After she takes on racism in the world of national bicycle advocacy, she finds her voice and heads back to LA to organize the movement for environmental justice in active transportation. Adonia is interim program chair of the urban sustainability program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food

Tomorrow’s Table argues that a judicious blend of two important strands of agriculture—genetic engineering and organic farming—is key to helping feed the world’s growing population in an ecologically balanced manner. Geneticist Pamela Ronald ’82 and her husband, Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer, take the reader inside their lives for roughly a year, allowing us to look over their shoulders so that we can see what geneticists and organic farmers actually do. Readers see the problems that farmers face, trying to provide larger yields without resorting to expensive or environmentally hazardous chemicals—a problem that will loom larger and larger as the

A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal

The age of climate gradualism is over, as unprecedented disasters are exacerbated by inequalities of race and class. We need profound, radical change. Political scientist Thea Riofrancos ’06 and her coauthors argue that a Green New Deal can tackle the climate emergency and rampant inequality at the same time. Cutting carbon emissions while winning immediate gains for the many is the only way to build a movement strong enough to defeat big oil, big business, and the super-rich.

A Planet to Win explores the contours of a Green New Deal. It calls for dismantling the fossil fuel industry and building beautiful landscapes of renewable energy, guaranteeing climate-friendly work and no-carbon housing and free public transit. And it shows how a Green New Deal can strengthen climate justice movements worldwide. We don’t make politics under conditions of our own choosing, and no one would choose this crisis. But crises also present opportunities. We stand on the brink of disaster—but also at the cusp of wondrous, transformative change.

Thea is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and an assistant professor of political science at Providence College.

What does it mean to live sustainably while still being able to eat bacon? Nicole Walker ’93 wants to know how we can get it together to save the planet when we have a hard time getting it together to save ourselves. After all, who wants to listen to a short, blond woman who is mostly a hypocrite anyway—who eats cows, drives a gasoline-powered car, who owns no solar panels—tsk-tsking them? Armed with research and a playful irony, she delves deep into scarcity and abundance, reflecting on matters that range from her uneasy relationship with bats to the fragility of human life, to what recycling reveals about our drinking habits. With a stark humor, she appeals to our commitment to sustaining our world, our marriages, our families, and ourselves. Sustainability won a Nautilus Award for Lyric Prose. Nicole is professor of English and director of the MFA program at Northern Arizona University.

Grass, Soil, Hope: A Journey through Carbon Country

This disarming book delves into a fascinating notion: that some of the excess carbon wreaking havoc in our atmosphere can be absorbed and stored in soil.

Courtney White ’82—a former archaeologist and the founder of the nonprofit Quivira Coalition—introduces the methods through which the essential road to land health can take place, from managing livestock to improve soil quality, to wetland and watershed restoration, to urban agriculture and more. He brings to life the people and projects that prove that we really can save the planet—if we have the resolve. This is a book of profound optimism, laced with a rare combination of science, philosophy, humor, and joy.

The book’s power derives from his grasp of the subject, his gift for lucid explanation, and his zest for ideas and people.

He visits France to inspect solar panels installed above crops, New York to view green rooftops, and New Orleans for new ideas about reusing wastewater. Along the way, he also leads you into the formation of the universe and the journey of a carbon molecule into the soil—a great wild ride.

march 2021 Reed Magazine 27

Green Ideas Let’s Fix This

photo by daniel cronin

Happy Birthday, Environmental Studies!

Reed’s unique ES program celebrates its 10-year anniversary.

Think back to 2010. The term “filter bubble” came into use. Instagram logged its first post (a photo of San Francisco’s Pier 38). And Reed launched an interdisciplinary environmental studies program unlike any in the nation.

The results have been phenomenal. Reed has been able to add four new professors to buttress the program, which is now one of Reed’s most popular majors. This year, the program offered 24 courses in disciplines ranging from anthropology to chemistry to political science. Roughly 15 ES seniors are set to graduate in June with another 15 juniors on their way.

And the program has produced more than 88 graduates who are working in every sector of the economy.

The first seedlings were sown in 2002, when a group of professors—including Noelwah Netusil in economics, Alex Montgomery in political science, and David Dalton and Keith Karoly in biology—set out to explore how environmental studies might fit into Reed’s curriculum.

The challenge was deceptively simple: how could students explore the vast breadth of this field without sacrificing the intellectual depth that is the hallmark of a Reed education?

With the help of former trustee Jeff Kenner, they invited prominent speakers to campus, including Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco, Stanford historian Richard White, and Buck Parker, executive director of Earthjustice, an environmental legal defense fund.

Prof. Peter Steinberger (another supporter) summed up their findings: “In order to deal intelligently with [environmental studies], you need two kinds of people—well-trained social

28 Reed Magazine march 2021

scientists and humanists who know a lot about physical and life science, and well-trained scientists who know a lot about social scientific and humanistic modes of inquiry.”

The initiative gained further momentum in 2006, when hundreds of students signed a petition circulated by biology major Monika Wieland ’07 calling for the creation of an ES program.

The faculty crafted a solution that was uniquely Reed. Students take interdisciplinary seminars that focus on specific problems in the field such as the economics of solar power.

They gain depth in ES from a “home” department—biology, chemistry, economics, history, or political science— and gain breadth through coursework in other departments.

“The ES program has made me an outstanding planner,” says Alma Siulagi ’14, who works as a transportation planner in Philadelphia.

“Not in skills – the hard/soft skills I need most at work (design, GIS, business writing, teamwork) I learned in graduate school. In thinking, it has set me apart from the beginning in two ways: in critical interdisciplinary thought and in methods. So many of my peers in planning are unable to truly think between disciplines (even if sometimes that’s more practical) and most are not equipped to do so. While many planners understand the basics of statistics, they are lacking the core foundational thought behind the sciences, statistics, and computing that I learned in the ES program.”

Join us for a closer look at some of the accomplishments of this program.

—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

Deepening the Bench

Philanthropy supports four new ES professors

Gifts from alumni, parents, and friends of the college have been fundamental in launching and sustaining Reed’s environmental studies program. In particular, four new professors were added to the faculty with leadership support from emeritus trustee Dan Greenberg ’62 and Susan Steinhauser; former trustee and parent Jeff Kenner and Hyunja Laskin; emeritus trustee and parent Randy Labbe and parent Leslie Labbe; and trustee Gary Rieschel ’79 and Yucca Wong Rieschel, among others.

Post-doc researcher Hannah Prather, Prof. Aaron Ramirez [biology], and Ariel Patterson ’20 examine the factors that help trees survive forest fires, parasites, and drought.

B R A N CH IN G O UT.

Prof. Julie Fry

Prof. Chris Koski

Prof. Josh Howe

Prof. Aaron Ramirez

Atmospheric and environmental chemistry, specifically interactions between anthropogenic nitrogen oxides and climate-relevant atmospheric aerosol particles. Fry has served as Climate Policy Fellow at the Environmental and Energy Study Institute in Washington, D.C., where she provided climate science information to members of Congress; has a master’s degree in environmental law; and has mentored students analyzing ice core samples in Alaska, air quality in Colorado, and diesel emissions in Portland.

Policy design and implementation, environmental policy, and the politics of state budgeting.

Koski currently focuses on the role local governments have to play in addressing climate change—and specifically how to integrate policy with science. He plans to study policy complexity by collecting and analyzing a large sample of statelevel policy documents from four related policy areas: renewable portfolio standards, smart grid, net metering, and electric vehicles.

American and world environmental history, history of science, American foreign policy, intersections of science and environmental politics in both foreign and domestic contexts. Howe won a Ritter Memorial Fellowship from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for his work on the history of atmospheric science and is currently investigating relationships between American foreign policy and the distribution of heavy metal toxicity from the 1950s through the second American war in Iraq.

Translational ecology, fire and drought, socio-ecological systems. Ramirez’s research topics have included translating the science of ecological drought for improved management and conservation decision-making; and the socioecology of urban trees and connected human communities. He is also the institutor of on-campus tree-climb studies and creator of the Reed Bio-Basecamp rolling wet lab for ecological research to take students across the Cascades.

[ES-CHEMISTRY]

[ES-POLITICAL SCIENCE]

[ES-HISTORY]

[ES-BIOLOGY]

march 2021 Reed Magazine 29

Green Ideas Let’s Fix This

Growing the Curriculum

The ES program currently offers more than two dozen courses. Here’s a small sample.

S INS OF E MISSIO N. Prof. Julie Fry [chemistry] and students in ES 300 visited PGE’s Boardman Coal Plant in 2014 to understand the tradeoffs facing power-grid operators as they seek to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

Bio 303 – Leaves to Landscapes

Econ 351: Environmental Economics

This field-based course examines the underlying structure, function, diversity, and ecology of Pacific Northwest forests.

Students go on forest trips to explore topics such as plant water and carbon relations, plant life history and resource use, resilience of trees and forests to disturbance, and plant responses to global change, observing how our forests operate as complex socio-ecological systems.

This course introduces students to the methods economists use to analyze issues related to the environment.

Students discuss the positive and normative aspects of environmental economics, techniques that are used to value the environment, and approaches—such as regulation and incentive-based program—that are used to control pollution.

Chemistry 230: Environmental Chemistry

History 338: Crisis and Catastrophe in Modern Europe

An introduction to the chemistry of natural and polluted environments.

Fundamental principles of chemistry are used to understand the sources, reactivity, and fate of compounds in the Earth’s atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere. Topics include the stratospheric ozone layer, photochemical smog and particulate air pollution, climate change and energy use, water toxics and treatment, and agricultural modification of the surface environment.

30 Reed Magazine march 2021

Between 1720 and 1870, a series of natural and manmade crises forced Europeans to question the purpose of violence in a supposedly “improving” society and the role of rational individuals in a world sometimes beyond their control. This course considers the political, religious, intellectual, and cultural ramifications of disaster and crisis, including financial collapse, revolution, war, earthquakes, disease, and famine. These crises disrupted Europe’s political and intellectual landscape, threatening and transforming ideas about risk,

progress, religion, and political authority, and restructuring the relationships between man and the natural world.

History 310: Water and the American West

This course uses the environmental and political history of America’s rivers, streams, reservoirs, and aquifers to introduce students to important issues in water history and contemporary water policy.

Students begin by exploring a series of different frameworks for understanding the complex relationships among water, labor, land, and political power as those relationships have changed over time.

As they build a deeper understanding of water as a natural, cultural, and political entity, they see the ways in which history has helped to shape the way we allocate and regulate water. Armed with the dual weapons of history and basic legal doctrine, they tackle some of the key issues in 20th-century American water policy, including groundwater, water marketing, and the implications of global warming.

Supporting Students photo by leah nash

Prof. Josh Howe [history] and students in History 310 explore the unique role of water in the American West and it complex relationship with labor, land, and power.

UNQU E NCHABLE.

Political Science 374: Science, Technology & Politics

Why or when should science play a role in policy debates? Why are certain scientific findings accepted over others in these debates? How can society manage the introduction of new technology and address risks that may emerge?

This course explores the relationship between science and politics, how the two at times compete and depend on each other. Students investigate models of knowledge production to better understand how we can study science in politics. The implementation of science and policy is often found in choices around technology, and this course will engage ideas for managing emerging, risky, or uncertain technologies.

ES300: Junior Seminar

In ES300, students dig into a group project through an interdisciplinary lens.

In 2014, they looked at PGE’s Boardman Coal Plant, a power plant in eastern Oregon responsible for 65% of

Oregon’s SO2 emissions and 7% of its CO2 emissions. The students examined whether Boardman could be converted into a biofuel plant fueled by straw from local corn and wheat farms. They concluded that switching to biofuels would cut carbon emissions in half, but that SO2 emissions would remain higher than federal targets. PGE ultimately shut down Boardman last year.

In 2017, they mapped the neighborhoods in Portland most at risk of climate hazards such as flooding, wildfires, and heat waves. Then they looked at indicators of social vulnerability and resilience.

By combining these maps, they identified neighborhoods that scored high on hazard and low on resilience. Students proposed several ways to strengthen resilience in these areas, such as more green spaces, better access to transit, tree planting, sidewalks, and community gardens.

Philanthropy has played a key role in supporting Reed students who pursue environmental studies.

Climate Change Fund

Thanks to generous support from the family of trustee Dennis Henner, Reed has launched the Climate Change Research and Education Fund to support student-faculty research, nonprofit internships, and allied student projects.

Similar to the Social Justice Research and Education Fund, the opportunities may take place at Reed or off-campus.

Going forward, the fund will support up to four student opportunities as well as professional development pursuits, travel, conferences, and costs related to student-led projects.

“I am grateful this fund will support ongoing efforts to support student interest in research and work focused on climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies,” President Bilger said. “We know these strategies will require advances in technology, governmental policy, and urban planning. It gives me great hope to know Reedies are and will continue to be at the forefront of these advances.”

Scholarships for ES Majors

Donors created an endowed scholarship focused on supporting ES majors. In the last ten years, this fund has supported 8 students, including transportation planner Alma Siulagi ’14, EPA biologist Annelise Hill ’17, and this year’s recipient, Sterling White ’21.

Internships and Other Projects

Donors have supported ES internships at nonprofits and summer research projects.

One example: Grisha Post ’21 worked with PSU professor Heejun Chang last summer to unearth Portland’s “disappeared streams”—streams that were diverted into sewers or simply paved over during urbanization.

march 2021 Reed Magazine 31

Reediana Books. Music. Film. Send us your work!

EDITED BY KATIE PELLETIER Email reed.magazine@reed.edu

The World Beneath Their Feet

Mountaineering, Madness, and the Deadly Race to Summit the Himalayas

By Scott Ellsworth ’76

As tension steadily rose between European powers in the 1930s, a different kind of battle was already raging across the Himalayas. Teams of mountaineers from Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and the United States were all competing to be the first to climb the world’s highest peaks, including Mount Everest and K2. Unlike climbers today, they had few photographs or maps and no properly working oxygen systems, and they wore leather boots and cotton

parkas. Amazingly, and against all odds, they soon went farther and higher than anyone could have imagined.

And as they did, their story caught the world’s attention. The climbers were mobbed at train stations and featured in movies, plays, and books. In the darkened corridors of the Third Reich, officials soon discovered the propaganda value of planting a Nazi flag on top of the world’s highest mountains.

Set in London, New York, Germany, India, China, and Tibet, The World Beneath Their Feet is a story not only

of climbing and climbers, but also of passion and ambition, courage and folly, tradition and innovation, tragedy and triumph. Scott Ellsworth ’76 tells a rollicking, real-life adventure story that moves seamlessly from the streets of Manhattan to the footlights of the West End, deadly avalanches on Nanga Parbat, rioting in the Kashmir, and the wild mountain dreams of a New Zealand beekeeper named Edmund Hillary and a young Sherpa runaway called Tenzing Norgay.

(Little, Brown, 2020)

Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 300 Films

By Rich Brownstein ’85

For generations, Holocaust movies have been an important segment of world cinema and the de facto education about the Holocaust for many viewers.

Nonetheless, few Holocaust films have been commercially successful and most have fallen through the cracks.

Now Rich Brownstein ’85 explores this fathomless genre in a magesterial guide to 300+ Holocaust films and made-for-television movies. Films from Anne Frank to Schindler’s List to Jojo Rabbit are

put into historical and artistic perspective and are discussed through many lenses: historically, chronologically, thematically, sociologically, geographically, and individually. Rich provides intellectual context not just for the films, but also for the filmmakers, including Charlie Chaplin, Sidney Lumet, and Steven Spielberg.

And if that weren’t enough, the book also includes recommendations and reviews of the 50 best Holocaust films, an educational guide, and a detailed listing of each film.

(McFarland, 2021)

The Seventh Millennium: A Look at Life’s Possibilities in the New Age Before Us In this post-Christian Eutopia, Luke Lea (Smith) ’64 explores a world of New Country Towns in which people live on small family homesteads grouped around neighborhood greens. They work part time outside the home and in their free time build their own houses, cultivate gardens, cook and care for their families, and pursue outside interests. For those who would like to move to this world, Luke provides a map with some detailed directions. (Luke Lea, 2020)

32 Reed Magazine march 2021

Brownstein explores films such as Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, which revolves around a haunted Holocaust survivor living in Harlem in the 1960s.

Collaborators Poised on the brink of war, the people of the planet Bandar are stunned by the arrival of a disabled Terran spaceship. But the Terrans are even less prepared to understand the politics, gender fluidity, or mob reflexes of the natives. Deborah J. Ross ’68 includes maps and behind-the-scenes essays in this revised edition of her Lambda Literary Award Finalist novel. (Thirsty Redwoods Press, 2020)

Beyond the Aria: Artistic SelfEmpowerment for the Classical Singer

MUSIC Reverser in Neutral

Neal Goren ’79 takes singers through a careful reading of clues provided by the librettist and composer, informed by performance practice, and empowers singers to make their own valid artistic choices. Neal provides sample analyses of six standard arias and songs; chapters addressing artistic collaboration and audition strategies; and exclusive interviews with eight great singing actors of the 20th and 21st centuries, who share their individual methods for constructing a character. (Amadeus, 2020)

Scot t M elville ’83’s band Gamma Repeater just released their newest album of progressive rock. The follow-up to G.R. took almost three years to make, only the last being socially distanced. Albums

by Scott’s previous band, crazy dumbsaint (The Sunset EP, Mortville, and Full Acre Crisis Garden) are probably available in some corner of the interwebs. You may remember Scott from such Reed bands as Gregor Samsa and Theses on Feuerbach Ensemble. https://gammarepeater.bandcamp.com/album/reverser-in-neutral

Deep Six

Scaffolding

In Scott Lazenby ’77’s debut sci-fi novel, it’s 2044 and pressure for genetic enhancement of human beings is at its peak. Maria Blair, herself the product of a genetic enhancement experiment and the daughter of two members of the “The Six,” a powerful group created to rule on genetic issues, is on a quest to find the forces behind a series of deaths and sabotage—and to discover what The Six are really up to. (Independently published, 2020)

Punk Portland in the 1990s.

Mentally ill, queer Lena Cosentino comes of age at Reed College.

Autobiographical fantasy told by an unreliable narrator, this is fiction with a dose of real-world cameos and ‘90s nostalgia for a world before the internet. Andrea Lambert ’98 developed her Reed thesis into this novel, a prequel to her Jet Set Desolate. (iBooks, 2020)

Savage Road In the second book in the Hayley Chill thriller series by Chris Hauty ’78, Hayley is tasked by the “deeper state” with tracking down the source of a series of devastating cyberattacks on the United States.

NSA analysts insist that Moscow is the culprit, but that accusation brings plenty of complications with Hayley directing the president as a double agent against the Russians.

(Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 2021)

Stories of Open: Opening Peer Review through Narrative Inquiry Emily Ruth Ford ’02 has collected personal experience narratives about peer review and open peer review in library and Information science. Emily interviewed students, professors, librarians, authors, editors, and referees, and analyzed their stories using narrative inquiry methods. Her book was the first in ACRL’s Publications in Librarianship series to itself have open peer review. (ACRL, 2021)

Mathilde Mouw-Rao ’12 has released a 5 song EP entitled Ulterior Futures under her stage name, Tilde Mouw. The project marks a departure from acoustic singer-songwriter music toward a more heavily produced indie pop sound. Aaron Deich ’11 filmed the music video for the first song on the EP, “Harm.” Mathilde’s music can be found wherever you stream music and the video collaboration can be found on YouTube.

FILM Highway 1 Anna is hosting a New Year’s Eve party. Nina, a longgone friend from high school, unexpectedly shows up, conjuring the feelings of another girl and bringing to the surface the inner lives of the ensemble: a gaggle of eccentric millennial partygoers. This loose adaptation of Chekhov’s Ivanov, set in rural California, is directed by Emmy-winner Jaclyn Bethany and stars Belle Aykroyd ’15, Stella Baker ’15, and Sophia Dunn-Walker ’15.

Holding On to Hope Ana is 15 when her brother, Junior, is arrested. Soon after, her Spanish teacher Ms. García disappears, and her father is detained by ICE. Paralyzed against government forces as her world falls apart, Ana is tired of feeling powerless. Will her friends help, or will they turn their backs?

The latest YA novel by Catalina Claussen ’93 explores the complex realities facing families and community members living under constant deportation threats.

(Progressive Rising Phoenix Press, 2020)

Ulterior Futures

The Oyster

3-Day Weekend

Multiple disciplines (philosophy, literature, visual art, biology, architecture) converge within the experiences of thinking, eating, and diagramming in this work by Nik Kosieradzki ’14 and Prof. Dejan Lukić [anthro 2009–13]. The center stage is given to a humble mollusk, which becomes an object, a subject, a sentient consciousness, and an alien will, progressively and then even simultaneously.

(Contra Mundum Press, 2020)

Deep in the woods, amateur camper Ben Boyd becomes lost after discovering a kidnapping badly off the rails. But is it a kidnapping? A postprison rendezvous? Revenge?

What’s actually happening in the woods on this 3-Day Weekend? Written and directed by Wyatt McDill ’94, this “puzzle thrill-ride” plays out through four different point-of-view characters—with no dialogue. (Sleeper Cell, 2020)

Reed Magazine march 2021 33

Class Notes

These Class Notes reflect information we received by December 15.

The Class Notes deadline for the next issue is March 15.

Class Notes are the lifeblood of Reed Magazine.

While a Reed education confers many special powers, omniscience is unfortunately not among them; your classmates rely on you to tell us what’s going on. So share your news and photos—births, deaths, weddings, voyages, adventures, transformations, astonishment, woe, delight, fellowship, discovery, and mischief.

Email us at reed.magazine@reed.edu. Post a note online at iris.reed.edu.

Find us on Facebook via “ReediEnews.” Scribble something in the enclosed return envelope. Or mail us at Reed Magazine, Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland OR 97202. And don’t forget the pertinent details: name, class year, and your current address!

As of September 2019, new class notes are available online in pdf form in our digital magazine. If you have any questions or concerns, let us know.

EDITED BY JOANNE HOSSACK ’82

1948

As a proud member of one of Reed’s many multigenerational families, Rosemary Berleman was inspired by our recent saga of the Robinson family (In Memoriam, September 2020). Rosie’s father, Ray Lapham ’19, attended Reed after returning from WWI. His son, Dudley “Six” Lapham ’43, was next, followed by little sister Rosemary.

Six married Constance Sumner ’43; their daughter, Roseamber Sumner ’73, attended Reed during the tumult years of 1969–71, and her daughter, Madrona Murphy ’02, graduated with honors. Other relatives include David Lapham ’60; his wife, Marcia Dalin ’51; and their daughter, Sarah Lapham ’76. Rosemary also writes that the most meaningful relationships she’s had throughout her life have been with friends from Reed, including the budding poets and writers she met while residing at 1414 Lambert Street (Phil Whalen ’51, Gary Snyder ’51, Lew Welch ’50). “They were all a fun-loving but deeply studious crowd!”

Now 95, Rosemary is newly arrived on Lopez Island, home of her Reedie niece, Roseamber, who has lived there since

34 Reed Magazine march 2021

1978. “I can still quote many passages from Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill, and the like as well as warble favorite opera pieces not half badly. My body is slowing, but my spirit is strong!”

1951 70th reunion 1961 60th reunion

In cleaning out their childhood home, Natasha Dehn ’85 and her sister came across a photo that includes their parents Peter R. Dehn and Dorothy C. Dehn (also MALS ’70), assorted unknown friends, and at least five cats.

“Based on the way our parents look, the picture was taken some time around the period when they attended Reed or perhaps just a few years later. We hope that means some of the other people in the photo can be identified and maybe someone can tell us more about this event.” We hope so, too!

1965

Race riots in Watts, California.

1966 55th reunion

Milton Bradley’s new game, Twister, denounced as “sex in a box.” Did you play?

1967

John Cushing walked 26 miles and 385 yards on October 11. His time was six hours, 33 minutes, and 41 seconds.

1968

1962-63

Congress passes Clean Air Act.

“I Heard it Through the Grapevine.” We’d like to hear from you!

1964

1969

Luke Lea (Smith) looks at life’s possibilities in his new book. (See Reediana.)

Kevin Bernard grew up four blocks from Reed and spent much time on

Two Rosies in bloom on Lopez Island: Rosemary Berleman ’48 (right) and niece Roseamber Sumner ’73.

Who are these cool cats? Two are Peter R. Dehn ’61 (white shirt, eyeglass case) and Dorothy C. Dehn ’61, MALS ’70 (dark sweater, glasses).

Their daughter, Natasha Dehn ’85, hopes one of you out there knows more about this cat party.

campus during his formative years.

(His mother also attended Reed for two years, and rode her horse to class a few times from the farm where she lived just west of the trolley barn on 17th Ave.) Kevin spent 7 years in the peacetime military as a radio operator in the Oregon Air National Guard in the ’50s; he also taught English in junior high school for 3 years and language arts and social studies in senior high school for 30 years before retiring in 1992. Kevin and his wife of 59 years have three sons with four degrees (two engineers and one federal agent) and six grandchildren (three in college and three in high school). Kevin’s closest friend/confidant is 100 years young and attended Reed 1938–42 before serving in the military 1942–46. “We talk a lot and have similar thoughts about Reed, even though we crossed paths in 1940 when I was 5 and he was 21.”

Gay Walker finally went net zero with a solar makeover from propane gas this summer to go along with the electric car. “It was something useful and almost fun to do during the pandemic!”

1970

On October 15, Terry Boyarsky’s Russian Duo held a livestreamed performance at the Maltz Performing Arts Center in Cleveland, Ohio, as part of the Silver Hall Concert Series.

Katherine Verdery received the 2020 Distinguished Contributions prize from the ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies).

The prize honors senior scholars who have made outstanding contributions to both leadership and scholarship in this field. Nicely done, Katherine!

1971 50th reunion

Antinuclear activists found a new organization named “Greenpeace.” Wonder what happened to them. And to you.

1972

Congratulations to Edward Peters, to whom the Association for Learning Environments (A4LE) has given its Lifetime Achievement Award for planning and building K-12 school facilities.

Edward continues to direct the Capital Projects Office at the Edmonds School District and, occasionally, to ride his motorcycle.

1973

Jill Gay continues as chief technical officer of What Works Association (whatworksassociation.org and

whatworksforwomen.org). She has articles coming out this year on social accountability and contraception (BMC Women’s Health) and approaches in primary schools in Senegal (Current Issues in Comparative Education) to promote gender equality. She and her husband drove 9,000 miles in summer 2019 across Canada and the United States (D.C. to Buffalo to Jasper to Vancouver Island and back to D.C.) and visited Portland for the first time in over 10 years.

She wishes all on the West Coast shelter from the storms and fires. Jill continues to work on social justice issues and serves on the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards Committee. She is willing to mentor younger feminists to carry on the struggle.

Laura Leviton and Sheldon Hochheiser have been hitched for 21 years, and Laura has not screwed it up yet, she writes. In semiretirement, Laura works with Dartmouth Medical School and Jönköping University in Sweden on the International Coproduction Health Network. This is an effort to improve health care by fostering collaboration between patients and their caregivers and providers. She also collaborates on evaluation of the National Emerging Special Pathogens Training and Education Center (NETEC), which gives technical assistance to health care and public health on treatment and management of COVID-19, Ebola, and other pathogens.

1974

David Brewster retired in 2017 from a career in publishing, music, and tech, most recently at Starbucks. He’s staying very busy with Edmonds Bookshop, board service with Edmonds Center for the Arts, cooking, golf, travel (when possible), and a continuing love of books, music, and the arts. David’s recent travels include Spain, the national parks of Utah, Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Croatia.

Kevin Downing retired from Oregon DEQ in 2018, spending his last 18 years there working to convince people to clean up older diesel trucks. Over that time, he was able to secure about $8 million in grants to assist in replacing/scrapping trucks and construction equipment and replacing towboat engines, with a net benefit in avoided environmental and public health benefits of probably $30–$40 million per year. He worked with Prof. Julie Fry [chemistry 2008–] to help her and students conduct monitoring studies in

Portland neighborhoods to document extent of exposure, and he collaborated with Robert McCullough ’72 and another author to publish in Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs a piece detailing health risk from the Brooklyn Rail Yard in Portland and possible regulatory strategies. Kevin is apparently failing at full retirement and is now consulting on further efforts to reduce diesel emissions.

The Russian Duo: Terry Boyarsky ’70 on piano and Oleg Kruglyakov on balalaika.

Laura Leviton ’73 poses à la Mme. Lavoisier with Sheldon Hochheiser ’73 near Lyon, France, in October.

1975

How’s your Pet Rock doing? Write us with the stone-cold truth, of quartz.

Mme. Lavoisier.

Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and His Wife (Jacques-Louis David, 1788)

“I treasure my years at Reed and want to ensure future students have the opportunity to experience Reed’s many gifts.”

— R AC H E L R E E D ’ 0 7

giving.reed.edu Reed Magazine march 2021 35

1976 45th reunion

Scott Ellsworth’s book The World Beneath Their Feet is getting worldwide attention. It was reviewed in the New York Review of Books, and its British edition made it onto the longlist for the 2020 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. A Polish translation came out this summer, an Italian edition will be published in October, and Czech and Slovak editions are forthcoming. Scott’s next book, The Ground Breaking, investigates the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and will be out in May. (See Reediana.)

1977

Scott Lazenby’s debut sci-fi novel, Deep Six, was published in October. “It’s a near-future story that includes some kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy for readers who like thrillers. But it also deals with serious issues, such as the ethics and inevitability of human genetic enhancement. And more so than in my other novels (see scottlazenbybooks.com), I was able to draw on my Reed physics degree!” (See Reediana.)

1978

The small but mighty ’70s email tree of Mark Aronson ’79, Jill Kuhnheim ’79, S. (Susan) Brophy-Spilka ’77, Martin Land ’77, and Jaci Cuddy is still sputtering along. Jaci’s unofficial banner cry of “Stay Well, Stay Healthy, and Stay Fierce!” has been unofficially taken up by this elite(ish) group. Jaci just hasn’t notified the group of this unofficial action she has taken.

Deep State, the first in the political thriller series by Chris Hauty ’78 was selected by the New York Times Book Review as an Editors’ Choice. The follow-up, Savage Road, was published in January 2021. Additionally, Chris has signed a deal with Simon & Schuster for books three and four in the series. (See Reediana.)

1979

Vera Boals continues her involvement with cat rescue, having started Those Cat Rescue People, dedicated to helping loved but disadvantaged pets to be spayed or neutered, and SnipItNH, a mobile spay/neuter service. “Thank goodness I have my military retirement to pay bills with!” Vera is part of a network of cat rescuers who are forming lines of communication to improve the plight of pets throughout New England.

Jennifer Camper got a shout-out from the New York Times for her contribution to Menopause: A Comic Treatment,

36 Reed Magazine march 2021

listed by the Times as one of “The Best Graphic Novels of 2020.” Go, Jennifer!

Neal Goren’s new opera company, Catapult Opera (catapultopera.org), is “engaging new media—film and streaming—with the timeless goal of delivering the sublimity and emotionality of the classically-trained voice, supported by a range of instrumentation, both unconventional and traditional, and complemented by arresting visuals.” Neal also has a new book out. (See Reediana.)

Greg Thayer retired a few years ago, after stints in neuroscience, law, and finance, as a company founder, and finally as a psychotherapist (a “social justice” program, “which might be a surprise”). “All good, really. Lived out of a suitcase for two years traveling the world. Escaped Mexico for rural Canada during early COVID. Now settled in the south of France in a pretty village near Nimes and Avignon. Good food, nice people, great weather, more culture than I can handle, and it’s very affordable. Painting every day, flying a glider occasionally. Plenty of room for guests, so contact us if you are headed this way.

Love to connect with Reedies.”

1980

Kristen Beiers-Jones is an assistant professor of nursing at Oregon Health and Science University and works with refugees and immigrants in Portland.

Kristen and her students successfully got legislature passed (Senate Bill 698) that mandates that pharmacies in Oregon provide a translated label in at least

14 languages. As of January 1, 220,000 Oregonians can now read their pill bottles. “I hope to help folks in other states pass similar legislation, so please contact me if interested.”

Michael Tippie sent us an update!

“I moved to Reno a year ago and am enjoying being 20 minutes from the Sierras for hiking and down the street from the Truckee River for kayaking.

My wife Katryn works in surgery here, and my youngest daughter, 21-year-old Julia, and her husband Ezra live with us. I continue to invest in and at times get sucked into operational roles in early stage biotechnology and medical device companies (including NeuraMedica in Oregon—9 months away from FDA approval). I am also an advisor to two therapeutic companies financed by the Berkeley Skydeck fund, at present. In a

The ceremonial pasta (blurred) is thrown at the wedding of Joanne Hossack ’82 and William Aegerter ’85. Left to right: Becky Chiao ’85, officiant Esteban Gutierrez ’94, Joanne, William, and friend/ neighbor of Reed Ken Avenoso. Note masks, social distancing, and Pastafarian headwear.

Jaci Cuddy ’78, her sister Robin (d. 2015), and Uncle Skip (d.

2012).

nod to the Italians singing opera from balconies during COVID lockdown, I have been playing jazz tunes with my various electric guitars on my back patio since the pandemic started with the help of my Looper pedal and stereo amps.

I am finally working out some of the complexities of the melodic minor over fast changes. So far no bricks have been thrown and neighbors come by and ask me to play. Life is good.”

Agricultural and Life Sciences. The first woman to receive this award, Pam was recognized for her history of major discoveries in plant molecular genetics.

1985

1983

1986 35th reunion

Scott Melville’s band, Gamma Repeater, just released their newest album of progressive music, Reverser in Neutral. Their follow up to G.R. took almost three years to make, only the last being socially dis-

Rich Brownstein has published a comprehensive guide to Holocaust cinema.

(See Reediana.)

Fujifilm distributes first mass-market disposable camera. Get any good thesis parade pictures?

Dr. Madeleine Martindale ’84 at work.

Audience members watch Megan Nicely ’89 (L in red) perform her site-specific dance as part of Erin Merritt ’89’s Neighborhood Stories.

1987

Still haven’t found what you’re looking for?

“ So far no bricks have been thrown and neighbors come by and ask me to play. Life is good.”

—Michael Tippie ’80

1981 40th reunion

Rubik extracts cubic brute from hell and unleashes it on an unsuspecting world.

1982

On Thanksgiving weekend, Joanne Hossack and William Aegerter ’85 were united in matrimony in the eyes of the State of Oregon and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The masked, socially distanced ceremony, held at Portland’s municipal volcano, was officiated by Esteban Gutierrez ’93 and witnessed by Becky Chiao ’85.

As part of their very brief vows, Joanne promised to try not to make noise when William was trying to sleep, and William promised not to ask Joanne any questions before she’s had her morning coffee. (Congrats to you both!—Ed.) Congratulations to Pam Ronald, named a 2020 World Agriculture Prize Laureate by the Global Confederation of Higher Education Associations for

tanced. Albums by Scott’s previous band, crazy dumbsaint (The Sunset EP, Mortville, and Full Acre Crisis Garden), are probably available in some corner of the interwebs.

You may remember Scott from such Reed bands as Gregor Samsa and Theses on Feuerbach Ensemble. (See Reediana.)

1984

Madeleine Martindale is “wondering what country will have any of us wanting to leave Trump’s sinking ship, a failed state. Being a physician gives me a modicum of global professional mobility, but approaching 60 makes it hard to convince a new place of the worth of my contribution to their society. So. Still here in Maine and enjoying my work as a hospitalist, all the more since going part time. Hiking, kayaking, biking makes COVID easier to bear—but I miss dancing and friends and socializing and the freedom to do all those crazy things we used to do.” We hear you, Madeleine!

1988

An article Dr. John Edward Peck Jr. wrote on the 20th anniversary of the “Battle of Seattle” (November 1999) as an activist participant was published in Socialism and Democracy. Otherwise, John has kept busy throughout the pandemic getting food from his farm to his community.

1989

“For those of us who make 100% of our living through the arts, this is a particularly challenging time,” writes Erin Merritt, “so I formed a new company that works with the challenges, commissioning site-specific performances from

“I hope these few dollars go to another student who needs them as much as I did and is as glad to be there as I was.”

— K AT H E R I N E C A H N ’ 7 6

giving.reed.edu Reed Magazine march 2021 37

a wide range of Bay Area performing artists, with audiences watching from their cars. Our first ‘episode’ showed off Oakland performers, including Megan Nicely, who choreographed a new piece for her balcony.” Live performances will pop up again in the spring, and in the meantime, the website will feature interactive performance activities for audiences to do at home to keep connected to others over the winter. Check out Megan’s dance company at megannicelydance.org and Erin’s new company at neighborhood-stories.com.

1990

Chris Lydgate built a Dalek with his Doctor Whovian kids.

1991 30th reunion

Burton Callicott accepted the Public Services Librarian position at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, E.M. White Library, at the start of October 2020. “Strange time to move and start a new job but I am loving Louisville and, after many years living on the coast of South Carolina, the return to a place that has a proper fall season.”

1992

Lisa Wathen has had an essay published in the anthology Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age. Currently living in Williamsburg, Virginia, Lisa is in her 21st year of teaching (high school English and journalism). Her two children are grown and fledged, and although the pandemic has sidelined her part-time music duo for the time being, she continues to write, both fiction and nonfiction, whenever she can carve out the time. The book is available on Amazon, and further writings can be found at medium.com/@lisawathen_92585.

1993

John P. Alderete, PhD, MBA, lives with his family on the island of Kauai, after several years in the San Francisco Bay Area. His company, Folium BioMed (Seattle, Washington), focuses on developing diagnostic tests in the infectious disease space. One of Folium’s subsidiary companies, Apollos Diagnostics, developed a rapid test suitable for home use for the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen. John and his family volunteer for the Kauai chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, with John on the board of directors as well as heading up the Blue Water Task Force, which is responsible for testing Kauai’s waterways for bacterial contamination. He also serves on

38 Reed Magazine march 2021

various pharmaceutical and device company boards, and has been a prominent member of several COVID-19 testing task forces for Hawaii.

Catalina Claussen has a new YA novel out! (See Reediana.)

What do you do with a BA in theater?

Stand up for democracy as a stage manager 25+ years later (still, no regrets).

Jenn Falco volunteered to manage run of show for the nonviolent Defend Democracy Coalition Count Every Vote: Electoral Justice is Racial Justice/Protect the Results event at Waterfront Park in Portland. This broad coalition event included faith leaders from the Jewish community, Native American elders, labor, and BIPOC-led community groups.

1994–95

Russian President Boris Yeltsin found on Pennsylvania Avenue, drunk, in his underwear, trying to hail a cab so he could go out for pizza. Yeah, we’ve all been there . . .

1996 25th reunion

Michelle Nijhuis has published a history of the modern conservation movement. (See Reediana.)

1997

In late October, Chantal Sudbrack joined the technical staff of the Research & Innovation Center with the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. The new job brings her back to Oregon, and she has relocated to Salem, which is much closer to Reed than her native Chicago. Welcome back, Chantal!

1998

clockwise from top-left Andrea Lambert ’98 has turned her Reed thesis into a novel.

DJ Anjali on the Defend Democracy Coalition/Protect the Results stage, November 4, 2020.

Jenn Falco ’93 managed run of show for this event.

Andrea Lambert has turned her Reed thesis into a novel. (See Reediana.)

John P. Alderete ’93 with the wife.

1999–2000

Catalina Claussen ’93 has a new book out.

Toyota’s Prius takes America by storm.

2001 20th reunion

In the New Zealand census, 53,715 people list their religion as “Jedi.” Any comments from religion majors?

2002

Emily Ruth Ford’s book Stories of Open will be published in the spring of 2021

by ACRl Press. The continuing project is at StoriesofOpen.org. (See Reediana.)

2003–05

We can’t stop thinking about buffalo wings. Are they from chickens or from buffaloes?

Lisa Wathen ’92 has an essay in the anthology Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age.

2006 15th reunion

Ceiling Cat is watching you.

2007–10

China National Highway 110 traffic jam lasts 10 days, stretches over 60 miles.

Yikes.

2011 10th reunion

Jason O’Neal King earned his master’s degree in 2020 from Heidelberg University of Art and Design, Karlsruhe, Germany, with a major in aesthetics media and art philosophy and a minor in philosophy. Nicely done, Jason!

Adrienne Lane and Paul Whittredge ’12 welcomed their first child, Eliot Lane Whittredge, on September 8, 2020, in Durham, North Carolina. Congratulations, Adrienne and Paul!.

Dr. Jean McMahon has settled into her position as an evaluator at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. As part of the Deployer Support Unit, she leads the synthesis, visualization, and reporting of data in support of staff serving in the COVID19 response. Connecting with distant college friends over bad musicals, FaceTime, and WhatsApp has been the twin highlight of her year. She’s keeping her fingers crossed for widespread vaccination in time for her 10-year reunion.

The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College has appointed Salim Moore as assistant curator of collections. Salim, a multidimensional arts professional, joined the Benton staff on December 1, 2020. Congratulations, Salim!

2012

This winter Mathilde Mouw-Rao released a five-song EP titled Ulterior Futures under her stage name, Tilde Mouw. She explored new-to-her audio engineering techniques in Ableton Live while producing the tracks, embracing the Reedie spirit of lifelong learning while sheltered in place in San Francisco. The project marks a departure from acoustic singer-songwriter music toward a more heavily produced indie pop sound. Aaron Deich ’11 filmed the music video for the first song on the EP, “Harm.” Mathilde’s music can be found wherever you stream music and the video collaboration can be found on YouTube. (See Reediana.)

2013

Grant Burgess sent us a picture of his next-gen Reedie! “I’ll support whatever little Ellis wants to do with his life, but I’ll definitely try to nudge him toward my alma mater.”

2014

Nik Kosieradzki and Prof. Dejan Lukić [anthro 2009–13] have coauthored an intriguing new book, The Oyster. The book includes a little bit of writing and photography by Will Scarlett ’12 (who tipped us off about the book—thanks, Will!) and a drawing by Joshua McCarty.

(See Reediana.)

2017

clockwise from top-left

Peggy Whitson sets record for most total days in space by a U.S. astronaut: 665.

Hope your thesis didn’t take that long!

2018

Mathilde Mouw-Rao ’12 and Aaron Deich ’11 run through the forest with camera and tripod.

Farhanul Hasan published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal on intergalactic gas clouds containing carbon. It is his first paper as a first author.

Adrienne Lane ’11 and Paul Whittredge ’12 brought Eliot Lane Whittredge home in September.

2019–20

More Eliot!

There are now 518 California condors, including 337 free-flying ones, and none of them has sent class notes either.

Grant Burgess ’13 and son Ellis (’41?) are decked out in Reed red.

2015

The feature film Highway 1 is now working with Bohemia Group distribution and will premiere in London this upcoming spring. Highway 1 is directed

by Emmy-winner Jaclyn Bethany and stars Belle Aykroyd, Stella Baker, and Sophia Dunn-Walker. (See Reediana.)

2016 5th reunion

RIP David Bowie. Glam will never be the same.

The Loyal Owl Society recognizes the steadfast support of those who give to Reed every year. Make your Annual Fund gift today. Join the parliament. giving.reed.edu Reed Magazine march 2021 39

In Memoriam EDITED BY RANDALL BARTON Email bartonr@reed.edu

Chemist Probed the Architecture of the Infinitesimal Marilyn Morgan Olmstead ’65

September 30, 2020, in Davis, California, from an accident while riding her bike.

A renowned international leader in the crystallographic study of fullerenes or buckyballs—spherical, crystalline allotropes of carbon— Marilyn devoted her life to deciphering nature’s rules for the assembly of molecules and atoms.

A crystallographer is a scientist who determines—via a picture created through X-ray diffraction—the geometric structure of molecules. “For an inorganic chemist, the structure is interesting itself,” Marilyn said. “New chemical bonds are discovered. It adds to our understanding of basic chemistry. There’s a lot of math (I love math), and there’s a lot of graphics. It’s a very artistic field.”

She likened X-ray cr ystallography to listening to an orchestra. Not only could she hear the individual notes, she comprehended the miracle of their complex integration.

A self-confessed tomboy, she grew up in Burbank, California, where, in addition to an interest in rocks, insects, and birds, she built and rebuilt radios. At the age of 12, Marilyn obtained a general ham radio operator’s license—becoming the youngest female ham operator in the United States. Her antennas dotted the neighborhood skyline; she used Morse code to communicate with other hams around the world and participated in civil defense drills.

From an early age, she was fascinated with symmetry, chirality, and repetitive motifs, and would peer at snowflakes, pine cones, insects, flowers, and mosaics to search for hidden symmetries and ponder their purposes in nature. She played tennis and piano, worked a summer job as a draftswoman at Lockheed, and was homecoming queen her senior year at her high school, from which she graduated with straight A’s.

She chose Reed after visiting the Northwest during the summer and deciding she wanted to learn how to ski. Majoring in chemistry, she thrived under the mentorship of Prof. Thomas Dunne [chemistry 1963–95], with whom she wrote her thesis, “Ultraviolet Absorption of Cisand Trans-Isomers of Platinum (II) Complexes.”

During a summer program, Marilyn met emerging leaders in inorganic chemistry and won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to support her graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

40 Reed Magazine march 2021

“Reed was a good place for her,” said classmate Bernard Wasow ’65. “People tended to undervalue Marilyn, because she was not a self-promoter and because she was a woman.

At Reed, she was able to explore her interests and gifts (such as playing the recorder), without being tracked into a role that others imagined she should fit into. I think she encountered relatively little discrimination at Reed as a woman who pursued hard science, which is why she had a good time there. Reed has the reputation as an arty place, but it is really more like a prep school for graduate school, not touchyfeely. That suited Marilyn. She could be both conventional and very original without being molded too much.”

She also learned how to ski. “My mom talked about learning to ski at Mt. Hood and staying at the Reed ski cabin,” said Marilyn’s daughter, Janis. “She loved it. She described the leather boots and long skis that they used in the 1960s.”

At the University of Wisconsin, Marilyn pursued her interest in inorganic chemistry, studying molecular orbital theory. There she was introduced to the wonders of X-ray crystallography by Prof. Larry Dahl. Her focus had been molecular orbital theory, but she grew dissatisfied with the slow computers and use of IBM cards for carrying out the computations. At UW, she met Alan Olmstead, whom she married in 1966. Their first child, Janis, was born two years later.

“My interest in crystallography was sparked

by Tom Dunne at Reed, and a grad school thesis committee member, Professor Larry Dahl,” she

recollected. “I decided to follow that interest a few years after moving to UC Davis with my husband, Alan, in 1969.”

As a female scientist, Marilyn faced hurdles.

Often the only female in her science and math classes in high school and graduate school, she was ridiculed and told that girls could not do that kind of work. Her first choice for a professor as adviser at UW turned her down, proclaiming that he did not accept female students. The professor who agreed to be her adviser refused to read or forward for publication the articles that she generated from her PhD thesis, telling her that he had to prioritize his male students, who needed jobs to support their families.

Accompanying Alan to UC Davis—where he had received a position as an assistant professor in the department of economics—Marilyn got a job as a lecturer in the chemistry department.

A year later, she gave birth to a son, Eric, who died in infancy. In 1972, she had a third child, Nate. This was before family leave benefits existed, and Marilyn was forced to resign from her job before each birth with no guarantee of reappointment.

Over the next 34 years, she held positions as postdoctoral fellow, staff research associate, and specialist. And though she typically worked full time, many of these appointments were 49% time with no retirement benefits. Undeterred, she won several large grants to modernize the UCD crystallography lab that she directed.

Under her leadership, the Davis facility would become one of the most productive crystallographic labs in the world. By 2000, she was the most published and cited member of the chemistry department. Marilyn believed that her accomplishments would speak for themselves, and that she would be appointed to the faculty.

This was not the case. Finally, in 2003, when she was 60 years old, after outside pressure was applied on her behalf, she was appointed to the faculty as a full professor. She became emerita in 2015.

With Prof. Alan Balch, she pioneered a technique to crystallize fullerenes in a manner that yielded superior structural data, and utilized this technique to elucidate the structures of numerous new, higher or endohedral fullerenes.

Marilyn was the first person in the world to characterize an endohedral metallofullerene and a non-isolated pentagon rule-obeying endohedral metallofullerene using X-ray

crystallography—work that was central to the PhD dissertations of dozens of students coadvised by Balch and Olmstead. In addition to her expertise in fullerenes, her crystallographic prowess spurred breakthroughs in coordination chemistry, organometallic chemistry, organic synthesis, and solid-state inorganic chemistry.

She was a visiting scholar at research institutes in numerous countries, including Malaysia, China, Germany, Great Britain, India, and Switzerland.

After retiring, Marilyn continued active research and mentorship. She regularly accompanied students to the synchrotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to collect datasets over daylong shifts. During the COVID-19 shutdown, she was remotely advising a half dozen graduate students and was branching into an entirely new field of chemistry.

In addition to her professional activities, Marilyn played tennis almost daily and won several local tournaments. She loved hiking, fishing, skiing, ice skating, snowshoeing, canoeing, and bike riding. She devoted herself to community and university activities, worked in voter registration drives, coached youth tennis, and was the consummate soccer and basketball mom. She was killed when a car hit her bicycle on a rural road in Yolo County.

Mildred Fahlen Taxer ’42

September 11, 2020, in Portland, of natural causes.

A lifelong Portland resident, Mildred often said, “There is nowhere any better than right here!” Her father, Nels, was a tailor who had come to Portland from Sweden, and her mother was the daughter of Swedish immigrants. After attending Ainsworth Elementary School and Lincoln High School, Mildred followed her sister, Ethel Noble ’40, to Reed. The college, as she noted, “was highly touted in high school.” It was also the Great Depression and economically advantageous to live at home.

She got a one-year scholarship at Reed for $100; tuition for the whole year was $250. An advertising pamphlet of the time listed the expenses for the college. “They said that with a $75 allowance for incidentals, $1,000 would adequately handle a year at Reed,” she recalled.

Mildred planned to go into math, but struggled mightily with differential equations. “I passed the course,” she said, “but made up my mind I was not a math major. I took a statistics course in psych, and decided I would be a psych major.”

Her adviser, Prof. Edward Octavius Sisson [philosophy 1911–43], invited his students to his house for a meeting. “He broke the ice by telling about his first adventure in entertaining on campus,” Mildred recalled. “He had

invited all of these gentlemen to sit around the table and have a soup dinner. His wife brought the soup in and he ladled it up. When he got about three-quarters of the way around the table he said to his wife, ‘We need more soup,’ and she said ‘Well, that’s it.’ So, he said, ‘Pass them back, boys. Redeal.’ He was a wonderfully warm person.”

She fondly recollected other professors.

“Barry Cerf [English 1921–48] always reminded me of a Greek god,” she said. “He stood up at the podium in the chapel and there was a halo of light about him that made him appear to be a vision. F.L. [Frank Loxley] Griffin [math 1911–56] was very good. He would say to me, ‘Even if you don’t pass this exam, your marks will carry you through.’”

Mildred wrote her thesis, “An Analysis of 1600 Service Ratings,” with Prof. William (Monte) Griffith [psychology 1926–54] advising. She remembered him chuckling and admonishing distractors at his Psych 21 lecture to hire their own hall.

Mildred believed that Reed’s system of not providing grades to students unless requested fostered more equality among students. “You were not elevated or downgraded because of your grade value,” she said.

The day after commencement, she reported to the City of Portland Civil Service Commission, where she worked for seven years, crediting the statistics class of Prof. William Stewart [economics 1925–49] and Griffith’s Tests and Measurements course in preparing her for the job. In 1949, she married Milton Taxer, a civil engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. With the birth of their three sons, her role changed to that of homemaker.

She continued to consult in the civil service testing department, was active in the First Unitarian Church of Portland, and, along with her sister, Ethel, was active in the Reed College Alumni Association, the Foster-Scholz Club, and the League of Women Voters. Mildred led many local community efforts to effect positive change, including her petition drive to convince the city to construct lighted tennis courts in Gabriel Park to provide a positive experience for youth and to reduce crime in the park. She kept active swimming, gardening, and biking.

“Reed’s emphasis on excellence, concern for individual development, and preservation of a truly free marketplace of ideas have been of great worth to me,” Mildred said. “The Reed experience, though rigorous, provided a great foundation for life. Education is something that nobody can ever take away from you. You can lose the data and forget a lot, but the means of obtaining information remains with you.”

After a brief illness, Mildred passed away at the age of 100. She is survived by her three sons, Gordon, Mark, and Eric.

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In Memoriam

Elmo Ellingson Fadling ’48

John A. Yngve ’44

“I enjoyed to the fullest my two years at Reed,” Elmo said. Her favorite professors were F.L. Griffin [math 1911–56], Owen Ulph [history 1944–79], and Dorothy Johansen [ histor y 1934–84]. Elmo married J.E. “Red” Fadling in 1946, and in their nearly 50 years together they operated the Flying R Ranch, breeding Arabian horses and training riders. She worked for years on the Washington State legislative staff and played violin in the Olympia (Washington) Symphony Orchestra and in the North Coast Symphony Orchestra.

Following the death of her husband in 1996, Elmo moved from Olympia, Washington, to Manzanita, Oregon, to be near her fun-loving siblings, Thelma, Wynona, Lu, Ardon, Pete, and Harold. They were a musical family, and Elmo, Wynona, and Thelma shared their music with residents of the Nehalem Bay House and Nehalem Valley Care Center, where Elmo later lived. She is survived by her sister Lu Ell.

May 21, 2019, in Golden Valley, Minnesota

John contributed to the public good through his participation in 18 public offices and commissions. He served three terms as a Minnesota state representative, was a member of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents, chaired the Metropolitan Transit Commission, and served on the Village Planning Commission and Village Council. In his own words he strived “to make government work a little better.”

He began his commitment to public service at an early age. Volunteering to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, he was assigned as a meteorologist on Okinawa.

He attended the premeteorology program at Reed in the mid-’40s. After graduating from the University of Minnesota Law School, he entered a law practice with his father, Justice of the Peace Anton Yngve; his mother, Esther Yngve; and his brother, Albert Yngve.

Not one to shirk a difficult task, John’s tenure on the Minnesota Board of Regents was characterized by his commitment to safety and order during a period of major demonstrations against the Vietnam War on the university campus. His particular skill lay in his ability to find the common path toward community betterment. As a state representative, he helped sponsor a major effort to decriminalize mental health sufferers and a precedent-setting bill to establish unemployment compensation.

His acumen and personal integrity led him to positions of leadership in business.

He became president of Nortronics, Inc., chairman of Bondhus Corporation, and chairman/founder of Cincinnatus, Inc. His success in business and devotion to community improvement led to his appointment

by Governor Arne Carlson to chair Minnesota Technology, Inc., where he focused state resources on leveraging technology to create business success.

Despite his demanding public life, he was an ever-present guiding and loving star to his family, especially his youngest son, John Per, who was tragically lost to cancer in 1999 after a lifelong battle with illness.

John is survived by his brother, Albert Yngve; sons Rolf, Aron, Hans ’82, and Hal; and his wife, Carrie Yngve, who brought five stepdaughters into his family, Linda, Nancy, Kathleen, Joni, and Janet.

42 Reed Magazine march 2021

June 16, 2015, in Wheeler, Oregon.

Katherine Ferguson Abel ’48 March 12, 2020, in Portland, after a brief illness, at the age of 93.

Katherine was born in Evanston, Illinois, but by the time she was 13, the family had settled in San Francisco. During the Second World War, her mother was a Red Cross volunteer. A fellow volunteer with two children at Reed praised the college.

“My mother had heard vague rumblings about the possibility of a female labor draft in the country,” Katherine remembered. “She wanted me to avoid that and get into college.”

Mrs. Ferguson sent a letter to Cheryl Scholz, the widow of Reed President Richard Scholz [president 1921–24], who married E.B. MacNaughton [Reed president 1948–52] in 1944. A devoted instructor then working in admission, Cheryl visited the Fergusons in San Francisco to interview Katherine and encouraged her to apply.

“I entered Reed before graduating from high school, just 17 years old, in the summer of 1944,” Katherine said. “Wartime on campus was a remarkable surcease from wartime in the world. It permitted that door to shut.”

Taking up residence in the Old Dorm Block, she found the introductory humanities course “was like being in nirvana.” She took creative writing from Prof. Lloyd Reynolds [art/English 1929–69], beginning a student-mentor relationship that blossomed into a lifelong friendship. Katherine was also powerfully influenced by the ceramics class taught by professors Fred Littman [art 1941–46] and Marianne Littman [art 1945–51].

“I knew I was in the midst of something incredible,” she said, “I was so grateful to be [at Reed]. I couldn’t let any person or chat or anything go by. I had to stop and engage myself in it. I just grabbed every brass ring of every element in the place, deliriously happy to be there, and sort of wore myself to a nubbin in reacting. I became so bedazzled and vibrated to every element of that place that I couldn’t eat properly.”

She also wasn’t sleeping enough and became wraithlike. At the end of her freshman year (which was fall quarter), her mother took her home.

The following fall, Katherine returned, focusing on sociology and literature. In her first year on campus, she met Richard Abel ’48 in the coffee shop and they courted in the downstairs living area of Anna Mann, her residence hall. Near the end of their sophomore year, he proposed. “In the class of 1948 there were at least five couples or six couples who married one another,” Katherine recalled. “Find somebody who has the common ailment, the bug, the addiction [to Reed], you want to stay with them.”

They married the following December and returned to Reed, where Richard continued his studies and Katherine audited classes until she became pregnant.

Family was the center of her world, but in addition to raising two daughters, Katherine volunteered in educational institutions. She was president of the parent-faculty association and a board member at Catlin Gabel School in Portland. She volunteered in the Catlin lowerschool art room, taught watercolor at Arbor School every summer for 25 years, was on the board of the Community Music Center, and wore many hats as a volunteer at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. She claimed that pottery was what kept her balanced in life, and was the most graphic expression of her legacy at Reed. “My Reed education impressed upon me forever the absolute imperative of leading an examined, reasoned life,” Katherine said. “I have steadily worked at being faithful to that.” She is survived by her two daughters, Cori Bacher and Kit Abel Hawkins.

Gerald H. Robinson ’48 November 13, 2020, in Portland.

Born in Portland, Gerald graduated from Lincoln High School, served in the U.S . Ar my, and earned his bachelor’s degree from Reed in political science.

In a letter written in 1988 to Reed President James Powell [1988–91], Gerald commended Prof. Richard Jones [history 1941–86], saying, “Dick Jones had been at Reed only three years

when I entered as a freshman, but already he was recognized as one of its finest faculty members, ranking in a company of giants . . .

Although I went on to study with many famous teachers, I still consider Dick’s course in English Constitutional History as the finest—and the most challenging—I have ever experienced.”

Gerald went on to earn both an MA and a JD from Columbia University and opened a law practice in Portland in 1952, the days of the “Red Scare,” McCarthyism, and the nascent Subversive Activities Control Board. Gerald was asked if he would take a case defending a Portland resident against deportation on charges that he was a Communist.

“There I was in a new office with one or two files,” Gerald remembered. “So, I said yes.

Once that case got into the press, there were a surprising number of cases that came to me.”

For the rest of his career, Gerald made a specialty of fighting for immigration rights. He was the first Oregon attorney to specialize in the field, one of the first members of the American Bar Association’s Association of Immigration Lawyers, and the author of Immigration Law for the General Practitioner. He was the organizer and first chair of the Oregon Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and upon his retirement was elected an honorary life member for his accomplishments as a litigator of immigration cases in various federal courts. He was also active in various civil liberty causes; organized a group of attorneys to represent conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War; and, until his retirement in 1997, handled a variety of business, personal, and trial cases.

At Reed, Gerald discovered photography through Ed Martin ’47 and participated in the joint program offered at Reed and the Portland Art Museum School. He became a well-known photographer with more than 20 one-man shows of his work. He taught the history of photography at Mt. Hood Community College and helped organize the University of Oregon Art Museum’s photo gallery. In addition to books of his photographic works, he wrote Elusive Truth: Four Photographers at Manzanar, featuring photographs taken at the Japanese-American relocation center by Ansel Adams, Clem Albers, Dorothea Lange, and Toyo Miyatake, and a book of essays on the history of photography, Photography, History, and Science.

Gerald is survived by his wife, Mutsumi I. Robinson, and a child.

James Rogers ’51 July 7, 2020, in Portland.

Born in Guernsey, Wyoming, James graduated from high school with an honors scholarship to the University of Wyoming. He served in the U.S. Army stationed in Japan after the bombing of Hiroshima. Returning stateside, he attended Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, and

SAVE THE DATE! VIRTUAL REUNIONS 2021 JUNE 7–13, 2021 We can’t wait to see you at Reunions 2021, which will be held virtually in lieu of an in-person celebration. Last year, Virtual Reunions brought hundreds of alumni together from around the world to share in events, including a poetry reading, happy hours, musical performances, and a Meat Smoke sausage-making demo. We can’t wait to share this year’s schedule! Reunion planning committees are being formed for class years ending in 1 and 6, but alumni from all class years are encouraged to attend.

Email alumni@reed.edu to get involved in class gatherings.

Visit alumni.reed.edu for details as the schedule develops.

VIRTUAL ALUMNI COLLEGE 2021 JUNE 4–6, 2021 In honor of the environmental studies program’s ten-year anniversary, Alumni College 2021 will focus on sustainability and the environment.

From June 4 to 6, we will offer lectures by alumni and faculty who are working to fight the effects of climate change through policy, research, technology, and education. All sessions are free for alumni and include time for discussion (almost like a Hum 110 conference!). Registration will open in May 2021—check back for updates.

In Memoriam then transferred to Reed where he wrote his thesis, “The Centro-Surface of an Hyperboloid of Two Sheets,” with Prof. F.L. Griffin [math 1911–56]. He earned a master’s in mathematics at Oregon State University.

After teaching mathematics at Rainier and Cleveland high schools in Portland, Jim was hired as one of the first two math instructors at the new Portland Community College. During his teaching career, he coauthored more than 20 math textbooks. He is survived by his wife, Elinore; his sister, Norma; and four daughters.

William Carl Schieve ’51

September, 19, 2020, in Fredericksburg, Texas.

A Portland native, Bill was an honor student and track star at Grant High School. He majored in physics at Reed, where he wrote his thesis, “Bose-Einstein Gases,” advised by Prof. Jean Delord [physics 1950–88]. He married Florence Gilleland ’53 in Portland; his lifelong friend David Ashmore ’52 was his best man. Bill and Florence moved to Pennsylvania, where he earned both a master’s and a PhD in physics from Lehigh University. He wrote his dissertation on “The Equations of Motion of Point Singularities of the Electromagnetic and ChargeSymmetric Scalar Meson Fields.”

Bill’s fields of interest included many-body relativistic particle mechanics, relativistic BoseEinstein condensation, relativistic chaos, ultrahigh-temperature thermodynamics, classicalquantum correspondence, quantum statistics of the micromaser, and chaos and limit cycles in Hopfield neural nets.

He began his career in the early ’60s at the United States Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL) in San Francisco, where he was awarded a silver medal for his research.

He received a NATO fellowship for a year’s 44 Reed Magazine march 2021

study in Belgium at Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he met future Nobel Prize laureate Ilya Prigogine. Prigogine invited him to join the Center for Complex Quantum Systems in Austin at the University of Texas. For more than 40 years, Bill mentored UT students toward their PhDs, and researched and wrote papers and books with colleagues. He authored more than 100 articles and edited five books in the field of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and chaos. With his student Matthew Trump, he published the book Classical Relativistic Many-Body Dynamics (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999). Quantum Statistical Mechanics (Cambridge, 2009), the book he wrote with Lawrence P. Horwitz, is referenced frequently. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Ulm. Bill was honored with an American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) award at the Navy Operational Support Center (NOSC) for work on the nonlinear and stochastic dynamics of the superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID). He received the Senior Humboldt Prize and a University Institute Award for a sabbatical leave to the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Garching bei München, Germany. His work on chaos in the SQUID, particularly the effects of noise, both quantum and classical, resulted in a semiclassical perturbation analysis of the mean field description of the laser. Two years later, he again received the ASEE award for a series of papers on a new nonlinear dynamics model of the Hopfield neural network.

Bill and Florence lived in Austin and then moved to a small farm near Fredericksburg, where they entertained visitors from around the world. She survives him, as do their two children, Catherine and Eric.

Paul Choban ’54

August 6, 2020, in Kailua Kona, Hawaii, from Parkinson’s.

Paul’s parents were both Greek; it was his first language. He learned languages easily. He began at Reed in 1950, majoring in chemistry and mathematics. He spent two years at Reed and then two years in the army. Coming back to Reed, he completed his degree in chemistry on the G.I. Bill and wrote his thesis, “The Reaction of Silver Ion with Carbon Monoxide,” with Prof. Arthur F. Scott [chemistry 1923–790] advising. But mathematics was always part of his education.

On graduating, Paul taught science at Portland State University. He married Mona Hege and then taught at the University of Connecticut, where his son Jim was born.

While Paul was teaching in Portland, he ran into Ehrick Wheeler ’52 at the Spatchaus,

where both men had gone to get the first beer of the day. Ehrick brought Paul home to our house for dinner and we became friends forever.

Later, when Paul married Mona, the four of us got together for barbeques frequently.

In 1972, Paul bought a farm in Forest Grove.

He said it was a good place to raise trees, children, and vegetables. After his career in teaching at universities, he began a career in investment banking—all that ability in mathematics came to the fore.

Paul lived to travel. He and Mona traveled through Germany, Italy, and Greece, and saw some of the islands of Southeast Asia. By himself he went to Russia, confident in Prof.

Vera Krivoshein’s [Russian 1949–52] teaching from Reed, and was successful.

The idyll of Paul and Sylvia Wheeler ’54 began after Ehrick died of colon cancer in 2001. Mona Choban also died of cancer and was not able to live in their new Hawaiian house very long. Paul came to visit me in Portland. We went out together, laughed, and had wonderful visits. He asked me to visit him in Hawaii. I did and stayed 20 years, with no regrets, because friendship blossomed into love. Reed men make good mates.

We loved Hawaii. He was a grand cook. No one had cooked breakfast for me in years. Paul’s love of travel led us to Crete; Greece; Turkey, where his family came from; and Ireland, where my family came from. We loved the grand American Southwest and Canada. We rode elephants in Vietnam, saw Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and floated on a teak boat in Ha Long Bay. We all mourn him. Paul lived a wonderful life and did not possess a mean thought ever.

As I said, Reed men make good mates.

He is survived by his mate of 20 years, Sylvia Sprout Wheeler; his son, James E. Choban; his daughter, Jennifer Choban; and his brother, George Choban. —contributed by Sylvia Sprout Wheeler ’54

Richard Eldon Blanchard ’56 September 4, 2020, in Oroville, Washington, from pulmonary fibrosis.

Richard was born in Tacoma, Washington, where he graduated from L incoln Hig h School. He attended Reed and the University of Puget Sound before concluding his education at the University of Washington Dental School. He practiced dentistry in Lakewood and East Wenatchee, Washington, and in Quesnel, British Columbia.

He also served in the Army Reserve dental corps.

He was married to Margaret Cluchey and they had two daughters, Jennifer and Anne Marie.

An avid outdoorsman, Richard loved to hunt, fish, and share adventures with Margaret.

They moved to a ranch in British Columbia and

raised Black Angus cattle. They each obtained a pilot’s license and then purchased a float plane. Family adventures involved camping and fishing trips at places not reachable by other vehicles. In 1980, the family moved back to the United States due to increasingly severe winter weather and to be closer to aging parents. When their daughters went off to college, they travelled extensively throughout the United States and Canada. When Richard retired from his dental practice, they built their dream log home in Okanogan and were able to just walk outside to go fishing. He is survived by his wife of 55 years and his two daughters.

Francis Many ’56

August 30, 2020, in Navarro, California, of a heart attack.

factors from serpentine soil in Alameda County, and impact of justice system referrals on alcoholism treatment.

Fran’s lifelong passions were vegetable gardening and trees. He planted his first victory garden at age seven, treasured the native dogwood trees at his childhood home, and continued to grow food wherever he lived.

So, it was only natural that he and third wife Kathy Janes retired to 40 acres of redwoods in Mendocino County in 1999, naming the place Many Acres. Fran created an orchard and practiced grafting. He built many raised beds for growing corn and other favorite veggies above the root-laden redwood soil. He grew his best garden ever during the summer of 2020, despite being weakened by heart problems. He died of a sudden heart attack among his redwoods, after having spent the morning working in the garden.

Fran is survived by Kathy Janes, his wife of 31 years; his son, Gabriel; and his younger brothers, Peter and Seth.

Robert Lloyd Smith ’57

November 15, 2020, in Corvallis, Oregon, at home.

Known as Fran by his family, Francis was born and raised in rural Mendham Township, New Jersey. He graduated from Morristown High School and came to Reed in 1953 after discovering that the Colorado School of Mines was not to his liking. His favorite professor at Reed was Prof. John Pock [sociology 1955–98], of whom he spoke fondly for many years, and he wrote his thesis, “Students’ Ideal and Typical Teachers,” with Prof. Leslie Squier [psychology 1953–88] advising.

Fran married classmate Karen Renne ’56 on their graduation from Reed in 1956, and they spent 10 years together as graduate students in Eugene, Oregon, and in Berkeley, California. They spent their spare time backpacking in the Sierra Nevada and enjoying serious bicycle riding with a group of companions that included fellow Reedies Dorothy Frey Marshall ’54 and John Scott ’55. Fran’s many travel adventures took him from Cape Newenham in Alaska to Morocco. He roamed at various times from the Darien Gap in Panama to the Arctic Ocean village of Tuktoyaktuk.

In 1969, Fran married Sheila Stern, the mother of his sons Adam and Gabriel. He worked for many years as a statistician at the Survey Research Center at UC Berkeley, where he helped design and analyze results of diverse research projects in public health and social science. Among them were analysis of gerontological admissions to UCSF’s psych ward, prenatal risk factors in hyaline membrane disease, effects of maize-based replacement for breast milk in Guatemala, mortality risk

A professor at the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University, Bob’s special interests included coast upwelling, dynamics of the ocean over the continental shelf and slope, and eastern boundary currents.

He was born in Chicago and grew up there in a home built by his maternal grandparents from Bohemia. His father was a businessman and his mother was a teacher. During WWII, the family had a victory garden and his mother pickled pigs’ feet and made soap. His grandmother Mary lived with them because her husband had died during the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Bob did well in school, attending Lowell Elementary and Kelvyn Park High School, where he played the tuba poorly—though he deeply enjoyed listening to music. His favorite subjects were art, math, and science. Bob was inducted into the National Honor Society and earned prizes at the Chicago Student Science Fair for his cloud chamber and an exhibit on chromatography. An article in the school newspaper noted that “Bob’s friendly smile and delightful personality makes a combination that is hard to beat.” Childhood summers were spent joyfully swimming and playing on the beach at the family summer home in Dune Acres. During his high school years, Bob attended Summer Naval School at Culver Academy in Indiana. He enjoyed the sailing, but not the military lifestyle.

In 1953, Bob came to Reed, which had recently been featured in the Saturday Evening Post. He enjoyed studying physics with fellow students in the so-called Rumford Society,

several of whom became lifelong friends: Larry, Gene, Chris, and Peter. He also enjoyed studying the humanities, particularly with Prof. Lloyd Reynolds [art/English 1929–69], a worldclass calligrapher and humanist. Bob’s physics professor was disappointed that, in his senior year, Bob chose to take Reynolds’s Graphics Arts Workshop rather than an extra physics course.

He loved calligraphy and adopted italic handwriting for everyday use throughout his long teaching career. In later years, he was a member of the Goose Quill Guild in Corvallis, studied calligraphy with OSU art professor Allen Q. Wong, and lettered wedding and birth announcements for his family.

Bob met his first wife, Sheila Smith ’60, at Reed. They married in 1958, while Bob was a graduate student in physics at the University of Oregon. His career took an unexpected turn as a result of academic politics: his studies at U of O were interrupted when his thesis adviser was given notice to leave, though the preceding department chair had given him a firm promise of tenure and promotion. Cast adrift, Bob and his fellow students eventually wound up at Oregon State University, where Prof. Wayne Burt was just beginning a new program in oceanography.

In the fall of 1960, Bob signed on as the first graduate student in physical oceanography. His OSU thesis adviser, June Grace Pattullo, had studied with Walter Munk at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and was the first woman in the United States to get a PhD in physical oceanography. She encouraged her students to collaborate not only with each other, but also with colleagues in other disciplines and other institutions. Her senior students, Curt Collins, Bob, and Chris Mooers, got along very well together, and their work focused on the local ocean off Newport; together they undertook pioneering measurements of the currents over the continental shelf as well as seasonal monitoring of coastal upwelling and downwelling. All became internationally known leaders in coastal oceanography.

After completing his PhD, Bob took a NATO postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Oceanography in England before returning to Corvallis as an assistant professor. After a few years, he felt the need to spread his wings further afield and took leave from OSU in 1969 to serve as scientific officer with the Office of Naval Research, traveling around the country for site visits at various oceanographic institutions to evaluate their research programs and proposals.

Two years was enough to convince him that the collaborative spirit at Oregon State suited him far better than the narrow focus or internal competition he observed elsewhere.

He returned to OSU in 1971. Bob was a leader in the NSF-funded Coastal Upwelling Unit off Oregon and follow-on experiments off Northwest Africa and Peru. He worked closely with OSU’s John Allen in Coastal Ocean Dynamics Experiment (CODE) and SuperCODE off Reed Magazine march 2021 45

In Memoriam

Yvonne Altmann ’60

California. Bob was vital in OSU’s participation and leadership roles in the many large-group, collaborative observing programs that followed, and he helped foster the tone for collaborative research in OSU’s oceanography for many years.

He was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and served as editor of Progress in Oceanography. He enjoyed sabbatical studies in Germany, in Wales, and especially at CSIRO in Hobart, Tasmania. Bob was adviser, mentor, and good friend to many students, postdocs, and technicians, and was a terrifically collegial scientist and a great host.

Beyond oceanography, Bob enjoyed the good things in life: swimming, walking, wine, food, art, music, Shakespeare, religion, history, and his grandchildren. His friendly good nature extended into all these areas. Reed College remained important to Bob, and he was very pleased to have his son, Colin Smith ’86, and his granddaughter, Ella Banyas ’17, become Reed alumni. He loved the Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene, and was especially inspired by the major Bach choral works conducted by Helmuth Rilling and Matthew Halls.

He was a member of St Mary’s Catholic Church in Corvallis and was friends with the monks at the Benedictine Abbey in Mt. Angel and the Trappist Abbey in Carlton, Oregon.

In recent years Bob’s weekly round of meeting with friends (for water exercise, coffee, beer or Bible study) grew more and more important. And then, in March 2020, all of those activities ended abruptly, and his joy began to fade. Bob is survived by his second wife Jane, and his children Suzanne, Sean and Colin.

Yvonne was born in Paris, France, and attended Reed for three years. She received a bachelor of science degree from Georgetown University, with majors in French and German. Completing course requirements for the master’s degree at Georgetown, she was awarded translator’s certificates in French and German and taught French at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.

Yvonne pursued a wide-ranging career, which increasingly focused on fundraising and development for nonprofit organizations. She served as assistant to four successive presidents of the Fund for Peace, a New York educational foundation promoting world order and citizen involvement in foreign affairs. She was administrator and fundraising coordinator of the New York–based Scientists’ Institute for Public Information, a national public interest group. She assisted in the establishment of the Margaret Mead Internship in Policy Related Science, an undergraduate internship for science students administered by the Scientists’ Institute.

After moving to Portland from New York, Yvonne was appointed assistant to City Commissioner Mildred Schwab and served as liaison between the commissioner and various departments within Portland’s Bureau of Parks.

In 1980, she began a three-year stint as the director of Reed’s Annual Fund.

Returning to New York, she became associate director of the New York Committee for Young Audiences, served as fundraising counsel to Family Recovery, Inc., and worked for years as a fundraiser for the Opera Orchestra of New York.

She was married to Peter Rubstein ’61, who died August 7, 2020.

Nancy Standhardt Seifert ’58 June 15, 2020, in Portland.

Nanc y was bor n in Roswell, New Mexico, and graduated from Roswell High School.

She came to Reed, where she met her husband, Harold Siefert ’55. For many years she worked at the Goose Hollow Inn as head of kitchen. Nancy was an accomplished pencil and ink artist and enjoyed being a homemaker with pets galore. She belonged to the Oregon Society of Artists and was a member of the Multnomah chapter of the D.A.R. She is survived by her son, Paul Siefert.

Mary Jones Flores ’59 May 31, 2018, in Spokane, Washington.

Born in Seattle, Mary attended Reed and was employed for most of her adult life by the State of Washington, beginning at the University of Washington and ending at the Department of Corrections. She is survived by her son, Nils Mork, and her daughter, Tina Fairfax.

46 Reed Magazine march 2021

November 19, 2018 in Portland, Oregon.

Ragan Lewis Cary ’60

August 30, 2020, in Union, Connecticut.

Mentor to generations of children and a gracious host, Ragan was born in New York City.

She and John Whittier Cary ’60 met as Reed students. It was not long before Ragan confided to friend Anne Wood Squier ’60 that here was the man she would spend the rest of her life with. Oh, was she ever right!

Ragan and John married in 1958. Together they raised a family in Vermont and New Hampshire, spending time many summers in midcoast Maine. Ragan adored children and made them—both family and students—a very special part of her life. After moving to Rockland, Maine, in 1990, Ragan taught gifted and talented students in Shapleigh, Alfred, and Waterboro; volunteered at the Rockland Public Library; and helped organize the Mid-Coast Maine Artist’s Tour for several summers.

John and Ragan owned and hosted the Old

Granite Inn in Rockland for seven years, after which they split their time among Texas, Maine, and Connecticut. Ragan made beautiful gardens and delicious food, and could always be located by following her easy, contagious laugh. This last blueberry summer in Union will be remembered as a treasured time of laughter, joy, and love.

Predeceased by her son, John, and her brother, Lawrence Lewis, Ragan leaves behind her husband, John; four beloved daughters, Ragan Bartlett, Catharine Cary, Sarah Cary, and Susannah Perkins; and her sister Lucy Lewis Johnson, as well as nephew William Johnson ’02.­ —submitted by Anne Squier ’60.

Mark Gabor ’60

May 2020, in New York, New York, as a result of complications from COVID-19.

Mark earned a bachelor’s degree in literature at Reed, where he wrote his thesis, “Dryden’s Chaucerian Fables,” advised

by Prof. William Alderson [English 1943–64]. As a student at Reed, he lived on a houseboat on the Willamette.

“Reed gave me the confidence to pursue a career in publishing,” he said. “It taught me to think for myself; not to be cowed by the establishment. I wish I could take the two years of humanities all over again.”

After earning a master’s of journalism from New York University, Mark became a director at the publishing firm of David & Charles, Inc., in Vermont. He continued to work as a freelance writer and editorial consultant and in 1960, he completed research and editing on a book, The Lower Eastside—Then and Now, a history and tour guide of New York’s colorful years of immigration and cultural assimilation. Other books he wrote include Art of the Calendar; The Pin-Up: A Modest History; Illustrated History of Girlie Magazines: From National Police Gazette to the Present; Houseboats: Living on the Water around the World; a book on the history of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.; and 111 Shops in New York that You Must Not Miss, which he wrote with his life partner, artist and book designer Susan Lusk. She survives him, as does his daughter, Julia Gabor.

David Dressler ’63

October 11, 2020, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, of oral cancer.

David wrote his thesis, “Martin Buber’s Notion o f R e s p o n s i b i l i t y,” advised by Prof.

William Peck [philosophy 1961–2002].

Armed with an inquisitive mind—honed by his philosophy studies

at Reed—he worked on a fish-counting boat one summer, and, fascinated with how fish moved, he was inspired to learn to dance.

Traveling from Alaska in the back of a pickup truck, he ended up in Vancouver, B.C., where he enrolled in a dance school.

After becoming a professional improvisational modern dancer, David opened his own dance studio in Vancouver. For him, dance was more than just movement; it was a way to get in touch with the energies of oneself and others. Decades after taking instruction from him, former dance students would contact him to say the new awareness those lessons had spurred continued to remain relevant.

Deciding he needed a more consistent and livable income David became a medical massage therapist. For 40 years, he devoted himself to helping people feel and function better, retiring in 2019. He also provided editing services, and was genuinely interested in helping to effectively convey a writer’s message. He wrote a bit himself, and his published works included a tribute to the astronauts killed when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003 and a research paper for a massage technique he invented.

He is survived by his brother, Joshua.

Jean Marie Walker ’63

April 13, 2020, in Corvallis, Oregon, at home.

Jean Marie majored in physics at Reed, where she wrote her thesis, “A Brief Study of Photoexcited Electrons in Thin Metal Films,” advised by Prof. Dennis Hoffman [physics 1959–90]. She received her MA in teaching at Reed, and later earned a master’s in ecology at San Francisco State University, an associate of arts degree in computer and information services at De Anza College, and another associate’s degree from Ohlone College.

Elizabeth Coates ’66

June 14, 2020, in Eugene, Oregon, from complications due to diabetes.

Following in the footsteps of their uncle, Arthur Kingsley Trenholme ’28, Elizabeth and her sister, Robin Coates Kunz ’69, both came to Reed. Liz received her bachelor’s degree in literature and later attended graduate school.

She worked in business and was married and divorced three times. In addition to her sister, Robin, she is survived by her five sons, David Coates-Chaney, Raleigh Coates-Chaney, Richard Coates-Chaney, Curtis Coates-Chaney, and Kingsley Coates-Chaney.

Anne Treseder ’66

December 1, 2020, in San Francisco, California.

When Janet Treseder, Anne’s sister, said that my wife, Elizabeth (Shaw) Cronbach ’66, and I were Anne’s best friends, we were touched.

Some things we remembered about Anne at Reed: On the occasion of my first meeting with her, Anne knew of Johnny Ace, a rhythm and blues musician. In the late ’50s, I would listen to him on a pop music AM radio show. By that time, he was dead, having shot himself playing Russian roulette. I was very surprised that anyone else at Reed had heard of him. Anne liked taking a bus to shop for food and going to the Catlin Gabel rummage sale. She was active in the left-wing Focus Club and managed to survive sociology under the Prof. John Pock [sociology 1955–98] regime. She wrote her thesis, “Role Orientations among Physicians,” advised by Prof.

Howard Jolly [sociology 1949–70].

Anne got a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Wisconsin and a law degree from Golden State University. She worked at various law firms, ending up as counsel at the State of California Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board, from which she retired.

In the ’70s in San Francisco and Madison, she was active in NARAL, the reproductive freedom network, when it was just starting. In the ’80s and later in San Francisco, she studied Portuguese, visited Portugal and Spain, and got interested in causes related to East Timor and the posthumous recognition of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a righteous gentile and diplomat who facilitated the passage of Jews from France to Portugal by issuing passports against the instructions of his government.

Anne did not convert to Judaism, but might as well have. (She officially left the LDS church— it took some doing!) She gave me a subscription to the Northern California Jewish Bulletin, now known as J: The Jewish News of Northern California. This was important to me since it is my only connection to organized Jewish life.

She had two nephews whose dad is a musician who had a longtime job on the Queen Mary.

We heard a lot about them. Their family is Jewish.

In the second half of the 2000s, Anne had to move from the apartment on Lake Street near 19th Avenue, where she had lived for more than 30 years. She managed to find another apartment on Lake Street near Fifth Avenue but continued to use the pharmacy and post office near her former apartment.

At this point, I started chauffeuring her around to run errands. Up until last fall, it was almost a weekly excursion for her and me to go up to CVS Pharmacy at 32nd and Clement, the post office at Geary and 21st, and the supermarket in Laurel Village on California Street. Finally, as her health

was failing, I would also drive her to get blood tests at the UCSF/Mt. Zion complex.

She had emergency surgery the evening of December 13, 2019, when she had her colon removed. After that, she spent a couple of weeks in the former Jewish Home for the Aged (now part of the San Francisco Campus for Jewish Living) and then was moved back to her apartment on Lake Street, where she stayed until the end. I would visit her up until the time of the initial COVID lockdown. After that, I would phone her occasionally. I kept hoping she would get out of her apartment, but there were three flights of stairs, so she never left.

I spoke to her a week or 10 days before she died. Anne was aware of the election results but confused about whether Donald was still in office. We’ll miss her. —Contributed by Michael Cronbach ’65

Laurie Appell ’70

April 16, 2020, in Hartford, Connecticut, from COVID-19.

Born in Queens, New York, Laurie attended both Reed and Hunter College, but earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing from New York University. For some time, Laurie had been a resident of Laurel House in Stamford, Connecticut, a housing and care facility for people with mental illness. While there, Laurie worked tirelessly as a mental health advocate, receiving a Governor’s Victory Award for her work in mental health advocacy. She was a gifted poet, but will be remembered for her kind heart, gentle soul, and determination that all people should be treated with respect and dignity. She is survived by her sisters, Randy Johnson and Jodie Appell, and her brothers, Glenn Appell and Jonathan Appell.

Andrew Marcus Kurn ’70 November 17, 2020, in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, of prostate cancer.

Andrew wrote his thesis “Optical Fourier Transforms: Or Through the L ooking Glass,” advised by Prof. Jean DeLord [physics 1950– 88] and went on to Syracuse University, but left Syracuse to follow a girl to the newly opened Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. Instead of enrolling in classes, Andrew approached physics professors and offered to solve problems for them. At a time when computers filled most of an air-conditioned room and programming was done using punch cards, he understood both physics and computers. In 1981, Simon Fraser Prof. John Cochran wrote the following about Andrew: “I have known Andrew Kurn for the period fall Reed Magazine march 2021 47

In Memoriam of 1970 to present. During the entire period in which we worked together at SFU, Andrew Kurn wrote and developed the programs which we use to compare our data with theory . . . The problem is not only to be able to make a calculation, but to be able to rapidly change the input parameters, to repeat the calculation, and to compare the calculation with the data using a graphics display. The set of programs which Andrew Kurn developed for us have evolved into an indispensable and convenient set of tools which form the heart of our data analysis system. Without these programs we would simply not be able to make sense of our data. I am convinced there was no other person on our campus who could have set up these programs as well as Andrew Kurn. We required a programmer who had to know what was required—not what we said we wanted; and Andrew Kurn is sufficiently independent of mind that he kept hammering at us to extract the information he required to give us what was needed consistent with what was possible within the evolving constraints imposed by our computing system.”

In 1977, Andrew completed his MSc thesis, “What Light?: Or the Question of Parallel Pumping in Ferromagnets,” concerning ferromagnetic resonance and ferromagnetic antiresonance. His sense of humor and love of the classics is evidenced by the quotes he attached to each chapter of his thesis, among which was “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; They toil not, neither do they spin.” He left SFU in 1981, but returned to complete a PhD in computing science in 1991. After holding a variety of positions at SFU and elsewhere, he joined the technical staff in physics at the SFU Surrey campus in 2008. Upon retiring in 2015, Andrew didn’t want to give up teaching, so he started tutoring students for free, offering two hours of help when they only expected one.

Andrew enjoyed many activities outside physics and computing, including music. He was partial to Bach and doo-wop, sang in the SFU Madrigal Singers and choir, and loved to listen to Irving Berlin while he commuted to work. In hospice, he overheard a fellow patient singing and immediately sang the melody back, using the solfege notation he had learned at Reed. He was a central figure in the local contra dance community, played bridge, went hiking, was an aficionado of film noir, and provided technical support for radio station CJSF. Andrew was a crusty man (with layers of crustiness) with an unusual level of self-awareness. A friend commented that Andrew wore his self-awareness on his sleeve. But once he trusted you, he revealed a warm, intelligent, kind, and caring soul. He is survived by his partner of many years, Barbara Beach.

48 Reed Magazine march 2021

Diane Shamash ’77

August 13, 2006, in New York, New York, from cervical cancer.

Diane devoted her life to bringing art to the people. Millions of people thrilled to the droll installations she organized on the streets of Seattle and an island that floated the waterways of New York.

She understood the power of whimsy and said, “Just to have something out there that’s unusual and unexpected that makes people think is important.”

A native New Yorker, she grew up loving the city’s waterways and the nearby Hudson River Valley. Years later, she would name the nonprofit arts organization she founded Minetta Brook, after a stream that once flowed through what is now Greenwich Village.

Committed to strengthening the relationship between artists and communities, Minetta Brook presented public art projects, publications, and exhibitions throughout New York State—reflecting the ecological, historical, and social organism of the place.

After attending Reed for one year, Diane went on to earn a masters of science degree in visual studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She became the curator of modern art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and then gallery director for the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts.

Moving to Seattle, she became the director of public art for the Seattle Arts Commission from 1987 through 1993. In Public, her imaginative series of temporary public art works commissioned from artists around the world, won honors from the U.S. Conference of Mayors as “a model for an effective strategy in public education.” Diane broadened the idea of what public art could be, hiring artist Cris Bruch, for example, to create a road to nowhere paved with bales of castoff clothes. Gloria Bornstein and Donald Fels created waterfront plaques that put a new spin on historic-interest markers.

Traveling the world lecturing about public art, Diane served as a consultant for the Dia Center for the Arts, Scenic Hudson, the Marian Goodman Gallery, The Redevelopment Authority of the City of Philadelphia, Parrish Art Museum, and the Architectural League of New York. She wrote articles and reviews for Art in America, Art Monthly, and Documents magazine.

Her commitment to artists and place resulted in her founding Minetta Brook in 1995.

In 2002, it produced riverrun, where for two weeks works by Richard Serra, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Peter Hutton, and Colleen Mulrenan were projected on the façade of the Holland Tunnel Ventilation Building for an audience of 2.5 million. That was followed by Watershed: The Hudson Valley Art Project, where 10 artists

presented site-specific works that engaged the natural and cultural geography of the Hudson River. By 2005, Minetta Brook was involved in numerous projects, including advancing the High Line artist collaboration with Anna Hamilton and Alice Waters.

That year, the Whitney Museum of American Art put together a retrospective of the artworks of Robert Smithson. As executive director of Minetta Brook, Diane worked in conjunction with the museum to realize Smithson’s Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island, a planted barge circumnavigating Manhattan Island. Conceived and sketched by Smithson in the ’70s, Floating Island would be a flat barge covered with soil, trees, rocks. and shrubs, pulled by a tugboat up and down the Hudson and East rivers. Following a plane crash in 1973, Smithson died without ever having seen his project realized.

Diane and Minetta Brook brought Floating Island to life—with the assistance of the Hudson River Park Trust and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

She was battling cancer and had undergone chemotherapy and radiation when construction commenced on Floating Island. She worked 16-hour days bringing the project to life, never letting her colleagues know of her illness. Floating Island, the 30 x 90-foot landscaped barge, circumnavigated Manhattan for nine days. Nearly a year later, Diane died at her Brooklyn Heights home at the age of 51, survived by her husband, Joseph Bartscherer, her son, Max, and her sister, Beba Shamash.

Elliot Jacob Sturman ’80 July 14, 2020, Los Angeles, California.

Elliot started at Reed but finished his bachelor’s degree in behavioral psycholo g y from Muir College at UC San Diego.

He earned an MBA in quantitative methods and human resource m a n a g e m e n t f ro m Northwestern University.

As a performance engineer, he worked for Blue Cross of California and developed performance measurement systems for organizations including Blue Cross of California, Wells Fargo Bank, Weyerhaeuser Mortgage Company, and Johns Hopkins Medical Center. Elliot was president and CEO of WorkScorecard.com, which generated single, analyzable overall performance scores in real time for every employee and team. He also gave presentations on performance measurement at the University of San Francisco, the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, and HR.com.

He is survived by his wife, Ann, sons Joshua and Daniel, his sisters Deborah and Esther, and his brother, David.

James McQuillen ’86

September 13, 2020, in Portland, from liver failure.

James was a self-made man: someone with a stubborn determination not to be made by others, but to make himself—to learn, experience, and master on his own terms every nuance of the world he encountered.

And do it wearing shorts if at all possible.

James grew up in Charlotte, Vermont, with two brothers and two sisters deep in the Red Sox Nation. Their parents were both doctors, his father a neurologist, his mother a forensic pathologist.

After becoming valedictorian of Champlain Valley Union High School, James entered Reed in 1982, where he majored in Russian, edited the Quest, played rugby, and picked up enviable amounts of Greek, French, Latin, and Sanskrit.

After college he taught English in Tokyo and mastered Japanese with astonishing speed.

To, from, and after Asia, James packed in as much exploration and travel as he could. He walked the Camino de Santiago with scallop shells in his pocket, no doubt savoring to himself the English translation of the pilgrimage as “the Way of St. James.” On another trip, he befriended some villagers in Syria whose hospitality included showing him how to fire an Uzi. That macho gun culture was so completely out of his character made it even more delightful to him, and a blurry picture of him unloading a magazine into a hillside was one of his most treasured mementos.

Back in the United States, he hatched a plan with Bill Fitch ’86 to bicycle from Skagway, Alaska, through the Yukon and Northwest Territories to Inuvik, Canada, an amulet’s throw from the Beaufort Sound. Their trip back up the Mackenzie River was foiled by a strike, so they called in a favor, and Sohrab Gollogly ’93 packed them into his single-engine plane for his first solo flight. Their 11-hour flight hopscotched them over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and stunning scenery James would never forget.

Back in Portland, James began working at Powell’s Travel Store, quickly charting a course to head map buyer in what was then the largest travel book and map store in the United States.

Soon his knowledge of the world’s far corners won him writing contracts for travel guides including Fodor’s, Northwest Best Places, and 1000 Places to See before You Die. Around this time, he also began working at Portland’s iconic Vat and Tonsure restaurant, where he was waiter, chef, and, after hours, player of a devastating game of chess. Steeped in classical music and opera, and boasting one of the city’s broadest and most eclectic wine lists (in addition to a jeroboam of Reedies behind the

counter), the Vat propelled James down three new paths of discovery: wine, writing, and music.

For example, not content to understand wine from only one side of the cork, James and Matt Giraud ’85 started making it together in 1994. That collaboration ultimately blossomed into Les Garagistes, a 30-family amateur winemaking collective featured in Fine Cooking, the Oregonian, and Willamette Week. The collective celebrated its 26th vintage last fall.

His knowledge of wine from grape to glass also grew into “The Crush,” a column on wine and wine culture James and Matt coauthored in Willamette Week. During their 5-year span as columnists, James also rose to become assistant arts and culture editor at the paper.

The soundtrack for all of this, since his first stunned encounter of a Mozart piano sonata

by Mitsuko Uchida in the late ’80s, was classical music. After Willamette Week, James moved to the Oregonian, where he wrote about classical music, commenting with style and insight.

He also joined Cantores in Ecclesia and sang before the pope in the International Palestrina Competition in 1997. Cantores won several gold medals that trip, but James would wryly note the biggest accolade was glancing over to see the aged pontiff going “wild with appreciation”— and here, James would stiffen and slightly move his right hand.

But in the end, no other study or subject could compare to the passion he put into raising his two daughters, Maura and Siobhán. The love he felt at their birth “was like being tasered

by God,” he once wrote, and seeing their rapt attention when he read Moby Dick to them at bedtime redeemed the world. —Contributed by Matt Giraud ’85

Devon Belcher ’89

September 14, 2020, in Sandy Springs, Georgia.

With an irrepressible grin, rock-star mullet, and unrestrained enthusiasm for heavy metal, Devon cut an unforgettable figure from the moment he arrived on campus. “I still picture Devon as that gangly kid, in shorts and a Metallica tee, with middle-parted long blond glam-metal hair,” Sandeep Kaushik ’89 wrote in remembrance of their friendship at Reed. A knack for outrageous pronouncements made him a fixture of late-night debates in the SU, where classmates soon learned that beneath the headbanging exterior lurked a first-rate intellect. Devon majored in philosophy and wrote his thesis, “ Time, Existence and Ontolog y: McTaggart’s Regress Argument and Some of Its Consequences for the Metaphysics of Time,” with Prof. Charles Cross [philosophy 1988–90]. After graduation he did a stint as a bartender and went

on to earn a PhD from the University of Colorado, eventually becoming a professor at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he taught philosophy and humanities.

Devon inspired students to love logic, metaphysics, the philosophy of language, classics of literature, and the history of science. He saw students as equals in terms of their being honest, sincere, and dedicated truth-seekers and won his university’s Award for Meritorious Teaching in 2013.

Devon never lost his plainspoken charm. He described learning philosophy as “learning to piss people off” and often made use of metaphors involving squirrels, pirates, and Vikings.

Prof. Mary Krizan, who teaches philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, overlapped in graduate school with Devon at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

“Devon was one of the good guys,” she said, “one of the people who helped me out when I was a lost and immature graduate student starting out in the PhD program at CU Boulder. While Devon was a serious philosopher of language and metaphysician, he also had a deep appreciation for the history of philosophy and proper respect for the a priori.

“Devon’s open-source, free-to-use logic textbook, Smoove Prooves, deserves special recognition. It is a clear (and entertaining) introduction to propositional logic, making a Fitch-style system of natural deduction easy for students to understand. Devon will be missed; but, as long as I am teaching logic, his legacy will live on through Albert the Pirate Squirrel sailing the high seas of natural deduction.”

Lainye Reich Heiles ’91 July 31, 2020, in Vancouver, Washington,

Lainye was born on New Year’s Day 1969, the oldest of three close-knit siblings. She discovered dance and the outdoors at a young age, the beginning of what would become a lifelong pursuit of movement and outdoor adventure. Lainye’s genius was her athleticism—moving consciously through space, creating beauty and expressing something from deep within herself.

She honed her gifts as a critical thinker, joyful dancer, and no-nonsense truth teller at Reed, where she surrounded herself with wonderful friends. A family member recalled, “She had a taste for high-quality individuals.” Her warm, magnificent smile was an invitation to swiftly reenter the generous and energetic connection she offered. Lainye wrote her thesis, “The Vietnam War and Filmic Event: The Deer Hunter, First Blood, and Platoon,” with Prof. Christopher Zinn [English 1985–92]. She chose the Reed front lawn as the location of her wedding to Tod Heiles, attended by many of her Reed friends.

Her Reed thesis led to a career in documentary filmmaking, producing and editing films, largely for Oregon Public Broadcasting. When video production proved financially insecure, she Reed Magazine march 2021 49

In Memoriam went back to school for her master’s in computer science and landed a job at Hewlett Packard, before ultimately rising to project manager in the videoconferencing industry. Long before we were all using Zoom, Lainye rigged her camper van to look like a home office so she could sleep next to the Columbia Gorge, work remotely by day, and windsurf in the evening.

In 2013, Lainye was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of breast cancer. She faced intensive chemotherapy and multiple surgeries: this was her mountain. She set in for the climb, absorbing all the information she could and taking on aggressive treatments, which saved her life but had devastating consequences.

Lainye leaves behind her two teenaged daughters, Skye and Ciela; her brother, Nathan; her sister, Sacha; and her mother, Norma. She was laid to rest next to her recently deceased father at Havurah Shalom cemetery, not far from her childhood home in Portland’s West Hills. We remain stunned by her passing. We remember her for her ambition and adventurousness, for her powerful intellect and radiant warmth, and for her spontaneity, courage, and optimism. — Contributed by Paul Edison-Lahm ’83 and Allen Poole ’92

Joshua Abraham Bell ’99 September 14, 2020, in Los Angeles, California; took his own life.

Joshua was a gifted filmmaker, director, musician, and lover of earth.

He struggled with mental illness and substance abuse. As his family encouraged, “Let us remember his brilliance, his kindness, his talent, his laughter, his dimples, his style, his many contributions to the world, and above all, his beautiful soul.”

Josh was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

At Reed he majored in English and wrote his thesis, “Saltwater Man,” with Prof. Nathalia King [English 1987–] advising. The creative thesis featured three short stories, including “Hunting for Didjeridus,” which told of Joshua’s first foray into Aboriginal society in Northern Victoria, Australia. Through a series of chance encounters—and diligent research—he was invited to Arnhem Land and introduced to an Aboriginal clansman, Djalu, setting in motion his quest to learn the didgeridoo.

“I heard the sound of the instrument and my life changed,” Josh said.

Over the next 12 years, he made five trips to Arnhem Land, bringing additional crew and building a unique bond with Djalu, his family, and the Aboriginal community. “Nothing could 50 Reed Magazine march 2021

prepare me for the challenges of working within the community,” Joshua said. “It was wonderful and scary, tragic and mystical, simultaneously.

My head was constantly spinning.”

Joshua earned an MFA in film at the University of Southern California, having started his career as a filmmaker at the Northwest Film Center in Portland. He spent nearly two years working with Cody Hanson ’99 on his first documentary, Elements of Style, about underground hip-hop in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

Joshua suggested that In Between Songs, the 2014 film he wrote, directed, and produced, had its beginnings at Reed, where his creative foundations and critical thinking were forged. The film tells the story of Aboriginal people in Australia’s Northern Territory beset by food shortages and high employment. A bauxite mining operation near their ancestral territory turns rock into aluminum, and yet for every ton of aluminum wrenched from the land, 13 tons of toxic chemicals leach into their soil and the water table. Very little of the $50 million promised in royalties ever reached the clans, and the mining has eroded their sacred traditions.

Joshua also directed the short documentary A .45 at 50th, recounting actor/activist James Cromwell’s involvement with the Committee to Defend the Black Panther Party in 1968. He received an Emmy Award nomination for his audio work on Visioneer, and commercial advertising clients included Coors, Toyota, General Mills, and Honda.

Joshua is survived by his wife, Heather; his daughter, Bowie; his parents, Carolyn and Edwin Bell; his sister, Stephanie Bell; and his brother, Randolph Bell.

“I won’t pretend to make any grand claims of friendship with Josh Bell,” said Miina Tupala ’99. “We would say ‘Hi’ in passing on campus. We didn’t party together or go grab beers off campus together. We were casually friendly. Ours was an easygoing acquaintanceship; smiles with no strings attached. And for me, that sums up what I considered the magic of Josh Bell. Despite our loose association with each other, he lives large in my memory as one gigantic bright spot of a personality. For all of the many quick interactions I experienced in person at Reed and beyond, I left every single one feeling better about myself, the world, Reed, the grey gloom, whatever. Josh was so quick with his smile and generous with his warmth. He personified, in the most positive way, that somewhat trite adage, ‘People may not remember what you said to them, but they will remember how you made them feel.’

“I feel thankful that I was lucky enough to have met Josh Bell and to have been the beneficiary of so many lovely smiles and kind words from him. I will remember him as a ray of light walking around as a lovely human being.”

Craig Lauder

December 21, 2020 in Milwaukie, Oregon, of natural causes.

If you saw Craig on campus and asked, “How are you?” he would answer in the ironic tone that was his trademark, “Living the dream.” One suspected that he was, however, living his dream.

Matt Kelly, director of donor relations at Reed, remembered, “He had a reputation for Hawaiian shirts, sardonic one-liners, large brightly colored instructional signs designed to prevent history from repeating itself, and prompt detail-oriented work.”

Born in Aberdeen, Washington, Craig graduated from Weatherwax High School and then gained certification as an offset reprographics printer from Clover Park Vocational-Technical Institute. His trade and forte was printing the old-school way: mixing inks, burning plates, and setting type. In his 20s, he worked in the printing industry in San Jose, California, and was something of a party animal, obsessed with golfing with friends every chance he could.

By his late 30s, he had mellowed out and quit drinking and smoking. He began working in Reed’s print shop in 1995, quickly earning a reputation for exacting standards and the care he took with his work. Craig went the extra mile to ensure that deadlines were met for everyone who came through the door. Thousands of Reed graduates passed through the print shop to have their thesis bound, and sharing that special moment with students was what Craig said kept him at Reed.

“His combination of gruff and sweet is what made my daughter think of Kamaji, the boiler man from Spirited Away, when she met Craig,” said Emily Hebbron, faculty administrative coordinator. “He’s running the place from the basement, with people making crazy demands, and through it all, he’s still looking out for you.”

Prof. Darius Rejali [political science 1989–] recalled elevator chats with Craig in Eliot Hall where both men talked frankly about caring for aging parents, life in Portland, and how retirement could not come soon enough. “We did this for decades,” Rejali said. Craig died one day before his retirement was to commence.

“Favorite curmudgeon of all time!” Prof. Peter Rock [English 2001–] said of Craig. “Always a ‘Well, work day ends in half an hour—that’s the good news!’ and some mysterious muttering as I handed him some last-minute, impossible, and probably personal work to do. What was he saying? Did anyone dress more brightly?

So capable, too, and always got it done, often stealthily delivered to my office before I expected it. In my classes, the students have to make and bring copies of their writing to distribute; they began every semester in fear of Craig, and within months were True Believers.”

It took five years of working with Craig for Andrew Lonergan, director of investments at Reed, to achieve what he felt was insider status with Craig.

“That feeling was never stronger than when I would watch him put some frazzled senior through the wringer because they filled out their thesis printing request incorrectly,” Lonergan said. “I always thought he was teaching them important life skills about accountability. About three to four times a year he would help me put together a big presentation. The dance went like this: I’d go to the print shop and tell him I needed ‘another one of those big books put together;’ he’d make it clear that it couldn’t have come at a worse time; and with those formalities out of the way we’d be off and working on the project. His work was always done on time and with a meticulous attention to detail, regardless of the dozen-plus other projects he

was no doubt working on. He was a character in the best sense of the word, and Reed College will be a less colorful place in his absence.”

Outside of work, Craig actively pursued his bucket-list activities: taking cooking classes with Emeril Lagasse in New Orleans, trying his hand at stunt-plane flying and NASCAR driving, and, of course, golf. He attended the 2010 Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, and five years later toured the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland—known as “the home of golf.” After exploring Scotland, he met up in Liverpool with his niece, Crystalyn Brennan, for a days-long immersion in Beatles culture, his all-time favorite band.

“We headed on to London for shopping sprees (cashmere sweaters! suede driving shoes!) and more amazing food,” Crystalyn remembered.

“He took several trips across the U.S. each year, sometimes for work, tacking on a few extra days to explore (especially if there was golf nearby!) and went to Vegas multiple times a year always taking in the Love show (Beatles), which he saw nearly a dozen times.”

Craig was the cool uncle who bought Nintendo and fancy Christmas dresses, and took his nieces and nephews to Disneyland, on speedboat rides in Portland, and on helicopter rides in New York. There were also birthday shopping sprees at Harrods and Vegas. A good cook, he loved great seafood and fine dining.

He had season tickets to the symphony, was a die-hard Seahawks and Lakers fan, and his stereo was usually blasting the Beatles or Frank Zappa. Indulging in the finer things in life, he was a snappy dresser whose signature style included cashmere sweaters, Tommy Bahama shirts, and driving loafers in the brightest of coordinating colors.

“Ever y spring , hundreds of seniors descended on the print shop to get their thesis printed before graduation, and, every spring, Craig managed to get all of their theses done,” said Angie Beiriger, director of research services. “We have a team in the library that helps students prepare their theses for final printing. And it was always such a relief and source of joy when we signed off on the final version and could tell them it was ready for printing. They were done! Because we knew that once they took their thesis to Craig, he would get it finished. Although he did have that gruff exterior, we always knew he would get it done.

Thousands of Reedies encountered Craig at a crucial time in their Reed career, and he remains a part of all of their theses. A bit of Craig will live forever in the thesis tower along with all of those printed, bound volumes.”

Pending Prof. Hubert (Hugh) Chrestenson, Prof. Mason Drukman, Monteith Macoubrie ’42, Margery Feldman Senders ’42, Robert W. Young ’42, Frances Hulse Boly ’44, Joan Chrystall Cutting ’44, Margaret Sprinkle Newton ’44, Jane Furkert Houser ’48, Clarence Allen ’49, Charles H. Lee ’50, Harvey Bjornlie ’51, Lorene Schmidt Burman ’52, Berenice Stocks Jolliver ’52, Iris Lezak ’53, Joe L. Spaeth ’53, Karl L. Metzenberg ’54, Harriett McWethy Straus ’54, James Barry Hoaglin ’55, Theodore Edlin ’57, John “Jack” Elmore ’57, Donald H. Flanders ’58, Henry “Hank” Van Meter Stevens ’58, Herschel B. Snodgrass ’59, Peter R. Dehn ’61, Dan Greenberg ’62, Richard Pincus ’64, Jon Westling ’64, Robert Morris ’65, Bernard “Biff” Bueffel ’66, David L. Garrison ’66, Michael Moran ’67, Suzanne Kali Fasteau ’68, John Oliver ’68, Robin Thomas ’68, Calvin Freeman ’69, Victoria Palmer ’70, Peter France ’76, Robert Granville, Jr. ’76, Darunee von Fleckenstein Wilson ’84, Amy Heil ’92, Christian Seppa ’93, Emiliano [Yano] Navarrette ’98.

REED COLLEGE MASTER OF ARTS IN LIBERAL STUDIES

“My work in technology is professionally rewarding but also intellectually one-dimensional. I was hungry for deeper engagement with the broader world of ideas and a guiding structure within which to do so. Participating in the MALS program has given me the opportunity to engage in the free exchange of ideas in a supportive, structured community of like-minded individuals. In my time at Reed I have experienced personal growth and significant scholarly development, and this is due in no small part to the academic excellence and attentiveness of the teaching staff, the dynamic dialectic of the class conference, and the diversity of course work.”

—DEREK FINN MALS ’21

Learn more at reed.edu/MALS.

Object of Study

What we’re looking at in class

p h o t o b y Pa u l E d i s o n - L a h m ’ 8 3

Clue to a Cataclysm This is a piece of quartzite, taken from the Reed Canyon. How did it end up there? Quartzite is a metamorphic rock derived from sandstone that has undergone intense pressure and heating below the earth’s surface. As students learn in Environmental Studies 220 (Geology) with Prof. Arthur Glasfeld, Portland lies in a basin between the Cascade volcanoes and the Coast Range. There’s a lot of volcanic rock being generated in the neighborhood, but no metamorphic rock.

52 Reed Magazine march 2021

This rock did not form underneath Portland, but instead somewhere under Idaho or Montana as part of the “Belt Supergroup” that is over a billion years old. Regional uplift brought to the surface in the northern Rockies. Then, in the last ice age, between 13 and 15 thousand years ago, a burst glacial lake washed this piece of quartzite downstream as part of a cataclysmic torrent, one of several so-called Missoula Floods, that inundated Portland and left sediment as much as 400 feet up the West Hills.

Reed’s campus is built on gravels left behind by that flooding, and the springs in the canyon are there because of a joint between two layers of flood gravels, the upper of which supports the Woodstock neighborhood. This little stone is a reminder of the titanic forces that are constantly reshaping our planet, sometimes erupting in bursts of fury, sometimes sculpting with the monumental patience of aons. (Thanks to rockhound Paul Edison-Lahm ’83 for the sample.)

These trees which he plants, and under whose shade he shall never sit, he loves them for themselves, and for the sake of his children and his children’s children, who are to sit beneath the shadow of their spreading boughs.

HYACINTHE LOYSON

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HANG IN THERE. Students post a message of hope and encouragement in the Old Dorm Block.