Reed College Magazine Fall 2023

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THE SECRET CEMETERY More than a million were buried on Hart Island, but families couldn’t visit.

Melinda Hunt ’81 changed that.

DONORS MADE AN IMPACT IN 2022—23 THANK YOU FOR ENABLING THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE WITH YOUR GIFT. Nearly 4,000 alumni,

• 100% of financial need met for all four years

parents, faculty, staff,

• 54% of Reed students received financial aid, with the

and friends energized this

average Reed grant totaling $46,643

community of scholars with

• 180 donor-funded student research and internship awards

a gift to Reed last fiscal year.

• 357 in-depth 1:1 research consultations with a librarian

“The academic style and structure of Reed feels tailored to me, and I cannot imagine experiencing college or finding a community that loves and accepts me the way Reed has anywhere else.” —SOPHIE GARTHOFF ’25

PHOTO BY ALEXEY YURENEV

F EATU RES

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What Is a Reedie, Anyway?

They analyzed Beyoncé, translated Chinese, and played frisbee. Now 12 members of the class of 2023 reflect on their time at Reed.

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The Secret Cemetery

More than a million were buried on Hart Island, but families couldn’t visit. Melinda Hunt ’81 changed that.

BY AMANDA WALDROUPE ’07

24

DEPA RTMENTS

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President’s Letter

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Eliot Circular NEWS FROM CAMPUS

Ross Tidwell ’23 Captures the Metaphor of Medieval Art Zave Payne ’25 Plays Civics Quizmaster on the Streets of Portland Triumph in 2023 10

Advocates of the Griffin A L L T H I N G S A LU M N I

Connecting with Other Reedies In Your Area Alumni Leaders Expand Support Volunteer Spotlight: Carol Casbeer ’10 32 Reediana B O O K S , F I L M , A N D M U S I C BY R E E D I E S

The Quickening 36 Class Notes REEDIE PHOTOS BY DANIEL CRONIN

News from Our Classmates 42 In Memoriam H O N O R I N G C L A S S M AT E S , PROFESSORS, AND FRIENDS W H O H AV E D I E D

Prof. Bert Brehm [biology 1962–1993] 52 What’s Next for

Reed Magazine

COVER PHOTO BY ALEXEY YURENEV

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‰

This Must Be the Place

Infinite Surprise

F ALL 2023

www.reed.edu/reed-magazine PHOTO BY LAUREN LABARRE

3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202 503-777-7591 Volume 102, No. 3 REED MAGAZINE EDITOR

Katie Pelletier ’03 503-777-7727 pelletic@reed.edu WRITER/EDITOR

Rebecca Jacobson 503-517-7735 rjacobson@reed.edu WRITER/ EDITOR

Britany Robinson 503-517-5544 robinsonb@reed.edu ART DIRECTOR

Tom Humphrey tom.humphrey@reed.edu CLASS NOTES EDITOR

Joanne Hossack ’82 joanne@reed.edu REEDIANA EDITOR

Robin Tovey ’97 reed.magazine@reed.edu GRAMMATICAL KAPELLMEISTER

Virginia O. Hancock ’62 REED COLLEGE RELATIONS VICE PRESIDENT, COLLEGE RELATIONS AND PLANNING

Hugh Porter EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, COMMUNICATIONS & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Sheena McFarland 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.

First year students: Reed’s class of ’27

As readers of this magazine have learned over the years, there is no one answer to the question What is a Reedie? There are, however, common threads. Reedies are curious, independent-minded, empathetic, and amazing.

Being Reed’s president is an incredible privilege because I get to learn about and from our extraordinary students. Some have traveled from distant countries to be here, leaving behind family and friends.

Others come from closer in distance, with experiences that vary widely. It is fascinating to hear their stories and to find out what means the most to them and what 2

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they hope to accomplish in their studies and in their life beyond Reed.

In this issue, you will be introduced to recent graduates, current students, and alumni from over the decades. I hope you will be inspired by their pursuits, projects, and creations.

Each new class enters the college and changes it. Reedies are never boring. Reed’s commitment to inquiry and exploration fosters an environment of innovation and infinite surprise.

Audrey Bilger President of Reed

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

“I give to Reed because the academic program and my fellow students challenged me, and I want to make sure that experience is there for generations to come.”

—CHRISTINE LEWIS ’07

monthly donor

YOUR IMPACT ON Academic Excellence Sustain a culture of daily investigation by creating a monthly gift to Reed.

Monthly giving is both a convenient and powerful way to make a difference. You might be surprised by your ability to make a sustained impact on students and faculty by taking one simple action today.

YOUR IMPACT ON Reed

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Eliot Circular NEWS FROM CAMPUS

PHOTO BY LAUREN LABARRE

Reed Welcomes Class of ’27

The class of 2027 has arrived. They number 351, bringing Reed’s total enrollment to 1,458, and hail from 39 states and 14 countries.

HERE ARE A FEW MORE STATS ABOUT THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF REED’S STUDENT BODY: • With 2,734 students admitted from a record applicant pool of 9,966, this year’s acceptance rate was 27 percent, the lowest ever.

• 60 percent of the incoming class attended public school.

• 38 percent identify as a person of color.

• 28 percent come from California. 19 percent are from the Northeast, and 16 percent from Oregon and Washington.

• Nearly 9 percent are international students, with China, Ghana, India, and Ukraine as the most represented countries outside of the U.S.

Eliot Circular

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Ross Tidwell ’23 Captures the Metaphor of Medieval Art Medieval artists depicted locusts as lions, monsters, part-humans, and also as ordinary bugs. While studio art major Ross Tidwell ’23 could describe these fantastical creatures, they’d rather draw them.

Ross has been captivated by medieval art since their parents started bringing them to art museums as a child. The aesthetic of the period—in their words, the “vibrant colors and grandiose style”—captured their imagination. So much so that they produced a senior thesis in the form of a 48-page graphic manuscript. Titled “Monsters and Miracles: A Medieval Comic Anthology” and saturated in colors and textures of another time, the work pairs medieval-style illustrations with modern interpretations and storytelling.

The project began with countless hours of research. Ross read medieval literature, studied fashion and architecture from the period, looked at trends in current medieval scholarship, and watched movies set in the Middle Ages. Then they started sketching and writing, distilling their research into a graphic exploration of medieval art’s ability to merge the metaphorical and the real. The project is whimsical yet firmly rooted in archival research: Ross embellished each page with rich details and marginalia and included references in each panel to specific medieval manuscripts and literature. But, they also leave room for their own imagination to lead the way. One section, “The Walking Reliquary,” is Ross’s original tale of a person, mistaken for a saint, who comes back from the dead in search of their tooth after their body has been dismantled, bejeweled, and sold off as relics.

In another section, “The Shape of the Locusts,” Ross explores how a string of similes found in the New Testament’s telling of the apocalypse shape-shifted through illustrators’ various interpretations of the original text. In conclusion, Ross considers why a medieval illustrator might depict a locust as something else entirely. “Often, the distinction was insignificant,” they write. “An insect scours a field just as well as a monster.”

— B R I TA N Y R O B I N S O N

Prof. Campillo-Alvarado takes the team outside of the lab: Shota Wetlesen ’24, Sid Agarwal ’25, Paul-Pierre Boutet ’25, Lixing Wang ’25, Josie Bicknell ’24, Kyle Peterson ’23, Amelia Schaeffer ’23, Isabella Jupiter ’25, Henry Holleb ’23, Koko Holcomb ’25, Nicholas Lutz ’23.

Chemistry Prof Wins Grant to Advance Research on Molecular Crystals Respiratory diseases—which spiked with COVID-19—are often treated in hospitals with invasive methods that make monitoring difficult and expensive. But Reed researchers, led

by Assistant Professor of Chemistry Gonzalo Campillo-Alvarado, are working on technology that could change that. Their work just got a boost from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust’s College Research Program for Natural Sciences.

The three-year grant will support Campillo-Alvarado’s research team in their work on flexible molecular crystals for use in medical technology.

The team comprises 11 Reed researchers, both students and recent alumni, as well as a postdoctoral scholar. The grant will support postbaccalaureate researchers to assist students with instrumentation and lab techniques. It will also support upgrades to the lab’s optical microscope so it can measure optical and physical changes in flexible materials.

The team aims to design and make crystals based on molecular sensors that can bend and respond to physical or chemical stimuli. Molecular crystals are known to be brittle by nature, but Campillo-Alvarado’s

group will use an emerging technology called “cocrystallization,” which installs molecular “lubricants” into crystals using weak intermolecular forces to make them flexible.

The ultimate goal is to incorporate crystalline sensors into wearable health-monitoring devices to provide remote, portable, and timely access to medical diagnoses. Patients with respiratory diseases, for instance, could use small devices adhered to the skin to accurately monitor body temperature and carbon dioxide. This would offer ready information on the patient’s breathing cycles and respiratory condition.

Campillo-Alvarado says he’s thrilled: “The grant from the Murdock Trust will enable us to expand the horizons of molecular crystals as sensors for human health in an undergraduatefueled research environment.”

Since 2018, the Murdock Trust has awarded more than $1.4 million in grant money to Reed. CampilloAlvarado previously received a research startup grant from the trust, an award that aims to supplement startup costs for new faculty positions in the natural sciences at undergraduate institutions. —KATIE PELLETIER ’03

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PHOTO BY CHRISTIAN SELDEN ’24

Eliot Circular

“I like doing most of my interviews downtown,” says Zave Payne ’25, on location at Pioneer Courthouse Square. “I think it’s important that I have people from all walks of life.”

Zave Payne ’25 Plays Civics Quizmaster on the Streets of Portland

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science major from the small city of Defiance, Ohio. He’d been civically engaged in high school: he led walkouts against gun violence, helped organize weekly protests after George Floyd’s murder, successfully advocated for greater police accountability, and spearheaded the city’s first Juneteenth and Pride events. His pace hasn’t slowed during his two years in Portland. In that time, he’s joined a leadership development program run

by Black & Beyond the Binary Collective, a local advocacy organization focused on combating white supremacy and advancing Black liberation; interned with Next Up, an Oregon nonprofit aimed at increasing civic engagement among young people; and worked on numerous political campaigns.

Zave points to cross-pollination between his civic engagement and his coursework at Reed. During the 2022 midterms, while interning at a public affairs firm and doing branding and graphic design work for several local political campaigns, he was also enrolled in Elections: American Style, a political science course taught by Visiting

Assistant Professor Dan Qi. “Identity politics was one of the focuses of the class,” Zave says, “and I was learning how identity politics play out in Portland at the same time.”

Hot Mic—which came about after a video he created for a political event impressed Willamette Week’s editor in chief—has been a source of joy for Zave. “I’ve been able to talk to so many people on the street, and that’s one of my favorite ways to learn about Portland,” he says. He also sees his videos as subtle pushback against notions that the city is on fire. By shooting so many videos downtown, for instance, Zave hopes viewers notice the bustle on the streets.

For his part, Zave is enthusiastic about his adopted city. He can see himself sticking around after Reed, perhaps pursuing graduate studies in urban planning and eventually a career in community development. “It’s a very neighborhood-based town, which I love,” he says. “I see myself here for the next few years, growing with the city.” — R E B E C C A JAC O B S O N

PHOTO BY CHRISTIAN SELDEN ’24

Reed students find all sorts of ways to immerse themselves in Portland: they volunteer at local schools, intern at local nonprofits, carry out research at local hospitals. But Zave Payne ’25 might be the only Reedie to host a roving civics quiz in the form of short, snappy videos.

Since April of this year, Zave has produced, hosted, and edited a video series called Hot Mic for Portland alt-weekly Willamette Week in which he asks passersby if they can, say, name the governor of Oregon, guess the mayor’s new salary, or identify Multnomah County on a state map. Though the videos sometimes touch on serious issues—in an August episode, interviewees reach nearunanimity on housing and homelessness as Portland’s greatest challenge—at the core they’re lighthearted, with clever sound effects and editing touches. As host, Zave is affable and engaging, and it’s clear the strangers he meets are having a good time, even if their civic knowledge is sometimes wanting.

“When I moved here, I really wanted to experience Portland,” says Zave, a political

GROWING BEYOND

R EED IE S TAC K L E F O O D I N S EC U R IT Y I N P O RT L A N D

TRIUMPH IN 2023 When the class of 2023 crossed the stage at Commencement this past spring with smiling faces and all the solemnity of Scottish bagpipes, it felt like a triumph over the challenges of the past four years.

Underlying all of our students’ successes was the support of Reed donors—alumni, parents, faculty, staff, and friends who made gifts to the Annual Fund totaling more than $4.3 million.

“As alumni we have the opportunity to encircle current Reed students with our support,” said Katherine Lefever ’07, cochair of Alumni Fundraising for Reed.

“Alumni gifts, no matter the amount, provide access to the Reed experience.”

Some donors chose to lock in their support for Reed this year by establishing a monthly gift. “I don’t have a lot to give, but I figure I can buy Reed a beer once a month,” said Spencer Trumm ’14. “That still adds up. I’ve heard that large foundations look at the percentage of alumni who give back, so if I give, I can boost that percentage.” Other generous supporters include the 30 estate donors who either joined the Eliot Society or doubled down on their commitments last year.

Throughout the year, alumni and parents forged permanent sources of support for the college by creating endowed funds.

Examples include the Albert Bandura Memorial Student Research Fund, created by Mary Bandura ’77 and Harton Smith ’75 to honor Mary’s father, one of the most influential psychologists of the past 100 years. Mary says, “He appreciated that Reed provides an environment in which students actively grapple with and research intellectual challenges, learn to think critically, and try to find ways to make their ideas matter.”

From young alumni making their first $5 gift to alumni setting down their intentions in their will this year, Reed donors made an impact on academic excellence, belonging, and student success, and the resonance of their support will be felt for generations to come.

Fueled by compassion and ingenuity, Khalil Laltoo ’23 and Alec DeContreras ’23—winners of a 2023 grant from Projects for Peace—are reimagining food distribution.

Their goal? Engineer a network of garden beds in front of SE Portland homes for decentralized farming during the summer of 2023.

The result? They harvested 500 pounds of homegrown food to distribute to some of the estimated 77,000 food-insecure residents of Portland, Oregon.

“Reimagining our methods of food distribution means recognizing that healthy eating is a human right.”

—KHALIL AND ALEC

Projects for Peace is a global program to support young peace leaders who are tackling the world’s most pressing issues. The Center for Life Beyond Reed helps connect students with opportunities like these.

Advocates of the Griffin

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

EDITED BY AURORE GIGUET, DIRECTOR OF ALUMNI RELATIONS

PHOTOS BY LAUREN LABARRE

The doctor is in at the Reunions advice booth.

Connecting with Other Reedies in Your Area

BY GRAY KARPEL ’08 CHAPTER LEADERSHIP COUNCIL CHAIR

Greetings, comrades!

One of my favorite parts of Reunions this year was stopping by the Advice Booth to ask for suggestions about my career path. Not only did I get excellent—and wide-ranging!—advice, I also spoke to Reedies from many different class years about their post-Reed experiences. I’ve been reflecting on that moment this summer as I become chair of the Chapter Leadership Council (CLC). The CLC, as its name implies, brings together the individuals leading chapters of Reed alumni all around the world. We share event ideas and best practices and support one another as we work to grow our alumni community wherever we live. Chapters are one of the best ways to connect with fellow Reedies, especially if you can’t make it to Reunions.

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Recent chapter events around the world include virtual conversations, museum outings, book clubs, berry picking, picnics, and theatre events. I always love meeting new Reedies at these events and learning about their passions, interests, and paths after Reed. If this sounds fun to you and you want to get involved, or if you have any ideas for local events, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the alumni chapter leadership team (alumni-chapter-leaders@ groups.reed.edu) so we can help make it happen! We’ll connect you with your local chapter, give you all the info you need to host, and send out communications to local alumni.

I am excited to take on the challenge of chairing this committee, and I look forward to hearing about the great events you plan wherever you live.

Best always, Gray Karpel, Class of ’08

Alumni Leaders Expand Support WRITTEN BY DYLAN RIVERA ’95 ALUMNI BOARD PRESIDENT, 2023-24

It’s easier than ever for alumni to volunteer their time to support other Reed alumni and the college.

As the president of the alumni board this year, I’m eager to help make volunteer opportunities more accessible to everyone in our community.

Alumni board members are the outreach leaders of our global community. We create venues for alumni to gather for mutual support, whether in person at Reunions or virtually in an online committee meeting or panel discussion on Zoom.

We also bring more alumni into the movement. We contact people we’ve never met and ask them how they’d like to help people they’ve never met. All three groups of strangers have one thing in common: we all had formative years on that beautiful 100-acre campus in southeast Portland.

This year, I want the alumni board to increase our collaboration with the other leadership committees of our alumni community: the Chapter Leadership Council, the Committee for Young Alumni, the Reed Career Alliance, the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, and the Alumni Fundraising for Reed Steering Committee. In recent years, we’ve more intentionally shared information and updates, but there’s more we can do.

This fall, alumni volunteers will gather on campus for the Forum for Advancing Reed, our volunteer leadership weekend. We will bring together alumni leaders from all volunteer committees to develop outreach ideas to engage more alumni and take advantage of our shared

Volunteer Spotlight: Caroll Casbeer ’10

BY TESS BUCHANNAN ’21 ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF ALUMNI RELATIONS

Dylan Rivera ’95

expertise and interests.

What chapter events in the coming year could provide an opportunity for collaboration with the alumni board’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee? The board’s career mentoring committee (the Reed Career Alliance, RCA) has convened more than a dozen career panels since the start of the pandemic; how can chapters and fundraisers harness that online energy to reach more alumni? Those are just a few ideas, and I look forward to hearing more.

It’s easier than ever for alumni to get involved. Anyone can attend and participate in an alumni board committee: Email alumni@reed.edu and let us know which area interests you the most: diversity, young alumni, or career advising.

As we bring in more volunteers, the Alumni Board will improve our succession planning. We’ll recruit vice chairs for each committee, giving our committee chairs more support and setting up the vice chair to step in as the next committee chair.

Reach out. Get plugged in.

Explore the many ways you can help our fellow alumni and the College that did so much for us.

Dylan Rivera ’95 is the spokesperson for the Portland Bureau of Transportation, where he hosts Reed student interns and offers job shadow opportunities. A former alumni trustee, he volunteers with the Portland chapter and Alumni Fundraising for Reed, organizing a wine-tasting fundraiser for the college. You can reach him at dylanrivera@alumni.reed.edu.

Caroll Casbeer ’10 has left an indelible mark in both the technology marketing field and in her commitment to giving back to the Reed community. As she celebrates a decade of volunteering with Reed, Caroll’s dedication to the institution shines through her unwavering support of numerous initiatives.

Her journey at Reed began during a visit to the Pacific Northwest in her junior year of high school. The vibrant community and opportunity to be her authentic self made Reed the perfect choice. Throughout her time as a student, she worked with the Conference & Events Planning office, forging relationships with staff. In her tenure as a Renn Fayre czar, she was introduced to volunteering for the Reed community— a concept she wholeheartedly embraced.

After graduation, Caroll joined the development office, where she played a vital role in planning Reed’s centennial in 2011. This experience allowed her to delve into the business side of the college while infusing her firsthand knowledge of Reedie culture into centennial celebrations, such as incorporating Renn Fayre’s Stop Making Sense event into Reunions.

Later, while her career in the startup world flourished, her commitment to Reed never wavered. She volunteered on many initiatives, including her 10th Reunion Committee, the local alumni chapter, the Reedie Wine event, Alumni Fundraising for Reed, and the Reed Career Alliance.

“Reed helped me develop an identity for myself, but outside of a great education and a transformative way of thinking, it also gave me what I am most thankful for in my life: really good friends that are almost family. . . . I have a very deep appreciation for Reed and how it has shaped and changed my life—in everything from my career to whom I call when I need to move a couch.”

For Caroll, volunteering is not just a means of giving back; it is a way to bring her present self back to the school she holds dear. By engaging with Reed through volunteering, she can contribute her unique skills and experiences: “[It’s] a great avenue

to bring who I am now back to the school because I am not 18 any more, so volunteering allows me to be engaged in the community in a way that works for who I am now and what I can bring to the community.”

She has built connections with a diverse community of individuals who have been regular volunteers alongside her. She cherishes engagement with notable alumni such as Dylan Rivera ’95 and Christine Lewis ’07 and “iconic older alumni.” She speaks fondly of her involvement as a young alumna: “When I was pretending to know what was going on, I went to dinners with some really impressive alumni who saw me and treated me like an equal . . . like Conrad Alt ’81 and Keith Allen ’83—people who are very polished and thoughtful. I was not asking them for jobs or networking advice, but just seeing how they moved through the world, seeing how they engaged with the college, or how thoughtfully they participated in conversations really helped show me how I wanted to mature and grow.”

Caroll exemplifies the spirit of dedication and gratitude that Reed College fosters in its alumni. Her decade of volunteering stands as a testament to her unwavering support for the institution that shaped her life and career. As she continues to make a positive impact through her involvement, Caroll inspires other Reedies to bring the best of themselves back to Reed.

CONNECT WITH REED! COME TO AN EVENT Check out in-person and virtual events at alumni.reed.edu VOLUNTEER Advocate for Reed. Organize an event. Share your wisdom.

Check out alumni.reed.edu/volunteer GIVE TO REED Make a gift at giving.reed.edu STAY IN TOUCH Let us know what you’ve been up to! Send in a class note or update your profile in the alumni directory. alumni.reed.edu • 503-777-7589

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What Is a Reedie, Anyway?

They studied mouthbrooding fish, knapped obsidian, analyzed Beyoncé and Katy Perry, investigated disability labor policy, translated Chinese and Russian, played frisbee and basketball and chess, learned to rock climb and to crochet and to knit—meet 12 members of the class of 2023 as they reflect on their time at Reed, the professors who inspired them, and the ideas that blew their minds.

PHOTOS BY DANIEL CRONIN

Kodinna Anachebe C H E M I S T R Y Hometown: I grew up in Lagos,

Nigeria, but my family is from eastern Nigeria!

Thesis adviser:

Prof. Nicole James [chemistry] Thesis: “ ‘A Teachable Moment’:

Examining Student Attitudes Towards Chemistry”

What it’s about: M y thesis looks at student experiences in different sections of one introductory chemistry class. I analyze the differences in experiences of these students based on the educator’s teaching practices as well as institutional factors to see what helps students learn and feel more confident in their chemistry knowledge. Ultimately, I look at ways that educators and institutions can center students in their own education and help them gain more confidence in their ability to learn.

What it’s really about:

Making sure students know they’re not the problem— oftentimes the system is.

In high school: I was a band kid

who only owned slip-on shoes (I thought I was too good for shoelaces at the time).

Influential class: I really enjoyed Introduction to Haitian Literature with Prof. Corine Labridy [French 2019–22].

I’ve been studying French for a really long time, and it was the first time that Black French-speaking countries were centered, which was what related most to my experience growing up in West Africa.

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Influential book: I always felt

like I didn’t have the time to read during the semester, so I really liked to read short stories.

I recently read Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who also wrote BoJack Horseman.

Like the show, the book experiments with a lot of the stylistic elements of its medium to explore the theme of love, and love was something that I was thinking a lot about right before graduation.

Cool stuff: I ’ve worked at the

Multicultural Resource Center all the years I’ve been at Reed, and I’m very grateful for the community I’ve found there as well as for the people who have put in the work to make student experiences at Reed a lot better. I was also on the Student Treasury for three semesters and admire the love that my fellow senators/treasurers had for different issues on campus and the work they were willing to do for the people they represented.

Honors, grants, fellowships: E ach summer I’ve been at Reed,

I’ve been awarded a Chemistry Summer Research Fellowship.

These fellowships were really beneficial in allowing me to have different experiences doing research across multiple chemistry disciplines, starting with biochemistry research and somehow ending with chemistry education research.

What’s next: H opefully learning

about education policy or working in education in some way.

Millie Forman C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E Hometown: B righton, England Thesis adviser: P rof. Ariadna

García-Bryce [Spanish and humanities]

Thesis: “ Writing the Mystical

Subject: The Works of Saint Teresa of Ávila”

What it’s about: M y thesis

is about the way in which Saint Teresa writes mystical experience. I consider the role of language in the construction of subjectivity, especially at the threshold of subjectivity that mystical experience makes manifest. I focus on ecstasy—as a mode of experience that defies description—and the way in which Teresa’s writing attempts to express the seemingly inexpressible. Central to this is the meaning of the feminine subject position in language, and the formulation of a specifically feminine mode of knowledge acquisition and creation.

What it’s really about:

What is it possible to say about embodied experience?

Influential professors: C hristian

Mysticism with Prof. Michael Foat [religion] was the first time I read any mysticism, and it totally rerouted my academic interests.

With much grace and generosity, Mike offered me an entirely new understanding of the possibilities of language and literature.

Prof. Lena Lenček [Russian and humanities 1977–2022] changed my relationship to literature with her insistence on the centrality of joy and wonder as foundational to the act of scholarship. Prof.

Zhenya Bershtein [Russian] has been so warm and so wry and has been boundlessly kind to me both in classes and out.

Influential book: P avel

Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, read in Prof.

Bershtein’s class on Russian Decadence, has proved essential in both my romantic and academic life.

Concept that blew my mind: I n kabbalah, language contains

creative metaphysical power at even the level of the letter itself.

Learning to think rigorously about the power of structure has been essential to how I now think about literature.

Cool stuff: I learned Russian

and worked as a translator for Prof. Bershtein. I almost became a Catholic!

Challenges faced: A t times it was really hard to be in Portland, so far away from my home.

Ultimately—and maybe to my own surprise—Reed became a really important home to me.

How Reed changed me: Th e

immense care and attention I have been given by many of my professors has shown me something of the possibilities of real mentorship. The support they gave me has formed the ground of myself as a thinker and writer (and friend). I was taught to take my own work more seriously without becoming totally ensnared in self-righteousness, and that being young doesn’t make everything I write trivial.

Help received along the way: F inancial aid meant that I could

be here in the first place!

Awards, fellowships, grants: I received multiple career

advancement funds, which I used to visit Redwoods Monastery in Northern California and, more mundanely, to pay for my visa. I also received the Spring Internship Award, which has allowed me to work for Simone Weil House, a Catholic Worker house in Portland, over the past few months.

What’s next: I am starting my

PhD in religion at Columbia in the fall.

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Lori Der Sahakian M U S I C Hometown: C hicago, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California Thesis adviser:

Prof. Mark Burford [music] Thesis: “ Constructions and

Representations of the Middle East in Post-9/11 Pop and HipHop Music”

What it’s about: Th rough

tracks such as “Naughty Girl”

by Beyoncé, “Candy Shop” by 50 Cent, and “Buttons” by the Pussycat Dolls, I explore a form of exoticism that uses musical ideas and gestures that can be heard as vaguely Middle Eastern but lacks the sonic specificity to allow listeners to locate a time, country, instrument, or genre.

Ultimately, I ask the question: what are the stakes of using generalized Middle Eastern musical gestures in Western pop music during a time of heightened attitudes towards the Middle East in America?

What it’s really about: W hat

makes “Talk Dirty” by Jason Derulo (feat. 2 Chainz) sound kinda like the band playing at my cousin’s wedding?

In high school: I played

volleyball and sang in choir. I also started writing my own music!

Influential class: M usic and

Voice with Prof. Mark Burford [music]. I have been a singer my whole life, so taking a step back from singing and actually thinking about the different roles voice can take on in music was so fascinating to me.

Influential book: I n Tehrangeles

Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California’s Iranian Pop Music, Farzaneh Hemmasi does such a beautiful job describing diasporic imaginations of a homeland. I also just really enjoyed learning more about some artists that I grew up listening to.

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Concept that blew my mind: Th e depth of the network of

revolutionary militia groups throughout West Asia and North Africa during the 20th century, and the forms of solidarity and resistance that grew out of these connections.

Cool stuff: I spent most of

my time at Reed singing, whether in Herodotones or in Collegium. I worked as a mentor and coordinator for the Peer Mentorship Program, as a ranger at the PARC, as a tour guide for the admission office, and as a research assistant.

My senior year, I cofounded the Southwest Asia and North Africa Union, which made me so happy—I’m glad I got to be a part of it before graduating. I also learned how to crochet and perfected my grandma’s tahdig recipe!

How Reed changed me: I have

always loved music, but the music department, especially Profs. Mark Burford, Morgan Luker, and Shohei Kobayashi gave me the tools to truly express my love for it. I am so grateful for everything they taught me and for all their support through my time here.

Help received along the way: Th e generous financial aid I

have received the last four years, especially the Elizabeth and Samual Surace Scholarship in Music, has made coming to Reed possible, and I am extremely grateful.

Awards, fellowships, grants: I

received an opportunity grant during the summer of 2022 to visit the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, which was one of the best experiences I had at Reed.

What’s next: M ove back home

to LA, spend time with my family, look into graduate programs, and get back into writing my own songs!

Joshua Park C O M PA R AT I V E R AC E A N D E T H N I C I T Y S T U D I E S Hometown: San Francisco, California Thesis adviser: P rof. Anand

Vaidya [anthropology]

Thesis: “Exploring Linsanity: the

Model Minority Myth, Laboring Bodies, and Asian American Racialization through Sport”

What it’s about: I n February and March of 2012, Jeremy Lin, a Taiwanese American basketball player, became the starting point guard of the New York Knicks. Lin led the Knicks to 10 wins in 13 games, captivating the attention of the sporting world. In my thesis, I explore the racial formations of the figure of the basketball star and the Asian American laborer, placing “Linsanity” within these histories. I ultimately explore the racial rhetorics that become mobilized through Lin’s media coverage.

What it’s really about:

How basketball and sports reinforce socialized notions of race.

In high school: I swam a lot on swim team and did community organizing work in the San Francisco Bay Area. More specifically, I worked on various local voting rights initiatives, including a peer-to-peer voter preregistration program in Bay Area high schools and a local ballot initiative to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local San Francisco elections.

Influential class: C ultural Study of Music with Prof.

Morgan Luker [music] helped me deconstruct naturalized notions of sound, music, and noise. Analyzing and listening to “Roar” by Katy Perry was iconic and a lot of fun.

Cool stuff: I was a team

coordinator for Ultimate Frisbee—it was a lot of fun building a sense of community through sport. I was also a peer career advisor with the Center for Life Beyond Reed.

Challenges faced: O ne of the challenges I faced during my time at Reed was the transition from predominantly Asian American institutions and communities in San Francisco to predominantly white ones at Reed and Portland. It was challenging to adjust to different ways of communication and social norms. I think I overcame them through support from on-campus institutions, particularly the staff who supported me from the Center for Life Beyond Reed.

Ability developed at Reed:

Working more efficiently. At Reed it always feels like there is more to do. More applications, assignments, and papers. As a result, I think I developed the ability to more effectively prioritize tasks and be more efficient with my time.

How Reed changed me: R eed helped me become much

more self-aware and critical, understanding how my various identities impact how I should interact and engage with others.

Help along the way: s a middle-class student, A

financial aid made it possible for me to attend Reed.

Awards, grants, fellowships: S ummer Internship Awards

in 2020 and 2021, Talent Development and Diversity Intern at Stoel Rives.

What’s next: F iguring it out :)

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Bean Fischer N E U R O S C I E N C E Hometown:

Concept that blew my mind:

Salem, New Hampshire Thesis advisers:

People don’t notice when color disappears from their peripheral vision.

Profs. Kara Cerveny and Drew Anderson [biology]

Cool stuff: My freshman

Thesis: “Honey I Ate the Kids:

Cichlid Fish, Their Fry, and Fluorescent Imaging”

What it’s about:

I investigated the neural expressions and mechanisms underlying a costly maternal care behavior called mouthbrooding, where the female incubates her eggs in her mouth for a twoweek period. During this time she doesn’t eat, and I wanted to understand why. I used lots of chemicals and fancy fluorescent images to tackle this exciting behavior.

Ability developed at Reed:

A fish holds her eggs in her mouth for two weeks of starvation . . . why? How is the brain responsible?

Having amazing mentor relationships. Prof. Sarah Schaack [biology] was not only an influential professor in my time at Reed but was also one of my biggest supporters. The guidance and care from faculty and staff are an integral part of my relationship to Reed.

Influential professor:

How Reed changed me:

Prof. Dana Katz [art history].

Comparing the production of art to the production of science— the art of the copy and scientific reproduction! Dana was always supportive of exploring art history from different perspectives, and that allowed me to pursue the intersection of scientific community and artistic creation. Every year there is a worldwide neuroscience art competition—who knew?!

Seeing art meld with science pushed me to use fluorescent imaging techniques in my thesis and to see my experiment for its brains and its beauty.

I grew out my hair, shaved it off, then let it grow out again.

A shaved head is a testament of my Reed experience.

What it’s really about:

Influential book:

Citizen by Claudia Rankine is a poem-lyric essay hybrid (with fascinating pictures) meditating on race and citizenship in contemporary America. I highly recommend reading it with the accompanying audio version.

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orientation trip was whitewater rafting on the Klickitat River, and I got to go again as an orientation leader my senior year. I even met one of my best friends on my freshman trip, who became my rafting coleader as a senior. Tutoring was a big part of my time at Reed, every week for three years— somewhere around 500 hours altogether. I also spin weapons and flags in my free time.

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Awards, grants, fellowships:

I was a Reed College Science Research Fellow, and being able to work full time doing lab research prepared me for the grind of thesis.

What’s next: More fish!

Research with them, rafting with them, maybe even getting one as a pet (or tattoo!). I’m also doing nonprofit work helping firstgeneration students get into and graduate from college!

Bequerel Yonaka A N T H R O P O LO G Y Hometown: Portland, Oregon Thesis adviser: Prof. Charlene

Makley [anthropology]

Thesis: “In the Shadow of

Capitalism: Experiences of Disabled USians in the Contingent Workforce”

What it’s about: I investigated labor conditions for part-time, gig, contract, and self-employed workers who identify as disabled, neurodivergent, or chronically ill, as well as the history of disability labor policy in the U.S. A lot of people are suffering, but the ways communities have formed around securing basic needs that so many are lacking embody a unique resilience and creativity.

What it’s really about: People

doing their best to survive in a world that wants to stamp them out.

In high school: One of a handful

of out transgender students and desperate for my life to begin.

Influential professor: Prof.

Michelle Wang [art history] was the first person who made me feel like I belonged here.

Influential book: Skin, Tooth, and

Bone: The Basis of Movement Is Our People is a collection of essays, definitions, and resources for learning and teaching disability justice principles. We bought a dozen copies for the Students with Disabilities Coalition, and the principles form the bedrock of my personal, political, and academic philosophies.

Cool stuff: Organizing the

Students with Disabilities Coalition for several years was one of my greatest joys at Reed.

Fostering a disabled community in higher education is very difficult—there is a lot of stigma and gatekeeping baked into institutions like these, but I’m so proud that we as a group have created a space where disability can be a source of pride and solidarity. I also loved working as a barista at the Paradox. Not just because of the free coffee, but because I got to be part of sustaining a really special piece of Reed’s institutional memory.

Challenges faced: My first experience with disability accommodations was at Reed, and at first I was reluctant to actually use them. I had to learn how to write an email requesting an extension, how to explain my needs while maintaining my own boundaries, and how to advocate for other students when their accommodations were challenged.

Working through these issues with other disabled students helped me become more assertive.

How Reed changed me: I’ve discovered I have no interest in being an academic. I’m grateful for the skills I developed here, but I’d much rather use them to advance radical structural change than write about all the change that needs to happen for the rest of my life.

Help along the way: I benefited greatly from financial aid, particularly the sizable Reed Grant that has kept my debt relatively low.

Concept that blew my mind:

Learning that there was a word for workers who are outside of a full-time-with-benefits employment structure! Almost every disabled person I know has some strange combination of gigs and jobs to make ends meet, and I was so excited to learn that economists call them contingent workers because it felt like a phenomenon worth studying.

Awards, fellowships, grants:

Anthropology grant for my thesis, commendations for academic excellence in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

What’s next: I’m finishing an internship at Multnomah County and pursuing permanent employment in the Department of County Human Services.

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Caden Corontzos C O M P U T E R S C I E N C E Hometown: Redding, California Thesis adviser: Prof. Eitan

Frachtenberg [computer science]

Thesis: “Optimizing LZW for

DNA Compression”

What it’s about: S torage and transfer of long DNA sequences means very large files, high wait times, and an overall bottleneck for biological research. My thesis looks at the Lempel Ziv Welch compression algorithm and attempts to specialize and optimize it to compress DNA. What it’s really about:

How can we make a fast, efficient algorithm to compress DNA? In high school: E veryone knew I was a nerd despite my best efforts to conceal it. I played basketball and was on the robotics team.

Influential Reed professor: I took several creative writing

classes with Prof. Pete Rock [creative writing] and really enjoyed the experience. The Realistic and the Fantastic let us explore the boundaries between the believable and the unbelievable in writing fiction.

It was a blast, and I felt like I really improved as a writer. I also loved the classes I took with Prof. David Ramirez [computer science 2020–22]. David is a great teacher who really takes an interest in his students. He has given me some great advice, career and otherwise.

Influential book: Th e Pragmatic

Programmer made me think critically about the way I write code and taught me how to approach software as a craft rather than a job.

Cool stuff: R eed Residence

Life, Reed basketball, Center for Life Beyond Reed. I also went horseback riding, whitewater rafting, windsurfing, skiing, and to many Trail Blazers games.

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Challenges faced: C omputer science is a relatively new major at Reed and deals with a lot of theory, so I found it difficult to find jobs and opportunities.

I went to a public school in a small town, so I didn’t come with much knowledge about or connections to the software industry, which can make it harder to get noticed. B Hunter, a rockstar adviser for the Center for Life Beyond Reed, helped me learn how to reach out to alumni, whom I have found to be very receptive and helpful to other Reedies. I met a bunch of cool alums who ended up in the software industry from all sorts of other paths, and was able to get great advice and build connections through our shared Reed experience.

How Reed changed me: I ’ve

learned how to approach solving problems that are hard or confusing, and how to discuss my reasoning with others and work collaboratively toward a solution. I also think I’m more open to trying new things and exploring new experiences.

Help received along the way: I f it

weren’t for financial aid, I wouldn’t have even applied to Reed. I wouldn’t have visited had they not provided me money to fly out. Financial aid made my whole experience possible.

Awards, fellowships, grants: C ommendations for academic

excellence, grants from the Career Advancement Fund.

What’s next: I ’m joining Box

as a software engineer. I’m also interested in eventually studying computer science in grad school. I definitely want to keep in contact with CLBR and hopefully provide guidance and mentorship to students as other alumni did for me.

Evangeline Nañez S O C I O LO G Y Hometown:

Albuquerque, New Mexico Thesis adviser:

Prof. Yaejoon Kwon [sociology] Thesis: “ ‘That’s Your Auntie’: An

Analysis of Southwest Pueblo Indian Family-Making after Attending Indian Boarding School”

What it’s about: M y thesis examines the contemporary relationship of American Indian boarding schools and Pueblo Indian alumni family making within Southwest Pueblo communities. I look at the relationships between boarding school experiences and kinship structures, household values, and resource acquisition. I seek to understand the changes in Indian boarding schools from their origin to the contemporary period, and how these changes have been reflected in Pueblo families.

What it’s really about: H ow do

historical and modern American Indian boarding schools impact the lives of Southwest Pueblo Indian people, and how do these impacts look throughout generations?

In high school: I liked to drive

around with friends, read, sleep, and take hikes.

Influential class: I n Obsidian Rocks with Prof. Alejandra Roche Recinos [anthropology], I got to learn to knap obsidian.

We sat in a large circle, wearing our protective gear, and learned how to shape obsidian through precise blows to the rock.

We learned the properties of obsidian, its significance in America’s Indigenous communities, and how to create lithic drawings of the rock. I got to keep the objects I made by shaping the obsidian, which include a spear point and several arrowheads.

Influential book: I n Racism

without Racists, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva writes about how racism persists in subtle forms in everyday life and how white people form various arguments and excuses to explain or justify racial inequality.

Cool stuff: I was involved with

the Multicultural Resource Center, SEEDS, the Office of Institutional Diversity, and Reed College Special Collections and Archives. I also went to the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival, brought writer Tommy Orange to campus, and helped throw Bey Ball and create a community altar for Día de Los Muertos.

I cooked delicious food and shared it with friends, visited the coast and went clamming, hiked to Mirror Lake and visited Mount Rainier, watched eagles fly, and stared at the night sky with friends to look for constellations.

Challenges faced: C OVID,

financial issues, personal loss, and dealing with being away from my home. Building a really strong friend network helped to support me during these rough times.

How has Reed changed you?

Reed connected me with some of the most amazing people I have ever met. I am happy to know so many people and feel so connected to community. It also helped guide me to what I would like to do in this life and where I want to be.

Awards, fellowships, grants: C obell Scholarship, Phillip &

Jeanne Wertheimer Scholarship, Raven Spirit Award.

What’s next: S pending time

with family, taking long walks, reading for fun, and eventually heading to grad school to focus on an education degree.

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Olivia McGough M AT H E M AT I C S Hometown: C orvallis, Oregon Thesis adviser: P rof. Angélica

Osorno [mathematics]

Thesis: “ Persistent Homology

and Applications to Graph Data”

What it’s about: P ersistent homology is a recently developed data analysis tool that relies on theory from topology and is used to extract information about the shape or structure of data. My thesis covers the mathematical theory needed to understand persistent homology and reviews published applications of persistent homology to different data sets.

I also run my own data analysis on publicly available U.S. migration data.

What happens if I glue some triangles together?

Challenges faced: I was pretty intimidated by how smart some of my peers were when I first came to Reed, especially in my math classes. For a while I felt like no matter how hard I tried I wouldn’t be able to keep up with them. I spent a lot of time freshman year in math drop-in tutoring and in my professors’ office hours, which was a game changer for me. I still receive tutoring and go to office hours regularly.

Influential professor:

How Reed changed me:

Prof. David Perkinson [mathematics] was an incredibly influential figure during my time at Reed. He let me work with him on a research project the summer after my sophomore year that ended up being a formative experience for me. The goal of the project was to construct a proof of a combinatorial result conjectured by Gopal Goel, one of David’s students. Throughout the process, I learned a lot of math, but more importantly I learned how fun research can be and what I am capable of. He also taught me the importance of good chalk.

I’ve definitely gotten gayer. And I have more tattoos. Not sure if I’m smarter but I know a lot more math.

What it’s really about:

Concept that blew my mind: There are infinities of different sizes?! Between every two rational numbers (fractions) there is an irrational number, and between every two irrationals there is a rational. However, the probability that a randomly selected number is rational is zero. The set of rational numbers is much smaller than the set of irrational numbers, even though they are both infinite sets.

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Cool stuff: I ’ve been a tutor and course assistant in the math department for three years, which has been a fun job and a good opportunity for me to give back to a department that has educated, mentored, and uplifted me during my time at Reed. I want to emphasize that the Reed math faculty are truly unmatched, and I will never be able to thank them enough.

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Awards, fellowships, grants: I received the Rosenbaum

Fellowship to work with Prof.

David Perkinson for a summer, and I received the Opportunity Grant to present my research at a conference. For the summer postgraduation, I worked with Profs. Angélica Osorno and Kyle Ormsby in their Collaborative Mathematics Research Group, which is funded by an NSF grant.

What’s next: Th is fall I begin a

statistics PhD program at the University of Washington.

Nareg Kedjejian B I O C H E M I S T R Y A N D M O L E C U L A R B I O LO G Y Hometown:

Los Angeles, California Thesis adviser:

Prof. Erik Zornik [biology] Thesis: “ An Enzymatic Biosensor

for the Detection of Changes in Acetylcholine and Choline Levels in Xenopus Laevis”

What it’s about: I built a device that can detect changes in neurotransmitter levels in real time. While I tested the device as a proof of concept on frogs, I hope it can be used for monitoring or diagnosing mental disorders, analogous to how a glucose sensor helps diabetics manage their condition.

What it’s really about: I built a device to measure chemicals in the brain so we know why we feel the way we do.

In high school: I took all the

hardest classes I could. I started the chess club and inspired so many people to play that teachers had to check computer screens to see if people were playing chess in class. I also started the Science Olympiad club with one of my friends.

Concept that blew my mind:

In one of my sociology classes, we read a paper about epistemology, which is essentially the study of how you know that something is true. The paper argued that epistemological dominance in STEM fields perpetuates disadvantages for students who enter higher education with alternative epistemologies. This really resonated, because I’ve seen these alternative epistemologies mocked or dismissed in STEM classes.

Awards, fellowships, grants: D unne Currie Scholarship

from the Portland section of the American Chemical Society, Reed Science Research Fellowship, commendations for academic excellence.

Influential professor: P rof. Erik Zornik [biology] has been my absolute favorite teacher at Reed and has been a major reason why my college experience has been so enjoyable. I met Erik during the second semester of my freshman year in intro biology. In one of our first conversations, I told him about a book I was reading on neuroplasticity, and we talked about how amazing the concept is. The summer after freshman year, I wanted to do research but COVID made things nearly impossible, so Erik included me in his lab meetings with thesis students and mentored me through a literature review on synaptic plasticity. Since then, he’s been involved in my academic life every year. This year as a thesis adviser, he was willing to guide me and learn with me on an exciting, new topic.

Cool stuff: I am passionate

about music production and started the music collaboration club at Reed, where producers, vocalists, and instrumentalists can come together to collaborate on songs. I met one of my best friends at Reed through this club, and we frequently make songs together. I also participated in the chess club, was an intro biology tutor for two years, and did an internship at OHSU on the effects of the herb Centella asiatica on mice with a model of Alzheimer’s disease.

Challenges faced: D uring my time at Reed, I have had a health condition called ME/CFS. The symptoms have required me to work twice as hard to complete any homework assignment or lab work, and I’ve had to properly manage my time and prioritize my health.

What’s next: I plan to take a

year off and focus on producing music. I will then either pursue a PhD in biochemistry or do research in an academic lab or industry setting.

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Stephanie Shu C H I N E S E Hometown:

San Mateo, California Thesis adviser: J ing Jiang

[Chinese and humanities]

Thesis: “ Writing Love

and Liminality: Female Homoeroticism in Early Republican Chinese Fiction”

What it’s about: I translate and analyze a selection of Chinese short stories from the early 20th century that center around female-female relationships and tease out the nuances across various perspectives on same-gender love. I also explore why the topic of female homoeroticism is inextricably tied to contemporaneous national discourses on Chinese modernity and women’s independence.

What it’s really about: U nearthing lost voices from the

past to reclaim space for queer love.

In high school: I was an obsessive rom-com watcher and comic reader, an aspiring polyglot, and an extremely ruleadherent kid who desperately wanted to seem cool and quirky.

At one point I thought I’d study biology, then it was linguistics, but never Chinese . . . back then I was flunking my vocab quizzes in Chinese class.

Influential professor:

My adviser, Prof. Jing Jiang [Chinese and humanities], constantly encouraged my writing, supported my various research whims, and always seemed to have the right words whenever I faced a personal crisis. Outside of our thesis advising sessions, she spent many hours guiding me through extracurricular readings, reviewing my translations, and offering her advice.

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Influential book: D isorientation

by Elaine Hsieh Chou. It’s a poignant, satirical novel about a young Chinese American woman pursuing a degree in Chinese-American literature and her experience confronting whiteness, Sinophobia, and the fetishization of Chinese women in academia. Though a bit on-the-nose, it helped me reflect on how my identity intersects with my work and informs my relationship to academia.

Cool stuff: I cofounded Chinese

eHouse and hosted conversation tables, mahjong nights, and off-campus excursions. I also helped organize the annual school-wide Lunar New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival events. I took a year off to study Mandarin and reconnect with my cultural roots in Taiwan. I collected and translated stories at the Taiwanese American Archives and presented at Reed’s translation symposium.

I taught myself to knit and play guitar (both badly), spent way too many hours in the ceramics studio, practiced Chinese calligraphy at Scriptorium, and learned how to throw a mean hotpot party. Reed was also where I discovered my queer identity, found community, and came out via my queer thesis!

Challenges faced: D uring my time at Reed I developed a chronic pain condition, struggled with my mental health, and experienced several difficult personal losses. I took time off twice and ended up as a nontrad student and a spring/ fall senior. It was lonely at times, but I received support from professors and ended up finding a really great community, which made navigating the unexpected detours a lot easier.

What’s next: R ead more books, do more art, see more places. Further down the line, I want to continue uncovering queer narratives in Chinese literature, whether that’s in grad school or elsewhere.

Tina Bardot E N V I R O N M E N TA L S T U D I E S – E C O N O M I C S Hometown: A ntwerp? Renton?

Miramar? (I am NOT from Florida.) I would broadly identify as a Pacific Northwesterner.

Thesis adviser: P rof. Noelwah Netusil [economics] Thesis: “ ESG Beyond Investing: Cross-Stakeholder Spillover of Sustainability Communication” What it’s about: E nvironmental, social, and governance (ESG) has gained attention as a new investment strategy that engages companies to quantify and improve their operations.

Though this framework has mostly been seen as investorfocused quantification and certification, I’m trying to see to what extent the kind of information that is investor relevant is also becoming consumer and employee relevant, as the way that ESG information is regulated is likely to ultimately affect more than just investors.

What it’s really about: P eople care more about the

environmental and social impacts of business, like carbon emissions and fair wages. I’m trying to see how a company communicates this information to different types of people to better understand how we can make sure this information is truthful and consistent.

In high school: I was an odd duck with big dreams.

Influential professor: rof. Noelwah Netusil P

[economics], my adviser, pushed me to pursue my passions at Reed and contributed significantly to expanding the scope of possibilities for me beyond Reed. She not only teaches the classes most directly related to my major but has also been a mentor and (in many ways) a friend.

Influential book: T out le Bleu du Ciel, a French novel that contemplates love and loss.

Filled with nostalgia while constantly tugging at you to be mindful of the present, it is full of contradictions that make you question your own relationship with the past. Also, a necessary break from the endless econ papers I had to read for thesis!

Cool stuff: C ochair of Restorative Justice Coalition, student teaching consultant, tutor for Felipe Carrera’s econometrics class. I also started rock climbing! One of my roommates and I have been going three times a week since the summer before my junior year, and it has been a unique and wonderful opportunity to foster one of my most cherished friendships.

How Reed changed me: B eing

at Reed has fundamentally changed how I think about relationships. I have fostered friendships with all kinds of people, which has completely changed my perception about the ways mutual support can look and feel. No one gets anywhere on their own, and thinking about the people who helped me get where I am today reminds me that I can have that impact on other people, too.

Help received along the way: I received a financial award my

freshman year that helped tip the scale for choosing Reed over another college.

Awards, fellowships, grants: A wards from the Climate

Change Research and Education Fund and the Social Justice Research and Education Fund.

What’s next: S omething that

helps the planet and the people on it, whatever that looks like.

Something that I can have an impact in, and that will keep me moving forward, even if not in a straight line.

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THE SECRET

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CEMETERY

More than a million were buried on Hart Island, but families couldn’t visit. Melinda Hunt ’81 changed that.

BY AMANDA WALDROUPE ’07

PHOTO BY ALEXEY YURENEV

Elsie Soto was ten years old when her father, Norberto, died in 1993 from AIDS. “Not being at his bedside, not saying goodbye, not seeing the coffin go in the ground,” Elsie said, made it difficult to reconcile her father’s death. Her grief and shock were compounded by the stigma surrounding AIDS—all the private funeral homes her mother contacted refused to perform the service.

Lizzette Rivera’s mother, Zaida, died from AIDS-related complications when Lizzette was 15 years old, in 1984. Like Elsie, she never got to say goodbye, and there was no funeral. Growing up, Lizzette felt as if she carried her mother with her everywhere, “inside of me, inside my heart.”

Both women knew their parents were buried on Hart Island—the location of New York City’s public cemetery. But they didn’t know where on the island their parents were buried. And, until just a few years ago, they were prohibited from going to the island.

That would likely still be the case were it not for Melinda Hunt ’81. Without Melinda, Elsie and Lizzette—and many others with family buried on Hart Island— would never have been able to visit, let alone know with certainty that their parents were buried there. Melinda is credited as the driving force that completely upended decades of the secrecy and neglect that Hart

Island, those interred there, and their families endured.

Through art, storytelling, scholarship, a public database, and political advocacy, Melinda reunited New Yorkers with their public cemetery.

Melinda first visited Hart Island in 1991.

The island, in the northeasternmost corner of New York City, is the largest municipal cemetery in the United States (it is also the country’s largest green cemetery). It is the final resting place for the city’s indigent— people who are unclaimed by family. People whose families cannot afford, or choose not to have, a private burial or cremation are also buried there. While any New Yorker can be buried on Hart Island, most of the interred are poor and disadvantaged.

Among them are hundreds of people who died from AIDS during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. During that time, with fear and homophobia rampant, private funeral homes refused to provide private burials for AIDS victims (in 1983, the New York State Funeral Directors Association even encouraged members to not embalm people who had died from the virus). Hart Island became the only place where they could be buried.

For much of its history, Hart Island was shrouded in stigma and secrecy, the island sometimes called the “Island of Lost Souls,”

Melinda Hunt on Hart Island, using a GPS tracker to find a gravesite in September 2023.

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THE SECRET CEMETERY the cemetery a “potter’s field” or “pauper’s cemetery.” Buildings— including an insane asylum, a tuberculosis hospital, and a boys’ reformatory (see timeline)—were derelict, with broken windows, collapsed roofs, trees and brush growing out of crumbling foundations. The city’s Department of Correction operated the island, and burials were carried out by inmates of New York City’s infamous jail complex on Rikers Island.

An artist and photographer, Melinda had been documenting the AIDS crisis. She was interested in publishing a photography book documenting Hart Island as a place that had been unchanged for over a century. She wanted to pay homage to the photographs that journalist and social activist Jacob Riis had taken for his book How the Other Half Lives, and she invited p h o t o g r a p h e r Jo e l Sternfeld, renowned for his large-format photographs chronicling roadside American culture, to accompany her.

(At that time, academics and members of the press were allowed to visit Hart Island; Melinda and Sternfeld were affiliated with universities.)

They visited the island for the first time in 1991. Melinda expected “a very dark place.”

She discovered the opposite. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I felt it was a very important and meaningful and beautiful landscape that was misunderstood.”

To Melinda, cemeteries are repositories of history, stories, and memory that help people not only grieve the passing of a loved one, but connect to their past.

From that perspective, Hart Island’s cemetery was dysfunctional. It was closed to the public. Even people with family buried there could not visit, effectively making it impossible for them to experience a common rite: grieving and coming to terms with the finality of death at the gravesite of our loved one, while also remembering that person.

“You can’t have a functional cemetery if the public doesn’t have access,” Melinda said. “The purpose of a cemetery is to reconcile death.” Drawn to the island’s beauty and the injustice of the deceased becoming

anonymous and forgotten, Melinda resolved to “reconnect the city to its cemetery.”

An artist trained in painting, installation art, and photography, Melinda was guided by a question much like an artist’s statement: “How do you make an invisible place visible?”

“My feeling is that you can only destigmatize a place if you show it impacts a broad spectrum of the population,” Melinda said.

“It’s our community. It’s our cemetery—not a pauper’s cemetery.”

Indeed, since burials began in 1869, over 1 million people have been laid to rest on Hart Island, and, in many ways, they tell the story of New York City: Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War are buried on the island, as are women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, immigrants, crime victims, and those who died from disease during the 1918 flu pandemic, the AIDS epidemic, and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. The island is also the resting place of over 42,000 infants. “To that mother, that child is a person,” Melinda said.

“These are everyone’s babies. These are everyone’s stories,” she continued. “If you make it so that people can reconcile these stories and their experiences, these burials are seen as part of our community.”

In 1998, she and Sternfeld published Hart Island, a photography book documenting the island, the cemetery, buildings, and history. In 2006, Melinda produced the feature-length documentary film Hart Island: An American Cemetery.

In 2011, she founded the Hart Island Project, a nonprofit arts organization. Legal counsel advised her not to charter the nonprofit’s mission as educational or as a historical society; each entailed compliance with various state regulations. An arts organization, she learned, would have broader latitude. “Art isn’t as regulated,” she said.

Melinda is as unassuming as Hart Island.

Wearing black glasses, she could be mistaken for a professor or librarian. When she visits Hart Island, she is dressed for the elements —during one trip on a dreary, rainy day in early December, she wore full rain gear and

“ You can’t have a functional cemetery if the public doesn’t have access,” Melinda said. “The purpose of a cemetery is to reconcile death.”

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hiking boots, as if about to go on a hike.

She is an animated speaker, with a quick and infectious laugh, especially when speaking about the absurdity of New York City bureaucracy. She is tenacious and dogged, with an encyclopedic knowledge of Hart Island, from its history to minutiae of New York City administrative code.

She credits her success to skills she learned and began practicing at Reed. Yet her intellectualism, penchant for civic engagement, and artistic practice started at an early age. She started painting as a small child and “was lucky as a kid to be taken seriously” and considered “talented” as an artist, Melinda said.

Her relationship with her great-aunt, Alice Riggs Hunt, who was a journalist, suffragist, and civil rights activist in New York, was also formative. At the end of her life, she came to live near Melinda’s family in Alberta. “She was a fantastic storyteller,” Melinda remembered. Because of cataracts and arthritic hands, she could no longer read or type. Melinda soon realized, “I could get out of raking leaves and washing dishes if I was reading newspapers to Aunt Alice.”

As Melinda read the news, her aunt would stop her and say, “Oh, we have to write a letter to the President. Get a piece of paper, I’ll dictate.”

“And I’m eight years old,” Melinda recalled, laughing, “and I’m writing “Dear President Nixon…”

She came to Reed after studying studio art for two years at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (and graduated from both institutions, as part of a joint program the art department had with the Pacific Northwest College of Art). She was inspired to work at the intersection of art, civic engagement, and social justice, even though a successful artistic career was defined at the time as showing work in galleries and exhibitions.

Like many students, she was at first taken aback by Reed’s high expectations.

She laughed as she recalled feeling as if “I didn’t know anything.” Despite that, “the rigor was good” and Reed instilled the capacity of “believing in yourself and doing something original.”

“You had to have a good idea and you had to defend it.” She honed the ability to “get into the library, do research based on primary documents”—and have the doggedness to get them—“and know what you’re talking about.” “Reed prepared me for all the pushback” she encountered in her advocacy.

P H OTO BY J O E L S T E R N F E L D / D O C U M E N T I N S TA L L AT I O N BY M E L I N DA H U N T

A page from the 1998 book Hart Island showing an installation by Melinda that includes Joel Sternfeld’s large-format photograph of Vicki Pavia, whose baby is buried on Hart Island.

The first big battle came when she wanted copies of Hart Island’s burial ledgers.

To understand Melinda’s advocacy of Hart Island, you have to understand a bit about New York City bureaucracy. It originally opened as a penal colony, and the city’s Department of Charities and Corrections, responsible for all social services and the city’s jails, originally managed the island.

In 1896, that agency split into two. But the city code relating to Hart Island didn’t change, so the Department of Correction— the same agency that operates the infamous jail complex on Rikers Island—continued overseeing Hart Island and the burials that took place there. Burials were performed by inmate labor.

As Melinda’s advocacy continued, relatives of people buried on Hart Island started to reach out to her. Melinda wanted to create

a searchable database so people could find their friends and relatives. At that time, the only way to identify the interred was by accessing the island’s burial ledgers, which documented who was buried on the island and where. The Department of Correction kept them on the island, and they had never been copied or digitized.

The Department of Correction denied Melinda’s early requests, so she lawyered up. Her legal counsel happened to be

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feature THE SECRET CEMETERY

Located off the eastern edge of The Bronx, in the Long Island Sound, Hart Island comprises 131 acres of woodland, scrub, closed forest, and mass graves. Points of interest, as documented by Hunt on The Hart Island Project, trace the history of usage: from the soldier’s cemetery, which holds unclaimed veterans from The Civil and Spanish Wars, to the Phoenix House, which operated as a residential facility for drug addiction treatment from 1967 to 1976.

Reedies—Mark Taylor ’99 and David Rankin ’99, who practiced law in the firm Rankin & Taylor. They filed a public records request, using the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), for every burial record since 1985.

The Department of Correction denied the request, citing public safety concerns.

“The law was very much on our side,” Mark remembered. They sued, and in October 2008, a county court ruled in Hunt v.

New York City Dept. of Correction that the Department of Correction’s rationale for withholding the ledgers was “unfounded” and “unavailing,” with “no evidence or valid argument.”

Soon afterward, large leather-bound ledger books, in banker’s boxes, arrived at Rankin & Taylor’s offices. With over 50,000 handwritten entries, the ledgers revealed an abundance of information: names, dates of death, place of death, and, most importantly,

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the exact location of the resting place. “It was a real breakthrough for her and her work,” Mark said.

Melinda, along with some volunteers, scanned and digitized each ledger, uploading the information to the Hart Island Project’s website, work she continues to do. In 2014, she launched a storytelling platform that tells the stories of the buried. Called the Traveling Cloud Museum, it contains stories, photographs, videos, sound files, and epitaphs added to the website by family and friends who have identified their deceased loved ones.

The Traveling Cloud Museum shows the location of each burial plot. Clicking on the plot pulls up a list of everyone buried in that plot. Many list the person’s name and their age when they died. Others say “Male Unknown” or “Female Unknown.”

And there is the “clock of anonymity.” Next to each person’s entry, a clock ticks, showing how long they have been buried on Hart Island.

When a loved one adds any information to a deceased person’s profile, the clock stops. It signifies that a deceased person is no longer just a name, but a part of someone’s family history and the larger history of New York City.

The Traveling Cloud Museum is a digital manifestation of a cemetery’s ultimate purpose: allowing family members to grieve, remember, and honor their loved ones through storytelling.

Starting in 2009, information about who was buried on the island was publicly available for the first time. “People could track down their loved ones,” Mark said. “It was a huge public service she conducted.”

More people with family buried on Hart Island began contacting Melinda. One woman wanted to visit the gravesite of her baby, who had been stillborn. Melinda contacted the Department of Correction, which told the woman she could attend a memorial service, held once a year, at a gazebo near

People are buried in mass graves, in trenches containing 100 adults or 1,000 babies.

They are buried in pine boxes stacked three deep in two lines, creating a grid. Each coffin is numbered. That allows the identification, by row and column, of any person’s gravesite.

Consequently, as Mark put it, Melinda “always had that knowledge at her fingertips.”

In 2012, Rankin & Taylor petitioned the city on behalf of eight women who wanted to visit the graves of their infants. This time, the suit proved challenging. Mark wrote a complaint claiming that people have a common-law right to visit the gravesites of loved ones and that people have a right to a decent burial— and that inherently includes the ability for family and friends to visit the gravesite. “New York law seems never to have contemplated the circumstances present on Hart Island,” the complaint reads, “where the public is forbidden from visiting the graves of an active public cemetery on public land.”

The ACLU of New York also sued, filing a class action lawsuit in December 2014 on behalf of three women wishing to visit the gravesites of family members. Both lawsuits were resolved before going to court. The Department of Correction agreed to begin allowing bimonthly visits.

“None of this would have happened without Melinda’s work,” David Rankin said. “No one would know anything about Hart Island.

It would just be an island on a map.”

PHOTO BY JEREMY GRAHAM / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

the ferry dock. “For them to set up these trips to the gazebo was viewed as this tremendous pain in the ass,” Mark remembered.

“It was really clear that [the Department of Correction] was not focused on anything having to do with Hart Island.”

The department also contended it was impossible to find a grave. There were trenches with markers at each end, they contended, but individual gravesites were unmarked.

Mark remembered Melinda’s quick response: “I can find a grave!”

That is because of Hart Island’s burial system. When one speaks with Melinda, it is a topic she often expounds on in a minilecture both morbid and fascinating. Hart Island uses a unique, efficient burial procedure that originated during the Civil War, when it was necessary to bury people quickly, but still allow their disinterment, so families could later rebury their loved ones.

In 2017, Elsie Soto searched the Department of Correction’s database for her father. She found nothing. She had heard “about the lawsuits,” so she emailed Melinda, sitting at her computer “hitting refresh, refresh” afterward, Elsie remembered, waiting for Melinda’s reply.

Melinda answered all her questions.

The Department of Correction’s database

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THE SECRET CEMETERY PHOTO BY ALEXEY YURENEV

Melinda steps onto a ferry with a family on their way to visit Hart Island.

had spelled her father’s name incorrectly (“Nobert,” instead of “Norberto”). He was buried in Plot 231, in Grave #27. After 25 years, she knew where her father was buried. “Just like that. I was amazed,” Elsie said.

“It was at that moment I could start grieving properly.”

Melinda helped Elsie and her family schedule a visit. “I was in awe that someone could make all this happen,” Elsie remembered. “Thank God for her.” In April 2018, Elsie, her sister, and her nephews visited Norberto’s gravesite. For the first time, Elsie felt closure.

When Lizzette Rivera’s mother died in 1984, Lizzette’s uncle, Zaida’s next of kin, had allowed the city to bury Zaida at Hart Island. He told Lizzette that government regulations prohibited them from going to Hart Island. When she heard that, “I was

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so angry,” Lizzette remembered, saddened by the idea that she and her family could never visit their mother’s grave.

Years later, her mother’s death certificate in hand, Lizzette called every city agency she thought could tell her where her mother was buried. She got nowhere. Finally, an officer at the Department of Correction—ironically—told Lizzette her mother’s name had been misspelled: “Zaidia,” with an extra “i.”

Poring through the 1984 burial ledgers, Melinda confirmed the misspelling. “The handwriting” that year, Melinda dryly said, “was particularly bad.”

“Melinda made it possible,” Lizzette said, for her and her family to visit. Lizzette, her brother, and sister visited their mother’s grave—Grave #6 of Plot 152—for the first time on November 14, 2021.

Afterward, each of Zaida’s children

contributed to their mother’s entry in the Traveling Cloud Museum. Lizzette’s sister, Valerie, wrote a poem. Lizzette posted photographs. Lizzette’s brother, Paul, stopped their mother’s clock of anonymity at 36 years, 229 days, 15 minutes, and 29 seconds.

Even though so much time had passed, “she was never forgotten,” Lizzette said.

“There was never a moment that we didn’t think about her, didn’t love her.”

“It’s beautiful,” Lizzette said of the gravesite. “It’s open. You can see the water.”

Nearby, a long white rectangular concrete pad marks the remains of a launchpad for the first surface-to-air guided missile system, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during the early years of the Cold War. Her mom was a “firecracker,” Lizzette said.

“This is where she is meant to be.”

In 2019, New York City’s city council voted to transfer control of Hart Island to the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, ending penal control of the island. During one hearing, a New York City councilor described Melinda as a “brilliant and determined” activist who “almost single-handedly dragged this issue into the public spotlight.”

The practice of using inmate labor to perform burials ceased in April 2020, and in 2021 the Parks Department took over control of Hart Island. Last spring, 15 buildings on the island were demolished, the debris shipped away on barges. Underbrush and dead trees were removed. “Those are real changes, real outcomes,” Melinda said.

“If a person had a baby buried six feet away from a building with the roof collapsed, it doesn’t say ‘The life of your baby mattered.’ ” Melinda continues creating in the digital sphere. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hart Island Project’s website was redesigned to work on mobile devices. While someone is on the island, GPS and navigation tools point out grave plots and historic locations.

Through the use of augmented reality (AR), when someone stands near a gravesite, the image of a virtual grave marker appears on the screen—another way for someone to remember and connect with their history.

JACOB RIIS COLLECTION © MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

Now, Lizzette says she visits Hart Island to visit her mother’s grave, yes, but more to support her “Hart Island sisters.” Lizzette refers to a group of women, including Elsie, who have developed a sense of kinship through their shared experience of having family buried on the island.

During one visit, they wanted to accompany one another as they visited their relatives’ gravesites. They were told it wasn’t allowed—they weren’t on the list of approved people to visit that gravesite.

“I’m not going to allow her to cry by herself,” Elsie thought. Then she realized people could bring up to four people, either family or guests. If they listed each other as guests, Elsie said, “they can’t tell us no.”

“We go as a group.” During a March 2023 visit, Elsie, Lizzette, three other women, and Melinda all visited the gravesites of the five women’s relatives. None of them mourns alone.

Journalist Jacob Riis’s photo of laborers loading coffins into an open trench on Hart Island, 1890.

THE HISTORY OF HART ISLAND PRIOR TO 1654 Hart Island is part of the traditional hunting and fishing grounds of the Siwanoy people.

1994 Melinda takes a family member to the island for the first time, to visit the gravesite of their baby.

1654 English doctor Thomas Pell purchases Hart Island from a local Native American tribe.

1998 Melinda and Joel Sternfeld publish Hart Island, a collection of photographs taken by Melinda and Sternfeld, as well as Melinda’s original artwork

THE CIVIL WAR The Union Army uses Hart Island for training exercises, as well as a POW camp. At one point, more than 3,000 Confederate soldiers were imprisoned there.

1868 The city Department of Charities and Correction purchases Hart Island for a municipal burial ground called City Cemetery.

1872 Mass burials begin.

1885 - 1960S Hart Island has many uses, including a 300-patient women’s insane asylum that later turned into a workhouse for incarcerated young men, a 50-bed tuberculosis hospital for women, and a Catholic chapel.

1991 Melinda visits Hart Island for the first time.

2007 The Department of Correction begins allowing “closure visits.”

2013 The Department of Correction begins allowing bimonthly visits.

DECEMBER 1, 2018 (WORLD AIDS DAY) The Speaker of the New York City Council visits the gravesite marker of the first child known to have died from AIDS. He is the first elected official ever to visit Hart Island.

2019 New York City’s mayor signs legislation ending penal control of Hart Island.

2008 Through a Freedom of Information Law request, Melinda receives over 50,000 burial records.

APRIL 2020 Use of inmate labor to perform burials on Hart Island ends.

2011 The Hart Island Project is incorporated as a public charity.

JULY 1, 2021 Control of Hart Island is transferred to the Department of Parks and Recreation.

2012 Rankin & Taylor files a petition on behalf of eight women requesting to visit the gravesites of their infants on Hart Island.

2012 The New York City Council introduces legislation to transfer jurisdiction of Hart Island from the Department of Correction to the Department of Parks and Recreation.

SPRING 2023 The island’s 15 buildings are demolished and the Parks Department announces Hart Island will open to public tours.

MAY 28, 2023 A bereavement stone in memory of those who died during pandemics is placed on Hart Island

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

EDITED BY ROBIN TOVEY ‘97 Email reed.magazine@reed.edu

The Quickening

BY BRITANY ROBINSON

Elizabeth Rush ’06 lists 38 people in a cast of characters at the front of The Quickening.

But none of them delivers the opening monologue of this book. Instead, it’s Rush’s mother, who candidly shares the experience of giving birth to the author. She describes her water breaking “like the ocean was taking leave of my body.” After many hours of labor: “I just looked at you and thought, You belong to the world and I will be your guide and protector.”

The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth is Rush’s account of visiting one of the most remote corners of that world, a scientific expedition to Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, potentially the most consequential glacier for global sea level rise. Those 38 characters are the crew members, scientists, support staff, and members of the media on board the 5,376-ton ice-breaking research ship, the Nathaniel B. Palmer. The expedition was an ambitious one: three teams collecting sediment samples and using submarines and sound waves to map the ocean floor, to better understand how Thwaites is melting from below. By studying this previously unchartered territory, scientists could more accurately predict the glacier’s future.

But first, in Rush’s telling of this voyage, there is a birth.

And so begins a theatrical dance between the hard science of climate change and Rush’s intimate exploration of her desire to have a child herself, to welcome a human into a world in which glaciers are melting, flooding our reality with consequences we’re only beginning to understand. Rush decided to postpone having a child to first set eyes on the ice that could shape our collective future.

“It is disorienting to simultaneously hold these two possibilities aloft in my mind—one 32

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The author captured the aftermath of a significant collapse of Thwaites’s calving edge.

grounded in disintegration, the other in creation,” she writes.

“Humans have long projected that which they most desire and fear onto the ice, and I am no exception.”

Climate science tends to be convoluted. Even when the implications are explained (i.e., projections that 2°C of warming, versus the target 1.5°C, could mean hundreds of millions more people will suffer climate-related poverty), it’s still hard to feel what those numbers could mean. It’s hard to want to feel it.

Rush understands this. In braiding together her personal journey to motherhood with detailed descriptions of how scientists and ship crew successfully obtained

groundbreaking information about Thwaites, she makes it easier—conceptually, but also emotionally—to consider. Somehow, The Quickening reflects hope—even when the evidence is bleak.

At the start of The Quickening, it is unclear why Rush would structure her nonfiction narrative like a play with a cast of characters and a description of setting at the start of each “act.” The structure seems unnecessary; her prose is so compelling on its own.

But then come sections of dialogue, delivered by Rush’s shipmates. The author steps aside completely in these moments, and the reader is presented with a rich variety of perspectives. In showcasing these voices again and again, The Quickening is increasingly personal but also communal. The characters share different backgrounds and career paths that led them to Antarctica; they share

PHOTO BY ELIZABETH RUSH ’06

Getting Lost to Find Home Caroline Miller ’59, MAT ’64, has written a memoir that begins as she graduates from Reed and follows her fiancé to England.

Heartbroken when the engagement ends, she lands in East Africa after the Mau-Mau uprising and navigates the turbulence of colonial imperialism.

Caroline is the author of four novels, 12 short stories, and a children’s radio play; also, she hosts a YouTube channel and her blog “Write Away.”

(Independently published, 2023)

Jewels of Darkover Deborah J. Ross ’68 continues the legacy of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series with the latest installation. Readers have been drawn to Darkover for over three decades, to its world of telepaths, swordsmen, intelligent alien races, and long-buried mysteries. (Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust, 2023)

the stories their parents told them of their own births; some explain how they decided to have children, or why they don’t. They are the voices of women, people of color, and ship crew—voices that are historically absent from the canon of Antarctic exploration. Despite the Pulitzer-finalist writer’s compelling narrative surrounding them, it’s these voices that offer some of the most powerful lines.

“My first time in Antarctica, we could not get close to land,” says Fernando Naraga, an able-bodied sailor from the Philippines.

“Now we can get closer because the ice is melting.” In his hometown of Bohol, “people who have eighty years or more, they’re saying that the heavy rains that we’re having, the mudslides on The Chocolate Hills— this is the first time in their lives this has happened. The world is different, I know.”

Edward Conze’s The Psychology of Mass Propaganda

Elizabeth Rush ’06

Most of us will never visit Antarctica. But Rush makes space for anyone to see themselves on this journey, to share in both the fear and hope that swirls around this planet in crisis—a planet to which we all belong.

This book, edited and with a new introduction by Richard N. Levine ’70, is a 1933 manuscript now in print for the first time. It presents a commentary on the psychology of propaganda during the rise of fascism in Europe and discusses the conditions which generate vulnerability to misinformation in human societies. In a nod to Prof. Lloyd J. Reynolds [English and art 1929–69], Levine created the calligraphed title page in collaboration with his son and co-editor, Nathan H. Levine. (Routledge, 2023)

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REEDIANA A Field Guide to Trees of Ontario The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) published this comprehensive guide by James Eckenwalder ’71 and three other authors. Covering both naturally occurring and cultivated species, this book features an illustrated glossary of botanical terms, distribution maps, and photographs of individual tree species. James is a Canadian botanist and associate professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. His previous publications include Conifers of the World, published by Timber Press. (ROM, 2023)

The Beautiful Leaves Out of The Workplace Trap: A Theory and Therapy of Organizations Based on the Work of Wilhelm Reich With years of organizational development study and practice, Martin Goldberg ’74 applies the pioneering psychiatrist and scientist Wilhelm Reich’s approach to energy flow, blockage, and intervention to understanding and improving workplaces. Martin addresses the roots of toxicity in the workplace and the pervasive problem of human unhappiness at work, then shines a light on resolutions. (nonlectures press, 2023)

Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton Lauri Scheyer ’74 edited this collection, celebrating a pioneer in the field of Black studies and a major voice in American poetry. Hernton may be best known as an antisexist sociologist, following in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois, but he viewed himself, above all, as a poet. In addition to unpublished material, this volume includes a generous selection of Hernton’s previously published poems, from classics like “The Distant Drum” to the visionary epic “The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong.” Coedited with David Grundy, it is considered the definitive poetry collection by one of the founding figures of the Black arts movement and cofounder of the magazine Umbra, which published Black writers including Langston Hughes, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker. Lauri is Xiaoxiang Distinguished Professor at Hunan Normal University and emeritus professor at Cal State, Los Angeles.

(Wesleyan University Press, 2023)

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Writer and clinical psychologist Karen Greenbaum-Maya ’73 has published a chapbook of poems about her late husband, his illness and death, and her ensuing grief. In a short film on Shrimper Records, she reads a passage from the collection. (Bamboo Dart Press, 2023)

California Story Steve Falk ’83 has published his first book, California Story. This personal narrative spans the years from the Great Depression through the COVID-19 pandemic, with each chapter set in a uniquely regional spot.

Kirkus Reviews called it a “lyrical love letter to California” that provides “insight into the people who made California what it is today—they are stories of hard work, struggle, joy, tragedy and, simply, life.”

(Independently published, 2023)

No Guilty Bystander: The Extraordinary Life of Bishop Thomas Gumbleton

Near Misses Cathy Altman Nocquet ’78 has written her third book, a novel set in 1990s New York City that follows two young women who are “self-aware but struggling.” Their paths cross continually in nail salons, restaurants, and museums, yet they never meet— or so it appears. (Independently published, 2023)

Frank Fromherz MALS ’80 and coauthor Suzanne Sattler chronicle the life of Thomas Gumbleton, a courageous voice for peace and justice in the Catholic Church.

Frank enjoyed a long career as a college professor, most recently teaching sociology at Portland State University, after having dedicated many years to Catholic social justice and directing the Office of Justice and Peace/ Catholic Campaign for Human Development for the Archdiocese of Portland. (Orbis Books, 2023)

Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War Andreas Killen ’85 has written an eyeopening chronicle of research on the brain in the 1950s, tracing the complex circumstances surrounding the genesis of our fascination with this organ. He explores the anxious context in which the mid-century sciences took shape and reveals the deeply ambivalent history that lies behind our contemporary understanding of the brain. (HarperCollins, 2023)

Surviving Spouse or Partner Suicide Loss: A Mindful Guide for Your Journey through Grief Michelle Ann (Mendelson) Collins ’87 published a pair of books this year, the above title and Supporting a Survivor of Spouse or Partner Suicide Loss: A Mindful Guide for Co-Journeying Through Grief, both offering insights and practices to suicide-loss survivors, among whom she counts herself.

After the suicide death of her husband, she says “escaping the darkness of the grief cave required the most excruciating work of my life.” Utilizing the tools she collected as a yoga therapist and wellness coach, she hopes to help others release the mental and emotional burdens associated with this type of loss. (Saved by Story Publishing, 2023)

Solastalgia In her latest collection of poetry, Brittney Corrigan ’94 explores issues of climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene age. It has been described as “a heartwrenching and harrowing overview of environmental destruction . . . an eloquent tribute to all the awe-inspiring flora and fauna that we have failed as a species” by poet Simone Muench. Brittney is the author of the poetry collections Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks, and Daughters. She is currently at work on her first short story collection.

(JackLeg Press, 2023)

Unicorns in Underwear: An Awesome Alphabet Book George Feldman ’95 and Krishna Vali Feldman ’94 published their latest, “a slightly naughty alphabet book,” tested and approved by five-year-olds. (Independently published, 2022)

Tangos del Berretin Alex Krebs ’99 and his band Conjunto Berretin released a new album, the seventh from the renowned tango master. Featuring musicians from the Oregon Symphony and Portland’s jazz scene, this collection offers a mix of new arrangements and old classics.

Turn to Class Notes to see him crabbing in a tracksuit. Listen to Tangos del Berretin on Bandcamp. (2023)

A Field Guide to Tequila The first book from Clayton Szczech ’00, a guide to tequila for the curious and connoisseurs, will hit bookstores this fall. This illustrated exploration of one of the world’s most popular spirits journeys into origin, process, tasting, and serving. Clayton has built a career “on messing around with Mexican liquor” and was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for dissertation fieldwork on the socioeconomic and environmental effects of a regional liquor.

The Council of Animals (What to do about the Humans) Over the summer, Quill Hyde ’95 had an art piece installed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in collaboration with PETA. One can view his build video on YouTube or see more on Facebook (quill-hyde) and Instagram (@quillhyde).

Infinity Blast and the Space Weapon of Doom Brad Wright MALS ’02 has written his first novel for kids aged 8–12 years. Selfproclaimed space nerds Infinity, Gabriel, and Twilight learn of a decoded message from the dormant Opportunity rover, and clues point to a galaxy-wide conspiracy. They feel big feelings but find bravery in the face of disaster. Brad manages the technology department and teaches robotics, programming, and design at a grade school in Los Angeles. (Reycraft Books, 2023)

Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe “What happens to those who die ‘out of place’?” In his first book, Osman Balkan ’05 offers an ethnographic account of migrants’ end-of-life dilemmas, illustrating how they are connected to political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and collective identity in contemporary Europe.

This blend of personal narrative and meticulous research is based upon fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul, where he worked as an undertaker. (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

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Class Notes

These Class Notes reflect information we received by June 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! Tell us about births, deaths, weddings, voyages, adventures, transformations, astonishment, woe, delight, fellowship, discovery, and mischief.

Maldives bliss!

Judith Hendershott ’66 with her husband John Munch and daughter Anna St-Amour and her family.

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. Photos are welcome, as are digital images at 300 dpi. And

Eleanor Mathews ’67 enjoys hiking in New Hampshire.

don’t forget the pertinent details: name, class year, and your current address!

EDITED BY JOANNE HOSSACK ’82

1952

I celebrated our 66th wedding anniversary. Had dinner in a lovely restaurant and drank a bottle of champagne. We are both working on our writing and hope to have our books out later this year. Stay tuned.” We’re tuned, John, and we hope your classmates are too!

1954 70TH REUNION

Roger Bannister becomes first human to break four-minute mile.

On receiving a recent issue of Reed Magazine, John Hudson was dismayed: “No mention of anyone from the class of 1952. Bummer! Therefore I’m saying hello from Iowa City on April 15, 2023, just to let everyone know that one person is still enjoying life from that wonderful class. In March my wife, Sandra, and

“Reed offered me generous financial aid, without which I would have never attended.

I support Reed’s mission and donate to keep that mission alive.”

—HYUN GU KANG ’15

reed.edu/givenow

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1955–58

Clint Eastwood makes film debut in Revenge of the Creature.

1959

The memoir Getting Lost to Find Home, by Caroline Miller (also MAT ’64), will be published on November 1, 2023. Early praise for the work includes comments by two New York Times best-selling authors.

(See Reediana.)

1960–63

Whatever happened to Charlie the Tuna?

1964 60TH REUNION

Beagle fantasizes about lifting US president by ears.

1965

Marsha Epstein writes, “I just had cataract surgery and my vision is amazing.

My wife self-published a book: Overcoming Deepest Grief, A Woman’s Journey. It’s available at Amazon, Kindle, bookstores, and lots of libraries. It’s won four awards so far because she’s an amazing writer.

When you read it, please give an honest review on Amazon.”

1966

Judith Hendershott MAT visited the Maldives for the sixth time in February with her husband John Munch and daughter Anna St-Amour and her family.

1967

John Cushing played at a flash waltz in the rose garden of Peninsula Park in Portland. Dancers waltzed in the aisles between the rows of rosebushes.

Eleanor Mathews worked as a hospice social worker for 25 years and is now in private practice with the same focus.

“I enjoy singing in a chorus performing classical works. My son Dan lives with me.

We walk in the woods every day and are distressed about the state of our country and the world.”

Marsha Epstein ’65: recommends her wife’s new book, Overcoming Deepest Grief, A Woman’s Journey.

1968

Fritzi Lareau is enjoying her work as a tour director, leading the Music Cities tour (Memphis to New Orleans), the Rhythms tour (includes Nashville), and the Maple Leaf tour (Niagara Falls to New York City). She will be leading student tours in DC and NYC as well.

Deborah J. Ross still lives in the redwoods, where she writes and edits fantasy and science fiction. Recent publications include The Laran Gambit (see March Reediana) and Jewels of Darkover (see this issue’s Reediana). She is now working on a novella that features a swordswoman and evolved, sapient dinosaurs, as well as another Darkover novel. Deborah has been studying classical piano for the last 15 years and finds the cross-fertilization of creativity most rewarding.

1969 55TH REUNION

Is it the Age of Aquarius yet?

1970

Richard Levine has coedited a previously unpublished book by scholar Edward Conze. (See Reediana.)

1971

The Royal Ontario Museum has published James Eckenwalder’s A Field Guide to Trees of Ontario. (See Reediana.)

Aaron Rhodes is senior fellow in human rights in the Common Sense Society, an international educational network. In January he undertook a research mission in Ukraine, and also spoke at a briefing at UN headquarters

issues to laypeople, and crafting effective and defensible plans and policies to achieve community goals. Retirement now includes rehabilitating a 105-yearold mixed-use light industrial building for my dream fabric art studio and home, exploring new and traditional fabrication techniques, and enjoying my grandkids.” in Geneva. He lives in Hamburg, Germany, with his family.

1972

Dan Feller’s article “White Tennessee Lawmakers Speak Out for Insurrection in Honoring Confederate History,” about a Tennessee state senate proclamation of April 2023 as “Confederate History Month,” was first published in The Conversation. It was picked up by several national news aggregators and has been read more than 50,000 times. Search for “White Tennessee lawmakers” at theconversation.com.

Sibylle Hechtel started her new job teaching skiing for Telluride Ski School in December 2022. Otherwise, she rock climbs whenever she gets time during spring, summer, and fall.

1973

Karen Greenbaum-Maya has published a chapbook of poems. (See Reediana.)

Nancy E. Murphy retired from a planning project management position at Oregon DOT in 2017. “Notable projects in the last few years included a completely revamped statewide transportation safety plan, assessment of existing data to identify seismic vulnerabilities of the transportation system to support project priorities for a more resilient highway system, and guidelines supporting ODOT collaboration with local governments. Loved the substance of the work: learning the vocabularies of various constituency groups and technical specialties, explaining complex

1974 50TH REUNION clockwise from top-left: Fritzi Lareau ’68 tours Graceland.

Sibylle Hechtel ’72 leads a route, a few years back, at Cactus Cliff, Shelf road, Colorado.

Nancy Murphy ’73 enjoys Egypt in 2019.

Martin Goldberg has published a new book on improving the life of organizations. (See Reediana.)

Lauri Scheyer’s newest book was published in July 2023 by Wesleyan University Press. (See Reediana.)

1975

Did you know there is no U.S. quarter in existence with your class year on it?

1976

“Hello Reedies!” writes Michael Schein.

“I’ve been back in Portland since 2017 . . . what a long, strange, circular trip it’s been! I’m working for the Oregon Liquor & Cannabis Commission. Who could have dreamt that such a thing would come into being? I published a selection of my poetry in 2019, titled Liquid, Perishable, Hazardous . . . just in time for the pandemic. I’m still here, grateful.”

1977

A class note or two would certainly light up our life!

1978

Here’s an update from Cathy Altman: “After six years in New York, my husband and I have returned to Paris, where I was just treated for my ninth and 10th cancers simultaneously. (Two for one. I love a bargain.) Pascal is a partner in a VR startup that makes training videos for first responders. Our daughter, Sarah, works in film and is moving to London this Reed Magazine FALL 2023 37

Class Notes year. I still coach writers. My third book, a novel, is now available on Amazon. I’d love to hear how everyone is doing.”

“Ever since the Russian invasion and war on Ukraine,” writes Jaci Cuddy, “I have often thought about and fondly remembered the Ukrainian Easter egg that Kathleen Schinhofen made for me our freshman year. The egg was handpainted and was beautiful, colorful, and very intricately designed. It always had a prominent place on my bookshelves, and I carefully packed it for more moves than I can even remember (more than 15, I believe). Unfortunately it came to a bitter end during one of my moves in Laguna Beach, California.”

Rev. Janet Russell has un-retired and is now serving as transitional pastor/head of staff at West Valley Presbyterian Church in Cupertino, California.

Chip Krakoff writes, “My wife Carlie and I moved from the Boston suburbs to Burlington, Vermont in the summer of 2021. This coincided, more or less, with the birth of a granddaughter, Lydia, who is now 17 months old and a constant source of joy, as she lives only five minutes away. I ruptured my right Achilles tendon in January in an off-piste ski accident in Austria (I just didn’t see that stream bed until I was in it), but I’m on the mend. Soon I will be back riding my bicycle and expect to be ready for skiing come December. I am still working and traveling and will probably continue to do so, at least part time, as long as I can.”

1979 45TH REUNION

LA man receives thousands of parking tickets because of DMV computers matching tickets for cars without plates to his custom “NO PLATE” license plate.

1980

Frank Fromherz MALS had a book published in June! (See Reediana.)

“I continue to give to Reed every year because of how my Reed experience transformed my life and continues to through alumni relations and the Southern California chapter’s book club in particular.”

— WAY N E D. C L AY TO N ’ 8 2

reed.edu/givenow

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Chip Krakoff ’78 sends greetings from the infamous Mooserwirt in St. Anton, Austria. “Das schlechteste Après-ski im Welt” (see his class note).

Sally (Jesser) Theriault ’81 is blessed with good weather for hiking in Switzerland!

1981

Sally (Jesser) Theriault retired last year after a career with California State Parks and is enjoying travel, most recently a month birding and hiking in France and Switzerland.

1982

How about a game of Trivial Pursuit?

1983

Mark Bussell and his wife, Kristi Lemm, will be Fulbright scholars in Budapest, Hungary, in fall 2023. Mark will do research at the Institute of Materials and Environmental Chemistry of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Kristi will teach in the Institute of Psychology at Eötvös Loránd University. They previously spent a year (2016–17) working at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

The multitalented Steve Falk has now published a book! (See Reediana.)

1984 40TH REUNION

Brittney Corrigan has published another collection of poetry. (See Reediana.)

Congratulations to William Neuman!

His book Things Are Never So Bad that They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela (Reediana, March 2022) has received the Cornelius Ryan Award from the Overseas Press Club of America as the best nonfiction book on international affairs published in 2022. Judges commented, “Neuman’s vivid reporting

never lets the reader forget how the lives of ordinary Venezuelans have been crushed by this man-made disaster.” The book was also named

one of the best books of 2022 by Foreign Affairs magazine and was named a

Notable Book of 2022 by the National Endowment for Democracy.

1985

Andreas Killen’s chronicle of research on the brain in the 1950s, mentioned in Summer Class Notes, slipped out of Summer Reediana at the very last second. We apologize to Andreas and classmates for any distress this may have caused. You can read about it in this issue’s Reediana.

1986

Or how about a Monumental Class Note?

1987

Michelle Ann (Mendelson) Collins has published two books on journeying through grief. (See Reediana.)

1988

Chela Jane (Cadwell) Noto had an exciting winter! “We live right in the storm path of the atmospheric rivers that hit the Santa Cruz Mountains this past winter—13 in total. We loved the 12 inches of snow, but not the 42 days (not contiguous) without power. We are fully electric/solar, but just haven’t installed the home batteries.” Chela paints—encaustic and resin collage—and looks forward to getting back into her studio once all the mud is cleared!

1989 35TH REUNION

Garrett Lenoir recently completed his second AIDS/LifeCycle 545-mile bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

He’s a training ride leader for the Sacramento area and plans to ride again in 2024. Go, Garrett!

1990

Christian Hatfield was appointed by Governor Jared Polis as District Attorney for the 22nd Judicial District of Colorado effective June 1, 2023.

1991

Allie Cliffe has moved to Portland . . . the other Portland, that is (in Maine). “A COVID silver lining was that I could keep my job in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and work mostly from Maine. When I want/ need to be in person, I hop on the bus/ train. Shoot me an email if you’re ever in town on the East Coast and want to grab a coffee.”

Now that she’s mastered time travel, Shula (Jill) Neuman is starting a new business that has nothing to do with time travel (too risky to share that skill).

Rather, she is using her journalistic and editorial prowess to help organizations with their content strategy, editorial quality, and content branding.

1992

John Worsley has been interviewed on three different podcasts about his experience grieving the death of his wife, Amy Heil (In Memoriam, June 2021), as well as his book, My Heart Has No Home (Reediana, December 2022): Grief Is My Side Hustle on December 16, 2022, Grief Trails on February 8, 2023, and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To My Life with Laura Muirhead on March 22, 2023. He’s found these opportunities useful as he tries to organize his thoughts about it all and starts work on some personal essays about various aspects of his grief.

1993

Got milk?

1994 30TH REUNION

Got wardrobe malfunction?

1995

Kasandra Griffin won the lottery for a cabin reservation at Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and went in early April with a group that included Heidi Becker, Nic Warmenhoven ’96, Yoram Bauman, and Yoram’s 91-year-old father Joel. They hiked 9.5 miles, with 4,300 feet of elevation gain, plus there was fresh snow over packed ice on the trail at the top, making for exciting conditions. Heidi led a makeshift Passover seder and said that Yoram’s ziplock bag of colorful assorted painkillers reminded her of “Renn Fayre for 50-year-olds,” and Nic went skinny-dipping at Ribbon Falls, because it was much warmer at the

bottom. Kasandra did two extra days and nights of hiking and camping after the two nights at Phantom, and is excited to count “50 miles hiking in the Grand Canyon with friends” as the first part of celebrating an upcoming milestone birthday.

1996

Dan Morgan was awarded the Alvan R. Feinstein Memorial Award from the American College of Physicians (ACP) for making a major contribution to the science of patient care and clinical epidemiology. This award was for his work improving understanding of clinical diagnosis and developing an online game to teach diagnosis, available at testingwisely. com. Dan is a professor of epidemiology and infectious disease at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

1997

Robin Tovey reports having a poem in Bel Esprit, “a literary newspaper” that is actually published in print each month (“How recherché!”). Also, she was accepted into Reed’s MALS program as a degree-seeking student: “Back to swimming in academic waters, and it never felt so good!”

1998

Oprah Winfrey meets Phil McGraw.

Hilarious hijinks ensue.

1999 25TH REUNION

Nico Azios has been the owner and winemaker for his eponymous label, Azios Cellars, since the inaugural wine of 2011. He recently received numerous awards for his 2016 Sangiovese: Gold Medal/Best in Show/95 points at the 88th Annual LA International Wine Competition (as well as a special award for label design), Gold Medal/90 points at the 46th Annual OC Fair Commercial Wine Competition, and 91 points from Wine Enthusiast magazine. He also recently poured his wines at the Reedies Drinking Reedie Wine for a Reed event in Portland this past April, where he reunited and sipped wine with old (and new) Reed comrades. He still lives in beautiful (unaffordable) Santa Barbara, California, and still has two beautiful (barely affordable) daughters, aged 15 and 10. Contact him through his website: www.azioscellars.com.

Alex Krebs’s band Conjunto Berretin just released a new tango album. He continues to teach tango dancing at Tango Berretin, his studio not far from Reed.

When not dancing, he enjoys crabbing in a tracksuit. (See Reediana.)

clockwise from top left: Alex Krebs ’99 enjoys crabbing in a tracksuit.

Yoram Bauman ’95 and his father Joel Bauman, Heidi Becker ’95, Kasandra Griffin ’95, and Nic Warmenhoven ’96 at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Left to right: Ben Leech ’99, John Bannister ’98, Nico Azios ’99, Tanya Kellam ’99, and Sky Ternahan ’99 at Azios Cellars’ most recent wine release party in Santa Barbara, California.

It’s Oscar night for Amy Foote ’00, center, with All the Beauty and the Bloodshed director Laura Poitras, left, and Amy’s wife, musician Ana Egge.

2000

Amy Foote was being glamorous at the 95th Academy Awards! With her wife!

Take a look!

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Class Notes A career built on messing around with Mexican liquor earned Clayton Szczech a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF). The educational tour and consulting company he founded, Experience Agave, turns 15 next year. CJ’s return to academia began in 2021, when he left his long-time home in sleepy downtown Mexico City to start a midlife sociology PhD at the University of Utah in cosmopolitan Salt Lake City. The GRF allows him to return to Mexico for two to three years of dissertation fieldwork on the socioeconomic and environmental effects of the nascent geographical indication for raicilla, a regional liquor from Jalisco state. And his first book, A Field Guide to Tequila, hits bookstores in October. (See Reediana.)

2001

After over a decade as a professor, Heather Houser gets to be a student again: she received a Mellon New Directions fellowship for 2023–24 and will be doing coursework at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health for a project on reproduction and climate. “In fall 2022, I acquired a ridiculously long title: Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at UT Austin.

Unfortunately, this does not mean I now know how to build boats.”

2002

Cheyenne Brindle, associate professor of chemistry at Trinity College, received an award for her scholarship during the college’s 197th commencement ceremony on May 21. In her position at Trinity, Cheyenne investigates the use of bisulfite as an inexpensive method to purify or remove carbonyl compounds from mixtures and novel catalyst designs based on replacing costly and expensive metals with “greener” organic molecules capable of catalyzing a wide variety of reactions. Using

“I only attended Reed because of the generous financial aid I received. I understand that financial aid is mostly from alumni donors like me, so I make a point of giving back so others can have what I was so lucky to be given.”

— LU CY S H O E M A K E R ’ 9 8

reed.edu/givenow

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these synthetic innovations, she and her team of undergraduate scientists are synthesizing a library of novel antibiotic compounds.

The first novel for kids (8–12 age bracket) by Brad Wright MALS was published in May! (See Reediana.)

2003

Tell us about those babies you’ve been publishing!

2004 20TH REUNION

World welcomes Gmail. We hope to welcome class notes.

2005

Osman Balkan has published his first book. (See Reediana.)

2006

After nearly 10 years with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, Scott Beutel started a new job on March 1 as assistant commissioner for special projects with Minnesota Housing, the state’s housing finance agency. Scott is excited to work on housing access, affordability, and stability issues, as well as to work in a new area of government.

After years working for members of Congress and the U.S. Senate, Ben DuPree is back to working in Portlandarea politics and government. He works Portland’s City Hall as communications

director for newly elected Portland City Commissioner Rene Gonzalez. He looks forward to the challenges of local government and city stewardship.

2007

Goodbye to the day job! Jackleen de La Harpe MALS ’11 celebrates the end of work (sort of) near a NE Alberta Street mural painted by her son, Henry Tolman.

Dan Dilliplane completed his PhD in communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he taught classes in performance, media production, and cultural studies.

His dissertation research focused on the intersections of performance and activism with an emphasis on embodiment.

2008

Rachel Apatoff has been working in costumes for film and TV in Los Angeles for over a decade, with a specialty in period projects. Notable recent jobs include Steven Spielberg’s movie The Fabelmans and an upcoming Apple show starring Brie Larson.

Rinna Rem’s brief update: “I survived two aortic dissections and 17 days in a coma. I can walk again!” Hooray!

2009 15TH REUNION

Our license plate is now “CLASS NOTE.”

2010

Bonnie Cuthbert and Alex Moran welcomed Julia Eleanor Moran-Cuthbert on October 19, 2022. They are currently residing in Irvine, California.

Ian Fries ‘18 is a hardworking SLACer.

On April 17, Natalie Morgenstern ran the Boston Marathon. It was her third time running Boston, and her seventh marathon overall. While every marathon finish is special, this one marked the 10th anniversary of the marathon bombing. The weather was good, spectators were fabulous, and the Boston Strong spirit was out in full force.

Parent & Family Weekend November 3 & 4, 2023

2011

Jackleen de La Harpe MALS recently retired as executive director of Underscore.news, a digital-first nonprofit media group in Portland that she founded in Oregon, and completed the Food Sovereignty Project, a series of stories written by Indigenous writers and published by EO Media. She has been awarded a two-week writing residency in fall 2023 at Pine Meadow Ranch in Sisters, Oregon.

2012

How about those jobs you’ve been birthing?

2013

Spike Horbinski finished his PhD in chemistry at the University of Utah in December 2021 after accepting a position as a process engineer at Intel. He is very happy to be back living in Southeast Portland.

Olive Perry just finished running their biggest crowdfunding campaign yet and is celebrating raising 977% of their original goal! It will allow them to adapt an antifascist sci-fi TTRPG to a video game called Lancer Tactics, with the tagline “Be gay // do giant robot crimes.”

2014 10TH REUNION

Natalie Hawkins is looking to reconnect with ’14 grads over wine, camping, or coffee meet-ups. “Currently in Sacramento/ Napa area and beyond. Missing my Urbex team immensely.”

2015–17

Happy 125th birthday to the Ouija board.

2018

Ian Fries is currently working as a cryoEM specialist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the S2C2 and SCSC programs.

2019 5TH REUNION Is Pepsi OK?

2020–23

Watch out for the murder hornets!

Join us for Parent & Family Weekend 2023!

Visit campus; enjoy speakers, performances, and other family-friendly activities; experience the rich array of student opportunities and resources Reed has to offer; and spend quality time with your student.

Schedule and registration: reed.edu/pfw

In Memoriam EDITED BY BRITANY ROBINSON Email robinsonb@reed.edu

Shared Passion for the Natural World Prof. Bertram G. Brehm Jr. [biology 1962–93]

March 21, 2023, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.

Bert Brehm, professor emeritus in biology, was someone with whom you couldn’t take just one class. Decades of students were hooked on his knowledgeable and enthusiastic teachings of biology, botany, and evolution. “Who could forget his lilting voice, his unforgettable lecture on why fig fruit is crunchy (pollinating insects inside!), the warmth of his home with Dorothy . . . and his kindness as we stressed over the senior thesis,” wrote student George Weiblen ’92.

Born on November 26, 1926, to Bert and Lucille Brehm of Cleveland, Ohio, Brehm grew up fishing, hunting, and tending to the family garden. He graduated from Mayfield High School in 1944. After serving in the U.S. Merchant Marine during WWII, Brehm returned to Cleveland and graduated from Adelbert College at Western Reserve University. He studied botany at the University of Texas at Austin in their doctoral program.

Brehm met Dorothy Prosinski at a Catholic social gathering in Cleveland, and the two married in 1950. Dorothy had a gift for listening and making everyone feel special.

When Bert, out of an abundance of enthusiasm, veered from conversation into lecture, Dorothy would bring him back to Earth with a nudge or change of subject. Dorothy had a long, rewarding career in adult basic education and tutoring. The couple welcomed countless students into their home for warm meals and conversation. Brehm and Dorothy were an inseparable team for 72 years; she passed away just five months prior to his death.

In 1962, Brehm accepted a position in the biology department at Reed, where he stayed for the rest of his career.

Brehm’s studies of plant biology and evolution included class field trips to gather native plants in the wild areas of the Oregon coast, the Columbia River Gorge, and the Sandy River, where he helped create an ongoing field study experience and the Sandy River database of plants. He was also involved with the Berry Botanic Garden, and the Oregon chapter of the Nature Conservancy and its first project at Cascade Head. His children remember many camping and road trips with abrupt stops for their father to gather plant specimens for his classes. Many of those specimens are now preserved in the Brehm Biodiversity Center at Reed.

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Brehm’s passion for the natural world was woven into much of his life, and he shared that with his children—instilling in them an appreciation for the outdoors and its bounty. He was a dedicated angler, pursuing salmon and steelhead in the rivers and bays of Oregon, often with his three sons. His three daughters loved being outside, hiking and gardening. Brehm maintained multiple gardens overflowing

with flowers and vegetables, many of which he served for dinner or delivered to friends and family, occasionally accompanied by a fresh filet of salmon.

After retiring, Bert and Dorothy spent many wonderful days with their family at their beach cabin in Nedonna, where Brehm kept a garden and a fishing boat. It was a peaceful place that gave them the time and space to

focus on grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Everyone remembers the special books Brehm picked out as gifts and read to them.

Brehm was a teacher by nature. His lectures made a lasting impact on his students, who continued to visit and write to him from across the globe. A recently discovered fossil from eastern Oregon was given the name Meliosma brehmii by one of his former thesis students.

When asked about this distinction, Brehm remarked that “one old fossil has now been named after another one.”

Brehm’s lifelong dedication to the pursuit of knowledge and teaching made a huge impression on loved ones, students, and colleagues— many of whom will further his legacy with the work he inspired. He continued to spend time in his office at Reed and kept up with his colleagues well into his 80s.

Prof. Bertram Brehm is survived by his children, Bert G. Brehm III, Chris Brehm, Theresa Enderle, Steve Brehm, Lucy Brehm, and Mary Behrendt.

Gary Schlickeiser

they played together, along with Tom’s wife.

While Tom could never beat Gary at chess, he did usually dominate with the newer games— except in what would be their final match of Wingspan (a bird-themed board game), which Gary was proud to win.

Rabeca Reese MALS ’86 started working for Gary in her first year as an MALS student.

“The best thing about the job was getting to work with Gary and be welcomed by the groups of people who were all part of his family. Also, I actually thought some of his puns were funny.”

Rabeca said Gary navigated the changes and challenges of technology in higher education, and “he did this with patience, kindness, intelligence, and honor.”

Gary’s son recalled how his father was so willing to train and nurture new employees.

“When they eventually left, he was sorry to see them go,” Tom said. “[But] he was only sorry because everyone he worked with was a friend, and saying goodbye is hard.”

Gary retired in 2018. He is survived by his wife and son.

Barbara Wuest Thompson ’43

March 10, 2023, in Portland, Oregon, of illness.

NINA JOHNSON ’99

For 38 years, Gary kept Reed connected. The former director of Technology Infrastructure Services (now Information Technology) maintained the campus network, email, phone system, internet connection, and other vital technology resources. He was equally committed to the well-being of students, faculty, staff, and coworkers. Marty Ringle, chief information officer emeritus, said, “As the person with primary responsibility for Reed’s technology infrastructure, Gary was genuinely ‘on duty’ 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” and he kept everything up and running “more than 99.9% of the time.” When Gary was asked how he achieved such success, he’d always credit his staff. “They were great,” said Ringle. “Thanks to the way that Gary mentored them, respected them, and cared for them.”

Alongside his indoor profession, Gary loved the outdoors. When he was younger, he enjoyed backpacking in the mountains. Later in life, he continued hiking, along with biking and birdwatching. He and his wife, Katy Schlickeiser, would take trips to central and eastern Oregon to view wildlife. Gary was an excellent chess player. His son, Tom Schlickeiser ’07, introduced him to some modern board games, which

November 11, 2022, in San Francisco.

Barbara, a talented ceramicist and cofounder (with her sister-in-law, Enid Thompson ’44) of Allied Potters in San Francisco, died at age 101.

At Reed, which Barbara said had an immeasurable influence on her life, she studied literature and wrote her thesis, “Constance Rourke and the Roots of American Culture,” under Prof. Victor L.O. Chittick [English 1921–48]. She went on to earn an MA in museum studies from John F. Kennedy University, served as editor of the graduate program’s journal, and became curator at the San Francisco Wine Museum.

Barbara and husband Ezra Thompson III had three sons. The family moved often, living in Canada, Colombia, and Venezuela. Later in life, Barbara moved into a home for active seniors in San Francisco; there she served as the chair of the library committee and wrote a biweekly column for the residence newsletter. She also volunteered her time as a reader to students at a local elementary school, held season tickets at the symphony and the theatre, and attended several classes a week at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning.

Barbara will be remembered for her abiding curiosity, love of literature, and passion for reading. She is survived by her three sons, Peter, Matthew, and John Ezra.

Sylvia Schnitzer Nemer Davidson ’47 February 22, 2023, in Portland.

A civic leader and social policy advocate, Sylvia Nemer Davidson spent much of her life in service to her community and causes she cared about.

During World War II, Sylvia joined the women’s branch of the United States Naval

Reserve, better known as WAVES. “All the young men were off getting killed and I felt I should do something,” she told the Portland Downtowner in 1993. Sylvia was assigned to run the public relations department and the station newspaper at Hunter College in New York City. Having spent the prior two years running the Reed College news bureau and working as a student stringer for the Oregonian, she found the position a natural fit, and Sylvia embraced the opportunity to dive into wartime stories. She interviewed wounded veterans and reported on the UN and women in the military. She recalled that time as one of profound growth: “I was working with wonderful, intelligent women.”

After the war, Sylvia attended Stanford University on the GI Bill, then returned to her hometown of Portland and Reed College, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in general literature. She wrote her thesis “The Moral Problem in the Novels of Arthur Koestler,” with Prof.

Donald MacRae advising.

Sylvia knew little about health care policy when she was first asked to join a committee.

But over 20 years of work, she developed a deep understanding and conviction for critical issues surrounding access to health care. She served on numerous committees and agencies, both local and national, including the American Health Planning Association and the Oregon Health Council. While serving on the National Health Planning and Development Commission under the Carter administration, Sylvia informed policy makers on the major shortcomings of rural health care. “[We] showed providers that most uninsured are the working poor,” she said.

Sylvia was a committed member of the Democratic Party, serving as coordinator for the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign primary and working on numerous local campaigns. Sylvia’s second husband, C. Girard “Jebby” Davidson, was a former assistant secretary with the U.S. Department of the Interior in the Truman administration.

In 2009, Sylvia donated Sol LeWitt’s Torn Paper Drawing (1975) to Reed College.

Sylvia’s devotion and work on various causes has been recognized by the Oregon Jewish Welfare Fund, the Harry S. Truman Freedom Bell Award, the Forrest E. Rieke Achievement Award in Community Health Planning, and the Reed Magazine FALL 2023 43

In Memoriam March of Dimes Community Service Award.

Sylvia was preceded in death by her husband of 30 years, C. Girard Davidson, who died in 1996, after 29 years of marriage. Her first husband, Norman Nemer, died in 1964. Her deceased parents were Marie (Murph) and Joe Schnitzer. She is survived by her two sons, Jerry Nemer and Philip Nemer, and by six stepchildren.

Phyllis Cohn Terkla ’48

March 9, 2022, in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

Phyllis grew up in Portland and followed her brother, Stanley Cohn ’47, to Reed, where she studied psychology and sociology and penned a thesis titled “The Nature of Stereotyped Thinking” under Prof. Read Bain [sociology 1947–49] and Prof. William (Monte) Griffith [psychology 1926–54]. After graduating she became an administrative assistant at the University of Oregon Dental School (what is now OHSU School of Dentistry), where she met a student named Louis Terkla who said he wanted to see Portland. The next day the two joined a tour that Reed was running to Multnomah Falls. They took a long hike, missed the return bus, hitchhiked back to Portland, and eventually got married.

Phyllis loved her work as a substitute teacher and enjoyed outdoor hobbies—hunting, fishing, camping, and hiking—as well as rug making, knitting, and reading. She shared a wonderful marriage with Louis, who became dean of OHSU’s dentistry school. She is survived by her children, David Terkla and Linda Peppler.

Marion Marx ’48

January 28, 2023, peacefully in Pasadena, California.

Marion was a loving wife, mother, grandmother, and friend to many. She was a double major in literature and Spanish at Reed. Marion and her husband, Horace, spent their retirement traveling to places like Alaska and Mexico, cooking healthy meals together, and working on their fitness. In 2008, they celebrated 60 years of marriage with their son, daughter, and grandchildren. Horace passed away in 2010. Marion will be remembered by all she touched with her kindness, intelligence, and generosity of spirit.

Stuart Crawford Gaul ’48

January 29, 2023, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Stuar t was bor n in Olympia, Washington, and graduated from Stadium High School in Tacoma. He entered Reed in 1942 and stayed a year and a half before being called up to the U.S. Army, serving as a radioman in New Guinea, in combat in the Philippines, and as part of the

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occupation force in Japan. After being discharged he returned to Reed, glad to be back at a place he loved and grateful for the opportunities the school provided him. He earned a degree in political science and wrote his thesis, “The Effects of the 1948 Budget Cut on the Bonneville Power Administration,” advised by Prof. Charles McKinley [political science 1918–60].

Stuart went on to Harvard Law School, later noting that Reed had prepared him well. He spent his career in corporate law, including 30 years at United States Steel. He was active in his church and loved organizing family vacations, reading, and grilling. He is survived by his wife, Joan Boffa; his sons, Stuart and Christopher; and four grandchildren.

John L. Shipley ’49

May 2, 2023, in Portland, Oregon.

John was a child of Berlin, Germany, and a proud citizen of Portland, Oregon. Born in 1927 to Julian and Erna Schybilski, John enjoyed a comfortable childhood, along with his older sister, Marianne Buchwalter ’45. John’s father ran a successful men’s clothing business, and the family enjoyed ski outings in the Alps and beach vacations along the North Sea. Tragically, their sense of security gave way to peril with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, the family gave up hope of a secure life in Germany and left for the United States.

Following a stormy Atlantic crossing and a brief stay in New York City, they landed in Oregon. Their surname, Schybilski, was changed to Shipley, as Julian felt an Anglicized name would be easier on American tongues. For John, the name change signified gratitude and a commitment to a country that generously provided a new life in the face of the horrors unfolding in Europe.

The Shipleys bought a home in Northeast Portland, and John attended Beaumont Middle School and then Grant High School, where he was an Eagle Scout. Upon graduation, John enrolled at Reed College before being drafted into the army and heading to Fort Lewis. After finishing his service, and with the help of the GI Bill, he resumed his studies at the University of Southern California, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics.

John joined his father’s business, Dennis Uniform Manufacturing Company, which they built into the leading regional manufacturer of school apparel. The company expanded into a factory on the east side of Portland, just under the Hawthorne Bridge, where it remains today.

At its height, the cavernous space was filled with unionized workers cutting plaids and sewing garments.

On a business trip to San Francisco, John met Joan Lesman, a Portland girl (and fellow Grant alum) who had graduated from UC Berkeley and started a career in advertising.

After a whirlwind courtship, the two married in 1962 and returned to Portland. John said that marrying Joan was at the top of his list of best life decisions. The couple moved to a ranch house in Southwest Portland, in what was then farmland, and started a family. There they raised three children, along with a number of golden retrievers.

Over the years, John became the sole proprietor of Dennis and continued to widen the company’s reach, turning it into a national brand. At the same time, he and Joan were active members of the Portland community, playing vital roles at Reed—Joan as a member of the Reed College Women’s Committee and John as a member of Reed’s alumni board and a Friends of the Gallery volunteer—and other institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Catlin Gabel, and Chamber Music Northwest. Their devotion to the arts and community engagement was honored when John and Joan received the Governor’s Arts Award in 2005. They were also active politically, starting with their opposition to the Vietnam War. John and Joan were true partners in everything, including their love of family, art, Portland, community, country, and civic duty. Yet when Joan died in 2011, John carried on. He kept a hand in the business, which to this day remains in the family, and filled his days reading history, listening to chamber music, and watching the sun set over the Pacific. The bulk of his attention, however, went to his grandchildren: Rosa, Joe, Owen, Fiona, Alex, and Henry.

Their lives and adventures gave him infinite joy.

John is survived by them, along with his three children, David, Ann, and Thomas. Though in recent years his body began to fail, John’s spirit and sense of humor shined through until the very end, when he died peacefully and surrounded by family in the same house where he and Joan had raised their family.

Willis Elbridge Sibley ’51 March 13, 2022, in Shady Side, Maryland.

Will arrived at Reed just two years after the conclusion of World War II. A 17-year-old with no military experience, he found himself studying alongside many veterans.

In an inter view for Reed’s oral history project, Will said these young men (and some women) had a no-nonsense approach to school and life that forced him to grow up quickly.

From a young age, Will thought he would

study engineering. But the curriculum at Reed ignited fresh curiosities. His freshman adviser, Prof. Raymond Ellickson [physics 1946–48], noticed that Will seemed more interested in the nature of human activity than the machines they operated. Will switched to economics and received a grant to write his thesis, “Possibilities of Expansion of the Aluminum Fabrication Industry in the Pacific Northwest,” with advising from Prof. Arthus Leigh [economics 1945-1988], after traveling around the region visiting aluminum fabricators. Will also worked as the driver of the bus that went up to the Mount Hood ski cabin. Reed had recently acquired this old bus, recently retired from carrying shipyard workers from Portland to Vancouver, Washington. Will had the honor of driving it on its very last voyage, when it couldn’t make it up the hill just outside of campus.

After graduating from Reed with a bachelor’s degree in economics, Will shifted his focus again to earn a master’s and a doctorate in anthropology, both from the University of Chicago. He taught anthropology at universities in Utah, Washington, the Philippines, and Ohio. Throughout his career he was an energetic supporter of applying and practicing anthropology within organizations, and a tireless volunteer. In 1994, he coedited (with Tomoko Hamada) the book Anthropological Perspectives on Organizational Culture.

Will held on to his interest in engineering by remaining what he called a “tinkerer” throughout his life; he’d always been a sailor, and in retirement, he took up repairing sailboats. He and his first wife, Barbara, sailed their boat down the St. Lawrence Seaway, down the Intercoastal Waterway, and into the Chesapeake Bay to their new home in Shady Side.

Will subsequently opened the highly successful Sibley Marine Services.

His colleagues at the Society for Applied Anthropology, of which he was a longtime and active member, say they will remember Will for his kindness and thoughtful nature. He was sincerely interested in learning about people and their lives.

After his first wife died of cancer, Will remarried. He is survived by his wife of 20 years, Marjorie Hegge, and three children.

Ruth Walby MAT ’52 April 4, 2023

Born January 21, 1928 to Paul and Gertrude Millard in Floriston, California, Ruth was the youngest of three daughters. After graduating as co-valedictorian from Camas High School, Ruth studied education at the University of Oregon.

She was a member of Chi Omega sorority and multiple honor societies.

Ruth taught secondary classes at Elgin High School from 1950-51, then enrolled at Reed to earn her master’s. She worked as an engineering

assistant at Boeing Aircraft Company, eventually becoming the head of her seven-person test data reducing crew.

Ruth met and married James L. Walby in 1955, and the two had three children: Ann, Kristin, and Nels. Ruth was a proud stay-athome parent. She enjoyed reading and following the financial world.

After Jim retired, Ruth and Jim enjoyed winters in Scottsdale, Arizona, and summers in Seattle and on Hood Canal.

HONOR THEIR

Memory IN THE SPIRIT OF REED

Thomas C. Burke ’55

May 6, 2023, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

An inspired scholar in the field of South Asian and classical Indian literature and linguistics, Tom grew up in Portland. A German major at Reed—he wrote his thesis about Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s classical odes under Prof.

Kaspar Locher [German 1950–88]—he also taught himself Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. He studied German and Russian languages at the University of Chicago, spent eight years in Munich and Berlin acquiring the linguistic forms of Proto-Indo-European, and then moved for 10 years to India, where he taught German and studied Sanskrit. Tom returned to America to study with Sanskrit scholar Daniel Ingalls at Harvard University, where he later became an administrator as well as a part-time instructor in the department of Sanskrit and Indian studies.

Tom helped students with research and study in multiple disciplines, including Sanskrit, Latin, Italian, and English. After retiring, he taught Hindi at Boston University for several years.

Tom facilitated a Mahabharata reading group at Harvard that met almost weekly for 26 years. He was also a keen member of a Sanskrit conversation group and donated much of his personal collection of texts to the university’s Sanskrit library. He was loved by friends and associates for his courtesy, gentleness, and profound humanism. He was naturally generous and would assist any learner who asked for guidance; he never expected recompense. In all of this he was a true scholar and enlightened teacher.

Tom spent the last two years of his life at the Sancta Maria Nursing Home in Cambridge.

He is survived by two siblings, Jennifer Burke Dudley and Richard Burke.

Edwin “Ed” Schneider MAT ’56 April 16, 2022, in Portland, after a brief illness.

Ed was a committed career educator. After graduating from Reed with a master’s in teaching, he worked as a teacher, a high school principal, and an assistant superintendent in Portland public schools. He also served as a part-time

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In Memoriam

Gene was a Renaissance man with a particular interest in automobiles, history, genealogy, and music, combined with a fantastic grasp of mathematics and its literature.

At Reed he wrote his thesis “Canonical Product Decomposition of Unimodular 2x2 Matrices,” advised by Prof. Burrowes Hunt [mathematics 1953–77], and earned a bachelor’s in mathematics. Gene continued his studies in mathematics at the University of Oregon, where he received a master’s, and at UC Berkeley, where he received a doctorate.

Gene was admired by those who knew him and much loved by family and friends.

He was preceded in death by his son Guy Vega. He is survived by his wife, Patricia; his daughters, Tanya Bottini, Cristina Vanderburgh, and Diana Smith; his sons Brook Gale, Ricardo, Rodrigo, Jeffrey, Dan, and Michael Vega; thirty grandkids and two great grandkids.

her brothers, Joan’s biggest regret was watching the women’s and civil rights movements from the sidelines. Perhaps propelled in part by that regret, she went on to be a force of support and advocacy for the LGBTQ community, of which she was a proud member.

After 20 years of studying and practicing sociology, she left the field to begin training as a psychotherapist for children. She earned her master’s in clinical psychology from the New College of California in 1992.

When Joan was 61, she attended a national gathering of the Old Lesbians Organizing for Change (OLOC) in Minneapolis. She was so impressed by the group’s loving acceptance— of themselves and each other—that she jumped into revitalizing the OLOC San Francisco chapter. For 17 years, she was a leading figure there, fundraising, organizing, and expanding the group.

Joan was a San Francisco resident for 34 years, much of which were spent in partnership with Dottie Fowler. The couple had a tightknit community of lesbian friends with whom they enjoyed vacationing at Discovery Bay in Washington. After Dottie’s death, Joan moved to The Redwoods, a retirement community in Marin County. But she hadn’t lost her energy for organizing and community support; at The Redwoods, she set up and ran the orientation program for new residents and taught classes in collage, which she loved. Joan also enjoyed swimming, good food, and creative writing.

In 2014, Joan received OLOC’s Old Lesbian Pride Award at the group’s national gathering in Oakland, California. Even after stepping back from her duties on the steering committee, Joan continued participating in community events as much as she could with the help of her partner, Jan Couvillon.

Jan said the last three years were tough on them both, as Joan’s symptoms from Lewy body dementia worsened. Jan was grateful to have the help of day care, which allowed Joan to continue being part of a social setting, which had always been important to her.

Joan is survived by her partner of 12 years, Jan Couvillon.

Joan Emerson ’57

Norman Knight Linton ’58

Through her work, volunteering, and community service, Joan dedicated her life to the wellbeing of others.

She was born in Washington, DC, in 1935.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Reed, writing her thesis, “Application of Interaction Process Analysis to Children’s Groups,” with advising from Prof. Howard Jolly [sociology 1949–70]. She went on to earn a PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley and taught sociology at Carleton College and the State University of New York, Buffalo. According to one of

Norman was born in 1936 in Por t Angeles, Washington, to Fred Linton and Ruby Oliva Linton, both first-generation immigrants from Norway and Switzerland/ France. Growing up on the Olympic Peninsula between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Olympic Mountains, Norman fished, hunted, camped, and hiked from a young age. As a youngster, he also worked on

adjunct instructor at Portland State University.

Ed was an active member of several committees, including the Merit Scholarship Program, the Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission, and the Accreditation Committee of the National Association of Colleges. He served two terms as president of the Portland Youth Philharmonic Orchestra. Ed felt privileged to have known so many fine people who were his students, colleagues, parents of students, and members of the community.

He enjoyed woodworking, flower gardening, and traveling through Europe and the U.S. Ed is survived by his wife of 74 years, Meredith Pauline (Paula) Schneider, and his muchloved extended family. He was preceded in death by his children, Cathie McPherson and Claude Schneider, and his parents.

Gene Gale ’57

May 30, 2020, in Corvallis, Oregon.

January 9, 2023, at her Mill Valley, California, home, from Lewy body dementia.

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March 3, 3023, after a long illness.

Olympic National Park trail crews and purse seine salmon fishing boats in southeast Alaska.

After graduating from Roosevelt High School in Port Angeles, he completed a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Reed and wrote his thesis “Conflict and the Disruption of Interpersonal Relationships in Groups of Differing Size,” with Prof. Howard Jolly [sociology 1949–70] advising. From Portland he moved to San Francisco and began a PhD program in sociology while intermittently and proudly working for the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union in San Francisco.

This work experience, along with his father’s longtime union association, fed Norman’s lifelong interest in labor issues and working people.

He completed a PhD at UC Berkeley and was an assistant professor of law and sociology at the University of Denver Law School, followed by a position at the University of Colorado, where he received tenure. In 1973, he moved to Durango to chair and teach in Fort Lewis College’s sociology department, working there until his retirement in 1993.

In 1973, Norman married Evelyn Uttecht and became stepfather to Evelyn’s son Marcus.

A daughter, Sarah Jean Linton, was born in 1974. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1992, he married Susan Moss, also a professor at Fort Lewis College. She ignored advice not to hike with such an intrepid walker, and together they enjoyed years of camping and hiking in the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, Baja California, and Costa Rica.

Norman was predeceased by his stepson Marcus Uttecht; his former wife, Evelyn Uttecht; and both of his parents. He is survived by his wife, Susan Moss; his daughter, Sarah Linton; and his stepson Luther Moss.

Irene Janofsky Hartzell ’60 February 1, 2023, in Simi Valley, California.

Born to artist Annelies Ehrlich and influential attorney Leonard S. Janofsky in Los Angeles, California, Irene grew up in Beverly Hills and attended Hawthorne School and Beverly Hills High School. From a young age she knew she wanted to pursue a career in counseling, specifically psychology.

After high school, Irene attended Reed and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UC Berkeley. Subsequently, she pursued her PhD at the University of Oregon, Eugene.

Irene worked for Kaiser Permanente as a clinical psychologist for 20 years, where she was director of the School Problems Screening Clinic. After retiring from psychology, Irene became a certified mediator and an educational

consultant, and published A Wizard’s Guide to Study Skills: Middle School Edition.

She married and later divorced Charles Timothy Hartzell. Irene is survived by her son, Mark Hartzell.

Janet Schmidt Swanson ’60

March 28, 2023, in Olympia, Washington, peacefully.

Born on January 8, 1938, to Elliott Emil and Alice Harris Schmidt, Janet was born and raised in West Seattle. She enjoyed the outdoors from an early age, camping with her family, riding horses, and working as a counselor at a girls’ summer camp. She was also active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, where she played the organ for services and taught primary classes.

As a teenager, Janet was fond of hopping the bus in West Seattle and spending the day downtown on her own. She graduated at the top of her class from West Seattle High School, then attended Reed, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics.

After college, Janet taught advanced math at Ingraham High School for a couple of years.

In 1961, she married Ray Swanson ’60; they had three children. The family lived in Los Osos, California, and Surrey, British Columbia, before settling in Tumwater, Washington. In 1976, Janet and Ray bought Smith’s Greenhouse in Olympia, renaming it Boulevard Nursery and Florist. While Ray managed the nursery, Janet provided bookkeeping support for the business while maintaining a full-time job with Washington State.

Ray and Janet divorced in 1984, prompting Janet to pursue many of her own interests and curiosities. Inspired by her love of British mystery novels, she began her adventures with several trips to London. Over the years she traveled throughout Europe, Morocco, Costa Rica, and Hawaii. She took up running and joined the Mountaineers, where she met many of her lifelong friends and completed a scrambling course, which gave her the confidence to climb Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens. She also enjoyed bicycling and cross-country skiing.

When she wasn’t traveling, Janet could usually be found working on her garden. In the

evenings she attended and supported hundreds of concerts, operas, and theatre productions; she loved sharing her appreciation for the arts with friends and family by bringing them along.

Janet was an especially devoted grandmother to her three grandchildren. She was able to devote even more time to them and the many activities she enjoyed after she retired from her job as the business manager for the State of Washington Law Library in 1998.

When Janet recognized a need, she took action. She hosted several exchange students, supported local organizations and artists (she was a big fan of local musician Timothy Brock), and was an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation. For a short period after her retirement, she was involved in the local peace and social justice movement. By her own acknowledgement, she had a very good life and was blessed to be able to do what she loved for so many years. Janet is survived by her children, Steven Swanson ’84, Sheila Smith, and Andy Swanson, and her grandchildren, Janine Smith, Simon Swanson, and Christine Smith.

Marian Goldman Wilcox ’60

April 16, 2021 in Tucson, Arizona.

Marian “Rafia” was born i n 1 9 3 8 i n Tu c s o n , Arizona. At Reed, she received a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, with Prof. John E.H. Hancock [chemistry 1955-89] advising on her thesis. She went on to earn a master’s in vocational rehabilitation counseling for the deaf from Western Oregon University and an associate’s degree in computer programming from Pima Community CollegeWest. In 1993 she married Ron Wilcox, who provided constant loving attention throughout the 28 years of their life together.

Marian was a multidimensional being with an independent spirit and a piercing, nonjudgemental, and loving gaze. Her enthusiasm and sense of adventure led her to travel up the Amazon, to India, and to hike in Nepal.

Despite living with Parkinson’s disease, Marian continued hiking, exercising, painting watercolor pictures, and writing books of poetry— one of which was intermixed with her watercolor paintings. She enjoyed painting nature, loved ones, and self-portraits.

Marian’s spirituality was an integral part of her life; her Jewish roots were celebrated along with a Sufi path with Inayatiyya lineage.

Her spiritual name, Rafia, reflects the exaltation that everyone experienced being with her.

She held the belief that each religion’s unique voice reflects the One God. As a minister in the Inayatiyya, she conducted universal worship services celebrating all traditions.

She was a recipient of a Golden Heart award

for recognition of work selflessly given. She is remembered for her great courage, truthfulness, simplicity, generosity, intelligence, love for family and community, and commitment to the rights of all humans. Marian was laid to rest in the Ner Tamid section of Evergreen Cemetery with a traditional ceremony conducted in Hebrew and English by her son, Rabbi Michael Goldman ’89. The Inayatiyya Tucson Center conducted a memorial service celebrating her life. She was widely loved and is greatly missed.

Marian is survived by her husband, Ron Wilcox; daughter, Dr. Lisa Goldman; granddaughter, Lucy Heller; son, Rabbi Michael Goldman; grandsons, Ben, Elie, and Judah Goldman; and stepson, Sean Wilcox.

Maria Haagen-Smit Daniel ’61 November 22, 2022, of COPD.

Maria advanced academically early in life, skipping grades and arriving at Reed as the youngest member of her class. She earned her bachelor’s degree in history. Maria and her husband, Tom, called Connecticut home for many years.

Together they owned and operated Daniel Technology, manufacturing and selling technical investigative and tactical equipment for law enforcement. In 2011, they moved to a ranch in Rio Rico, Arizona. For the last 12 years of her life, Maria loved living among the cacti and quiet of the Sonoran Desert. She is survived by her husband of 40 years, Tom, and her son, Kenneth.

Charles Pollack ’61

February 4, 2023, in Palo Alto, California.

Born to Samuel and Esther Pollack, Charlie lived in the Bronx until his 10th birthday, when the family, which now included his younger brother David, moved to Van Nuys, California, so Sam could open his own pharmacy. At Van Nuys High School, Charlie lettered as a member of the varsity tennis team.

Charlie began his college career at Reed, but after two years decided to concentrate on a premed curriculum and transferred to UC Berkeley, where he attained his BA in political science. Thereafter, he began his medical training at UC San Francisco. He decided to become a psychiatrist and had his residency at Langley Porter, UCSF. Upon completing his medical training, he took his first position with Contra Costa County and worked at the facility in Pittsburg, California, as a staff psychiatrist. After a number of years in that position, he became the mental health director of Contra Costa County. During this period, Charlie cofounded the Berkeley Therapy Institute, a nonprofit mental health clinic, with a group of fellow mental health professionals Reed Magazine FALL 2023 47

In Memoriam that included psychiatrists, psychologists, and marriage and family thereapists. Charlie retired from seeing patients in 2008 but continued to be very involved with BTI as a founder and active member of their board of directors until his death.

A lifelong learner with an avid interest in historical biographies, Charlie had a keen intellect and a fantastic memory for events, statistics, and trivia. He was also a massive San Francisco sports fan, especially of the 49ers during the ’80s and ’90s championship eras. He would record games and rewatch them enough times that he could even call plays. He also loved to travel and was an expert landscape photographer, hiking into Zion National Park at dawn for the best light. Charlie was an enthusiastic member of the UC Alumni Chorus for many years. On chorus trips to Mexico, Eastern Europe, Norway, South Africa, Cuba, and New Zealand, he reveled in singing in grand cathedrals as well as in capturing vivid photographs of the people and scenery.

Charlie was an extremely generous person towards his community and causes that were important to him, including local and national political issues. He was a longtime caregiver and advocate for people with disabilities, and for 10 years was executive director of Maya’s Music Therapy Fund (MMTF), a local nonprofit founded by his wife in honor of her late daughter, Maya. MMTF provides music therapy services to people with developmental, physical, and cognitive disabilities. Charlie’s generosity was a part of his personality; he readily provided his time, advice, and guidance to those who came to him.

Charlie is survived by his wife, Joanna A. Cooper, MD; his brother, David Pollack; and four children, Stephen, Jason, Naomi, and Dina.

Doris (Felde) Avshalomov ’43, MAT ’63 November 4, 2020, in Portland.

A lifelong Portlander, Doris was born at her family’s home in Eastmoreland. As a child she and her brother would walk to Reed’s campus to pick raspberries and swim in the pool. “To me Reed was like a magic place,” she later recalled.

After graduating from Franklin High School at age 16, she worked in the public library as a page for three years in order to earn enough money to start college. When asked why she chose Reed, Doris, whose parents hadn’t attended college, answered that she thought it “would be a good place to go because serious students went to Reed.”

Doris came to Reed as a day-dodger, living at home and walking to campus each day to attend classes and participate in musical activities. She took double bass and voice lessons, sang in the chorus and a madrigal group, and

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performed in several theatre productions.

She studied literature and wrote a thesis on Virginia Woolf under Prof. Victor L.O. Chittick [English 1921–48]. She also took classes on creative writing and 18th-century literature with Prof. Lloyd Reynolds [English & art 1929–69]. He “was sort of my hero,” Doris said. “He was a great teacher . . . He had sort of beetling brows, and he’d say, ‘Now, I may look angry but I’m not. It’s just the way my eyebrows are.’” Other highlights at Reed included classes with Profs. Rex Arragon [history 1923–62], Barry Cerf [English 1921– 48], Harold Sproul [music 1938–43], and F.L. Griffin [mathematics 1911–52].

Through her brother, a violist with the Portland Junior Symphony, Doris met a cellist named Jacob Avshalomov ’43, LHD ’73. The two quickly became a romantic item at Reed— Doris had a photo of them flirting in front of Eliot Hall—as well as creative collaborators, with Doris singing some of Jacob’s compositions and Jacob later setting some of Doris’s poems to music. They married in 1943. Jacob would go on to spend 41 years as conductor of the Portland Youth Philharmonic; he died in 2013. The couple had two sons, David and Daniel, who both became professional musicians.

As a public school teacher in Portland, Doris worked at Franklin and Wilson High Schools before deciding at age 60 to become a publisher. She’d attended a summer poetry workshop in Port Townsend, Washington, where she had the chance to typeset and print a poem, and she fell in love with letterpress.

She began hunting for an antique printer and eventually found a Chandler & Price press manufactured in 1920—the same year she was born. It weighed a half ton and had to be dislodged from the second floor of an old building in downtown Portland. “There was no elevator, and the room was so small that the door had to be taken off and the press partly dismantled,” Doris told The Woman’s Journal for a 1994 article. A couple of strong piano movers helped transport the press to the basement of Doris and Jacob’s home in the West Hills.

Doris launched Howlet Press—the name references the witches’ brew in Macbeth— in 1980. The first book she published was a collection of her own poetry, Equisetum, which included a poem about calligraphy dedicated to Reynolds. She went on to publish more than 30 hand-set and hand-bound books, mostly poetry and chapbooks by Northwest writers, including two by Lois Baker Janzer ’50, MAT ’66. As publisher, Doris designed the covers, printed the necessary copies, bound the books, and helped some with distribution. She closed the press in 2013.

Doris is survived by her sons and two grandchildren.

Raymond B. “Ray” Baggs ’64 April 23, 2023, in Portland.

Ray, a loving husband and father of three, died at the age of 80. Born October 27, 1942, in San Mateo, California, Ray spent some childhood years there before his family moved to Virginia, where they purchased a small farm. After high school, he crossed the country to attend Reed, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, writing his thesis “Trace Metals in Normal and Neoplastic Tissue: Neutron Activation Analysis of Subcellular Components,” advised

by Prof. John Thorpe [chemistry 1958–63].

During his time at Reed, Ray worked on the reactor, drove the Mount Hood ski bus, and met his future wife, Judith. Ray and Judith married on June 3, 1962, and celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary last year. After graduation, the young couple spent a year in eastern Washington before moving to California.

Ray’s love of animals and interest in research led him to UC Davis, where he received his doctorate in veterinary medicine. After the birth of Ray and Judith’s sons, Aaron and Joshua, the family moved to Massachusetts, where Ray continued his studies at MIT for a PhD in nutritional pathology as well as a veterinary residency at Angell Animal Medical Center. Their daughter, Kassandra, joined the family in Massachusetts. After several moves, they ended up in Rochester, where Ray spent 30 years teaching and consulting as a veterinary pathologist at the University of Rochester; he retired when Judith took a new position in Portland and found a post-retirement role at Oregon State University as attending veterinarian.

Ray had a lifelong love of teaching, learning, and the outdoors. He enjoyed fishing, tending to his bountiful vegetable and dahlia gardens, and he was an excellent chef. His breads and sourdough waffles were particularly loved.

Ray became an accomplished woodworker, crafting everything from beds to bookshelves, tables, desks, and a breakfast nook, traveling the country to find just the right wood for his projects. He drove across the U.S. many times, traveling by car, truck, RV, and motorcycle. He loved music, from Miles Davis and the Rolling Stones to classical, and he collected a variety of obscure recordings to listen to while exercising. Ray was an exceptional storyteller, especially delighting his grandchildren. His children remember him as a man of great wisdom who loved and cared for his family.

Ray was preceded in death by his brother, Jerry; his father, Chester; and his mother, Evelyn. He is survived by his wife, Judith; his children, Aaron, Joshua, and Kassandra; and his grandchildren, Myles, Zachary, and Allison.

Jill Susanna Dubisch ’65

January 30, 2023, in Rimrock, AZ, from complications related to Parkinson’s disease.

questionnaire about memories on campus, she offered: “The library on Saturday night, spring in Portland, and the troll under the bridge.”

Jill and her husband Ray lived in the Verde Valley with their three cats. She was smitten with the three redheaded daughters of her nephew (her substitute grandchildren). She was a practitioner of Jin Shin Jyutsu and a Reiki master.

Jill is survived by her husband, Raymond Michalowski Jr.; stepson, Raymond Michalowski III; and brother, Ralph Dubisch. She was preceded in death by her parents and her brother, Russell Dubisch ’67.

Bart Jones ’65

March 5, 2023, from Parkinson’s disease.

Jill was born in Missoula, Montana, and grew up in Fresno, California. She earned a bachelor’s in anthropology from Reed in 1965 and wrote her thesis on “Double Descent in Africa,” advised by Prof. Gail M. Kelly [anthropology 1960–2000]. She went on to the University of Chicago, where she earned a doctorate in anthropology, for which she did dissertation fieldwork in Greece, a country that drew her back many times. She taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for 20 years and at Northern Arizona University for 20 years.

In 1988–89 Jill was a Rockefeller “Humanist in Residence” in the women’s studies program at the University of Arizona, where she wrote a book based on her research on gender and pilgrimage in Greece. Jill’s passion for pilgrimage stretched from the Mediterranean to the Beltway. In the summer of 1996, she participated in the Run for the Wall, a California to Washington, D.C. motorcycle trip that concluded at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

This experience was the basis for her book Run for the Wall: Remembering Vietnam on a Motorcycle Pilgrimage (with Raymond Michalowski, her husband, from Rutgers University Press, 2001). She retired in 2013.

Over the course of her career, Jill taught more than 6,000 undergraduate university students, mentored numerous graduates, authored four scholarly books and 30 academic articles, and served as president of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe.

In addition to her academic work, she published two novels, sailed between North Carolina and Florida, crossed the United States by motorcycle four times, and in later years became a watercolor artist. On an alumni

Bart learned to read at age five when he had rheumatic fever; he then skipped first grade. After graduating from Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York, Bart attended Reed, where he studied linguistics and received a bachelor’s in general literature. He spent his junior year in Greece learning the language.

Bart entered doctoral programs in linguistics at the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania (where he edited a book, Kinesics and Context by Ray Birdwhistell), and SUNY Buffalo, where it became clear he wasn’t destined to be an academic. While living in Portland, Bart helped start a bicycle repair collective and worked for the urban planning department for the city.

Bart’s pursuit of a unique lifestyle was an inspiration to many. He embraced the past as well as the future; he was a lover of Renaissance music and a steward of the land, while also being an early computer enthusiast. Bart lived an unconventional, frugal life, riding his recumbent bike around much of the country.

He was gifted in making things work and using words creatively to express firm opinions. He had a discerning ear and liked early music, the recorder, and the flute. He also loved folk dancing, scouting, science fiction, and doing pretty much anything barefoot—including hiking. In 2000, he donated a kidney to his niece, Rae Jones.

He met Ruth McNeil (known affectionately as “Woofie” to many) through his sister-inlaw in what started as a cross-continent correspondence. They married in 1992 and lived together in Medford, Massachusetts, then moved to Corvallis, Oregon, where Bart owned and managed an undeveloped tree farm. Bart added a road, a yurt, and some shelters to the land, and worked diligently on managing the trees. Ruth died about 2 years ago.

Bart had Parkinson’s disease for about 10 years, which became more serious during the past year. He leaves behind his brother, Stephen Jones; sister, Marion Phelps; and many close friends and chosen family in the Willamette Valley. Bart’s body is undergoing a composting

burial process, and the majority of the soil from this process will be sent to a conservation site on the Olympic Peninsula.

Alan Ackerman ’68

February 23, 2023, in Berkeley, California, after a three-year struggle with dementia.

Alan was born in Des Moines, Iowa, February 8, 1947, and grew up in Texas. He graduated from Reed with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, wr iting his thesis on “Valuations and the P-Adic Numbers,” advised by Prof. Joe Roberts [mathematics 1952–]. He completed a master’s in mathematics at Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.

Alan lived in Berkeley for 52 years, working as a computer programmer for various companies. It’s where he met his wife, Betsy St. Aubin; they married in 1983. Alan was a nature enthusiast. Weekend hikes and family camping trips were cherished experiences, and he was a wonderful wildflower photographer.

Alan loved reading, particularly natural science books and mysteries. He also enjoyed music and dance; he was an exuberant English and Scottish country dancer, a longtime member of the SF Folk Music Club, and singing was his greatest delight.

Alan adored being a father and grandfather.

His loved ones will always remember his beautiful smile.

Alan is survived by his wife, Betsy; daughters Clara Ackerman and Esther Ackerman; brother, George Ackerman; and grandsons, Calvin and Sasha Manshardt.

Emerson Mitchell ’71

April 23, 2023, at home in Martinez, California.

Emerson Mitchell was a teacher, a mentor, and a genius problem solver.

Born in Twin Falls, Idaho, he earned his bachelor of arts in mathematics from Reed, his master of arts in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His professional career was in computer programming. He was active in his church, Walnut Creek Methodist, and in the pursuit of social justice. Formerly Emerson was active in the Society for Creative Anachronism, known there as Emory MacMichael.

In the early 2000s, Emerson, a lifelong teetotaler, nearly died of liver disease of unknown cause.

He was in a coma and in hospice care, but woke up and was eventually able to receive a life-saving liver transplant. It took several years for Emerson Reed Magazine FALL 2023 49

In Memoriam to regain his energy and intellectual ability, but he persevered. In retirement, Emerson and his wife, Johanna Meyer-Mitchell ’73, MD, enjoyed slow cross-country road trips to visit their grandchildren on both coasts, taking plenty of time to enjoy the sights along the way.

Emerson is survived by his wife; his son, Merlin Meyer-Mitchell; his daughter, Arwyn Daemyir; grandchildren Nina, Tristan, Brisen, Taelyn, Aspen, Juniper, and Rowan; sisters Jean Mitchell, Terri Mitchell, and Sue Connolly; and brothers Bill and Mike Mitchell.

Monica Ellen Mayper ’73

May 7, 2023, at home, with friends and family at her side.

A favor ite quote of Monica’s: “The pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite—toujours, bon appetit!” Monica celebrated those pleasures through her literary talent and her zest for life.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and raised in Fairfield, Connecticut, Monica came to Portland to study English at Reed. She went on to work as a senior copy chief at Disney Hyperion Books and as senior production editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books.

Monica was the author of four children’s books, the last of which, A Night on the Sand, was published in 2022 to critical acclaim. A “practicing poet,” she and her work were wellknown and loved. Her positive outlook, optimism, and perseverance during her courageous two-year battle with pancreatic cancer were an inspiration to all who knew her.

Monica was predeceased by her parents, Stuart and Lois Mayper, and her partner, Martha Geissinger. She is survived by her brother, Thomas, his wife, Laurie, and their two children, Shay and Maryn, as well as her two beloved cats, Rosie and Pippi.

Erik Mutén ’77

February 2, 2023 in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.

Erik was an irrepressible force and a loving provocateur. There was no limit to his enthusiasm for creative ways to experience the joy of living.

Any room Erik entered was filled with his raucous sense of humor. He was rarely a follower but always a seeker, and because he was so often able to say the thing no one else would say, outright and without reservation, he made the world more free.

Whether skiing competitively in his youth,

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playing baseball with his son, Bjorn, exploring the archipelago of his Viking ancestors on the west coast of Sweden, sailing across the Atlantic at age 22, or tracking lynx with his grandson in the subzero temperatures of northern Maine, Erik embraced life and the power of nature. He was most at home in the natural world, often choosing to live off-grid for years at a time.

In all kinds of weather, Erik could be found sitting outside, listening to a stream. His spiritual home was Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, where he led groups of adolescents on wilderness retreats, and where he once constructed a 220-foot wooden stairway down a cliff to the rocky shore.

Erik earned his bachelor’s degree in theatre at Reed and wrote his thesis, “I Never Had a Dream in My Life: The Written Accompaniment to a Production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker,” advised by Prof. Larry Oliver [1972–77]. He continued his education at Southern Methodist University, where he earned a master’s in fine art, and at Virginia State University, where he earned a doctorate in clinical psychology. Erik spent his adult life designing, leading, and participating in transformational experiences.

His work was informed by over 35 years of study and practice as a psychologist, theatre director, and organizational consultant.

In the 1990s Erik founded DramaWorks Theater Company, for which he wrote, directed, and acted in performances designed to heal the workplace, working with family businesses internationally. He and his wife, Amelia Perkins, founded Kailo Mentoring Group, where they created workshops to support couples to live with more authenticity, experimentation, and tenderness.

In his last two decades, Erik also worked with peer groups of men committed to deepening their capacity for intimacy, compassion, and self-honesty. With his friend Charles Greene, he cofounded the Big Black Men Project to share stories of hope, disappointment, and resilience. In all of his professional endeavors, he openly shared his own struggles and discoveries, modeling that life is one big experiment to explore fully.

As one former student of his put it, “He was a great man because he was an imperfect man. He was a model man because he was a wounded and vulnerable man. He was a great man because he dared to love this wounded world with its wounded people courageously.”

He is survived by his beloved wife, Amelia Perkins; son, Bjorn Mutén; daughter, Iris Eichenlaub ’99; two grandsons, Jonas and Sylvan Eichenlaub; and sister, Kristina Mutén.

Think of Erik when you’re in the woods, sitting next to a stream, or watching the flames of a fire. Remember him when you’re dancing with the volume turned up or making something beautiful with your hands.

Francis Joseph Varga ’79

January 4, 2023, suddenly, in Springfield, Missouri.

Francis embraced chemistry with childlike wonder throughout his long career. He loved designing science experiments to impress and inspire his children. He bought mercury and dry ice and taught them how to handle these materials safely. He purchased Karissa her first iMac in strawberry when she was only 3.

But was it for her or both of them? Watching them play together on the computer, it was hard to tell.

Francis graduated from Northwood School in Lake Placid in 1973. He attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., for his freshman and sophomore year, before transferring to the University of Freiberg in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. At Reed, he wrote his thesis “Use of Artificial Bilayers in Examining Rate Constants Involved in Carrier-Mediated Substrate Transport across Membranes,” advised by Prof. William Weir [chemistry 1968–83]. He graduated from Reed with a bachelor’s in chemistry and mathematics, after which he attended medical school at Syracuse University and then completed his residency at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, specializing in anatomical and clinical pathology. While at Dartmouth Hitchcock, he was appointed chief resident and an instructor in pathology. Following his tenure at Dartmouth, he became certified in hematopathology and received the Hitchcock Foundation Scholar’s Award. He was certified to practice medicine in 1982. Francis recently retired from Mercy Hospital in Springfield, where he served as director of hematopathology, flow cytometry, and immunoperoxidase for 14 years.

Francis was an avid collector of art. He was particularly fond of contemporary furniture and photography. He loved trees and arboriculture and enjoyed tending to his garden and spending time in the woods of the Adirondacks.

He could identify trees by their leaves and exotic woods in fine furniture. He loved photography and proudly displayed many pieces he acquired at fine art shows and galleries with photos he had taken himself.

A lifelong student of history and politics, his constantly expanding library was filled with books on post–World War I Russia, World War II, Reconstruction, and the history of communist China. Every few years, a new bookcase would appear in his study. New shelf space was never wasted.

A loving father to Karissa and Alexander, he adored spending time with his children.

Halloween was one of his favorite holidays; he took great pride in creating original costumes for his kids. A bit of a showman, Francis couldn’t resist sporting a pair of horns for the occasion and parading around the neighborhood. Why miss out on all the fun?

Francis was a kind and thoughtful intellectual who possessed a unique perspective on life and the human condition. A true Renaissance man and unique soul, he was loved dearly.

He is survived by his children, Alexander and Karissa Varga; his parents, Anita and Francis Varga; siblings Victoria Varga Brouder and her husband Daniel, and Thomas Varga; and nephews Ethan and James Brouder.

He was predeceased by his brother, George Varga, and sister-in-law, Loren Varga.

Michael Groves ’80

May 22, 2023, after a long illness.

Michael was the first child and son born to Clifford and Eldora Groves in Gillette, Wyoming, on November 28, 1948. He was the oldest of five children. The family moved to Oregon around 1956, where Michael attended West Linn public schools, graduating from West Linn High School in 1967. At Reed he wrote his thesis “The Complete Transference: An Alternative to the Equivalent Translation,” with Prof.

William Peck [philosophy 1961–2002] and Prof. Kenneth Hanson [English 1954–86] advising. He graduated with a bachelor of arts in literature and philosophy. Michael went on to teach English at West Linn and Wilsonville high schools.

Michael’s hobbies included fly-fishing, photography, learning French, traveling to as many countries as possible, playing squash, making sourdough, and baking. Alongside teaching English, he was involved with the drama department at Wilsonville High School, putting on numerous plays throughout his tenure.

Michael was preceded in death by his parents. He is survived by his siblings Karen VanDomelen, Rebbecca “Becky” Groves, Jill Groves, and Mark Groves, along with nieces and nephews.

Daniel J. Rankin ’06

March 11, 2023, suddenly and unexpectedly at home.

Dan was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. A graduate of Marin Catholic High School, Dan made Portland his home after attending Reed College, where he wrote his thesis on “The Unfinished: Symbol and Self in Poetry of William Butler Yeats,” advised

by Prof. Ellen Keck Stauder [English 1983– 2013]. In 2006 he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English. He received a master’s in education from the Special Education Dual Educator Program at Portland State University in 2013 and spent his professional life in service to the educational needs of underserved children and young adults, first as a special education teacher/specialist and most recently as the academic support and inclusion coordinator for the Community and Career Studies Program at PSU. At the time of his death, he was a doctoral student in special education.

Dan was an excellent cook, brilliant storyteller, scholar, and devoted friend. When not perfecting his pizza recipe or playing, reading, and writing stories with his son Dashiell, Dan enjoyed live music, comedy, and spending time with friends and family.

“Dan was many things—wickedly smart, sweet, salty, and sagacious,” said classmate Claire Foster ’06. “Knowing him was one of the best parts of my time at Reed. Dan and I were in the ‘Paradise Lost’ junior seminar with Prof.

Ellen Stauder. We read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, ending with The Amber Spyglass.

This final book and its bittersweet goodbye has always reminded me of Dan.” Dan is survived by his beloved son, Dashiell; his wife, Jessica Rore Rankin; his mother, Annette Rankin; his father, Jeffrey M. Rankin; his stepmother, Mary J. Ewert; and numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Prof. Angela Ayres [Spanish 1966–73] May 3, 2023, in Portland, Oregon.

Prof. Angela Ayres was very fond of her time teaching at Reed and is remembered as an influential professor who had high expectations of her students. She continued teaching after leaving Reed, but would say that Reed students were the most impressive she ever taught. Outside of work, Ayres enjoyed gardening and traveling. Her husband, Prof. Fred Ayres, taught chemistry at Reed from 1940 until his death in 1970. She is survived by her son, Dr. Fred Donald Ayres ’89.

Prof. Frank Porter Hungate [biology 1946–52]

April 18, 2023, in Seattle, with family in attendance.

Prof. Frank Hungate lived to be almost 105 years old. He was born in Cheney, Washington, in 1918, the grandson of James Hungate, who signed the Washington State Constitution, and the youngest of five boys born to Joseph Wynne and Winona Hungate.

After growing up in Cheney and starting college there, he moved to Austin, where his brother was teaching microbiology at the University of Texas. In his brother’s biology lab, he met the lab assistant, Mary Virginia, who was to be the love of his life. After Hungate graduated from the U of T, he went into a doctoral program at Stanford. He and Mary Virginia (Mollie) were married in 1941, and she joined him in graduate studies under Dr. George Beadle, a later Nobel Prize winner.

After Hungate finished graduate studies in 1946, the family moved to Portland, Oregon, where Hungate taught at Reed College. In 1952, he was offered a job at Hanford and the

family moved to Richland, Washington, where they lived in government housing until 1955, when they built a house on two acres of land in Kennewick. They lived in that house for 38 years, raising four children and establishing strong friendships in the community. Hungate continued to work in the field of biology, first with General Electric and later with Battelle. His field of research was exploring the utilization of low-dose radiation in prevention of organ rejection and as an alternative to insecticides in food safety. He was chosen to advise scientists in Greece on initiating nuclear research, and, as a result, the family lived in Athens for a year in 1960.

Many weeks in summer were spent at a family log cabin on Priest Lake in northern Idaho. After retiring in 1994, Mollie and Hungate moved from the Tri-Cities to Seattle, where they became part of a multigenerational household with their daughter’s family.

Many summers they returned to Priest Lake or traveled further, exploring almost every corner of the world during their more than 72 years of marriage. They appreciated the wide variety of cultures and customs in the countries they visited. Mollie passed away in 2013, but Hungate continued spending time at Priest Lake and remained a participant in the Women’s University Club in downtown Seattle.

He was always welcomed by the social bridge group and mahjong players, and he looked forward to his games at the club.

Hungate was an unapologetically positive individual, forming many connections and greatly impacting those who knew him.

Throughout over a century of life, he witnessed immense changes: from horse and buggy to electric cars, from washboard and wringer laundry to electric washing machines and dryers. He learned penmanship in school and recently became proficient at word processing on his iPad. He could split roof shingles, make a loaf of bread, and plumb and wire a house, and was chopping wood last summer. He is survived by his children, Frank II, Jess, Bonnie, and Tom; 10 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

PENDING Kenneth Starr ’44, Rosemary Berleman ’48, Betty Jo Van Gelder ’50, Marjorie (Daum) Floren Columbus ’51, Malcolm Klein ’52, Dr. Arlen Quan ’54, Ronald A. Laing ’56, William Y. Tomori ’56, David L. Stone ’57, Joan Allen ’58, Ruth Meenk ’61, Christopher Getman ’65, Linda Howard ’70, Paul Bigman ’71, Kenneth Harrison MALS ’71, James Andrew (“Jim”) McConnell ’71, Miles Jacoby ’72, Laura Cooper ’84, Adam Masaki Joy ’89, David Wayne Armstrong ’91, Prof. Raymond Kierstead, and Prof. Joe Roberts. ’

Reed Magazine FALL 2023 51

Dear Reed Magazine readers, In case you didn’t hear, the magazine will be on hiatus in December and back in mailboxes in spring 2024. As always, we will be on the hunt for inspiration, ideas, and stories, but this pause will allow us to make bigger, thoughtful changes in response to the feedback we have gathered from the Reed community.

While you wait, you can find college updates and fresh stories at reed.edu/reed-magazine.

ReediEnews will be delivered to your email inbox monthly, as usual.

Thank you for reading, and we’ll see you in 2024.

—REED MAGAZINE TEAM

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Reed Magazine FALL 2023

“What is a legacy? It’s PLANTING SEEDS

in a garden you never get to see. ” LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA

Art by LILLIE SPENCER ’25 Religion Major

An easy way to create a legacy:

Give all or a portion of the remainder of your • retirement accounts, such as an IRA, 403b, or 401k; • life insurance policies; • donor-advised funds; • commercial annuities; • bank & investment accounts.

AS EASY AS 1, 2, 3.

1. Contact your plan administrator to update your beneficiary designation form. You may need to know some basic Reed information: Reed Institute d.b.a.

Reed College Tax ID: 93-0386908.

2. Inform Reed of your gift! We want to thank you and ensure that the college knows how you want your gift to be used.

NAME Reed as a beneficiary

Office of Gift Planning

3. Rest assured that 100 percent of your gift will support academic excellence, access, and community.

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503-517-5282

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giftplanning@reed.edu

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photo by lauren labarre

Karnell McConnell-Black, Vice President for Student Life, serves up ice cream on move-in day.