‰ june 2018
THE PROTON PHENOMENON
Prof. Miriam Bowring investigates ways to liberate hydrogen from its bonds.
WHY LABELS MATTER | THE BATTLE OF PARKROSE | RIDING ACROSS AUSTRALIA
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Eliot Circular news from around campus
clayton cotterell
henrik beck
A bold new course for Hum 110. Faculty approves new major on race & ethnicity. New Republic editor named Reed trustee. Science majors create giant stick of chalk. Academy of Saturn wows critics.
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Advocates of the Griffin News of the Alumni Association
Letter from the Alumni Board President. Lewis to chair fundraising effort. Help us find epic Reedies.
Features 12
Theatre Professor Designs Punk Opera
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By Katie Pelletier ’03
By Juan Flores ’13
Fighting for Parkrose
Mingus Mapps ’90 is on a quest to revitalize one of Portland’s most divided neighborhoods.
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Revolutionary Spirit
Author Janet Fitch ’78 storms the barricades with new novel on the Russian Revolution. By Angie Jabine ’79
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Wild Tracks
Psych grad undertakes an epic Australian adventure on horseback.
By Romel Hernandez 16
Spirit in the Rock: The Fierce Battle for Modoc Homelands by Jim Compton ’64. Ghazal Cosmopolitan: The Culture and Craft of the Ghazal by Shadab Zeest Hashmi ’95. And many more.
From intelligence officer in Afghanistan to political science major at Reed, Laura Swann ’20 brings a unique perspective to the classroom.
Experimental musical is based on archive of iconic punk band Fugazi.
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Reading the Signals
The Proton Phenomenon Prof. Miriam Bowring investigates ways to liberate hydrogen from its bonds.
Class Notes News from our classmates
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In Memoriam Honoring classmates, professors, and friends who have died
By Katelyn Best ’13 24
Reediana Books, Films, and Music by Reedies
Journalist William Smart ’48 Housing advocate Carole Calkins Colie ’54
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Object of Study What we’re looking at in class
Why Labels Matter.
By Kieran Hanrahan ’15
Cover photo by Clayton Cotterell
june 2018 Reed Magazine
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Letters to Reed nashco
Write to us! We love getting mail from readers. Letters should be about Reed (and its alumni) or Reed Magazine (and its contents) and run no more than 300 words; subsequent replies may only run half the length of their predecessors. Our decision to print a letter does not imply any endorsement. Letters are subject to editing. (Beware the editor’s hatchet.) For contact information, see facing page. Read more letters and commentary at www.reed.edu/reed-magazine.
Genetic Affinity
I read with great interest that Professor Derek Applewhite [biology 2014–] will study the role of SPECC1L in facial clefting in Drosophila since this Reedie played a major role in cloning the gene. Many years ago, I examined an infant with severe lateral facial clefting going bilaterally from her lip along the nose and into her orbits, causing her to be blind (during fetal development, amniotic fluid is toxic to the developing eyes). Despite many surgeries, she remained facially disfigured and, perhaps, it was a blessing that she couldn’t see herself. She had loving parents and developed a sweet personality. Her chromosomal study showed a translocation (a breaking and joining of two different chromosomes), suggesting the location of a gene whose defect caused her problems. It took a long time to develop the collaboration to clone the gene which was SPECC1L. It’s great to see that studies of it are going on at Reed! Bob Erickson ’60 Tucson, Arizona
Brutal Reality
The construction of additional student housing on campus is good news. But I am perplexed and dismayed in looking over its design in the March issue of Reed Magazine. Past new construction has made a point of referencing the architectural style of the campus. The new dorm does not. Instead it imposes technocratic brutalism, dropped down from another planet. Could not comfort and function be built in while harmonizing the project with extant campus design, or at least with the adjacent Grove? Yale recently opened two new residential colleges with architecture in tune with existing campus buildings. Why could Reed not manage to make this new project similarly attractive? Stephen William Foster ’69 MALS Portland, Oregon
Reed’s First Climbing Wall?
I was just thumbing through the December 2016 issue and admiring the photo of the climbing wall on page 17, which sparked a funny memory. Back in 1991, the sports facilities were less modern, but Chris Nyce ’96, Cristobal Viveros ’96, and several other young men loved bouldering and rock climbing. We spent secret hours down at the train tracks coveting perfectly shaped rocks, then more dark night hours in some strange underground hallway, gluing the rocks to the walls. While I had never used toxic epoxy before, and none of us had ever built a rock wall in our lives, I believe we unwittingly created Reed’s first unofficial rock wall for bouldering. The only problem is that I can’t remember which building (maybe Physics), which hallway, and what happened to our hard-earned respite. Seeing that amazing rock wall in the December magazine, I have to admit I was simultaneously impressed with the new perks
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causing delusions of grandeur? It was a great way to escape Plato’s cave. Update on my life, things are blessed, too many jobs, but still mountain biking, running, snowboarding, fishing, kayaking, teaching, chauffeuring progeny, and volunteer work with local non-profits. David Tourzan ’95 Ashland, Oregon
Now Moore than Ever
Malin Frazel ’18 ascends Reed’s climbing wall.
afforded to Reedies, and impressed that we got away with our secret underground rock wall for all those years. For a study break there was nothing better than to just face yourself and the wall always seeking new routes, adding self-imposed challenges, and feeling the zen moment of you and gravity in tense harmony. It has remained one of my subversive passions, finding random rain-protected walls, and gluing rocks to them to turn them into works of bouldering art. Does anyone else remember that wall, or was this the result of too much humanities reading
Ever since Bob Richter ’51, Bea Cohen Koch ’56, and I began a 35-year struggle to persuade the administration and trustees of the college to confront their capitulation to McCarthyism by firing Stanley Moore [philosophy 1948–54] in 1954, we were (and still are) discredited for “raking up old wounds,” being clinically obsessed with the past, and other insults intended to bury Reed’s institutional memory in that infamous dustbin. But recent events suggest that despite those efforts the Moore case lives on and continues to influence both the Reed and the broader community. The most bizarre episode is the December statement of the trustees, explaining why they rejected a request to divest college funds from the Wells Fargo bank. To divest, the trustees asserted, would be to adopt a political position and thus violate academic freedom. That was the lesson they claimed to have learned from the Moore case, when “the college did support
‰ june 2018
www.reed.edu/reed-magazine 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard Portland, Oregon 97202 503/777-7591
crossword BY ZOE NEFF ’20 62 What heat or acidity can do to proteins
Volume 97, No. 2
64 Maryland batter
REED MAGAZINE
65 March for Our Lives, Black Lives Matter, for two
editor
66 Swelling in the mouth 67 Soundness of mind 68 Every Reed grad has one DOWN 1
Centers
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An immortal Dungeons and Dragons race with psionic powers
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Dog-pulled transport
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Medical term for “club foot”
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Sumerian fertility goddess
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Used to make calcium oxide
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Notice
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_____ Riser Breakfast Special
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Olde spelling of a word synonymous to productions
10 Antigen-presenting cell, abbr. 11
Happens June 6–10!
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“Willing and ____”
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It might be in or out
14 Nebraskan export, maybe 20 Compassion 24 “Come on little miss, and do the _____.” 25 Following
specific political positions, which resulted in the dismissal of a faculty member who refused to conform. The college later concluded that this dismissal—and the attempt to force a particular political belief on Reed’s community members— was an error not to be repeated given its grave consequences for academic freedom.” Leaving aside whether that was in fact what the trustees (after a bitter debate and 12–7 vote) “later concluded,” the Moore case was also cited in an article on Reed’s black studies program in the March 2018 issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly, when a significant number of faculty members insisted that faculty alone (and not black students) can decide on hiring faculty by referring to the trustees’ rejection of faculty advice when they fired Moore. Finally, out of the blue, Moore (seen in two photos) returns in an Oregonian article (March 15) on the impact of the HUAC hearings on witnesses who challenged the committee’s legitimacy to demand they “confess” their political opinions and affiliations. Michael Munk ’56 Portland, Oregon
26 Member of the workin’ class ACROSS 1
Related to celebration
27 Latin name for a cuttlefish, and the color derived from its ink
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Come apart
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A central Dravidian language
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16 Medical term for eyelid 17
Chisel, in Latin
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Chill
32 Found below the MasonDixon 33 British unit of measurement
19 In a roundabout way
35 Casual greeting to President Roosevelt
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36 One focus of Hum 110
Provincial park in Ontario
22 Hawaiian word meaning “hole”
40 Also known as dwarf elder
23 Famous white-furred outdoorsman
45 Bathroom, in the military
43 Dragonflies, for instance
25 The semicircular part of a church
47 Turn down
28 “W”-loving org.
53 Wife of Abraham
30 Plowshare materials 34 Post-prospie
54 Adenosine diphosphates, for short
37 Nonreactive
55 Prefix meaning “horn”
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Kinds
38 ___ Gun
56 To spy, to listen __ __
39 Guts
58 Rechargeable energy storage system, abbr.
41 From the country next to Thailand
59 Us, in France
42 Administrative building on campus
60 Norse personification of old age
44 Where Reedies can be found when the sun is out
61 Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, abbr.
46 Each senior ideally gets 4
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Chris Lydgate ’90 503/777-7596 chris.lydgate@reed.edu In Memoriam editor
Randall S. Barton 503/517-5544 bartonr@reed.edu Reediana editor
Katie Pelletier ’03 pelletic@reed.edu class notes editor
Joanne Hossack ’82 joanne@reed.edu art director
Tom Humphrey tom.humphrey@reed.edu grammatical kappelmeister
Virginia O. Hancock ’62 REED COLLEGE ACTING president
Hugh Porter director, communications & public affairs
Mandy Heaton Reed College is an institution of higher education in the liberal arts and sciences devoted to the intrinsic value of intellectual pursuit and governed by the highest standards of scholarly practice, critical thought, and creativity. Reed Magazine provides news of interest to the Reed community. Views expressed in the magazine belong to their authors and do not necessarily represent officers, trustees, faculty, alumni, students, administrators, or anyone else at Reed, all of whom are eminently capable of articulating their own beliefs. Reed Magazine (ISSN 0895-8564) is published quarterly by the Office of Public Affairs at Reed College. Periodicals postage paid at Portland, Oregon. Postmaster: Send address changes to Reed Magazine 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd. Portland OR 97202-8138
48 “___ so, Lord Jesus, quickly come” 49 Part of a simple machine 50 Love poems
From the Editor: I fully agree that the echoes of the Moore case still reverberate. Let us agree never to forget what happened—even if we disagree on What It Means.
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Cautioned
june 2018 Reed Magazine
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Eliot Circular news from campus
A detail from the mural The History of Mexico (painted between 1929 and 1935) at the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City by Diego Rivera, showing the life in Aztec times, i.e., the city of Tenochtitlan. (Right) Portraits of W.E.B. DuBois and Nella Larsen, important figures of the Harlem Renaissance.
A Bold New Course for Hum 110
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moment in the evolution of the class,” says Prof. Nigel Nicholson [classics 1995–], dean of the faculty. “I am excited to see the possibilities that will be opened up by the new areas and periods the class will be studying.” Hum 110 will remain committed to its foundations as a unified year-long interdisciplinary course required for all first-year students that examines the ways in which people have represented and reflected on the physical, social, psychological, and ideological features of the world in which they live. The new model, however, offers a significant contemporary rethinking of both the scope and nature of humanistic inquiry. The ancient Mediterranean unit, “Exile and Return,” introduces central humanistic questions by examining the motifs of foundation, utopian and mythic places, displacement, and wandering in the ancient Mediterranean. Readings will include the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, and texts from the Torah. The Athens unit, “Governing the Self and Others,” explores philosophical, historical,
and political models for understanding the self and society in ancient Athens. The Mexico City unit, “Constructions and Reconstructions,” will explore how a city and its inhabitants have been represented through historical changes. This will start with the migration of the Mexica and their foundation of Tenochtitlán and then move through conquest and colonialism, the creation of the Mexican Republic, the Mexican Revolution, and into the indigenous peoples’ and students’ protests of the 20th century. The Harlem unit, “Aesthetics and Politics, Race, and Democracy,” will begin with the movement of African Americans from the rural south to New York City as part of the “great migration.” It will then focus on the rich cultural and political flourishing that occurred in Harlem during the period between the two wars and its interaction with other minority discourses in New York during this time. The units are designed to evolve over time, allowing the course to focus on new areas and cultures as the faculty decide.
portraits by Carl Van Vechten
Hum 110, Reed’s signature humanities course, is moving beyond the ancient Mediterranean and coming to the Americas. The faculty has approved a new structure that allows students to dive into a particular historical culture each quarter. The first unit will focus on the ancient Mediterranean, the next on Athens. The course will then turn to Mexico City and finish with the Harlem Renaissance. The structure represents a new approach to humanistic studies in the 21st century. In 2016, the Hum 110 faculty chose to review the course following campus protests that raised the issue of whether the old syllabus gave sufficient credit to traditionally marginalized voices. After surveying students and alumni, consulting noted scholars, and meeting more than 30 times, the majority of the Hum 110 faculty has approved the new model—the latest in an ongoing evolution of the course throughout its long history. “This new syllabus represents an enormous undertaking and commitment on the part of the Hum faculty and marks an important
Faculty Approves New Major on Race & Ethnicity Interdisciplinary program may graduate its first cohort as soon as 2020.
The Reed faculty voted unanimously to approve an interdisciplinary major in comparative race and ethnicity studies (CRES) in March. “This is an exciting and overdue addition to the Reed curriculum,” says Prof. Nigel Nicholson [classics 1995–], dean of the faculty. “A new position will provide new offerings and create a stronger structure for organizing existing offerings, so that we can better nurture the work on race and ethnicity that many Reed students are keen to pursue.” As part of the new program, Reed will offer a junior seminar to equip students with the conceptual and methodological tools to pursue the subject. Students majoring in CRES will be required to complete six units across three fields, a foundational course, the junior seminar, and four additional units in their home departments. They will also need to meet standard Reed requirements, such as passing a junior qualifying exam and writing a senior thesis. Planning for the new CRES program began in 2011, responding to longstanding interest on the part of students. In recent years, scores of seniors have written theses on topics such as language and identity in the poetry of Langston Hughes, African immigration and assimilation in Portland, the economics of Native American reservations, the experience of Muslim Turks in Germany, the politics of affirmative action, and the debate over “veiling.” The faculty anticipates that the first set of majors may graduate as early as spring 2020. —CHRIS LYDGATE ’90
Visit the Reed College Bookstore for a great selection of drinkware, including these hand-thrown mugs from Deneen Pottery—available in the store and online.
bookstore.reed.edu
Novel Sensation leah nash
Prof. Pete Rock published the hit novel My Abandonment in 2009. Prof. Pete Rock [creative writing 2001–] will be seeing his name in lights. His novel My Abandonment, about a girl and her father who live in a cave in Forest Park, has been adapted for the screen. Leave No Trace, directed by Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone) and starring Ben Foster, Jeff Kober, and Dale Dickey, will be in theatres this summer.
839 Yes, that’s how many donors stepped up to support Reed for the March Match campaign. In a short 15 days, they contributed $101,380 in support of our students and the transformative education that shapes them. Congratulations from Linda Matthews ’67, Konrad Alt ’81, and the team at the Annual Fund.
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Whispers From the Thesis Tower Note: I recently stumbled across this letter from an econ major thanking a donor who supported his Reed education. I was so impressed I decided to share it with our readers. —Ed.
Dear X, I am full of gratitude for your contribution to my Reed education. I wouldn’t be able to attend this school without the financial support of others—especially this year, as my younger brother begins his own college journey. Year after year, my heart smiles as I observe the willingness of my fellow human beings to help me attain the life-changing privilege of being a Reed student. As I prepare to graduate in May 2018, I am struck by the ephemeral nature of my final year at this school. My interactions with friends and professors are imbued with a bittersweet significance. My classes seem particularly heightened in their applications to the world beyond Reed. My thesis— on affordable housing policies
in the San Francisco Bay Area— and my extracurricular efforts to implement a restorative justice policy here are reflected through the now-pressing lens of legacy, as I consider how I can give back to a school that has given me so much. Yet even as my undergraduate experience comes to a close, I find that my senior year has been my favorite so far. After three years of learning, living, and growing here, I feel truly at home. I have the incredible opportunity to work with an advisor, whom I care about and deeply respect. And I continue to hone the critical thinking skills that are central to a Reed education. Through it all, I am uplifted by a community of people cheering for my success: family, friends, professors, colleagues, even the people who
serve my meals at commons. It is this powerful sense of community that is my beacon in times of hardship and my reward in times of celebration. My experience at Reed has heightened my confidence and wisdom in ways that I couldn’t have imagined as a freshman. I am thankful every day that I decided to attend this school, and just thankful for the people—yourself among them— who have surrounded me and supported me throughout this journey. Sincerely yours, Samuel T. Pléchot Binder ’18 Economics major at Reed
Gabriel Zinn ’15
Win/Win Tin House founder and New Republic editor becomes Reed trustee.
Oregon Business, Oregon Home, Travel Oregon, Military History Quarterly, and Art and Auction magazines. In 1999, he founded Tin House, a literary magazine that has become enormously respected as a platform for writers starting their careers. In 2005, Tin House expanded into a book division. In addition to the many magazine articles he has written, McCormack has authored two books, including The Rajneesh Chronicles, about the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers. He won the William Allen andie petkus
Win McCormack first learned of Reed College as an undergraduate studying government at Harvard. He was intrigued with Reed’s celebrated reputation for having the largest number of Rhodes Scholars per capita of any college in the country. As Reed’s newest trustee, McCormack is interested in maintaining the storied quality of the college’s liberal arts curriculum. “At various levels and in various places, liberal arts education is sort of under siege right now,” he says. “Reed is well situated to counter that. A liberal arts education teaches you to write; it teaches you to think. It gives you the ability to project yourself into other people and empathize with them. It makes life more enjoyable.” The founder and editor in chief of Tin House magazine and Tin House Books, McCormack is also the owner and editor in chief of New Republic magazine. Describing his path from Harvard to a career in publishing and politics, he concedes, “So many of the things that happen in life are accidents.” After getting his bachelor’s degree, he worked for three years teaching and doing social work. He decided he wanted to write, and, after visiting a friend at the University of Oregon, signed up for their masters of fine arts in creative writing program in 1970. As he was finishing his MFA, someone suggested that he apply for a job running a congressional campaign in Oregon’s Fourth Congressional District. He got the job, and when the campaign was over, a coworker asked him for financial help in acquiring Oregon Times magazine. McCormack’s mother had just died, and, having inherited some money, he went into business with his friend. Though he had never contemplated being in the magazine business, he took to it with alacrity. He published Oregon Magazine from 1976 to 1988 and has been involved in publishing
Win McCormack
White award for his investigative coverage of the Rajneesh cult from 1982 to 1986. In 2003, Tin House began an annual summer writers’ workshop at Reed. The Great Lawn and the Cerf Amphitheatre were ideal venues for readings and literary discussions. At Tin House, McCormack got to know Reed through its graduates working as interns. “I was always struck by the similarity between Reed students and Harvard students,” he says. “They had the same level of intelligence and intellectual curiosity that I found as an undergraduate at Harvard, more than other representatives of colleges that I’ve seen. The undergraduates at Reed are a very impressive group.”
NEVER OUT OF STYLUS. Giant stick of chalk weighs roughly 250 pounds.
Chalk and Awe Science majors create a gargantuan stick of chalk, possibly the biggest on record.
Dust off the record books—four Reed science majors have created what they believe to be the world’s biggest stick of chalk. The cylindrical behemoth—a veritable chalk ness monster—is the size and shape of a 55-gallon trash can (in fact, it currently resides in one) and weighs approximately 250 pounds. It has a creamy white color, and its face is emblazoned in glitter with the phrase “Mad Sci”—the name of the theme dorm where its creators live. This white whale was fabricated in January as part of a Paideia class led by physics majors Patrick Bedard ’19, neuroscience major Alexander King ’19, and physics majors Trevor Schlack ’19 and Lorenzo Barrar ’20. The process of making chalk is not complicated; just combine plaster and water. A stick of this magnitude, however, required that the group buy out Home Depot’s entire stock of plaster, 125 pounds total. The students have not yet written anything with this giant stylograph—they are currently awaiting certification from the Guinness Book of World Records—but are confident that their chalk will easily erase the competition. Until then, you can color us amazed. —GABRIEL ZINN ’15
—RANDALL S. BARTON
june 2018 Reed Magazine
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Eliot Circular
Welcome to Here—24,859 Miles Away anna harris
Inspired by Voltaire, Reed art show Academy of Saturn captures the imagination through sight, sound, and even smell.
My wig is gone. Is this the earthquake or is my upstairs neighbor having another drum circle? Heal me coconut water. So read three of the myriad “bricks” that form the Portland Wall, a work of art currently standing in Reed’s Cooley Gallery as part of a new show entitled The Academy of Saturn. It’s an arresting physical structure assembled from social-media updates captured within a five-mile radius of the college by the British artists behind the show, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead. Each tweet or Facebook post has become a graphic poster, and together they form a whole that is both poetic and material, and occasionally absurd. It’s a description that in many ways could apply to the entirety of the show, which takes its name from a 260-year-old science fiction novella by Voltaire called Micromégas, in which a pair of gargantuan aliens visit Earth and strike up a conversation with some philosophically versed humans they can only see through a microscope. Stripped of context, the data these artists use as found material finds new function— becoming commentary, communication, and serving as a form of documentary practice Thomson and Craighead say is central to their artistic approach. Take a seat behind the Portland Wall and you find yourself watching a series of slides found in the harbor archives of Aberdeen in Scotland—old images of docked boats, bucolic landscapes, snowy peaks, British royalty— while listening to an accompanying narrative created by the artists, a pairing that comprises Control Room. As the grazing cows in one image make way for an aerial harbor view in the next, an interrogator asks questions of an interviewee who can only answer repeatedly that he can’t remember, he doesn’t know, he can’t say. The audio recontexutalises the images, lending an eerie quality to the found
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The Portland Wall intrigues visitors at the Cooley Gallery by juxtaposing social media updates in new context.
footage that forces the audience to make new sense of what they’re seeing. It’s documentary pointedly wrestling with the constraints of memory and our need for narrative cohesion—and it’s spookily affecting. The documentary impulse is exemplified in Horizon, which Craighead calls “an electronic sundial,” showing every time zone in the world in storyboard form. Live webcams in places as far flung as Samoa and St. Petersburg form part of this tapestry of
longitudinal time, a live feed that it is somehow both literal and lyrical. Another piece, Corruption, comprises a series of colored light boxes containing image frames from a corrupted computer file viewed on a video player. Seen in its new context, the information morphs into something resembling abstract paintings, pixelated colors bleeding into each other and shifting as the viewer moves, an example of what the artists call “drawing with data.”
For Untitled (balloon work), a screen showing footage of a group of women popping dozens of balloons to clear an area after a corporate balloon drop provides the staccato, gunfire-like audio backdrop to the physical balloons that float across the gallery floor, with the names of military actions and operations—like Valiant Guardian (2007, Iraq War) or Bayonet Lightning (2003, Iraq war)—printed on their shining, taut surfaces. Once again, found footage reinterpreted creates new context—in this case, an audio accompaniment to the warlike messages on the bouncing party props all around. If the cacophony of popping corporate balloons has not pushed you to contemplate mankind’s doom, be it through corporate culture or outright war, Apocalypse might. It’s a fragrance created with perfumer Euan McCall based on olfactory notes the artists culled from the Bible’s Book of Revelation: “blood,” “flesh,” “thunder,” etc. The sweeter notes? Turns out that’s the kind of putrid scent a rotting body gives off, according to Craighead. “We’re at a period where we really feel the weight of the apocalypse,” she says. Their response is a sensual reinterpretation of biblical data, a sensory experience that brings together the art and the absurd. Finally—or initially, depending on where you begin your experience of The Academy of Saturn—right outside the building, you find Here, a regulation American street sign in a newly created iteration for this Portland show. It shows the distance in miles from the sign itself in a circumnavigation of the globe north or southwards. Thomson calls it “an imaginary drawing,” and Craighead “an absurd gesture,” both of which get to the heart of an exhibit in which a profound and lyrical aesthetic coexists with a raised eyebrow and works in tension with our philosophical flailing—like our tiny Voltairian representatives—in search of meaning in daily human practice. If found data and corrupt files and Google computer searches and random, geo-located tweets can find artistic form, then this is the place for it. Here, 24,859 miles away from the inescapable present. —FIONA MCCANN
06-10
2018
REUNIONS
JUNE
REED COLLEGE
!e
SALAD DAYS As you reflect on your time at Reed, consider a gi! that honors your milestone reunion and safeguards the "ture of Reed College.
When you establish a charitable gi! annui# at Reed, you can • receive guaranteed payments for life; • take advantage of a$ractive rates; • earn a charitable income tax deduction; • reduce recognition of capitals gains by donating stock; • support Reed’s "ture. To learn more, contact Audrey Anderson by phone at 503/517-7937 or by email at giftplanning@reed.edu. reed.edu/LifeIncomeGifts Gift annuities are subject to age minimums and are not available in some states.
Advocates of the Griffin
News of the Alumni Association • Connecting Reed alumni across the globe
leah nash
From the ALUMNI BOARD Prez
Cheers to Volunteers! It is my honor to thank and congratulate all of the dedicated alumni who volunteered their time and talent to Reed this year. Though the space I have to recognize your hard work is limited, my gratitude is not. A huge thanks to all alumni volunteers: admission representatives, Alumni Fundraising for Reed, chapters, Foster-Scholz Club, international student hosts, Paideia, Peer Mentor Program advisory board, Reed Alumni Connect, Reunions, summer internship & Winter Shadow hosts, my fellow alumni board members, and the sundry others who serve our community both officially and unofficially. I’m excited to call attention to a few highlights from this year:
Alumni Board
The alumni board has taken on a number of exciting projects this year. In particular, we have initiated a committee for young alumni chaired by Ben Rankin ’87 and a diversity and inclusion committee co-chaired by alea adigweme ’06 and Melissa Osborne ’13 . We continue to build our Reed Career Alliance, chaired by Darlene Pasieczny ’01, and our chapter chairs committee, chaired by Dave Baxter ’87 . A great big thank you to our committee chairs and the directors who serve with them! Your energy is tireless, your creativity inspirational, and your positivity infectious. It is an honor to serve with you and to represent our community! To learn more about the alumni board, contact Mary Askelson at askelsom@reed.edu.
Alumni Fundraising for Reed (AFR)
So far, 58 AFR volunteers have raised $66,103 from 239 alumni—congratulations! Rumor has it that this already impressive
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number will continue to grow once AFR volunteers get to work on their June outreach initiative. I also hear that you are currently seeking volunteer fundraisers for said June initiative . . . wink, wink, nudge, nudge. To learn more about AFR or to sign up to for this June’s effort, contact Carlie Stolz ’13 at cstolz@reed.edu.
Chapters
Our chapters have been buzzing with activity this year! I deeply appreciate our chapter chairs for organizing so many lively activities, and the same goes for the chapter volunteers who helped behind the scenes. Some recent notable events: • Convivial pizza parties in Boston, Chicago, NYC, and D.C. to welcome new graduates • Spellbinding book clubs in Seattle, D.C., Portland, and Southern California • Festive holiday/solstice parties in the Bay Area, D.C., and Boston
Reunions is only one of the ways dedicated alumni volunteers come together to help Reed.
• Picnics in Seattle, D.C., Southern California, the Bay Area, and Chicago. To learn more about Alumni Chapters, contact Wendell Britt ’13 at wbritt@reed.edu.
Reed Alumni Connect (RAC)
For many of our graduates, their first welcome into the alumni network comes through RAC volunteers. What an incredibly important role you provide! Shepherding our newest alumni into the community that will be with them for the rest of their lives is invaluable. Thank you for reaching out to this year’s brand new graduates to offer congratulations and resources. Twelve RAC volunteers contacted 97 of our newest alumni this year. You all RAC! To learn more about RAC, contact Haley Parra-Cain ’17 at parracha@reed.edu.
Winter Shadows
Winter Shadows are key to helping current students explore their purpose and the workplace. I’m proud to thank the alumni and parents who offered 117
shadow opportunities to 152 students. You show students new possibilities for what life after Reed might offer. Fun fact: Winter Shadow opportunities routinely result in internship and full-time offers all over the country. Impressive! To get involved with the Center for Life Beyond Reed, contact Brooke Hunter at hunterb@reed.edu.
My sincerest thanks to you and the many, many other volunteers not listed here. I am constantly in awe of the amazing work that you all contribute. You should be proud of what you do for Reed—every bit of it impacts Reedies past, present, and future. Thank you, thank you. Make sure to look out for Reed’s Volunteer Impact Report this summer for a more robust summary of your innovative volunteerism! Love Reed, Lisa Saldana ’94 Alumni Board President
Reunions Are Nigh . . . Join us on campus June 6–10
Lewis to Chair Fundraising Effort As the outgoing chair of Alumni Fundraising for Reed (AFR), I have the privilege of announcing Christine Lewis ’07 as my successor. I’m particularly excited about Christine taking the helm of AFR; I know few alumni whose personal passions, volunteer history, and professional background more closely align with the current needs of AFR than hers. Christine joined the AFR steering committee in 2013 and immediately started asking insightful questions— questions that were poignant and thoughtful, and that forced the group to confront its biggest challenges and most exciting opportunities. She engaged with volunteers and college staff with the style of a true leader, fostering discussion and encouraging disagreement when necessary while making sure that all opinions were heard. Of course, her volunteer work with Reed is only part time. Christine has worked in politics for the past several years, most recently serving as legislative director at the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. And, let’s be honest, politics requires the skills we need in development leaders: the ability to paint a picture of a strong future, and to garner the financial support and community engagement needed to make it happen. In comportment, Christine is a Reedie through and through. She has
a delightful quirkiness to her and a warmth that quickly puts people at ease (her Sally Jesse Raphael-esque glasses help, too). And, perhaps most importantly, she is ruthlessly devoted to and optimistic about Reed College. Christine exudes a passion about what Reed stands for—the kind of passion that makes people want to support the college now and in the future. Reed has made remarkable fundraising progress over the past decade. Consider AFR’s impact since its founding in 2010: • Fundraising volunteers have risen from eight to more than 100. • Alumni who give $1,000+ per year have grown from 486 to a projected 675 this year. • We’ve added more than $1 million in ongoing annual support for the college. At this point, Reed needs someone to establish a bold vision for a future Reed whose alumni support the college in overwhelming numbers and on a consistent basis. I’m so very excited to watch (and help) Christine Lewis do just that. Michael Stapleton ’10 Outgoing Chair of Alumni Fundraising for Reed
Do you look forward to Reed traditions* at Reunions? Added to these familiar fan favorites each year are special, one-time-only events. Join us at Reunions 2018 for these ephemeral festivities: The Multicultural Resource Center’s 25th anniversary celebration and panel discussion. The Nuclear Research Reactor’s 50th birthday celebration. Writers’ Workshop: Word Workers of the World Unite, this year’s Alumni College. All writers, editors, publishers, booksellers, and other word workers are invited back to campus Tuesday through Friday before the Reunions kick-off for alumni-led writing workshops, talks, and panels that will cover everything from literary craft to the business of writing. Bon Voyage, Mike Teskey! Mike has been a cherished leader in alumni relations for almost two decades and will be leaving Reed this summer for new adventures on another continent. Join the party on Saturday afternoon and send him off in style. *Fireworks, Stop Making Sense dance party, Reedie Artisans and Authors Marketplace, Meat Smoke, S.L.U.R., Carnival, the class parade, and many more . . .
Know an Epic Reedie? Reed needs your help to find and celebrate Homeric alumni for the following accolades:
Babson Society Outstanding Volunteer Award: Established in honor of Jean McCall Babson ’42, this award recognizes outstanding volunteer service to Reed. Eliot Award for Lifetime Achievement: This award acknowledges alumni who, through their professional endeavors, have exemplified qualities that Reed values: intellectual rigor, independence, and integrity. Foster-Scholz Distinguished Service Award: Named for Reed’s first two presidents, this award honors alumni from Reed’s earliest classes through the most recent 40th reunion class who have made major contributions to the greater community and to the world. Please impart your suggestions to the Office of Alumni Programs at alumni@reed.edu or 503/777-7589.
june 2018 Reed Magazine 11
THEATRE PROFESSOR DESIGNS PUNK OPERA Experimental musical is based on archive of iconic punk band Fugazi. BY KATIE PELLETIER ’03
A scene from the debut run of It’s All True, designed by Prof. Peter Ksander [theatre].
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henrik beck
The punk band Fugazi may seem an unlikely source of inspiration for musical theatre, but experimental group Object Collection recently made an opera called It’s All True based on the band’s entire live archive. To produce this offbeat new project, the creators sought out Reed’s own mastermind scenographer, Prof. Peter Ksander [theatre 2011–]. The project began in an email exchange between Prof. Ksander and Object Collection cofounder Travis Just. The entire archive of Fugazi’s live shows from 1987 to 2003 was being put online and made available to the public. Fugazi, known for its uncompromising stand against the rock and roll establishment, playing all-ages shows and never charging more than $5 a ticket, had played over 1,000 shows over 15 years, and the archive would be considerable. “Wouldn’t it be cool to make something with this someday?” Ksander and Just wrote to one another. Just took all the instrumental sounds that occurred between songs and sets of Fugazi performances, listening to over 1,500 hours of archive material. He collaged them together into a musical piece, which he then transcribed and scored for a live band (a guitar quartet with two drummers). Meanwhile, Object Collection’s other cofounder, writer Kara Feely, wrote the libretto with all the text that Just pulled from the interlude moments during his “obsessive deep dive” into the archive. “The idea was that we would make this piece out of everything but the songs in the archive,” Ksander explains. The work is composed of all the interstitial material: tuning, noodling guitar work, chatter, bantering with the audience, all the strong political feelings the band voiced on stage, and feelings about how people in the room should behave (Fugazi was notoriously disapproving of aggressive slam dancing, fighting, and crowd surfing). The show is called an opera-in-suspension. Throughout the piece, something is about to happen, or has just happened. “It’s all built out of the inbetweens,” Ksander says. With this to work from, Prof. Ksander faced some obstacles as the show’s scenographer. He had to figure out whether the visual components (the lighting, set, and scene design) should borrow from other Object Collection work, experimental theatre, or rock and roll. But Fugazi eschewed rock and roll trappings
such as flashing lights and elaborate displays. Ksander notes that in listening to the archive, you hear again and again the band saying, “Could you just leave the lights the way they are? Are there any house lights? Could you just turn on the house lights?” How could he design a show in keeping with the band’s ethos? And second, how could he design a show that then had to be transported to Norway? The script has no central narrative, although there are through lines, and its experimental qualities meant that the characters who speak the lines could be anywhere, doing anything. “It could be anything, so where do you start making some structure to make a choice becomes the question,” Ksander says. Ultimately, he chose props and scenery that could be sent to Norway ahead of time, like folding chairs, tables, and boxes. He then designed a series of floor plans that would be changed out at each interlude in the opera. For the North American premiere, he added more changes in the lights, playing with the way the lighting might amplify the energy in the room at certain moments of the opera. Taking into account the band’s preference for house lights over elaborate lighting design, he designed the opera’s lighting with floor lamps and bare lightbulbs and chose a daylight temperature for the backlights, which at one point he turns on the audience. The opera is not actually about Fugazi. Ksander says, “It’s not about using their name to make the thing popular; it wasn’t about publicity. It was about our real love for their ethos, and their spirit, and their thinking— and their music on top of that.” The band, who agreed to allow their archive to be used for the opera, said they were “blown away and disoriented by the work.” In a statement, Fugazi guitarist Guy Picciotto said, “I still don’t know how to react to the work, but there are many strains in what they’ve accomplished that parallel whatever ethic we might have had as a band; there is a diligent, contrarian method of working, there is a refusal to coddle sensibilities, and of course there are serious politics at play.” The show is not Mamma Mia! with Fugazi tracks, the Guardian noted in its review. Instead, it’s “a thrilling ordeal,” loud and confounding.
june 2018 Reed Magazine 13
FIGHTING FOR PARKROSE
Mingus Mapps ’90 is on a quest to revitalize one of Portland’s most divided neighborhoods. BY ROMEL HERNANDEZ
Parkrose is the sort of place you drive through on the way to somewhere else. An out-oftime Portland neighborhood where every block tells a story about the past, present, and future—the weathered tombstones in the pioneer cemeteries bookending the commercial strip, the derelict bus abandoned in the weeds, the German/Romanian sausage joint. It’s seen better days. And it may see better days yet—if Mingus Mapps ’90 has anything to do with it. Mingus is on an epic journey that has taken him from studying at Reed to teaching at leafy campuses in New England, and now back to Portland, where he is striving to revitalize the down-at-heel yet proud neighborhood. The path might seem unconventional, but he sees it as a continuum. “My academic career informs the work I do today,” he says. “I love teaching, but I was never addicted to the privilege and prestige of academia. I’m very happy to be in this world.” This “world” is Parkrose, a diverse neighborhood on the fringe of Northeast Portland. Bisected by a mile-long stretch of Sandy Boulevard, the area is also home to a motley strip of hardware shops, gas stations, taverns, motels, and vacant storefronts. On paper, his job as executive director of the nonprofit Historic Parkrose is to provide technical assistance and storefront improvement grants to small businesses sprucing up with a fresh coat of paint or new signage. In practice, however, his day-to-day work is manifold—organizer, facilitator, mediator, booster. He serves as an unofficial liaison between residents (from homeowners to the homeless), businesses, police, churches, social services, and assorted community groups. “We’re taking the traditional model of urban renewal and turning it on its head by shifting power from developers to the grass roots,” he says. “The mission is to go beyond ‘sticks and bricks’ to empower those who live
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and work here and want this to be a better place to live.” Working out of a storefront on the strip, he plays a part in almost everything that happens in Parkrose. If there is a key to success in this sort of work, he says, it’s inclusivity. In five years on the job, he has been involved in a wide range of initiatives, including wooing a long-needed supermarket chain to the neighborhood, commissioning a giant mural, rallying opposition to a lingerie modeling business called “Tush,” convincing bar and motel owners to hire private security to deter prostitution, and forging partnerships among police, church, and homeless campers to clean up trash. “It’s a hard job,” he says. “A lot of two steps forward, one step back. But it’s so satisfying.” Growing up in California, Mingus was connected to Reed through relatives who attended the college. His father worked for the state small business office and his mother worked for the welfare system, so “government was never an abstract concept to me.” At Reed he majored in political science, played rugby, and wrote for the Quest. “I had a typical Reed experience as a student—intense, sometimes angsty,” he says. “I made lifelong friends and had excellent mentors,” including professors still teaching on campus, such as Prof. Darius Rejali [political science 1989–] and others who moved on, such as Prof. Jon Goldberg-Hiller [political science 1987–93]. “Prof. Steve Kapsch [political science 1974–2005] was a huge influence,” he adds. “He taught me political science, but also the nitty-gritty of public policy. He helped me make the connections for my first job.” After graduating, he remained in Portland, bouncing around various jobs on political campaigns and as a policy analyst for Multnomah County. Looking for a new challenge, he headed to Cornell, where he earned a PhD in government. He focused his
scholarship on race in American politics, writing his doctoral thesis on electoral redistricting and pursuing postdoctoral work at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He joined the faculties at Bowdoin and then Brandeis—small schools that reminded him of Reed. After his family moved back to Portland in 2015, he switched gears from teaching about social justice to making it happen. He says, “If you’re interested in urban politics and race and inequality in public policy, you ultimately want to put yourself out there. I reached a point in my career where I wanted to get involved in making policy.” Parkrose has proved to be the perfect place for him to make a meaningful impact.
Tojo Andrianarivo
Founded a century ago by German and Italian immigrants as a farming community, it was a middle-class suburb in the 1950s and ’60s before going into decline. The area was annexed by Portland in the 1980s, but has its own school district, where about 3 of 4 students are economically disadvantaged. The area’s population, which includes about one-third people of color, is more diverse than the rest of Portland. He both fits into and stands out in the neighborhood, where his tall, preppy, baldheaded figure is a familiar sight strolling up and down Sandy Boulevard. Which is exactly what he was doing on a recent rainy day when he ran into Samantha Montanaro, a
local entrepreneur. She was bouncing with excitement to tell him about a new building she was buying in the neighborhood. “Mingus brings a calm, grounded, strategic approach to his work,” Montanaro says. “Before he arrived, the neighborhood was really divided; it felt like everyone was only out for themselves. Mingus has been instrumental in bringing this community together— and that’s no easy feat.” Damian Crowder, a project manager with Prosper Portland, the government agency charged with economic development, also praises his knack for engaging a dynamic, but sometimes divided, community. “That’s where his experience is an asset,” Crowder
says. “The issues are very intricate, and it takes someone with a critical perspective to understand the challenges you have to tackle.” The job can be grueling, but Mingus is focused on the payoff. He’s working on attracting more family-oriented businesses; coffeeshops and brewpubs are on his wish list. He is also mustering support for more pedestrian crosswalks along Sandy Boulevard. “You see so much tragedy in this job just walking through the door every day,” he says. “At the same time, it’s such satisfying work. I get to help people who really need it, and I get to work with partners who are genuinely optimistic about the future. We’re doing good things here.”
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REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT Author Janet Fitch ’78 storms the barricades with new novel on the Russian Revolution. BY ANGIe JABINE ’79
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It took me a solid week to read all 800 pages of Janet Fitch’s third and latest novel, The Revolution of Marina M. (Little Brown). It’s an epic tale of St. Petersburg during the Russian revolution, replete with bloody demonstrations, warring ideologies, unthinkable betrayals, and a brave new regime that quickly turns as brutal as the monarchy it destroyed. This monumental story is narrated by a young poet named Marina Makarova. Reared in bourgeois comfort, she has no idea how to live like the masses, and what sticks with me a month later is her horrified introduction to roaches, fleas, and bedbugs—and her even greater horror when she learns that her fellow slum dwellers repel the vermin by putting the legs of their beds in buckets of kerosene. “Bozhe moi, was that what they were doing?” she thinks. “I hoped the neighbors didn’t smoke in bed. Now I was glad we slept in our clothes. It would make for an easier getaway.” The Revolution of Marina M. has drawn a lot of critical attention, not least because Janet’s two previous novels generated so much media heat. White Oleander, her 1999 story of a Los Angeles teenager bouncing between her troubled mother and foster care, was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and became a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer in 2002. Paint It Black, her 2006 follow-up novel, focused on two women grieving for the same man. With its psychological acuity, sexual frankness, and lacerating turns of phrase, it was enthusiastically received and also eventually adapted to the screen. But after these two novels came silence as she plunged into more than a decade of research on Revolution. “I had no idea the book would take 10 years,” she says by phone from her home in Los Angeles. “I
might not have started it if I had known.” humanities conference with art historiAlthough Reed played an essential role in an Prof. Peter Parshall [art history 1971– the novel’s genesis, she always 2000], she dismissed one of his knew she would write about assertions as “bullshit.” Instead Russia. “I had a Cold War girlof ejecting her from the room, hood. I used to watch all the he challenged her: “Why do spy shows. I saw Dr. Zhivago you think that? Support your on the wide screen, with the claim.” She was amazed. “Wow, little train going across the this guy was actually listening to vast expanse—high drama!” me! This was a place where you she recalls. “When I was in could be as smart as you were.” junior high, I started readOther professors who stand ing Dostoevsky. I was a malout in her memory include Ed content—I was a total Reedie Janet Fitch’s third and Segel [history 1973–2011], novel, The Revolution even then. My father put Crime latest Kaspar Locher [German of Marina M. and Punishment into my hands. 1950–88], and Owen Ulph That’s my world. The depth of the passion [history 1944–79], whose Russian history and the seriousness and the claustropho- classes were especially unforgettable. “That bia—Dostoevsky just spoke to me.” guy was more eccentric than any student In her first month at Reed, in a freshman could possibly have been,” she says. “He’d
john weber ’78
Janet at Reed, from the 1977–78 edition of The Gryphon
sit back with his green boots on the conference table and say, ‘If you bore me, you’re going to get a C!’ He loved the Mongol invasions—he would say, ‘Oh, the Mongols, they were men! They cooked their meat under their saddles.’” As part of a student exchange program, she spent the summer before her senior year in what was then called Leningrad, staying in a dormitory with other Westerners. “We had our KGB minders, our tour guides,” she recalls. “You had random encounters on the street but it was very, very clear that you were not Russian. Everyone wore gray and brown and nobody cared about fashion. You’d see women on the beach in their bras and panties. I don’t remember restaurants or clubs. People would go to somebody’s room, drink vodka, and play guitar . . . They were super–culturally aware. Your
bus driver might bust into some Pushkin, and theater tickets cost a ruble.” Thirty years later, she returned to Russia in 2007 as part of an alumni tour led by Prof. Judson Rosengrant [Russian 1979– 90]. The changes astonished her: “The supermarkets, cafes, movies, Western TV—I wouldn’t have known I was in Russia. There was a BMW dealership on the main drag in Moscow, with a rainbow-colored BMW on a turntable!” She spent an extra week in St. Petersburg, scouting locations for the novel, including the Church of St. John the Baptist, where Marina meets her archnemesis, Arkady von Princip. Still not satisfied that she was prepared to convey the sights and smells of the era, she returned to St. Petersburg two years later on a Likhachev Foundation Cultural Fellowship, designed for foreigners working
in the arts and culture. She made a beeline for the Museum of Political History, where she peppered curators and historians with seven single-spaced pages of questions. After 10 years of research and rewriting (interspersed with teaching at the University of Southern California), the book was ready, and so was the publishing world. The reviews for The Revolution of Marina M. ranged from the rapturous to the mildly exasperated. The Christian Science Monitor called it “Fitch’s most powerful narrative, beautifully and propulsively written, dense with atmosphere and poetics.” The Chicago Tribune opined, “Like Marina, it is maddening and flawed,” but conceded that The Revolution of Marina M. was “astonishingly . . . hard to put down.” USA Today called it “sprawling, immersive, and heavily researched—and it’s only part one of two.” The New York Times reviewer, Simon Sebag Montefiore, a rival author of Russian historical novels, professed shock that the tale seems to focus as much on sex and survival as sectarian struggles. Rather than being a “quintessential revolutionary heroine,” he sulked, Marina “is tossed like flotsam by great events, and the novel would benefit if she were more of a participant.” Ruled by a rash and fickle heart, Marina is indeed tossed like flotsam—not just by great events but by her own impulses, both noble and carnal. It is her schoolmate Varvara, a staunch Bolshevik, who plays the role of defending the revolution against Tsarists—real and imaginary. Varvara ranks high among Fitch’s favorite characters, along with Kolya Shurov, the suave speculator who leaves Marina hanging again and again. As the winter of 1919 closes in, Marina casts her lot with a group of occultists at her family’s rural dacha. Any reader who has made it this far will be avidly waiting for March 2019, when Book Two picks up the story.
june 2018 Reed Magazine 17
READING THE SIGNALS
After two tours of duty in Afghanistan, Army veteran Laura Swann ’19 brings a unique perspective to Reed. BY JUAN FLORES ’13
Inside the Lockheed C-130 Hercules, the atmosphere was tense. The deafening roar of the plane’s quadruple engines hummed over the anxious shouts of the soldiers. Pinched into their flight gear, they prodded at each other’s parachutes. The air was thick with adrenaline until the drill sergeant’s command cut through the noise. The soldiers snapped into a line and, one by one, began to leap out of the plane. Laura Swann ’19 contemplated her fear of heights and her fear of failure as she inched inexorably toward the open hatch, and... Silence! Floating through a brilliant blue void over a field in Georgia, she felt a sense of solitude and rebirth before crashing to the ground with a violent and disorienting bang. Standing up, she first found herself, then her peers, then their destination.
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On her intellectual odyssey from naive Young Republican to political science major at Reed, the most important skills Laura has learned are how to land, how to reorient herself, and how to keep moving forward. Laura grew up in a conservative household outside Denver, Colorado. Her father immigrated from Syria to get a fresh start in the U.S., and her mother was (and still is) an Objectivist, a subscriber to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of rational self-interest. Laura inherited her mother’s Objectivist philosophy and demonstrated in favor of the Iraq War with the Young Republicans. When she turned 18, she promptly enlisted as a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collector with the U.S. Army, motivated by a mixture of nationalistic pride and a genuine desire to help people with whom she identified.
By the time she completed basic training, however, she realized something was wrong. She didn’t feel transformed by the Army, just crushed. “There was a lot of breaking down, but there wasn’t a lot of building back up,” she says. She spent 18 months studying Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, before shipping off to Goodfellow Air Force Base to complete her training. When she finally arrived in Afghanistan, she began to appreciate the depths of the Army’s ignorance about the people it purported to help. The U.S. had occupied Afghanistan for almost seven years, but her commanding officers couldn’t provide a simple breakdown of the nation’s tribal structure. Worse, her Arabic was practically useless; Afghans have their own rich linguistic tradition that doesn’t include the language. When she landed at Kandahar Air Force Base (KAF) in 2009, Laura was greeted by a sprawling military establishment rife with contradictions. The base featured a boardwalk lined with restaurants and souvenir
natlie behring
shops catering to KAF’s international population of soldiers and civilians. At the center of it all was a sewage treatment pool dubbed Lake Shitticaca. Lacking a secure facility, Laura and her team were unable to collect any intelligence while their commanding officers played politics and jockeyed for promotions. Throngs of Afghan men crowded the base’s gates to check out female guards whenever her team drew guard duty; on one occasion, Laura was bitten by a monkey that was tossed over the fence at her in a bizarre gesture of either affection or hostility. As time marched forward, she grappled with isolation and despair. On New Year’s Eve, 2009, she found herself alone in a tent, depressed and on the precipice of suicide. She stayed up all night reading Deep Survival by Lorenzo Gonzalez from cover to cover. In the morning, she received word she would finally begin operations as a SIGINT analyst. It wasn’t what she was trained to do, but she enjoyed the work. She pored over the digital detritus she found in captured cell
phones, searching for actionable intelligence. Mostly what she found was Bollywood videos—vibrant and exuberant celebrations of life—occasionally interspersed with photos of bloodied corpses. Sometimes she found Taliban recruitment videos that spliced footage of the United States with scenes of the Soviet-Afghan War. She began to realize that in the eyes of many Afghans, she was just a member of another occupying force. In her free time, she began to play Dungeons & Dragons with other soldiers. The dice, dialogue, and the invented worlds were a welcome distraction from the banality of military life. The monsters she faced weren’t always imaginary, however. Once, while trying to deliver her daily intelligence report, Laura was cornered by two army colleagues wielding a camel spider— a giant arachnid of the order Solifugae with distinctive pointed pincers. They didn’t back off until she pulled out her knife. Late in 2010, Laura’s five-year enlistment
finally ended. She returned to the States, loaded up her car, and drove to Portland. After tending bar for several years, she knew it was time to expand her horizons. “I wanted to go to Reed because when I visited, it seemed like everyone was really engaged and interested in the material for its own sake,” she says. “Also, I loved that everyone took a year of classics in Hum 110.” When she arrived on campus, she felt like she had jumped into “the deep end.” At Orientation, she was surprised to be asked for her preferred pronouns. “I honestly thought it was a Tumblr joke,” she says, adding that since then she has come to believe that asking for pronouns is “pretty awesome.” With time, Laura soon found her footing. With Prof. Ben Lazier [history 2007–], she studied Hannah Arendt, which transformed her analytical framework. As she gained confidence, she began to lend her perspective as a veteran to academic conferences about war, weapons technology, and torture. She started a blog, The Misanthrophile, where she writes about history, philosophy, and politics, and joined a student organization named the Thinkery, dedicated to critical and open discussion. “I really believe in the power of dialogue,” she says, citing how thankful she is to have had the opportunity to argue about and reform her former Objectivist ideology. Now, as a political science major, she is turning her analytical eye toward White Nationalist groups such as Identity Evropa and how they function in the Pacific Northwest. She is also working part time as a research assistant for Prof. Paul Gronke [political science 2001–], who says her writing is on the pulse of the discipline, following in the footsteps of political scientist Katherine Cramer, whose 2016 book, The Politics of Resentment examined the rise of anti-government sentiment in rural Wisconsin. It has been a turbulent journey, but Laura is ready to take the next leap: writing her thesis. Nobody can say where she’ll land, but she isn’t worried. She knows she’ll find her way.
june 2018 Reed Magazine 19
WILD TRACKS
Psych grad undertakes an epic Australian adventure on horseback. BY KATELYN BEST ’13
3,311 miles. High mountain passes. Tropical heat. Rivers that flood in the wet season and vanish in the dry season. Wilderness as beautiful as it can be dangerous. That’s what awaits Clemmie Wotherspoon ’13 and her three rescued horses—Whiskey, Mac, and Ari—as she sets off on an epic journey along Australia’s Bicentennial National Trail. Completing the whole route unsupported on horseback is a feat fewer than a dozen people have accomplished. It’s the kind of once-in-a-lifetime adventure many dream of—but dreaming is one thing, actually doing another. And doing, in this case, has been a staggering logistical challenge that’s taken four years of planning. “Oh my god,” she sighs, when I ask how much preparation has gone into the trip. “So much.” She’s packing up for the trail as we talk via WhatsApp—everything you’d need for a backpacking trip, plus an electric fence, hobbles, nose bags, vet supplies, farrier’s tools. . . All of it has been donated by sponsors, the product of what she describes as a full-time job raising money for the trek. On top of that job, she’s had to learn a huge array of new skills. Surviving in the wilderness. Navigation. First aid. Managing the horses. Shoeing the horses, which is an art unto itself. She’s had to carefully plan her timing to follow sources of water and avoid exhaustion, plan for bush fires, river crossings, crocodiles, snakes. “With horses,” she says, “if something can go wrong, it will go wrong.” This trek isn’t just an adventure, however. It’s more like an existential wager, a cosmic bet on the power of horses to traverse a landscape that is both physical and psychological.
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Alex Philips
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Clemmie was raised in Delaware by an American mom and an Aussie dad, and was always fascinated by her father’s stories about the Australian outback. At Reed, she studied psychology, focusing on behavioral neuroscience. Working with Prof. Paul Currie [psychology 2007–], she wrote her thesis on the endocannabinoid system and emotional memory. “I was studying the underpinnings of fear and anxiety—why we have an experience, it scares the hell out of us, and then every time we’re around associations with that experience, we get scared again,” she explains. She also took classes from Prof. Tim Hackenberg [psychology 2009–] on behavior and conditioning, which is the foundation for training animals, be they dogs, pigeons, or horses. A couple of years after graduation, however, she went through a spell of depression and anxiety. She had a job waiting tables when “one of the waitresses took pity on me and took me to start training horses,” she says. She was resistant at first—she was actually afraid of horses. “In part, because they’re intimidating,” she says. “And in part because I was projecting my own anxieties.” Confronting that fear, and learning to overcome it, changed everything. She soon grasped how psychological principles can help us understand horses, and how horses can help us understand ourselves. “When you’re working with a horse, they’re reacting to what’s really going on deep inside your mind,” she says. Horses are sensitive to extremely subtle changes in physiology and body language—a slight change in posture, an increase in heart rate. “You can’t fake it,” she says. “When you work with them, you have to learn to monitor your emotional state. It’s like meditation, where you objectively observe your mind. It’s the same with horses—you have to objectively observe them and work with them without getting upset.” The bond between horses and people goes back for millennia, and medical writers since Hippocrates have extolled the physical benefits of riding. But researchers are just beginning to explore the potential psychological benefits. This issue was on her mind when she chanced across a book titled Tracks by Robyn Davidson, an account of an epic 1700-mile journey across Australia with three camels. Suddenly, the jigsaw pieces fell into place.
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Over the course of her trek, Clemmie will visit people she’s connected with in the horse community: trainers, equine therapists, people who run horse rescue and recovery programs. Aided by the knowledge and connections she develops on the journey, she plans to launch an equine therapy program, ideally using rescued brumbies— Australia’s version of the mustang. Like their American analogues, brumbies are viewed by some as an iconic symbol of Australia’s history, and by others as a destructive pest. But on a continent with no native hoofed animals, the ecological
damage is of greater concern, a problem compounded by the fact that horses have no natural predators in Australia. Management strategies range from fertility control to capture and adoption to lethal culling. To mitigate the ecological impact of brumbies, Clemmie favors creating sanctuaries where the horses could attract tourism to rural economies, as well as using them in the kind of equine therapy programs that so profoundly affected her life. “They have this incredible temperament as a horse, with so much potential to help us,” she says. “Practicing horsemanship, ultimately, forces you to become a better person.”
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2018 9 A.M. RACE START IN THE QUAD The 7th annual Reed College 5K FUNd RUN/WALK is a fundraiser for neighborhood elementary schools: Duniway, Grout, Lewis, Llewellyn, and Woodstock. ♦ A Free Pancake Breakfast ♦ Live Music ♦ Vendor Booths ♦ ♦ Kids’ Activities ♦ Tech T-shirts ♦ Participant Medallions ♦ Awards ♦ SPONSOR, VOLUNTEER, OR REGISTER TODAY!
reed.edu/5k Sponsored in part by Bon Appetit Management Company.
THE PROTON PHENOMENON Prof. Miriam Bowring investigates ways to liberate hydrogen from its bonds.
BY KIERAN HANRAHAN ’15
Hydrogen is the perfect fuel—if you can get it right. Pound for pound, it boasts more energy than any other combustible material— more than three times the energy content of gasoline. It burns cleanly, combining with oxygen in the atmosphere to produce water as its only exhaust. And there’s plenty of it around (it is, in fact, the most abundant element in the universe). But getting it right is not easy. Hydrogen is costly to produce and notoriously difficult to store (partly because it’s so light, and partly because of its explosive personality). Just ask Prof. Miriam Bowring [chemistry 2016–], who recently won a three-year, $43,500 research grant from the Murdock Charitable Trust to study catalysts that could revolutionize the production and storage of hydrogen. The catalysts Prof. Bowring studies bypass the energy constraints that make conventional hydrogen production so expensive by exploiting a quirk of quantum mechanics known as proton tunneling. Or, at least, “People think that it does,” she is quick to say, hedging like any good scientist. “What we’re doing, in the long term at Reed, is trying to find out—is proton tunneling something that’s really happening? How do we know it’s happening? Can we do something useful with it?” It’s too early to know the answer. But the potential implications are huge. At first glance, proton tunneling—the spontaneous teleportation of a proton from one location to the other—is little short of miraculous. But it is in fact a direct consequence of basic quantum mechanical principles. “At the atomic level, particles do not exist in the same way that we imagine objects that we interact with in normal life,”
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CLAYTON COTTERELL
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says Zac Mathe ’17, one of Bowring’s former thesis students, who is now pursuing a master’s in chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany. “In particular, they do not have defined boundaries or an exact spatial location. Instead, we have to think of, for example, an electron, existing as a probability distribution. It doesn’t exist in one place. It’s in a range of places.” As a result of this blurriness, subatomic particles that are most likely to be on one side of a barrier occasionally show up on (i.e.,tunnel through to) the other, like minuscule ghosts. But the barriers in this case are not made of bricks but of energy—the energy requirements that prevent chemical reactions from happening. “By a classical mechanism, you may have to put a lot of energy into a reaction to get it to happen,” Zac says. “With tunneling, you don’t have to do that. You can get from A to B without ever having to put in enough energy to exist in the middle.” The smaller the particle, the more likely it is to undergo tunneling; photons, which are massless, tunnel more often than electrons, which have the mass of about two nonillionths (30 zeroes after the decimal point) of a pound. Protons are nearly 2,000 times more massive than electrons, but also appear capable of quantum tunneling. Preliminary studies suggest that enzymes in the human body—and likely throughout all forms of life—actually depend on proton tunneling to break down and combine essential molecules. In the world of chemistry, protons are better known in their role as the sole member of a hydrogen nucleus, and proton tunneling implies that, under the right conditions, hydrogen may spontaneously react by jumping from its bond with one atom to another even when the energy necessary for that jump isn’t present. In 2010, researchers in Professor Shunichi Fukuzumi’s lab at Osaka University were studying the ability of a catalyst containing the metals iridium and ruthenium to generate hydrogen gas from water. They did an experiment with “heavy” water— water made up of oxygen and deuterium, a rare isotope of hydrogen that boasts a neutron in its nucleus—to produce deuterium gas instead. Chemically, deuterium is
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CLAYTON COTTERELL
THE PROTON PHENOMENON
FUMIN’ BEINGS. Prof. Bowring flanked by chem-environmental studies major Hunter Wise ’18 (left) and chem major Jo Keller ’20 (right) brandishing flasks of liquid nitrogen—yet another cool thing about Reed’s chemistry department.
identical to regular hydrogen because it has the same number of protons. “We’d expect hydrogen and deuterium to basically do the same thing,” says Bowring, “but sometimes they don’t.” Comparing heavy water to regular water, Fukuzumi’s team discovered that the catalyst generated deuterium gas 40 times more slowly than it generated hydrogen gas. Their explanation? The heavier deuterium was less likely to exhibit quantum tunneling because it has twice as much mass. In other words, quantum tunneling was the reason why the iridium-ruthenium catalyst worked so well. Bowring was intrigued, though skeptical. So she set out to investigate. Bowring brings a wealth of research expertise to her quest. She earned her BS in chemistry from Yale and her PhD from UC Berkeley. She worked as a postdoc at Yale
and the University of Washington, where she focused on quantum tunneling. But she also has a knack for teaching. “She taught me everything I know,” says Jo Keller ’20, who spent the past summer working in Bowring’s lab. “Miriam is a great teacher, a great mentor, in and out of the lab.” Bowring’s teaching philosophy resembles the phenomenon she studies: she presents her students with obstacles and trusts them to figure out how to get to the other side. “At the beginning of my summer, I came to Miriam with a few different ideas of how to separate two products of a reaction from each other,” Jo says. “She asked me, ‘Have you considered optimizing the reaction instead?’ A few days later, I came back to her with a plan that included optimization. I was more excited about trying other techniques before optimization, which was intimidating.” When Jo’s attempt to separate the products of a reaction by straining them through
Quantum Quirk: Proton Tunneling i l l u s t r at i o n : b e n m o l l i c a , g u i d a n c e : j o s h t s a n g ’ 1 8
In the classical picture, the particle needs enough energy to cross the barrier in order for a reaction to happen. In the quantum picture, even if the particle does not have enough energy to cross over the barrier, it has been found to sometimes, mysteriously, teleport to the other side. This quirk of quantum mechanics is known as tunneling and is not fully understood.
a column of silica gel did not go as planned, Bowring explained her thinking. “‘I probably would have started with optimization,’” Jo remembers her saying. “‘But the separation was useful. You learned a lot.’” Oleks Lushchyk ’17 wrote their thesis on palladium catalysts last year with Bowring. Now they work as a substitute teacher in Alaska and hope to get a teaching certification and teach full time. “My time with Miriam really prepared me for doing this kind of teaching,” Oleks says. “She did some good guiding as to what she thought would work and wouldn’t work. You don’t want to hold students’ hands the whole way, but you do want to guide them in the right direction.” Oleks attributes Bowring’s teaching style to her experience outside the lab. Between Yale and Berkeley, she taught high-school chemistry for two years at an independent school in Massachusetts. Oleks borrows from her pedagogical approach every day. “When I work with students, I don’t tell them, ‘You’re doing that wrong, you’re doing this wrong.’ I ask them, ‘Do you need help?’” Bowring is as dedicated to the craft of teaching as she is to the science of chemistry. At Berkeley, she won awards from the nonprofit Community Resources for Science for her work as a volunteer teacher in Bay Area classrooms. As a PhD student, she went beyond standard grad-student duties and took on undergrad and high school mentees each year. She served as a volunteer outreach teacher for the National Science Foundation during her postdoctoral research at the University of Washington, and—in the most literal manifestation of
her hands-on approach—volunteered as a women’s ultimate frisbee coach at Yale. For the thesis student of a new chemistry professor, building a lab from scratch is part of that hands-on experience. “A great part of working with Miriam for me was feeling like I was part of the process of building a lab,” Zac says. “For the first half of my thesis, more often than having a flask in my hand I had a wrench in my hand.” Though these obstacles were sometimes frustrating—for instance, working for three days to find a leak in an instrument that creates a vacuum when functional versions of the same instrument exist in labs down the hall—Zac is grateful for having had the chance to learn from Bowring. “Reed science gives you a very strong theoretical background—it is Reed,” they say. “I was lucky that I also got a lot of very practical experience, experience solving physical problems with things in front of me, that made me a much better scientist. I only got that experience because I was in Miriam’s lab.” Bowring and her students are working hard to investigate the riddle of proton tunneling. “What I’m trying to do is find examples where someone found a huge isotope effect and replicate it in our lab,” she says. “Can we simplify the system that they’ve seen it in and study it and tweak it? Can we do anything to make the isotope effect go away, or get bigger, or smaller?” To start, she eliminated much of the complexity of Fukuzumi’s catalyst by more or less chopping it in half and studying how the iridium
half of the compound functions on its own. The resulting iridium compound is an organometallic “half-sandwich complex.” The “bread” is a ring of five or six atoms of carbon that can have various extensions attached (these structures are known as “aromatic rings” even though they do not always have an odor). The “meat” is the iridium atom. A full-sandwich complex consists of two such rings with a metal atom in between. These iridium half sandwiches can combine carbon dioxide and hydrogen to store the fuel as a safe intermediate—formic acid— and then break apart that intermediate to regenerate hydrogen. Even better, they are capable of running the reaction both ways at room temperature. “A reversible catalytic system that could store hydrogen as formic acid and release it when you need it, and store it back again using CO2, that could be really useful,” Bowring says. That’s an understatement. The Japanese chemists who filed a patent application for the catalysts described them as “epoch-making.” Iridium sandwiches significantly reduce the amount of energy required to generate hydrogen and make it possible to store the fuel in the form of the relatively benign formic acid. As an added bonus, one of the feedstocks for the process is carbon dioxide. Unlocking the secrets of proton tunneling may be the key to making hydrogen a viable fuel—and finding a new use for a greenhouse gas that plays a key role in climate change. Kieran Hanrahan ’15 lives and works in Portland with his dog, Lily, and his growing collection of spiders.
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Reediana Books. Music. Film. Send us your work!
EDITED BY JOANNE HOSSACK ’82 Email reed.magazine@reed.edu
Spirit in the Rock: The Fierce Battle for Modoc Homelands By Jim Compton ’64 (Washington State University Press, 2017) Despite a long and successful career as a foreign correspondent for NBC News, then as a local television journalist, and later as a member of the Seattle City Council, the late Jim Compton ’64 never forgot the “vicious stereotypes” of Native Americans that permeated his childhood community in southern Oregon. He vividly remembered his own father, a surgeon, vowing in a fit of rage at a Native patient never again to offer medical treatment to an Indian. In the preface to Spirit in the Rock, his posthumously published history of the cross-cultural misunderstandings and clash of incompatible interests that fueled the violent 1872–3 Modoc War between Native Americans and white settlers, Compton recalls, also, family summer trips to the arid lava beds, a wild, tortured terrain of black volcanic rock near present-day Klamath Falls. It was in those inhospitable lava formations that Modoc Indians spent months fighting—and often winning—a brave but quixotic war to retain a small portion of their
traditional homelands against the might of the United States Army. Spirit in the Rock is a deeply personal effort to make some amends for the decades of mistreatment that southern Oregon tribes suffered at the hands of whites. While written with the careful precision of a professional historian, it is clearly a labor of love. The end result is a detailed and compelling story that skimps on neither plot nor character. At the center of the tale is Captain Jack, a Modoc chief who reluctantly led his people into a war he knew they could not win. Compton paints a nuanced portrait of this conflicted man, a kind of tragic hero who sought only to live in peace in his ancestral homelands alongside the white invaders, despite his profound anger at the accumulating injustices perpetrated against his people. As Compton explains, conflict became
inevitable when Captain Jack’s simple but unshakable demand that the Modocs be treated fairly ran squarely into the entrepreneurial ambitions of a prominent settler family, the Applegates, who harbored big dreams of remaking the isolated Modoc homelands through the addition of a railroad line and vast drainage and irrigation schemes. The end result was a bloody conflict that culminated with the eventual capture, show trial, and hanging of Captain Jack and several of his compatriots. In deftly telling this undeservedly obscure story, Compton offers a valuable addition to the early history of Oregon, as well as adding an important chapter to the sad history of the havoc American westward migration wreaked on Native American peoples. Compton’s deft and empathetic telling of their story may not constitute anything close to full amends to the Modocs, but perhaps it is a start. —SANDEEP KAUSHIK ’89
Ghazal Cosmopolitan: The Culture and Craft of the Ghazal By Shadab Zeest Hashmi ’95 (Jacar Press, 2017) Born in the Bedouin campsites of sixth-century Arabia, the ghazal might be the perfect poetic form to contain the homesick longing, cultural clashes, and surprise harmonies of today’s global community. Shadab Zeest Hashmi first encountered the form as a child in Pakistan, listening to popular Pakistani singers sing ghazals in Urdu on her parents’ LPs. Urdu, a mix of courtly Persian and folksy Hindavi, adopted the ghazal form early on. “The ghazal,” she writes, “not only allows contraries to cohabit, but in the best compositions, it makes a demand to frame polarity in the same space.” Literally “gazelle” in Arabic, the ghazal is thought to mimic the intensity of the hunted animal’s last cry. The cry is for an absent beloved, which might be a person, a place, or something less tangible. The cry-like effect comes from the abrupt end of each of the poem’s 5 to 15 couplets, which do not continue a thought from verse to verse but are 28 Reed Magazine june 2018
instead self-contained. Agha Shahid Ali, the poet largely responsible for popularizing the ghazal in English in the second half of the 20th century, likened the ghazal’s couplets to stones on a necklace—each one precious in its own right. And what is the string? Not a continuous narrative, but rather a repeated rhyme (or qafia) and refrain (or radif), which provide atmospheric cohesion and a loose theme. Hashmi writes that the characteristic features of the ghazal, intensity and disunity, are precisely what can make the form difficult for a modern American audience: Intensity can come across as sentimentality or hyperbole. Disunity can be disorienting in this culture where clarity is valued and expected, and there is little tolerance for obfuscation or abstraction compared to Urdu aesthetics.
But these difficulties can be overcome. The praise Hashmi heaps on successful English ghazals is also due her book. Just as the ghazal’s couplets can stand alone, so can the chapters of Ghazal Cosmopolitan—a sumptuous mix of essays, memoir, criticism, and original poems, collected here in a slim, accessible volume that is part how-to, part ode. The stones on Hashmi’s necklace include a nostalgic vignette about soothing her colicky baby; an instructive essay describing the ghazal’s made-to-be-broken rules; a reflection on the ghazal’s influence on the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca; even a Q&A interrogating the English ghazal. Across these ardent, eclectic chapters, the ghazal is the book’s refrain, and cosmopolitanism its rhyme. —JOHANNA DROUBAY ’04
Fundamentals of Soil Ecology (Third Edition) Coauthored by David Coleman ’60 (Academic Press, 2017)
Fundamentals of Soil Ecology offers a holistic approach to soil biology and ecosystem function, providing students and ecosystem researchers with a greater understanding of the central roles that soils play in ecosystem development and function. The textbook emphasizes the increasing importance of soils as the organizing center for all terrestrial ecosystems and provides an overview of theory and practice in soil ecology, from both an ecosystem and an evolutionary biology point of view. This new edition is fully updated, including an expanded treatment of microbial ecology and new sections on advances in molecular techniques and climate change research. David is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at the Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia.
A Borneo Healing Romance: Ritual Storytelling and the Sugi Sakit, A Saribas Iban Rite of Healing Clifford Sather ’61 (Borneo Research Council, 2017)
A Borneo Healing Romance records a 2003 performance of the Sugi Sakit ritual sung by the last living priest bard still able to perform it. The book contains a full text and translation of the ritual together with analysis and detailed commentary. A distinctive feature of the Sugi Sakit was its incorporation of an epic narrative romance featuring the Iban culture hero Bujang Sugi, and a major theme of the book, addressed directly in the final chapter, concerns the way in which romantic love, compassion, and aesthetic beauty were made to serve as instruments of healing. In recording the ritual, Cliff was assisted by his wife, Louise Klemperer Sather ’61, who passed away in 2016.
Aegean Fire Lin Sten ’67 (self-published, 2018) In 433 BC in Classical Greece, from his chained position at his oar, Arion catches a glimpse of Athens’s fabled Akropolis through an oar port of the trireme commanded by his nemesis, Smerdis. Despite the fantasies of his childhood as the scion of a wealthy mercantile family on Lesbos, when he had always dreamed of coming here, he now hates Athens. After the Battle of Sybota, due to previous violent insubordination witnessed by Artontes, Arion’s new master, Arion is dispatched
to the dreaded mines in Laurion. In 431 BC, like all other movable property, Arion is brought back to Athens for the duration of the first Peloponnesian summer occupation of Attica. After Arion nurses Artontes’s wife and child through the plague, Artontes assigns Arion to an oar bench on one of his cargo ships, but exposure to pirates might be more threatening than the plague, naval battles, or the mines. Aegean Fire is the second volume in Lin’s tetralogy, Arion’s Odyssey.
Lace and Blade 4 Crossroads of Darkover edited by Deborah J. Ross ’68 (Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust, 2018)
The Girl from Black Point Rock Deborah J. Ross ’68 (Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust, 2017)
Two anthologies edited by Deborah have been published this year. Lace and Blade 4, published on Valentine’s Day, offers “a bouquet of sensual, romantic, action-filled stories,” continuing the anthology series Deborah has edited since the first volume was published in 2008. Crossroads of Darkover is the the 18th in the Darkover anthology series and features “tales of decisions, turning points, love lost and found, all in the beloved world of the Bloody Sun,” including one cowritten by Deborah. Last year, Deborah’s novelette “The Girl from Black Point Rock” appeared in Sword and Sorceress 32; it has been recommended for the Nebula Award.
My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File Katherine Verdery ’70 (Duke University Press, 2018)
In 1973, Katherine began her doctoral fieldwork in the Transylvanian region of Romania, ruled at the time by communist dictator Nicolae Ceaus,escu. She returned several times over the next 25 years, during which time the secret police—the Securitate—compiled a massive surveillance file
on her. Reading through its 2,781 pages, she learned that she was “actually” a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, and a friend of dissidents: in short, an enemy of Romania. In My Life as a Spy, Katherine analyzes her file alongside her original field notes and conversations with Securitate officers. She also talks with some of the informers who were close friends, learning the complex circumstances that led them to report on her, and considers how fieldwork and spying can be easily confused. Part memoir, part detective story, part anthropological analysis, My Life as a Spy offers a personal account of how government surveillance worked during the Cold War and how Katherine experienced life under it. (See Class Notes.)
Three-Text Edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Political Theory: The Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan Edited by Deborah Jones Baumgold ’71 (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
For the first time, Thomas Hobbes’s masterpiece Leviathan is presented alongside two earlier works, The Elements of Law and De Cive. By arranging the three texts side by side, Deborah, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Oregon, offers readers an enhanced understanding of Hobbes’s political theory and addresses an important need within Hobbes scholarship. The parallel presentation highlights substantive connections between the texts and makes it easy to trace the development of Hobbes’s thinking. Readers can follow developments both at the micro level of specific arguments and at the macro level of the overall scope and organization of the theory. The volume also includes parallel presentations of Hobbes’s chapter outlines, which serve as a key to the texts and are collected in a précis appendix.
Tortuga: A Confection of Blood and Gold Thomas Erikson ’71 (Cascade View Publishing, 2017)
The streets are not mean, they are downright vicious in the pirate port of Cayona. Orphans like Jack Higgins scratch a living from errands and mugging drunken pirates. But during a hurricane’s deluge Jack pulls a retching body from the flooded street. It is Old Kit (a centenarian Christopher Marlowe), Cayona’s patriarch. Jack’s reward is to be his protégé—but with Kit in ill
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health, will he have time to learn to survive Cayona’s literally cutthroat commerce? To save a dying Kit, Jack treks to Hispaniola’s high country and a dead Indian shaman’s haunted cave for a “magic” medicine stone—and stumbles into a terrifying dream where the dead may still live and speak. Jack must escape it and return to save Old Kit, his own future, and soon his own life. The short, fast-paced chapters intersperse Jack’s adventures with the brutal, fantastic, and exotic tall tales told in the taverns: Tom’s first novel “might be a mash-up of Captain Blood meets A Clockwork Orange meets My Dinner with Andre.”
The Atomic Cafe (digital restoration) Jayne Loader ’73 (1982/2018) Jayne and her partners, Pierce and Kevin Rafferty, recently supervised the 4K digital restoration of their 1982 cult classic film, The Atomic Cafe, which was described by the New York Times in its initial release as “a devastating collage-film that examines official and unofficial United States attitudes toward the atomic age in the years immediately after World War II.” The restoration was funded by the Library of Congress and produced by IndieCollect in New York City. It premiered at SXSW in Austin, Texas, on March 10, 2018. North American rights to The Atomic Cafe have been acquired by Kino-Lorber. The film will be rereleased in theaters in the summer of 2018.
Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food (Second Edition) Coauthored by Pamela C. Ronald ’82 (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Pam, a geneticist, and her husband, Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer, take the reader inside their lives for roughly a year, allowing us to look over their shoulders so that we can see what geneticists and organic farmers actually do. Their book argues that a judicious blend of two important strands of agriculture—genetic engineering and organic farming—is key to helping feed the world’s growing population in an ecologically balanced manner. This second edition includes a new preface and three new chapters: one on politics and food-related protests such as the Marin County antivaccine movement and the subsequent outbreak of whooping cough, one on farming and food security, and one containing recipes. Existing chapters on the tools of genetic engineering, organic vs. conventional foods, the tools of organic agriculture, and food labeling and legislature have all been updated to reflect developments since the first edition.
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Antisemitism, Gender Bias, and the “Hervay Affair” of 1904: Bigotry in the Austrian Alps Alison Rose ’85 (Lexington Books, 2016) Alison’s book provides an in-depth study of an episode of Austrian history that had a significant impact on the development of Austrian law; the role of religious institutions; perceptions of Jews, women, and sexuality; conceptions of Austrian bureaucracy and the need for reform; and the relationship between the provinces and the Viennese center. The 1904 arrest and bigamy trial of Frau von Hervay, the Jewish wife of the district captain of a Styrian provincial town, is closely examined to shed light on the relationship between Jews and non-Jews and attitudes towards women and sexuality in the small cities and towns of the Austrian provinces. The case demonstrates that anti-Semitism influenced popular perceptions of Jews and women at the local level and that it targeted women as well as men. The book also provides insight into the public interest generated by sensations such as arrests, suicides, crimes, and trials and the way the press of that time reported on them.
Like a Fat Gold Watch: Meditations on Sylvia Plath and Living Edited by Christine Hamm ’87 (Fat Gold Watch Press/Lulu.com, 2017)
Christine writes that she “was lucky to gather awardwinning writers and artists from around the globe with an incredible variety of backgrounds and expertise” for this anthology inspired by Sylvia Plath. The artists, poets, writers, and essayists who contribute to this work respond to Plath’s work and life—not her death—with images, poems, essays, short stories, and academic texts, appreciating Plath as lively and complex, not as suicidal and one-note.
Notes on Wolves and Ruin Christine Hamm ’87 (Ghostbird Press, 2017) Notes on Wolves and Ruin is a collage text of prose poems and historical/scientific excerpts regarding violence, mental illness, women, and werewolves. Poet Mark Bibbins states, “Prepare to be amazed by the vivid and often terrible
images . . . as [Christine] blurs the distinction between memory and fantasy, between quotation and invention. There is no moralizing here, though many possible morals emerge, as they often do when wolves are invoked.” Says author and critic Kristina Marie Darling, “Christine Hamm is an exciting and innovative voice in contemporary poetry. . . . By eschewing a main text constrained by its own importance, and embracing the paratextual zone, Hamm opens up the possibility of risk, beauty, and transformation where the reader does not expect to find it.”
When the Eye Sees Itself Eric Borgerson ’88 (Polylyric Press, 2018) In a society that segregates Aggressives and Vulnerables from full-fledged Citizens, a culture war rages over access to the powered class. Behind this public conflict lurks a new technology, Quantum Field Resonance Imaging, that enables people to touch minds. Intelligence agencies and hacktivists, cops and criminals, spiritual seekers and purveyors of institutional oppression, commercial opportunists and political revolutionaries race to control its staggering potential. The struggle for power lays bare both a rift and a linkage more fundamental than even the most sacrosanct of divisions, as the battle for the country and world becomes a battle of the mind. When the Eye Sees Itself is Eric’s first major work of fiction; while neither biographical nor autobiographical, it is informed and animated by Eric’s extensive experience with politics and the law as activist, participant, and exile. (See Class Notes.)
How to Transport the Cremains of Your Loved One Allyson Lazar ’96 (2017) “Look [the flight attendant] right in the eye and ask them this simple question, ‘But if living children can sit on laps, why can’t dead ones?’” Allyson’s narrative nonfiction piece takes the reader on a darkly funny, heart-wrenching journey through sudden bereavement, framed as advice on “safely transporting home the cremains of your loved one with a sense of dignity and respect and in a fashion that is mostly legal.” It appears in the Fall 2017 issue of Blood and Bourbon.
The Whiteness Album Nato Green ’97 (Blonde Medicine, 2018) Nato’s second comedy album, The Whiteness Album, is now available on most streaming and download platforms, with tracks including “Techies Behaving Badly,” “Trump is Bad at White Supremacy,” and “No One Really Wants to Come to America.” Nato has been summed up “more or less accurately” by the East Bay Express as “erudite and acerbic, a San Francisco–raised father, union organizer, gastronome, bibliophile, and political sparkplug.” He’s also been named San Francisco’s best comedian by SF Weekly, Huffington Post, SFist, and CBS. Besides performing stand-up comedy, Nato has written for multiple media outlets; he created and hosted a live game show, Iron Comic; and he wrote for Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell on FX and toured nationally with W. Kamau Bell and Janine Brito as Laughter against the Machine. He is currently on sabbatical in Cuba. (See Class Notes.)
Old Gold Mountain Bradley W. Wright ’02 (Black Opal, 2018) In Brad’s first novel, Justin Vincent is a San Francisco– based artist who leads a secret double life as a cat burglar. He likes the freedom, money, and self-determination his unusual career provides, but also increasingly feels that it is a life he fell into by accident. When a valuable painting is stolen from his lover, Valerie, Justin agrees to use his underworld contacts and knowledge of the black market to help. The search leads him ultimately to a mysterious chateau in the south of France and a dangerous web of secrets and lies. To escape with his life and complete his objective, Justin’s skill, luck, and perseverance will be tested to their utmost limit.
A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era April Holm ’03 (Louisiana State University Press, 2017)
In the decades before the Civil War, the three largest evangelical denominations diverged sharply over the sinfulness of slavery. This division generated tremendous local conflict in the border region, where individual churches had to define themselves as being either northern or southern. In response, many border evangelicals drew upon the “doctrine of spirituality,” which dictated that churches should abstain from all political debate. A Kingdom Divided uncovers how evangelical Christians in the border states influenced debates about slavery, morality, and politics from the 1830s to the 1890s. Using little-studied events and surprising incidents from the region, April argues that evangelicals on the border powerfully shaped the regional structure of American religion in the Civil War era. April is assistant professor of history and associate director of the Center for Civil War Research at the University of Mississippi; her book is part of the series Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War.
Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics Colleen Rosenfeld ’03
Ship It Britta Lundin ’07 (Freeform, 2018) Claire is a 16-year-old fangirl obsessed with the show Demon Heart. Forest is an actor on Demon Heart who dreams of bigger roles. When the two meet at a local Comic-Con panel, it’s a dream come true for Claire. Until the Q&A, that is, when Forest laughs off Claire’s assertion that his character is gay. Claire is devastated—after all, every last word of her super-popular fanfic revolves around the romance between Forest’s character and his male frenemy. Forest is mostly confused that anyone would think his character is gay—because he’s not. Definitely not. Unfortunately for Demon Heart, when the video of the disastrous Q&A goes viral, the producers have a PR nightmare on their hands; in order to help bolster their image within the LGBTQ+ community—as well as with their fans— they hire Claire to join the cast for the rest of their publicity tour. What ensues is a series of colorful Comic-Con clashes between the fans and the show, and a funny, tender, and honest look at all the feels that come with being a fan. Britta also writes for the hit TV show Riverdale; she was a poli sci major at Reed, but, according to wife Aya Burgess ’07, “soon after graduation decided she wanted to write for The West Wing, not work in the West Wing.”
A Step-by-Step Guide to the Principles of Microeconomics
(Fordham University Press, 2018)
Nick Huntington-Klein ’09
Indecorous Thinking is a study of artifice at its most conspicuous: it argues that early modern writers turned to figures of speech like simile, antithesis, and periphrasis as the instruments of a particular kind of thinking unique to the emergent field of vernacular poesie. The classical ideal of decorum described the absence of visible art as a precondition for rhetoric, civics, and beauty: speaking well meant speaking as if off-the-cuff. Against this ideal, Colleen, an associate professor of English at Pomona College, argues that one of early modern literature’s richest contributions to poetics is the idea that indecorous art—artifice that rings out with the bells and whistles of ornamentation— celebrates the craft of poetry even as it expands poetry’s range of activities. Drawing widely across the arts of rhetoric, dialectic, and poetics, Indecorous Thinking offers a defense of the epistemological value of form: not as a sign of the aesthetic, but as the source of a particular kind of knowledge we might call poetic.
(Kona Publishing, 2018)
One prominent feature of the standard principles of microeconomics curriculum is the use of mathematical and graphical models— all those crazy graphs! These models are in the course because they represent economic concepts. Nick, known at Reed as Nick Chandler-Klein, provides a textbook that shows the exact steps necessary to work with these models and also shows why each of these steps works. Nick is an assistant professor of economics at California State University–Fullerton; he was inspired to write this book through his experience teaching Principles of Microeconomics at Fullerton and at Seattle University, as well as through his work tutoring in person and online.
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In Memoriam Ink in His Veins William Smart ’48
January 25, 2018, in Salt Lake City, Utah.
A straight-shooting journalist, Bill was instrumental in turning the Deseret News, a churchowned newspaper in Salt Lake City, into a regional powerhouse. He was with the paper for four decades, rising to become its editor and general manager for 14 years. The investigative team he established rocked Utah’s establishment by sniffing out scandals, and in addition to being a community leader, Bill helped pioneer televised political debates in the state. He was the fourth of six children born to Thomas Smart and Nellie Buckwalter in Provo, Utah. Bill loved to read: adventure stories, Richard Halliburton’s travel books, and anything by Jack London. By the time he was 12, he had read all of the books in the junior section of the city library and was accorded a card for the adult section. The family moved to Reno, Nevada, where Bill got a job delivering the morning paper on his bicycle, taking care not to run over the drunks lying in the streets. Shortly before his final year of high school, the family moved to Portland, Oregon. Acclimating to a new school in such a short time proved difficult. To earn money for college, he worked for a year after graduating. He continued to work throughout his years at Reed, washing pots and pans in the cafeteria, or working in the ice cream store in the student union building. At the time, there were about 650 students attending the college. Bill split his major between history and political science, writing his thesis, “The Oregonian, a Preliminary History,” with Prof. Dorothy Johansen [history 1934–84], whom he adored. “It was a wonderful school, a wonderful education,” Bill said. “As I think back on my life, I think those years at Reed College were maybe the best years that I had. Reed College had a two-year humanities course that really shaped my life and my thinking. As I look at my attitudes now, and what I’ve done with my life, I go back to that course and those teachers.” In addition to Johansen, he also gave kudos to Prof. Robert Rosenbaum [math 1939–53]. “Bob Rosenbaum was a great teacher in math,” Bill said, “and I never was any good in math. But I took a class from him in non-Euclidean geometry which also shaped my life. It taught me that there are very few absolute truths; that everything needs examination. It was almost a philosophy course, and it was a most exciting course to me.” The day after the December 7, 1941, bombing
of Pearl Harbor, Bill made his first foray into journalism. The Portland bureau of the International News Service (INS) was managed by his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) stake president, George Scott. (A stake is an administrative unit composed of several congregations.) Though Bill had no journalism experience (save for delivering the paper in Reno), he hoped that with the impending war Scott might take a chance on him and deliver him from washing pots and pans. Scott hired him to manage the bureau from midnight until 8 a.m. Bill attended classes in the day and worked at night. In addition, he played on the college basketball team and worked on the school newspaper. He was burning the candle at both ends, but loving it. In the summer of 1942, he went to help staff the Seattle bureau during the vacation period. While he was there, the bureau manager died of a heart attack and the assistant manager was called up to service. At the age of 20, Bill ended up being the sole person staffing the bureau. After a brief return to Reed his sophomore year, Bill was called up for active duty as a reservist, first with signal corps training, followed by nine months preparing to be an intelligence officer in the Army Specialized Training Program at the University of Wyoming. It was there he met his future wife, Donna Toland. “I had been dating some other girls who were not Mormons,” he recollected. “I hadn’t been to the church at all during that period. But for some reason I went one day to church in Laramie. It was a testimony meeting. And I sat there and heard a voice behind me, a girl standing up to bear her testimony. I looked around and I said to myself, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’” The courtship was conducted largely by mail. When he got out of Officer Candidate School, they were married. After he was mustered out of the service, he returned to Reed on the G.I. Bill. Because of his earlier work with the INS, he was able to get a job with the Oregonian. He worked full time and went to college, because by then they had a baby and it was necessary for him to work as he studied to be a history professor. Just before graduating, he applied for entrance at Harvard and was given a fellowship. The LDS-owned Deseret News was starting a big expansion program, and Alfred Bowen, an apostle in the church and president of the Deseret News, came to Portland for a stake conference. He asked Bill’s old INS boss, George Scott, if he know of any bright young newspapermen, and
George told him about Bill. Bowen called him in for an interview and invited him to join the News. Having worked for 40 hours a week while attending school and supporting a family, Bill was tired. He was finishing his thesis and nursing an ulcer. Thinking it would be a good rest before starting at Harvard, he agreed to come to the Deseret News for a year. He started the day after graduation and worked at the paper for the next four decades. Starting first in sports, Bill moved to the city desk as a reporter. In 1957, he became an editorial writer and was soon the chief editorial writer and then the editorial page editor. He maintained the editorial page responsibilities as he was promoted to assistant general manager and then executive editor. After Bill became the newspaper’s editor and general manager in 1972, he organized a crack investigative team called Pinpoint that shook Utah’s old guard by exposing a series of scandals. The group he put together included veteran reporter Bob Mullins—whose relentless reporting of a kidnapping and murder in 1962 earned the Deseret News a Pulitzer Prize—and two young, eager writers named Joe Costanzo and Dale Van Atta. “The thing about Bill was he was courageous,” Costanzo said. “Before the Pinpoint team, the tendency was to be careful about what to report on the power structures in june 2018 Reed Magazine 39
In Memoriam this state. He was willing to take the risk of offending people who previously could count on the News to not offend them.” Pinpoint won its first investigative reporting award for a series of stories about equipment purchases in Salt Lake County government that benefited certain public officials. “After that,” Costanzo said, “it seemed the Pinpoint team won investigative journalism awards every year.” Bill was also an early proponent of environmental reporting and a leader in preserving open space. He was director of the Grand Canyon Trust, which worked to protect the Colorado Plateau, of which the Grand Canyon is a part. He was prominent in the effort to make Utah’s
Capitol Reef a national park. After retiring from the Deseret News, Smart continued to consult as a senior editor. He traveled internationally, wrote editorials for the Church News, became editor of This People magazine, and authored or edited nine books, including Words and Actions: An Autobiography, published in late 2016. His scholarly interest in history bore fruit in the award-winning books he wrote, Mormonism’s Last Colonizer, a biography of his grandfather, William H. Smart, and Over the Rim, an account of the first Mormon expedition to Southern Utah in 1849–50, coauthored with his wife. Donna, his wife of 70 years, survives him, as do his five children, William T. Smart, Melinda Graves, Kristen Rogers, Thomas Smart, and Lawrence Smart.
The Spirit of Reed READ about classmates and professors who have died at www.reed. edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam. SHARE your memories on our website or via email at reed.magazine@reed.edu. HONOR them with a gift in their name at reed.edu/givingtoreed. EDITED BY RANDALL S. BARTON
Housing Authority Carole Calkins Colie ’54 December 27, 2017, in Portland.
Someone who knew her once called Carole “a warrior, a soldier for justice.” She was an indefatigable champion of any animal or person being mistreated. Growing up in the lumber town of Shelton, Washington, Carole idolized her older brother and had a trusted canine companion in Bingo. The family moved to Chehalis, Washington, where Carole attended high school. High school students planning to go on to college were invited to attend admission seminars conducted by visiting colleges and universities. During one assembly, the principal announced the colleges that would be presenting that day, including Reed College. “But we don’t have any Jews in this school,” he added, “so I doubt any of you will go to that one.” Carole was offended by the remark. She spent most of the afternoon with Reed’s director of admission. While initially her parents were amenable to her desire to go to Reed, they changed their mind after talking to what Carole termed “the wrong people” and discovered the college had “a reputation.” Carole refused to apply to another four-year program and began attending community college in Centralia, working nights in a bakery with the hope of earning enough money to attend Reed the following year. By her sophomore year, her parents relented and she began at Reed. But by the time she returned home for summer vacation, rumblings about Reed’s communist reputation had reached her parents, and they had misgivings about her returning. That summer (1951), the film Goodbye, My Fancy was released, starring Joan Crawford as a U.S. senator who returns to her small liberal arts college and finds a diminishing regard for academic freedom. As the college president cracks down on liberal professors, Joan fights tooth and 40 Reed Magazine june 2018
nail for academic freedom. Carole and her parents attended a Saturday matinee of the movie. As they exited the theater, Carole asked, “Daddy, can I go back to Reed?” He answered, “I guess so, Cookie,” and her life was changed. The next semester, she was introduced to Christopher Colie ’56 and was told, “He’s weird, even by Reed standards.” Initially Carole shared that opinion of Chris, but they were in the same creative writing class. When Prof. Ruth Collier [English 1933–52] commented in class that Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was not realistic because no lactating mother would have nursed the old man in the boxcar, much less someone else’s baby, Carole said, “I would. And I would nurse an old man too.” Chris mumbled his approval. Later, she ran into him at an offcampus party, and when Chris suggested to someone else that they ditch the party and head to Hung Far Low in Chinatown, Carole asked if she could join them. It wasn’t until later that Chris learned it was her party they were ditching. They talked for three hours, and Chris asked Carole to marry him. “I said yes, because I knew I could get out of it later,” she remembered. But she didn’t get out of it. After taking
their final exams they drove to Lewiston, Idaho, and got married. By the time they got back from their honeymoon to Mexico, there was a draft notice waiting for Chris. He was stationed in Fort Knox, Kentucky, where Carole got a job doing payroll in a dustpan factory. They returned to Portland after Chris was discharged, and from 1958 to 1962, Carole worked as public occasions secretary in the public affairs office at Reed. She then began a career that perfectly suited her spirit, fiercely advocating for the rights of tenants in subsidized housing at the Housing Authority of Portland. Then for 20 years at Legal Aid of Oregon she fought long and hard to ensure the rights of renters, prevailing again and again in her fight to keep people in their homes. Finally, she returned to the Housing Authority as a hearings officer and was renowned for doing all she could do to make sure everyone had a fair chance. Carole feared no adversary and had a keen sense of right and wrong. She barged into a house filled with strangers to take away a cat she’d been told was being mistreated. She took her daughter’s wagon up the street to serve as a Welcome Wagon to the first black family to move into Eastmoreland as her neighbors where threatening to put their houses up for sale. When she moved to Irvington in 1969, she hired an arborist to examine the tree a local builder said he was cutting down because it was diseased. The arborist found nothing wrong with the tree and the building was constructed around it. She cared deeply, and yet Carole was fun to be around. Eternally curious and enthusiastic, she had a passion for art, jazz, books, people’s stories, entertaining, cooking, and her family. Carole is survived by her husband of 65 years, Christopher Colie, and her six children, Christopher Colie Jr., Melissa Lilly, Tanya McGee, Elizabeth Gadberry, Amanda Colie, and Nora Colie.
Genevieve Hall Smith ’43 March 4, 2018, in Cupertino, California.
Dubbed “the Naturalist Queen of the Eastern Sierra” for her writings about the history, geology, and biology of the region, Genny was a devoted conservationist who wanted future generations to experience the same joy the mountains, lakes, and birds had given her. She was born in San Francisco in 1911 and raised in Portland. At Reed, she earned a degree in political science. Genny acknowledged that the college taught her to think, research, analyze, and be both skeptical and logical. But she wished there had been a better balance between scholarly and nonscholarly achievements. “At Reed, I certainly gained self-confidence in scholarly and academic fields,” she said, “but overlooked just about everything else. It took a long time to realize that, while academic excellence is pleasant and worthwhile, other aspects of life are just as important, some more important, for a happy, fulfilled life. A crucial element in almost any endeavor is knowing and getting along with many people—networks, contacts. That love and friendships are more important than getting the best grades and scholarships.” However inadequate she felt in her ability to network with others, she made up for it after leaving Reed. Genny began working in recreation: camp director at summer camps, hospital recreation with the American Red Cross in Utah, working at a community Center in Hilo, Hawaii. She married Gerhard Schumacher and began teaching in Bakersfield, California. When a local ski club introduced her to Mammoth Lakes and the eastern Sierra, it was love at first sight. She started coming to the area in the summer to hike and backpack. In the ’50s, she and her husband acquired a cabin in the Lakes Basin. Her first guidebook started out as a simple pamphlet drawn up by a group of friends. “Four of us, eating spaghetti one evening in my cabin at Mammoth Lakes, kicked around the idea of writing a little booklet on local mountain trails,” she said. This resulted in a 200-page book with Genny as the editor. In 1959, Sierra Club published her first book, Mammoth Lakes Sierra. Her second book, Deepest Valley, published in 1962, covered the Owens Valley. She then started her own company, Genny Smith Publishing, and continued to publish books about local history. The last book she edited, Sierra East: Edge of the Great Basin, was published in 2000. Perhaps her greatest achievement was stopping the construction of a trans-Sierra highway that would have cut through the heart of her beloved mountains. Upon learning about the
project in 1958, she began writing letters and gathering a team of like-minded activists to start what became a 27-year battle to thwart the state’s efforts to build the road. Genny networked to ensure local interests were being heard. She drew on her media resources in the outdoor community, called hiking companions and colleagues from wilderness conferences, and arranged for editorials to be written in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. She was a genius at getting local people to make their voices heard on a state and federal level, creating a coalition that included backpackers and hippie environmentalists. People drove from Mammoth Lakes to Sacramento to talk to their legislators and to the governor. As Genny noted, “It wasn’t just the tree-huggers either.” In 1972, following a pack trip through Middle Fork Valley, thenGovernor Ronald Reagan announced that the road would not be built. Genny later helped sue the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power after the city began piping water from from Mono Lake and was instrumental in limiting the amount of water that could be taken. She coached others how to be effective as small-town political activists. “Don’t throw mud,” Genny advised. “You can have opposite ideas, but don’t make enemies; that doesn’t bring you together. Everybody deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. It’s very heartwarming to me that a bunch of political amateurs can win sometimes. Look at the Mono Lake Committee. If a little organization like that can go up against the City of Los Angeles with all its money and all its lawyers, anyone can.” Once while advising a crew of young environmentalists working to expand Death Valley National Park, she cautioned, “Don’t trust the fat cats.” Attending a meeting between developers and local environmentalists in the Lakes Basin that included helicopter rides and an impressive spread of food, she said, “Beware, there are sharks in the water.” In 1968, she married Ward Smith, and the couple spent summers at the cabin until his death in 1998. One of her favorite maxims was “Anything is possible until it’s proven that it’s not.”
Phyllis Glasener Whitman ’44 December 11, 2017, in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Phyllis was born in Providence, Rhode Island, a year after women in the United States got the vote. She lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the terms of 17 presidents. As a child, she enjoyed a Saturday morning art class at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she got her first taste of set and costume
design and studied ballet. At the age of nine, she heard opera on the radio for the first time. “I thought I’d never heard anything more wonderful,” she said, and became a devout opera fan who in later years would study voice. Her mother wanted her to get a degree in education so she wouldn’t have to work in an office, and Phyllis began at the Rhode Island College of Education. But three years into it, she told her mother she didn’t want to continue, and they began searching for another college. They consulted a book called Choosing a College, and at the end of each chapter was a listing of colleges that were “good in this way.” Reed was included in every category that was important to Phyllis. Because so many of her courses in Rhode Island had been geared to teaching, only two years of credits transferred to Reed. “I was very happy to discover that I had to take two years at Reed, instead of one,” she said. “I loved the campus and the buildings. It was just so wonderful to have all these people moving around and talking about things that I liked to hear people talk about!” Phyllis majored in literature and wrote her thesis on the Pre-Raphaelites with Prof. Lloyd Reynolds [English and art 1929–69]. Going to Reed was one of the best decisions she ever made, she said. “It added a lot of understanding to my life.” She also credited Reed for influencing her work in poetry, which she enjoyed for years. She remembered that during those days men visiting the women’s residence halls had to keep one foot in the hall at all times. Card games were played with the table pushed up to the door with men sitting in the hall and women in the room. By the end of her first semester, there were mostly female students on campus because the men had been called up to war. There were servicemen on campus taking premeteorology courses, but they weren’t in the regular classes. “They were in the army and marched everywhere,” Phyllis recalled. “They were trying to learn an awful lot as fast as they could, and I think every week more of them were dropped.” She was once asked whether the shortage of men meant more women finished their bachelor’s degrees instead of dropping out to get married. “Reed makes the academic thing so delightful and so fascinating and wonderful that I think people want to finish,” she replied. Phyllis had graduated by the time the G.I. Bill brought scores of men back to campus. She joined the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) and was in boot camp at Hunter College in New York when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. From that time on WAVES began releasing women from service, so she was only in for a year. But she was eligible to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and studied voice for two years at the New England Conservatory of Music. Because her eyes were slow to focus, june 2018 Reed Magazine 41
In Memoriam she had trouble reading music, and working at it harder didn’t make it better. She gave up the dream of a career in music and got a degree in library science from Simmons College. In 1957, Phyllis married Lee Whitman. They lived in Lexington, where she was a reference librarian and tutor in the public schools and reviewed concerts for the Beacon newspapers. Phyllis sang in the church choir, often as an alto or mezzo soprano soloist; taught voice; and wrote poetry and children’s stories. She was politically active, took her right to vote seriously, and participated in peace marches in the 1970s, including John Kerry’s Vietnam Veterans against the War rally on Bunker Hill. She is survived by her daughter, Susanna Whitman.
Enid Phillips Ledbetter ’46 January 7, 2018, in Burlington, North Carolina.
Enid Lamar Phillips was born in Lexington, North Carolina, the fourth of five children of Ora and Wade Phillips. She graduated from Lexington High School and attended Reed College for two years before getting a bachelor’s of science degree in zoology from the University of North Carolina. She married Charles Bennett Ledbetter III, and the couple began their marriage in Polkton, North Carolina, before relocating to Burlington in 1950, where they raised their three children, Charles IV, Wade, and Cynthia. Enid worked as a medical technologist for Alamance County Hospital and later for Burlington Memorial Hospital. She was an avid reader and enjoyed tennis, Carolina basketball, and robust conversations regarding politics and current events. She was preceded in death by her husband, Charles, and her daughter, Cynthia.
Marshall Wright ’46
July 26, 2011, in San Luis Obispo, California, from cancer.
Marshall earned bachelor’s degrees in chemistry (1946) and philos ophy (1952) from Reed and his master’s in chemistry from the University of Oregon. He wrote his thesis, “The Electrodeposition of Beryllium” with Prof. Frank Hurley [chemistry 1942–51] advising. He met his wife, Virginia Shirley Wright ’52, while at Reed, and both were musicians. Prior to his marriage, Marshall had played with the Ray Bauduc Orchestra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. By the time of their marriage in 1950, Virginia had become principal clarinetist with the Portland (later Oregon) Symphony Orchestra, and Marty played saxophone and clarinet with local dance bands. The 42 Reed Magazine june 2018
Wrights moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1952, where Marty played with the Jack Fina Orchestra, big band leader Gerald Wilson, Earl Hines, and a quintet led by Brew Moore. Marshall brought his family, which now included his children, Tracy and Jeffrey, to San Luis Obispo in 1960, where he taught chemistry for 31 years at Cal Poly before retiring in 1988. He continued his music while teaching chemistry, playing clarinet, bass clarinet, and saxophone with the San Luis Obispo Symphony Orchestra, including a concert tour of Spain, a concert at Carnegie Hall, and a performance at the Sydney Opera House. Marty was also a member of the Royal Garden Swing Orchestra and returned to campus in 1991 to teach a course in jazz history.
John E. Gahringer Jr. ’48
October 25, 2016, in Wenatchee, Washington.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, to John and Alice Barclay-Gahringer, Jack moved with his mother to Wenatchee, Washington, when he was a year old to live with his grandfather while his father completed a medical residency. Jack graduated from Wenatchee High School in 1942. While at Reed, he was drafted for World War II, serving as the head medic in a field hospital in the Philippines for nine months and then in occupied Japan. When he returned home in 1946, he resumed his studies at the University of Washington and received his medical degree in 1952. Jack joined his father’s medical practice in Wenatchee, Waterville, and Odessa, Washington, working as a family physician for 40 years. He served on many community boards and as treasurer for the American Medical Association. As a Boy Scout leader for more than 30 years, he received the Silver Beaver Award. While living in Odessa, he founded the Odessa Historisches Museum, and with his wife, Florence, was its curator for many years. At the age of seven, Jack received a camera from an aunt and never stopped taking pictures, which he loved to develop by hand. It remained a hobby throughout his life. He was also an avid gardener, and growing flowers and vegetables was his main summer occupation in his adult years. He is survived by his daughters, Pamela Day, Michelle Taylor, and Rebecca Gahringer, and his son, Tracy Gahringer.
Norman Lezin ’48
January 9, 2018, at home in Santa Cruz, California.
Emeritus Tr ustee Norman Lezin was an optimist who always saw the glass as half full. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and his family moved often, relocating to new postings for his father’s work as an electrical engineer in the U.S.
Navy. After graduating from Seattle’s Queen Anne High School, Norm took a solo bicycle tour across Canada. At Reed, he majored in political science, but his studies were interrupted by the war and he enlisted in the army in 1943. Norm served in the Pacific theater in military intelligence under the command of Douglas MacArthur. After the war, he returned to Reed, where he wrote his thesis, “A Consideration of Federal Reduction in Force Procedures at the Bonneville Power Administration,” with Prof. Charles McKinley [political science 1918–60] advising. It was at Reed that he met and married Margaret Salz ’45. The couple moved to Santa Cruz in 1948 so that Norman could spend the summer working at his father-in-law’s tannery. He had contemplated a career in academia or public service, but the craft of making fine leather grew on him, and within a couple of years he was named president of the A.K. Salz Company. He expanded the small artisanal operation into an international business. Norman drew criticism in Santa Cruz for hiring African Americans at the tannery and leading civil rights sympathy rallies. His relentless energy, optimism, and imagination drove the launch of many internationally acclaimed leathers. Brands like Coach, Red Wing, Dr. Martens, and Birkenstock achieved huge success based on leathers from Santa Cruz. Salz’s production peaked after the movie Midnight Cowboy was released in 1969, creating an insatiable demand for cowboy boots. The tannery was expanded to 400 employees and operated around the clock. Norman was a practical environmentalist, long before it was a popular stance. In 1971, he offered to finance bicycles for his employees with company-subsidized loans, with the goal of getting employees out of their cars. Over time, factories and then tanneries migrated to Asia in search of cheaper labor. When Salz closed its doors in 2001, it was the last remaining tannery west of the Mississippi River. Norman entered the political scene unintentionally while petitioning the planning department to correct the misspelling of his street name. Though he couldn’t convince them to make the change, his compelling arguments were so well received that the city employees suggested he run for city council. In 1962, he won a seat on the council, and two years later was elected mayor of Santa Cruz. He served as president of the Santa Cruz Citizens’ Health Council, was appointed to the California Industrial Welfare Commission by Gov. Edmund G. Brown Sr., served as a Democratic superdelegate to the 1956 national convention, and chaired the Santa Cruz Planning Advisory Committee. In 1989, he and his wife were named Man and Woman of the Year by the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce. Twelve years later, he received the award again.
Norman was quick-witted and wonderfully irreverent. While he was serving as the mayor, a heckler shouted, “Lezin, you’re a Jewish Communist!” Without hesitation Norman quipped, “You’re half right, but I won’t tell you which half.” He was an avid sailor, a passionate but impatient fisherman, and a lifelong member of the Santa Cruz Yacht Club. A strong advocate of a harbor at Twin Lakes, he later served as port commissioner for 17 years. Norm embraced the future and sprinted towards it. A desire to stop the branding of cattle inspired him to develop subdermal tags, which led to the formation of Identronics, Inc., a cutting-edge electronics firm. Concerned about California’s rising high school dropout rate, he established one of the county’s first charter schools. Predeceased by Margaret, his wife of 54 years, and his second wife, Mary Kate, Norman leaves behind three children: Jennifer Lezin ’71, Jeremy Lezin, and Matthew Lezin. Norm was a member of Reed’s Eliot Society and included a gift to the college in his estate.
George E. Young ’49
December 30, 2017, in Vancouver, Washington.
George was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and passed away the day before his 90th birthday. As an infant, he was adopted by George and Katherine Young, and when he was eight years old the family moved to Corvallis and then to Portland. George graduated from Benson High School and attended Reed. He served his country from 1946 to 1949 and became an avid supporter for veterans’ issues. George worked in the banking industry for 40 years in various cities in the Northwest. After retiring, he and his wife, Jane, traveled and spent winters in the Phoenix, Arizona, area. He passed along his love of classical music to Jane, and they spent many enjoyable date nights at the Oregon Symphony. He kept abreast of current events, which often resulted in letters to the editor. He was always ready with a joke, advice, or an anecdote. George is survived by his wife of 59 years, Jane Young, and his two daughters, Julie and Katherine.
Patricia Towne Jahoda ’50
November 9, 2017, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of a stroke.
Patricia Marie Towne was born in Helena, Montana, a few hours from Kalispell, where the family finally settled. The Townes were of old American stock, able to trace their family back to the early Puritan arrivals in Massachusetts. Pat was the first child of Dr. Ralph and Marie Towne; her sister Paula would follow some eight years later. Ralph made his career as a doctor in Kalispell, a town in the Flathead Valley, where Pat developed her enduring passion for the outdoors. She learned to ski with her father and rode horses as
Pat Towne Jahoda ’50
well. Marie had high aspirations for her daughters and wanted them to receive a better education than the public schools could provide. When Pat was a teenager, she was sent to a boarding school in Walla Walla, Washington. She went to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts for two years and then completed her undergraduate education at Reed. She wrote her thesis, “A Study of Enzyme Action with Particular Reference to Amylolytic Action in Several Vegetables,” advised by Prof. George Livingston [biology 1948–50]. Pat’s lifelong self-sufficiency was born as she learned to fend for herself far from home. She decided to pursue a career in nursing, and while studying at Cornell University, she met Franz Jahoda, a graduate student in physics whose family had fled the Nazis in Austria and found refuge in the United States. Pat and Franz wed in Ithaca in 1955, and two years later Franz received a job offer at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. Their children, Keith and Ellen, were born in Los Alamos, and northern New Mexico would be Pat and Franz’s beloved home for the rest of their lives. Pat was a fully engaged mom, cooking healthy food before our current consciousness of nutritional health, reading endlessly to her children, making Halloween costumes, and taking picnics into Bandelier National Monument and down to the Rio Grande. Outside the home Pat was a quiet activist who put her principles into action. She organized and led the local chapter of Zero Population Growth, an environmental group focusing on the demands of increasing population. A lifelong environmentalist, she organized the first Earth Day celebration in Los Alamos in 1970. When she was ready to reenter the workforce, she took a position as a public health
nurse for family planning in Rio Arriba County, and would make the rounds of the clinics in that mostly Spanish-speaking county. The job let her address her concerns about family planning and reach across the class and language barriers of New Mexico, of which she was acutely aware. In 1980, Pat and Franz moved to Santa Fe, where Pat applied herself in new civic directions. Her nephew had an autism spectrum disorder, and Pat observed her sister’s tremendous efforts to support her son’s extensive needs for care. Aware of the struggles faced by the mentally ill and their families, she became director of the New Mexico chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), lobbied in the state capital, and worked with Senator Pete Domenici to secure funding for initiatives to assist the mentally ill in New Mexico. Among her many accomplishments in this role, Pat created a handbook for assisting the mentally ill. After retiring, she remained involved; joining the board of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization in northern New Mexico. As with her work at NAMI, Pat chose to support and nurture an organization that improved lives of at-risk youth, one at a time. She was a lifelong supporter of Reed College. The family was passionate about the outdoors, and weekends were filled with skiing, backpacking, and hikes. Pat and Franz traveled with Earthwatch to monitor sea turtles in the South Pacific, bushwhacked across Baranof Island, hiked in the Dolomites, scuba dived in the Great Barrier Reef, and traveled to Patagonia. The wonder of solar eclipses entranced them, and they made 11 trips to witness eclipses all over the world, including Mongolia, Egypt, Turkey, Zambia, and the Galapagos Islands. Pat’s final wish was that her family have the opportunity to witness a solar eclipse. She made arrangements so that her children and their families would be able to witness the total eclipse on August 21, 2017, in the United States. Her own stamina gave way and she was unable to join her family for the adventure. Three days after the eclipse, Pat suffered a stroke, and death followed in November. She is survived by her son, Keith Jahoda, and her daughter, Ellen Jahoda.
Gem Cressman Nelson ’50
January 1, 2018, in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania.
Gem was born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and raised in Eugene, Oregon, where her father, Luther Cressman, established the anthropology department and the museum of natural history at the University of Oregon. (Luther’s discovery of 9,000-year-old sandals in a cave near Fort Rock southeast of Bend forced scientists to more than double their estimates of how long ago the first humans came to the Pacific Northwest.) Gem met her husband, Dr. James june 2018 Reed Magazine 43
In Memoriam T. Nelson ’50 , at Reed, and they were married for 69 years. He passed away three weeks after Gem’s death. Both are survived by their son, Richard, and their daughter, Patricia.
James Nelson ’50
January 22, 2018, in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania.
James was born in Portland, Oregon, and served in the navy during World War II, as an electronics technician in the Pacific Theater on the USS Vega. After the war he attended Reed, where he met and married Gem Elizabeth Cressman ’50 . James earned a bachelor’s degree in physics, and went on to the University of Oregon, for both a master’s and a doctorate degree in physics. He worked for years at AT&T Bell Labs, as a physicist in transistor development, in the memory diagnostics group, and as a supervisor in reliability physics. James had numerous patents, awards, and published research papers in semiconductor technologies. His children, Patricia and Richard, survive him.
Joan Averill Otte ’50
February 15, 2018, in McMinnville, Oregon.
Born in Portland, Joan grew up in Jennings Lodge and Oregon City, Oregon. She attended Reed, before transferring to Oregon State University, where she earned a bachelor of science degree, followed by a bachelor of nursing degree from the University of Oregon Medical School. While at OSU, Joan met George Otte, and they were married in 1951. Their careers led them to The Dalles, Oregon, and Lanai City, Hawaii. Eventually they settled back in McMinnville, where they raised their three children. In 1976, Riitta, a Finnish exchange student, joined the family. The family moved to Casper, Wyoming, and when Joan and George retired, they returned to McMinnville, where they built their dream home. A longtime member of the Junior Matrons and the American Association of University Women, Joan was active in her church, especially as a youth leader, and was also a Red Cross nurse and teacher, a Girl Scout camp and day camp nurse, and both a Girl Scout and Cub Scout leader. She loved camping, backpacking, and mountaineering, and as a member of the Mazamas mountaineering club climbed major peaks in Oregon and Washington. She loved sewing and tailored most of the family’s clothes as well as designing and sewing backpacking tents, down coats, sleeping bags, and a sail for a sailboat that George built. Following a 30-year career in nursing, Joan learned to weave on a floor loom and wove complicated sample cards for an international weaver. In 1975, Joan and George started second careers in the Coast Guard Auxiliary. Joan was twice elected commander of Flotilla 66. She taught member training and water safety classes for 44 Reed Magazine june 2018
third and fifth graders. Summers were filled with regattas and safety patrols on rivers and lakes and offshore. She retired from the auxiliary after 42 years of dedicated service. George passed away in 2000. Joan is survived by her children, Tom, Terry, and Nancy; her Finnish daughter, Riitta; and her brother, Jim.
Don Edwin Sullivan ’50
February 18, 2018, in Walla Walla, Washington.
Upon graduating from O re g o n C i t y H i g h School, Don moved to Salinas, California, to attend college and play basketball. One of the courses he took was aviation, and when World War II began, Don s er ve d in the Army Air Forces. He developed vertigo and a badly infected knee and washed out of pilot training. He served as a B-17 electrical specialist, stationed in England and Libya. After the war, Don attended Reed, and while in Portland he met and married Medora Matteson. In 1950, their only child, Mark, came into the world. For most of his career, Don worked in Washington State’s adult correction division. He was a parole officer and a regional administrator, and was chosen by Governor Dan Evans to sit on the parole board. Don especially enjoyed being with nature. He was a backpacker, canoer, prospector, rock hound, hunter, horseman, dog trainer, boater, golfer, adventurer, and lifetime fisherman. Being of Irish heritage, he was a wonderful storyteller who favored social get-togethers. After retiring, he and Medora wintered in Yuma with a troupe of like-minded souls. Don is survived by his son Mark.
Celia Walker Moss ’51
December 1, 2017, in Ashland, Oregon, of metastatic lung cancer.
Born in Portland to Eldred and Leda Walker, Celia attended Washington High School and then Reed College for a year. She moved on to Lewis & Clark College and finally to the University of Oregon, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1951. Celia went on to earn a master’s degree in social work, and was a social worker for more than 30 years, retiring as director of social work at Bess Kaiser Medical Center in Portland in 1984. She moved to Atascadero, California, where she married Roy Moss. In 1999, she moved to Ashland, where she lived at Mountain Meadows, a retirement community. Celia loved to travel, was involved in her community, and was a staunch advocate for human, animal, and environmental rights. She fancied cats, was an excellent chef and an avid reader, and enjoyed
talking about politics and current events. Celia is survived by her sister, Linda Allaway, and five stepchildren.
Geoffrey Gass ’52
February 16, 2018, in Portland, of congestive heart failure.
Geoffrey was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, where his father was a university professor. He attended college in Nebraska and Chicago before enlisting in the army late in World War II. He married Betty Jane Thompson in 1947, while still in uniform. Geoff transferred to Reed and then continued his education at Northwest Broadcasting School. He worked as a radio station engineer and announcer, primarily in Ontario, Oregon. In 1958, he started a career with Tektronix, first as a field engineer and then as a specification control engineer. At the end of the Vietnam War, Geoff and Betty fostered five young Vietnamese refugees and helped them start a new life in the U.S. After retiring, Geoff cultivated an interest in Oregon wines and was active in NAG (Northwest Amiga Group), ROBOTS (Retired Old Bastards of Tektronix), Oregon Philatelic Society, and Special Olympics. As a volunteer patron of Albert Kelly Park, he became a familiar figure to many of his neighbors over the years. Betty preceded him in death; he is survived by his children: Andrea Carlson, Dorian Hess, and Leslie.
Richard Baird ’53
October 25, 2017, in Wilmington, Delaware, in his sleep.
Dick was born in Sioux City, Iowa, the eldest son of Charlotte and John Baird. At Reed he majored in chemistry and wrote his thesis, “An Investigation of the Mixed Anhydride Method of Peptide Synthesis,” advised by Prof. Marshall Cronyn [chemistry 1952–89]. Dick got a PhD in organic chemistry from UCLA and completed postdoctoral studies at Harvard University. He married Janet Morton of Staten Island, New York, in 1959. Dick taught chemistry for several years at Yale University before moving to Wilmington, where he spent the rest of his career as a research chemist for DuPont. After retiring, Dick volunteered for and ran the local AARP tax program for many years. He was also active with the New Castle Sailing Club, sailed his own boat on Lake Sunapee, and traveled extensively with his wife. Janet, his wife of 58 years, survives him, as do his son, Bruce, and daughter, Catherine Kusmin; his sisters, Joan Jarboe and Susan Ninnis; and his brother, John Baird.
Murray Work ’53
January 31, 2018, in Sacramento, California.
As a child in Chicago, Illinois, Murray’s insatiable curiosity was cultivated at the progressive Francis W. Parker School into a love of science, music, and art. He served as an army medical tech during the Korean War, stationed in Honolulu. After starting at William and Mary College and then studying biology at Reed, Murray finished his bachelor’s degree at Tulane University, where he also earned both a master’s degree and a PhD. Murray then launched a more than 35-year career as a psychology professor at California State University, Sacramento. During his tenure, he was a Fulbright fellow and awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct research on hagfish at Cambridge University in England and at the University of Bergen in Norway. Graduate students remember diving in the American River for the eel-like lamprey used in Murray’s research lab. While touring the country as a teenager in a 1929 Model T Ford, he met Harriette Hawkins, the love of his life. They were married for more than 64 years and had two daughters, Lucie Payne and Emily Gorin. Throughout his life, Murray championed social justice and civil rights causes, and volunteered for the nuclear freeze, antiwar, and progressive political movements.
Robert A. Fernea ’54
December 15, 2017, in San Diego, California.
For half a century Bob was a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas and the founding director of the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, one of the premier Middle Eastern studies centers in the nation. He was adopted at birth by George and Alta Fernea and graduated from high school in Vancouver, Washington. At Reed, he majored in sociology and was president of his senior class. He wrote his thesis on whether it was possible to distribute an F-scale test to a population and get a reading of their authoritarianism—an idea based on the work of Erich Fromm. “Reed was an essential part of my intellectual life,” he said. “It was a revelation as well as an education. It was the education at Reed that gripped me.” Reed afforded him entrance to an intellectual community. “Once you’ve learned a few things, or many more than a few things, you can move around in the intellectual community with a fair degree of confidence, and operate successfully,” he said. “And that’s the academic world, isn’t it? We can move from one university setting to another and to a degree find ourselves at home.” He earned his master’s degree in anthropolog y from the University of Chicago, followed by a PhD in cultural anthropology, and was awarded fellowships from the
University of Chicago, the National Science Foundation, and the Danforth Foundation. In Chicago, he became reacquainted with Elizabeth “B.J.” Warnock ’49. B.J. was nearly four years older than Bob and had a job in Reed’s news bureau when Bob was a student working in the alumni office. They met up again in Chicago. “I was walking down 57th Street one day, and ran into Bob,” she recalled. “‘Oh, hello, Bob. How are you?’ ‘I’m fine. I’m having trouble meeting girls.’ I introduced him to my roommate, whom he didn’t like. Then he called me up and said that his mother had sent him $25 for his birthday. Would I like to go out to dinner with him? And I said, ‘No. I’m too old for you.’ ‘Oh, come on, you wouldn’t mind having a good dinner.’ I finally went.” Two years later they were married. “If we hadn’t known each other at Reed, we wouldn’t have developed a friendship in Chicago,” Bob said. “The most important thing was to marry an intelligent person, who you could talk to and who would sustain an interesting conversation in the middle of all of the ups and downs of daily life.” Following their wedding, the couple moved to Al Nahra, a remote Iraqi village, where he conducted his PhD research for two years. From 1959 to 1962, Bob taught at the American University in Cairo, where their children were born. In 1962, he directed the Nubian Ethnological Survey, a project funded by the Ford Foundation to illuminate and study the displacement of the Nubian people from their villages as the Aswan Dam was built, after which he published Nubians in Egypt: Peaceful People. In 1965, Bob returned with his family to the U.S. and spent a year as a Harvard University postdoctoral fellow before beginning his teaching career at the University of Texas. In addition to being the founding director of the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Bob was also a founding member and past president of the Middle East Studies Association, a nonprofit association fostering the study of the Middle East. Bob published many books, including the award-winning The Arab World, which he coauthored with B.J. The couple forged a personal and professional relationship that spanned their 52-year marriage. Bob narrated a documentary produced by B.J., The Struggle for Peace: Israelis and Palestinians. Although they made their home in Austin for more than 40 years, they frequently returned to the Middle East to live and work. In addition to his wide-ranging career, Bob was a Renaissance man who danced ballet with the Portland Ballet and was a board member of the Austin Civic Ballet. He was an accomplished trombone and piano player and played with a local jazz band. He was athletic, spoke
French and Arabic fluently, and had friends all over the world. Bob is survived by his daughters, Laura Ann Fernea ’83 and Laila Stroben; his son, David Fernea; and his devoted Chihuahua, Harry.
Ted Gurr ’57
November 25, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In the 1960s, political violence was not a field of study in political science. Ted was a major force in legitimizing the study of political conflict and instability, emphasizing the importance of social-psychological factors and ideology as root sources of political violence in his 1970 book, Why Men Rebel. He was also a proponent of cross-national statistical research designs, and his bestknown data set, Polity, is still widely used in political science research. He was born in Spokane and majored in psychology at Reed, where he wrote his thesis, “A Study in the Attainment of Abstract and Thematic Concepts,” with Prof. Leslie Squier [psychology 1953 –88] advising. He then studied at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and earned a PhD in government and international relations at New York University. As a recently minted PhD, he codirected the academic staff of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, created by President Lyndon Johnson following the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. The resulting volume, The History of Violence in America, became a New York Times best seller in 1969. Ted received the Payson S. Wild Chair appointment in political science at Northwestern University, and served as head of the department. Following the death of his first june 2018 Reed Magazine 45
In Memoriam wife, he left Evanston and joined the faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he chaired the political science department and was director of the Center for Comparative Studies. Joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, he initiated a research project that analyzed and monitored the status and conflicts of 283 politically-active minority groups throughout the world, titled Minorities at Risk. Still in operation, MAR seeks to identify where the groups are located, what they do, and what happens to them. It contributes to the understanding of conflicts involving relevant groups by providing information in a standardized format to aid comparative research. Ted wrote or edited more than 20 books and monographs, including Peace and Conflict 2010, coauthored with Joseph Hewitt and Jonathan Wilkenfeld. He is survived by his wife, Barbara; his daughters, Lisa and Andrea; his stepson, Timothy Gribben; and his brother, David.
Joanna Jeffreys Klick MAT ’59 November 5, 2017, in Portland.
Joanna began playing piano at the age of four and continued through the last week of her life, when she died of heart problems at age 88. Born in Clarkston, Washington, she grew up entertaining community members with recitations of poetry and literature, as well as performances on the piano and violin. Her love of literature and film guided her through the Northern Idaho College of Education, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in education, and the University of Iowa, where she received a master’s degree in theatre. Post master’s studies included a Russian language course at Reed and a John Hay Fellowship in humanities at the UC Berkeley. During her teaching career, Joanna taught high school English, drama, humanities, film appreciation, and Asiatic history. Her career began in Montrose, Colorado, and included 24 years at Portland’s David Douglas High School. Her final nine years in education were as librarian at Reynolds High School. Joanna met and married fellow David Douglas teacher Lamont Klick in 1963, and they had two children, Larisa and Paul. After retiring she traveled and wrote poetry and fiery political letters to local newspaper editors. Her love of history and world religion led to volunteer leadership positions at First Unitarian Church and with the David Douglas Historical Society. She is survived by her children and stepchildren.
46 Reed Magazine june 2018
Jaclyn M. Vidgoff ’62
March 28, 2017, in Vancouver, Washington.
The daughter of prominent Portland physician Dr. Benjamin Vidgoff ’29, Jaclyn graduated at the top of her class from Lincoln High School. At Reed, she wrote her thesis, “Synthesis of Dimaleimides,” with her advisor, Prof. Marshall Cronyn [chemistry 1952–89]. After graduating in 1962, she remained at the college for further study in chemotherapy, especially in the areas of cancer, malaria, and leprosy. In 1970, she received a doctorate degree in biochemistry from the University of Washington. She did a postdoctoral fellowship in medical genetics at OHSU and then worked there as an instructor in genetics, followed by a gig as a biochemical geneticist at Portland’s Emanuel Hospital. Focusing her research on birth defects, Jaclyn developed a test to determine if an unborn infant had Tay-Sachs disease, a recessive genetic disorder, meaning that when both parents are carriers, there is a 25% chance of giving birth to an affected child. A vital enzyme, hexosaminidase-A or hex-A, is missing or inactive in all of the tissues of the child. The disease progresses to the point the baby forgets how to smile, to grip a finger, raise its head, or kick. Finally, it loses the ability to swallow and cry. Death usually occurs within 18 months. The disease is associated with Ashkenazi Jews, whose chances of being a carrier are 1 in 30, versus 1 in 300 for Gentiles. Jaclyn worked in immunology at the Red Cross (Portland) doing HIV and AIDS diagnoses. She later joined the faculty of the University of Illinois, where she taught pharmacology at the Urbana campus. After several years, she returned to Oregon to take up her research at the Oregon Primate Center until she retired. She is survived by her brother, Martin Vidgoff.
Peter G. Stone MAT ’67 December 11, 2017, in Salem, Oregon.
In order to feel potent, Peter needed to put his h a n d s i n c l a y. H e created for more than 70 years and his work is included in the Tokyo International Museum of Art and the New York Me trop olitan
Museum of Art. He traveled the world to discover art and was an art ambassador to Micronesia and Japan. At the age of 6, Peter began studying art at the Seattle Art Institute. His creative talents were further energized two years later, when his father built him a darkroom in the family home. He was a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Air Force in the ’50s and went on to earn a bachelor of science degree from the University of Washington and a master’s in teaching from Reed. He once said, “My time at Reed was the first time I understood what learning was all about. My association with educators like Prof. Lloyd Reynolds [English and art 1929–69] made me a far better teacher and person.” He became a professional photographer in Seattle and taught art at Seattle’s inner-city Garfield High School and at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. At Western Oregon University he was a professor who taught sculpture, ceramics, jewelry, design, and lettering— all in the dank and dimly lit basement of Campbell Hall, where surroundings were largely unchanged since its construction in 1871. Nonetheless, Peter had fond memories of the space and the students he taught there, some of them familiar names in Oregon’s arts community. He was named Oregon’s Outstanding Artist Educator by the Oregon Art Educators Association and was the recipient of a Crown Zellerbach scholarship, the Horace Mann Fellowship, and a Fulbright fellowship. As an artist, he was known primarily for his large ceramic terra-cotta reliefs installed throughout the Northwest, including at the Inn at Spanish Head, Salishan Lodge, Salem Public Library, and the University of Oregon. After retiring, Peter continued to be active in creating, teaching, and supporting the arts. As a volunteer, he taught at Taft High School, Western Oregon University, and Capital Manor Retirement Community in Salem, where he taught his last class four months before he died. He is survived by his sister, Bettie, and his six children.
Marshall Sherwin MAT ’69 November 1, 2013, in Roseburg, Oregon.
Born in Laramie, Wyoming, Marshall attended schools in Laramie and in Eugene, Oregon, where he received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon. In 1950, he married Adelle Buchanan. He got his master’s degree from Reed, an accomplishment of which he was inordinately proud, and began his teaching career in Joseph, Oregon. He also taught at Douglas High School and Roseburg High School, where he served as chair of the social studies department. His volunteer work included Crater Lake National Park, Battered Persons Advocacy, and Umpqua Actors Community Theatre. He is survived by his children, Michael Sherwin, Marian Parsons, and Alice Ann Eberman.
Anthony Tunder ’74
October 16, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Born in Austria, Tony loved to travel, and in the course of his life visited nearly every state. At Reed, he studied physics and wrote his thesis, “Light Modulation via the Pöckels Effect,” with Prof. Kenneth Davis [physics 1948–80]. Tony worked in the computer industry. He fell in love with the town Pahrump, Nevada, and lived there for the last 15 years of his life. He is survived by his wife, Sue; his daughter, Alysea Massey; his sons, Erik Tunder and Anton Tunder; his stepdaughters, Jeni Carroll and Misty Mock of Stayton; and his sister, Mari Tunder.
Debra Porter ’75
October 11, 2017, in Rhododendron, Oregon, of breast cancer.
Born in Pasadena, California, as a child Debra possessed unusual capacities: a photographic memory, stunningly rapid reading skill, extraordinary musical ability, and the facility to perceive patterns and perspectives. At 13, she volunteered to help children from troubled homes, foreshadowing a lifelong interest in helping the disadvantaged to lead better lives. Bored with high school, she took the SAT a year early, got a perfect score, and, chose Reed. It was a good match. Reed nurtured and gave scope to her innovative mind. Her differentdrummer creativity flourished. In her thesis, advised by Prof. Allen Neuringer [psychology 1970–2008], she demonstrated that pigeons could tell the difference between the music of Bach and the music of Stravinsky. It was published by a high-tier journal and continues to be cited to this day. She was even interviewed by Canadian Broadcasting on the topic, which she found quite amusing. At Reed, she formed a close bond with Prof. Judith Massee [dance 1968–98], who trained her to be a first-rate dance accompanist. Debra considered Judy to be the finest teacher she had ever known, and the experience led to Debra’s involvement in the dance world as a composer and choreographer. Life after Reed was challenging; Debra faced issues of physical and mental health. She was adamant about living as independently as she could. In trying circumstances, she maintained a strong moral compass and a deep commitment to do good in the world, and found fulfillment in living simply and in harmony with the earth. Over the years, she wrote endlessly about improving education. She imagined and proposed simple, direct social organization that would enable people to share, understand, and support one another. Her strength of will was astonishing, and her creativity never flagged.
Even when ill she produced a prolific flow of writing, painting, and music composition. Many of her compositions were performed in community settings organized by herself. Debra perceived the world in her own unique and insightful way, often causing others to consider life afresh. She sought, always, to help and heal. Among her Reed acquaintance she will be remembered especially by Allen and Martha Neuringer and by musical compatriot John Vergin ’78. She is survived by sisters Kimberly Martin and Laura Porter. —CONTRIBUTED BY JOHN VERGIN ’78
Laurie Levich, art director 1955–92 January 2018, in Portland.
Michael Preston ’83
December 15, 2017, at Breitenbush Hot Springs, Oregon.
M i c h a e l ’s l i fe l o n g passions included teaching, music, meditation, and mindfulness, and he lived his life according to his Buddhist beliefs. He visited Breitenbush Hot Springs for the first time as a child and returned as an adult to attend retreats. In April 2017, he took his sons there for the first time to experience the healing powers and magical community. In December, he suddenly passed away at the retreat. A native of Oregon, he grew up in Corvallis, and attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts. At Reed he majored in psychology and religion and wrote his thesis, “An Investigation of Psychokinetic Theory and Practice,” with Professors Les Squier [psychology 1953–88] and John Kenney [religion 1980–95]. Michael studied hermeneutics and extraterrestrial mathematical ontology at Purdue, where he was a research assistant. Then he went to the University of Cincinnati as a doctoral candidate in the philosophy of education. At UC, he met and married Kristin Seeberger. The couple made their home in Baltimore, Maryland, for 19 years, where his sons were born. Michael taught and played music, and was the director of religious education at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore. In 2012, he moved back to Oregon to help his mother care for her husband, who had ALS. Six months after his stepfather’s death, Michael’s mother developed pancreatic cancer. Michael’s deep calling to help those in need or who were suffering, combined with his Buddhist practice, led him to study becoming a chaplain. Through his teaching and music (he played anything with strings), he touched many lives. Michael led meditation and mindfulness at the Oregon State Penitentiary and was committed to the Buddhist recovery group Refuge Recovery. He is survived by his sons, Garrett and James; his siblings, March and Joe; and his father, Fred.
Artist and graphic designer Laurie Levich died peacefully at home at age 87. Born in Sioux City, Iowa, she attended Morningside College, where she met her future husband, Prof. Marvin Levich. She then graduated from the University of Wisconsin and moved to New York City, where she worked for an advertising art firm. In 1953, she and Marvin moved to Portland. He taught philosophy, and she worked as a graphic designer and art director at Reed. Laurie brought sophistication and insight to the college’s graphic identity, producing books, booklets, catalogs, brochures, and posters that conveyed Reed’s distinctive character in a way that was striking but never slick. Generations of Reed students remember Laurie’s warm, reassuring presence and her sturdy easel, on which she sketched a delightful series of griffins whose whimsical expressions captured the essence of Reed. Laurie also created art for the Woodstock Neighborhood Association. She designed the gateway sign on Woodstock Boulevard, created the logo of the Douglas fir trees for neighborhood banners, and generously promoted the Woodstock Community Center. Laurie will be remembered for her social and political activism, love of culture and the arts, and selfless care for her family. She is survived by her husband, Marvin, children Jacob Levich and Jenny Westberg, six grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter. She was preceded in death by her daughter Naomi Levich.
PENDING Patricia Mitchell ’32, Merlin Morasch ’48, George Edward Bussell ’51, Benjamin Stark ’53, William Terry ’54, Eli (Robert) Leon ’57, George G. Barnes ’58, Barbara Jean Heigel Orr ’58, Lynn Bowers ’65, Bill Bulick ’74, Mary Freeman Rosenblum ’74, Peter Abrahams ’77, Lee Ann Fujii ’84, Marianna Scheffer ’94
june 2018 Reed Magazine 47
Object of Study
What we’re looking at in class
label photos courtesy of The Edouart P e c o u r t c o l l e c t i o n at t h e U C S B l i b r a r y
Connecting the dots: what labels can tell us. Tango singer Carlos Gardel (1890-1935) was and remains an icon of Latin American popular culture. The first tango he recorded, in 1917, was “Mi Noche Triste” (My Sad Night), a song that recounts the elaborate regrets of a recently dumped man in melodramatic fashion. That recording is commonly heard as a foundational moment in the history of tango, almost inseparable from Gardel’s legendary status within that genre. But how else might we hear it? What other stories can it tell us? In Music 308: Music as Material Culture, we think about historic sound recordings not only as documents of musical history but as material objects with “lives” of their own. Thus while “Mi Noche Triste” is about the history of tango, it is also about the history of technology; Gardel rerecorded the song
in 1930 using electrical recording technology (with microphones), which did not exist when the acoustic original was made. It is also about the transnational music industries and the creative misunderstandings they engendered, in that the distinctly Argentine recording was rereleased in multiple national markets where it was framed as everything from “orchestral tango” to “Mexican” music. Above all else, the materiality of these recordings speaks to the accumulated social histories of musical engagement and listening that they enabled and contain, the dust and scratches of previous auditions literally etched into the discs themselves. Hearing these and other stories is a matter of critical listening, but it is also a matter of connecting the material dots. —PROF. MORGAN LUKER [MUSIC 2010–]
A WORKFORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH Reedies are skilled synthesizers, critics, analysts, and storytellers in a wide range of fields, making them great interns and employees. Look to Reed when seeking excellent future talent for your institution. Questions? Email Brooke Hunter, Assistant Director of Employer Relations & Strategic Partnerships at hunterb@reed.edu. Post a job or internship: reed.edu/beyond-reed > For Employers.
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TANKS FOR THE MEMORY. Prof. Suzy Renn [biology] studies the evolution of behavior in the fish room, which houses thousands of African Cichlids in conditions similar to Lake Tanganyika.