Occidental Magazine Spring 2025 by Occidental College

Comic Relief

Stand-ups Eddie Gorton ’01, Paul “PK” Kim ’98, and David Murphy ’02 bring the funny back to Oxy

Interim Vice President for Academic Aﬀairs and Dean of the College

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Volume 47, Number 1 oxy.edu/magazine

OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE

Tom Stritikus

President

Kathryn Leonard

Interim Vice President for Academic Aﬀairs and Dean of the College

Vivian Garay Santiago

Vice President for Student Aﬀairs and Dean of Students

Amos Himmelstein

Vice President & Chief Operating Oﬃcer

Suzanne LaCroix

Vice President for Institutional Advancement

Perrine Mann

Vice President for Marketing & Communications

Maricela L. Martinez

Vice President of Enrollment

James Uhrich

Vice President & Chief Information Oﬃcer

Rachael Warecki

Senior Director of Communications

editorial staff

Dick Anderson Editor

Marc Campos

College Photographer & Videographer

Gail (Schulman) Ginell ’79

Class Notes Editor

SanSoucie Design Design

DLS Group Printing

OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

Published quarterly by Occidental College

Main number: 323-259-2500

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Cover photo by Max S. Gerber Oxy Wear photo by Marc Campos

Kathryn Leonard

Mira Hart ’26 makes her way out of a tight crawl in Bangalau Cave after collecting cave drip water from two ongoing stations within the cave.

First Word

President Stritikus on the power of research. Also: Susan Stockdale ’76 takes a deep dive into coral reef life in her 11th picture book, Please Don’t Eat the Cleaners! 4 From the Quad Hailing from China, India, Mexico, and all over the United States, Oxy’s newest cohort of tenure-track faculty embraces the liberal arts in Los Angeles. Also: a spring speakers roundup.

Oxy Talk

Separated by 2,700 miles, National Labor Relations Board administrative law judges Brian Gee ’87 and Ira Sandron ’71 ﬁnd common ground in Oxy.

Last Page

A dozen years after the publication of her memoir, Anne Marie (Kurtz) Novinger ’57 checks in with an update—and shares her secret to 67 years of wedded bliss. 32 Tigerwire The post-Rhodes legacy of Cullen Taniguchi ’98.

Features

10

Life After Fire

The Eaton and Palisades ﬁres took their toll on members of the Occidental family, including students, alumni, faculty, and administrators. With a long rebuilding process ahead, they ﬁnd strength and support among the Oxy community.

Advanced Projects in Photography

With two exhibits opening simultaneously and a new teaching space at Oxy, Assistant Professor Janna Ireland navigates her burgeoning career while parenting two growing boys.

Sitting Down With the Stand-ups

Paul “PK” Kim ’98, Eddie Gorton ’01, and David Murphy ’02 trace their comic odysseys from talent shows and laundromats to Thorne Hall and the Laugh Factory.

» FROM PRESIDENT STRITIKUS

Tapping Into the Power of Research

Higher education has a unique capacity to address national priorities, confront global challenges, and improve outcomes for humanity. Many of our most important medical, technological, and social advancements have been driven by academic researchers who dedicate their careers to furthering our collective knowledge.

Our society beneﬁts from the rigorous work accomplished at U.S. colleges and universities—not just at large research institutions but at small liberal arts colleges such as Occidental.

We benefit from the passion, knowledge, and ingenuity of Oxy students and alumni, who use their lifelong affinity for learning to answer important questions. Over the College’s 138-year history, our students have received 10 Rhodes Scholarships, more than 50 National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, and more than 40 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships, all of which support in-depth inquiry into vital scientific areas. Oxy alumni have earned master’s and doctorate degrees from prestigious graduate programs, led academic departments, and conducted groundbreaking

“Thanks to Oxy students and alumni, the world now has a better understanding of infectious diseases, sustainable farming methods, asteroid components, and so much more.”

research at various institutions, from the Food and Drug Administration to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Thanks to Oxy students and alumni, the world now has a better understanding of infectious diseases, sustainable farming methods, asteroid components, and so much more.

We also beneﬁt from the excellent research done by Oxy faculty, which is frequently recognized on a national level. Over the last year, our faculty have earned honors from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Cottrell Scholar Award program, and the NSF—

awards that recognize not only academic research but also engagement and partnership with surrounding communities. Moreover, in February, our research activity was officially recognized in the 2025 Carnegie Classifications. Occidental’s classification as a Research College is a testament to the caliber and impact of our faculty’s curiosity, creativity, and dedication.

In true liberal arts fashion, the impact of our inquiry-based, research-driven education is interdisciplinary. In all areas of study, our students develop the skills needed to tackle global issues from a critical perspective that is grounded in facts. As our students collaborate to examine their hypotheses in classrooms and in their communities, they learn how to conduct quality research as well as how to assess their ﬁndings critically, communicate them clearly, and understand how they intersect with and support research across disciplines.

I witness the power of an Oxy education every day—especially with Commencement drawing near, as I attend an impressive range of senior comps presentations and speak with members of our graduating class I’m proud that Occidental provides students and faculty with opportunities to explore creative problem-solving through initiatives such as the Undergraduate Research Center and the Humanities for Just Communities program, which introduces incoming students to the ways in which the humanities can advance social justice.

As we continue to assess the impacts of federal research funding decisions on the College, we remain, as always, committed to our academic mission: educating students through our support of exceptional teaching, experiential learning opportunities, and innovative research.

Tom Stritikus

President Stritikus listens as Media Arts and Culture Assistant Professor Vivian Lin, left, and MAC students Truman Urness ’25 and Reyan Nguy ’27 discuss their Faculty-Led Richter Research project, which took them to Nepal last summer at Oxy’s annual Access and Opportunity Luncheon on April 6.

Photo by Marc Campos

Everyday Democracy: Civil Society, Youth, and the Struggle Against Authoritarian Culture in China, by Anthony J. Spires ’92 (Columbia University Press) Everyday Democracy examines two youth-led volunteer groups in China, revealing how their values and practices foster new, more democratic forms of association. Drawing on more than a decade of ﬁeldwork, Spires pinpoints the seeds of a democratic culture inside an authoritarian regime. These insights not only illuminate China’s unique dynamics but also shed light on the broader challenges facing emerging democratic movements worldwide. Spires is a sociologist and associate professor at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies. He majored in Asian studies at Occidental and is the author of Global Civil Society and China (2024).

of horseback riding and the falling, failing, and joy it brings. Mahdavi shows how her relationship with horses gives her insights into intergenerational strength and tools for healing intergenerational trauma experienced within her IranianAmerican family. Riding from the mountains of Iran to the beaches of California, Mahdavi shares her love affair with horses, rediscovers a homeland she longs for, and ultimately finds her strength. A diplomacy and world affairs major at Oxy, Mahdavi is a journalist, entrepreneur, coach, and keynote speaker. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Ms., and the Huffington Post.

John Jeﬀries and his family, who embrace him as one of their own. Yet Nynan remains haunted by the loss of his parents, sister, and country. His fragile stability comes from a relationship with a melancholic artist and teacher, but the world itself seems unsettled. Over decades, bizarre meteorological events threaten humanity, mirroring Nynan’s inner turmoil. As he grapples with trauma and connection, can he forge a meaningful life amid the chaos of his past and a planet in peril? The Laissez Faire Light of Life is the seventh novel by Angelo, aka Anthony Iacoboni ’73, who lives with his wife in Spain and works as a psychologist and English teacher.

The Warrior and the Dragon, by Rusty Reece ’71 (iUniverse). Jason is a war-weary warrior seeking peace in Smoky Springs. Tasked with delivering a magical athamé, he is hunted by the necromancer Erlender. Along the way, he meets Akela, a shapeshifting wolf who helps him unlock his ability to transform into a dragon—fulﬁlling a prophecy of which he was unaware. When his village is threatened, Jason trains Smoky Springs’ women and children in combat, leading them to victory in a battle that leaves him seriously wounded. As Erlender closes in, Jason must choose between his quest and protecting those he swore to defend. The Warrior and the Dragon is the ﬁrst book in a planned fantasy trilogy by Reece, who majored in mathematics at Oxy and turned to fantasy writing after retiring from El Camino College as professor emeritus of mathematics. He lives in Manhattan Beach.

Riding, by Pardis Mahdavi ’00 (Duke University Press). In Riding, Mahdavi meditates on the lessons learned over a lifetime

Don’t Eat the Cleaners! by Susan Stockdale ’76 (Peachtree Publishing Company) Growing up swimming in the ocean oﬀ Miami, Stockdale was enthralled by the experience, which helped inspire her 11th picture book, an exploration of animal life beneath the waves. Stockdale’s deep dive into coral reef life celebrates the teamwork of the tiny but mighty cleaner ﬁshes and shrimp that scrub larger ocean animals of pesky parasites in return for a tasty meal. Sea turtles, manta rays, and even sharks line up for a scrubbing in “cleaning stations” around the world, just like at a car wash. Cleaners even have specialties, like “sea dentist” cleaner shrimp that clean the teeth of a moray eel. And all the ocean animals must remember the rule if they want a scrubbing by the clean team: Don’t eat the cleaners! A studio art major at Oxy, Stockdale lives in Chevy Chase, Md.

The Laissez Faire Light of Life, by Darren Angelo ’73. Nynan Genes is a man shaped by displacement and resilience. Rescued as a child after his homeland was invaded, he is raised by a family of doctors but struggles to belong. Though a brilliant student, he abandons a prestigious college scholarship, disillusioned by his peers’ blind optimism. Instead, he trains as a plumber in the Midwest, ﬁnding unexpected kinship in mentor

Podcast: True Stories From an Old Dirt Road, by Anthony Ciardelli ’10. Sharon, Vt., is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Mormonism founder Joseph Smith. A short stretch of dirt road in Sharon has seen some fascinating things that you wouldn’t expect in a sleepy Vermont town. Ciardelli—who grew up on that dirt road and in the house where some of these things occurred—tells the whole story in this seven-episode podcast. An art history and visual arts major at Occidental, he lives in Manhattan Beach.

We All Dream , by Terry Kitchen ’81 (terrykitchen.com). Kitchen’s ﬁrst album of new material since 2020’s Next Time We Meet, We All Dream features the Boston singersongwriter at his most essential: a voice, a guitar, a story, a glimmer of hope. Joined by a talented array of friends, including Rebecca Lynch ’81 on harmony vocals, Kitchen (aka Max Pokrivchak ’81) weaves an intimate portrait of who we are at this critical moment, and why we all need each other. Combining the storytelling tradition of folk with Kitchen’s pop instincts, We All Dream is a welcome gentle breeze over a too-long ravaged landscape.

All Paths Lead to Oxy

Hailing from China, India, Mexico, and all over the United States, Occidental’s

newest cohort of tenure-track faculty embraces the liberal arts in Los Angeles

“Politics was something my family never shied away from talking about within our household,” Samantha Acuña says. “My parents have had very diﬀerent trajectories in terms of their life and immigration experiences because of the political histories of their respective countries. All the work I do is inspired by my family and our own history.”

Acuña, an assistant professor of politics, is one of 13 new tenure-track faculty at Occidental this year. She has a Ph.D. in political science from UCLA, where she was a Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellow, and a B.A. in public policy, Spanish, and English from the University of Redlands. Acuña is interested

in constitutional law, immigration policy, judicial behavior, and gender-based violence.

As a ﬁrst-generation college graduate who attended a small liberal arts college, Acuña calls Occidental a “perfect ﬁt.” She enjoys teaching the constitutional law sequence of courses, although she hopes to teach an immigration law class next year.

Having a larger understanding of both checks and balances as well as civil rights and civil liberties “could not be more relevant in this moment,” she says. “Immigration is at the heart of this nation and now more than ever its history is something we should not put aside or forget.”

Cristina Awadalla (assistant professor, Latino/a and Latin American studies) comes to Occidental from UC Santa Barbara, where she earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in sociology, with an emphasis in feminist studies. Her scholarship studies the intersections of gender conservatism, populism, and authoritarianism, with a focus on Central American politics and Latin American feminisms.

Having grown up in Highland Park and Glendale, Awadalla was drawn to Oxy’s small-classroom environment and emphasis on collaboration, experiential learning, and community engagement. “I saw Occidental as a place where I could bring teaching and

Photos by Marc Campos

From left, assistant professors Jingyi Li (Asian studies), Cristina Awadalla (Latino/a and Latin American studies), Hector Camarillo Abad (computer science), Lydia Harmon ’13 (geology), Nicholas Grebe (psychology), Shengyun Gu (cognitive science), Ramona Gonzalez ’09 (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music), and Claire Grossman (English).

service together and explore ways to bridge the town-gown divide in ways that serve our students and the local community,” she says.

Awadalla witnessed these elements of an Oxy education in her Latina Labors course last semester. For their ﬁnal project, students were asked to interview a Latina about her experiences in the labor force; many students chose to interview their mothers.

“It was powerful to hear their stories and see them apply course theories to personal experiences,” Awadalla says. “Through the project, students were able to see how their mothers’ experiences speak to global issues we tended to in class as well as how their moms are key knowledge holders.

“Oxy students are incredibly thoughtful, engaged, well-rounded, and eager to ask critical questions,” she adds. “I also appreciate how they draw connections between course content and the world around them.”

Hector Camarillo Abad (assistant professor, computer science) comes to Occidental from Universidad de las Américas Puebla, where he received a Ph.D. in intelligent systems, a master’s in computer science, and a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering and intelligent systems. His research involves designing, developing, and evaluating wearable technology to enhance the teaching and learning of physical activities, such as dance.

Camarillo Abad ﬁrst became interested in wearable technology during a Ph.D. course in which he had the freedom to create his own project using a wearable technology device. A dance aﬁcionado, he used the device’s vibration capabilities to simulate cues from the leader in a couple’s dance, prompting partners to perform the correct dance step.

“I enjoyed every second of my day doing that project,” he says. Now, by incorporating dance into electronic engineering, he’s able to “blend everything I like into my research.”

Outside the classroom, Camarillo Abad is a member of Oxy’s Folk and Historical Dance Troupe, an organization that was founded in 1971, and is active in the Gaming Club, which he joined after talking to student members at the Involvement Fair. “I enjoy a friendly competition every Monday night with them, and everyone is very welcoming.”

Ramona Gonzalez ’09 (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music) is a Los Angeles-based musician, multimedia artist, and scholar. A Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, her dissertation, Why Sad Song? Women’s Laments in Popular

Music, investigates the function of lament in the music of Björk, Rosalía, and Sade.

Gonzalez herself is a professional recording artist, having worked for over a decade as Nite Jewel. Her music has received accolades from outlets such as Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, NPR, and The Guardian

A decade after graduating from Occidental, Gonzalez returned to her alma mater as the Johnston-Fix Professor in the Practice of Songwriting, having previously guest-lectured on topics related to the music industry and music production. She describes her students as “thoughtful and inspiring.”

Gonzalez ﬁrst became interested in the musical tradition of women’s lament while taking a course on baroque opera at UCLA. In a similar vein, her favorite Oxy class she has taught so far is Music and Gender: “How could you not love a course on pop music, gender, and authenticity?”

Nicholas Grebe (assistant professor, psychology) comes to Occidental from the University of Michigan, where he was a post-

“I love that there’s a norm for students to get involved in research early here.”

doctoral fellow. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of New Mexico and a bachelor’s degree in psychology and neuroscience from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Grebe’s research interests span the ﬁelds of psychology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology. Through a combination of lab work and ﬁeld research, he studies how behavioral and hormonal mechanisms have evolved to support social diversity in human and non-human primates.

Grebe knows exactly when he first became interested in evolutionary biology and who inspired his curiosity. Grebe’s high school biology teacher, Mr. Hays, refused to cave to significant pressure from their politically conservative, evangelical Christian community to provide equal classroom time to both evolution and intelligent design, a pseudoscientific form of creationism that lacks empirical support.

“Evolutionary biology was already something of a subversive topic, which I’m sure

piqued my interest,” Grebe says. “But more importantly, Mr. Hays taught me how an idea, like evolution by natural selection, could be beautiful: It organized the natural world in a logical way, it explained where we came from and the amazing diversity of creatures on our planet, and, despite 150 years of exploration, the full implications of this theory had yet to be determined.”

Grebe found the newer discipline of evolutionary psychology—the observation that evolutionary forces have acted on the brain just as they have on the body—particularly compelling. (“It blew my mind,” he admits. “I’m just as hooked as I was in high school.”) As he charted his academic path, he realized he wanted to work at an institution like Oxy, where he could grow as a teacher-scholar.

“I love that there’s a norm for students to get involved in research early here,” he says, noting that he hopes that he can provide students with opportunities to research alongside him as he conducts ﬁeldwork with wild mountain gorillas at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Rwanda. “I’m really excited to bring this ﬁeldwork component to Oxy, and to bring students with me to Rwanda and other primate range countries.”

Claire Grossman (assistant professor, English) comes to Occidental from Stanford University, where she earned her Ph.D. in English and earned numerous fellowships, including the Stanford Humanities Center Next Generation Scholar Fellowship and a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. Grossman’s research interests include 20thand 21st-century U.S. literature, comparative ethnic literary studies, Asian American literature, and postwar racial and economic discourses. With Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, she has co-written Crowd Control: Riot and Literary Reward, a forthcoming study on how race riots led to the invention of literary “excellence” in the United States.

Thus far, Grossman has particularly enjoyed teaching The American Experience in Literature (ENGL 289), which studies works that critique and converse with each other across centuries. Her syllabus includes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; James Baldwin’s 1955 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” a takedown of Stowe’s racialized sentimentalism; and stories by Sui Sin Far and Zitkála-Šá, which play with ideas of how ﬁction can represent or evoke crossracial sympathies.

“A survey class is meant to cover the greatest hits—the novels, poems, and essays deemed important,” Grossman says. “These books don’t just fall from the sky.”

She appreciates her students’ approach to the writers they’re studying, noting their “aﬀectionate irreverence” for their favorite canonical writers and their comfort with contradictions. “They can sit with ideas that don’t make sense together,” she says, “or use that as a starting place for conversation.”

Shengyun Gu (assistant professor, cognitive science) comes to Oxy from the University of Connecticut, where she earned her Ph.D. in linguistics and was a postdoctoral fellow. She also holds a Ph.D. in foreign linguistics and applied linguistics from East China Normal University and a B.A. in medicine and healthcare communications from Tianjin Medical University. Her research aims to better understand language through the lens of both Shanghai Sign Language and American Sign Language.

“Languages can be heard, but languages can also be seen,” Gu says. “Studying sign language oﬀers a unique way to inquire how our mind works, how language is intricately related to other cognitive abilities, and how the notion of multimodality is not only for deaf communities but extends to all of us.”

Gu’s classes at Oxy include courses on language and culture in deaf communities, language acquisition, and language diversity. Because linguistics is so interdisciplinary in nature, Gu hopes that her classes will provide a springboard for students who are interested in not only languages and cultures but also cognitive science, analytical thinking, puzzle-solving, and the creation of more linguistically equitable societies.

“Linguistics is one of the fundamental disciplines of cognitive science,” Gu says. “It also says a lot about humanity through topics such as language equality, language rights, language preservation, and linguistic diversity.”

Lydia Harmon ’13 (assistant professor, geology) comes to Occidental from Arizona State University, where she was a postdoctoral scholar at the School of Earth and Space Exploration. A geology major at Oxy, she earned her Ph.D. and M.Sc. in earth and environmental sciences from Vanderbilt University. Through a combination of ﬁeldwork, lab work, and computer modeling, Harmon studies volcanoes and magma systems, focus-

ing on the processes and tectonic inﬂuences that govern magma formation and eruption. Harmon credits her Occidental education with fostering her interest in volcanoes and magma systems. She returned, in part, because the College’s location provides geology students with robust opportunities to participate in hands-on, experiential education.

“For many students, this is their first time exploring the San Gabriel Mountains or the Mojave Desert, so there is often a combination of excitement, uncertainty, and enthusiasm,” she says. “It is so rewarding to see students gain confidence and independence in the field to develop a greater appreciation for the landscapes around them.

“I know ﬁrsthand that studying geology at Oxy is life-changing,” she adds. “I am thrilled to be back to help inspire the next generation of students and geologists.”

In true liberal arts fashion, Harmon is quick to emphasize that geology “isn’t just about rocks.” Through classroom teaching and ﬁeldwork, she hopes to impart a better understanding of the planet and its resources, and humans’ place among it all: “I hope students learn to see the world through a geological lens, whether they become geologists or simply develop an appreciation for Earth’s dynamic processes.”

Jingyi Li (assistant professor, Asian studies) comes to Occidental from the University of Arizona, where she earned her Ph.D. in East Asian studies with a focus on Japanese history and literature. Prior to that, she earned her M.A. in premodern Japanese literature from Kyushu University and her B.A. in Japanese language and literature from East China Normal University. Her research centers on Japanese popular literature, print culture, and cultural identity in the 19th century, and she volunteers as a podcast host on the New Books Network’s Japanese studies channel.

Li’s interest in Japanese culture began in high school, when, as a self-described “huge anime fan,” she started reading Japanese history to better understand the animated works’ context. She was particularly drawn to the cultural history of the 18th and 19th centuries; her current research focuses on 19th-century calligraphy and painting salons and the role they played in transforming the social perception of educated elites in Japan. In exploring these salons and their impact, she hopes to highlight the ﬂuidity of cultural hierarchy and the inﬂuence of national identity in shaping cultural history.

Like other faculty, Li was drawn to Occidental because of the experiential learning opportunities oﬀered by its small class sizes

From left, assistant professors Samuel Luterbacher (art and art history), Vikram Shende (chemistry), Ben Ratskoﬀ (critical theory and social justice), S.K. Ritadhi (economics), and Samantha Acuña (politics).

and location. “Los Angeles has had a strong presence of Japanese culture, making Oxy an exciting place to teach Japanese language and culture,” she says. “I was excited for the opportunities that students would have to connect what they learn in the classroom with what they see and feel in the streets of L.A.”

One of Li’s favorite moments of connection during her ﬁrst year at Oxy, however, happened on campus. During a visit to the Mary Norton Clapp Library’s Special Collections, Li’s class on early modern Japanese pop culture and literary traditions viewed a series of rare books from early modern Japan.

“The students were able to ask amazingly sharp questions even without any formal training in book culture or paleography,” she says. “They paid such close attention to detail and integrated all kinds of knowledge from class. It was one of my favorite moments.”

Samuel Luterbacher (assistant professor, art and art history) comes to Occidental from Yale University, where he earned his Ph.D. in art history and received the Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C. He earned his M.A. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a B.A. in art history and Japanese language and culture from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. His research focuses on the arts of the early modern Portuguese and Spanish empires, particularly Iberian expansion in Asia and its connections to colonial Latin America.

Having spent three years as a visiting assistant professor at Oxy, Luterbacher appreciates the opportunity to examine artistic movements from broader and more crosscultural perspectives. “I have always been curious about rethinking these traditional parameters and considering the diverse cultural inﬂuences that shaped art both within and beyond Europe,” he says. “Studying the art of the past allows us to preserve nuance, complexity, and diversity in cultural discourse.”

Luterbacher enjoys engaging with students in experiential ways, whether through museum ﬁeld trips or through inviting artists from multiple disciplines to lead hands-on workshops in his classroom. He encourages his students to think “not only about the history behind artifacts, but also about the politics of their display, accessibility, and provenance in modern-day museums.”

Ben Ratskoﬀ (assistant professor, critical theory and social justice) comes to Occi-

dental from Hebrew Union College and USC. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in comparative literature from UCLA and his B.A. in English from Northwestern University. He specializes in histories and theories of antisemitism, race, and fascism; Holocaust and genocide studies; Black diasporic culture and thought; and critical theory and cultural studies.

Ratskoff was first drawn to the intersection of Black and Jewish studies as an undergraduate, when his general education courses in Black studies led to a deeper interest. “It was in these courses that I first developed a critical curiosity around histories of diaspora, race, nation, and genocide, and that I acquired a new language to understand dimensions of Jewish culture and life,” he says.

Ratskoﬀ previously taught in Occidental’s Religious Studies Department while he was completing his doctorate. He appreciates the College’s tight-knit community and support for civic engagement, and admires his “remarkably curious, worldly, inquisitive, and driven” students who are eager to engage deeply in their own education.

“In my experience, Oxy students model rich engagement across diﬀerence and disagreement in the classroom, making for exciting and productive class discussions, and are also eager to extend their learning outside of the classroom, from self-organized reading groups to attending public cultural events in Los Angeles,” he says.

S.K. Ritadhi (assistant professor, economics) comes to Occidental from Ashoka University. He earned his Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from UC Berkeley, and his B.A. in economics from Grinnell College. Prior to his teaching career, Ritadhi worked as a research economist at India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India. He is an applied microeconomist whose research interests lie at the intersection of development and ﬁnance.

Ritadhi is slowly realigning his research toward his ﬁrst love: political economy. He ﬁrst became interested in economics during India’s 2004 federal elections, when the incumbent party campaigned on a platform that highlighted the nation’s GDP growth but lost to a more liberal coalition that called for greater inclusivity in the economic growth process. “This dichotomy between aggregate growth, citizens’ participation in the growth process, poverty, and inequality—and how these aspects all manifested through the

electoral process—was my primary attraction to the ﬁeld of economics,” he explains. At Occidental, Ritadhi enjoys the ability to balance his research with teaching and extracurriculars. (When he’s not in the classroom, he’s competing on the cricket oval in the Southern California Cricket Association’s local league.) He also appreciates students’ robust engagement in classroom discussions.

His favorite class, Econometrics, “is challenging to teach, as it introduces students to a new methodology,” he says. “But I greatly enjoy the responsibility of oﬀering students a completely new approach with which to analyze questions in the world of economics.”

Vikram Shende (assistant professor, chemistry) comes to Occidental from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he was a National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow. He earned his Ph.D. in chemical biology from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and a pair of bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of MichiganDearborn. His research group studies the structure and function of molecules found in nature, and how we can engineer enzymes— proteins that catalyze chemical reactions— that biosynthesize these “natural products.”

Shende ﬁrst became interested in isolating molecules from natural sources when he attended an American Chemical Society national conference as an undergraduate. A presenter described the isolation of halichondrin B, a natural product that comes from a sea sponge, and how a version of that molecule was brought to market as an FDA-approved treatment for metastatic breast cancer.

“Since that presentation, I have been fascinated by the diversity of molecules that can be found in nature and have dedicated my career to ﬁnding new natural products and exploring their potential applications in medicine, agriculture, and as commodity chemicals,” Shende explains.

Shende was drawn to Occidental because of the faculty’s rich history of STEM research and his sense of community and engagement on campus. “Since I ﬁrst stepped foot on campus I have been impressed by the kindness, determination, and curiosity of all the students,” he says. “The faculty, staﬀ, and administration have been so welcoming and have made it easy to know that I made the right choice and am here for keeps.”

RACHAEL WARECKI

An Underground History of Climate Change

Assistant Professor Natasha Sekhon and junior geology major Mira Hart take their research abroad, looking for clues inside Philippine caves

Mira Hart ’26 enjoyed science in high school and assumed she would major in chemistry, although as a self-described “outdoorsy person,” she had a hard time imagining herself working with molecules in a lab as a career. But when she joined the Geology Club in her ﬁrst semester at Occidental, the Seattle resident found her passion—a ﬁeld of study that combined her existing love for the outdoors and chemistry with her newfound interests.

“I quickly learned that I was way more interested in the questions geology poses and that I could use chemistry to ﬁnd the answers to these questions,” says Hart, who traveled to the Philippines in January with Assistant Professor of Geology Natasha Sekhon. There they worked with local researchers and the caving community to install water collectors at three cave sites, gather data on stalagmite formation, and collect stalagmites for further analysis.

The hands-on experience taught Hart how to conduct cave monitoring ﬁeldwork, an integral part of reconstructing climate change data. She hopes her research will produce a

more thorough understanding of ancient climate change as well as clues to help predict Earth’s climate future.

This winter, communities and agricultural areas across the Philippines were disrupted by a higher-than-usual number of typhoons. By monitoring cave systems in tropical regions, which are already highly impacted by climate change and typically understudied, Sekhon is examining the short- and long-term eﬀects of

extreme hydroclimate conditions, such as ﬂoods, droughts, and monsoons.

Through her examinations of inﬁltrated water and stalagmite growth, Sekhon (who has been studying historical climate shifts in the Philippines since 2022) is able to reconstruct periods of previous climate change as far back as 140,000 years ago. “Cave formations such as stalagmites are valuable time capsules that store clues to ancient water climates, going back hundreds of thousands of years,” she says.

Hart is following in Sekhon’s footsteps, gathering data about changes in the strength of the Philippines’ monsoon seasons across geological eras. Using two stalagmite samples collected from the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park cave system, Hart hopes to create a high-resolution paleoclimate record for the Philippines, speciﬁcally examining the period that occurred 20,000 to 40,000 years before the present day. This period is particularly important to researchers because it covers two periods of abrupt ancient climate change, known as Heinrich

Left: Sekhon studies broken stalagmites to decide whether they should be brought back to the U.S. for further research.

Right: Hart collects cave drip water for geochemical analyses to assess processes driving stalagmite formation.

From left, local caver Khylle Tabujara, Sekhon, and Hart stand in front of the St. Paul tropical karst outcrop. Within and below this sits the cave system from which Hart’s samples were taken.

Events (HEs) 2 and 3, that are analogous to modern anthropogenic climate change.

“By understanding how the climate responded to these HEs, we can better predict how the climate will respond to anthropogenic climate change in the future in tropical island nations,” Hart explains. “This knowledge will help inform policy decisions, climate change mitigation eﬀorts, and future research into the drivers of and responses to climate change in the tropics.”

The Philippines trip marked a series of firsts for Hart: her first time in Southeast Asia, her first time conducting fieldwork, and her first time visiting a cave as a researcher rather than a tourist. Hart had to climb, crawl, and swim to reach some of her research sites, an experience that instilled in her “a huge respect for the effort and dedication that international fieldwork requires,” she says. “In addition to learning to collect data and samples in the caves, I also learned a lot about how international fieldwork is organized and the importance of building relationships with local collaborators.”

Hart and Sekhon also were treated to a homemade meal of chicken adobo, considered the national dish of the Philippines, and were unexpectedly introduced to the governor of Cagayan and the mayor of Santa Teresita, an experience that Sekhon describes as “right out of an Anthony Bourdain episode!”

“Everything about this trip was new to me in some way, from the way the cities look to the climate, plants, and animals,” says Hart, who plans to apply to Ph.D. programs in climate research in the fall. “The opportunity to visit the Philippines and see with my own eyes the place I am studying, the cave where my samples grew for thousands of years, and to meet the people who are directly impacted by the changing climate I study makes the research all the more meaningful for me.”

The opportunity to conduct international fieldwork as an undergraduate—which was supported by the Geology Department, the International Programs Office, and the Undergraduate Research Center—only reaffirmed Hart’s belief that she can be successful in a research-focused career: “This experience showed me how incredibly rewarding it can be to work across language and cultural differences on a project like climate research, which has significant importance for the entire planet.”

—RACHAEL WARECKI

Spring-loaded With Speakers

Ed Ruscha, Deirdre Cooper Owens, and Tom Nichols lead the discourse at Oxy this semester

From art to history to politics, the Oxy calendar has been top-heavy with visitors who had plenty to say this semester. Oxy Live! welcomed visual artist Ed Ruscha to Thorne Hall on February 4. On February 18 and 19, historian and reproductive justice advocate Deirdre Cooper Owens visited Occidental as the 2025 Staﬀord Ellison Wright Scholar-in-Residence. On April 8, Atlantic staﬀ writer Tom Nichols delivered the 2025 Jack Kemp ’57 Distinguished Lecture in Choi Auditorium.

Ruscha, whose urban landscapes and multimedia work were featured in exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York’s Museum of Modern Art last year, packed Thorne for his talk with Paul Holdengräber. “His creative vision challenges us to see the world through new perspectives and his contributions to our arts ecology is nothing short of extraordinary,” said trustee Lisa Coscino ’85, who presented Ruscha with an honorary doctorate from Oxy last May. “In so many ways, Ed Ruscha is L.A.”

The Omaha, Neb., native, who came to L.A. to study commercial art in 1956, ﬁrst made a splash in the 1960s, when he began to publish artist’s books under his own imprint. His initial book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), was warmly received by many, but intellectuals were put oﬀ by the content, Ruscha recalled: “They felt like I was messing with their minds.”

An associate professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Connecticut, Cooper Owens spoke in Choi Auditorium on “Slavery, Gynecology, and Black Placental Resistance: Why Black Mothers Matter.” She also led a healing circle with her cousin, Dr. Joy Cooper, cofounder and CEO of Culture Care, a telemedicine startup for Black women, and disability rights advocate Lisa Holloway.

Black studies and American studies double major Mikayla Woods ’25, who interned with Cooper Owens at the Library Company of Philadelphia in summer 2023, calls the professor “a true trailblazer. Her devotion to the intersections of scholarship and advocacy work is inspiring.”

An admitted “small-c conservative,” Kemp Lecturer Nichols expanded on the themes of his most recent books, The Death of Expertise and Our Own Worst Enemy, discussing the weaponization of expertise in popular culture and the antidemocratic movement in the middle class.

“Can any republic survive on ignorance?” he asked in closing. “The answer is no. Our founders in the United States argued that only an informed electorate could sustain this democracy. Even before many of them had died, Adams, Washington, Madison, and others believed that they were already seeing the end and that we weren’t going to make it.” So, what he’s saying is there’s a chance.

Photos by Marc Campos (Ruscha, Nichols) and Sarahi Apaez (Cooper Owens)

left: Ed Ruscha and Paul Holdengräber. center: Deirdre Cooper Owens. right: Tom Nichols.

Illustration by EVA V ´ AZQUE Z Photos by KEVIN BURKE

The Eaton and Palisades ﬁres in January took their toll on members of the Occidental family, including students, alumni, faculty, and administrators.

With a long rebuilding process ahead, they ﬁnd strength and support among the Oxy community

Camilla Taylor had been driving for 16 hours on the night of January 7 and was getting close to their Altadena home when the fire on the mountain came into view. “The hillside was black besides the fire because all of the power was out,” recalls Taylor, an artist, printmaker, and sculptor who joined the Oxy faculty as a resident assistant professor in 2018. Once they got home, they ran inside to find their husband, Jason Troff, with an overnight bag packed and carriers at the ready for their four cats, waiting for an evacuation order. “We’ve got to go!” Taylor screamed. “We have to leave now!”

Within 15 minutes, Taylor says, “We got the cats in the carriers and in the car, we

drove away, and our house burned down that night. We never got an evacuation order. We weren’t even in the preparedness zone.”

Looking back on that night, Taylor says, “I didn’t think that our house was going to burn down. If I had been thinking, I would have taken 10 minutes to get our passports and birth certiﬁcates and get some things out of the house. I got nothing besides my cats and my husband—that was it.” After being away for a month at a residency called Sitka in Oregon, “I never really saw my house again because it was dark. There was no power.”

Taylor’s story is unique—no two wildﬁre stories are alike—but sadly, not an isolated one. The Eaton and Palisades ﬁres ravaged Los Angeles at a scale never experienced in

“I feel awful all the time, but I don’t know what else to do besides just keep doing,” says Camilla Taylor. “It’s not like you get to take a break.”

the ever-growing history of California wildﬁres. And while the Occidental campus was spared from the ﬁres’ trajectories, every segment of the College community experienced their devastation.

Thirteen current employees lost their homes, and many others have been displaced for months by fire-related damage. Emeriti professors Maryanne Horowitz and Lynn Mehl saw their longtime homes in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, respectively, decimated. Six current Oxy students and their families were left homeless, and an estimated two dozen or more alumni lost their homes or businesses to the fires.

Taylor lost not only their home but their studio space as well. “Everyone keeps telling

me that we’re so resilient,” Taylor says— speaking for the couple, but in a way for the Oxy community as well. “But resiliency is not how you feel—it’s how you react. I feel awful all the time, but I don’t know what to do besides just keep doing. It’s not like you get to take a break. You just have to move forward.”

Growing up in Provo, Utah, Taylor originally planned to be an entomologist (“I was already doing a summer internship studying non-social wasps”), but a high school trip to Los Angeles altered that trajectory. “While we were here, we went to LACMA, and I saw this installation called Central Meridian by Michael C. McMillan. And I thought, ‘If this is what you can do in art, then I want to be a part of this.’ ” (Since moving to Los Angeles in 2008, “I’ve gotten to know Michael, and he gifted me a print that burned up in the ﬁre,” Taylor says. “But it was exciting to live with it for a while.”)

A number of factors attracted Taylor and their husband to Altadena. “Jason works at a law ﬁrm downtown, so we circled downtown on the map, going farther out as we were priced farther out,” Taylor says. In unincorporated Altadena, “You could buy a house relatively aﬀordably and have space to make art in ways that you couldn’t most other places.” Taylor had a kiln and was doing foundry work in their backyard, “and as long as I was not being so dangerous that I was alarming my neighbors, no one cared. Our detached garage was my art studio, and we replaced the garage door with all frosted glass so there was natural light all the time. It was perfect for me.”

In the aftermath of the ﬁre, the couple stayed for a couple of weeks in a downtown

studio space that belonged to friends before renting a place in Mid-City that would accommodate their four cats, who range in age from 13 (Mulcifer) to 1 (Totzke), with Alberich and Geordi in the middle.

“They’re roommates, not friends,” Taylor explains. “Totzke has been fantastic through all of this, because his joie de vivre cannot be tamped down. Every new place we’ve gone and every new person he meets, he’s so excited. It’s fantastic to have one member of my family who is doing OK.”

After resisting several friends’ overtures to start a GoFundMe on their behalf, Taylor ﬁnally relented when their artist friend Nova Jiang, calling from London, woke them at 4 a.m. “You don’t have a safety net,” she told Taylor. “Don’t pretend that you can just take care of everything yourself.”

More than 650 donors contributed nearly $68,200 to the fund (“which was very kind,” Taylor says)—and Occidental stepped up with not only a sizable grant within a week of losing their home but also a studio space in the Weingart Center for Liberal Arts. “Occidental gave me this space to work in, which I ﬁnd incredibly generous.”

“We’re absolutely planning on rebuilding, but genuinely I don’t know if we will move back,” Taylor says. “So much of the charm of Altadena was that it was historic and there was this great mix of income levels—there were really fancy houses close to very modest ones. But now the trees are gone, and everything is going to be new. We’re not going to have this beautiful range of history in the buildings anymore.”

Shortly before the ﬁre, Taylor notes, “We applied to be part of this grant program to renovate old houses to have earthquake infrastructure. And the guy who came to look

at our house told us, ‘This is the best-built house from this era in the area.’ We were so proud of that: ‘best-built house.’ But, you know, ﬁre takes everything.”

“This was our forever home,” Caryn Rothschild says of her residence in historic Janes Village in northwest Altadena. In July 2017, she and her family—husband Mike and young sons Logan and Henry—moved into a 1,300square-foot home that was constructed in 1925. “The house had enough charm for me and was move-in-ready enough for Mike,” Rothschild says. “There was even a mature avocado tree in the back—we didn’t know that when we bought the place.

“Mike and I saw 130-something houses, and we were outbid 12 times,” she adds. “This was our lucky No. 13. There were places that we looked at in our epic house hunt that I said were too high up, too much of a ﬁre risk. Our house was only half a mile north of the Pasadena line. This ﬁre came so far south.”

Rothschild joined Occidental as senior director of major gifts in March 2018. Her parents, John Garner ’71 and Carolyn Layton ’71, met as freshmen at Oxy. “At ﬁrst, my mom thought he was a turkey—that was her word,” she recalls, “but by the end of third quarter they were dating. They got married two weeks after they graduated.” (Her father passed away in February 2018, just 2½ months after a “ﬂuke” cancer diagnosis. “Before he died, Dad was over the moon that I was going to work at his alma mater,” Rothschild says.)

When the family was awakened by an evacuation alert at 3:25 a.m. on January 8, “We were part of that group that never got a get-set warning,” she says. “Our phones went absolutely bananas with the message, ‘Go now.’ We left in less than 10 minutes; we had

Caryn Rothschild and husband Mike survey their Altadena property. Among the items recovered from the debris is a bright blue ornament from 2009 of their wedding cake, below

packed up the cars the night before.” One casualty of the rush to leave was Rothschild’s wedding band, which she left by her bedside. A day or two later, a firefighter whose sister works with Rothschild “spent hours at our property trying to find my wedding band,” she says. “The kindness of strangers has been overwhelming in the best possible way.”

Jumping ahead to the present, “We are living at my mom’s home in Pasadena for now,” Rothschild says. “The rental market was tight in L.A. before all this, and pretty much everyone we know who’s ﬁnding a place is ﬁnding it through some connection. And we adopted two big dogs in July [Dusty and Rosie, a pair of rescue doodles], which further complicates things.”

Mike, an independent journalist and author, has been documenting their recovery journey in a series of blog posts on his website. “The stereotype of L.A. is a bunch of neighborhoods with no center, where nobody talks to anyone else,” he wrote in March. “But that hasn’t been our experience losing our home—the city has come out for us.”

Although they both majored in psychology and had a few mutual friends, Natalie Kolodinski ’10 and Adam Greenhouse ’10 largely traveled in separate social circles and only knew each other tangentially. After graduation, both took jobs in the Admission Oﬃce, and that’s when things started to develop.

“We really got to know each other working together in the office,” says Adam, now a business value adviser for Microsoft. “Natalie’s office was next to the water cooler. My office was down the hall, and as we started to get to know each other better, I found myself filling up my water bottle something like 15 times a day as an excuse to talk to her.”

The couple moved to New York for graduate school, completed their master’s degrees, and got married in 2016. Their son, Aaron, was born two years later. “His ﬁrst Oxy Ambassador activity was going to an admitted student reception in New York City,” says Natalie, who returned to Occidental in October 2023 as senior director of advancement services. “Aaron had a name tag and everything—Class of 2040.”

The Greenhouses moved back to Los Angeles in June 2020 during COVID, living in an intergenerational household with Natalie’s parents while they were ﬁguring out next steps. “A big driver for us to come back to L.A. was being in a community with which we had shared values and experiences—something that was going to be important for us to expose our children to,” Natalie says.

Like the Rothschilds, they found a house in Janes Village, a historically Black community in West Altadena. Built in the early 1950s, it had gone through a couple of renovations “that made it easy for us to move into—just what we needed for a small but growing family,” Natalie says. The Greenhouses started escrow when Natalie was 38 weeks pregnant and moved in March 2021, when daughter Eliza was 3 weeks old.

This semester at Oxy, for the ﬁrst time, Adam is teaching Organizational Psychology, which he describes as “the science of people, organizations, and the workplace. Students learn about leadership, motivation, and organizational culture. It’s been really fun so far.”

and games with

Fun

the Greenhouse family at their temporary quarters in Eagle Rock: Natalie ’10, Aaron, Adam ’10, and Eliza.

Following the loss of their home, the Psychology Department quickly identiﬁed a space where Adam could work full-time while he’s teaching, “solving that problem in a very swift and supportive way,” Natalie says. “There’s a very strong culture of care at Oxy that circumstances like this pressure-test and activate. I’ve seen that at every level, including how the president texted me to let me know that he was available for anything.”

“A week or two after the ﬁre, I ran into an administrator [Marisa Moﬀord, associate director of international programs] who had helped me when I was a student on a project, and she gave me a hug and asked how I was doing,” Adam says. “It meant a lot to have someone who I worked with over 15 years ago give me that sense of support. That has always been my experience at Oxy—that

those relationships shine through, especially in hard times like this.”

What’s their thinking about rebuilding? “It’s hard to tell,” Natalie says. “It’s such a monstrous project—I don’t feel like I have the bandwidth to take on a home rebuild at this moment. But the community has to be rebuilt. We’re still trying to ﬁgure out what we can do to support that process.”

For now, Adam says, “We’re trying to stay connected to the community as best we can. Even though we’re living in Eagle Rock, I’m going to be coaching on the Altadena tee-ball team for my third season this spring. Aaron and Eliza will both be playing on the team.”

With Farnsworth Park out of commission, having been damaged during the fire, the league’s organizers were able to find other fields in Pasadena. More than 200 kids

signed up for the Central Altadena Little League, for ages 4 to 14. “Trying to have a fun season, being part of that community, and connecting with other families who also lost their homes or have been displaced, it’ll feel good to give back,” Adam says.

With a son who plays baseball in the Central Altadena Little League, Bill Gould ’86 likewise feels the loss of 91-year-old Farnsworth Park, which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. The community’s history is important to Gould, who moved into a cul-de-sac in Altadena in 1988.

“At the time, there were nine African American families out of 12 homes on my block,” Gould recalls. “I loved that dynamic. It felt like a sign of generational wealth, and maybe moving ahead in life as a community.”

After ﬁve weeks apart in the wake of the Eaton ﬁre, Bill Gould ’86 was reunited with his dogs (including 1-year-old Boston) in mid-February.

As a sociology major at Oxy, Gould participated in the College’s Justice Semester in Washington, D.C., interning with the Public Defender Service to support incarcerated youth. After graduation, he spent a summer working with Crossroads Africa in rural Zimbabwe and living without running water or electricity for most of the summer. “It was a fascinating time to be there,” he recalls.

After earning his master’s in social work at UCLA, Gould dedicated his career to uplifting marginalized youth in Los Angeles. At the child advocacy organization First 5 Los Angeles, he spent 17 years shaping policies and grants for early childhood development. In his current role as a policy analyst with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, Gould studies the impact of state and federal laws on the substance abuse service landscape.

On the evening of January 7, “The winds were just howling and whipping. Trees were breaking. I have never seen the winds be that strong, and I’ve lived there for many years,” he says. “We could see the ﬁre on the mountainside out the back window of our house. But as we were watching the news, they had the ﬁre heading toward Sierra Madre.”

After the power went out, Gould and his wife, Dorena Rodriguez, made the decision to evacuate to a friend’s house with their two children and three dogs. Later that night, he says, “I wanted to go back through my house and retrieve some things. I had an autograph from Alex Haley when he came to speak at Occidental. I had a basketball signed by Kobe Bryant. I had a bottle of champagne the Red Sox had for their 2004 World Series championship.” He also had many family keepsakes, including a diary that his great-great-grandfather William Gould’s oldest daughter had written. “I kept thinking I was going to come back. But it didn’t end up happening.”

The following morning, a basketball pal of Gould’s was helping someone in his neighborhood evacuate and shared a video in their group chat showing the street right above where Gould lived, with the two houses closest to his home fully engulfed in flames. Later in the day, a neighbor who had stayed behind to fight the fire sent Gould a photo confirming his fears. “Sorry, man,” he wrote, “your house went down.”

“There’s many parts of Altadena that are completely wiped out,” Gould says. “Of the 12 houses on my street, half of them burned

down. My brother lived a mile west of me, and his whole neighborhood burned down. “It is surreal sometimes to take a look at what has gone on,” he says. “My wife looked at our insurance policy and it had a zero percent risk rating of wind ﬁre where we lived. We’ve experienced ﬁres before and I’ve always been nervous about smoke damage, but I never experienced something like this.

“There’s a great mix who are living in Altadena—Latino, Asian, white—but there’s a lot of important African American contributions to the area,” he adds. “I really liked joining that community in the 1980s. And 37 years later, I fully intend to move back there when we can rebuild.”

“It’s going to be a long dig-out process,” Bill Gould ’86 says. “But I’m hoping we can come back strong and ﬁgure out ways to build back better.”

Somewhat circuitously, Dave Andres ’83 and his siblings all found their way to Oxy. Older sister Jamie ’79 initially intended to enroll at UC Irvine out of high school. But at the urging of Tigers baseball legend Don Hagen ’63, an assistant principal at her school, she took a tour of Occidental, Dave recalls. Jamie ended up graduating with a degree in geology.

One by one, the Andres siblings followed: Older brother Paul ’81 transferred from Harvey Mudd after a year. Dave himself started at Cal State Dominguez Hills but transferred to Oxy, majoring in American studies and playing baseball for the Tigers. Phil ’84, the youngest, turned down oﬀers from top schools like Pomona to join the family fold.

For Dave’s daughter Grace Andres ’26, a history major, her Oxy experience has been “pretty good so far. I’ve met a lot of kind people and have a lot of really good friends.” Photographing the baseball team all season long—an activity her father began doing in 2016—“has been really nice and given me something fun to do,” she adds.

Not long before Dave and his wife, Susan, got married in 1995, they began looking for houses. A decade earlier, brother Paul and his wife had bought a house in Bungalow Heaven —a 16-block area stretching from Pasadena into Altadena—and his Realtor mother-inlaw told Dave and Susan about a listing on Poppyﬁelds Drive. “We ended up buying it,” Dave says. “It was nice to have my brother a couple of blocks away.” (Paul, too, lost his home in the Eaton ﬁre.)

When the newlyweds moved in, the house had 1,070 square feet with two bedrooms and one bath. “We expanded it signiﬁcantly in 2003 and nearly doubled the square footage, making it three bedrooms and two baths,” Dave says. “All of our kids have lived their whole life in that house.” Grace is the youngest of their three children: Older daughter Emma graduated from UC Irvine, and son Adam, who just turned 24, has CoﬃnSiris Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder. (“He’s a fairly severely handicapped young man but a very nice little guy,” Dave says.)

January 7, he recalls, “was a very windy day. We had already lost power a couple of times and actually had a cord running from my neighbor’s house to the fridge. On her way home, Susan had picked up a generator from Harbor Freight in anticipation of losing power again. As the sun was going down and we were getting ready to eat, she got a headsup text from her teaching partner who lived near Eaton Canyon.”

Like so many others, they got the news about their home by text the next morning. “When we left we really thought we were coming back,” Dave says. “Even though we’ve seen this in California now multiple times, there wasn’t a sense that every single house would just be wiped out. But that’s pretty much what happened in our area.”

After spending 10 nights with his wife’s sister and her husband in Hancock Park, they moved into a home in Temple City (not far from Gould, his Oxy baseball teammate) that would accommodate Adam’s needs as well: “We’re still taking care of him,” Dave says.

Grace, meanwhile, returned to campus early after winter break and found a reprieve from the ﬁres in resuming her photography duties with the baseball team, who surprised her with “a nice present and card,” she says.

Looking to the future, Dave says, “We’ll rebuild on the property,” to which Grace adds, “Yeah—get back on Poppyﬁelds.”

“We actually paid oﬀ the darn house two years ago, so we own it outright—which is nice, because a lot of folks are having to deal simultaneously with insurance companies and lenders,” says Dave, who coincidentally works as a property underwriter in the heavy manufacturing sector of the insurance business. “But we’re going to build pretty much the same house with better ﬁre resistance.

“We had a beautiful California native plant garden,” he adds. “I started as a bio major at Oxy. I’m a nature guy and a birder. Seeing how full of life our yard is compared to our neighbors who just have lawns, we’re going to rebuild that. Some of our native plants are already resprouting green growth, and any rain is going to further help them.”

Even before making an oﬀer on the place they have called home since 2013, Grace (Wang) Flowers ’00 found herself driving up to Topanga and tending the 3½-acre property. “The home was unoccupied, so I would just drive up to visit. I remember pruning the lavender bushes and simply enjoying the serenity and the quiet,” she says. “That’s how we found this little slice of heaven, and we’ve been there close to 12 years.”

Flowers and her husband, Jason, were living in Venice when they decided to go house hunting one weekend. “We drove through the Palisades, but it just wasn’t our vibe,” she says, “so we headed to Topanga and came upon this house. I actually didn’t think we were going to move there. I thought the roads were too windy and I am prone to getting carsick. But I believe in being called to a place much like how certain people are called to visit vortexes. There is a resonance to a place that you feel in your bones. That’s how we felt about Topanga.”

At the time they moved in, Flowers had left the corporate world and started to teach yoga full-time. “The land stayed barren up until I had my ﬁrst child about three years into living in Topanga,” she recalls. “That’s when I started to work on land restoration, restoring the native habitat and ecosystem. When you start to pay attention to a piece of property that has soil on it, it comes to life. With a little bit of love, nurturing, and water, nature comes in and does the rest.

“As I shifted my own identity to motherhood, I started to nurture not only my family but steward the land around me,” Flowers continues. “Just before my second child was

born, I was very intent on having a ﬂock of fowl, so we built a very large enclosed garden at the bottom of the property. Eventually, my vision for the land grew to include everything from a small orchard to medicinal and healing rose gardens and bees. It was a thriving ecosystem of beauty with the ocean as the backdrop. I had visions of community members coming to La Salvia Sagrada—what our home was called—to escape from the jungles of city life. I wanted this to be a place where all could rest in quietude, where children could pick fruit oﬀ trees and run free— a sanctuary for all of our hearts.”

Flowers’ most recent project involved the construction of a ceremonial dome to host not only tea ceremonies but other gatherings “for people to commune, learn, or just retreat in silence. This beautiful temple was almost finished. We were opening to receive our tea guests the following week before the fires came and our first community farm day was scheduled for the end of January.”

She and her family had only returned to their home last fall after 2½ years of being displaced for renovations. “We were a week and a half away from being able to move back into our master bedroom when everything lit up,” she says. “Now, everything’s gone.”

Six days after the fire, staying with a friend down in Oceanside, Flowers and her husband went to look at a house in nearby Cardiff-by-the-Sea, which has become their home for the time being. With her children’s school across the street and the beach mere blocks away, she says, “Cardiff felt like a really soft landing for my family.”

Amy Lyford met her husband during her ﬁrst semester at Pomona College. David Clegg was two years ahead of her and graduated with a B.A. in mathematics in 1984. Lyford graduated with a B.A. in art history in 1986, and the couple got married three years later.

Clegg, a software engineer and mobile security specialist for Sybase and SAP, was among a select group of experts across North America and Europe who met regularly to discuss the challenges of blockchain and artiﬁcial intelligence. “Dave was the real deal,” Lyford says. “But he was also an artist, musician, and furniture maker.”

In November 2017, Clegg died in a motorcycle accident following a heart attack. “He had no idea he had a heart problem,” Lyford says. “Our house in Altadena was in-

credibly meaningful to us both. Maybe six months before he died, my husband said to me, ‘I never want to leave here.’ ”

Following a small memorial service, she scattered his ashes in the yard, honoring the spirit of his wishes. In the aftermath of January’s wildﬁre that claimed their home, “I went back to the house, but I couldn’t ﬁnd his urn,” she says. “And I thought to myself, ‘I guess he stayed here like he wanted to.’ ”

As a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, Lyford wrote her dissertation about surrealism and masculinity, which ended up being her ﬁrst book (Surrealist Masculinities, published in 2007). “When I interviewed at Oxy and other schools in 1999,” she says, “I gave a campus talk about sculptor Isamu Noguchi and Japanese American internment based on work that I did as a master’s student at Boston University,” which became the topic of her second book (Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism, 2013). Of the three campuses she visited, “The reception of my work at Occidental felt the most robust and positive. People asked really good questions about my research.”

Oxy also introduced her to her eventual home. After she accepted the job, Cecilia Fox, executive assistant to then-Dean of the College David Axeen, picked up Lyford and Clegg and drove them up to Altadena. “We thought, ‘Oh my God, this place is really cool,’ ” Lyford recalls. “We had dogs, we liked to go hiking, and it felt a little like Berkeley or some of the nicer parts of the East Bay.”

They purchased a place on Skyview Drive —“I just call it the Skyview House,” Lyford says. “The architect’s name was Boyd Georgi, and he had built the house for himself and his family in 1954. Then he retired to a home he built for his parents in Laguna Beach, which actually still stands to this day.”

After a bit of research, she found Georgi’s architect’s license and called his home. “I actually talked to him and invited him to come meet with me and Dave once we got settled,” Lyford recalls. “Two months later I called, and he had just passed away.” Nearly 25 years later, Lyford met Georgi’s son, Karl, who showed up at her doorstep in December. A month later, the Skyview House was gone.

On the morning of January 8, Lyford and a friend who was staying in her guest house drove back to Altadena to survey the damage. “It was like a war zone,” she says. “There were fires still going on everywhere and officials hadn’t blocked everything off yet. We got up

“Being distracted right now might not be a bad thing,” says Grace Flowers ’00, preparing a tea ceremony at her new residence in Cardiﬀ-by-the-Sea as husband Jason watches.

to my place and the only thing standing was the chimney and this steel trellis in front of the house. My husband and I replaced that trellis in 2011 after a tree crushed the old one.”

When she ﬁnally sifted through the remains some days later, she found several random items, including silverware, as well as two undamaged coﬀee mugs cradled next to each other in the dishwasher. One of them was a handmade mug that had belonged to her mother, who died in 2014: “I kept that mug and thought about her every time I used it.” The other mug was from a whale watch foundation—blue with a whale tail on it— that her husband had picked out when the couple vacationed in Hawai‘i. “Every time I used that mug, I said, ‘Hi, Dave,’ ” Lyford explains. “I know it sounds weird, but I felt like these mugs were sending some kind of message, like ‘We’re with you.’ ”

In conversations with architect Renee Dake Wilson and contractor Carl Bronson,

who renovated her home five years ago, Lyford has expressed an interest in rebuilding, but she’s not making any decisions just yet. “If I do rebuild,” she says, “it would be different and obviously hardened for wildfire. If you look on a map, it shows that my house is in the Angeles National Forest, even though it’s on Skyview Drive, which is above East Loma Alta.”

Lyford, who is currently on leave, is midway through a three-year phased retirement.

“My ﬁnal semester as a tenured professor will be next spring,” she says. “I’ve had people say, ‘You’re too young to retire.’ But my ﬁnancial situation changed after my husband died. I think Dave would want me to travel and do research. My plan is to spend about a month living in Paris and doing research every fall.”

Lyford’s companions through it all have been her dogs Angus, a rescue Doberman, and Kaya, a Rhodesian Ridgeback. “Angus is interested in new things, whereas Kaya needs

her stable, regimented schedule. After we had to evacuate, Kaya was so upset that she was barely peeing and not pooping at all for days. Normally, she would at least go twice a day— you just know these things.”

A few days after the fires, President Stritikus contacted Lyford to offer the Annenberg President’s House, with its fenced-in space, as a temporary shelter. “When Kaya got to the President’s House, she began galloping around and finally started to go to the bathroom.” The home was a comfort to Lyford as well: “There’s this fountain outside by the table that is very zen. My friend and I were also able to do what little laundry we had and feel safe at night.”

The hospitality extended beyond a warm bed and a nice yard when nature calls. After Stritikus returned home from his travels, he prepared dinner for his houseguests. “Tom’s a really good cook,” Lyford says. “He made us feel so welcome.”

In addition to those members of the Oxy community who lost their homes, many others went without power for several days, and still others had to evacuate their homes. In the face of all that, a hot meal of comfort food—brisket, chicken, mashed potatoes, vegetables, and desserts—oﬀered a respite to a gathering of about 50 in Gresham Dining Hall on Thursday, January 9. People brought their children and their dogs in many cases, and “just found solace in each other’s company,” says Mel Gamba, who came to Oxy as associate vice president and chief human resources oﬃcer in September. “For the folks that showed up, it was nice.”

“For many of us, myself included, it was the ﬁrst normal meal we had in over 48 hours,” says Erik Russell, assistant vice president of hospitality and auxiliary services at the College. “That evening we were able to dampen the chaos and restore a sense of normalcy, even if only for a few hours.”

The following day, the Business Office, working closely with Institutional Advancement, sprung into action to provide muchneeded financial support to nearly three dozen employees hit hardest by the wildfires. Building on their experience implementing an Employee Relief Fund at the height of COVID five years ago, they spent much of the weekend putting together the framework for an Emergency Relief Fund to provide immediate cash infusion to those who were suffering the most.

Compared to COVID, “We knew that this natural disaster would impact people in a far greater capacity,” says College Controller Lupe Salmerón. “We had to do something and we had to act fast.”

Before the first dollar had been raised, President Stritikus and Chief Financial Officer Amos Himmelstein made the decision to front-load the necessary capital “because we needed to get money into the hands of the people who really need it as quickly as possible,” Salmerón says. “If we had waited until we had received donations to dispense funds, it could have been weeks.” The initial round of applicants received their funds by direct deposit just a week after the fires.

“Here we have something that was really devastating, that happened very quickly, and there wasn’t even a hesitation by the administration to support them,” Gamba says. “It really speaks to the strength of our commitment to one another as a community.”

“I just got a tattoo of a part of my house on my arm,” Professor Amy Lyford says. She’s sitting on York Boulevard outside Cafe de Leche, whose Altadena location burned in the Eaton ﬁre. “That house was incredibly meaningful to me.”

All totaled, the College raised $278,529 from over 350 donors, with gifts ranging in size from $5 to $25,000—“not only people who are close to the College, such as volunteers and supporters whom we work with all the time, but also people without a long history of giving who felt compelled to step up in this moment,” says Suzy LaCroix, who shepherded the fundraising eﬀorts as vice president of institutional advancement. “It’s been a very touching outpouring.”

In addition to the money that has been distributed so far, the College has set aside funds for ﬁnancial aid to award scholarships

to those students who were impacted by the ﬁres, according to Salmerón

Their eﬀorts have not gone unnoticed.

“The College making the commitment to support people who are probably at one of the lowest points of their lives felt really good,” Lyford says. “It’s putting into practice the kind of ethics that Occidental is meant to follow.

“There’s a lot of conﬂict on college campuses right now,” she adds. “But when push comes to shove, Oxy has done a pretty good job of living up to its mission. It feels very meaningful to be seen and supported.”

With two exhibits opening simultaneously and a new teaching space at Oxy, Assistant Professor Janna Ireland navigates her burgeoning career as she parents two growing boys

By DICK ANDERSON

Advanced Projects in PHOTOGRAPHY

Janna Ireland, in a selfportrait with sons Adrian (in blue) and David (in red) in 2023.

Photo by JANNA IRELAND

WHEN SOUTH CAROLINA resident Julian Washington enlisted in the Army in 1966, he expected to be deployed to Vietnam for his service. Instead, he was sent to learn photography during basic training in New Jersey. After that, he did public relations and photojournalism while stationed in Germany, and he continued to pursue photography professionally after his discharge in 1969. “I grew up with my dad taking pictures and with cameras and lights being around,” says his daughter, Janna Ireland. “I took my ﬁrst pictures at age 5 and then got into taking photographs in a serious way when I was 13 or 14.”

Even after graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in photography and enrolling in graduate school at UCLA four years later, Ireland still wasn’t thinking of photography as her ultimate career goal. “I thought of graduate school as something necessary to teach photography at the college level but still separate from working as a photographer,” says Ireland, who completed her MFA in 2013.

More than a decade later, Ireland’s career in photography is thriving, both academically and professionally. She’s midway through her third year as an assistant professor in the Art and Art History Department at Occidental.

Her work is in the institutional collections of a number of major museums, and her editorial photography has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, among other publications.

Most recently, back in January, two separate exhibits of her architecture photography opened on the same day. Running through September 27, Janna Ireland: Even by Proxy is a centennial exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House featuring 21 new images of the L.A. landmark taken by Ireland. Frontier Spirit: Paul R. Williams in California

and Nevada—an overview of Ireland’s signature work documenting the pioneering African-American architect—recently concluded a six-week run at the Princeton School of Architecture in New Jersey.

While it’s coincidental that both exhibitions opened simultaneously, together they provide a window into Ireland’s growing portfolio, which examines such themes as family and domestic life, the built environment, and interactions between humans and the natural world. “We have been working on the Hollyhock House for a long time,” Ireland says from her oﬃce in Weingart Hall,

which is adjacent to a newly renovated digital lab and darkroom for her students. “The opportunity to do the show at Princeton came together very quickly—I think they asked me to do it the week of Thanksgiving.”

When she was looking for a teaching job in Los Angeles, Ireland was attracted to Occidental’s liberal arts curriculum, its commitment to service, and the work that Oxy Arts was doing in the community. “I bring my classes to all the new shows at Oxy Arts,” she says. Last year she taught the senior seminar in studio art, working with a small group of students on their Senior Comps exhibition at Oxy Arts: “I was able to give each student a lot of individual attention, which they appreciated.”

This semester, Ireland is teaching three classes: L.A. Stories, which explores the relationship between place and photography; Photograph as Object, which utilizes Oxy’s spiﬀy new darkroom space; and Advanced Projects in Photography, a studio course in which students work in a genre and medium of their choosing. Enrollment for each course is capped at 15.

In the classroom, Ireland says, “It is really exciting to me to see students ﬁgure out how to tell their own stories as well as how to ethically and compassionately tell other people’s stories. Watching them learn and hearing the things that they think about is something that feeds into my own practice. It’s part of the work that I do as an artist.”

Nearly a decade ago, Ireland’s nascent career got a boost with a commission by the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University in Burbank to document the architec-

ture of Williams (1894 -1980), who designed more than 2,000 buildings over the course of his 50-year career. “It started as a project that seemed like it would be short-term,” she says. “The idea is that I would have an exhibition of the work at the gallery that Woodbury University had at the time.”

The resulting exhibit, titled There Is Only One Paul R. Williams, opened to acclaim in 2017. (“Unlike conventional architectural photography that is intended to document every detail, Ireland’s shadowy photographs conjure a moody richness, inviting viewers to focus on unique architectural elements and how they may be experienced,” wrote Carmen Beals, an associate curator with the Nevada Museum of Art.) “That could have been the end of the project, but I was still interested in it,” Ireland says. “I still had my Google Alerts on so when a Paul Williams house came on the market, I found out about it, I still had all these opportunities to continue doing the work, So, I kept doing it.”

organized the exhibit into 10 large photos that reﬂect Williams’ dexterity as a designer, accompanied by three grids of smaller images that showcase “three diﬀerent economic levels of Williams homeowners,” Ireland says.

OPPOSITE: A self-portrait of Ireland at Williams’ Rancho San Rafael project in Reno, Nev.

In March 2019, at the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre next door to Hollyhock House, Ireland spoke at an event moderated by former Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne for Occidental’s 3rdLA series. (The event was titled Is There an L.A. Sensibility? Place and Politics in Los Angeles Design.) That was her ﬁrst visit to Hollyhock House, and her ﬁrst exposure to Oxy.

“Because of that talk that I gave at Barnsdall Art Park, I was invited to speak at a conservation symposium at LACMA,” Ireland says, “and the publishers of Angel City Press were there.” That led to the opportunity to publish a book of Williams’ work [Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View, 2020], so Ireland continued to document his architecture. After its release, she says, “I stopped for a while because of the pandemic and I couldn’t go into people’s homes, so that could have been the end.”

But because of the book, Ireland got a magazine commission to go to Las Vegas and

For Frontier Spirit: Paul R. Williams in California and Nevada, at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Ireland

Exhibition photos by Michael Vahrenwald

photograph some of Williams’ work, and pivoting oﬀ of that she was commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art to photograph more of his work in Nevada. All totaled, Ireland devoted seven years to the study of Williams, which has resulted in a reevaluation of his legacy (a discourse that began in the 1990s, thanks to the work of his granddaughter and archivist, Karen E. Hudson).

In summer 2021, Ireland was contacted by Hollyhock House director and curator Abbey Chamberlain Brach about an exhibit to celebrate the centennial of the house, which was built in 1921. In her approach to the project, “It was important to me that the work have its own identity,” Ireland explains. “I decided pretty early on that I wanted the Hollyhock House pictures to be in color. Not only did I want them to be visually apart from the Williams photographs [which are all black-and-white], I wanted to really look at the way color is used in the house.”

Between the pandemic and the mechanics of working with the city of Los Angeles, which owns the property, it took more than three years to bring the project to fruition. Last summer, Ireland ended up making nearly 500 images of the property; she edited that

ABOVE LEFT: Ireland spoke about the life and legacy of Williams at a 3rdLA event sponsored by Occidental in March 2019: “If you’ve ever spent an afternoon driving around Los Angeles, you’ve seen a Paul Williams building or two.” ABOVE: A portrait of Ireland’s spring 2024 Photograph as Object class, taken with her large-format camera. LEFT AND BELOW: A look inside Oxy’s new digital lab and seven-station darkroom, designed by Peter Mitsakos, principal of West Edge Architects. Located in the former printmaking classroom in Weingart (which has been relocated upstairs), the spaces are connected directly to Ireland’s oﬃce.

down to 100 images, which she printed out and examined on a big table in her oﬃce.

After arriving at the ﬁnal group of 20, “There was one image from the larger group that the curator wanted to bring in, so we made that addition,” Ireland says. (At the Hollyhock House show’s opening reception in January, she received the Shulman Institute’s Excellence in Photography Award, presented annually to a photographer “who challenges the way audiences look at physical space.”)

In a major 2024 exhibition titled Janna Ireland: True Story Index, the Santa Barbara

Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara joined forces for a two-museum retrospective in what was labeled as “a mid-career survey and the largest presentation of Ireland’s photographs and installations to date.” Ireland is currently busy turning that exhibition into her next book, but there’s no timetable for its release yet: “We have a designer, but the curator who did the exhibition is pulled into other projects,” she says. “It’s very hard to get everyone together.”

For her next show, Ireland is one of more than 20 contemporary artists who work in self-portraiture exhibiting their work at the

Credits: Marc Campos (3rdLA), Janna Ireland (Photograph as Object), Paul Turang (digital lab)

Forest Lawn Museum. Opening April 26 and running through August 10, Persona: Exploring Self-Portraiture will feature the work of these artists as well as historical self-portraits in a range of media, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, fused glass, textile art, and illustrations.

FAR LEFT: Patrons at an opening night reception in January for Janna Ireland: Even by Proxy, Hollyhock House’s centennial exhibit, featuring 21 new images of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ﬁrst L.A. commission. LEFT: Ireland, shown with Hollyhock House director and curator Abbey Chamberlain Brach, received the Shulman Institute’s Excellence in Photography Award at the opening. BELOW: Three perspectives of Hollyhock House taken by Ireland. The image on the right combines a photograph Ireland made at the house last summer with a photo of the olive grove that she took in 2022.

While Ireland continues to explore selfportraiture in her photography (her go-to camera is a Fujiﬁlm GFX100S), in recent years she has focused her lens more on her family. As a mother of two—sons Adrian and David are 9 and 7, respectively—“my relationship to family changed when I had children,

of course,” she says. “Now, they’re in a lot of my work.”

Do her boys enjoy being photographed? “They either enjoy it or don’t mind it,” she says with a smile. “My youngest is very interested in art, but I’ve gotten very good at doing it quickly before they get bored.”

Reception photos by Paul J. Cozzi

SITTI N G DOWN WITH THE STAN DUPS

By DICK ANDERSON

“Comedy is a beautiful torture sometimes,” says David Murphy ’02, photographed at the

Laugh Factory in Hollywood on Nov. 18, 2024.

Photos by MAX S. GERBER and MARC CAMPOS

Paul “PK” Kim ’98, Eddie Gorton ’01, and David Murphy ’02 trace their comic odysseys from talent shows and laundromats to Thorne Hall and the Laugh Factory

“ WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, I had the biggest crush on Margaret Cho,” David Murphy ’02 recalls. “I would have dreams where I was on a talk show with her.” For Murphy and fellow stand-up comics Paul “PK” Kim ’98 and Eddie Gorton ’01, Sept. 6, 2024, was a dream come true—the chance not only to perform at their alma mater in an iconic space (Thorne Hall) but to open for a pair of comedy veterans: Saturday Night Live alumna Melissa Villaseñor and Cho herself.

“For an hour or so before the show, we were back in the green room just chopping it up,” Gorton says. (Of the trio, only Kim had met Cho before, having interviewed her several years ago for a Laugh Factory podcast.) “The three of us were starstruck with both of them—Melissa being on SNL and Cho just being an absolute legend in the game. I’ve known about her since I was a kid. I was sitting there thinking to myself, ‘Don’t say anything stupid.’ ”

At the encouragement of Cho’s assistant, Murphy shared his adolescent dream with the Asian American comic pioneer. “She was very receptive,” he says. “She has all these tattoos and I have tattoos. Hopefully, I’ll run into her again one day at a comedy club.”

As for the show itself—Laugh Your Class Oﬀ!—which was supported by the First-Year Engagement Program Fund through a gift

from Oxy trustee Larry Solomon ’84—Villaseñor’s vocally dexterous set, including pitchperfect impressions of Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, and Natalie Portman, brought much of the crowd to its feet, including President Tom Stritikus. And if anyone was fretting that the notoriously profane Cho would tone down her act in the august surroundings of Thorne Hall, worry not; her ribald barbs would have made Charles Thorne blush. “The students went crazy,” Murphy says. “The energy in there was powerful.”

In terms of stand-up seniority, Kim did his ﬁrst open mic at the Laugh Factory a quarter-century ago. Murphy ﬁrst took the stage in January 2014, and Gorton went on in March 2019, just shy of his 40th birthday.

Perhaps you’re wondering: How did a philosophy major, a psych major, and a econ major get to this place? “When PK, David, and I realized we’re the only three alumni doing stand-up in L.A. that we knew of, I began pushing this idea of getting on stage together,” Gorton says. The trio performed for the ﬁrst time collectively on Nov. 15, 2023, at an Oxy L.A. alumni mixer at the Laugh Factory Hollywood.

The event was such a success that they did a second show at Oxy in April 2024, part of an evening of comedy in the Cooler assembled by Steve Eulenberg, Occidental’s assis-

tant director of student involvement and concert production. Other comics on that bill included Fahim Anwar, Andrew Adolfo, and BT Kingsley, with Carlos Aguilar ’98 (Kim’s longtime friend and Oxy roommate) emceeing the show. “The Cooler was mostly full, but not packed,” Kim says. “Thorne was on another level. That was an epic night.

“There are probably other Oxy alumni who have done stand-up, but we’re trying to keep that dream alive,” he adds. “I hope one of us three can make it big, because we’ll all help each other.”

PK Kim: “I always wanted my son to be a leader in America. I wanted to name him Martin Luther Kim—the leader of Asian American people. My wife always said, ‘That’s so much pressure. Do you want to do that to him?’ So, our second choice was Abraham Lynn Kim.”

“Many ﬁrst-generation immigrants only use biblical names,” Kim proclaims. “Growing up, I knew ﬁve other Paul Kims, so everybody called me ‘PK.’ ” He was, indeed, a preacher’s kid, and his father pastored a big church in El Sereno with a congregation of more than 3,000.

Growing up in a strict religious household, “I wasn’t allowed to listen to music on the radio—it was all the devil’s music—and I wasn’t allowed to watch anything vulgar,”

Kim says. “When my friend gave me a tape of Eddie Murphy Delirious, I was blown away. [Gorton likewise cites the classic 1983 standup special as an early inﬂuence.] After my parents went to sleep, I would stay up and watch Johnny Carson’s opening monologue every night. And the fact that The Tonight Show was in Burbank made it feel real to me—that people did this for a living.”

Having endured his share of verbal taunts as a teenager, Kim turned to comedy in selfdefense. “I would recite these stand-ups that I was watching, and that gave me an ‘in’ toward diﬀerent groups of friends where I would be self-deprecating,” he says. “Socially, comedy helped me a lot.”

Academically, he admits, “I did not do well at Oxy. My mind was all over the place, and I got my ass kicked in philosophy. But my professors rocked my world. Occidental opened my eyes—it was like ripping a BandAid oﬀ for a kid who grew up in a boxed-in church life.”

At age 23, Kim launched an Asian talent show called Kollaboration as a showcase for what he calls a “very fragmented” community of Asian American performers. “I was trying to show people, ‘Hey, we’re not just math and science geeks—we actually have singers, dancers, poets, and comedians.” Kim poured $5,000 of his own money into the show, renting a 1,200-seat theater. The ﬁrst event sold only 200 tickets, he says, “but the kids in the show emailed me messages like, ‘This really made a diﬀerence in my life.’ ”

Eventually, Kim turned Kollaboration into a nonproﬁt, spending 10 years as executive director while training youth for leadership roles, building a network of Asian American performers, and expanding the program into 13 cities nationwide as well as Toronto. “It got really big,” he says. “For our ninth show at Shrine Auditorium, 6,300 people came out.”

Around the time that Kim launched Kollaboration, he started doing stand-up at the Laugh Factory, a Sunset Strip mainstay since 1979. On Tuesdays he would see a line outside the venue for Open Mic Night, where owner Jamie Masada would take the ﬁrst 10 comics in line for a guaranteed two-minute set (with an additional 10 chosen in a random drawing). “People waited in line for six hours, maybe longer,” Kim says. “Some guys wore diapers if they couldn’t leave the line.”

Kim did the line (but not the diapers) for about a year, starting his day selling ads for

the L.A. Times’ Food section at 6 a.m. every Tuesday so he could leave early. Then one day, Masada asked him if he wanted to host a weekly Asian Night. “I thought that was my break right there,” he says. “I worked so hard promoting that show, bringing so many people to the Laugh Factory, and hosted that show for almost 20 years.”

Kim has performed at the Laugh Factory hundreds of times over the last 25 years— not only at the Hollywood mother ship, but also Las Vegas, San Diego, and Long Beach. Perhaps his most popular video is a 2013 clip titled “North Korean Comedian,” which has 2.4 million views on the Laugh Factory’s YouTube channel.

As a father of three, a hotel event director, and running a wedding event company (Prokreation Entertainment) on weekends, comedy is fourth on Kim’s call sheet most days. “I have all the excuses, but I need to ﬁnd a dedicated time to write,” he says. “Stand-up used to be all about material, but now all the clips that are going viral are crowd work. I’m really trying to strengthen that muscle.”

David Murphy: “I’ve been dating this woman who’s a little bit older than me. I didn’t realize she was older until she gave me her email and it was Sarah@hotmail.com. And I said, ‘You were the ﬁrst Sarah to sign up for Hotmail—no underscores, no numbers?’ God created the universe, and his email is Jesusdad1225@hotmail.com.”

“When I started doing comedy, I would see PK at the Laugh Factory,” Murphy says. “He’s the sweetest, most encouraging human there is.” The two connected over Oxy, and Kim put him in a show he was producing. “I did really well and after I got oﬀstage, PK said, ‘Oh, man, I’m so glad you’re funny. All I knew about you was that you went to Oxy.’ ” Murphy chuckles. “He was so relieved.”

A graduate of Daniel Murphy (no relation) High School, Murphy played basketball for three years under Coach Brian Newhall ’83 and majored in economics at Occidental. He thought that he would pursue a career in business like his dad, but the class that had the biggest impact on him was an elective he picked up to impress a “cute” theater major.

“I took an acting class from Professor John Bouchard,” he says, “and everyone did a scene at the end of the semester. After class, Professor Bouchard pulled me oﬀ to the side and told me, ‘You have something.’ As I turned around to walk oﬀ, he said, ‘I’m

serious, David. I wouldn’t say it’s developed or anything, but there’s something about you on stage, that’s all.’ ”

His first job after graduating was in sales for a national insurance company, complete with an Amex corporate card and traveling for work around the country. Even so, “I wasn’t happy being in the office,” Murphy says. “I realized I didn’t have the money-at-allcost gene that some people have. Life was too short to do something that I wasn’t passionate about, and I definitely did not have a passion for insurance.”

Consequently, Murphy started traveling abroad on his own, a passion that continues to this day. “I went to a couple places and that changed me. I saw people being happy in diﬀerent parts of the world who didn’t have as many material things.”

Over the years, Murphy has visited about 26 countries. “I’ve traveled to Bali four times now,” he says. “There’s no status there. Everybody’s on scooters and wearing beach clothes —tank tops and board shorts. Everything is chill and the cost of living is really cheap.”

Making the leap into stand-up “took me a while,” Murphy admits. Though he would land the occasional acting gig, memorizing lines “was never really my thing,” and he grew frustrated with the industry’s red tape: “Too many people had to say yes.”

On Jan. 13, 2014, Murphy went to his ﬁrst open mic at a place called Amsterdam Cafe in North Hollywood. “It was scary,” he recalls. “A comedian friend of mine said, ‘Come to the open mic.’ I think there were ﬁve people there. Maybe a minute and a half into my set, I was thinking, ‘Man, these three minutes are moving slow.’ But I fell in love with it. When I told my dad, ‘This is what I want to do,’ he told me, ‘I don’t care what you do. It could be whatever you want. So many people spend their lives on the platform. Don’t wait to get on a train—just pick a train.’

“A lot of comedy is what happens oﬀstage—your ability to engage, network, and be friendly with all kinds of people,” he says. “Everybody always tells me, ‘Murph, you’re so good at talking to people,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, because I went to Oxy. There were so many diﬀerent types of people there, and I’ve always been fascinated by people.”

After the Thorne Hall show last semester (“a bucket-list moment”), Murphy felt the same warmth about the current generation of students that he knew a quarter-century

As a transfer student at a private K-12 school near Burbank, “I ate lunch alone every day for months in high school, but it shaped me,” Kim says. “That’s when I started becoming this deep thinker and fantasizing about doing comedy.”

ago. “Oxy still has the same friendly culture on campus where you can talk to anybody,” he says. “I went to the Cooler after the show and when I tried to pay for something, these kids were like, ‘No, I’ll get the pizza. I have so much money on my card.’ I remember doing the same thing as a student when visitors would come to campus.

“Comedy has a lot of ups and downs,” he adds. “You’re driving three hours down to San Diego just to do six minutes without getting paid and turning around. I’ve done shows in laundromats and on sidewalks. Everybody thinks of comedy as just clubs. The truth is, you do a lot of grunt work, but you love it.”

Whether it’s telling his own jokes and stories or writing material for others, comedy

is Murphy’s full-time pursuit. In recent years, he’s gone out on the road opening for headliners Theo Von, Eric Griﬃn, Amir K, and Damon Wayans Jr., among others.

For much of his career, commercials have been his bread-and-butter. Murphy has appeared in about 50 national commercials for brands such as McDonald’s, Apple, and Tide. For a national commercial like the one he did for AT&T last year, he says, “You might make $40,000 from that one day.”

Murphy recently wrapped production on the second season of the BET comedy series Churchy, on which he is co-head writer. Last year, he and his writing partner wrote a feature ﬁlm script for Churchy creator and star Kevin “KevOnStage” Fredericks as well. He’s

done some punch-up jobs on writing jobs with the Farrelly Brothers—two seasons of the streaming series Loudermilk as well as The Now, a 2021 show for the Roku Channel.

“My dream is to write for a network TV show for ABC or NBC or something,” he says. “I feel like it’s in the universe. I went on a walk yesterday with a buddy who just sold a show to Amazon. I’m around it. I’m seeing that it’s doable.” (Fun fact: Murphy’s high school basketball coach was Kenya Barris, creator of Black-ish and a host of other series.)

“If I can go through life and not have to wake up and go to something I don’t want to, that’s a super win for me. I don’t need to be rich. I like traveling. I spent two months in Bali last year. And if I want to go to lunch

with my dad, I can go to lunch with my dad. But that comes with keeping a low overhead. I just hope to be doing this for a long time.”

Murphy’s dad has been to two or three of his shows, “but not because he won’t come,” Murphy says. I just tell him not to come. I still get nervous. I only recently had my ﬁrst show where I was OK with bombing. It took me 10 years to realize he’s still gonna love me even if I don’t do well.” His mom has never come to a show, but for a diﬀerent reason: “She thinks I talk about her too much.”

Eddie Gorton: “I’m the only one of my friend group from high school that made it out and went to college. It’s a lot of pressure when you’re the only one. Clap it up if you’re the smart person in your friend group—even if you came here with your dumb friends. They won’t know.”

Last May, Eddie Gorton taped a game show hosted by Travis Kelce titled Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity? We won’t spoil the episode (which premiered on Amazon Prime Video in December) but Gorton misspelled a word for $15,000, he says: “The kids at school have been reminding me how to spell that word ever since.”

When he was applying to colleges in 1997, Gorton was looking to enroll at San Jose State and play football as a walk-on when he got a phone call from Marcus Garrett ’93, an assistant football coach for the Tigers. “Oxy’s football team was looking for some speed and I

ran track as well at that time,” says Gorton, who grew up in San Mateo. “Once I got to Oxy, I played football and ran track for a couple of years.”

Later on, as a psychology major, he gave up sports (“I wasn’t going to the NFL”) and started focusing on student life, helping to revive Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity’s Lambda Rho chapter and reinvent campus radio station KOXY. “Going to Occidental was the best decision I ever made,” he says.

When he graduated from Oxy, “I didn’t have a plan,” Gorton admits.“I didn’t have a car, an apartment, or a job. But within a week, I got hired by Enterprise Rent-A-Car, found an apartment in Pasadena with some friends from Oxy, and got a used car. Once I got micro-established as far as survival goes, I decided I wanted to be a teacher.”

Even as a ﬁrst-grader, Gorton says, “I remember thinking, ‘I can do this better than my teacher, Mrs. Trailor.’ She was so boring, and I would be funnier than her doing this. I was like 6 or 7, right? I always had that in the back of my head.”

Fast-forward 16 years: As luck would have it, one of his customers at Enterprise was a principal, and he put Gorton in touch with a colleague who needed to replace a teacher in a combined fourth grade/ﬁfth grade class with four months remaining in the school year.

“I think of teaching as an art, not a science,” he says, “and I always had that ability

the green room in

on Sept.

The Stand-up Sit-Down—an exclusive video featuring Kim, Gorton, Murphy, and chuckles galore—visit oxymagazine.edu.)

to talk to kids and work with students.” Pointing to Malcolm Gladwell’s maxim, he says, “If you do the math, it takes about 9½ years to get to 10,000 hours in front of the kids. I was maybe in my ninth year when I thought, ‘I’m really good at this.’ ”

After 12 years, he left the classroom to become a Title III English Language Instructional Coach. He did that for two years, followed by nearly 18 months as a restorative justice coordinator for about 25 schools in the district, and three years as an assistant principal at Strathern Street, Sylvan Park, and Carpenter elementary schools.

In September 2020, Gorton accepted a job as principal of Colfax Charter Elementary School. “Administrators were clamoring for a new voice,” he says, “and I think they reached out to me because they wanted to bring a little more jazz to the situation.”

In 2022, Colfax was one of two LAUSD elementary schools to be named a National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education. “Coming out of COVID, we were just really smashing these state tests,” Gorton says. “My teaching staﬀ is by far the best that I’ve ever worked with. I ended up in a great spot.” (That same year, Gorton received the Alumni Seal Award for service to the community from Occidental.)

Gorton got the nickname “Principal of Comedy” before he got the Colfax job. “After I started stand-up, the host of a show I was doing knew I was an assistant principal,” he recalls. “When he introduced me, he said, ‘Here’s the Principal of Comedy.’ I took that name and branded the heck out of it.”

For years, Gorton had been channeling his inner stand-up in the classroom and at school assemblies. In the summer of 2018, with his 40th birthday on the horizon, he was at a dinner party where guests went around the table talking about a work of art that inspired them. “I mentioned this HBO documentary about Robin Williams [Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind] and said, ‘I’ve been thinking about doing stand-up for the ﬁrst time.’ This guy across the table gets up and says, ‘You should do it. And if you don’t

Inside

Thorne Hall

6, 2024, prior to Laugh Your Class Oﬀ! From left, Eddie Gorton ’01; Margaret Cho and her beloved chihuahua, Lucia; David Murphy ’02; Melissa Villaseñor; and Paul “PK” Kim ’98. (To watch

do it by the next time I see you, f*ck you.’ He kind of playfully cussed me out, but I was thinking, ‘Now I’ve got to do it.’”

The very ﬁrst joke he told on stage was based on a true story. “I lost my Social Security card when I was about 25 and had to go down to the oﬃce and get a new one. In the government system, my ethnicity was listed as Caucasian, because my mom is white—when I was born in the hospital, the nurse checked the box next to Caucasian. I was legally white for 25 years. And when the lady across the table asked me if I wanted to change it, I replied something like, ‘Yeah, let’s get this party started!’”

The story builds to a climax that really happened: On his way home from the Social Security oﬃce, Gorton was pulled over by a patrol car. “The cop comes up to my window and asks me, ‘Do you know why I pulled you over?’ And I said, ‘I’ve been Black for 12 minutes. Y’all don’t mess around.’ We both laughed, and he didn’t give me a ticket.”

Comedy isn’t Gorton’s primary job, of course—he was judging a spelling bee at Colfax on the day of this interview—but he tries to maintain a routine for his side hustle. “Once a week I’m writing,” he says, “and twice a month my goal is to get up at a legit venue and tell some jokes. The buckets that I usually play with are things that happen at school, things that happen with my wife and kids, and things that have happened to me personally that involve race.

“Growing up, my immediate family at home was all white people. My mom, dad, and sister were all Irish. Along with your general childhood experiences, I was surrounded by alcoholism and quite the blended family. So, you pull from all that and make it funny.”

In his second year as a stand-up, Gorton got the chance to open for comic Dan Mintz (best known as the voice of Tina on Bob’s Burgers). “Our kids were in kindergarten together, and we became friends,” he says.

A typical weekend of stand-up goes like this: “You do five shows in three days— a Thursday show and two shows each on Friday and Saturday,” Gorton notes. “I flew all the way to Tampa for my first time ever going out with Dan. And on the way there, he told me, ‘If you bomb on Thursday, you will be hosting on Friday.’

“I never looked back,” he declares. “I was funny on Thursday.” And he’s been funny every Thursday ever since.

With Oxy-speciﬁc jokes name-dropping dorm life and SAE, Gorton quickly won over the Thorne Hall audience. “But when I got into my other material, that worked, too,” he says.

Judgment Calls

Separated by 2,700 miles, National Labor Relations Board administrative law judges Brian Gee ’87 and Ira Sandron ’71 ﬁnd common ground in Oxy

congressional intern in summer 1970 and to go on to law school.

“I use my Oxy education every single day of my life,” says Gee, who majored in history and lives with his wife, Grace Choe ’88, in Los Angeles. “As a judge, I need to concisely explain nuanced concepts. Without the Oxy writing program, I wouldn’t be the clear writer I am today.”

What was the atmosphere at Oxy like during your respective eras?

Sandron: Reﬂecting the national debate over the Vietnam War, there was a large peace movement on campus that wanted the College to advocate against the war. Some professors and students disagreed with this, asserting that the College should refrain from taking any position. Importantly, Occidental fostered an atmosphere of tolerance and respect for other points of view, despite the heated emotions that the war engendered.

Gee: When I arrived in 1983, the vibe at Oxy was still laid-back and liberal artsy. The emphasis was on personal growth, not necessarily about ﬁnding the right career. Over the years, the Reagan era started to seep in, and by the time I graduated, people had started thinking more about careers and professional grad schools—nothing wrong with that, it was just a change.

Did any particular professors of classes at Oxy have a lasting impact on you?

Sandron: In addition to Dr. Reath, I had a special relationship with political science professors James Lare, Raymond McKelvey, and Jane Jaquette. They all contributed to my knowledge of politics, our constitutional system, and the interface of law and society.

Whenever Administrative Law Judge Ira Sandron ’71 of Miami is in Los Angeles for a trial, he has lunch with his L.A.-based counterpart, Brian Gee ’87. “We enjoy reminiscing as well as discussing procedural issues,” says Sandron, who works out of the Washington, D.C., Branch of the Division of Judges within the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

“Ira and I have a lot in common, including our shared Oxy experience,” says Gee,

who works out of the San Francisco Branch —just like Sandron did at the outset of his nearly 50-year career in government service.

“The substantive knowledge and writing and analytical skills that I gained from my time at Occidental paved the way for me to become a government lawyer and administrative judge,” says Sandron, who majored in political science and was encouraged by his adviser, Professor Richard Reath, to be a

Gee: As a senior, I had an independent study project on Asian American literature with David Axeen. I chose the books and got together with Professor Axeen to discuss them. Our conversations were always interesting and enriching. I was also inﬂuenced by Eric Newhall ’67, my professor for American literature, and his humble, self-eﬀacing way of speaking. To this day, I follow his example and phrase my positions with, “I think….”

Why did you pursue a career in law?

Gee: During my junior year, I had an internship at an L.A. city councilman’s district oﬃce. One day, a homeless man came into the oﬃce and asked for help. I made some calls and was able to get him immediate assistance. After that experience, I knew I wanted to use law to pursue community service. It wasn’t

Growing up in Highland Park, Gee would study in the Occidental library while in high school.

so much law but rather what I could achieve through law that motivated me. It still does.

Sandron: I always enjoyed writing and following politics, and from my poli sci classes, particularly Constitutional Law, I decided early on that I wished to pursue a legal career.

How did your law school experience inﬂuence your trajectory?

Sandron: Duke Law School actively recruited seniors, and Dr. Reath had received very positive feedback from alumni who had gone there. Charles H. Livengood Jr., former chair of the American Bar Association’s Labor and Employment Law section, taught most of the labor law courses at Duke. I was his research assistant during my third year. Prior to graduation, I accepted a job oﬀer with Region 31 of the NLRB in Los Angeles.

Gee: Because I wanted to focus on employment and labor law, I asked Vanderbilt Law Professor Robert Belton, an accomplished employment and civil rights lawyer, to be my adviser. He emphasized to students the importance and dignity of work, and encouraged me to pursue a career with the NLRB.

How did your work as federal trial attorneys prepare you to serve as judges?

Sandron: I was a trial attorney for the NLRB, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service before becoming an immigration judge in 1991. I learned the importance of being prepared, of treating everyone with respect, and of realizing that trial strategies are not locked in concrete but often need to be adjusted depending on the course of a hearing.

Gee: Trial work, at its core, is simply presenting a compelling narrative through witnesses and documentary evidence. If you tell a story that is believable and compelling, then the legal analysis part naturally ﬂows your way. As a history major, I always enjoyed explaining how something came to be. It was by litigating a lot of cases as a younger attorney that I developed the background to become an administrative law judge.

How would you describe the role of administrative law judge?

Sandron: My primary responsibility is to apply the law even-handedly and to serve the public interest in the best way that I can. The challenge can be in balancing the need to conduct a trial eﬃciently so as to minimize the burden in time and expense for the government and all other participants, while at the same time aﬀording the parties the op-

“I have fond memories of Oxy’s close-knit community and its focus on providing a well-rounded education that encouraged free thinking,” Sandron says.

portunity to present relevant evidence for a full record. At times, I serve a quasi-mediator role before the hearing opens. Engaging in dispute resolution that ends with a settlement acceptable to all parties is quite satisfying.

Gee: In most trials, you have two opposing parties who present diﬀering versions of events. Did this happen or did that happen? Our ﬁrst job as judges is to oversee the hearing to make sure that all parties get the chance to present their version of the case fairly and fully. That’s crucial because the trial record is all that appellate bodies see. Once we have an evidentiary record, I decide which facts are most credible and then simply apply fact to law. We judges don’t have authority to make law—we just apply the credible facts to existing case law and then draw a conclusion.

What do you ﬁnd most rewarding about your work?

Sandron: No two cases are identical. I go to diﬀerent cities to hear cases involving a

wide range of respondents—usually employers but sometimes unions. During the course of the trials, I learn about diﬀerent industries, including how technological developments impact on how they operate. Some respondents are mom-and-pop businesses, while others are billion-dollar corporations.

Attorneys diﬀer widely in temperament and/or competence, and witnesses’ credibility has to be determined based on their demeanor, the content of their testimony, and credited evidence in the record. I enjoy the challenge of analyzing witness testimony and documents and writing a decision that is persuasive and hopefully will be upheld on appeal by the agency and the federal courts.

Gee: I went into public service just to make sure regular people get treated fairly. In a workplace, there is a hierarchy. But in a courtroom, everyone is equal. I ﬁnd it rewarding that the employee witnesses in my courtroom have the opportunity to come and tell their story.

Photos by Kevin Burke (Gee) and Kiko Ricote (Sandron)

Newlyweds Anne Marie (Kurtz) ’57 and George Novinger ’54 on the front porch of George’s family home on Burchett Avenue in Glendale in August 1954. inset: Anne Marie’s 2013 memoir.

night on the porch of Haines Hall, “I said, ‘George, I want to tell you a secret,’” Anne Marie says. “He leaned down to me and I kissed his ear. George later said that was the moment he fell for me.” Four months after that, the couple secretly eloped to Las Vegas before the school year was over.

20 Minutes With Murtz

Anne Marie (Kurtz) Novinger ’57 checks in at 89—and shares her secret to 67 years of wedded bliss

It’s a meet-cute story that bears repeating: Anne Marie Kurtz ’57 met her future husband, George Novinger ’54, in a bedroom of the ATO house. “George had been injured in a football game against Pomona, and he was sitting on the bed, with his leg in a cast, where the girls put their coats and purses,” she recalls. “I immediately fell for him because he was very good-looking. George said he’d been smiling and waving at me on the Quad for weeks, but I would look the other way because I was very nearsighted. I didn’t like to wear my glasses—I thought they made me look icky.”

When they ﬁnally went out on a date three months later, as the two said good

George graduated from Oxy in June 1954, but Anne Marie dropped out after a single year of study, much to the disappointment of her mother, 1922 alumna Anne Marie Jacobsen.

“Our family has seven people who went to Oxy, and all of them graduated except for me and my mother,” she says. “But I was determined to ﬁnish college.”

It would be another 15 years before Anne Marie, by then the mother of three, would complete her degree in biology from Cal State L.A., and from Pasadena City College’s nursing program two years later. She spent four years working in the Los Angeles and Glendale school districts before taking a job in 1975 as a nurse director at Glendale Community College Clinic, where she would remain for the next two decades.

In 1982, George was oﬀered a job he couldn’t refuse: After 27 years at Herbert Hoover High School in Glendale, he was selected out of 62 applicants for the job of principal of Tehachapi High School. Anne Marie remained in Glendale, and the couple commuted for 13 years between Tehachapi and Glendale. “It was good for our marriage, because we got on each other’s nerves when we were both working so hard down here,” she says. “It turned out to be a blessing.”

After retiring as principal in 1992, George became a ranger naturalist in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest east of Bishop. “He was very popular teaching people about these ancient trees that were over 4,000 years old,” Anne Marie says. Soon after she moved to Tehachapi in 1995 to be with her husband full-time, George announced that he and a business partner were going to buy an old packing shed that had belonged to Anne Marie’s uncle, J.C. Jacobsen, and turn it into a retail space. Initially, “I sort of bristled,” she admits, but the three opened the Apple Shed—a 64-seat restaurant with a bakery, gift shop, and fudge factory—in 1996.

“George would work mornings on the restaurant side and I would work afternoons running the gift shop,” Anne Marie says. Over the years, her customers included Oscar-winning actor Jack Palance, actress and comedian Lily Tomlin, and Oprah Winfrey, who dropped in one day for lunch with her boyfriend, Stedman Graham. “When they left, everybody waved at her from the porch—and Oprah waved back,” she recalls.

In 2013, Anne Marie published her memoir, Where Did Murtz Come From? And How Did She End Up in Tehachapi? “I wrote the book so that my children and grandchildren would know about my life and about their part in it.” The process took more than six years, but “I had a lot of fun doing it,” she says, “and readers told me they stayed up all night reading it.” The book sold over 500 copies. (To answer the titular question: “Murtz”—a play on her maiden name—is a childhood nickname that stuck.)

Following the death of their partner and manager, the Novingers sold a majority interest in the Apple Shed in 2005 with an eye toward ﬁnally enjoying retired life. In 2015, they sold the business to manager Mano Lujan and his wife, MeiMei, who renamed it The Shed. Citing family obligations, the Lujans closed the restaurant for good in December 2016.

Good news: There may be life in the old shed yet. “We’re in the middle of a big process to turn the property into the Apple Shed Historical Museum,” Anne Marie says. “We’re setting up all the legalities and gathering memorabilia to go in the building.”

A fifth-generation Californian, Anne Marie now lives in La Crescenta with daughter Barbie Novinger ’81. She remains a big booster of Occidental, having created a charitable remainder trust (with George) with a gift of Apple stock to the College in 2006.

Much has changed in Anne Marie’s life since the book’s publication. Son George “Tom” Novinger ’81 and his wife drowned while vacationing in Hilo, Hawai‘i, in 2017; and her husband passed away in 2022 after 67 years of marriage. Does she have any desire to update her memoir? “Well, I only have seven copies left, so I’m thinking I could just republish it,” she says. (The occasional copy pops up on Amazon.) “I’m 89, for heaven’s sake. I just walked four blocks and it feels good to sit down.”

—dick anderson

Photo courtesy Anne Marie Novinger ’57

Snapshots From a Community Dinner: Oxy Loves L.A.

Students, alumni, faculty, staff, and their families enjoyed a special dinner at Branca Patio and Gresham Dining Hall on March 22. Titled Oxy Loves L.A., the event was designed to offer a reprieve from the aftermath of the wildfires “in a very casual, low-key atmosphere,” says Dana (Valk) Brandsey ’02, director of alumni and parent engagement. After dinner, many attendees migrated to Thorne Hall for Oxy’s 77th annual Dance Production as guests of President Tom Stritikus. 1. From left: Amie Kashon ’13, Alex Arenz ’13, Oswald, Rae Barish, and Lucas Avidan 2. Family night: Ronald Harden ’94, Amare Harden, Jayla Harden, and Chellette McDonald-Harden ’95 3. Seated, l-r: Tony Grande P’22, Leslie Scott ’87, Laura Hamilton ’88, and Marcie Chan ’89. Standing, l-r: Miki Springsteen ’86 P’22, Judy Lam ’87, Kaoru Ichikawa ’87, and Bob Gutzman ’87 4. Erin Ay ’20 and Chris Woodland ’18. 5. Carolyn Layton Garner-Reagan ’71 and Val Reece ’73 P’95 GP’22

HOMETOWN TIGER MIXERS: In mid-January, Occidental’s Alumni and Parent Engagement team hosted Hometown Tiger Mixers in Chicago, Seattle, and Denver. The Hometown Tiger Mixers are programs designed to connect alumni and current students in their local communities while the students are home for winter break. Collectively, the three events brought almost 100 Tigers of diﬀerent generations together to build the regional Oxy network. These events kicked oﬀ the launch of the active alumni chapters in both Chicago and Denver, bringing Oxy’s chapter count to 14 (and growing). To learn more about the regional engagement program, contact Kelsey Belli at belli@oxy.edu.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Actress Lencia Kebede ’16 is truly defying gravity: After ﬁve years with the Angelica and Phillip touring companies of Hamilton, she made her Broadway debut March 4 as Elphaba in Wicked—the ﬁrst Black woman to play the title witch in the smash musical. Below left: Desiree LaVertu, resident director of choral and vocal activities at Oxy and Kebede’s vocal coach since 2018, celebrates with her star pupil after opening night. Below right: Grey Centauro ’16 tries on Elphaba’s signature hat.

Wicked photo by Joan Marcus | Additional photos courtesy Desiree LaVertu and Grey Centauro ’16

Kaiser Tiger in Chicago, January 12.

Stoney’s Bar & Grill in Denver, January 15.

Photos by Marc Campos

Ofﬁce of Communications F-36

1600 Campus Road

Los Angeles CA 90041-3314

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Six Sensational Years!

FOR SIX YEARS RUNNING, alumni spanning eight decades have joined families and friends across the globe to support Occidental’s incredible students on Day For Oxy. With your continued generosity, Day For Oxy will soon eclipse the $10 million mark in cumulative giving. When you support the Oxy Fund, you make an immediate impact on the lives of 1,991 students. Did you miss out on the excitement on April 23? Make today your Day for Oxy with a gift to the Oxy Fund.

Photo by Marc Campos

Dance Production, one of Oxy’s oldest and largest student-run clubs, returned to the Thorne Hall stage for its 77th year in March.