Reed College Magazine December 2018

‰ december 2018

RISING Elizabeth Rush ’06 reports from the front lines of climate change

S AV E T H E DAT E

06-09

JUNE

2019

Calling all 4s and 9s!

Volunteer for a class committee and help plan your class event at Reunions 2019.

Email alumni@reed.edu to get involved.

reunions.reed.edu

‰ december 2018

Departments 4

Eliot Circular Multicultural Resource Center celebrates 25 years.

Geselbracht Honor goes to Prof. Arthur Glasfeld.

Isolating the virus that plays on deadly germs.

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Advocates of the Griffin New Faces for the Alumni Board.

Stephen McCarthy ’65 awarded for distinguished service.

FAR-sighted alumni help chart Reed’s future.

Keith Allen ’83 gets Babson Award

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Our cover photo taken by Kael Alford, “Flooding on Island Road, View toward Isle de Jean Charles from Pointe-aux-Chenes, Louisiana, 2008”

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kendrick brinson

Features

Answering the Call

Phonathon connects a new generation Phonathan generation of studentsof and students alumni.and alumni.

By Romel Hernandez

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A Fertile Mind

In his seven-decade career, economist Mason Gaffney ’48 championed the primacy of land over capital.

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Professors Johnny Powell [physics] and Wally Englert [classics] retire.

By Mamie Stevenson ’12 16

Voice of Conscience

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By Romel Hernandez

The Last Cruise by Kate Christensen ’86 Get Your Money Together by Lillian Karabaic ’13 Crazy Rich Asians, a film produced by Robert Friedland ’74 and Kilian Kerwin ’85 And many more.

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Rising

Reediana

Books, Films, and Music by Reedies

linda kliewer

She fought for gay and civil rights, and just recorded her first album. The inside story on the remarkable life of Kathleen Saadat ’74.

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Last Lectures

Class Notes

News from our classmates.

American coastlines are drowning. In an excerpt from her stunning new book of literary reportage, Elizabeth Rush ’06 finds out what this means for coastal communities and the rest of us.

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In Memoriam

Honoring classmates, professors, and friends who have died.

Attorney Jacob Tanzer ’56 Scientist and inventor Steven Boggs ’68

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Object of Study

What we’re looking at in class

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What social networks can tell us about scientific innovation.

december 2018 Reed Magazine

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From the editor

december 2018

A Salute to the Generalists

www.reed.edu/reed-magazine photo by stephanie alvarez

3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202 503/777-7591 Volume 97, No. 4 REED MAGAZINE editor

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

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

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

Joanne Hossack ’82 joanne@reed.edu art director

Tom Humphrey tom.humphrey@reed.edu A new book by Elizabeth Rush ’06 is a polyphonic account —privileging voices often kept at the margins—of the stark choices facing communities vulnerable to sea-level rise.

grammatical kapeLlmeister

Virginia O. Hancock ’62 REED COLLEGE

We live in an age of specialization. I got a painful reminder of this last month when I jammed a jagged shard of plywood into my thumb during a freak carpentry accident. The splinter was buried too deep for the nurse to retrieve. He referred me to a family doctor, who passed me along to a surgeon, who bounced me on to a hand surgeon, who recommended a thumb specialist.

Traversing the chain of experts took about a week; once I found the specialist, the extraction itself took about 10 minutes.

Specialization is great, but it has drawbacks. As they know more and more about less and less, specialists tend to avoid problems that do not fit neatly into their narrow field. When big issues come along, there’s a strong temptation to duck—it’s not their department, after all.

Global warming is a prime example of an issue that transcends categories, and Rising, the powerful new book by Elizabeth Rush ’06, is a prime example of the value of the generalist—or synthesist, if you like. To write the book, which we’ve excerpted in this issue,

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Reed Magazine december 2018

Elizabeth had to combine the roles of reporter, anthropologist, geographer, historian, and environmentalist.

This ability to weave together insights from disparate fields into a coherent tapestry is one of the hallmarks of a Reed education, and one of the reasons why Reed is more impor-

Acting president

To write the book, Elizabeth had to combine the roles of reporter, anthropologist, geographer, historian, and environmentalist.

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

tant than ever. Because if we are going to survive the crisis of climate change, we need atmospheric chemists who understand public health, political scientists who can talk to biologists, writers who can code, doctors who can do carpentry—and extract a splinter.

—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

Hugh Porter director, communications & public affairs

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

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

Periodicals postage paid at Portland, Oregon.

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

Mailbox Write to us! We love getting mail from readers. Letters should be about Reed (and its alumni) or Reed (and its contents) and run no more than 300 words; subsequent replies may only run half the length of their predecessors. Our decision to print a letter does not imply any endorsement. Letters are subject to editing. (Beware the editor’s hatchet.) For contact information, look to your left. Read more letters and commentary at www.reed.edu/reed-magazine.

Wild Tracks of Yore

Your June issue perked up my eyes and ears. It contained two articles which I found very interesting: the class notes of John Hudson ’52 and Sandra, and the article titled “Wild Tracks.” The notes brought back interesting and pleasurable memories from my and my late husband Tom’s nine trips to Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. Our first and second trips were during the terrible Communist period. The third was in October 1989, just on the cusp of the Velvet Revolution. During those trips we learned to wait in line for each type of grocery item: meat, produce, pastry. In 1989 we saw many two-cylinder Trabants left on the streets of Prague by those desperate to leave East Germany. They sought refuge in the embassies of the U.S. and West Germany. We were cautioned not to take photos near the river and almost every other place.

Our later trips after the rise of the Democratic Republic and Vaclav Havel centered on my relatives and trips to Pilsen. In that town Tom was celebrated along with those who had liberated that city in May 1945, even though he had spent his time in the South Pacific with the U.S. Army Air Corps.

The article on the Australian trip on horseback will be on its way to Adelaide, Australia, where a good friend of my sister Zora lives. Your magazine is truly handsome.

Vlasta Becvar Barber ’47 Tigard, Oregon

Climbing the Walls

Predating the unauthorized climbing wall epoxied together by David Tourzan ’95 [Letters, June 2018, “Reed’s First Climbing Wall?”] is my junior year recollection, circa 1968. I was anguishing over papers due and preparing for final exams when—imagine my amazement— outside my third story window in the men’s dorm

(Foster-Scholz), I caught a glimpse of a couple of die-hard “vulgarians” scaling the brick facade! The hilarious conversation that followed disclosed that their joyful exertions were in preparation for some now-forgotten adventure on Mt. Hood.

Firmly ensconced in Plato’s cave at the time, I had only the shadow of fond childhood memories “freelance bouldering” on my great-grandparents’ farm to help me share vicariously in their “peak” experiences.

Years later, as a school psychologist and adventure-based counselor working with special-needs students, and trained in debriefing and ropescourse techniques, I learned firsthand the value of this approach for confidence and team building.

As an outgrowth of the “Outward Bound” concept, and based on Kurt Hahn’s philosophy (developed during WWII), the idea was that self-esteem could be enhanced, and self-image reevaluated and strengthened, through opportunities for initiative and group problem-solving via challenging, mildly “stressful” situations.

With its emphasis on personal growth and the development of positive coping skills through structured risk taking, the potential benefits of this kind of program have proven themselves and are objectively measurable.

I agree: as a means for stimulating learning by overcoming barriers to communication (viz. anxiety and inner conflict in social situations), this method comes highly recommended. It could be profitably employed (if it isn’t already) as a general requirement in physical education, as it was in my day. Discourse is markedly enriched once trust is built, and defensiveness is overcome through playful, game-like exercises. And, ultimately, motivation is increased, positive attitudes fostered, and the drive toward academic achievement energized.

Ed Fisher ’69, PsyD. Pine Bush, New York

Wrestling with Thucydides

A part of me suspects that the choice of September letters was a clever marketing ploy by your planned giving department, designed to stir us up. [Ha! No. —Ed.] The shock and dismay over the evolution of Hum 110 that some alumni express certainly got me thinking about planned giving to Reed for the first time.

Despite having been an immature and poorly organized student who left Reed after three years, I still treasure how those Hum 110 seminars and papers were a remarkable and valuable experience. The shared content was definitely less important than the shared opportunity to

engage with the minds of others in a way that opened my own mind and heart to new possibilities. The form taught deep respect for the wisdom of others, whatever their “expertise” might be.

I sincerely hope that folks who are closing their purses to Reed will rethink their position on this. Did your sense of community with other Reedies actually come from a shared ability to quote Thucydides? Or did it come from hard wrestling with the details of his work, supported and challenged by your professors and fellow students? Don’t confuse the “values” of any particular ancient author with the values that Hum 110 teaches. The search for truth and mean-

“ I still treasure how those Hum 110 seminars and papers were a remarkable and valuable experience.”

—Carol Kraemer ’73, MD ing transcends any particular work of ancestral wisdom. Thank you, Reed College, for continuing to instill the discipline of Humanities 110 in your charges and “propelling them on their intellectual voyages.”

P.S. No need for any calls from planned giving . . . I’m very healthy and THINKING about it.

Carol Kraemer ’73, MD Windsor, California

Big Bang

Your article about quantum tunneling [“The Proton Phenomenon,” June 2018] made me think about the diffusion constant. At Reed I studied under Prof. Ken Davis [physics 1948–80] and Prof. Nick Wheeler [physics 1963–2010]. Later I worked in radar, including Doppler radar, when in the Navy; I saw Nagasaki, I saw atomic bombs, I saw rockets. I’ve read Einstein, Planck, Gamow, Jeans, Reichenbach, Bohr, Dewey, Schrödinger (my wife Judy Watson, understands Schrödinger better than I do) and the more modern though less comprehensible Bowler. There’s fame for some Reed graduate if they can discover the diffusion constant—for there must be one—before I do.

Michael Lewis ’67 Richland, Washington

december 2018 Reed Magazine

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Eliot Circular news from campus

Happy Birthday, MRC! Lucy Xing ’21, MRC lead Ruby Joy White, Chanticleer Trü of Chanti Darling, Mia Bonilla ’19, Alystair Augustin ’19, and Elena McKnight ’20 celebrate in the Quad.

MRC celebrates 25 years

photo by timothyt horn

There was a jubilant vibe on the Quad. A DJ mixed “Mooo!” by Doja Cat with other upand-coming hip-hop artists. Local musicians Chanti Darling and Maarquii got ready for their own sets and mingled with some students in the Reed Sound Kollectiv. The smell of BBQ floated through the air as students played cornhole and a giant game of Jenga big enough to engulf any dogs or small children that ventured near. All of this in celebration of the 25th birthday of the Multicultural Resource Center, affectionately known as the MRC, which took place on September 7.

Twenty-five years represents a lot of change for a college, especially at a place that is known to generally be at the forefront of discussions on progressive secondary school options. Back in 1993, when the MRC was founded, Reed had only 17 students who identified as African American and 51 who identified as Hispanic. Today, with its constant push toward an ever-morediverse campus environment, the college has a student body that is 41% students of color, with 11% of that number being students attending Reed from international homes.

Reed’s curriculum has changed as well, with a new major in comparative race and ethnicity studies (CRES) and an expanded syllabus for Hum 110. All of this is directly related to the work done by the MRC over the past quarter of a century.

As an African American student, watching this event unfold was a powerful thing.

The gravity of administration giving the MRC leeway to make this event a reality is something that has not been lost on me: it shows the institution’s commitment to making this campus one where my peers of color and I feel wanted, valued, and safe. Although there still is much work to do on this front, every journey has to start somewhere. That Reed’s journey started 25 years ago is a strong sign of the college’s past—and continued—efforts to make this campus one of multicultural freedom. —VARIK HARRIS ’19

Pantry Nourishes Reedies tom humphrey

SEEDS czar Tara Sonali Miller and Roselyn Tovar ’18 stock the Reed Community Pantry.

Top Ramen. Beans. Scrounging. For decades, thrifty students have applied their ingenuity to the perennial predicament of a rumbling stomach and an empty wallet. Now, they are finally getting some backup from the Reed Community Pantry, which offers food and support to hungry Reedies.

Food insecurity, defined as a lack of reliable access to food, isn’t a new problem. However, in the last three years, there’s been a surge of national attention to the issue in higher education, according to Tara Sonali Miller, program manager for Reed’s SEEDS (Students for Education, Empowerment, and Direct Service).

Reed collaborates with 550 other institutions through the College and University Food Bank Alliance.

“It’s not necessarily that food insecurity didn’t exist before,” Miller says.

“It’s that more attention is finally being paid to it.”

Reed’s Food Security Initiative (FSI) is a multi-layered response that includes a dedicated pantry stocked with food and supplies open to students, staff, and faculty; a working group of over a dozen students and staff; and an educational campaign about food insecurity. This year, the FSI plans to host workshops on

nutrition, cooking, and financial literacy. A recipe zine is also in the works to answer questions like: What’s in season? How do I store food items so they don’t spoil? Where can I get the foods I like and know how to prepare? How do I cook without water or a sink?

The FSI’s goal is to offer resources that alleviate food insecurity at Reed so that every community member can live, learn, work, teach, and thrive.

“Food is part of how we take care of each other,” Miller says. Located in the basement of the Gray Campus Center, the pantry itself is warm and friendly and stocked with staples such as pasta, soup, beans, and rice, a fridge of fresh and frozen food, gluten-free and vegan meals, and popular favorites like Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

You can also find snacks, toiletries, clean clothing, books, menstrual products, healthy microwaveable meals, spices, and vitamins.

The pantry also accepts donations and seeks volunteers to join its mission of building community and keeping Reed students nourished—intellectually and bodily.

—CLAIRE RUDY FOSTER ’06

Geselbracht Honor Goes to Glasfeld Prof. Arthur Glasfeld has been named the inaugural holder of the Margret Geselbracht Chair of Chemistry.

Created with a $3 million gift by an anonymous donor, the chair memorializes the Prof. Glasfeld career of Prof. Maggie Ges elbrac ht, who passed away in 2014 after a hard-fought struggle against lymphoma. An inspiring teacher, committed mentor, and exceptional researcher, Prof. Prof. Geselbracht Geselbracht joined the chemistry department in 1993 as the only female chemist, and ultimately became the first woman to be tenured in the department.

She touched many students’ lives through her courses and her research. She took her position as a role model seriously, and it is no accident that when she died, the department had graduated two successive classes that were majority women.

“Maggie Geselbracht was the ultimate Reed professor,” says Glasfeld. “She was active nationally and locally in teaching and scholarship, absolutely committed to her students and their careers, and fully engaged in the college’s future. Holding a chair in Maggie’s name is an incredible honor and great reminder of all she meant to me and to the college as an inspirational colleague and friend. The fact that the position will allow increased staffing and greater team teaching in our first-year course fulfills one of Maggie’s highest priorities. This is a terrific gift all the way around.”

Glasfeld earned his PhD from Harvard before coming to Reed in 1989. His expertise lies in structural biochemistry and he has advised 117 senior theses (and counting!).

The anonymous gift will also add a new professor to the chemistry department.

Maggie’s family has launched the Prof.

Maggie Geselbracht Women in Chemistry Fund to reflect her passion of providing support to female chemists at Reed. Make a gift to the fund at giving.reed.edu.

Reed matters.

Reed Biologists Isolate Virus That Preys on Deadly Germs

Tiny PDX viruses (icosahedral bumps) latch onto the outer membrane of the sinister pathogen EPEC, which is responsible for millions of cases of foodborne illness every year.

Leah Cepko ’16 isolated the PDX virus for her thesis.

like a syringe and injects its DNA into the hapless bacterium, essentially hijacking its host’s cellular machinery for its own reproduction. The bacterial cell eventually collapses, releasing a flood of new phages to seek fresh targets.

Since then, Reed biologists including Madeline Dinsdale ’17, Eliotte Garling ’18, William Scott ’19, and Loralee Bandy ’20 have been working hard to understand the biochemical mechanisms behind PDX and explore its potential as a treatment for E. coli infections.

—CHRIS LYDGATE ’90

P h o t o b y L e a h C e p k o a n d D r . C l a u d i a S . L ó p e z at O r e g o n H e a lt h & S c i e n c e U n i v e r s i t y.

Reed students working with Prof. Jay Mellies [biology 1999–] have developed a virus that attacks deadly strains of E. coli bacteria responsible for millions of cases of foodborne illness every year. With antibiotic resistance becoming increasingly widespread, the discovery of the virus—known as PDX—points the way towards a new therapeutic strategy in which the pathogen’s game plan of attacking a host from within is effectively turned against it.

The team’s preliminary findings, reported in the preprint journal bioRxiv, reveal that PDX is a lethal saboteur when it comes to killing two deadly strains of bacteria, enteropathogenic (EPEC) and enteroaggregative (EAEC) E. coli. The team used host susceptibility assays, transmission electron microscopy, and genomic analysis to confirm that PDX shows strong “bacteriolytic activity”— in lay terms, it kills bugs dead.

PDX belongs to a group of viruses known as bacteriophages (phages for short), which prey exclusively on bacteria. Leah Cepko ’16 became fascinated by phages after taking a class in microbiology with Prof. Mellies. “I loved that class,” she says. “For my thesis, I wanted to see if we could find a phage that targeted EPEC.” The hunt began at a Portland wastewater treatment plant. Donning a sturdy pair of gloves, Leah stuck a bottle on a pole and gingerly lowered it into a giant vat of sewage. After filtering out the impurities, she injected samples into petri dishes laden with EPEC, and then waited to see if any of the dishes developed plaques—tiny dots indicating that the phages had successfully attacked the EPEC. One morning in the fall of 2015 she got up early and rushed down to the lab.

“I was praying for plaques,” she says. “I remember opening the incubator door—it was so dramatic—and seeing the plaques and being amazed. It was insane!”

PDX is a species of myovirus, a distinctive family characterized by icosahedral heads and spindly tails that attach to the cell wall of their bacterial target. Once attached, the phage punctures the wall

When you make a gift in your will or trust, you influence the future of Reed.

“The college’s service will be for every citizen. Its influence is not for a day, nor a year, nor decades only, but for centuries, as a source, a promoter of high intelligence and inspiration to the body politic, a provider of the highest forces of civilization.”

—Thomas Lamb Eliot, Trustee, 1910

Contact Kathy Saitas in the office of gift planning to discuss creative and mutually beneficial ways to make a difference at Reed.

503/777-7759 giftplanning@reed.edu reed.edu/legacyplanning

Advocates of the Griffin News of the Alumni Association • SEE MORE AT alumni.reed.edu

Alumni Board Wants You The working committees of the alumni board are looking for more volunteers and we need you. You don’t have to be a member of the alumni board to get involved, the time commitment is usually minimal, it’s important for our community, and it’s a lot of fun.

What’s that, you say? Not sure what the committees actually do? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Without further ado: The committee for young alumni (CYA) focuses on all things young alumni (those who graduated within the last 10 years) as well as the student-to-alumni transition.

Have thoughts about what you need/needed as a young alum? Want to proactively work with the college on improving the transition into the alumni community? Want to support current young alumni in getting connected and finding their way? This is the

committee for you.

The diversity and inclusion committee (DIC) is committed to engaging and supporting Reed community members from historically underrepresented groups. It strives to fully engage all alumni by recognizing the complexities of identity, diversity, and privilege. While this is a relatively new committee on the alumni board, it has been years in the making thanks to some very dedicated alumnae. Join us!

The Reed Career Alliance (RCA) is currently accepting résumés—just kidding!

The RCA supports the career development of recent and midcareer graduates through mentoring, coaching, affinity groups, and more. And let’s be honest, Reedies often do not follow traditional career paths. Whether you need help in your current career, want

Allen Awarded Babson

McCarthy Awarded DSA

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Reed Magazine december 2018

strategic planning and oral history projects, and made himself available as a career network volunteer. Most recently he lent his exceptional abilities to the alumni office, undertaking an extensive data-mapping project that has advanced the college’s ability to engage and deepen its relationship with the alumni community. Keith warmly and enthusiastically received the award, surrounded by fellow alumni, family, and friends.

NINA JOHNSON

NINA JOHNSON

Keith Allen ’83 was honored with the Babson Award at the Forum for Advancing Reed this fall. The Babson Outstanding Volunteer Award, established in honor of Jean McCall Babson ’42, recognizes outstanding volunteer efforts by Reed alumni. Keith’s contributions to Reed are vast and innumerable—he’s served on the alumni board, chaired the North Carolina alumni chapter, participated in the college’s

to switch to doing something new, or want to help other Reedies succeed professionally, the RCA is here for you.

Finally, the alumni chapters are the driving force behind regional alumni events and we’d love your help. Want to start a game night? Able to give a tour of the interesting place you work at? Think Reedies should join you at Shakespeare in the Park? Craving a book club that includes ornate discussion?

Think that Austin, Denver, or [insert your city here] has enough Reedies to do at least one thing a year? If so, then the alumni chapters want to hear from you.

Interested? Email volunteer@reed.edu and the alumni office will get you plugged in. More details can also be found on alumni.reed.edu. Our alumni community needs you. We need you. Join us!

The Foster-Scholz Distinguished community as well—serving Service Award was conferred as the first executive director upon Stephen McCarthy ’65 of OSPIRG, advancing pubat Reunions 2018. The award lic transportation as general is given to alumni who have manager of Tri-Met, launching made major contributions to the nationally renowned Clear the community and the col- Creek Distillery, and activating lege, and Steve is an exemplary his philanthropic resources to recipient. As an emeritus trust- strengthen the civic fabric of ee of the college, Steve has given our state. Reed College and the generously of his time, talent, larger community of which it is and treasure to strengthen the a part are stronger because of mission of Reed. Stephen’s con- Steve’s leadership. tributions reach deep into the

FAR Sighted Alumni Help Chart Reed’s Future

New Faces for Alumni Board

More than 60 alumni descended on campus in September for the Forum for Advancing Reed. The weekend was chock-full of events, ranging from pure fun to informative sessions to nitty-gritty volunteer work. Highlights included: • A session on how to work effectively in volunteer groups, especially those with conflict.

• A fence-line tour of the new residence hall (rain shortened the tour but provided an in-depth look at the functionality of the space).

• Alumni volunteer meetings produced goals, metrics, and productive brainstorms to guide this year’s work.

• A special update on student success highlighted important changes Reed is making for current students.

• A low-key happy hour at Gigantic Brewing saw alumni kick back and relax at a Reedie-owned business.

Interested in participating next September?

Stay tuned for more details this spring!

Constitution Will Go To a Vote Alumni will decide the fate of a set of amendments to the alumni constitution. The amendments were approved by the alumni board of directors in June by a vote of 20–5 and duly published in Reed Magazine. But the proposed changes have drawn enough opposition— objections by more than 50 alumni— to trigger a ballot of the entire alumni community. Details of the referendum were still being worked out as we went to press.

For the latest, see alumni.reed.edu/2018-aaconstitutional-changes.html.

december 2018 Reed Magazine

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LAST LECTURES: Saluting our retiring (and not-so-retiring) professors

Prof. Johnny Powell [physics 1987–2018]

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photo courtesy of Darrell Schroeter

Prof. Johnny Powell points toward a shelf of thesis books bound in black, blue, green, and burgundy, author names scribbled on the spines in gold ink.

“That,” he says, “is my legacy.”

After three decades of teaching, he takes the greatest pride in the work of his students.

Especially those he mentored—working alongside them in the lab, or encouraging, challenging, and reassuring them as they toiled away on their senior theses.

“I always wanted to be as real as possible with my students,” he says. “I love having those deep one-on-one conversations, taking time to figure things out with them.”

Prof. Powell grew up in LA and was inspired by a childhood visit to the Griffith Park Observatory. “I knew from that point” that he would grow up to be a scientist, he says. “There was never a question about it.”

He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cal State–Northridge during the late ’60s and early ’70s. “Disillusioned” with the grind of grad school, he joined the Peace Corps and taught for three years in Malaysia, where he rekindled his love of physics and discovered a passion for birdwatching.

After returning stateside, he earned a PhD from Arizona State, specializing in spectroscopy experiments on DNA. Following a postdoc stint at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, he was wooed to Reed in 1987 by Prof. Nick Wheeler ’55 [physics 1963–2010].

At Reed he pursued biophysics, earning a reputation in the department as a prolific researcher, securing big grants from the National Science Foundation. About a decade ago he changed course and returned to his first love—astrophysics, specifically the dynamics of barred spiral galaxies.

“Johnny was way ahead of the curve in recognizing that research isn’t something that comes at the expense of teaching, but that it goes hand in hand with working with students,” says Prof. Joel Franklin ’97 [physics 2005–], who credits Powell for helping him get through the rigors of his own undergraduate days at Reed. He sees more to admire now that they are colleagues.

“He is so fiercely engaged with students,” Franklin says. “He approaches everything he

does with incredible passion and enthusiasm, whether it’s birding or physics or mentoring.”

“I feel incredibly fortunate to have had Johnny as a mentor,” says Noah Muldavin ’13, who developed a computer simulation of the evolution of a spiral galaxy for his thesis. “He is so enthusiastic, it helps just being around someone so positive in a place as intense as Reed.”

Several former students traveled across the country to attend his retirement party, and others recorded videos paying tribute to his impact on their lives. “I spent a long time at Reed feeling like I somehow didn’t fulfill my promise, before getting to see that my work as a mentor to students is what was really important,” Powell says. “It’s crazy to have to live 70 years to figure out who you are!”

In retirement he plans to continue his work in astrophysics and looks forward to

having more time for travel. Birding has taken him and his wife Shari to far-flung destinations such as Brazil, Madagascar, Bhutan, and Antarctica. His bird “life list” stands at a staggering 3,500 species. His top three most-wanted birds are the Ross’s gull, a native of the Arctic; the La Sagra’s flycatcher, a denizen of the Caribbean; and the ashy storm petrel, a seabird found off the Northern California coast. He seems sanguine about getting them, but the fun is in the pursuit.

“You might travel across the world to a new place hoping to find a particular rare bird,” he says. Sometimes you see the bird.

Sometimes you don’t. In a way the bird is almost beside the point. “The thing is, you get to enjoy so many other wonderful experiences along the way.” —ROMEL HERNANDEZ

Prof. Wally Englert [classics 1981–2018] p h o t o C O U R T E S Y O F S P E C I A L C O L L E C T I O N S , E R I C V. H A U S E R M E M O R I A L L I B R A R Y, R E E D C O L L E G E

It’s hard to imagine a Reed without him. For decades, Prof. Wally Englert taught incoming students how to chant the first line of Homer’s Iliad in ancient Greek—a tradition that indoctrinated generations of Reedies into the idiosyncratic, playful rigor that defines the campus. He also introduced them to Lucretius’s monumental epic On the Nature of Things, an influential account of philosophy, physics, psychology, and the pleasure of learning and living a moral life. (Englert was the ideal guide to the epic—he wrote the translation.)

For a renowned scholar of ancient philosophy, these things are not just an academic pursuit; they form the moral landscape for a patient and empathetic educator. Now, after teaching at Reed for 37 years, he has retired.

Englert came to Reed in 1981 after earning his PhD from Stanford and teaching at the University of Michigan. He soon fell in love with Hum 110 and Reed’s “intense” liberal arts environment.

“I loved working with students of all majors who might not ever take a classics course,” he says. “I wanted to be a teacher where people felt open about expressing their views.

It’s not about trying to get everyone to the same place, but to have everyone feel that they can come to the opinion they think is most warranted.”

His goal as a conference leader, he said, is to cultivate a “place where people feel like they have a stake and that their voices matter in the conference.” He estimates he’s led conferences with 2,000 students at Reed.

Englert is the sort of professor who is unlikely to tell a student they’re wrong, even if it’s abundantly obvious. More often, he’ll lightly question their thinking until they realize—apparently on their own—that there’s a better interpretation of a text. It’s a style that might sound familiar to Reedies who remember reading Plato. “He controls the classroom discussion beautifully while giving students lots of space to roam, and brings out the best in everyone,” says former student Brett Rogers ’99, now a classics scholar himself. “Wally is very good at making you do hard things without realizing how hard the task really is, and students often share

with me that he makes you want to succeed because no one wants to disappoint him.”

“He’s an extremely respected scholar, incredibly skilled and beloved professor, the best colleague you can imagine,” says Prof. Ellen Millender [classics 2002–].

“Imagine—16 years and I’ve never heard him badmouth anybody, ever.” (One former student explained that he’s only once seen Englert get upset, and it was at a slowworking printer, which he called “stupid.”)

“For Wally, Reed is a kind of mechanism for working on oneself and bettering oneself, all the time, repeatedly, not just at the start,” says Prof. Nigel Nicholson [classics 1995–].

“That is what makes him a great teacher and great person.”

In retirement, Wally will be taking bike day trips, volunteering in Portland, and spending time with his grandchildren. He’ll also

be finishing his upcoming book on Cicero’s philosophical works, which were intended to make philosophy palatable to hard-headed Romans. “What Cicero was trying to do was convince his Roman readers that, far from being a waste of time, studying philosophy is an essential part of what it means to be a good human being,” he says.

For his retirement party, Englert’s students and colleagues performed a parody of Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae, affectionately called The Wacchae (written and directed

by Brett Rogers). In the play, a cult forms around the hero Waldonysos after he successfully defends the merits of teaching ancient Greek. “Some profs are rigorous, and some are kind, but rarely are they both rigorous and kind,” exclaimed Millendesias (played by Prof. Millender). No truer words have been said of Englert. —CECILIA D’ANASTASIO ’13

december 2018 Reed Magazine 11

ANSWERING THE CALL Phonathon connects a new generation of students and alumni

BY ROMEL HERNANDEZ

You’ve just put away the dinner dishes and are getting ready to unwind with a glass of wine, maybe catch the latest episode of Game of Thrones, when the phone rings.

“Hello!” says a chipper voice on the line.

“I’m a student at Reed calling on behalf of the Annual Fund . . .”

The possibilities are myriad—swapping stories about the steam tunnels and owl fights in the Quad, what classes they’re taking, your first job after Reed, Occam’s razor, the Pareto principle. Who knows? That serendipitous conversation may wind up being the best part of your day.

And if the connection is genuine, you might even donate to the Annual Fund.

The gift you make winds up going into everything that makes Reed, well, Reed. The Annual Fund’s impact is pervasive and profound, supporting an array of worthy endeavors—financial aid for needy students, faculty research, library books, computers, lab equipment . . . there is not a single student or professor who doesn’t benefit directly.

Located in the basement of Eliot Hall, the phonathon is staffed by 32 Reed students who have been put through a rigorous hiring and training process. On the wall is a poster with the four values the students chose as attributes of a phonathon caller: Professional.

Personable. Persuasive. Persistent.

The operation is overseen by Alex Cherin ’12, assistant director of the Annual Fund and himself a phonathon caller in his student days. After working in advertising after graduating, he jumped at the chance to work with and mentor current students and play a role in “shaping a positive part of their experience at Reed.”

Phonathon students are encouraged to see the job as more than a work-study gig.

A certain degree of salesmanship is essential, to be sure, but the work is ultimately

12 Reed Magazine december 2018

Lara Simonetti ’20 and Joel Staudinger ’19 keep the Phonathon environment fun and the conversations engaging.

driven by Reed’s mission.

“At first the job can seem stressful and scary,” says Joel Staudinger ’19, who started out as a caller and worked up to shift manager. “Over time I was able to see that this work was about something bigger, that it was about this grand idea about what Reed is and what it can be. That’s what makes it fulfilling.”

On a recent afternoon, the phonathon was buzzing with a diverse range of voices— first-years and seniors, humanities and science majors, extroverts and introverts. The lights are dimmed but the room is illuminated by the sparkle of Christmas-tree lights.

Alex kicked off the shift with a silent meditation, followed by a quick group check-in and a whimsical question to loosen everyone up (a recent example: “Beyoncé or Rihanna?”) Then he wrote the day’s goal on a whiteboard: $16,857.

“Who thinks we’ll make that tonight?”

Across the room hands shoot up. “Yeah!”

The most enthusiastic voice belongs to Lara Simonetti ’20. Last year she inspired more than 200 donors to give back to Reed— an astonishing number.

What’s her secret?

“I just enjoy the conversations,” she says.

tom humphrey

PHONATHON FUN FACTS $352,086 8,813 given to Annual Fund through phonathon

number of calls completed

$4.9M $20,511 total given to Annual Fund

pledged by alumni who didn’t graduate from Reed

6 minutes 48 minutes average talk time

longest call on record

32

students on the crew

$14,432 $17,204

pledged by econ majors

pledged by English majors

(all stats from FY 2017-18.)

“I see it as getting to talk to interesting people from many walks of life and connecting over the amazing place that is Reed.”

A history major with an outgoing personality, she takes pride in her job, especially given the fact that she could not have come to Reed without the help of the Annual Fund. A native of Corrientes, Argentina, she dreamed of attending college in the United States but her family couldn’t afford to pay.

Most American colleges and universities don’t award financial aid to international students, but thanks to the generosity of donors to the Annual Fund, Reed is among the few that do.

Working for the phonathon allows her the opportunity to give back to the college and also share her own story with donors. “It helps to be able to talk about your own experiences,” she says. “It gives them a chance to see that by giving, they help provide students a great education and a great environment.”

Alex credits her success to an engaging personality and exceptional work ethic. “Lara cares immensely and is always extremely prepared,” he says. “She is a great ambassador for Reed.”

Asking for money can be challenging, but Alex has worked to enhance the professionalism of the operation, while also making

the job more fun. Students have decorated the space with art—cardboard leaves dangle from the ceiling, a paper dragon breathes fire from one wall. Posters feature the strangest excuses they’ve gotten for ending a call (e.g., “My wife’s giving birth!”) and the most offbeat email usernames they’ve heard (hamsterwrangler, veganchili).

The vibe belies the importance of the phonathon, as well as its complexity.

On any given shift, callers attempt thousands of calls, though only a fraction lead to actual interactions. Last year the phonathon generated nearly $352,086 from roughly 1,800 donors, a crucial chunk of the $4.9 million raised by the Annual Fund. This year the goal is $400,000 and 2,200 donors. They’re off to a promising start—in September alone, the phonathon raised $153,000.

While Alex provides tips on making “the ask” or handling rejection, the operation is as much about heart as it is science. More than anything, he says, he wants the students to make genuine connections with the people they call—a dynamic that results in a win-win for everyone, regardless of the outcome. Although, of course, he would prefer that the phone conversations end with a generous donation, too.

“It’s not just about money,” he says. “It’s really about engaging with someone else who loves Reed. Ultimately you want to have a conversation that makes the case for why it’s important to give back.”

So when you hear the phone ring, take a moment to answer the call—you may be surprised to find a kindred spirit on the line.

december 2018 Reed Magazine 13

A FERTILE MIND

For 70 years, trailblazing economist Mason Gaffney ’48 has championed land over capital.

BY MAMIE STEVENSON ’12

Mason Gaffney ’48 is a cowboy. Known for his weathered Stetson, genteel swagger, and comprehensive understanding of American terrain, he has ridden outside the herd of mainstream economists for the better part of the last century, arguing that the discipline’s traditional emphasis on capital and commerce is a tragic mistake.

The way he sees the story, the land and its resources are the central protagonists, the landowner plays a naive villain, and the sales tax hangs around like a hungry wolf. Armed with this perspective, and a journalist’s way with words, he has written more than 150 articles on subjects from market crashes to the future of cities to the perils of military spending—marked by analysis that is often decades ahead of his contemporaries.

Mason was born in 1923 and grew up in New York, South Dakota, and Chicago. Always a bright student, he was inspired by reading Henry George’s Progress and Poverty in high school. Considered a seminal text of the Progressive Era, George’s 1879 book argues that instituting a single tax, and one tax only, on the land and its natural resources would create a mode of thinking among citizens that the land is communal, a shared interest, and thus incentivizing the common good. George— the Bernie Sanders of his time—galvanized the American working class to recognize and challenge the wealth disparity created by land monopolies and private interests. The single tax, he argued, would close the wage gap, eradicating patterns of poverty.

As a Christian, Mason saw ethical value in George’s framework; as a product of the Great Depression, he recognized historical significance in George’s movement; as a student, he imagined a future education steeped in Georgist ideology.

Mason began his college career at Harvard, but was disappointed by the economics department there. Few of his professors were familiar

14 Reed Magazine december 2018

with Progress and Poverty and he found little support for his Georgist analyses. Then came WWII, and he was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Corps, serving as a communications officer in Manila. “I spent a lot of time in the Philippines and New Guinea, and got to observe the social and economic conditions close at hand,” he remembers. “It confirmed my suspicion that land tenure was unequally distributed and made me suspicious about American imperialism.”

Returning stateside, he transferred to Reed and wrote his thesis with Prof. Art Leigh [economics 1945–88] about the causes of unemployment. It was a formative experience. Prof.

Leigh fired his intellectual curiosity, encouraging him to refer to the great thinkers of the past while simultaneously breaking the mold and applying Georgist frameworks to contemporary problems. “He was the spirit of Reed,” Mason remarks.

Economists at the time tended to overlook the role of land in the broader scheme of the capitalist system. Mason argued that unemployment was due in part to credit rationing, which is the process of limiting otherwise available credit to borrowers despite demand and willingness to pay interest. With credit given away at the often senseless discretion of lenders, land ownership and monopoly create a hierarchy of access, ultimately resulting in polar wealth disparities and a grave misuse of the land and its resources.

The issue of land misuse continued to gnaw at him long after Reed. He went to UC Berkeley to study agricultural economics and developed his own ideas, which centered around the inherent value of socializing the land within a free enterprise system. “If anyone had ever read the Bible,” he asserts, “they would pick these ideas up.” This was not a popular opinion at Berkeley, however. He was attacked both by students who held his religious views in contempt and by McCarthyites who sought to have him expelled after he penned an article that argued for a more equitable redistribution of the land.

Mason hung on, earned his PhD in 1955,

photo by kendrick brinson

and secured a job as an enumerator for the U.S. Census of Irrigation. During this time, his Georgist underpinnings moved from the abstract to the applied. He studied forest management, the timber industry, and water laws, producing trenchant analysis that elevated him “from just another nice boy with good grades to someone serious.” He climbed the ivory tower, first as a professor at various universities, then as a research associate and director of think tanks. Eventually, he settled into a teaching position at UC Riverside, where he served on the economics faculty for 39 years and earned the reputation of being the foremost Georgist of our time.

The extent of his impact on progressive economics is far-reaching. In a system that tends to focus on labor and human production, Mason offers a contrasting view that the land and its resources—often regarded as a static input—are fundamental in their value.

Through a Georgist lens, he interprets some of the major economic dilemmas of our time, such as the market crash of 2008, American dependency on foreign oil, and tax reform. His articles demonstrate shrewd historical insight peppered with a cheeky panache, with titles like “Sleeping with the Enemy” and “The Sales Tax: History of a Dumb Idea.”

Now, at 94, Mason continues an incredibly prolific career. He still regularly publishes economic analyses, taking on some of the more urgent consequences of American imperialism. When I spoke to the prominent economist James Galbraith on the phone, he told me he had just finished reading an article by Mason about the perils of corporate involvement in the military, an analysis Galbraith describes as “striking.” He continued, “Every time you read one of Mason’s articles, you come up with something that places in a very crisp and clear light some important issue, and he has thoroughly persuaded me over the years of the centrality of the question of land rent to our understanding of economics.”

Mason has told some of America’s sadder stories, but he always offers something that feels a little bit like faith. As a man who spent his life pointing out the errors of his profession, he reassures us that the solution to our problems has always been there—in the earth beneath our feet.

Find out more at MasonGaffney.org

december 2018 Reed Magazine 15

VOICE OF CONSCIENCE

She fought for gay rights. She fought for civil rights. At 77, she’s just recorded her first album.

Kathleen Saadat ’74 tells us the inside story of her remarkable life.

BY ROMEL HERNANDEZ

Portland’s Pride Parade has evolved into a (mostly) family-friendly affair in its 40+ years. Every June, rain or shine, tens of thousands throng downtown to cheer on stiletto-heeled drag queens on festive floats, rainbow-tutu-wearing marching bands, and dykes on bikes. It has become a major civic affair as well, featuring an array of politicians and community leaders.

It’s a far cry from the city’s very first gay pride march back in 1975. Kathleen Saadat ’74 helped organize the event, which drew fewer than 200 marchers. The event also brought out a crowd of protesters from the religious right wielding signs warning “Turn or burn!”

“I remember being scared to death,” she says. “We were considered radical!”

While proud to see a cause once considered radical going mainstream, she is concerned the event seems to have become more of a party. She asks, “Where are the poltics?”

Now 77, Kathleen has spent four decades speaking truth to power as a social justice activist in Oregon. An outspoken advocate, she has championed the rights of women, communities of color, and LGBTQ people before that acronym even existed. In addition to marching in the first gay pride parade, she spearheaded the state government’s affirmative action agenda in the 1980s and the campaign to defeat the virulently antigay Measure 9 in 1992. More recently she led community oversight of police amid a

16 Reed Magazine december 2018

public outcry over police violence and racism.

Oh, and she just released her first album as a singer. Love for Sale is a collection of jazz and pop standards recorded with internationally acclaimed big band Pink Martini.

She also sometimes performs onstage as a guest of the company, led by old friend Thomas Lauderdale.

“Kathleen has been one of Oregon’s most dynamic and important civil rights leaders, and you can’t really separate her experience from her music,” Lauderdale says. “Her voice is so rich with the years she’s lived—you can hear heartbreak and joy and everything in between.”

Kathleen has been rummaging through boxes in her basement, rediscovering longforgotten letters and photos and newspaper clippings, even her 1973-74 student identification card from Reed. After a lifetime spent restlessly pressing onward to new challenges, she has decided at 77 that it is time to sort through the past, an exercise that is making her wistful. She’s trying to be practical about what to toss out and what to keep, but it’s not that easy.

“I’m a paper junkie, but there are memories associated with everything in those boxes,” she muses. “It brings back old friends, old loves, places you’ve lived, things you did or didn’t do.”

She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1940, growing up there as well as in Tennessee and Illinois. Those early years spent growing up in the Jim Crow-era South

photo by linda kliewer

In 1992, Kathleen was a key figure in the fight against Ballot Measure 9, which would have legalized discrimination against gay and lesbian people in Oregon.

and Midwest, attending segregated public schools and sitting in the blacks-only sections of the movie theaters, would forge her social conscience. She says that she grew up “shy but angry.”

She was back in St. Louis in 1970 when a childhood friend urged her to check out Portland. Encouraged to attend Reed by a professor she met, she enrolled soon after that. In her 30s, she was not a “typical” Reedie, and she found college both inspiring and exasperating.

Being at Reed, she says, taught her to think critically and to be a better writer. She also came face to face with white privilege, encountering peers who made offhand racist remarks or who stole simply for the sake of stealing—“for no apparent reason, they had money in the bank.”

Her Reed years were transformative. “I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything,” she says. “It was illuminating, uplifting, painful, frustrating. I learned about people who were dramatically different from me. Most importantly I learned not what to think, but how to think.”

Returning to campus to deliver the 2015 commencement address, she challenged graduates: “Our world is not a sequence of dichotomies strung together by arguments. . . . The ability to deconstruct is not creativity. To improve the world, one must do more than live abstractly.”

She graduated in 1974 with a psychology degree, writing her thesis on family and community social services in the historically black Albina neighborhood of Portland.

She settled down in the city, going on to work with the Urban League and other community organizations.

She also started to make her mark as an activist on several fronts. In addition to organizing Portland’s first gay rights march, Kathleen held various jobs with city and state government before getting tapped

december 2018 Reed Magazine 17

VOICE OF CONSCIENCE photo by linda kliewer

Leading Portland’s Pride Parade in 1994. Gay rights were under attack in Oregon during the mid-nineties.

in 1987 to lead Oregon’s affirmative action office, overseeing initiatives to promote diversity and inclusivity. “Human differences—race, gender, sexuality, income— was always the foundation,” she says.

Perhaps the defining moment of Kathleen’s career, however, was the fight against Measure 9.

Conservative groups in 1992 put forth a ballot measure for an antigay amendment to the state constitution. The blatantly homophobic amendment called for banning civil rights protections based on sexual orientation, and instructed schools to teach that “homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism and masochism are abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse, and that these behaviors are to be discouraged and avoided.” Oregon became a flash point for the gay rights debate nationwide.

Kathleen was one of the most visible spokespeople of the No on 9 campaign.

As a member of the campaign’s steering

18 Reed Magazine december 2018

committee that developed political strategy, she crisscrossed the state to spread public awareness. And when she deemed the campaign was not doing enough to relate to the community of color, she formed African Americans Voting No on 9.

Throughout the grueling campaign she pushed for greater understanding. She remembers speaking to a Measure 9 supporter who was walking out of a meeting in rural Grants Pass.

“I told him to stay. I told him we are both human beings, we get to live on the planet at the same time and because of that, he should stay,” she says. “Afterwards he thanked me and said he knew more than he did before. I don’t know if we changed his vote, but for me the moment illustrated the importance of speaking with people with whom we don’t necessarily agree.”

She faced anonymous death threats during the campaign, but did not waver. “I had to decide,” she says, “whether I was going

to live my life, or let somebody compromise my life.”

In the end Measure 9 was defeated by Oregon voters, 56-44 percent.

“I am proud of the work we did,” Kathleen says. “At the same time the pendulum never stops swinging. We need to stay on top of the issues. We need to keep doing more to reach out.”

Cliff Jones, a Portland activist who has worked with Kathleen since the ’80s, calls her a “connector.” No matter the issue, he says, she strives to “reach across differences.”

“I describe her as velvet and steel,” Jones says. “She’s incredibly compassionate and sees the humanity in everyone, even those with whom she vehemently disagrees. At the same time, her mind is a matrix, thinking down and across and over and under, seeing every side of an issue.”

Kathleen’s musical collaboration with Pink Martini has political roots; she met bandleader Lauderdale when he was an

GIFTS FOR ALL OCCASIONS

At the age of 77, Kathleen recorded her debut album—a collection of jazz classics—with Pink Martini.

Kathleen has spent four decades speaking truth to power.

intern at City Hall in the 1980s, where he would hear her singing in the hallways.

They stayed in touch over the years, making music together occasionally. A few years ago they started recording songs that eventually became Love for Sale. The tunes hearken back to her youth singing along to Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. Her favorite cut is “For All We Know,“ with its poignant lyric, “I will hold out my hand/ And my heart will be in it.”

She is proud of the album, and is even starting to enjoy performing onstage. She says, “I never aspired to to fame and fortune in the world of entertainment, so it is all a bit mystifying.”

She adds, “Music is magical, the way it takes you places and gives you feelings you haven’t felt in a long time. I have had a hard life in many ways, but I never let it make me cynical.”

Cozy up in Reed gear this winter. bookstore.reed.edu

photo by William Widmer / Redux

EXCERPT

RISING: DISPATCHES FROM THE NEW AMERICAN SHORE

21

Coastlines are drowning. Elizabeth Rush ’06 investigates the devastating impact of climate change on coastal communities in a stunning new book of literary reportage, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, excerpted here.

S

ometime during my first week on the 665 and stick to the Island Road.” Behind him stands Louisiana bayou, I walk to the Isle de Jean a fifteen-foot-high statue of Jesus. The martyr’s body Charles. The Island Road, built in the early is lank and lean, his arms outstretched toward the fifties right after the first oil rig went in, watery expanse. Next to the statue a dead cypress tree runs eight miles southwest from Pointe- looms. Its empty branches mirror the man’s sacrificial aux-Chenes out between two expanses of gesture. It too has passed beyond the barest version water so new that neither has a name. Since of itself into death. Its roots soaked in salt. the little remaining land is incredibly flat, the sky’s

extravagant clouds serve as a sort of alternative to topography. Hoodoo-shaped cumulus formations hug The film Beasts of the Southern Wild, a postapocalyptic the horizon, where a storm is fixing to start. Snowy tale of a band of homesteaders who survive a fierce egrets dig in the few remaining bayou banks, and mullet storm and eke out a living in the drowned world that throw themselves out of the water as the first dime-size follows, was shot on the island and is based loosely droplets of rain fall. Less than halfway on the lives of those who still reside out to the island, my gut confirms what I there, many of whom identify as Native already know from my research. This is American. I remember watching the film a world unto itself, coming undone. and thinking it remarkable that I was seeJust fifty years ago, the surrounding ing environmental destruction bringing geography was complex and intercona community closer together instead of nected—a network of lakes and marshbreaking it apart. I wanted desperatees that were navigable in flat-bottomed ly to know what that might look like in boats called pirogues. If you didn’t have real life. This was long before I moved to a boat, you could walk between places Rhode Island, long before I saw my first by sticking to the higher ground abutdead tupelo, but after my initial trip to ting the arterial bayous. This word, bayou, Bangladesh. It was the summer of 2013 sounds French, but it is actually Choctaw and I was looking for proof of the rise in Milkweed Editions, 2018 in origin. It means “slow-moving stream.” milkweed.org the United States, so I flew to Louisiana.

Today it is used in a general sense to When Benh Zeitlin, the director of describe Louisiana’s rare riparian coast, Beasts, told me that the island “felt like even though the bayous themselves are disappearing. the end of the world,” I wasn’t sure if he was speaking of its remote location or of something less literThe natural ridges and pathways that the Choctaws used to travel are going with them. Nearly every defining fea- al. The farther I amble out the single-lane highway to ture has been replaced by a single element: salt water. Jean Charles, the more I realize that both explanations make sense. The Isle de Jean Charles is where North The loss is pronounced enough that a few years ago America’s immense solidity ends, the frayed fingers of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fine tidal lace splaying seaward. It is also possible to had to remap the nearby Plaquemines Parish and in so catch a glimpse of the future out here, of a world where doing removed thirty-one place-names. Yellow Cotton the ocean covers what we used to think of as the coast.

Bay, English Bay, Cyprien Bay, Dry Cypress Bayou, and That is because over the past sixty years the wetlands Bayou Long; none of these individual bodies of water that once surrounded the Isle de Jean Charles have all exist anymore. The wetlands that once gave them shape have disintegrated, making the bayous and bays indis- drowned, the rate of accretion trumped by land subsidence, erosion, and sea level rise. When I squint, it tinguishable from the surrounding ocean. “Maybe you could swim,” the owner of the Pointe-aux-Chenes mari- is difficult to tell just where the Island Road ends and where the water begins. na tells me when I ask if I can get to the Isle de Jean A man in a black pickup slams on his brakes and rolls Charles without a car. “But I wouldn’t, on account of down his window. “There’s gonna be some rain. Need the gators. Better just to take a right off of Highway

22 Reed Magazine december 2018

photo by stephanie alvarez

From Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Rush. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org

a ride?” he asks, leaning back against the cab’s cracked leather and pulling at the brim of his baseball cap.

“I’m just walking out to the island,” I answer. This doesn’t clarify matters for him, so I add, “I’m OK,” and shake open my umbrella. He shrugs, rolls up his window, and keeps driving in the other direction, back toward Houma and firmer ground.

I repeat the phrase I’m OK in my mind as I walk along the rock-lined road. Three nights before flying to Louisiana, I fled the apartment I shared with the man I was to marry. For months I had sensed that this was not the relationship that would buoy me through the long passage that is adulthood, but I resisted leaving because there was still love, if fraught, between us. Eventually the levee of my optimism broke, and I stuffed my rolling suitcase with clean underwear, empty notepads, and a tent. It is not the first time, nor the last, that I turn my back on something I care about immensely.

Though it is the first time it feels like a form of deceit.

Soon the road makes a sharp left along the highest and most stubborn spine of land. Two miles long and a quarter mile wide, this is what remains of the Isle de Jean Charles. Less than half a century ago, the island was ten times larger. Waterfowl marshes surrounded this chenier, or wooded ridge, atop which hundreds of residents built their lives. Now many of the homes that flank the Island Road sit on sixteen-foot-high stilts. Briars billow from the windows of those remaining on the ground, undoing the frames one growing season at a time. The ratio looks like one-to-two: for every lifted house there are two abandoned ones. For every person who has stayed, two are already gone.

Out toward the island’s tip, a man sits underneath his raised home enjoying the storm wind, backlit in the bruised light. As I walk past he hollers, “Get off this island!” Behind me a minivan crawls by, and the driver cackles from her window. “You leave!” she heaves in response. I am relieved that neither is speaking to me.

The wheels of her Toyota Previa crunch across broken bits of blacktop as she pulls into the driveway next to one of those deflated swimming pools that look like big blue doughnuts. Now, I decide, is as good a time as any to start endearing myself to the people who still live out here. I turn and head toward the house, cantilevered up over the surrounding remnants of marsh. Much to my surprise the seated man says, “You must be Elizabeth.”

“Well, then, let me guess. You’re Chris Brunet,” I reply as I step onto the poured concrete slab that serves as his porch. He is the only islander who returned the calls I made in the weeks leading up to my trip. We had hatched a plan to have lunch on Friday, before I got it in my mind to walk out to the island a day ahead of schedule.

environmental science box

RISING TALENT Environmental writing was always a passion for Elizabeth Rush ’06, but early on her focus was on poetry. Her senior thesis was a collection of lyric poems about the female body encountering wilderness and the world, and her thesis adviser, Prof. Katie Ford [creative writing 2006–07], urged her to pay attention to sounds in language—a skill which is evident in the lyrical prose of Rising.

Elizabeth says, “I can see very clearly that at Reed I developed so many of the skills I need to be the writer I am, chief among them discipline.” She learned to put in hours of hard work during the week, so she could play in her time off. “I would go hiking in the Cascades on the weekends or up to the Reed College ski cabin or I would dance my brains out at the Stop Making Sense screening. This oscillation between time deep in my writing practice and time in my body exploring the world is something I maintain even today.” After Reed, she undertook a solo bicycle trip from Portland to Skagway, Alaska, then moved to Hanoi, Vietnam, to work as an arts writer at a gallery that supported controversial North Vietnamese artists.

In addition to Rising, Elizabeth is the author of Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper’s, Guernica, Granta, Orion, Creative Nonfiction, Le Monde Diplomatique, and the New Republic, among others. Her work explores how humans adapt to changes enacted upon them by forces seemingly beyond their control, from ecological transformation to political revolution. In 2019 she will serve as an Antarctic artist and writer in residence for the National Science Foundation.

december 2018 Reed Magazine 23

RISING “I wasn’t expecting you out here until tomorrow.”

Chris braces his arm against the seat of an adjacent wheelchair, throws his weight forward, and twists into place. He was born with cerebral palsy but it hasn’t slowed him down much. We shake.

“I must be pretty lucky to run into you,” I say. “I haven’t seen anyone else on the island all afternoon.”

“I don’t tend to go far,” Chris replies. A horsefly circles his head like a ball on a string. “And you just missed Theo, down the way. I saw him drive past in his pickup a bit ago.” He must have been the man who offered me a ride.

The woman in the van is Chris’s sister Teresa. She shakes my hand and walks over to the refrigerator, where she unloads an armful of soda pop, sweetened tea, and bottled water.

“I’m starting to get a feel for the place. It’s awfully pretty,” I say.

“Even prettier at sunrise and sunset,” Chris adds, pushing up the sleeves of his cotton baseball jersey.

“You can’t say nothing about this here island until you see both. When it lights up the sky—putting the clouds in different colors—well, I don’t know how much you’d pay to see that on a vacation somewhere.” He picks up a yellow vinyl chair and rolls over to offer me a seat.

Chris’s nephew Howard—whom Chris took in a few years back, along with Howard’s sister, Juliette— is fishing in the channel behind the house. In 1951 the first oil rig was installed nearby, and with the rig came “channelization,” the digging of access routes through the marsh. The oil companies were supposed to “rock” each channel—to backfill it—when the rigs left, reducing the movement of water through the fragile marshland that surrounds and supports the bayous. “But they didn’t do that, they didn’t maintain the bayou like they said they would, and now the gulf is at our back door,” I was told in town. Every year, thanks to erosion, the channels grow wider, eating into the land that once comprised Jean Charles.

Just then, a dolphin swims up the man-made waterway, past the spot where Howard is casting his line. For a second I find its undulating fin thrilling.

“Forty years ago you would have never seen that animal all the way up here,” Chris says. “But the land is opening up all around us. The cuts they made in the marsh speed up the process. What was once sweet water is now salt, so these dolphins, they come in.” The entire time that humans have inhabited these bayous, it would have been unimaginable to find a big marine mammal so far “inland.” Then again, this island isn’t inland anymore.

While the dolphin is not direct evidence of sea level rise, its sudden appearance does point to a dramatic

24 Reed Magazine december 2018

photo by William Widmer / Redux

What remains of Isle de Jean Charles is two miles long and a quarter mile wide. Less than half a century ago, the island was ten times larger.

december 2018  Reed Magazine 25

RISING shift over time. It is a shift that Chris, who has lived here his entire life, can perceive and that I, as a visitor, cannot. My initial thrill settles into some other emotion. I think if I look at that dolphin long enough, fix my gaze on its body nosing north, I will once again be able to see—as I did with Faharul’s limp mustard plants—what is largely invisible to anyone who moves as often as I do: the hallucinogenic transformation of our coastline, the salt water kneading in—into the aquifer and root systems, into our backyards and basements and wildlife refuges and former freshwater creeks—a change so large it unsettles our very ideas of who we are and how we relate to the land we have long lived atop.

“Is there some single thing that you saw that made it clear to you that the environment was changing, and not just in a normal way?” I ask Chris. “Like that dolphin. When did you see your first one?”

“I don’t know, maybe fifteen years ago,” he says, scratching his graying goatee. “But you have to know that the thing that makes this saltwater intrusion so damaging now is that it’s close to home. Yes, we get

oaks. And the fishing camps destroyed by Rita. Past Theo’s parents’ old home, and Lora Ann’s old home, and Albert’s old home, and all of the other residences that have been abandoned because rebuilding is tiresome and expensive. So tiresome and so expensive that for some, leaving Jean Charles became the best option in a set of only bad options.

I have started to think that those who lived on the island and fled are some of the first climate refugees.

By 2050 there will be two hundred million people like them worldwide, two million of whom will be from right here in Louisiana. And then there is Chris, who stays.

“Mind you,” Chris says as if he were reading my thoughts, “there is no real difference between those who go and those who stay. After a while people left because of the challenges of living here.” His eyes are bright and damp and his skin slick. “When a hurricane hits, you have no bed, no sofa, no lights, no icebox, no gas, no running water, sometimes no roof for a month or more. You sleep on the floor, if you have that to go back to, and you start to rebuild. Or you leave.”

“ THE IRONY IS THAT LOUISIANA ISN’T SHAPED LIKE A BOOT ANYMORE.” —ELIZABETH RUSH ’06 dolphins up here, but the worst destruction is taking place in our communities.” He pauses, unsure of how to go on. Teresa fills the silence by offering me an Arizona iced tea. It seems to me that what Chris can’t quite put his finger on is that the dolphin is just a symbol. For me the symbol is environmental; I can point to it and say, This is evidence that the ecosystem is in flux. But for Chris the dolphin represents the slow disappearance of his neighbors. Over the past forty years nearly 90 percent of the islanders have moved inland. When the people who long called this place home left, they took a little piece of Chris’s own idea of home with them.

The dolphin heads back down the channel. It likely encountered some piece of riverine infrastructure, a floating barge, levee, or floodgate. All of which were put in place to protect Houma, the parish seat, from the storms that seem to come at a rate of once or twice a year now.

The dolphin swims past the homes with their roofs blown off. Past the molding mattresses, and the trailers with their piping ripped out. Past the gas pipeline that broke during Gustav and was never repaired, leaving the residents without heat in the winter. Past the empty firehouse. The hundreds of dead cypresses and

26 Reed Magazine december 2018

“I see,” I say, looking up at the floor of his house, which hovers overhead.

Teresa takes this as her cue, hugs Chris, and heads back to her minivan.

“It’s not that those who left wanted to go. But each person has a decision that only they can make. And if you are one of those who left, there is still a big part of you that wants to be here,” Chris says.

I think for a moment about my apartment in Brooklyn with its view of the S train that I will likely never see again. Then I think of the man I left inside it, whose presence has defined much of my life for the last three years.

Chris watches my features turning inward in the waning light, but is, I think, too polite to pry. Sensing the importance of making myself vulnerable too, I offer the information up, try to turn the interview into an exchange of ideas between equals. When I tell Chris about my flight, about my personal life imploding, his warmth deepens. “Child,” he says, “you have to do what is in your heart, even when it’s hard. But if he’s taking energy from you, then you know what you need to—” Chris looks out toward the open water, his voice trailing off.

In that moment I cease to be the reporter from far away and instead become a mirror in which he can

Isle de Jean Charles

Isle de Jean Charles

1932

2011

Every year, 25-35 square miles of land off the coast of Louisiana—an area larger than Manhattan–disappears into the water due to a combination of subsidence (soil settling) and global sea level rise. These maps show how much land has been lost to the Gulf of Mexico in the past 80 years.

test out and analyze the causes and consequences of leaving someone or something you love. As I watch a series of unknowable thoughts rearrange his owl-like face, I realize that my attachment to my former fiancé, to my apartment, and to the vision of the future I have spent the last couple of years conjuring is much less fierce than Chris’s to this island. This shrinking strip of land that, for fifty years, he has rarely left. If it was hard for me to choose to give up a life I had imagined and invested in, what, I wonder, would it take for Chris to let go of the only place he has ever really known?

Chris invites me to visit the next day, and I accept.

I walk back down the Island Road, and every hundred yards or so, I pass a huge cypress or oak stripped bare, its leafless branches reaching like electricity in search of a point of contact. The cause of the trees’ untimely demise isn’t in the air, but deep in the ground where the roots wander, where the salt water has started to work its way in. Just south of the Island Road, half the trees have fallen into the widening channel. Those that are still standing are just barely so. Everything, it seems, leans toward the salt water that wasn’t always here.

On my way back down Highway 665, I stop to buy some groceries at the Pointe-aux-Chenes Supermarket, a lowslung building with a long white veranda and a limited selection of shrink-wrapped vegetables in Styrofoam packaging. Inside, a woman speaks with the cashier about the squashed snake she almost stepped on in the parking lot. I check on the snake—a garter—and notice a bumper sticker on her rusting Camry’s trunk.

The state of Louisiana is bright yellow, and inside it are the words “Shaped like a BOOT because we kick ASS.” The irony is that Louisiana isn’t shaped like a boot anymore. Back at my rental house in Montegut, I pull up an aerial picture of the state on Google Earth. Today the wetlands that once made up the boot’s sole are all

tattered and frayed. They look more like mesh than rubber. And in fifty years they are likely to be gone entirely. According to the United States Geological Survey, Louisiana lost just under 1,900 square miles of land between 1932 and 2000, an area roughly equal in size to Delaware. And it is likely to lose another 1,750 square miles by 2064, an area larger than my soon-to-be-adopted home state of Rhode Island.

That’s because the southern edge of Louisiana is eroding at a rate among the fastest on the planet, and sea level rise and the oil industry aren’t the only things to blame. The Mississippi River is directly responsible for building up the coast of the Bayou State. For much of the past ten thousand years, it deposited silt from the far reaches of the continent here, where it emptied into the sea. The world’s fourth-longest river drained a vast watershed stretching from Wyoming to Pennsylvania, from the border of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. In wet years a section of the river that might typically be one mile across can swell to as many as fifty (as has happened all along the river’s lower reaches in present-day Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana), picking up additional soil and sediment and carrying it south.

Pre-Columbian Native American societies understood that a healthy river goes through cycles of flood and drought, and they shaped their civilizations around the Mississippi’s ebb and flow. Their villages were sited not on the banks but nearby, and most weren’t permanent settlements but camps that could be relocated if the waters rose. In 1543, however, the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto was stopped in his march westward across present-day Tennessee by a swollen Mississippi. His chronicler, Garcilaso de la Vega, mentions the encounter in his book The Florida of the Inca; it was the first time (to the best of my knowledge) that the Mississippi’s regular high waters and sediment-delivering surges were described as a deterrent to human progress. The second recorded instance of the river’s

december 2018 Reed Magazine 27

RISING “wrath” came in 1734, when it flooded a fledgling New Orleans. Then in 1927 the river inundated an area the size of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont combined for several months, destroying new towns that had sprung up all along its banks. It wasn’t until the Mississippi got in the way of the colonial project that its predictably fickle flow was deemed a problem.

In an effort to “manage” the mighty river, the Army Corps of Engineers put in one dam, then two, then three, then nineteen. Today there are twenty-nine dams and locks on the upper Mississippi, and the lower Mississippi is lined with levees and floodwalls. Instead of preserving the low-lying land at the Mississippi’s mouth, these river controls have contributed to its destruction by impounding land-replenishing sediment behind man-made barriers upstream. Thanks in part to these interventions, the Isle de Jean Charles, and the wetlands surrounding it, started to disappear, not just temporarily beneath floodwaters, but for good.

The next day I drive back out to the island for my midday meeting with Chris. Here on the far reaches of the bayou, my visit is an event. Another one of Chris’s nephews, Dalton, comes over to watch Mission: Impossible and when the movie ends he joins our conversation.

The afternoon is hot and still. The three of us sit together and eat slices of store-bought cake from the market in Pointe-aux-Chenes. The talk moves easily through a range of subjects: the kids’ schooling, the bus schedule, the weather. It is a great comfort to be engulfed in the workings of a family not my own.

I felt immediately at home despite the fact that Chris’s house is physically falling apart. The plaster and particleboard have been stripped from all the walls, and the bones of the structure shine through. In order to save it from mold after Hurricane Lili, in 2002, Chris gutted the entire thing.

“That Lili, she got all the way into the house here,” he says with a sweep of his arm. “I had to take out all the walls. I’ve been repairing them little by little, but the going’s slow.” He rolls from the living room to the kitchen and offers me a soda. “When more people lived on the island I would have been able to call on some of them and get help with this here,” he continues. The bedsheet tacked between his bedroom and the kitchen flaps in the wind. “Now I get help occasionally but mostly do the work myself, one board at a time.” His living room, which is separated from the children’s bedroom by a faded piece of red fabric, has been under construction for more than a decade.

“Do you remember,” Dalton says, “I forgot what hurricane it was, when they were dropping all them

28 Reed Magazine december 2018

sandbags from the helicopters? You know that levee busted for the fourth time during the storm and they still haven’t finished fixing it.”

“It wasn’t Rita, and it wasn’t Gustav or Katrina or Ike,” Chris says, rattling off names with an ease that borders on the familial. He looks out the window to where the nameless bay laps at the disappearing land and laughs.

“If they really wanted to save the island they would have included it in the Morganza to the Gulf protection plan.”

Chris is speaking of a $13 billion infrastructure project to construct ninety-eight miles of levees that would wrap most of the Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes in ten-foot-high earthen berms. The project, which is part of an even larger socalled Master Plan designed to “rescue” part of the state’s crumbling coast, will require $50 billion to complete. That’s more than the costs of the Manhattan Project, the recovery from Sandy, and the Hoover Dam combined.

“No one is surprised that we weren’t among those who were saved,” Dalton says firmly. “We are Indians, after all.”

On the last morning of my trip I speak with Albert Naquin, the reigning chief of the Biloxi-ChitimachaChoctaw tribe to which Dalton and Chris belong. Albert, like so many others, doesn’t live on the island anymore.

He moved to Pointe-aux-Chenes—a stone’s throw from the grocery—after he had to mop an inch of mud off brand-new appliances and dining room furniture in his first year of marriage. “I was fresh out of the army with a baby on the way. The first time I flooded, it was the end for me,” Albert tells me, tugging at a black baseball cap with the word NATIVE embroidered on it in big block letters.

Albert, who is in his sixties and built like an old Buick, has spent the last twenty years trying to organize the remaining islanders to relocate as a group and to get the Army Corps of Engineers to pay for it.

While Chris says he isn’t against the idea, he has yet to wholeheartedly embrace it. And others are completely opposed. Back in 2002, when the initial Morganza to the Gulf feasibility report was submitted and Jean Charles left out, that was as close as Albert ever came to uniting the islanders.

“I think the Army Corps was feeling guilty about not including us in their big plan, so they offered to help us relocate,” Albert tells me. “But we needed to show that nearly everyone living on the island would be interested in leaving. On the day we met with the government folks there were a bunch of people who don’t even live on Jean Charles asking all of these questions that derailed the conversation. After that the interest in relocation dropped, and without consensus no one was going to give us money to move.”

Before coming to Jean Charles I researched the

history of Louisiana’s wetlands. Not surprisingly, our knowledge of early residents is somewhat limited; most artifacts have been found in less ecologically volatile areas upstream, such as the Cahokia Mounds of Illinois.

The Chitimacha are said to have lived in what is present-day central Louisiana for over six thousand years.

In the face of the violence that accompanied the arrival of Europeans, they migrated south along the lower Mississippi in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arriving at the far reaches of the delta at roughly the same time as the Biloxi and the Choctaw, who were retreating from their ancestral homes in the wake of Florida’s bloody Seminole Wars.

The convergence of so many disparate Native groups—along with the Acadians, who were expelled from Nova Scotia and other soon-to-be-Canadian provinces by the British in 1755—on the boggy fringes of the continent was no coincidence. Living in this marshland—considered uninhabitable by most mainland

Europeans—was a kind of shared survival tactic, and Acadians and Native Americans thrived together here.

But today the high rate of intermarriage between these groups means that the federal government does not recognize the residents as Natives. And since the island was never formally a reservation, there is no federal mandate to relocate the islanders now that their home is disappearing.

“At first we were losing one or two families with every storm,” Albert says. “But now, with the wetlands opening up, the storms are getting worse, and over the years the flow of people off the island has increased.

If it continues like this, eventually there won’t be anyone left out there. And who we are, our unique Native community, will become fractured, will disappear along with the land.”

In 2016, $48 million dollars were allocated to the island through the National Disaster Resilience Competition to help residents relocate inland as a group. The resettlement process, while moving forward, remains deeply fraught.

AN ENVIRONMENT FOR CUTTING-EDGE IDEAS leah nash

Reed’s unique program in environmental studies teaches students how to attack problems from a multidisciplinary perspective. ES majors choose one of five primary disciplines— biology, chemistry, economics, history, or political science—as a sort of intellectual base camp, but also benefit from rigorous exposure to other disciplines that provide invaluable insight into the subject matter.

With the program’s diverse array of scientific, social scientific, and humanistic influences, ES majors learn to communicate across disciplines. The program creates biologists who can speak with public policy makers, political scientists who understand atmospheric chemistry, historians who can splice genes.

More than 40 students have majored in ES since the program was launched in 2010, thanks to generous gifts from John Gray; Dan Greenberg ‘62 and Susan Steinhauser; Jeff and Hyunja

Rachel Fox ’15 and Claire Brumbaugh-Smith ’15 investigate the canyon’s amphibean habitat.

Kenner; Randy and Leslie Labbe; Gary Rieschel ’79 and Yucca Wong Rieschel; and an anonymous donor.

Recent ES theses have found the traits which allow nonnative species to thrive in urban environments (Nadav Mouallem ’17, ES– biology); investigated Oregon honey for neonicitinoids (Lauren

Kupper ’17, ES–chemistry); found out why Washington doesn’t have a bottle bill (Alexandra Gumas ’17, ES–political science); studied imperial forestry in 19th-century India (Garrett Linck ’17, ES–history); and analyzed credit availability in the coffee sector (Edward Witte ’18, ES–economics). See more at reed.edu/es/

december 2018 Reed Magazine 29

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

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

The Last Cruise “Overhead, the Milky Way sprawled across the length of the sky, a violently lavish expanse of light. . . Christine felt a burst of wild, open excitement. Here she was, drunk on a raft in a pool on a ship on a dark ocean, thousands of miles from home.”

In her first novel since 2013, Kate Christensen ’86 seems to pay homage to Katherine Ann Porter’s 1962 Ship of Fools. But unlike Porter’s backward glance at the first inklings of fascism, The Last Cruise voyages uneasily in the present.

We experience the Queen Isabella’s farewell Hawaiian cruise through the eyes of 36-yearold Christine Thorne, a married but restless Maine farmer; Miriam Koslow, an Israeli violinist, onboard with her ex-husband and their bandmates in a classical string quartet; and Miklos Szabo, a youngish sous chef who dreams of leaving shipboard life for good.

Days into the trip, the crew stages a walkout to protest the cruise company’s plans to dismiss them all in Hawaii. Abandoning

their 16-hour workdays and cramped berths, while Christine and Valerie vie for the charms they establish an open-air tent camp that of the moody Hungarian sous chef.

Christine’s journalist friend Valerie dubs If Nazism is what thrums through Ship of “Occupy Main Deck.” Then Fools, global ruin is the everthe vacation from hell realpresent hum that powers The ly begins. A mysterious fire Last Cruise. It’s no accident and catastrophic power outthat the strike leader’s tattoo age leave the ship bobbing reads En Peligro de Extinción. As helplessly in the middle of a massive storm approaches the Pacific Ocean. Norovirus the becalmed ship, so does breaks out. The cruise line’s a solar-powered catamaran with a blond-haired Palo Alto rescue barges are delayed for family aboard. “We just sailed days, and as food supplies through hundreds of miles of dwindle, the ship’s billionaire trash,” yells the father to the owner ditches the whole debastranded passengers. “We cle aboard a private helicopter. were headed for Hawaii but Still, there is no aphro- (Doubleday, 2018) we decided to take a detour disiac like salt air, especially because we wanted our kids when things are looking dire.

Disgusted at her husband’s craven getaway, to see the reality firsthand.” It’s a disturbing tale, deftly told. —ANGIE JABINE ’79 the billionaire’s wife consoles herself with Miriam’s ex. The quartet’s first violinist and Miriam rekindle their long-buried attraction,

Get Your Money Together participation, including space for note-takWhen you’re living paycheck to paycheck, words like “budget” and “savings” often ing and reflection. Rather than prescribing conjure sensations of doom, a specific financial regimen, frustration, or defeat. Get Karabaic provides a frameYour Money Together seeks to work for the reader to conclear that emotional hurdle struct their own strategy and help you regain control of based on personal goals. The your expenses. Through eight process that emerges is one chapters, Lillian Karabaic of incremental, weekly steps, from tracking daily purchas’13 and a host of adorable es to choosing a budgeting cats guide you through the method to prevent overspendworld of financial planning ing. Karabaic’s goal is not to with concise but clear explacrack down on the reader but nations, tables to keep track to help them reach a sense of of your own budgeting and calm about their money, consaving, and discussion ques- (Oh My Dollar!, 2018) tending that “the most punk tions that make it easier to rock life of all is one where discuss money with friends, you are in control of your money and can family, and partners. make the choices to enjoy life—based on The kitten-filled pages of Get Your Money your own values.” If you find yourself peeking Together not only inform but invite reader 30 Reed Magazine december 2018

at your bank balance through closed fingers, dreading your rent payment, or even if you just want to understand what a mortgage is, Karabaic’s book has resources for you.

—KATIE STEELE ’18

Crazy Rich Asians (movie)

Robert Friedland ’74 and Kilian Kerwin ’85 are producers of this box office hit, a romantic comedy based on the novel of the same name by Kevin Kwan about a young woman of modest means who travels to Singapore to meet her longtime boyfriend’s family and is surprised to discover they are one of the country’s wealthiest families. The movie’s press notes that it is the first film from a major Hollywood studio in 25 years to feature a majority Asian American cast.

A Memoir 1917–2017

The American Psychological Association listed Eleanor Maccoby ’39 as among the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Throughout her career she studied developmental psychology, specifically sex differences, gender development, gender differentiation, parent-child relations, child development, and social development from the child perspective.

Her memoir traces her formative years in Tacoma, Washington, through the professional work that has brought her renown.

(CreateSpace, 2018)

The Ethical Chemist

(second edition) Jeff Kovac ’70, professor of chemistry at the University of Tennessee, says the basis of this book, now in its second edition, is a series of specific cases that present the kinds of ethical problems faced by both students and practicing chemists. Commentaries discuss the ethical issues raised and present possible solutions in the form of morally acceptable courses of action. The introductory chapters provide an overview of ethics, morals, and ethical theory, as well as a discussion of professionalism and ethics in science.

(Oxford University Press, 2018)

The Debasement of Human Rights

The idea of human rights began as a call for individual freedom from tyranny, yet today it is exploited to rationalize oppression and promote collectivism.

How did this happen? Aaron Rhodes ’71, recognized as one of the leading human rights activists in the world by the University of Chicago, reveals how an emancipatory ideal became so debased. (Encounter Books, 2018)

Allen Wood ’64, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, has a handful of recent publications: Kantian Ethics (Cambridge, 2008), The Free Development of Each (Oxford, 2014), Fichte’s Ethical Thought (Oxford, 2016), and Formulas of the Moral Law (Cambridge, 2017).

His most recent is a revised version of his translation of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Yale, 2018). His next book, Kant and Religion (Cambridge), is due to go to press in 2019.

A Kind of Paradise

In latest novel by Bev Jafek ’71, Jean and Red retire and return to a paradise village in Mexico where they planned to build their dream house, but they encounter a new Mexico filled with political corruption, police brutality, and violence against women. A serial murderer is loose in the village, and Jean and Red attempt to arm and defend the women of Mexico.

The effort is harrowing: Can they save the village women? Will they even get out alive? (Bedazzled Ink, 2018)

december 2018 Reed Magazine 31

Reediana The Hero’s Brother

It’s hard enough being barely above average when your brothers include the deadliest swordsman of the realm, a saint, and the greatest hero of the Middle Ages. But what if your Queen of Love is imprisoned by a one-armed religious zealot and lethal librarians? The result is either high adventure or an identity crisis. Or both. A new historical fantasy novel by M. Scott Anderson ’73 is available in audio format.

See herosbrother.com.

Write a Bad College Essay . . . Then Write the One That Gets You In

In a new college essay manual Cathy Altman Nocquet ’78 leads readers to explore their creative and critical thinking to elicit an authentic essay no one else could write. Her approach is fresh and wise and well suited for contemporary applicants.

(CreateSpace, 2018)

The Rise of Animals & Descent of Man 1660–1800: Toward Posthumanism in British Literature between Descartes and Darwin

John Morillo ’82, associate professor of English at North Carolina State University, has written a sophisticated intellectual history of the origins of our attitudes about animals that at the same time illuminates major currents of 18th century British literary culture. (University of Delaware Press, 2017)

The Word Made Flesh

The second novel by Bob Rashkin ’72 (published under the pen name Bannager Bong) is a work of “prehistoric realism” exploring how how people first developed speech.

Somewhere, sometime around 100,000 to 70,000 years ago, some early humans first started talking. Ever wonder how that happened, he asks. (Lulu, 2008)

The Dystopian Imagination in Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film

Diana Palardy ’87 examines contemporary Spanish dystopian literature and films (in) directly related to the 2008 financial crisis from an urban cultural studies perspective. In close reading of texts and films

by Ray Loriga, Elia Barceló, Ion de Sosa, José Ardillo, David Llorente, Eduardo Vaquerizo, and Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, Diana offers insights into the creative ways that these authors and directors use spatial constructions to capture the dystopian imagination.

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are

Rudy Owens ’87 (formerly Rudy Brueggemann) profiles the American adoption system and experience.

Owens’s memoir as an adoptee and foster child examines the institutions, the medical and social work personnel, and the national system that promoted adoption as the “most suitable plan” for single and pregnant women in the four decades after World War II. (BFD Press, 2018)

Knitting Wild: Knitting, Nature, and the Resistance!

When the Trump administration put an oil industry insider in charge of the Dept. of the Interior, Theressa Silver ’93 responded by writing a book of knitting patterns. Each pattern is a love letter to America’s wild places. The book includes a fair bit of biology, a liberal dose of environmentalism, and a dollop of political activism. Photographed in the Reed canyon and Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge.

(Cooperative Press, 2018)

On a River Winding Home: Stories and Visions of the Petaluma River Watershed Through the use of stunning photography and intimate storytelling, writer John Sheehy ’82 and photographer Scott Hess pair contemporary photos of Northern California’s Petaluma River watershed with stories that capture the watershed’s colorful history and its shifting identity over the past two centuries.

Stories extend from the native Coast Miwoks to the Spanish

missionaries, Mexican rancheros, Gold Rush settlers, railroad barons, bootleggers, socialist chicken ranchers, slow-growth pioneers, winemakers, and farm-to-market artisanal farmers. Part rambling walking tour, part voyage to the past, the book deepens the watershed’s unique sense of place by “restory-ing” the landscape. (Ensatina Books, 2018)

The Petaluma Marsh, photo by Scott Hess.

32 Reed Magazine december 2018

Repossessed

Cry, Blueberry (play)

In a new play by Greg Lam ’96, he imagines what would happen if anyone could choose to remix and rewrite their memories and personalities. Rich and Gretchen seem to have the ideal marriage until they learn that it was manufactured by a mysterious biotech company which installed it into their brains.

Because they can no longer afford this service, the company must repossess their improvements. Repossessed explores questions of identity, morality, and authenticity amidst a world of rapidly changing technology and the ethics that come with it. The play was produced by Theatre Conspiracy in Fort Myers, Florida after winning its 2017 New Play Contest over a field of 500+ entries. It also recently won a Lotus Lee Foundation New Work Initiative and will be produced in Shanghai with a possible tour afterward.

Harvests, Feasts, and Graves: Postcultural Consciousness in Contemporary Papua New Guinea

Ryan Schram ’99 explores the experiences of living in intercultural and historical conjunctures among the Auhelawa people of Papua New Guinea. In this ethnographic investigation, Ryan ponders how Auhelawa question the meaning of social forms and through this questioning seek paths to establish a new sense of their collective self.

(Cornell University Press, 2018)

Public Children Law: Contemporary Issues

Dr. Bianca Jackson ’00, family law barrister, has coauthored a guide to current, important, and commonly misunderstood issues in public children law. Drawing together the key statutes, case law, and procedures in relation to twelve central themes, this book examines current issues of particular difficulty in public children law, with an emphasis on those with an international dimension.

(Bloomsbury Professional, 2018)

George Goodell ’17 recently directed Cry, Blueberry, which ran at the Gothenburg Fringe Festival. A oneman show featuring two characters, Isaac Solomon Loew and his clown avatar, Blueberry, the play has been produced four times, garnering fourstar reviews and a Buzz Award. As Blueberry removes his blue and white face paint—a nod to Edward Hopper’s painting Soir Bleu—the audience discovers the man behind the mask.

Set in Great Depression–era America, the dramatic arc of the play is generated by Loew’s account of his life, punctuated by his confessions to a

Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance

Adonia Lugo ’05 paints an unforgettable picture of Los Angeles—and the United States—from the perspective of two wheels. This is a book of borderlands and intersections, a cautionary tale about the dangers of putting infrastructure before culture, and a comingof-age story about power and identity. (Microcosm Publishing, 2018)

variety of sins. Economic, social, personal, emotional, and spiritual “ups and downs” are the key motifs. The play explores mental illness, escapism, bystander apathy, and the thin line between self-referential comedy and self-deprecation. From the beginning of Blueberry’s monologue to the end of Loew’s, writer-actor Richard Canal stages how fatally flawed a person can be and still learn from their mistakes, living up to Blueberry’s mentor’s maxim: “It is not comedy that makes a clown great; it is his sincerity.” —SEBASTIAN ZINN ’18

American Fix

Claire Foster ’07 cowrote American Fix with Ryan Hampton who describes his personal struggle with addiction, outlines the challenges that the recovery movement currently faces, and offers a concrete, comprehensive plan of action towards making America’s addiction crisis a thing of the past. (St. Martins, 2018)

december 2018 Reed Magazine 33

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

Prosecuted Klansmen in Landmark Case Jacob Tanzer ’56

July 23, 2018, in Portland, following a fall in which he struck his head.

Lawyer, judge, and public servant, Jacob spent decades building an outsized reputation as a lion of the law, ultimately serving as a justice on the Oregon Supreme Court. But the case that launched—and defined—his career was the investigation into the 1964 murders of civil rights activists Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner—immortalized in the film Mississippi Burning.

“It was pivotal historically,” he said. “It was when the nation as a whole said, ‘No more.’ . . . These dozen Klansmen and their victims really changed history.”

The son of Russian immigrants, Jacob was born in Longview, Washington, where his father ran a men’s clothing store. In later years, when Jake asked his father, “What is socialism?” his father replied, “Socialism is anything but the tsar.” Neither parent had ever spent a day in school, but they felt it was important for their sons to be educated.

“If I wanted to do something I had to explain it to my folks,” Jake said. “If the explanation wasn’t very satisfactory—it didn’t seem to make them want it—I would say, ‘It’s educational.’ That was the magic word. If it was educational, I not only could but should do it.”

Jake graduated from Grant High School, initially began at the University of Oregon, and transferred to Stanford. When his mother came down with tuberculosis, the family could no longer afford to send him to Stanford, so he transferred to Reed, where his brother, Hershal Tanzer ’48, was an alumnus. Jake spent a couple of years at Reed and eventually earned both his BA and his JD from the University of Oregon.

In 1959, after passing the Oregon bar exam, he established a small law practice in Portland. “I had no great desire to join a large firm,” he said. “My grades weren’t particularly good. In fact, I graduated as the top man in the bottom half of my class. I’ve always been rather pleased with that. So, I wasn’t largefirm material.”

Jake yearned for a job with the administration of President John F. Kennedy, whose “New Frontier” slogan inspired him. In 1962, 40 Reed Magazine december 2018

he married Miriam Albert, whom he met when she was briefly enrolled as a student at Reed, and the couple moved to Washington, D.C., where Jake joined the U.S. Department of Justice, serving as a trial attorney in the organized crime and racketeering division under Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

“Compared to a corner office on 122nd and Glisan, it was wonderful,” Jake said. “I loved it.”

His unit investigated Mafia corruption in the United Auto Workers union and eventually shut down the entire numbers racket in Cleveland, Ohio. As he gained experience working with grand juries, he transferred to the civil rights division and was selected to join a team sent to Neshoba County, Mississippi, to investigate the 1964 deaths of three civil rights activists and prosecute the Ku Klux Klan. This case—which would later become known as the Mississippi Burning case—was instrumental in shaping the civil rights movement. President Lyndon Johnson and civil rights activists used the outrage over the activists’ death to gain passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Jake asked his boss, Bob Owen, who headed the team, “‘Maybe we can prove the murder, but where is the federal crime?” Owen suggested that for public officials, such as the sheriff, to deny someone his rights under the U.S. Constitution was a crime under an old Reconstruction Era statute. Jake wrote the indictment, which was later upheld by the Supreme Court.

The young lawyers from the DOJ fanned out into the cotton fields around Neshoba County to find witnesses. Jake was warned by a federal marshal that Mississippi was a dangerous place, and told to be wary of pickup trucks with guns in the racks.

“Most of the vehicles were pickups and they all had gun racks, and they all had guns in the gun racks,” Jake said. “We were careful about being in Neshoba County after dark.

After dark we always had other things to do.

But I was never really scared. We just weren’t thinking that way. We had a job to do.”

His previous work with the organized crime and racketeering division had trained him to think like a prosecutor of big cases, using the grand jury as an investigative tool—not necessarily to indict the guilty, but to stir the pot,

giving the impression that it was closing in— making conspirators and witnesses nervous enough to talk to the FBI. Jake was adamant that “we didn’t carry the ball, but we helped. It was the African Americans who lived in the South who made change happen. They were extraordinarily courageous.”

While he enjoyed the film Mississippi Burning, he pointed out that “the movie portrayal of FBI activity was pure fiction.

The [real] FBI went by the book. They used gumshoe tactics, traditional investigative methods, with an infiltration into the Ku Klux Klan, which by the next year left the Klan riddled with FBI employees and informants.

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In Memoriam They developed the infiltration techniques investigating the Communist Party, then used many of those methods to infiltrate the Klan.

Ultimately, it made the Klan paranoid and had much to do with the crumbling of the Klan.”

A few years later, Jake volunteered with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, who went to Mississippi to represent clients—civil rights organizers, people who’d been assaulted by state, county, or local police, and victims of hate crimes—unable to find Mississippi lawyers who would take their cases. “It was fun when you won,” Jake said. But the victories were often small, and Jake recollected once losing 26 cases in one afternoon.

In 1964, the Tanzers returned to Portland with their first child, Joshua, and Jake went from deputy trial attorney for the Multnomah County district attorney to director of the Oregon Law Enforcement Council. One of his first responsibilities while working for the district attorney was to edit the briefs in Thornton v. Hays, the bill that preserves Oregon beaches for public use. He became the state’s first solicitor general and argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Oregon in the American Can Co. v. OLCC case, which upheld Oregon’s bottle bill. Jake became the director of the Oregon Department of Human Resources (now the Department of Human Services), and then sat on the Oregon Court of Appeals, an elected position for which he ran unsuccessfully the first time, but was unopposed the second.

Jake and Miriam divorced in 1972. Two years later, he married Elaine Rhine, a Portland schoolteacher who later purchased Elephants Delicatessen. For many years, Jake helped out behind the counter on weekends, to the surprise of colleagues in the legal profession who were more accustomed to seeing him in a black robe than a white apron.

In 1980, when he was 45, he was appointed to the Oregon Supreme Court by Gov. Victor Atiyeh (where he served alongside Justice Hans Linde ’47). Jake wrote a number of opinions from the bench involving land-use law and was the author of the court’s ruling that overturned Oregon’s death penalty in 1981. (Voters reinstated it in 1984.)

Three years later, he resigned to return to private practice, explaining, “Unforeseen family circumstances compel me to immediately seek income greater than my judicial salary.” He had been involved in a protracted court suit with his former wife, Miriam, over child support, which resulted in his having to pay higher support payments.

He is survived by his wife, Elaine Tanzer, and his children, Joshua Tanzer, Jessica Tanzer Conroy, Rachel Tanzer, and Elan Tanzer.

42 Reed Magazine december 2018

Capacity to Astonish Steven Boggs ’68

June 2, 2018, in Columbia, Maryland, of brain cancer.

Scientist, inventor, educator, and engineer, S te ve n fo c u s e d h i s remarkable career on the problem of harnessing electricity on a gargantuan scale. Author of more than 300 papers, he pioneered new techniques for handling massive quantities of electric power—enough to light up cities—and developed better ways to transmit, store, and insulate it.

Steve was born in Miami, Florida, grew up in Portland, and attended Lake Oswego High School. As a young boy, he was distinguished by his intelligence and a lack of interest in following the crowd—a rare quality for an adolescent. Steve was interested in radios and high-fidelity equipment of all kinds. At the age of 13, he used a crystal set and a meter to determine the amount of signal he would receive from the local radio station. Throughout his life, Steve retained this curiosity and “geekiness.”

He majored in physics at Reed and wrote his thesis, “The Covariant Presentation of a Postulatory Approach to Electromagnetism,” with Prof.

Dennis Hoffman [physics 1959–90] advising.

“Experience suggests that what one learns is much more determined by how hard one works than by the environment in which one works,” Steve said in later years. “However, the environment provided by Reed makes hard intellectual work much more enjoyable. Working as a Reededucated physicist in a field dominated by engineers has great advantages, as one approaches problems from a sufficiently different point of view that one can solve many problems which engineers find daunting. Finally, I can think of no better place to find a spouse than at Reed.”

His wife of many years was Joan Raymond ’68; the couple later divorced.

Steve obtained his PhD in physics at the University of Toronto and subsequently did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing at the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa. He then joined the research division of Ontario Hydro—at the time, the largest electric power utility in North America—and worked at their Toronto laboratory from 1975 to 1987. It was a fantastic time to be involved in research in the power sector.

The U.S.-based Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the Canadian Electrical Association were starting to fund major, long-term investigations into various utility problems. At the same time, advancements in oscilloscopes, wideband spectrum and impedance analyzers, digital instruments, fast photomultipliers, and

other optical tools were enabling much deeper investigations into insulation failure mechanisms and diagnostics. The invention of the Tektronix 466 and 7104 scopes enabled scientists to see the true partial-discharge (PD) current pulses for the first time, without the distortion caused by the measuring system.

Personal computers enabled cost-effective automated measurements and analysis.

Steve did pioneering work on the nature and measurement of PD, including the measurement of PD in the ultrahigh-frequency range in gas-insulated substations and rotating machines. At the same time, he pursued an MBA part-time at the University of Toronto, earning this degree in 1987. Some of his colleagues wondered why he pursued this degree—this new knowledge was of limited use in his research position at Ontario Hydro. But the new degree may have been instrumental in his beginning to look for another position.

In 1987, Steve joined Underground Systems, Inc. (USi), as director of engineering and research and was a major contributor in USi’s role as EPRI’s prime contractor on a number of underground electric power transmission research programs. He spearheaded the successful development of a novel high-pressure fluid-filled (HPFF) pipe-type cable termination utilizing ceramic capacitors for stress control, which resulted in a patent coauthored

by Steve. He was also vice president of Chicago Condenser Corporation, a USi subsidiary, and was the principal investigator on a U.S. Department of Energy-funded development program for a high-energy-density electrolytic capacitor for the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative Organization “Star Wars” program.

In 1993, Steve left industry to pursue his academic interests at the University of Connecticut as a tenured research professor and the director of the Electrical Insulation Research Center of the Institute of Materials Science, with a joint appointment to the graduate programs of materials science, physics, and electrical engineering. He was also an adjunct professor and advisory professor of the department of electrical engineering at both the University of Toronto and Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, China.

Between the universities, he supervised more than 20 PhD students, half of whom were female, making him an early practitioner for gender equality in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

At the University of Connecticut, Steve’s research interests focused primarily on understanding high-field phenomena in solid dielectrics, and development and applications of computer programs for transient nonlinear finite element analysis. He continued to

contribute to the understanding of highfrequency phenomena in power apparatus, SF6-insulated systems, outdoor insulation, and PD measurement. A strong proponent of the EPR (ethylene-propylene-rubber)Cable Technology Consortium, he was active in industrial collaborative projects on nonlinear materials for surge arresters, stress grading for cable joints and rotating machine endwindings for Toshiba, TMEIC (Toshiba Mitsubishi-Electric Industrial Corporation), Kerite, and Okonite, among others. As the principal investigator, Steve developed and led many major research programs, including high field injection with guarded needle electrode and high range radiation-monitoring cables for EPRI and various pulsed power capacitor projects for the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Laboratory, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency through prominent programs such as Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives.

Steve’s research encompassed both experimental and theoretical bases. At the beginning of his career, he was primarily an experimentalist. However, with the advances in computing power, he gradually transitioned into a theorist. Although this transition started at Ontario Hydro (his 1982 IEEE Transactions on Electrical Insulation paper on “Fundamental Limitations in the Measurement of Corona and Partial Discharge” was widely cited), it was at UConn that the theorist in Steve took hold. He once said, “A PhD study is not about collecting data but is about analyzing and developing new models based on those data.” Steve was one of the early thinkers at UConn who saw the value of a computational approach in materials science and engineering, and he inspired his colleague Rampi Ramprasad, who was a junior faculty member when they met in 2004, to explore the atomic-level origins of dielectric response, aging, and breakdown. Through 14 years of collaboration, their joint work (along with key contributions from others) ultimately led to some remarkable materials discovery outcomes.

Steve retired from the University of Connecticut in 2013 to devote time to his consulting company, NonLinear Systems, Inc. In addition to being a proactive member in many professional societies, he was an important contributor to the Basic Energy Science workshops organized by the U.S. Department of Energy, and was a key contributor to the roadmap report on Basic Research Needs for Materials under Extreme Environments. He was a prolific writer and delivered lectures in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. A fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a technical professional organization for the advancement of technology, he was awarded its DEIS Thomas Dakin Award.

Ben Ross Burgoyne ’39

Lyle Ross Crafton ’41

Ben was born in a sod house on the prairie near Youngstown, Alberta, Canada. When he was four years old, the family moved to Valemount, British Columbia, where his father was running a logging company, providing railroad ties and poles to the Canadian Pacific Railway. The rest of the family joined him later—traveling in the same boxcar as their milk cow, providing fresh milk for the children and enabling Ben’s mother to earn money selling milk to passengers along the way.

At the age of 19, Ben left Canada to attend a chiropractic and naturopathic school in Portland. He married his first wife, Bernita McClure, in Newberg, Oregon, while attending Reed.

When World War II began, he joined the U.S. Army and was told, “The U.S. needs doctors, so we will send you to medical school.” As a surgeon he served in the MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) 8055 in Korea and was made a captain.

In 1952, Ben moved to Arlington, Washington, where he set up his medical practice with Dr. Kessling. He was a family practice physician, a surgeon, and an acting anesthesiologist. When Kessling died, Ben’s practice doubled in size. He convinced his friend Norm Zook to join him, and together they built the Arlington Clinic next to the hospital. The two men also worked diligently to build and grow the Arlington Free Methodist Church.

In addition to delivering thousands of babies, Ben was a founder of the Warm Beach Senior Community & Health Care Center. He served on the board of trustees for Seattle Pacific University and was a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, an honorary society for doctors. Mission work took him to Haiti, South Africa, and Guatemala.

When Bernita became ill, Ben retired from his practice to care for her. He enjoyed flying, missions and volunteer work. He enjoyed his time in the sky so much that he built a Falco plane.

After Bernita passed in 1994, Ben was introduced to a widow, LaWanda Goldthorpe, by a mutual friend who described them as “two peas in a pod.” After they married, he moved to Lake Stevens, Washington. To keep his medical license active, Ben kept up with continuing education and licensing requirements until he turned 99.

Ben is survived by his brothers, Lloyd, Frank and Dale; his three children with Bernita, Bonnie Brann, Beth Irby, and Brian Burgoyne; and the three children he gained through his marriage to LaWanda, June Goldthorpe, Jerrie Waltz, and John Goldthorpe.

Lyle was born on a small farm near McMinnville, Oregon, and moved to Portland when he was six. His father ran a roofing and shingling business, and by the age of 11, Lyle was working for his father. By the time he was 20, Lyle had his own business, in which he worked on and off for most of his adult life.

He graduated from Oregon City High School and attended both Reed and Lewis & Clark College before deciding to work full time at roofing and shingling. While roller skating at the Oaks Park Roller Skating Rink, he met Doris Rivers, whom he married in 1941. Their daughter, Cheryl Christine, was born three years later. On his 25th birthday, Lyle joined the U.S. Navy, serving as a navy shore patrol guard and aboard the troop carrier USS Laurens.

In 1948, he purchased an interest in a farm implement business in Goldendale, Washington. After selling this business in 1954, he went to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service. Lyle spent the next 23 years traveling the 39 counties in Washington state, training, auditing, and setting up an aerial photo program for measuring field sizes from the air.

He and Doris divorced in 1956. Lyle met Lucille Campbell when he was performing an audit in Prosser, Washington, and they married in 1957. Lyle adopted her daughter, Barbara, and twin sons, Darrell and Gary, were born the following year. The family moved to Spokane, where Lyle became active with Boy Scout Troop 130, going on campouts with his sons and becoming a merit badge counselor.

When he turned 75, Lyle found that his roofing and siding business had become too demanding, and he began doing title work for Garry Montague. Lucille passed away in 2001, after 44 years of marriage. Lyle married Laura J. Scognamiglio of Spokane in 2003. Laura liked cruising and Lyle immediately took to it. They went through the Panama Canal twice and visited Alaska, Europe, and the Mediterranean islands. Lyle joined the Spokane Eagles Aerie 2 and served as their auditor for 11 years.

He said he had always had a wonderful life that only got better after he and Laura got together.

Laura passed away in 2017, and Lyle is survived by his son, Daniel, and his daughters, Cheryl Crafton and Barbara Reames.

July 14, 2018, in Lake Stevens, Washington, at the age of 101.

May 28, 2018, in Spokane, Washington.

Thomas Goff ’48

July 10, 2018, in Ashland, Oregon.

A one-eyed, left-handed, classically trained humanist from Reed and Berkeley, Tom had a unique style. He was known to cite Longfellow and Dr. William Osler; explore back roads; snitch peaches, flowers, and asparagus from abandoned orchards, sing 1930s church camp songs, and unknowingly create amusing spoonerisms, such december 2018 Reed Magazine 43

In Memoriam as commanding his daughters to “pass the paramecium” cheese at the dinner table.

He was born in Bellingham, Washington, and grew up in Blaine, where his father was the proprietor of Goff’s Department Store. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Merchant Marine as a radio officer in the South Pacific and the Middle East. After the war, Tom earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Reed, writing his thesis, “The Influence of Experimentality Induced Muscular Tension on Variability of Response,” with Prof. Frederick Courts [psychology 1945–69]. He also earned a bachelor’s degree in social work from the University of British Columbia and then got a master’s degree in psychiatric social work from UC Berkeley. He married Kaye Bush Kroman and they had three daughters. In 1956, the family moved to Oregon’s Rogue Valley; Tom and Kaye divorced in 1965.

He was a director of Jackson County Mental Health Clinic, but Tom’s true calling was working with individuals, families, and couples. His work took him to Washington, Oregon, California, and Alaska. He was a member of the Rogue Valley Sierra Club, a charter member of the Rogue Valley Unitarian Universalist congregation, and an early organizer of outdoor ski and hiking groups. Young at heart and steadfast in body—at the age of 80 he climbed Mt. Shasta—he was the oldest member of the Ashland YMCA senior floor exercise class. Quoting from a long-lost source, Tom said, “Give me the late bloomer, the person in their 50s or 60s who says, ‘I haven’t yet made up my mind what I want to do with my life.’”

As a father, Tom shared his love of exploration, backpacking, and fishing, along with a gusto for life and regional conservation efforts.

He romped with the family goat and applauded sunsets at mountain lakes. He is survived by his daughters, Mary and Joanna. His youngest daughter, Betsy, preceded him in death.

Opal Gardner ’49 July 15, 2018, in Portland.

Opal was born in Winner, South Dakota, and moved with her family to Hermiston, Oregon, where her father worked at the Umatilla Army Depot. The family lived on a small farm and Opal attended Hermiston High School. At the age of 16, she went to work in the Portland shipyards as a welder, where she met her husband, James Gardner. A year later, when she was 17, she married him; they were married for 67 years. She attended Reed for three semesters shortly after the Second World War, but dropped out to raise a family. When her children were older, she returned to college and completed both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Portland State College. She taught third grade for 30 years, and, in addition to regular classes, taught her students to crochet 44 Reed Magazine december 2018

and made a class project of raising parakeets.

Opal was involved in educational politics and served on the board of the Oregon Education Association’s People for the Improvement of Education. She was an accomplished tennis player, loved to play bridge, and was active in the Hillsboro Methodist Church and many social organizations. She is survived by her three sons, Mark, Craig, and Rick.

Adrian Greek ’50

July 26, 2018, at his home in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

Growing up in the town of Hinsdale, Illinois, Adrian followed his interests in math and science.

In high school, he started a science club, a slide rule club, and a math club.

B u t a f t e r t h e U. S . dropped atomic bombs on Japan, he concluded the world didn’t need more scientists building bombs; they needed ones that would put the world back together. He switched his interests to psychology and sociology. He suffered from asthma in the cold Midwestern winters and decided to go to college in balmy Southern California. Living with relatives, he began classes at Los Angeles City College. The asthma disappeared and Adrian took up hiking and climbing.

But he was interested in experiencing campus life at a smaller college. His mother sent him a magazine article that described Reed as a top college with more than its share of Rhodes scholars. One of the math textbooks he studied at City College was written by Prof. Frank Loxley Griffin [mathematics; Reed College President 1954–56], and Adrian recollected, “That recommended it to me. That book had been a pretty clear type of study.”

Reed was more expensive than City College, partly because he now had to pay for room and board. His father worked extra jobs to pay his tuition, and as Adrian put it, “I never worry a great deal about money. I put one foot in front of the other and things seems to take care of themselves as necessary.”

There was heavy snow his first winter at Reed, and the heat in his residence hall dissipated before it reached his room. Adrian bought an old flip-bread toaster at the Salvation Army and used it as a heating element. Psychology was his major, but he jested that his real focus was extracurricular activities. Involved with the outing club, Adrian helped build the ski cabin. He was a student union manager, was active in the camera club, and was introduced to international folk dancing, which remained important to him for many years. All of this may have compromised his junior qualifying exams, which he flunked, explaining that the exams tapped into other than his focus on experimental psychology. Adrian spent that

summer boning up on mental illness and disease, and took the exams again. This time the questions were almost all on developmental and experimental psychology, his strong suit, and he passed. His senior thesis compared reading comprehension and speed in the presence of music and noise, and was advised by Prof. Monte Griffith [psychology 1926–54].

During his senior year, Adrian was part of a search team looking for a student who had failed to return from a climb. It turned out she had become lost on a trail and was found by rangers. But remembering that moonlight night on Mt. Adams in the company of other Reedies, Adrian concluded: “In terms of learning, the students are as important as the faculty.”

Throughout his life, people would ask, “Aren’t people at Reed sort of weird?” “Well, some are and some aren’t,” he replied. “There are all kinds at Reed, and it’s a good thing that you learn to live with some diversity in your population.”

Reed laid a base for Adrian. “It was a growing period for me in terms of sorting things out and what was important to me,” he said. “It gave me a feeling of ‘You can figure things out and you can do things that maybe you didn’t think you could do before.’ The general feeling coming out of Reed was become a world leader.

I can do whatever I want to do, and if I’ve got questions about things, I can research it and find ways to get the information I need to make decisions and figure things out.”

Equipped with a new psychology degree, Adrian realized his passion was helping others achieve their full potential. He returned to Illinois and took a job as an assistant program director at the YMCA on Chicago’s north side.

When his boss left, Adrian took over the adult education program, scheduling classes, hiring teachers, and doing public relations and communications. He felt strongly about adult education and the lifelong need to continue learning. Eager to return to the Pacific Northwest, he worked in program and executive positions within the YMCA, both in Tacoma, Washington, and in Portland, where he directed the YMCA’s family life education program.

He lost his wife of 19 years, Delores Smith, to cancer in 1970. The following year, he married Anne Emard, and in addition to the four children he had fathered with Delores, gained six stepsons. Two of their children were “snatched” out of college by recruiters for the Unification (Moonie) Church, and in 1977, Adrian and Anne quit their jobs and founded the Positive Action Center, a nonprofit family education and counseling agency in Portland. They helped found the Cult Awareness Network, an agency that grew out of a meeting of approximately 60 people who had lost relatives to cults. Adrian served as the network’s first president, and in 1988, largely because of their efforts, the Cult Awareness Network held its national conference in Portland, drawing

several hundred participants from across the country, including Patricia Ryan, the daughter of California congressman Leo Ryan, who was assassinated by the followers of cult leader Jim Jones in Guyana. Within hours of the assassination, Jones and hundreds of his followers committed suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with poison.

Adrian and Anne worked with individuals and families whose members had fallen under the influence of mind-abuse cults. The couple authored the book Mind Abuse by Cults and Others, which explained how such groups operate. They described a destructive cult as having a complex ideology that cannot be scientifically confirmed and must be accepted on faith, a single leader, a unique vocabulary in which conventional terms such as “love” are redefined, deceptive recruiting practices, internal propaganda, coercion to keep members from leaving, and total control of members’ lives.

Adrian was very involved with Reed’s alumni association board and received the Alumni Program Volunteer Recognition Award in 2001 for his volunteer efforts as chair of the FosterScholz committee.

“Reed made a real impression on me,” he said. “It wasn’t just the academics as much as it was the people and the experience in lots of other ways.”

Anne, his wife of 32 years, died in 2003. Adrian is survived by his sons, Phillip and Kevin Greek; his daughters, Sheryl “Annie” Fair and April Greek; his stepsons, Barry Emard, Larry Emard, Terry Emard, Jerry Emard, and Garry Emard; and his brother, Ronald Greek. He was preceded in death by his beloved stepson, Kerry Emard.

Charles Joseph Goodner ’51 July 9, 2018, on Lopez Island, Washington.

Charles—or Joe, as he was known—was born in Seattle, Washington, where his grandfather was a professor at the University of Washington. One day Joe would follow in those footsteps.

Majoring in biology at Reed, he wrote his thesis, “A Tracer Study of the Conversion of Serine to Alanine in the Silk Worm,” with Prof. Frank P. Hungate [biology 1946–52] advising.

His junior year at Reed, he met his future wife, Oakley Comstock ’53. They married after Joe’s graduation and moved to Salt Lake City, where Joe entered medical school and Oakley taught sixth grade in a private girls’ school.

Joe graduated and interned in Salt Lake City, and the couple moved to Boston, where Joe finished training as an academic endocrinologist. He moved his family to Germany, where he served for two years as an officer in the U.S.

Air Force as a physician at Ramstein Air Base.

In 1962, Joe joined the medical school faculty stationed at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Eventually, he joined the faculty of the University of Washington. After making their home in Kirkland, Joe and Oakley bought an old farm property on Lopez Island where they developed a working family sheep operation. They lived in a tent while building a guesthouse, a main house, and a barn. In support of the Lopez Island Medical Clinic, Joe became a board member of the Catherine Washburn Medical Association.

He was an accomplished skier, spending memorable time atop mountains in Utah and Washington. Joe was also an international birder, and every year he and Oakley went on guided bird trips around the world. In addition to seeing nearly half of the world’s avian species, they visited many of the most interesting places on earth, absorbing each unique terrain far better than they might have with conventional travel focused on cities and tourist venues.

In January, Joe developed complications with his artificial knee, leading to infection, which progressed rapidly and proved to be fatal. He died at home, surrounded by his family, three days after the death of his dog, Tru. He was preceded in death by Oakley and his daughter Gretchen and is survived by his son, Philip, and his daughter Stephanie.

Irvin Jolliver ’51

May 28, 2018, in Vancouver, Washington.

Irvin grew up near the railroad roundhouse in Vancouver, Washington, where he played with his cousins and friends. He loved everything about trains and would later site his home based in part on its proximity to the train tracks. He attended Vancouver High School, was elected to the Honor Dramatic Society, and because of that recognition was given the opportunity to design and build the sets for the senior production of Pride and Prejudice. When World War II broke following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Irvin joined the army and served for three years in the Pacific region as a classification specialist with an aviation engineer battalion participating in the construction of airfields on Guam and Okinawa.

After the war, Irwin’s high school teacher and mentor, Pearl Hall, encouraged him to participated in a joint program between the Portland Museum Art School and Reed College. At Reed he met his wife, Berenice Stocks ’52. A lifelong educator, Irwin taught ceramics at the Portland Museum Art School for 18 years and then taught humanities, art, and biology at Hudson’s Bay High School for more than 35 years. He was selected for the National Endowment for the Humanities faculty, and he and Bernice established the Vancouver Arts and Crafts Fair.

A member of the Mayor’s Art Commission,

Irwin participated in the selection of the architectural firm to design Vancouver’s city hall. He spent years renovating the home and grounds he built next to the home of his teachers, Ruth and Pearl Hall, and created many interesting landscape features from found materials. Irvin spent summers working for the Erickson Farms, driving all kinds of equipment, a skill he picked up during his years in the military. In addition to his interests in railroads, he was a watercolorist who liked to paint trains in landscapes.

He taught wine tasting at Harris Wine Cellars in Portland.

After retiring, he devoted time to building extensive train models, chasing trains around the northwest, and watching trains with friends at the Vancouver Depot. He travelled extensively. Irvin is survived by his wife, Berenice, and his children, Cerise, Linette, Cynthia, Holly, and Vincent.

Miriam Orzech ’52

August 31, 2018, in Corvallis, Oregon.

Born in New York, Mimi graduated from high s cho ol i n Por t l a nd , at te n d e d R e e d a n d Lewis & Clark College, and then graduated from UC Berkeley. At Berkeley, she met her husband and partner in life, Ze’ev, and they married in 1952. The couple moved to Corvallis, Oregon, where in the mid-’60s Mimi was asked to teach in the history, department at Oregon State University. This prompted her to get a master’s in history, followed by a PhD in education from OSU in 1974. She accomplished this while working full time in the Educational Opportunities Program, first as an academic advisor and then as its director. Mimi later served as assistant vice-provost for academic affairs at OSU, overseeing all diversity-related p ro g ra m s , i n c l ud i n g t h e E d uc at i o n a l Opportunities Program. In addition, she spearheaded the creation of OSU’s Holocaust Memorial Program.

Mimi believed deeply in education, and that it should be available to more than just a privileged few. She created SMILE (Science and Math Investigative Learning Experiences), which provides science, math, and engineering programs to minority and disadvantaged students at public schools throughout Oregon.

The program continues to offer a pathway to college for students who often come from families where no one has attended college before, and has inspired the creation of a parallel SMILE program in Rhode Island.

Having a lifelong commitment to social justice and to the arts, Mimi was involved in the early days of the Barn Theater, predecessor to the Majestic Theatre. Perhaps closest to her december 2018 Reed Magazine 45

In Memoriam heart was the Jewish community in Corvallis, where she was a founding member of that chapter of the Jewish women’s organization Hadassah, and later Beit Am, the Mid-Willamette Valley Jewish Community.

The Orzech home was always open to guests, including new Jewish arrivals in town and the many foreign students and visiting professors that Ze’ev collected. There was always something delicious cooking in Mimi’s kitchen, and her generosity and warmth—not to mention her homemade quince jelly—will be remembered fondly by people around the world.

Preceded in death by her husband, Ze’ev, Mimi is survived by her three children, Sarah, Dan, and Joe; her brother, Harrison Weitz; and her sister, Ellen DeNelsky.

Ellen A. Spear ’52

September 11, 2017, in Eugene, Oregon, from complications due to a stroke.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ellen moved to Camas, Washington—her mother’s hometown— following the death of her father when she was five. She grew up exploring the woods, creeks, and rivers surrounding Camas and developed a lifelong love and respect for the natural world.

She graduated from Camas High School, where she played clarinet in the band that marched in the 1948 Pasadena Rose Parade. Ellen attended Reed and earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from UC Berkeley in 1958.

She moved to San Francisco in 1952 and lived in the Bay Area for many years. Ellen loved writing, bicycling, gardening, literature, geology, social justice, classical music, painting with watercolors, and making things with her hands. While living in Berkeley in the early ’70s, she was an avid political activist, organizing a group that fought to end illegal taxation and for public ownership of Berkeley’s municipal utilities. She was also a committed antiwar activist, and to the last days of her life was a self-reliant feminist, ahead of her time, who valued intellectual and creative thought. In 1973, she moved with her daughters to Eugene, Oregon, where she lived the remainder of her life. She worked state government jobs and spent much of her career assisting students in the government documents section of Knight Library at the University of Oregon. Ellen is survived by her daughters, Pamina and Renata Ewing, and her brother, John Speer.

Michael Baird ’53

May 27 2018, in Portland, Oregon, of natural causes.

Michael spent his career at Oregon Health & Science University, where he was a physician in internal medicine and psychiatry. He was on the teaching faculty at OHSU Medical School and served as director of medical services at OHSU Hospital.

46 Reed Magazine december 2018

Born in Portland to Dr. David and Mary Baird, Michael attended Reed before transferring to the University of Oregon, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in science.

During the Korean War, he was accepted into an accelerated program designed to train doctors at the University of Oregon Medical School. He also earned a master’s degree in biochemistry and in 1957 served an internship, followed by a residency in internal medicine, at UOMS. The medical school became a teaching hospital in 1955, and nearly 20 years later the group of institutions on the Marquam Hill campus were merged into an independent, self-governed institution called the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center. It was renamed Oregon Health Sciences University in 1981, and 20 years later it became Oregon Health & Science University.

Michael was on the teaching faculty and was a physician in internal medicine and psychiatry. In 1968, he became director of medical services, administering the hospitals and clinics. Two challenges he faced were the initiation of charging fees for services at the medical school and insurance billing, brought about by changes in state funding and the creation of Medicare. He oversaw the closing of the Tuberculosis Hospital, which became a campus services building.

In addition to being a scientist, Michael was a musician, a patron of the arts, a gardener, and a philosopher. He married his wife, Jane Spencer, in 1954. She survives him, as do his daughter, Wendy Baird, and his sons, Jeffrey Baird and Andrew Baird.

Oakley Comstock Goodner ’53

September 27, 2016, in Lopez Island, Washington.

Oakley was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up in Southern California, dividing time between her mother’s home in Pasadena and her father’s in the Ojai Valley. Her mother, Helen Evans Brown, remarried and became a renowned cookbook author and authority on the West Coast food scene of the ’50s and ’60s.

Oakley benefited from this, becoming an accomplished cook in her own right and enjoying a wide circle of friends in the food world, including James Beard.

After graduating from a private girls’ high school in Azusa, Oakley entered Reed College, where she met her future husband Charles (Joe) Goodner ’51, who was entering his junior year. She was an outstanding student, but elected to leave the school following Joe’s graduation. They were married in Pasadena in 1951 and moved that summer to Salt Lake City, Utah, where Joe entered medical school

and Oakley taught sixth grade in a private girls’ school. They moved to Boston, where Joe finished training as an academic endocrinologist. While in Boston, Oakley had two children, Philip and Gretchen. The family followed Joe to Germany, where he served in the U.S. Air Force, and a second daughter, Stephanie, was born while they were in Germany.

In 1962, Joe joined the medical school faculty stationed at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. They made their home in Kirkland, where Oakley became a member of the board of the Lake Washington School District, serving several terms including as board president.

In the late ’60s, she became a realtor and later a real estate broker. She rose rapidly in the profession and went on to manage major offices, first for John L. Scott and then for the Coldwell Banker Bain agency.

Her daughter Gretchen died of acute myelocytic leukemia in 1989. The family was devastated, and within two years she and Joe both opted to retire and begin a new adventure by selling their home on Lake Washington and moving to Lopez Island.

Oakley had always wanted to live on a farm, so with the help of their son, Philip, they created a working sheep operation after purchasing an old farm property on Lopez Sound. It provided an excuse for Oakley to train border collies, and she had a series of them to help with the raising of the purebred Romney sheep, which gave her great joy. Another source of joy was becoming an accomplished birder.

In the late ’90s, she developed a chronic, low-grade malignancy of the bone marrow called myelofibrosis. This was not greatly limiting until her last two to three years, when it required more frequent transfusions to maintain her red blood cell level. She was survived by her son, Philip, her daughter, Stephanie, and her husband, Joe, who died in July of 2018.

Richard Dean Carper ’60 March 9, 2018, in Corvallis, Oregon.

Dick grew up in the small rural town of Galva, Illinois, where his grandparents farmed, his father owned a gas station, and everybody knew everyone else. As was common at the time, as soon as he graduated he volunteered for the army, where he received technical training in missile telemetry and worked at the White Sands Missile Range on the United States’ first guided ballistic missile system. This training and experience led him later in his career to NASA. After completing his army service in 1956, Dick drove with a friend to Reed and applied for admission. He did not graduate from Reed, but found the two years funded by the GI Bill transformative. Dick’s small-town, Midwestern upbringing contrasted with the diverse and academically challenging atmosphere at the college. He was able to keep pace with his peers in this intellectual environment, and for the rest of his life he cherished the concepts and history he had learned in what was then Hum 11, and continued to read from the required text, Arts & Ideas. In choosing a major, Dick was torn between physics and philosophy, and though he chose a career in engineering, he always maintained those interests.

When his tuition funding ran out, Dick went to work for the RCA Missile Test Project doing telemetry testing. In 1958, he married fellow Reedie Margot Wilson ’58. The couple moved to Maryland, where Dick took a job at NASA’s Goddard Flight Center in 1960. They had two daughters, Rachel and Ruth ’91, but divorced in 1976. The girls spent extensive time with both parents, and often spent summers with Dick, who made constancy and stability a priority throughout their childhood. When Rachel underwent a long hospitalization and difficult brain surgery at the age of 14, he made long visits every day, often spending the night to reassure her, and cared for her during her recovery after leaving the hospital.

For more than 30 years, Dick was a systems engineer at NASA, working on space data and communications systems for more than 20 research spacecraft projects, including environmental and astronomical observatories. He contributed significantly to the development and adoption of international standards in space data systems, often through his involvement with the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) an international forum of the world’s major space agencies on the development of international spaceflight standards. In addition to the fascinating technical challenges, this gave him the opportunity to travel the world.

Shortly before his retirement, Dick, a “pathfinder for CCSDS for more than 20 years,” became the first recipient of the Telemetering Pathfinder Award for his lifetime contributions to the field.

In 1993, he moved Corvallis, Oregon, with his new wife, Mary McCarthy Carper,

continuing as a part-time consultant for NASA. The two were eventually joined in Oregon by both of Mary’s adult daughters and their families, and Dick delighted in his role as grandfather and great-grandfather.

In his retirement, Dick renewed his pilot’s license and enjoyed several years of flying, working as a “test pilot” for flight simulators and volunteering as a ham radio operator with Good Samaritan Health System’s emergency preparedness program. Garbed in his tuxedo, he was a regular attendee at Reed’s holiday party, and returned frequently to take in readings from the humanities syllabus. Dick was introduced to river kayaking by his honorary granddaughter, Jen Hooke, and continued to paddle into his late 70s. He worked towards his goal of solo kayaking the entire Willamette River in segments, and made it to the St. Johns Bridge in Portland, leaving only the final leg unfinished. But most of all, he enjoyed spending time with his family in the Willamette Valley with his front-door view of the Three Sisters. He passed away quietly in Corvallis, surrounded by his family, and is survived by Mary, his wife of 25 years; his daughters, Ruth and Rachel; his stepdaughters, Suzanne Limerick and Katherine Steele; and his sister, Joyce Dietrich.

the University of Hawaii, the University of Maine at Fort Kent, and Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where he also served as dean of the School of Arts and Sciences for 10 years.

He retired in 2001, and he and his wife, ShruDeLi, continued to travel. He led student and alumni study tours to Europe and taught the writing component of an Italian photography tour. Ray made pottery; pursued his interests in music, reading, writing, photography, architectural design, and family history; and volunteered with Salt Lake County’s Department of Aging Services.

When he was in his late 70s and battling interstitial lung disease, leukemia, and heart disease, he and his wife decided to keep creating a future by designing and building a new, smaller house off the grid with geothermal and solar power. It was a contribution they felt they could make to the environment. They shared several years in the new house, where Ray died peacefully with ShruDeLi at his side. She survives him, as do his son, Micah Ownbey, and his sister, Fay Ownbey Ligon. To the end, despite his health struggle, he maintained his irreverent sense of humor and lack of bitterness. He donated his body to the University of Utah’s donor program in the hope that others will benefit from medical research.

Ray Ownbey ’66

Ben Howe Rowland ’07

June 22, 2018, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Ray and his twin sister were born in Portland.

After graduating from Gresham High School in 1954, he volunteered for military service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and became a staff photographer, stationed in Hawaii. Following his service, Ray completed a bachelor’s degree at the University of Oregon, got his master’s degree in teaching from Reed, and then earned a PhD in English from the University of Utah. Ray taught literature, writing, and communications in high school, then at the University of Utah,

June 14, 2018 in Washington, D.C., following a long struggle with depression.

Ben was a graduate of the Field School in Washington, D.C., before attending Reed, where he majored in sociology and wrote his thesis, “Out of Sight and Off the Streets: Risk and Enforcement in the Sex Industry,” with Prof. Marc Schneiberg [sociology 2000–] advising.

“Ben helped break a thesis mold in our department, combining interviews with advocates for sex workers with a meta-analysis of ethnographies of sex work to produce a wonderful thesis,” Schneiberg said. “In everything we did together, Ben engaged rather than went through motions, and I remember him especially for his sensitivity and compassion for those he studied, and for how he combined grace, care, thoughtfulness, and a wonderful sense of humor to work through and work me through a clear and unflinching view of world and its ways.”

Ben had been working as an outreach specialist at Pathways to Housing in Washington, D.C. He is survived by his mother, Julia, and his sister, Katherine.

Pending James Thayer, Jerry Kelley ’44, Alice Rigby Carlson ’46, Charles Conrad Carter ’46, Earl Roger Hibbard ’49, Mary Teal Garland ’49, Sylvia Wells Baldwin ’50, Mark Lee Woodbury ’50, Virginia Shirley Wright ’52, Hans Grunbaum ’53, Margaret Hyman MacGregor ’53, Mary Jo Moore Kitz ’54, Ruth Seitlin Grinspoon ’55, Stephen Tellman ’57, David Ambrose Potts ’62, Gary L. Brooks ’72, Garry Whyte ’73.

december 2018 Reed Magazine 47

Object of Study

What we’re looking at in class

Inventing the Future What drives scientific innovation? According to Prof. Kjersten Whittington [sociology 2007–], a key factor is collaboration.

This graph, drawn from 783,835 biotechnology patents from 1976 to 2005, depicts the activity of 215,450 global inventors. Each dot (or node) is an inventor. Connecting them are lines that represent who has invented with whom.

Students in Prof. Whittington’s Sociology 380: Networks and Social Structure course learn to analyze large data sets like this one, which she compiled and used for a recent paper, “A Tie Is a Tie? Gender and Network Positioning in Life Science Inventor Collaboration.” The complete data set is shown in the spherical image above; to the right, an enlarged area shows a portion of the network in detail.

A network approach captures underlying patterns of activity and can deepen our understanding of how relationships among scientists influence innovation. A scientist’s degree of “embeddedness” in the network— i.e., the extent to which they occupy a central position in collaborative space­—is a potent predictor of future innovation, Whittington finds, especially when an inventor brings together communities of scientists who are otherwise unconnected. She also turns an eye towards the positioning of women scientists in this network, compared to men, to help researchers solve problems of gender inequity in scientific fields.

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FOR THE AGES. Ananke Krishnan ’22 clears invasive species from the canyon, making room for the 700 native plants that were reintroduced on Canyon Day.