Category: Olde Reed

X Marks the Midget: The Story of the Car Under the Library

Every school has one or two crazy incidents that get cemented in its history. Reed has many such cases, but the one that I would like to focus on is the car buried under the library. Some alumni still do not believe that this actually happened, but the photographic evidence suggests otherwise. According to the legends, a (at the time) certain student called Mark Verna ’87 had bought a car called an MG Midget. After graduation, the MG stayed in the east parking lot while Mark went off to find work. Eventually, the MG got moved off campus to the red house, which was an apartment that was frequently rented out to students during the 80s. Because the car had been neglected for so long, the neighbors soon called for the city to get rid of the MG. 

This is when our band of merry heroes enter the scene: May 1988. A gaggle of students took it upon themselves to bury the car. Up the hill to the red house they trekked, and down the hill they dragged the MG Midget.  Their final destination? The Hauser Library. At the time, an extension was being built, and there was a giant hole that was going to be filled with concrete for the foundation. That hole was going to be the MG’s final resting place.

 An nighttime image of several people standing around a pit that contains a half-buried car

But, you see, simply dumping a car into the official hole would have gotten it removed with lots of angry people involved and tons of burned up cash, so instead the group decided to instead dig a hole under the hole. This way, the construction crew would not know until it was too late. Thus, the students began digging, for several hours. When they rolled the car into the new hole, they realized that the car still peeked out a little and that the hole was not deep enough, so the students decided to do some percussive modifications to the car, like popping the tires, and beating down the windshield so the car fit in the hole. They then filled in the hole with dirt and promptly left as if nothing ever happened. The story of the buried car later got lost in the wind tunnels of time and became more and more like a fairy tale.

There still is some speculation from various experts, who still do not quite believe that a car is indeed under the library. Their reasons range from digging such a perfect square hole takes a lot longer than a night, to the concrete structures in the photos don’t match up with the library exactly. Yet, the alums who participated in the burial of the car insist that there is indeed a car under the library and that the night’s events did in fact transpire. William Abernathy ’88 said, “I have to apologize to the experts, But there is a car down there.” Abernathy was the one who popped the tires. Still, this ranks as one of the top pranks to ever happen in Reed history.

A nighttime image of several people using tools to dig in dirt

In 2011, the Reed Magazine published a feature on this mystery. If you’re an armchair skeptic, I encourage you to read through the article, and top it off with the notes to the editor published in the following issue! More alumni chime in with their own evidence.

An alum named Dave Conlin ’88 wrote this limerick about the MG:

There once was a Reedie named Mark,
His MG the butt of a lark,
In a story from fairies,
Under the library now buried,
As the Pharaohs  once did with their ark.  

Tunneling my way to the Library,

William Clarke ’27

The Beautiful, the Soul Crushing, and the Leaking: A Brief History of the Buildings on Reed Campus

When walking around Reed College, one can see a lot of buildings in various styles. These different styles represent the changes in Reed’s history and can be defined into four types of architectural styles: collegiate gothic, modernist, post modernist, and contemporary modernist. 

The Sallyport in ODB

In the college’s beginning, most of the important buildings were built in the style of Collegiate Gothic. Buildings such as Eliot Hall and Old Dorm Block (ODB) were built with lots of brick and stone, and these buildings were emulating older buildings like the dorms of Princeton and University of Pennsylvania which in turn emulated gothic style architecture and even older college buildings like St. John’s College in Oxford. The architect Albert E. Doyle was the one who designed both ODB and Eliot using a slightly different style called Tudor style. In fact, the arch facing the Great Lawn on ODB, called ‘Sallyport,’ is a replica taken from a tudor manor called Compton Wynyates which was built in honor of Henry VIII. Eventually, Collegiate Gothic fell out of fashion in the 1920s and there was demand for a new style of buildings. 

Eliot Hall and the Old Dorm Block in 1913, right after completion of ODB

After Doyle died in 1928, his protege Pietro Beluski took over and designed many of the buildings on campus. A change in architect meant a change in architectural style, and Belewski was a modernist. A couple of Beluski’s buildings on campus are the McNaughton, Foster, and Scholtz dorms that many alumni may not remember so fondly. (I have heard rumors that the paint job inside was a psychology thesis trying to see what colors would make students most likely to drop out.)

MacNaughton Dorm

Unlike the detailed and beautiful architecture of Eliot and ODB, McNaughton, Foster, Scholtz were built with one word in mind: practicality. The school needed to house students and those buildings did the jobs perfectly. Another modernist building on campus is the psychology building, formerly the chemistry building. While one could say that the introduction of modernism on campus brought many buildings that did not fit with the style of Reed college, another can look at it more like Reed casting off a bourgeois influence. 

The original modernist chemistry building

After a while, people wanted a break from the soul crushing bleakness of modernism; postmodernism was a way for architects to be playful with the designs of their buildings. Vollum Hall is a building on the Reed College campus that one could say was built in a postmodernist style; others would argue that it just looks really 70s. Another example would be the extension built onto the library. While it blends in with the older section of the library, it is not Tudor by design and contains many postmodern elements.

The entry to Vollum Hall

Finally, the most modern buildings on the Reed campus belong to the contemporary modernist architectural style. Two examples of this include the Performing Arts Building, and Reed’s newest dorm, Trillium. While not a full return to the hyper practicality of modernist architecture, there still was a belief that function mattered more than form. The Performing Arts Building was made to center all of the arts in one building, and so it has practice rooms for music, dance studios, etc., but it fits the design of other Reed buildings by its usage of brick. Trillium also uses brick, just not the red ones that we are used to seeing on the various buildings. The usage of bricks shows how architects are trying to make buildings pleasing to the eye or at the very least fit in with the other buildings while trying to make them as functional as possible. 

The different buildings at Reed represent different eras of Reed College along with the hopes and desires of the various architects that built them. Taking a walk around Reed campus is a lot like traveling through different eras of Reed College. You are time traveling through the different periods of Reed and seeing what were the college’s  needs, its hopes, and its dreams.

With An Eye On Campus,

William Clarke ’27

Foster’s Quest: Reunions Scavenger Hunt

On an otherwise unremarkable spring day in 1915, William T. Foster, Reed’s first President, strolls toward Sallyport, lost in thought. Life is a course charted between knowledge and ignorance, light and dark, truth and fiction – indeed, between Lux and Nox, the two grotesques guarding the portal as he enters. Where to guide his nascent College, newly troubled by adversity? And it is this question, posed precisely between these two poles, exactly as he enters the portal, that bends the fabric of time toward an answer and propels him out the other side… into 2025!

Reunion-goers have the chance to pick up the quest–your task is to help him return to his time by deciphering 11 clues to 11 locations around Reed Campus, enjoying a rather pleasant tour while collecting one letter at each locale. Then, gathering together those letters, you have only to unscramble them into a four-word phrase and you have saved the day. But more: the first 250 to show their work at Prexy earn a special keepsake reward – and yes, boundless glory!The Scoutbook you’ll pick at Prexy contains valuable information to spark your quest, or pick up the trail at any of the 11 locations if you happen upon one over the weekend.

Scavenger hunt designed by Matt Giraud ’85

Oh My Renn Fayre

As commencement and graduation draw ever closer so does the grandest celebration of the year at Reed College: Renn Fayre! You can read more about the history of Renn Fayre in a series of articles published through The Grail, a student-run creative magazine. I’m not here to tell you the history of Renn Fayre itself, but a short history of some of its best previous themes–all leading up to the reveal of this year’s theme, of course!

The first decades of Renn Fayre were Renaissance themed, or without a theme entirely. In the year 2000, an article in The Quest led to the first themed Renn Fayre:

Our magical weekend of joyous mayhem and drug-induced glory is only the beginning. The forces of Good and Evil are upon us […] There is only one answer. SUPERHEROES.

— Mistress of Costumery, The Quest, April 4, 2000

The success of a themed celebration took off, and in 2002, the Czars made the theme a riff of a classic film with: Bill and Ted’s Excellent RF. The campus came alive with creatures for the apocalypse theme of ’03. 

The entrance to the library, decorated for the apocalypse

’05 was graced with a hot air balloon and a Ziggy Stardust theme!

The view through the Sallyport of festivities in 2005
A Renn Fayre hot air balloon on the great lawn

The Body was the theme for 2009, which featured a giant vagina and a “boob room,” where the bean bag chairs had nipples. In the aughts, theme reveal videos became all the rage. During a ball held a few months before the semester’s finale, a Czar-made video would play to reveal the theme for the spring’s celebrations. The earliest one I can find is the reveal for 2010, where they blasted Daft Punk and revealed the Final Frontier theme.

 In 2012, the Czars took a page from the HUM 110 syllabus and themed Renn Fayre: “Genesis”, although the theme was more broadly about the origins of creation, not limited to its namesake required reading. The great lawn was filled with little plastic flamingos in 2015 for the Miami Boom Boom Renn Fayre, which was surely a blast wilder than Spring Breaking in Miami proper. 

Elvis Presley (impersonators), balloon arches, and gaudy decorations peppered Reed’s campus for the Sin City Renn Fayre of 2018, accompanied by the Vegas Chapel that was set up all weekend, pictured below. Rumor has it that some of the weddings performed were never formally annulled, and some of those Reedies are still married to this day… 

A wedding ceremony in the Sallyport, officiated by Elvis

For 2019, the theme was Lucid Dreams (not the hit single by the late Juice WRLD, but the concept itself)! Student art projects for this Renn Fayre featured lights and colorful psychedelic iconography.

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Jellyfish in the grove on the Great Lawn

I might be biased, as this was my first Renn Fayre, but I think the Pandemonium theme of 2022 was truly a sight to behold. A student put together a montage of thesis burnings, where the outfits and whimsy around campus are on full display. 

While all of the themes listed above were amazing in their own right, I’m most excited for this year’s theme (and it’s definitely not because I’m a senior). This year’s theme is, drum roll please……. Cosmic Resurgence! The theme reveal video features intergalactic iconography of all sorts. I hope to see an abundance of aliens, astronauts, planets, moon dust, retro futuristic outfits, and disco gogo boots!

Did Renn Fayre in your time have themes? What were your favorites? 

Preparing to burn my thesis,

Taliah Churchill ’25

Fig Tales at Reed

Deep in the Reed College canyon lies the orchard, home to various fruit trees. But the orchard is not the only place on campus to forage fruit. Below is a tale from Tracy Poe ’91 about the old fig tree by the Reed College Apartments (RCA) and her endeavors to care for it.      

There’s this fig tree, see, down at the RCAs. When I was a kid living at 36th and Knapp in the 70s/80s, before RCAs or even many of the Canyon-adjacent parcels even belonged to Reed, I used to forage from that tree in the summers. Summer-time in Portland was a child-forager’s dream, from the crawdads in Johnson Creek to the old orchards that used to surround the Canyon, yielding plums, cherries, apples, quince, and of course blackberries. 

Reed has a lot of legacy trees from the days when the surrounding area was all homesteads and truck farms. 40 years ago they were still harvestable, but it was the beginning of the end of anyone looking after them on any kind of regular basis. Development and neglect encroached on a lot of our old foraging territory over the years. Reed campus still has some thriving black walnut trees, and the remnant of the old orchard just below 39th at the south end of the Canyon. When I was a student, the Grove Dorms were a giant community garden. 

The Reed fig in October, 2024

Fruit trees are domestic plants, and they need care in order to keep giving food, but sadly a lot of those caregivers are gone and the trees just get old and die if no one attends to them. 

Anyway: the ReedFig was still bearing beautiful fruit well into the early 90s. As a Dorm Mom at the RCAs, just a few years after it was acquired by Reed for student housing, I was still harvesting grocery bags full of fruit every September/October. 

I graduated in ’91, left for grad school on the East Coast, where I live now, and didn’t think about that tree until many years later, when I attended a Reunion and decided to go give the tree a visit. That must have been 2015 or so … 

When I did, I discovered that the tree had at some point been hacked way back. Not pruned, but chain sawed down, so that it was being choked by undergrowth and blackberry runners. I was very sad to see this, and was sure the tree would die.

The undergrowth of the Reed fig, choked out by other plants

But I kept visiting, and what do you know, that tree just kept sending out new growth, and searching for the sun. It was too weedy and starved to give much fruit, except in the very upper story where it was only good to feed the birds. Invisible, probably, to anyone who happened by. Every year, I thought, if that tree doesn’t die, I should find someone who cares enough to prune it properly and give it a new life.

In the meantime, I did a little research. The tree has a sister, across 28th Ave behind the farm stand and food trucks. Both of them were planted by the Japanese immigrant family who owned the farm that used to cover the whole curve of the road from Bybee to the Rhododendron Garden, sometime between 1900-1920, from what I’ve been able to gather. 

That tree is huge—almost 40 years older than it was when I was harvesting it in my Reed days. And it still produces beautiful fruit in the late summer/early fall. Both sisters are 100, maybe 125 years old now. Standing so near to one another, and yet so different in their fates. 

The sister fig tree behind the fruit stand

So I put the word out on a Facebook page: Reed Culinaria. And to my surprise, a lot of people remembered the RCA tree and wanted to bring it back to life.

So we got some folks together —alum Hilary Trzynka ’91 agreed to teach a Paideia class about pruning and taking cuttings from the tree. We did that in January. Ten people showed up, but we made cuttings for a bunch of alums around the country who plan to pick them up at Reunions this year. Amanda Waldroupe ’07 helped us get funding to pay for the supplies from the Portland Alumni Chapter.  

Fig cuttings under a grow light

For now, we are posting on Reed Culinaria and hoping we’ll be able to continue to care for the tree. Our long term goal is to get a group in to clear the understory and prune it back to a place where it can begin to flourish and produce fruit again. We’d love for current students to take an interest and help us re-establish the tree’s health. We’ve been keeping it lowkey, but we’d be really happy to have other caretakers. 

It’s been a cool journey to get other people involved, and I’ve been moved by the level of enthusiasm my fellow alumni have shown. I think just for its connection to the historic farms around it and its sister tree, it deserves to be noticed and commemorated by the community in some way.

I haven’t met anyone yet who doesn’t think that is a good idea.

I don’t have Facebook but that story just might make me create an account to join Reed Culinaria…

Feeling inspired,

Taliah Churchill ’25

Historical Hijinks

Wacky hijinks and antics are part of the Reedie lifestyle. I’ve heard rumors that in the 70s, the Yale Insider’s Guide to Colleges said, “Reedies are a strange lot and they know it.” Pranks, goofs, and straight-up oddity has often been a part of the Reed ethos for eons, but many of the April Fool’s Day pranks rule them all: toothbrush gardens, swiped owls, and geodesic domes in Eliot Circle.

These photos from ye Olde Reed highlight Reedie antics perfectly…but now that I’m thinking about it, what prompted these photos/events? No seriously, does anyone know??

Confused and intrigued,

Taliah Churchill ’25

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Ye Olde Reed

Photo of graffiti in the steam tunnels from 2015 that reads, “Schrodinger’s old reed is alive. Schrodinger’s old reed is dead”

“Olde Reed is dead.”

A phrase every Reedie knows, but few truly understand. This sentiment has been shared for decades, from Reedies dating back to the classes of the 60s (likely even further) to present day (guilty as charged). We repeat it back for the incoming years to hear, we post it on social media, and dedicate entire blogs (blogception!) to it, so the mantra lives on unchanged while its meaning is ever evolving. You see, everybody knows that:

Olde Reed=n-1, where n is your freshman year.

While my time as a Reedie has been comparatively short, I’ve had the honor of hearing tales of Olde Reed from many an alum. Some, like the giant snowball of ‘14, are wild but believable, but many others, like the car supposedly buried underneath the library, are more in the vein of myths. While I fear the traditions I took part in at Reed are less eventful than those aforementioned, I hope that one day they too can become “Olde Reed” lore such that I have legends of Olde to pass down to young Reedies. What are your favorite tales of Olde Reed, either from your time here or that you heard when attending Reed? Submit your stories in the comments below!

Awaiting new rumors to spread,

Nü Reedie

Taliah Churchill ’25

Love Is In The Air

‘Tis the season…of love! Many a couple has been formed at Reed college, and while not all of them make it out of the bubble intact, there are still so many others with tales sure to make even the most cynical Reedie’s heart melt.

This Valentine’s Day I want to share with you the story of (to my knowledge) the oldest living Reed couple, Eva Labby ’51 and Arnold Labby ’51. Arnold recently celebrated his 100th birthday with his wife of 67 years, Eva, in their lovely home just outside of Portland and near their mutual alma mater: Reed College. 

Arnold and Eva on vacation in the French Marquesas in 2006

For an oral history project with the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, Arnold recounts their first date: “…my brother Bob had a blind date with Lorie, his wife, Lorie Carrow. She wasn’t quite sure about him…So she brought along Eva, and the next thing I knew Bob was yelling up the stairs to me, “Get dressed! You’re going out.” “Who am I going out with?” “You’ll find out when you come down.” It was Eva, and that’s how we met.”

While they attended Reed at the same time, and even went on that date before they both graduated, they didn’t really get together until years later, when they reconnected in San Francisco.

In San Francisco, they were only “buddies” at first, as Eva called it. One day, Arnold mentioned he was going back up to Portland to visit family and offered Eva a ride if she wanted to come along. She ended up forgetting about his offer….until the next morning, when he showed up at her door with a pot of hot coffee. He told her “If you want to go, I’ll wait,” and that he did. They drove to Portland together and later in the week even attended the same party. On the way back down to San Francisco, Eva realized she suddenly saw Arnold in a new light. 

Some time later, after a night in with a home cooked dinner, the pair was watching The Maltese Falcon and Arnold proposed! Three days later, Eva accepted, and the rest is history. The happy couple has since spent the last 6 and a half decades together, with their three children. 

Their wedding day in 1958

You can read more about these sweethearts and others here in the Winter 2007 edition of the Reed Magazine.

Are you a #Reedie4Reedies person? Refuse to ever date another Reedie? Married four times but just keep coming back to other Reedies? Tell me about it and give me hope?

Awaiting my reed romance,

Taliah Churchill ’25

Mary Barnard ’32: found in translation

sappho_book.jpg

Sweep the mind

clean

like a field of dry stubble

when the constellations

of daisies have been mown


–Mary Barnard

Mary Barnard ’32 is arguably Reed’s most prominent creative artist. Her original poetry and translations of classic poetry influenced generations, including the Beat poets who followed her by one generation. Her 100th birthday was celebrated in 2009, so it is appropriate that the Reed Centennial honor her with a full day of lectures about her life, her work, and her influence (see “Alumni College: Letters 100: Experiencing Mary Barnard ’32” on Thursday, June 9).

It is also fitting that pre-eminent Barnard scholar, our own Sarah Barnsley ’95, should return to lead this seminar. Sarah was an exchange student from University of East Anglia for one year, and she now teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her other research interests include American literature, poetry and poetics, modernism, gender and queer theory. Following her tenure as H.D. Fellow in American Literature at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, Sarah has completed a book manuscript, “‘A bright, particular excellence’: Mary Barnard, American Imagist.” She is also a poet in her own right.

Mary Barnard ’32 was born in Vancouver, Washington, and attended Reed College, where she discovered modernist poetry and Ezra Pound; she later initiated a long-distance correspondence with Pound that was to last nearly 40 years.

As noted by the Beinecke Library, “With Pound’s encouragement, Barnard began translating Sappho’s poetry from the Greek. Her translation, published in 1958, has never been out of print. Barnard’s own poems won her Poetry magazine’s Levinson Award when she was only 26 years old. Her shorter fiction was published in Harper’s Bazaar, The Yale Review, and The Kenyon Review. She later composed a book-length essay in verse entitled Time and the White Tigress and researched and published her own genealogy and various essays on mythology.”

The delightful and spirited memoir of her school days, Erato agonistes: Writing a creative thesis at Reed College in “The Golden Age”, is available in the bookstore.

Other speakers in the seminar will include Professor Anita Helle, Oregon State University, on Mary Barnard’s original poetry, and Professor Ellen K. Stauder, dean of the faculty and David Eddings Professor of English & Humanities, on Mary Barnard’s Sappho, in the morning sessions.  Afternoon conference leaders will include, in addition, Elizabeth J. Bell ’87 MALS, Mary Barnard’s literary executor; and Anita Bigelow ’67, illustrator of Mary Barnard’s work.