Olde Reed – The Riffin' Griffin

Epic Friendship – Beyond Gilgamesh and Enkidu

On Wednesday, September 2, Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Robert Ribera, gave a lecture to Reed’s class of 2030 for their second ever class of HUM 110. He lectured on The Epic of Gilgamesh, with a talk called “How Would it End? Ain’t Got a Friend” (which references the song “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue,” utilized across Invisible Man, which be the final unit of HUM 110 this year).

Weeks before, Professor Ribera had put out a call to Reedies far and wide: “I was hoping to end by telling the students that they are going to meet some lifelong friends at Reed, perhaps right there in Vollum lecture hall.”

Responses poured out of the woodwork—many Reedies truly did make friendships of epic proportions during their time at Reed. Professor Ribera and the freshmen left Vollum with a sniffle or two.

See a selection of our favorites:

I’m currently relaxing on a couch in Burgas with my best friend, Alex ’04, and his family on my annual Bulgarian holiday trip. Bulgarian Disney junior is playing on the TV for the kids and I just read the request of professor, Robert Ribera. I thought I’d send a quick note that, yes, you will make life long friends at Reed.
Evan Hayashi ’02

In the first black and white image from 1979, are (left to right), Mark Mosley ’81 , Beneth Sauer ’82, and myself (Jean-Pierre Masclet ’81).

In the color image shot in New York City in 2023, a group of us chose to meet and see the Edward Hopper retrospective at the Whitney.
(left to right: me, Beneth Sauer ’82, Felicia Value ’82, Jane Page ’81). We all met at Reed and have stayed friends ever since

This is Noah Iliinsky (left) and Jer Faludi (right), both physics ’95. The earliest photo is probably in Sission dorm in the ’92-’93 school year. This photo montage was created for Noah’s wedding.

Tina Le and Jessa celebrating their 18 years friend-iversary after meeting at Reed, where they took HUM 110 together.

John Ullman ’65 wrote in about his wife, Irene Namkung ’65, who he met in freshman year:

“I suppose Irene counts as a friend. The first was taken in Fall 1962, or maybe spring 1963, our sophomore year. She’s looking out of her room in McNaughton, second floor. The second slide is Irene with Peter Bergel at our 40th Reunion. Peter has been a life-long friend. The third is with Phil and Vivian Williams who graduated a few years before us. They collaborated with us to start the Seattle Folklore Society. The pic is from a Seattle Times article from 2006 about the Folklore Society’s 40th anniversary.

Making life long friends doesn’t begin to tell the story, at least for us. There were at least a dozen Reedies, probably more, who impacted our lives in profound ways, quite apart from anything academic.

Never thought of ourselves as characters from Gilgamesh, though.”

I met my best friend (and former husband) Jeremy Stone at Reed. As did many of my classmates!
Here is us in freshman year.
Anne Pearson ’99

Two are from our time at Reed (graduation and spring break in Astoria). We graduated in 2014. The other two are pictures from a wedding and our group trip to Alaska in 2025. Despite living all over the country, we have remained friends and see each other every year or two!
Alumni pictured: Lisa Hiura ’14, Nisa Beceriklisoy ’14, Larisa Owechko ’14, Phoebe Young ’14, Alan Bauer ’13
Phoebe Young ’14

Larry Randall and Judith Gedney Baggs, class of ’64, remain friends.

Larry and Judith have been friends since Reed days in the early 1960s. Larry lived in Quincy with Judith’s spouse, Ray, for their freshman and sophomore years, until Judith and Ray married in 1962. At the wedding, Larry was the Best Man. They all moved apart after Reed but had a few in-person visits in New York state, California (on Larry and Marla’s cross country honeymoon), and Washington state. Ray died in 2023, but Larry and Judith, both of whom now live in Continuing Care Retirement Communities, in New York and Seattle respectively, have kept in touch. Larry provided advisement to Judith when she moved.
Photos show Ray and Judith’s wedding, with Larry as Best Man

Bonnie Stockman and I became friends in fall 1967, when she was a freshman and I was a sophomore. We bonded over folk dancing, which was very popular at the time, sourdough pancakes, and in later years, horses.
Here is the Peach Jam Story. In 1968, we found ourselves in the same city at the same time. Our first visit consisted in catching up on gossip about mutual friends. For the second, however…what else was there to say? Was continuing gossip healthy? I had a bag of peaches and she knew how to make jam. We spent the afternoon making peach jam, laughing and engaged in kitchen creativity. The lesson we both understood was that friendships endure when they are based on shared life experiences and mutual passions (and delicious jam is always a good thing.)
We remained best friends over the decades, living in different states, and vacationing together with our families. When she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I flew up for some of the initial rounds of chemo. Almost 5 years later, in 2013, she asked me to come when she entered hospice. I helped to take care of her and her family for the final 6 weeks of her life. I wrote her obituary for the Reed magazine.
Here are a few photos from across the years.
Deborah J. Ross ’68

We all met in 1972 at Reed. We’ve stayed in touch since then over the years. From all over the US (NH, MA, MT, MI, NY, CA), we shared houses all over southeast Portland from Holgate, to Hawthorne to Carleton Street. Two of us became dentists, one a hand surgeon, one an ophthalmologist, one an investment banker, another an attorney and another a college professor. Scattered after Reed to the four winds, New Hampshire, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, Connecticut, London, California. We are constantly in touch, messaging photos of our journeys…hoping to rendezvous once again soon… once we are all on the same continent at the same time!
Art Lyford ’76

From Rafeal Gurvis ’77: “A group of LIFE LONG FRIENDS from the classes of 1976 and 1977 are shown in these 4 pictures. Not every picture shows everyone, but between the 4 pictures most members of the tribe are shown. We got together over the decades for various joyous occasions:”

Lolo Scheiner and Beth Melton (née Ungerecht), both class of ’06, met during Prospie week. They immediately connected and spent the week together – eating in Commons, touring the dorms, and buying their first Reed sweatshirts in the bookstore together.

This was before the era of cell phones, so they stayed in touch by email when they headed back home. They both chose Reed as their first choice, and when they arrived, were in neighboring cross-canyon dorms (Bragdon and Chittick).

They spent much of their time at Reed together. Parties in the Bragdon hallway and the Chittick balcony (RIP), knitting or studying in each other’s rooms, and even going in together on a slightly functional $600 car so they could get off campus.

Lo and Beth shared a thesis office in the psychology department. When Lo graduated a semester early, Beth’s disposable camera roll (remember, no cell phones yet) was full of blurry photos of her rainy spring-fall thesis parade.

After graduation, they went their separate ways, Beth staying in Portland and Lo headed to New York. But, as fate would have it, they ended up back in the same place – Boulder, Colorado – as Beth started her first teaching job and Lo started grad school.

They haven’t had the opportunity to live in the same place again, but it doesn’t matter. They talk constantly, sending each other “which bird are you?” quizzes, obscure questions about niche linguistic observations, and photos of the new and interesting plants and fruits they find. Weddings, kids, land projects, road trips – they are in it together. Friends for well over half their lives.

We met at Reed in the early 1980s. Cathy and Louis bonded during an Orientation Week hike in the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness. Laurie and Louis met in Hum 110 conference. Cathy and Laurie met later in an Anthropology class and lived together senior year, enduring the trials and tribulations of our theses. Over the past four decades, we’ve stayed in touch across the miles – attending weddings, bat mitzvahs, sharing meals and lively conversations in Seattle, Boston and points in between.
Cathy Baker ’86

From Ann Campbell ’94: “Anna Billstrom ’94 and Nanci Surrett were my best friends. Nanci transferred to Mount Holyoke during her junior year (lots of people used to transferred out of Reed in the early 90s), but we’ve all stayed close over the years.

Nanci was my roommate during my first year of a PhD program at Emory in Atlanta. We lived together during 1994-1995. Anna and I have gotten together at reunions or on trips many times over the years. All three of us traveled to Austen in 2022.

I always tell students in a class I teach called “Applied Austen: Emotional Intelligence in Austen’s Novels” that you cannot make new old friends. Maintaining friendships is as important as cultivating new ones. Anna and Nanci have been important to me for more than 30 years now. And it’s great to make lifelong friendships at Reed, because you find out quickly once you graduate that Reedies are unusual people. They’re smart, quirky, funny, imaginative, and just interesting to know. They are great conversationalists. You never get another shot at that sort of concentration of “clubbable” (Samuel Johnson’s term– although it was actually “unclubbable” as applied to a boor) people in one place. “

As Professor Ribera said in his lecture, “look around you. In the coming weeks, semesters, and years, some of the people sitting around you will become your own lifelong friends.”

Who were your epic friends from your time at Reed, or the Reedies who have become your friends since?

A group of freshman during the last session of HUM 110, A cluster of them near the back have remained friends to this day. Courtesy of Zach Babb.

Simplified Spelling and Reed College

William Trufant Foster, the first President of Reed College, was a strong
supporter of reforming the spelling of the English language. In 1909, while a
professor at Bowdoin College, Maine, he was on the Advisory Council of the
Simplified Spelling Board as well as being the Chairman of the Executive
Committee of the Maine Center of the Simplified Spelling Board. When he was
appointed President of Reed in 1910, he brought his convictions about spelling
with him.

Due to Foster’s influence, simplified spelling was used in many of the college
publications. Perhaps the most notable was Reed’s first yearbook from 1915.
The students of the initial graduating class compiled it and included an
explanatory note on the verso of the title page that read:

Note—The simpler, briefer and more fonetic forms of English spelling recommended in the first four lists of the Simplified Spelling Board ar used thruout this volume

One of the opening pages of the Yearbook, which features a uniquely spelled tribute to Foster

This publication confused readers then and continue to do so today; some think
that these early students were woefully bad spellers. What follows is a sample
paragraph from that first yearbook:

Other publications that reflect Foster’s simplified spelling influence for the
period of 1911 through 1919 are the student newspaper—the Quest, the 1916
Yearbook, and many official college documents. Number 1 of the Reed College
Record for March, 1911, notes that it “…starts out with simplified spellings—tho,
altho, thoro, thoroly, catalog, program, addrest, publisht, thru, thruout” (from
Simplified Spelling Bulletin, Vol. II:4, March 1911). It is interesting to note that
several of these words have become commonly accepted today.

Besides influencing the college publications, President Foster wrote articles and
gave talks in support of the new system. For instance, he addressed the annual
meeting of the Inland Empire Teachers Association in Spokane, Washington, in
April 1913, with a talk entitled “The Economics of Spelling Reform.” At least one Reed faculty member, Professor George H. Danton of German in 1915/1916, also
supported the new spelling, and in fact served on the Advisory Council of the
Simplified Spelling Board in 1913.

The Simplified Spelling Board was created in 1906 by Andrew Carnegie, who
supported it for twelve years. In an article in The New York Times, he stated that
he believed “English might be made the world language of the future” and thus
encourage universal peace. However, its role was hindered by its “contradictory
and difficult spelling” (NYT, 3/12/06). Many people adopted this idea besides Foster, including Mark Twain and William Dean Howells. In 1916, the Simplified Spelling Board restated its mission in the following manner:

The purpose of the movement is to hasten the process of rational orthographic change, to guide it in the direction of simplicity and economy; and gradually to substitute for our present caotic (sic) spelling, which is neither consistent nor etymologic, a simpler and
more regular spelling, based on existing rules and analogies, and in harmony with the history and genius of the language.

By 1918, Carnegie gave up on the idea, since even the Carnegie Institution of
Washington, D.C., did not use it in their reports. He wrote to the Board saying “I
think I hav been patient long enuf…I have a much better use for Twenty-five
thousand dollars a year.”

Original article by Mark Kuestner and Gay Walker, May 2009, additions by Tess Buchannan in 2026

The Legacy of an Original Reedie

Jean Carmeta Wolverton (1892-1974), Reed College class of 1915, was an accomplished artist and naturalist. Her father, Bruce Wolverton, was born in a covered wagon on the Oregon Trail, and their family settled in the Willamette Valley. With Reed College opening its doors in 1911, Jean was one of the first women to attend. Reed welcomed women into their college and provided a pathway to education at a time when it was more unusual for a woman to have the opportunity to earn a degree. She played basketball and danced at Reed while teaching and working with students while pursuing her degree in education. Jean was able to break through these barriers while attending Reed, where she was elected Vice President of her Freshman class and later elected Secretary and Treasurer of the Student Body Council.

Jean practiced her artistic skills during her time at Reed, illustrating playbills on campus for student performances.

Poster publicizing the pageant-play of Everywoman’s Road written and directed by Reed professor Josephine Hammond. It specifies that it is in support of the Women’s Building Fund. The poster design was by J. Wolverton [Jean Wolverton Petite] ’15

Later known by her married name, Jean W. Petite, she utilized her education at Reed to become a dedicated and accomplished educator, artist and illustrator. Jean was inspired by and specialized in birds, flowers and the nature that surrounded her. She illustrated several magazine covers for Nature Magazine, and Better Flowers (published by the Portland Rose Society).

Jean also illustrated two books by her son titled “The Elderberry Tree” and “The Best Time of Year”. Her son, Irving Petite, was a NY Times best selling author and naturalist, who was heavily influenced by his mother’s respect and love of nature.

Jean held Art Shows along the west coast throughout her career and her art was featured in the Expo ’70 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan. Jean’s intricately detailed and accurate paintings of birds, were utilized to document and teach about birds and wildlife. Her paintings of birds were made into slides and sold to Washington and California public schools as a teaching guide, which became one of her most outstanding art and educational achievements. She studied birds extensively throughout the Pacific Northwest, California, Hawaii and Mexico. In 1972, the State of California Parks and Recreation Department commissioned Jean to document 48 Shore and Sea Birds at the Point Lobos State Reserve which was published as a guide called “The Birds of Point Lobos”.

Jean was one of the original Reedies and her legacy as an artist was passed down through generations with a familial tradition of artists, musicians, writers and a family that embraces nature.

–Tonya Morris, great-granddaughter of Jean

7th Annual Nitrogen Day, Again!

Wednesday, April 22, 2026 marks Reed’s 7th Annual Nitrogen Day, put on by Reed’s American Chemical Society and American Nuclear Society! Enjoy liquid nitrogen ice cream, hot dogs, and fun science demos! In Nitrogen we Trust! See the below article written by Raymond Rendleman ’06 for the May 2009 Reed Magazine, or this Grail article from 2018, or the Quest article from this year about it.

You can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t taste it. It doesn’t burn, explode, alter consciousness or make you talk funny. It is anything but rare—in fact, it makes up the greater part of the atmosphere.

It is, of course, nitrogen, and it is the apotheosis of dull.

Except at Reed.

Once a year, Reedies fling aside all pretense of neutrality and plunge into communal worship of the seventh element. The nitro-veneration takes form in everything from the freezing of ice cream and everyday objects with liquid nitrogen (ever seen a sock snap in half?) to the recitation of elaborate pro-nitrogen odes.

Nitrogen Day, which usually falls on the Thursday eight days before Renn Fayre, has become one of the most popular traditions on campus, enduring for more than 15 years. Yet illuminating its origins is no easy task.

Longtime chemistry professor Alan Shusterman has no idea how it started. Biology professor David Dalton, who has affixed his career to unraveling the mysteries of certain plants’ ability to self-fertilize, and who argues that the ability to fix nitrogen industrially was the most important discovery of the 20th century, is similarly baffled.

The key to unlocking the elusive origins of N-Day came from emeritus professor of chemistry Tom Dunne, who remembers with pride the impassioned nitrogen-related speeches delivered by science majors in the quad. Dunne says he may have delivered a speech or two himself. “It was always a lighthearted thing,” he recalls.

Dunne suggested we contact physics major Rob Mack ’93, who confessed to being one of the instigators, although he stressed that it was a group effort.

Posing as the “Committee to Sustain Mysticism, Spirituality, and Awe While Deconstructing and Rationalizing the World Around Us,” the organizers staged the first N-Day on April 23, 1992. Starting at 4 p.m., the festivities began with a brass-band parade from the library lobby. On the Student Union porch, religion major David Weinstock ’92 presided over a ceremony titled “In Nitrogen We Trust,” according to Mack’s original Quest article. Hotdogs cooked over burning charcoal, the Just Say N to O Band provided a musical interlude, and the celebration concluded with an “Ode to nitrogen and its triple bond.”

From Reed College Quest Vol 158 No 11 Apr 21 1992

Biology major Nick Kaplinsky ’93, who helped with the first N-Day, calls it another one of those Reed events that popped out of a “wouldn’t it be great if’ conversation among friends.

The event was so successful it was repeated the next year. “The most amazing part was how quickly it caught on,” says bio major Al Kun ’95, another principal organizer.

By 1994, political science major Francisco Toro ’97 wrote N-Day’s annual Quest advertisement, saying that seeing the inaugural event as a prospie was “one of the main reasons” he chose Reed. From the student handbook to admission office literature, the event—invariably described as the ‘Seventh Annual” in a nod to its place in the periodic table—has become a quintessential demonstration of Reed culture. Last year, the first known extramural N-Day celebration was held at the house of chem major Steve Carlson ’93 in California.

Besides the addition of tofu dogs to the barbeque, little has changed of N-Day traditions. The craziest thing typical of the celebration is a nitrogen-infused beer garden. (Professor Dalton regards the smaller bubbles of dissolved nitrogen in ale as the 20th century’s second-greatest discovery. )

Why nitrogen? Theories abound. “It was fun to say, ‘I will make you love something you didn’t know anything about,” Mack recalls. Nitrogen’s tendency to be overshadowed by flashy elements such as oxygen also appealed to Reedies. “People feel they must root for the underdog,” recalls physics major Ben Brau ’93.

If one were to remain neutral on the subject, one could argue that other elements are as interesting and as important. Oxygen supports combustion; carbon is essential to all known forms of life; helium makes you sound like Donald Duck. Among Reedies gathered in the Quad for N-Day, however, any suggestion that another element might make a superior object of veneration will elicit a chorus of boos. Whatever the reason, Reed and nitrogen share a unique and powerful bond.

More than a century of Canyon Day

Reed is notorious for our traditions, but few have the staying power of Canyon Day. Canyon Day dates to nearly the school’s inception, with our first records pointing to April 15, 1913. At the time, Albert Doyle submitted plans to transform the canyon into “an artful landscape of Tudor Gothic quadrangles and formal gardens.” When the college’s shoestring budget of the time made that impossible, focus shifted to adapting the canyon from a cow pasture and trickle of a stream to a recreational area.

Campus Day work across the canyon with a pair of horses to help, 1913. Most of the students and faculty are clearing ground with rakes or hoes.

Even the college president, William Trufont Foster, put his back into it:

Campus Day near the Reed Lake dam, circa 1914. Students and faculty are clearing logs out of the Canyon Lake. President William T. Foster is in the water, pushing a log.

In 1915, students excavated a ten foot deep swimming hole on the west side, complete with bathhouses. In the ’20s, a dam was built to make way for a formal swimming pool. In the ’50s, the north bank was excavated for the construction of cross-canyon dorms. A Quest article from `1955 reminds students that they would soon,

“have a chance to uphold a miss-clad tradition when they forsake the cloisters of academic learning to shoulder arms . . . against the common enemy. Weapons will be rakes, shovels, hoes, and related miscellany suitable for an attack on the defiled beauties of nature.”

Year by year, the community gathered with snacks, gloves, shears, and every once in a while, with a live band to cheer them on.

Canyon Day, April 1962. A student German Band is playing in the rain at 6:30 a.m., probably outside of the Old Dorm Block.

Over time, our approach to the canyon has evolved–it has been named part of the Johnson Creek Watershed in recognition of the headwaters of Crystal Springs Creek on the east end, and the canyon is now protected as 60 acres of habitat for urban wildlife. In ’01, the college constructed a fish ladder to re-establish connectivity between the lake and the lower creek, allowing access to the salmon spawning grounds. Opening day featured champagne and a timely spring downpour.

A snowy day in the Canyon, featuring the Reed College Fish Ladder, circa 2009

As such, a century into the tradition of Canyon Day, the focus is on planting native trees and shrubs, pulling out invasive plants, maintaining trails, and collecting debris.

Canyon Day, April 4, 2010. Students are making piles of weed debris behind the Studio Art Building.

In the area? Join the community on April 4, 2026 to get your hands dirty! We can’t promise a live band, but we can guarantee camaraderie and a day’s work to feel proud of.

Dreaming of Snow

As we watch towns in Massachusetts get over 40″ of snow this week, I find myself reflecting on what would happen if Portland faced such a storm. At first, it seems rather funny: the city would probably stop dead in its tracks. I can imagine our single snow plow chugging along the infinite loops of streets.

On a little further reflection, I recall other (comparatively mild) storms that have caused fairly impressive amounts of damage. The PNW is not equipped for that kind of weather, and even six inches has the potential to be destructive!

Portland’s record for the single snowiest day was set on January 21, 1943, with 14.4 inches in a single day. Life in the city came fully to a halt, although some students were able to secure skis to navigate campus:

Four students are standing in front of the Chapel entrance in Eliot Hall, January 1943. It is snowing, and there is a pair of skis in the foreground.

In 1980, another record-breaking storm rolled through, dropping 6 inches in a single night before coating it with a thick layer of ice. Reed’s trees were no match for the ice’s weight, and nearly every single one was damaged:

A clipping from a February *Quest* article from 1980, describing damage to campus from 6 inches of snow.

Not to be outdone by some measly sky-fallen ice, students have had their own weather-borne impacts on campus. In 2014, Reed made headlines around the state, when a group of students created an 800 pound snowball near the Grove dorms. A pair of math majors miscalculated–clearly they hadn’t earned their laurels yet–and an attempt to send it down the hill to crash on 28th Street sent it careening off course instead. It smacked into one of the Reed College Apartments instead, ripping a wall off its studs. Fortunately, no one was harmed, and the snowball narrowly missed the window.

The snowy behemoth cut a path of destruction on the way to its rendezvous with destiny (aka the Reed College Apartments).

In 2021, Mother Nature proved, once again, that she is not to be outdone with snowy carnage. Again, only about 6 inches of snow fell on the city, but it was combined with freezing rain, which clogged downspouts and increased the weight borne by roofs around the city. In dramatic fashion, the Reed gym collapsed under the pressure:

Michael Lombardo, director of athletic, fitness, and outdoor programs, stands before the ruins of Gym I and Gym II.

Were we to see even half of the snow the East Coast is blanketed in, I have to believe even the Old Dorm Block might meet its wintry end! Instead of longing for a few snowflakes, I will have to resign myself to appreciating that the forecast calls for weather in the 50s with sunshine, as out of place as it may seem.

– The Prexy Ghost

The 50th Anniversary of Reed Rugby: 50 Years of Reed-Sanctioned Mud Wrestling

Before American Football, there was rugby and before rugby there was rugby, and our school has been playing rugby officially for 50 years now. Starting in 1974, the proud members of the Rugby club had only a book on rugby as their head coach and a foreign exchange student from Keele as their assistant coach. Somehow, they managed to win their first game, but that was probably mostly due to dumb luck. Paul Lucre ’92 said that they only won two games while he played on the rugby team, but nevertheless he had a lot of fun. Eventually, the rugby team managed to get a coach by the name of Peter Carmini. The Rugby team back then was dirt poor and could not even buy their own Rugby balls, they had to ‘acquire’ them through various means (and from various teams).

Rugby players in 1974

One time the rugby team was going to play against a Catholic School, and some students decided that it would be funny to dress as monks, and bring out a cross and burn it in front of the Catholic players. Understandably, the Catholic players were not pleased and promptly left without playing a game.

Typically, when people talk about Rugby, they are talking about two different styles of Rugby: fifteens and sevens. Fifteens is fifteen players versus fifteen players, and sevens is seven players versus seven players. The beauty of Rugby lies in the fact that you need all kinds of body sizes to make an effective team—you need your big guys to play forward positions because they can tackle and hit more effectively, meanwhile the smaller and faster people play as backs. These are your scorers, they run around with the ball and score tries (Rugby touchdowns). Personally, I enjoy the rush of tackling someone to the ground (Yes officer, I assure you I am indeed a sane person), but in rugby there is a position for everyone’s body size and for everyone’s interests. Rugby is not a gentlemanly game played by thugs, it’s a thuggish game played by gentlemen.

50 years of anything is bound to create traditions, and Reed Rugby is no exception. At the end of the year all the members, regardless of gender, put on prom dresses and play rugby. The Rugby team is also famous for winning the owl fight on multiple occasions, sometimes in collaboration with other entities like the Russian House, or sometimes just by themselves. (Bulky Reedies who exercise regularly and have built-in teamwork are bound to do well in a brawl for a concrete owl.) Some traditions have changed, for example, there used to be a tradition where after a person scored their first try they would have to strip naked and dance. This has (thankfully) been replaced with just drinking a beer out of a boot. Rugby players in prom dresses during a skirmish

The Reed Rugby Team is not just a team of Reed students; it merged with Lewis and Clarke to form the Reed Lewis and Clarke rugby club or simply RLC, which has two teams under it, the W+ team and the M+ team or the Porcupines and River Rats, respectively. This merger is most beneficial for everyone since we get to borrow LC’s football players while they get more bodies on their rugby team. At the end of the day, we get more wins, which is great for all parties involved. To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Reed Rugby, there was a game held on the Rugby Field during Reunions. Many people showed up and despite some of the alumni’s ages, a lot of them were just as fast and just as slippery as they were when they started playing rugby.

Mildly Concussed,

William

A Very Reedie Limerick

Reed hosted a limerick contest in 2015, and while many are too lewd to share here, a few struck me as particularly worth revisiting, ten years later.

There once was a poor kid so alien
to her family episcopalian
she became a red Reedie
and took up graffiti
in the form of a thesis Hegelian.
Anonymous Reedie

Would you believe me if I told you there were 17 theses listed in the library with “Hegel” in the title? That feels a little low, if I’m being honest…

Those debates on the Reed Facebook forum
Tend to bring out the worst trolly foram.
They stick out their tongues
And find themselves stung.
‘Cause to Olde Reed and Nu? They just bore ’em.
Anonymous Reedie

Thank goodness Reed (Unofficial) has settled down a bit in the last 11 years…

Reed’s symbol, our favorite Doyle owl
Must be stolen, lest someone cry foul.
Each and every theft Leaves some Reedies bereft
And incites other ones to the prowl.
Janet Svirsky ’64

The Doyle Owl makes me feel the need to wax poetic from time to time myself, for sure.

“Kids these days have gone soft in the head;
they should do it the old way, instead!”
Hey, it’s ok to mourn –
but no need for such scorn.
Every era’s Olde Reed will be dead.
Lev Navarre Chao ’12

Ah yes, the second most common motto at Reed, behind “Atheism, Communism, Free Love”–Olde Reed is Dead. I like Lev’s take on the matter, though!

Humming off to the Great Lawn,

The Prexy Ghost

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.

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.)

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.

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