Pomona College - Metate Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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DONALD BACON DR. CHARLES K. EDMUNDS DR. FRANK PITMAN In Memoriam

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GORDON HOGAN GEOFFREY AYRES Xv; ik t f- - ivi-

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POMONA WAS A LONG ESTABLISHED TRADITION AND A WHIM OF the moment — a kind of equilibrium between the permanence of a campus and the flux of an ever changing student body. The students, noticing the seasons whisper across the quad — the fall bare sycamores new green in the Spring — watched the changes in the campus and thought themselves unchanged. But old grads, returning, discovered that the slow drift of seasons about the weathered buildings was the only real per- manence. The buildings, old and new seemed to take their life from the students in and around them, but, subtlely, the campus imposed itself on the movement of the college. Its dormitories, classrooms, and athletic fields were vortices around which the shifting currents of a busy student body whirlpooled. Each year a new fourth of Pomona came down College Avenue and through the stone gates. An initial unity was forced upon them by their newness. Un- knowing and unknown, they clung together as a class, amazing upperclassmen by their enthusiasm. But the enthusiasm, broadening, overflowed class unity and began to subordinate into smaller, more intimate unities. Drawn apart by diversity of temperament, students united with those who shared their interests. For their interests, curricular and extra-curricular, Pomona found a place. The enforced first loyalties were academic. There was a devotion to class- room and textbook which was unmatched by an equivalent interest. The shared knowledge of the binomial theorem or Mendel ' s Laws united incon- gruous groups who exchanged textbooks, information, and class notes. Other groupings were less arbitrary. All of them, the diverse loyalties to Coop so- ciability, to student government, to team or fraternity tended to destroy the oneness of the student body. But occasionally the college community, together at a football game or con- vocation, achieved with its physical unity a sudden unified enthusiasm, an in- tangible something called school spirit. The group held the momentary spirit even as it lost its physical unity, spilling off toward Clark or Harwood. And students walking back across the Quad let the remnants of their enthusiasm be caught up by the look of the pale winter sunset tinting the early mist beneath the trees. The spirit which infect- ed them expanded into a vague unspoken affection for the part of Pomona more indelible than memory — its unchanging campus.