Faculty Retirees

Five long-time Pomona faculty look back on their careers as they enter retirement.

Retirees: Anne Bages | Mike Riskus | Bill Wirtz | Jerome Rinkus | Stanleigh Jones

Anne Bages
In 1959, Dwight Eisenhower was president and Anne Bages was just arriving at Pomona. As foreign policy was being made according to Dwight’s “domino” theory, Bages’ evolving career proved that the social barriers could fall faster than regimes in Indochina.

For Bages, it started in Galesburg, Illinois, a small town about 180 miles from Chicago that was once a stop on the Underground Railroad. She was the daughter of Greek immigrants—an outspoken father who loved talking politics with customers at his restaurant, and a mother who didn’t learn to speak English until Anne was in junior high school.

Hers was one of the few immigrant families in town and she felt it. “When I was growing up, that was very difficult—being a child of an immigrant in a town where few people spoke anything but English. It was very difficult to know your place.” Adding to her feeling of estrangement was her love for sports, an uncommon pursuit for a girl in those days.

In college, she chose physical education over physics, and after teaching high school for a while, she left for California and UCLA, where she earned her master’s. While there, she and a fellow teaching assistant saw a job opening at a small liberal arts college in Claremont.

“It was an accident when I came here,” she says. “I drove out here on a hot day. I thought it was going to be the end of the earth.” The facilities were no more inviting. Renwick Gymnasium was a “blue-smoke-filled thing with acorns and dead bees on the floor.”

She started out teaching PE and coached women’s tennis and basketball. She drew on her modern dance background to help organize the “aquacade,” a synchronized swimming review—of course, the girls were only allowed in the pool early in the morning and late in the evening.

Pomona was better than most places, Bages recalls, but she and other women coaches struggled around the men’s schedules, vying for a place in the gym, for office space, for equality. She was already marching against the war and for the Equal Rights Amendment, so why not join the effort for equality in women’s sports. In 1972, her work on a number of committees paid off when Congress passed Title IX. “When I was growing up, they didn’t have teams for women,” she says. For Bages, Title IX was a lesson that silence is rarely golden and closed doors must be opened.

In 1984, she left athletics and took over as acting director of the Oldenborg Residence/Center—the first coeducational dormitory in the United States, she notes. “My office was a former date room.” The assignment was for one year. She stayed for 18.

A year later, she was made coordinator of Women’s Studies at The Claremont Colleges. For three years, she brought in lecturers to talk about women’s sexuality, ethnicity and politics—everything from goddess theory to lesbian literature.

She was also instrumental in starting the school’s Gay (now Gay and Bisexual) Student Union. It began as a loosely knit group of gay and lesbian students emboldened by the civil rights efforts of other groups. Since she was open about her own orientation, students knew they could come to her.

“It was nice being in an academic setting, because you could deal with these issues.” But even as her career moved through apparent barriers, Bages says she led by following. “I never went after these things. People saw me as someone who could do something.” 


Mike Riskas
His broad-knuckled hands look as if they were hewn by a pick ax. Instead, Mike Riskas shaped them as a young man swatting baseballs and tackling his gridiron opponents. And he kept them in condition over the last 42 years clapping encouragement to his Sagehen players.

Ironically, Riskas, 69, spent his career at a liberal arts college after defying his mother’s prohibition of sport, which she deemed antithetical to a “good” education. “None of my older brothers were allowed to play football,” he relates. “My mother was known to go on the field and take them off in their uniform.’’

He got his break after the family moved to Los Angeles. Living away from home while in high school, he began forging his parents’ signatures on permission slips. Under his mother’s nose, he became an all-state tackle on the Belmont High School football team. This, in turn, earned him a scholarship to UCLA to play football and baseball.
Success spoiled his cover. One day, Riskas remembers, a neighbor stopped by his mother’s house to tell her that her son was playing football on television. “No, he doesn’t play football,” she said confidently.

“I had a lot of explaining to do,” Riskas says.

Expected to go into medicine at UCLA, he decided instead to study physical education. He earned his degree in 1959 and during his final year coached the frosh baseball and football teams. After graduating, he spent a year coaching football at Alhambra High School. But he was a PE grad in a bad job market. “I was going into the plumbing business of all things, in Alhambra of all places,” Riskas explains.

As luck would have it, an assistant was needed for the track and football teams at Division III Pomona. Riskas jumped at the chance to fill in for a year—he came in 1961 and stayed until 2003.

Although he returned to UCLA to earn his master’s, Riskas says he learned his important lessons from the scholar-athletes he coached and the colleagues he admired. For most of his career, he was head coach of the Sagehen baseball team and an assistant for football.

“It was a difficult adjustment to come from a Division I school,” where winning was everything, to Pomona, where success frequently had to be found somewhere other than the win-loss column. “Sports, the years I was here, were not a high priority,” he says. Some years, there was even a shortage of players on a team.

Nonetheless, Riskas says the experience gave him tremendous gratification. To coach the young men who came here was to teach strategy, discipline and the spirit of competition. “To apply the edict to get better everyday in every way in everything you do,” Riskas adds. He has a stack of letters from former players, including two current Pomona trustees, that tell of how the lessons learned on the field have translated into success in later life.

“I had a reputation as a hard guy and a disciplinarian—they seem to have appreciated that,” Riskas says. Certainly, he built camaraderie with his players. Even now he can rattle the names of dozens of former ballplayers, along with what they do, where they live and the names of their wives and children.

“Working with these guys, these students, these athletes, was the greatest part. I only hope they had as great a time as I had.”

Today, perhaps emboldened by converting his mother to athletics, Riskas is working to bring baseball to his mother’s homeland. Starting in the 1970s, at the behest of CMC coach Bill Arce, Riskas began coaching baseball in several European countries. At present, he is helping build the Greek national team for the upcoming 2004 Olympic games.

He also wants to gather 16 mm film of football and baseball games taken over the years and build a highlight archive. “I hope to stay on and keep doing things for the College. They’ve done a lot for me.”


Bill Wirtz
William Wirtz is the kind of guy who brakes for dead kangaroos.

That’s what he did while escorting Pomona College alumni around the Australian outback. “Notice,” he told those willing to pile out of the truck and gaze upon the corpse, “the way the teeth are formed.” The bottom set sits at a 90-degree angle to the top, he explained, and there’s reason for that, just like there is a reason for everything in nature.

Then he took some pictures so he could capture the marsupial’s peculiar molars for his class.

“One of my crusades is that too many people don’t know about the outdoors,” says Wirtz, who wraps up 35 years as professor of zoology and biology.

Humans flourished in their early days because they knew how to use the plants and animals around them. For most people, Wirtz laments, this has become an esoteric discipline. “This is a very basic knowledge any human being should have.”

The study of ecology came naturally to Wirtz. “I was the kid who brought home mice and snakes. And I never stopped.” Growing up in New Jersey, he enjoyed wandering in the woods and taking a boat out onto the nearby salt marsh to study the critters.

Ecology went from curiosity to career while he was attending Rutgers University. There, he studied under one of the nation’s foremost experts, at a time when ecology was a relatively new academic discipline.

He cut his teeth, so to speak, studying armadillos in the Everglades—“I was collecting them, a euphemism for killing them, to check the contents of their stomachs.” As a Cornell student, he did his postdoctoral research on the habits of the Polynesian rat in the leeward Hawaiian Islands.

Today, Wirtz, 68, is mostly interested in the nesting habits of the endangered gnatcatcher, which often lives in the endangered coastal sage scrub. Between that and mock cavalry charges at the Little Bighorn—he is a member of a “living history” regiment that recreates the life and times of the frontier’s Seventh Cavalry—he plans to keep busy in retirement.

The ecosystem is a scheme much grander and more elaborate than the human mind can understand, Wirtz says. But every discovery unravels this scheme a little further, and, perhaps more important, generates respect for the diversity of life.

“The Native Americans said all life is dependent on earth, water, air and fire. Earth is ultimately the source of all our food and we’re poisoning it; our bodies are 75 percent water…and we’re poisoning it; air is needed to breathe and we’re poisoning it; fire refers to the sun…while we’re not poisoning it, we’re putting things in the atmosphere that changes the way it gets here.”

He and his wife, Helen, who met through the Audubon Society, decided not to have kids, Wirtz explains, “so when people ask how many children I have, I say hundreds—most of them have graduated.” In fact, he points to a card on his windowsill from a former student. It’s a Father’s Day card.

If his students are his extended family, Wirtz says he hopes to have passed on two pieces of parental advice: first, that they should decide for themselves what they want to do with their lives; and, second, everyone should appreciate the natural world around them. “If there was one mission in my career,” he says, “it was to pass that on to students.”


Jerome Rinkus
It wasn’t long after Jerome Rinkus began studying the language at Middlebury College in Vermont that the then-Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first manned spacecraft, and simultaneously launched an already edgy United States into a cultural and political race that overtook the world.

Know the enemy, they said. And so the U.S. government began granting National Defense Education fellowships to study Russian. Rinkus used his to study at Brown University. “If you studied Russian in the old days, you could either work for the government or teach,” Rinkus recalled.

Although he was leaning toward the latter, he was drafted into Vietnam before he could choose. Returning from active duty, he took up the protest against the war. He went on to earn his doctorate at Brown, specializing in 19th century Russian literature—Tolstoy and Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. “In a sense, politics has influenced the overall pattern of my life,” he said. “But it is the love of literature that has kept me going.”

In the era of détente, Rinkus studied texts wrought under one of Russia’s most oppressive czarist regimes. “Somehow this adversity helped the creativity develop,” Rinkus said of the writers. “They had to deal with secret police, censorship. Ironically, the revolution was supposed to change all that, but it didn’t.”

Certainly, Rinkus did not choose the easiest tongue to master. Unlike the Romance languages, Russian is based on the Cyrillic alphabet. It also relies not on word order but on declension for meaning.

“The most important information tends to come at the end of the sentence,” Rinkus explained. “The ability to switch those words around gives a poet great flexibility.” However, such flexibility also makes translation much more difficult. Not only do you lose the colloquial, but the entire rhythm and rhyme of Russian masterworks. Such is the difference that one of Rinkus’s friends decided to learn the language in order to figure out why Pushkin, who struck him as mediocre in English, was considered the country’s greatest writer. After reading it in the original, he understood, Rinkus said.

But while art and literature might be the reward, for most of Rinkus’s students learning Russian was an entrée into a range of government jobs: translators, diplomats, even CIA. With the fall of the Soviet Union, however, came a fall in enrollment. “Most of the students interested in Russian do have a broad international interest as well,” Rinkus explained. ”When the Soviet Union collapsed, interest in Russian dropped 40 to 50 percent. It was almost as if they were studying it to understand our enemy.”

Today, a slowly emerging economy has begun once again to draw students interested in international business, trade or medicine. For his part, Rinkus, who has visited Russia nine times, plans to travel, but probably not back to Moscow or Kiev. He wants something with a little bit more mystery to it. “Now I would like to see the Great Wall of China.”


Stanleigh Jones
Beneath a jacaranda’s purple canopy, Stanleigh Jones cuts the figure of a retired Air Force colonel. But he’s already given himself away with his answering machine greeting in which he mimics a computer-generated voice. Perhaps that gentle subversiveness helps explain how this Virginia Military Institute graduate finds himself retiring after 19 years of teaching Japanese language and literature at a small, liberal arts college—with a lingering fondness for puppets to boot.

It began with military service. Starting in 1953, Jones spent two years in Korea as a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer. But it was during a series of visits to Korea’s renascent neighbor—Japan—that Jones found his true calling.

He’d been 10 years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. It was a vivid memory, colored by the anti-Japanese propaganda that flourished during the war. The memories stuck, Jones says. “I remember when visiting, when it got dark I didn’t want to find myself alone in an alley.”

But what he found was a “gracious, cordial, hospitable” people—“everything opposite the propaganda picture put in my head.” With no compelling reason to return to the United States, Jones stuck around for a year, taking an intensive language-training course to better understand this exotic place.

He’d never really considered studying, much less teaching, a language. “I took French in college; it was a bore,” he says. Back home, however, he enrolled in Columbia University’s Japanese program, where he earned his doctorate. His first job was teaching the language at Yale University. “If you like something well enough, that interest alone will carry you to some kind of success,” Jones explains.

After stints at USC and the University of Kentucky, Jones took a position at the Claremont Graduate School in 1968. He jumped at the chance in part because he’d come to like the well-manicured island of Claremont. Sixteen years later, he moved into Pomona’s language program.

Around that time, Japan was just emerging as an economic powerhouse. “They began imitating things of the West that they thought made the West strong,’’ Jones says.

Many of Jones’s students enrolled because they had become interested in Japan through an exchange program. Some were themselves of Japanese ancestry. And, of course, there was the popular explanation given on a class survey conducted at the start of each semester: “I dig weird languages.”  

With Japanese script being as aesthetic and symbolic as painting, it is no surprise that it is the symbolism in the culture that continues to interest Jones, now 72. His particular passion is Japanese puppet theatre, an art form that emerged in the mid- to late-17th century. “Some of the greatest playwrights were in the puppet theatre,” he says. Like the more popular kabuki theatre, it is highly stylized. But its symbolic form harkens more to the nature of animation, allowing it to express things that can be awkward in live theatre. So skilled are the puppet handlers, Jones says, that their charges sometimes “look like they’re trying to escape the hands of their manipulators.”

In his retirement, he plans to translate several of the most influential puppet plays into an academic compendium—although he admits that he continues to delay the project by finding more yard work to do—such as cleaning up the fallen jacaranda petals.

—Gary Scott is a reporter for the Pasadena Star-News and
a frequent contributor to PCM.