CLAREMONT, CA (2024) “The Five Colleges”

Claremont was a kind of oasis of learning and culture, there among the desert sagebrush and tumbleweeds.

Student Lounge, Claremont McKenna college.

During my senior year in high school, they started having people come from different colleges to tell us about their schools, to give us ideas where we might apply. 

Most of these people tried to be cool and current.  They wore the clothes of the era (late 70s).  They told us about their college.  What the vibe was.

And then one day a guy from Pomona College in Southern California showed up.  We didn’t get many people coming from that far away, or from that good of a college.  Pomona was like a West Coast version of Amherst or Dartmouth.  It was considered “a very good school”.

I went to see the Pomona guy.  I expected a young, super-smart guy, like our high school Trigonometry teacher, who had graduated from MIT and had long hair and a crazy mustache and put his feet on the desk on Fridays and took questions from us students about Life in General. 

The Pomona guy was not like that.  He had a short precise haircut, parted to one side. He wore a blue blazer, a light blue shirt, a tie, khaki pants and oxblood penny loafers.  He didn’t smile very much. 

A dozen students showed up for his talk.  We kind of gawked at him.  He seemed from another world.

I didn’t apply to Pomona, but I never forgot that guy.  This was 1979.  What point was Pomona trying to make by sending a guy like that?   Was Pomona super conservative?  Was he there to show us that Pomona was equal to the Ivy League?  Was he indicating this was a wealth and class thing?  And that we better be ready to fork over some serious $$$ to go there?

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Then many years later, a writer friend, Jonathan Lethem, got a prestigious professor-ship teaching creative writing at Pomona.  David Foster Wallace had once held that job. After that, I found myself thinking about Pomona again.  If I saw it mentioned somewhere I paid attention. 

About teaching college-level creative writing, David Foster Wallace famously said—in affect—that the best part was the first semester and after the novelty wears off it’s a hellish grind.  But DFW was a gloomy sort.   Jonathan Lethem was a people person, and a good explainer of things, a born professor. 

And then I’d think of myself.  Would I have been a good teacher?  Would I have enjoyed being surrounded by bright, well-to-do students at a place like Pomona?   

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These adult presenting men are COLLEGE STUDENTS.

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Pomona College is part of the Claremont Five Colleges system, which includes several other “very good schools” like Harvey Mudd (a west coast MIT) and Scripps (a west coast Smith.)   

This little enclave of academia is located in the California desert between Los Angeles and Palm Springs.  I always thought of the town of Claremont as a kind of oasis of learning and culture, there among the sagebrush and tumbleweeds.

So then one night, I was looking at interesting places I might go for my Travel Substack and I thought:  why don’t I drive down to SoCal and check out Pomona and the Claremont Five Colleges?