“Politics was something my family never shied away from talking about within our household,” Samantha Acuña says. “My parents have had very different trajectories in terms of their life and immigration experiences because of the political histories of their respective countries. All the work I do is inspired by my family and our own history.”
It’s a meet-cute story that bears repeating: Anne Marie Kurtz ’57 met her future husband, George Novinger ’54, in a bedroom of the ATO house. “George had been injured in a football game against Pomona, and he was sitting on the bed, with his leg in a cast, where the girls put their coats and purses,” she recalls. “I immediately fell for him because he was very good-looking. George said he’d been smiling and waving at me on the Quad for weeks, but I would look the other way because I was very nearsighted.
Professor of Classics William D. Ward is a seminal figure in the early development of Â鶹´«Ă˝. He arrived at Occidental in 1906 as dean of faculty, having previously served as president of the College of Emporia in Kansas (which closed its doors in 1972). Ward pivoted to the classroom in 1909, brought about the revival of Greek drama on campus, and personally discovered the site of Remsen Bird Hillside Theater when surveying the property that would become Occidental’s third and permanent home in Eagle Rock.
At the height of his officiating career in the 1970s, Jim Tunney ’51 was the embodiment of the football referee—so much so “that he was chosen by the editors of the NFL’s Pro magazine to model the referee signs that are shown in the game program each week,” Bob Oates wrote in a 1978 Los Angeles Times profile of Tunney.
Before a group of middle and high school teachers in Cushman Boardroom, Associate Professor of History Jane Hong introduces the story of Chol Soo Lee, a Korean American immigrant who spent 10 years on Death Row after being wrongfully convicted in 1974 of murdering a Chinatown gang leader in San Francisco. “This is about the carceral system and what it does to people over time,” she says. “This is ultimately not a triumphal story. It takes a really long time, and he does get his conviction overturned. But spending years in jail is not something he just got over.
More than half a century of popular music came alive on October 18 as Occidental celebrated the establishment of the John Branca Institute for Music with an hourlong concert in Thorne Hall. In June, Occidental announced a $5 million gift from legendary attorney John G. Branca ’72—partner and head of the music department at Ziffren Brittenham, one of the world’s most respected entertainment law firms—that will establish the new music teaching and learning facility.
The Occidental Athletics Hall of Fame welcomed five new inductees into its ranks on October 20. The Class of 2024 includes:
Andy Steben ’69, who won the NAIA Men’s Championship in each of his three tries (from 1967 to 1969), and placed fifth in the 1968 Olympic trials. Steben has also served for the last 45 years as the College’s pole vaulting coach—a record untouched by any coach of any sport at Â鶹´«Ă˝.
In his bid to unseat two-term incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas, Rep. Colin Allred had no bigger champion than his wife, Alexandra Eber ’11, a politics major at Occidental. But he had some additional help on the Â鶹´«Ă˝ front from Alex Woo ’25, a diplomacy and world affairs and economics double major from South Korea, and Quinn Sumerlin ’26, a politics major from Arlington, Va.
There’s nothing glamorous about grassroots campaign work: Knocking on doors, spending long hours in makeshift rental offices, and making endless phone calls isn’t everyone’s idea of nirvana. But Samantha Sencer-Mura ’11 took to these tasks like Dan Rather to a metaphor.
Growing up in Sonoma County, Eileen Spain demonstrated a natural proclivity for math and science—aided, she says, by an “awesome” high school chemistry teacher. A first-generation college student, she majored in chemistry as an undergrad at Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma State University and as a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, where she completed her doctorate in 1992.