Claremont (Pomona, Scripps)

When the settlers of California dreamed mundane dreams of shiny streets of gold, they turned to an old Spanish custom and called California an El Dorado.

But there were milder settlers in California who dreamed of golden grain and ripe fruits. When a small group of these beheld. 30 miles east of busy, sprawling Los Angeles, a hill profuse with oranges, lemons, apricots, peaches, it was also quite natural that they should invoke an Italian legend and call the spot Pomona.* Pomona it became when it was settled in 1875.

Thirteen years passed; the lush fruit had done well, the colony prospered. In 1888, then, the two great things happened: Pomona was chartered as a city, Pomona College was founded by a group of settlers who felt the need of a small "Christian college of the New England type."

Scattered here and there in the simple sun parlor of a private house the first students began to learn their Christian duties of citizenship. The next year, an uncompleted hotel at Claremont, three miles north of Pomona, was given to the college and the students were assembled. In 1894, 47 students were graduated. It soon became difficult to cling to the ideal of a small college. Nevertheless Pomona firmly shut its doors yearly in the face of all but 750 students. But if there were two colleges? Later, perhaps, three? On the coast of the Pacific another Oxford, a group of autonomous colleges united by a common central organization?

Today next to Pomona stands Scripps College for Women./- Together Pomona and Scripps are referred to as The Claremont Colleges, which is the name of the central mediating organization acting between the two individual colleges. Dr. James A. Blaisdell, onetime president of Pomona, is now president of this organization. Dr. Charles Keyser Edmunds, onetime president of Lingnan University, Canton, was inaugurated president of Pomona last fortnight.

A year before Andrew Jackson yielded the presidency to Martin Van Buren. and before California became a state, Ellen Scripps was born. In 1873 she helped her brother found a newspaper which was the first of today's Scripps newspaper syndicate. "Miss Ellen" always considered her wealth a public trust. She harkened to the faintest plea for a sound philanthropical cause. She has endowed hospitals, schools, given parks, community buildings.**

Last week, in California, Miss Ellen celebrated her 92nd birthday. Many and sincere were her well wishers but none more sincere than the students and professors of Scripps College, which her money founded when she turned 89.

* Pomona was an Italian Goddess of fruit and gardens. In Ovid she is wooed by Vertumnus, God of the Changing Seasons.

/- Pomona is coeducational.

** Among these are Balboa Park, San Diego, the world's largest aviary; the San Diego Community Welfare Building; the Scripps Memorial Hospital; the Scripps Biological Institute at Miramar; the La Jolla playground.