The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 59

VIEW JLJLJ EOS Alleles SuneS Monday, January 23, 1984PartV Lifestyle The Paterfamilias of Pomona College David Alexander: Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground 1 i "i Karen Einstein, Rose Warner, IRIS SCHNEIDER Lot AnftiM TlmM Samara Koffler, Candy Apple, Melissa Clark. Molly Minnaker. Santa Monica rap group includes (from left) Naomi Steinhardt, Gussie Barkin, Liz Bliss, Tesa-Agsrs. EldcrfySfisro Lives Putting the Rap on the Generation Gap By JOY HOROWITZ. Timet Staff Writer By JOHN DREYFUSS.

Timet Staff Writer Behind his back, some of David Alexander's employees call him "Da." Da for his initials. Da for his father-like image. It's an affectionate sobriquet Alexander is the 51-year-old president of Pomona College. His passion for the school is fatherly. Except for his family, he says the college and his work mean more to him than anything.

He vigilantly oversees the campus and vehemently responds to criticism he feels to be unfair to Pomona. Like many fathers, he comes across as fanciful, funny, curious and caring. And. like many fathers, he also can be aloof, stern, intense and demanding. "Put quite simply," Alexander said, "I feel personally responsible for everything that goes on at the college." A FiM Small College Pomona is one of the best small undergraduate liberal arts colleges in the country, according to those who rate such institutions.

It is an intellectual place, a place that puts great emphasis on thinking. And that suits David Alexander just fine. He has always been a successful thinker. A superb student (only one since the 7th grade), a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a Rhodes scholar. Alexander is a formal man and a formal thinker.

He keeps his feet firmly planted on the ground, raising money and dealing with the often petty day-to-day responsibilities of academic administration. And he keeps his head in the clouds, promoting scholarship and old-fashioned academic excellence among faculty and students. "We want to have essentially an intellectual institution with emphasis on academic rigor, personal development and social concern," Alexander said. In his 14 years as president he feels he has "kept the college, to the extent that one person can do it moving in the direction it was going when I came here." Maintaining academic dignity and formality is one of Alexander's highest priorities. He is almost Victorian on the subjects of social separation between faculty and students and the ceremony of education.

"I think there is a real risk to the Why had the disappearance of a bottle of ink and some per. nibs infuriated the president of Pomona College? Because he needed them to sign diplomas. And Pomona's diplomaswhich are made of parchmentare important formal, ceremonial symbols of a Pomona education. They must be just right which means signed with the correct pen and India ink. "A ballpoint wouldn't have worked on parchment and a fountain pen wouldn't have done a clean job." Alexander said.

"So I had to have the correct pens and India ink. "In a world that's about to fall apart that doesn't seem like much." he added. "But it is an outward manifestation of the college, which is the oldest living tradition in the Western world outside of the church." Not a Backslapper Alexander's formality is often taken for aloofness. He is not a backslapper. His attitude leads many students and lower-level staff members to see their president as distant and cool.

"I think he's incredibly interested in education and the institution of Pomona College," said Leah Van Voorhis, a senior from Bakersfield who has met with Alexander. But. she added: "I feel that students see him as an impersonal figure. I feel he wants to be close to the students and he finds it difficult A lot of students would like to get him into the Co-Op instead of in that big, oppressive office where you feel as if your tongue is made of cotton." Interviews with Pomona's administrators and faculty members indicate they hold their president in high esteem. "He is a true academic man and a supporter of academic people," said Robert T.

Voelkel, Pomona's vice president and dean of the college. "He has a sense of style and dignity. He believes very much that curricular ideas and the business of the faculty arise from the faculty, and as an administrator he is an enabler." But Alexander is perceived as relating best to high-level administrators. "He relates well to deans and vice presidents, but below that he doesn't relate so well," said one professor with administrative responsibilities. "I think he considers himself ratherclose to the faculty, -and I dontfcmk the faculty does (see him that way)." "I don't think of myself as being Please see ALEXANDER, Face 2 this sun-filled room on the third floor of the Jewish Family Service in an old downtown Santa Monica building.

It is here that a half -century gulf is being bridged as the girl in the woman meets the woman in the girt They call it an "intergenerational rap group." The idea was to dispel stereotypes that teen-agers have about the elderly and that the elderly have about adolescents. But it is really much more. They talk about dating, about parents, about depression, about relationships, about guilt, about survival, about each other. And they have become friends. At the moment, 76-year-old Molly Minnaker, whose surgical cane is propped up against the easy chair in which she "SIS, is discussing how much she loves to dance so long as she can throw all her weight onto her dance partner.

"You think maybe it's psycholog Four teen-age girls. Four grown women. They met as strangers and now call themselves family. The girls think about life as elderly women. The elderly women think back about their lives as teen-age girls.

At 16, Gussie was married. Holly was looking for dates. Candy was going steady. And Rose was in a concentration camp. They know what it's like to be 16, even though they're in their 60s and 70s.

They remember, they tell the girls. A School CUcjm The girls. 16 going on 17. look grown up in their tight designer jeans and high heels. They are a clique in school and have affected the same mannerisms, tossing their hair back in an identical way.

Karen, Liz, Samara and Melissa can't imagine what they'll be like in college, let alone as old women. But once a week, they meet in ical?" asks Liz Bliss. "No. baby doll. No.

it isn't." the older woman replies. "I've got arthritis, that's all" "Well. I've got tendinitis and complain like anything." the petite 16-year-old in suede boots replies. "It's good you don't let it get to you. You're a fighter." WoBoloogteaFamily' The two exchange loving glances.

Naomi Steinhardt, who acts as a sort of intermediary the social worker who oversees the group, and the only middle-age person present say "It seems like we've been together always. But next week is our last week together." "We belong to a family." Rose Warner says to her young friends. "Now the family will fall apart And we're going to miss you. going up-, we're going down. We're See GENERATIONS, Page 3 Industry BENOLENDER Lot Anfrfet Timet Pomona President David Alexander, signing diplomas.

academic intercourse in having faculty barely above their students in the classroom," Alexander said. "Faculty members even here try to curry the favor of students by being their buddies. I think there has to be a degree of friendly respect both ways. I absolutely do not like informality and intimacy in working relationships. I think it mixes things up too much." Alexander believes his emphasis on formality may stem from "a longstanding affection for liturgical ceremony in the (Presbyterian) church." Missing Ink, Pea Nlbo "The Great India Ink Story" illustrates his dedication both to ceremony and formality.

A couple of years ago, when a box of pen nibs and a bottle of India ink vanished from his supply closet, Alexander got furious. "The whole top floor (of Sumner Hall, where Alexander's office is) was running. around saying: The president can't find his India said one staff member. "He had all of Sumner Hall upside down," said another. LA.

Chamber Honors Oil 77 vfen By MARY LOU LOPER. Times Staff Writer It would be an understatement to say that the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce was fired up last weekend at the Century Plaza, emblazoning five top executives of the petroleum industry in a tribute to "Excellence in Energy," extolling the contributions of Peter Ueberroth, president of the 1984 Summer Olympics, and introducing its new chamber chairman, Robert M. Mc-Intyre, president of. Southern California Gas who replaces Harold S. (Pete) Voegelin, a lawyer.

Photos With Sam To show you what kind of an evening George Gibbs dinner chairman, concocted, Sam, the Olympic Eagle, was in the foyer to be Polaroided with Tennille sang a rousing national anthem. And someone had provided a Sharp solar pocket calculator for each guest The oil industry showed the new-old of its business with displays, Chevron even importing a 100-year-old wooden oil drilling rig that pumped until last year, and Please see TRIBUTE, Page 4 IAN DRYDEN Lot Anfetef Timet The George Gibbses Jr. attend Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce dinner honoring oil industry at Century Plaza. Alexander during a rather informal chat with students, an activity some view as uncharacteristic. Jack Smith football and Australian football are not the same game.

I thought everyone knew that As far as 1 know, football American-style is played only in the United States, though a somewhat different version of it is played in Canada. That's why the team that wins the Super Bowl is the world champion who's to challenge it? The fact that the American and Australian games are different is irrelevant to what they have in common the saturation of social intercourse, the domination of the media, the mass pervasion of emotions and the citizens of Melbourne support their sport," she recalls a scene from the movie "On the Beach," in which the last habitable city on earth is shown deserted after a radioactive cloud has passed over it in a nuclear war. "The story goes that the scene was filmed in downtown Melbourne on the Sunday morning after the Aussie Rules Grand Final. Apparently the entire citizenry was exhausted by this (contest) for not a soul was in the streets. Of course Sydneysiders contend that Melbourne looks like that every Sun Hype, hype hooray! a super idea that From Down Under, could go over big Reisfeld sees some good signs in the Super Bowl tournament however: "If the Russians ever intended a Pearl Harbor type assault on the United States they could have done it on a Super Bowl or Playoff Sunday with nobody prepared for it Since they haven't done it I feel pretty safe.

(If you're reading this, it means we got away with it again. "Will you kindly tell Keith Dunstan for me that his Anti Football League needs a chapter here in America," writes Florence Click of Pasadena, "and I am willing to start it as soon as he sends me a badge and a red cube. (A red cube is given to all members as a symbol because, unlike a football, it doesn't bounce. Mrs. Click adds: "Mr.

Dunstan was, I believe, overly kind in saying that 'Los Angeles is middling berserk about He should have said completely berserk." The letter was signed Florence, but the letterhead identified her as Mrs. Shavenau Click. Shavenau Click? Shav Click? Could she possibly be the wife of our sportswriter Shav Click? How many Shav Clicks did I know, after all? I called Shav to make sure. "That's her," he said. "She's the most anti-sports person I know." Malcolm Deutsch of Monro Bay thinks pro football is too violent to be allowed on TV, and should at least be rated and he suggests that "some legislation would indeed be helpful." That's going too far.

If you can legislate in favor of the Anti Football League you can legislate against it Let's keep the politicians out of this. Don't write me. Write my wife or Mrs. Click. Barring some final cataclysm, by the time you read this the football championship of the world will have been decided, and the world's greatest free press can turn its attention to something less amusing and inconsequential.

Meanwhile, at least 100 million Americans will have seen the Super Bowl on television, and another 100 million will have been indirectly and helplessly exposed to the two weeks of hype that heralded its coming a force-feeding of hoopla so gross that even devout fans were beginning to regurgitate. In this halcyon period between the game and the hype that will soon be engulfing us in advance of the election, it is perhaps a good time for people who aren't that keen about football to start up an auxiliary of the Australian Anti Football League. Readers have expressed considerable interest in the league since I reported here the other day on its success in Melbourne, where it was launched a few years ago by Keith Dunstan, a columnist for the Melbourne Sun. The 1 AFL's goal is not the banishment of football, but some restraint in reporting it so that at least 25 of Melbourne's newspaper space and television time may be devoted to other matters. Dunstan likes football himself, but he doesn't like the feeling that he has no choice.

First, I must note that several readers inferred that, since I didn't point it out, I didn't know that American usurpation of leisure time. As Dunstan's associate says, "There must be a better life than this." After all, Dunstan lived here three years as a correspondent and is quite aware that the game isn't the same, but he noticed while here that Los Angeles is "middling berserk about football." A reader who wishes her name withheld, evidently because she is Australian and hopes to go back, writes that the game played in Melbourne is called "Aussie Rules football" and in Sydney is called "aerial Ping-Pong" and disdained as "semi-controlled chaos." She says It is virtually the only major spectator sport in Melbourne, which is why so much emotion and energy arespentonit To illustrate "the passion with which the crazed day. As she describes it, Melbourne football sounds closer to American football in violence; and the Rev. Vance Geier recalls that the British correspondent Alistair Cooke called our football "a mindless bout of mayhem between brutes got up in spacemen outfits," which is pretty good, except that the game isn't quite mindless, which Cooke conceded when he also called it "an open-air chess game disguised as warfare." Bert Reisfeld, a European correspondent based in Beverly Hills, asks to be enrolled as a charter member if anyone forms an American auxiliary of the AFL. "I played European football (soccer) as a boy in Vienna and cannot accept the fact that every foul in soccer seems to be a merit in American football.".