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Picture this! I will take your published photo of the laundry truck in Alabama to my Santa Ana high school classrooms. We study the Civil Rights movement and pictures are worth a thousand of my words. Field notes and addendum You may also be interested in this image (pictured right), from Killing Custer, by James Welch and Paul Stekler (Norton, 1994). Stenciled on the tent behind the fabled Plains warriors is “NPRR.” It’s almost like the race car driver whose sponsors appear on suit and car. Jay Gould and the Northern Pacific are the sponsors of this large and illegal junket into the Black Hills. Custer’s party confirmed the rumors about gold and was the last prop for Eastern financiers’ dreams of turning dreary prairies into another railway to profits. Tom Sloss ’64 I thoroughly enjoyed William Smock’s article on photography, and was especially thrilled to find a page devoted to the work of my friend and colleague, the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A few points: The text says that Cha’s work “seems to stress photography’s inadequacy as a record of the past and of absent people.” Quite the contrary, Theresa’s work deals with the power of language (of any kind) to maintain connections that often seem impossible. The text also states that “she seems painfully averse to speaking in her own voice.” Again I must say that Theresa’s work demonstrates the exact opposite. In all of her art, Cha has crafted her own voice, a voice that respects the heterogeneous, complex, and often contradictory threads that make up the self. And finally, sadly, I must correct the reference to Theresa’s “accidental death.” Theresa Cha was raped and murdered by a security guard in the Puck Building in New York City, where she had gone to meet her husband Richard, who had been photographing the architecture there. Through a hideous irony, the brutality of Theresa’s death and her premature silencing has furthered the reach of her work among the generations after her. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis ’68, Ph.D. ’82 Twisted Titles A wistful goodbye to "Twisted Titles" (but not for long—see page 8). Sunrise Punset Jerome Fishkin ’65 California on the cusp In your Editor’s Note, you say that California’s profound changes “promise to ripple through the nation and the world.” But whither will the winds blow? In the early 1950s, I witnessed during my years at Cal the blossoming of a new subjectivism and the birth of the beatnik generation. Today, I see evidence that even the best of the universities have become high-level trade schools. With the overpowering presence of technology, degradation of the human spirit has taken hold. As the new editor of California Monthly what do you see as being the “deepest traditions of public service”? Are these traditions merely a matter of a “respect we hold for our readers’ intelligence,” or does that tradition hold to the value of each and every human life, and the spirit that lives within, extending even to those who are not a part of the University’s elite universe of which you and I are a part? Harry Otsuji ’51  Return to Top
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