Farewells
Pomona Exemplar
While his scholarship—on the nature of evil, on Kierkegaard or on the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church—was top-notch, Frederick Sontag will be remembered most for his enduring influence on Pomona College students. The longtime philosophy professor served as an adviser for a fraternity and several sports teams. He ate lunch with students, relaxed with them in the evenings and helped them when they got in trouble.
He was performing such a mission on October 30, 2000, when a mentally ill student he had just bailed out of jail stabbed him twice in the neck. (Sontag drove himself to the hospital, but first stopped to telephone a warning that his attacker needed to be found before the delusional man hurt anyone else.) "It's a wonder that he lived," his wife, Carol Sontag, says. "Every single inch of his clothing was soaked in blood from his tie to his shoes." But Sontag's concern for the student did not wane. He helped hire the youth's defense attorney and testified on the young man's behalf so that an attempted-murder trial ended in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
A Pomona professor for 57 years, Sontag died June 14 in Claremont, Calif. He was 84.
Sontag, '49, was born in Long Beach, Calif. His parents died when he was young. He put himself through Stanford working as a hasher. He went on to get a master's and PhD at Yale and to become an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.
He was the author of 28 books, including Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, an examination of the controversial Korean religious movement. The book was informed by a rare, nine-hour interview with the movement's founder.
When he was honored in May with the Pomona trustees' medal of honor, Stewart Smith, chair of the board, said: "For Fred, every student, however mischievous, is (as he would say) 'really a good kid,' deserving of his generous support and guidance." One young alum summed it up: "Fred made us believe in ourselves, thereby giving us the greatest gift we could have ever hoped for."
Sontag is survived by his wife; a son, Grant, '77, MA '78; a daughter, Anne Karch; and three grandchildren.
Eva Spitz-Blum's varied career found her trekking through the Amazon rainforest, rubbing shoulders with anthropologist Margaret Mead, working beside Ken Kesey, Gr. '59, before he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and studying the control of opium poppies in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion.
But Spitz-Blum always returned home to the windswept ridges in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where she raised Southdown sheep and Scottish Highland cattle. "My mother got to be an excellent vet," said her daughter, Lisa Duhl.
Spitz-Blum, PhD '54, who was affiliated with Stanford for six decades, died on May 2 at Stanford Hospital. She was 90.
Eva Spitz was born in Budapest in 1919. Her father, René, was an early psychoanalyst and follower of Sigmund Freud. (A Spitz biography titled Through a Daughter's Eyes remains unfinished.) Her family bounced around Europe, first fleeing a revolution in Hungary and later living in Vienna, Berlin and Paris. In 1938, her family moved to New York where she graduated from Barnard College. In 1949, having married, had two children, and divorced, Spitz-Blum moved to California and earned her doctorate in clinical psychology and studied anthropology.
From the mid-1950s, she and second husband, Richard Blum, PhD '51, did research on drugs, alcohol and mental health. The couple separated in 1984 and divorced several years later.
As late as 1995, this Explorers Club member took a trek in the Ecuadorian Amazon to study female shamans. "She was raised basically the same way her father was—in a Victorian household with nannies," Duhl says. "To go from that formality to the United States in the 21st century—she kept pace. It was amazing to watch."
Spitz-Blum is survived by Duhl; a son, John Shippee, MA '67; a grandchild; and two great-grandchildren.
Among his earliest memories: his father's account of the day he heard Abraham Lincoln had been shot; among his most recent, the election of the nation's first black president.
The life of news photographer Hart Preston was epic with tales of the famous and infamous, the powerful and the powerless, the immediate and the far-flung. Preston died on July 20 in Santa Monica. He was 99.
An English major at Stanford, Preston, '32, cultivated a love of theater, wrote for the Chaparral and participated in that publication's social organization, the Hammer and Coffin. His Chappie escapades included a roaring night out with W. Somerset Maugham at Izzy's bar in San Francisco.
In 1938 he hit the open road with friend Charles Steinheimer, '36. The two documented a six-month journey through Mexico for Life magazine. Both were hired as staff photographers not long after the 17-page article appeared. Later, at Time, Preston photographed and wrote stories, and spent evenings with his journalism colleagues entertaining the likes of George Balanchine, John Steinbeck, Frank Sinatra and Walt Disney.
During World War II, Preston crisscrossed Africa and the Middle East on assignment. He accompanied goodwill ambassador and former presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, photographing meetings with Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran and French Gen. Charles de Gaulle. (The last was "one cold hombre," Preston observed in an unpublished memoir.)
After the war, Preston worked at Time under editor Whittaker Chambers around the time Chambers was accused of being a Soviet spy. In 1948 Preston became a speechwriter for Paul Hoffman, director of Paris operations for the Marshall Plan. While he never stopped taking pictures, he pursued many other careers, including writing books and plays, brokering produce, managing an art gallery and developing real estate in Costa Rica.
Preston is survived by his daughter, Heidi Landers; and a granddaughter.
