Category: Winter 2021

He could have been a mathematician. He could have been a linguist. Calvert Johnson ’71 was strong in these areas, enjoyed them, but he chose another path—music. 

In a family living in Denver, Colorado, alongside five siblings, young Cal grew up in a home where music was considered a necessity and an achievement. Johnson’s father even made violins as a hobby. Even so, Johnson says, he was discouraged from taking a career path in music. Perhaps he could be an accountant? A linguist? Wouldn’t that be more…practical? 

The teenager wasn’t afraid of following his own path. In high school, he excelled in math and he excelled in his classes in the Russian and Spanish languages. Eventually, he would become fluent in Spanish, French, German, and could get by in Italian—he even studied Arabic. 

“It all comes from the same areas of the brain,” Johnson says. “I picked up the viola when my school orchestra needed a violist in 7th grade, and I’ve played the piano since 6th grade, the organ since 7th grade, the oboe in 10th grade. And I’ve always loved the pipe organ from church.”

When an admissions advisor from Kalamazoo College came through town during Johnson’s senior year in high school, Johnson’s attention sparked. 

“The study abroad program got my attention,” he says. “I wanted a good liberal arts curriculum. And, I wanted to get far from home.”

Exploring the world beyond held great appeal for Johnson, and he was up for the adventure. He stepped onto the Kalamazoo College campus for the first time in September 1967, a newly enrolled freshman, ready to embrace all that the College offered. While at first, he planned to major in foreign languages, by his junior year, he was focused fully on music. 

“Once I could be persuaded that I could make a living with music, that I could teach at the college level and play the church organ, I was decided,” he says. “Taking those advanced calculus classes, I realized I wasn’t really interested in solving equations.”

Johnson had continued studying music throughout his years at K, focusing on keyboard instruments and participating in recitals and concerts, taking part in the Bach Festival. During his sophomore year, while still a math major, he was a mathematics teaching assistant in Honduras for his career service work, and the following year he studied abroad in Madrid, Spain. It was all he had hoped and more. 

“I was in Central America for three months, and it was eye-opening,” Johnson says. “I was there all alone, and it forced me to rely on my Spanish skills. I heard the many dialects of the language, listening to others. That kind of exposure to another culture was enlightening.”

While in Madrid, Johnson took time to travel across Europe. 

“My parents wrote a letter to the study abroad professors asking permission for me to travel alone,” Johnson says. “The trips were exhausting, figuring everything out in different languages and across different cultures, but it was all worth it.”

After earning his bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, at K, Johnson continued his studies in organ and harpsichord at Northwestern University in Chicago, earning his master’s and then doctoral degrees in music. After receiving his degrees, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study organ music at the Toulouse Conservatoire in France.

“And then I got my first job as a choir director and organist at a church in South Arkansas,” Johnson says. “That was the biggest culture shock of all of my travels. There were railroad tracks through town that literally divided Black and white. On one side lived the millionaires, many of whom were members of the church, and on the other side lived the Black community. I spent two years there and was desperate to get out.”

It was an awakening to a deeper understanding of the marginalized that would remain with Johnson ever after. His next position, as associate professor of music, took him to Northeastern State University, in the Cherokee capitol Tahlequah, Oklahoma. For the next nine years, he became more acquainted with Native American culture, even as he longed to join a larger liberal arts institution. 

That proved to be Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, where Johnson taught courses in sacred music, women in music, and music before 1750, as well as giving organ and harpsichord lessons. 

“I was back at a liberal arts college, and it was wonderful to be back,” Johnson says. 

When Johnson joined the faculty of Agnes Scott, the college was struggling to attract Black students, Johnson says. 

“The president wanted me to help build community,” he says. “We had weekly convocations, and I looked for relevant music. When we had a Black Awareness week, I looked for music by Black composers, but found little. Students asked me for music by a Black woman, but it was only two days before the convocation, too late to find and prepare music, so I made a promise to find something for the next year.”

Johnson kept his word. When Sharon J. Willis, a Black composer and singer, founder of the Americolor Opera Alliance, was invited to speak at Agnes Scott, Johnson made a vital connection. 

“She performed music by Florence Price, and I thought, there it is, right in my lap, what I was looking for,” Johnson says. “I cornered her afterwards to ask where I could get more of this music. It was dynamite! People needed to hear this.”

Determined to not only introduce the music of Black women to his students, Johnson took on the mission of bringing to light the music of marginalized composers to ever wider audiences. 

“After all, we might be overlooking the very best around,” he says. “Why wouldn’t we want to find them and hear them? We can continue to play Handel and Bach, but why not play these, too? I have found over the years that audiences respond with great enthusiasm.”

Johnson researched the works of many such marginalized composers, but he took a special interest in the work of Florence Price (1887-1953), the first Black woman to have her work performed by a major American orchestra when the Chicago Symphony performed her “Symphony in E Minor” in 1933 at a concert titled, The Negro in Music. After that performance, however, her work had once again slipped into oblivion. Music composed by women was often not taken seriously, and that of a Black woman—even less so. 

“I performed the music of Price at the next convocation, in 1988, playing her entire ‘Suite No. One,’” Johnson says. 

In 1992, Johnson was on the steering committee for the American Guild of Organists convention in Atlanta, and he was struck by the realization that the national convention had not performed a single composition by a Black composer or a Black organist in 12 years. 

“I think we can do something about that,” he told committee members. “When you think of Atlanta, you think of Martin Luther King and civil rights, and we also have a large Hispanic population that was underrepresented. I made it a theme for the convention, to represent the music of the Black and Hispanic communities and by women composers.”

“I cornered her afterwards to ask where I could get more of this music. It was dynamite! People needed to hear this.”

Johnson reached out to schools nationwide for recommendations. He invited musicians worldwide to submit recital proposals that included works by women, Blacks and Hispanics. 

“Was there pushback? Was there ever!” Johnson chuckles. “They were furious. You can’t request proposals from distinguished performers, I was told. No one will come to this convention, they warned me.”

But they came. They came in droves. Given a venue that seated 2,000, Johnson filled almost every seat and felt vindicated as waves of applause greeted performances. 

The positive reception only fueled Johnson’s interest in marginalized music more. He discovered the forgotten works of Asian women composers, tracked down their harpsichord and organ music and began to perform it. He gathered the music of Korean composers and added it to his repertoire, teaching students, publishing their manuscripts, but also performing at concerts and making recordings. 

“I traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, and found colonial-era music manuscripts that were stitched together by twine, the earliest Mexican organ music,” he says. “These were notebooks passed down through generations.”

Johnson’s interest in the work of Florence Price, however, remained a top focus as he collected manuscripts of her work, finding yet undiscovered compositions.

“I’ve just edited and published a fifth volume of a collection of Price’s work,” Johnson says. “And I am still sleuthing to be sure I have found them all.”

Johnson says he is fascinated by the story of Price, her commitment to her music from childhood on, even as her mother encouraged her to conceal her race, listing her on recital programs as Mexican to avoid the prejudices of her time. Price became a pianist, an organist, a composer, a music teacher, and earned critical acclaim in later years, even as performances of her work were few. She composed for orchestra, chamber music, choral music, solo pieces, symphonies and concertos. 

“Florence Price has finally been welcomed into the canon of classical music,” Johnson says. “Today most major orchestras are performing and recording her symphonies, concertos and other symphonic works. Pianists and singers have been performing her solo vocal repertoire—think Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price, among others. Also, in the organ world, major organ departments are having their students study her works, and professors are performing them around the world.”

Johnson retired from Agnes Scott College in 2012, at which time he was the chair of the music department and the Charles A. Dana Professor of Music and college organist. He had served as chair of the faculty executive council, faculty representative on the college’s Board committees on finance and investment, and co-chaired the mission statement task force with the president of the college. He also was responsible for a conference on “Women in the Chicago Renaissance” that featured not only Florence Price but also Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks and choreographer Katherine Dunham.

Johnson now lives in Big Canoe, a mountain community and Audubon sanctuary an hour north of Atlanta, Georgia, with his spouse, Ken. He is anything but retired! Here he founded the Knowledge Series that features speakers, discussion groups and international events. He was a co-founder of the Black Bear Project to raise awareness of living in harmony with wildlife in the north Georgia mountains, and stepped up to become chair of the Conservation Committee. Musically, he is completing 16 years as organist at First Presbyterian Church in Marietta, Georgia, and is executive director of a chamber music series in the county: Casual Classics Concert Series. He is also on the Board of Directors of the North Georgia Community Foundation.

Even in his retirement, Johnson has not forgotten his own roots. He recently established the Calvert Johnson ’71 Endowment for the Maintenance of Keyboard Musical Instruments at Kalamazoo College. The endowment supports the upkeep of pianos, pipe organs, harpsichords and fortepianos in buildings across campus.

Johnson says, “My passion for music and keyboard instruments will always remain a part of my life, and that all came together at Kalamazoo College.” 

“My passion for music and keyboard instruments will always remain a part of my life, and that all came together at Kalamazoo College.”

Sonya Olds Som ’94, hadn’t planned to go to Kalamazoo College, but she says she’s glad she did. The College gave her the broad liberal arts education that has helped her thrive as a lawyer and the resiliency she needed at a crossroads during the 2008 recession. Today, as a lawyer and an executive search consultant in Chicago, Olds Som helps her clients find their way forward—from individual executives looking for new jobs, to large corporations wanting to diversify their workforce. Some of them are at a crossroads, just as she was, as the coronavirus pandemic and heightened focus on racial inequity prompt professionals to reassess their goals, their jobs and their lifestyles.

She counsels them from her own experience of facing an unknown future. Fortunately, throughout her education and career, her ability to make the most of serendipity has served her well, starting with Kalamazoo College.

“You have to have confidence that you can find a new path that will take you to wonderful places that are unexpected,” Olds Som says.

HAPPENSTANCE

Near the end of high school in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, Olds Som was accepted at the University of Michigan and was preparing to enroll there. Happenstance brought a change of direction, a theme that would repeat itself in her life. A high school friend asked Olds Som to come along on a trip to Kalamazoo College, where she was going to meet with the admissions office. While Olds Som waited for her friend outside the office, an admissions counselor asked her where she was going to school, then invited her in for a chat. 

“Next thing I knew, instead of going to U of M, I went to K.”

It fit. Her passion for traveling abroad already had been sparked by a trip to England with her high school choir, and the college’s emphasis on study abroad was appealing. At K, she says, she felt like “a big fish in a small pond,” and she took advantage, cramming as much into her four years as she could. 

“I was Miss K College!” Olds Som says. 

“I was involved in everything possible.” That included singing in the Bach Festival Choir, acting in college plays and working behind the scenes in the theatre department. She played saxophone in the band, was active in the Black Student Organization, took classes in four languages—Latin, French, Italian and Spanish—and studied abroad in Spain. 

She had lots of energy to pour into her projects, including the female barbershop quartet she formed and a school newspaper column on diversity she co-authored with classmate and lifelong friend Psiyina (Hines) Davis ’93. They took up questions such as “Why do some Black people prefer to be called African Americans?” and “Why do all the Black students sit together in the dining hall?” It wasn’t provocative stuff, Olds Som says. The campus was pretty liberal, although there weren’t a lot of minority students and perhaps 20 Black students in all. 

“When I think of my undergrad, I think about a time of immersion and discovery and really being nurtured and exposed to so many different ideas and people,” she says. “There were just so many interesting things to be a part of.”

She darted between majors, including theatre and music, before finally settling on English. She was close to her English professors, including the late Ellen Caldwell, who opened Olds Som’s eyes to the depth and brilliance of Shakespeare, and Gail Griffin, still a friend today. 

In her senior year, Olds Som was no less driven. She put together a Senior Individualized Project in theatre/English/sociology that took her to Sierra Leone, where she studied West African storytelling by traveling to villages to collect and record traditional stories. Back in Kalamazoo, she weaved the stories into a cohesive script, gathered students from the Black Student Organization and directed a performance. Many of her classmates in the performance had studied abroad in Sierra Leone too, and they wore the African clothes they had gotten there. 

While she was in Sierra Leone, Olds Som was waiting to hear back from law schools she had applied to, complicated by the fact that getting mail from the United States wasn’t all that easy. Another instance of serendipity was about to occur. 

Her Latin teacher, Peter Corrigan, had suggested Cornell Law School. Olds Som had been Corrigan’s teaching assistant for Latin and Greek. He had attended Cornell as an undergrad and had a good experience. What’s more, he told her, he had heard through his alumni network that Cornell Law School had a program in Paris at the Sorbonne. Olds Som was sold. 

“I thought, ‘That’s the thing for me!’” she remembers. 

“These are the kind of decisions that you make when you don’t have it all figured out.”

RESILIENCY

Growing up in Pittsburgh and later Detroit, Olds Som was exposed to arts and culture in a variety of ways—her mother ensured it.

“My mother made sure that I not only saw movies and concerts, but I went to church and the symphony and the opera. I was just exposed to a lot of different things culturally, and I think that formed a lot of the foundation for my liberal arts mindset that attracted me to K.”

It being the ’80s, she also watched The Cosby Show. Clair Huxtable, the matriarch of the Huxtable family, played by Phylicia Rashad, gave her an example of what she could become.

“She seemed just to be so all-knowing, had all the answers, had everything together. And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s who I want to be.’”

Law seemed like a natural path, Olds Som says. She wrote well and was a confident public speaker, and she wanted a challenging career where she would be able to help people and also have a good life. Her first job out of law school came about much as her decision to go to Kalamazoo College did—by happenstance. 

She graduated from Cornell Law School without a job, but with the connection of a Cornell alumna, she landed a position in the immigration practice group in an Atlanta law firm. 

She hadn’t studied immigration law, but for the next 10 years, she traveled to China, Japan and South Korea, working with U.S. corporations to secure work visas for their foreign national employees. These were the years of the tech boom, and companies sought the highly educated software engineers and programmers who came from these countries. The work was intricate and detailed but rewarding, especially when clients were grateful and happy she had helped them achieve their goals.

Suddenly, the 2008 recession altered everything, just as Olds Som became a mom. She and her husband were living in Chicago by this time, and their son was born in January that year. In September she moved to a new job at a new law firm.

“It was spectacularly bad timing to change firms and try to bring over business and build a practice,” she says, laughing. “I was not able to do the business generation that I’d hoped I’d be able to do.” In a short time, she was laid off, along with lawyers who had worked at the firm for years, even decades.

After the shock wore off, she got some sound sleep. Then she reflected. It was a chance to think about her direction.

“It actually became sort of a moment to say, ‘Have you really been happy doing this? Are you managing it and juggling that well? You’ve been trying to be a new mother and trying to keep this career afloat. Is this really what you want to be doing?’”

Olds Som sought input from other professionals, including lawyers who had left law to pursue new interests. Again, a connection led to a new start. The recruiter who had placed her at her most recent firm, where she had been laid off, suggested Olds Som come talk to her about being an executive recruiter herself. Olds Som was interested and decided to give it a shot for six months. She’s now been an executive recruiter for 10 years. 

REEVALUATING

Today, because of the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic fallout, some of the executive clients Olds Som counsels also have lost their jobs. Some of them are viewing their change in circumstances as an opportunity to reevaluate the direction of their lives. Some live on the other side of the country from their families and are thinking of moving closer, now that it’s not as easy to fly as it once was. Others say they’re contemplating whether their companies’ values align with their own.

“There’s a generation of lawyers now who did not experience that 2008 downturn, and some who have been laid off recently,” she says. “I’ve been able to share the benefit of my experience and how something that felt like the worst thing ever ended up being an opportunity to reinvent myself and do something else.”

Olds Som’s reinvention brought her closer to an issue she cares about and put her in a position to make an impact. As an executive search consultant at Heidrick & Struggles, which she joined last year, she guides companies, universities, nonprofits and law firms in their efforts to increase diversity in their workplaces and executive ranks. 

To varying degrees, hiring managers have said for years they want to increase diversity in their companies, she says. But now, particularly with the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, the timing may be better than ever to make strides. 

“It’s put a real spotlight on the racial divisions and challenges in this country,” she says. “That has been at a societal level, but it’s also a spotlight on corporate America. Since this summer, there has been just a laser focus on, ‘No, we really have to do better as a company. We have to do better for our existing employees and we have to do better at bringing in diverse talent from the outside.’”

There is a business case to be made for increased diversity in companies, she says. Statistics show that diverse teams in the workplace make better decisions. They’re less likely to, for example, produce an ad that appears tone-deaf to women or minorities if women or minorities are on the team. 

“Smart companies realize they need to be in touch with their customer base,” Olds Som says. “They need their workforce and decision-makers to be in touch with and in tune with the society around them.”

Another approach she takes when counseling companies on diversity is to ask them what kind of company they want to be.

“You say you have certain goals, a mission statement, beliefs…How are you actually living those stated principles? Are you the organization that you say you are and that you want to be, and how is diversity and inclusion a part of that?”

Along those lines, some of her executive clients say the pandemic and national discussion about racial injustice have given them pause to consider whether their employers, or even they themselves, are living up to the values they set forth, including diversity. 

And for clients who have lost their jobs, particularly minorities, she counsels them on the skills they need that go beyond textbook learning. Most important among them is being able to connect with people who are different from you, she says. It might mean being able to talk about books and theatre or sharing a love of opera or travel. Olds Som connects with her clients over an affinity for the movies of Orson Welles, comic books and the musical “Hamilton.” 

“There are all of these ways to build relationships with people, so that you can build trust, so you can get clients, so that you can win the trust of your colleagues and partners in your firm.”

That skill of building connections is essential for minorities and women seeking to excel in their careers, she says. It’s imperative to making workplaces more diverse.

“For women and minorities, that’s particularly important, because you may not remind the person that you’re talking to of themselves or of a younger version of themselves. So they may say, ‘There’s distance between us.’ These are ways to bridge that gap…to be able to show that you can get to know me and I’m not an outsider.

“K was a really great preparation for not just law school but for being a lawyer,” she says. “The thing that people don’t really tell you is that once you have mastered your craft and you’re good at being a lawyer, all these other things about you end up being so important to your success and your career.”

For her, that well-roundedness stemmed from her liberal arts studies. “All of those lessons for me go back to K, and getting that renaissance type of education.”

The first memory Donald L. Hafner ’66 has of Kalamazoo College is of a pristine campus draped in freshly fallen snow.

The tall young man had traveled south from his home in Grand Rapids to visit the campus over his Christmas break. He was curious to see the college his high school librarian, Lodisca Payne Alway, a Kalamazoo College Class of ’31 alumna, had told him about. 

“She was the embodiment of a liberal arts education,” Hafner recalls. “She was a mentor to me in high school, recommending books, telling me about her wide range of interests.”

The librarian’s advice was sound. As soon as he stepped into the snow on the Quad, Hafner knew he would attend Kalamazoo College. 

“When I enrolled at K, the K-Plan was a new concept,” he says. “I wasn’t a very assertive type back then, and the College proved to be a prod for me, encouraging me to try new things, get involved in new experiences I might have never otherwise tried.”

Still in his freshman year, however, Hafner’s college experience nearly came to a screeching halt. 

“I had been estranged from my father for some time,” Hafner says. “In my freshman year, my mother had a mental breakdown. The marriage was coming apart. My father opposed my going to college and he told me I had to come home. He said he would no longer pay my tuition.”

Hafner went to Dean Paul Collins, fighting back tears. He wanted to stay. Surely, somehow, he could stay and continue his education?

The dean was sympathetic to Hafner’s plight and helped to put together a financial package that would keep the young man at K. It consisted of a scholarship, a loan and on-campus jobs. 

“I scrubbed toilets in the residence halls, and I pulled hot dishes from the dishwashers in the cafeteria,” Hafner says. “And I studied. I did what I needed to do to stay.”

Yet there were far more positive aspects of Kalamazoo College that were even more memorable. 

“Kalamazoo College developed me into the person I am today,” Hafner says. He embraced the new K-Plan in its every offering. 

“For study abroad, I chose the place I knew I would never get to, if it weren’t for Kalamazoo College,” he says. “All my K friends were going to Europe, but I chose Sierra Leone in West Africa. I went with a group of seven other K students, and we lived in the college residence halls there.” The food in the dining hall was monotonous—rice with a sauce or a stew every day of the week. His weight dropped from 140 pounds to 125 pounds. Living lean was an experience he would never forget.

For his internship, Hafner traveled to Washington, D.C. He passed up the obvious option of working in a Congressional office (“That usually ended up as feeding paper into copy machines”), and instead he opted to work in the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare office. 

“I worked in the cancer control division, tracking cervical cancer screening programs,” Hafner says. “I worked for women and with women mentors. Working for women, I found out, was different—they taught me valuable lessons in leadership that have helped me throughout life.”

In his senior year, Hafner worked on a Senior Individualized Project (SIP) about American foreign policy, once again in Washington, D.C., conducting his research in the Library of Congress. 

“I was given a desk in the bowels of the library,” Hafner recalls. “Any book I wanted, I just asked and within five minutes, it was delivered to my desk. I was surrounded by college professors writing their own books. It was a wonderful experience. Again, all because of Kalamazoo College arrangements.”

Hafner’s interest in international politics and foreign policy remained with him, and after graduating from K, he went on to the University of Chicago, earning his master’s degree in 1968 and his Ph.D. in political science, specializing in international politics, in 1972. 

A newly minted Ph.D., Hafner moved to Boston, returning to the classroom, but this time as a college professor at Boston College, teaching international politics, American foreign policy, international politics of Europe, national security policy and about the Vietnam War. 

Tucked within those years at Boston College, Hafner returned to Washington, D.C., to serve with the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Carter administration, from 1977 through 1978. That, too, he attributed to Kalamazoo College. 

“I learned to write well at K,” Hafner says. “When someone needed a report written on arms control, I quickly volunteered where others were reluctant, knowing that well-crafted writing could shape the policy debate. It was something I enjoyed. I was sent to Geneva for the U.S. SALT II nuclear arms negotiations, and there was great joy in that.”

Hafner also served as an analyst for the National Security Council SALT and Anti-Satellite Arms Control working groups. At the end of 1978, he returned to Boston College, where in 2007 he was promoted to vice provost for undergraduate academic affairs, until he retired in 2014, rounding out an academic career of 43 years. His legacy at Boston College included his work on developing the University Fellowships Program, aiding many hundreds of students to win national and international fellowships. Working with his faculty colleagues, he helped to establish the faith, peace and justice academic minor, the political science department honors program, the international studies major and the global public health program at Boston College. 

“I like to say that I have had 6,000 children, and I am proud of every one of them,” Hafner smiles. 

Hafner likes to think his experiences in the Kalamazoo College classroom prepared him to teach new generations of students. He cites a history professor who taught him African politics and another in religion who taught him critical thinking skills and developed his lifelong intellectual curiosity. 

“My history professor, John Peterson, asked me for another copy of a paper I had done for him, to keep in his own files. I remember how complimented I felt,” he says. “And John Mark Thompson in religion was also an important influence in my freshman year. He taught us to be open-minded as we confronted contradictions and puzzles in the synoptic gospels. He taught us to ask questions; he got me to think about things I’d never considered before—all of that was a wonderful experience that shaped me.”

That life-shaping experience, Hafner says, was one that he wanted no student at K to be denied. He would never forget his financial hardships that so nearly led him to leave Kalamazoo College in his freshman year. Looking back, that might have changed—everything. 

“And so, my wife Mieko—she, too, comes from an academic background—agreed that we should establish an endowment at Kalamazoo College to help other students who might be facing financial hardships. It will take a few years to fully fund it, but I understand the endowment has already helped a few students stay at K.”

The Donald Hafner and Mieko Kamii Scholarship was established in 2016. The scholarship aids students experiencing financial emergencies. Dr. Kamii, now also retired, was a professor and administrator at Wheelock College and Roger Williams University. 

Retirement has not meant shelving his interests or sense of responsibility to pay forward what Hafner feels he was given. Hafner, who earned the Kalamazoo College Distinguished Alumni Award in 1987, has served on the Kalamazoo College Board of Trustees since 2016. He is a member of the Lincoln Historical Society in Lincoln, Massachusetts, volunteering as a tour guide and interpreter and participating in historical reenactments and school programs.

“I dress in the historical garb of a minuteman of the American Revolution, and to play the part, I challenged myself to learn to play the fife, an 18th century instrument,” Hafner says. 

Playing the fife, Hafner says, is another challenge he might never have taken on but for that Kalamazoo College prod, that nudge to expand his horizons, to try the new and unusual and to learn something he might have otherwise never considered.