Julia “Julie” Besteeter Swartzendruber, who worked at Cal Poly Pomona for 30 years, died Jan. 5 after a battle with brain cancer. She was 68. During her career, the Alabama native served as the assistant to the University Library dean…
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Phillip Browne, a beloved music professor who taught at Cal Poly Pomona for more than three decades, has died. Browne, a former music department chair, started teaching at the university in 1963 and retired in 1994. He continued to teach…
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Marcelino Vera, a former equipment technician for the athletics department who worked with legendary Cal Poly Pomona coaches Roman Gabriel and John Scolinos, has died. He was 98. Vera came to work at the university in the 1970s, assisting the…
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Professor Emerita Margarita McCoy, a former chair of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, has died. She was 92. McCoy was a professor in the department from 1975 to 1989, serving as its chair from 1977 to 1983. The…
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Gregarious, outgoing and possessing an easy laugh, James Bell didn’t have trouble relating to students when he arrived at Cal Poly Pomona in 1968. “He was very kind, very sweet, thoughtful, meticulous in detail, really fair-minded,” recalled daughter Elena Bell…
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Professor Emeritus Fred Meeker loved Cal Poly Pomona so much that after nearly three decades of teaching in the Department of Psychology and Sociology, he kept serving students one-day a week as a docent at the University Library. Known for…
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Takeo Uesugi, a professor emeritus of landscape architecture and designer of Cal Poly Pomona’s Aratani Japanese Garden, died from cancer Jan. 26. He was 75. The world-renowned architect immigrated to the United States in 1962 from his native Japan. A…
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Robert V. Stumpf’s interest in computers started while he was stationed in White Sands, New Mexico, to track missiles for the U.S. Army in the early 1960s. That passion for computers in the nascent industry would lead to graduate school…
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For Debra Brum, Cal Poly Pomona was more than a place where she earned two master’s degrees and served as a professor and administrator. It was also a place where she became a mentor to colleagues, made lifelong friends and…
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Gloria Ricci Lothrop, a pioneering California historian who was the first female professor hired to teach in Cal Poly Pomona’s history department, died Feb. 2 in Arcadia after battling chronic pulmonary disease and pneumonia. She was 80. Lothrop joined the…
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