THEN
WHEN: June 1974
WHERE: Cornell Grove on the UCLA campus
That’s Rick Becker ’76, Edmon Rodman ’75, Marty November ’76 and me — the core staff of the 1974 UCLA yearbook. Marty had put his camera on a tripod, setting a timer. He sat on the grass, and so did I. The others stood. The sun was shining, and the eucalyptus trees towered over us.
We had a lot to smile about. Not until January had the Communications Board committed to publishing a 1974 yearbook. In less than six months, we had put together a quirky new edition. Edmon was the driving force, parodying everything from Playboy to the Bible to the Sears catalog. I was the graphics editor, waxing type and pasting up page layouts. Marty and Rick circled the campus with their cameras, taking group portraits, candid photos, and action shots of varsity and intramural sports.
Our tools were primitive: T-squares, X-ACTO knives, metal straight edges, proportion wheels. Marty and Rick spent long hours in the darkroom developing the film, making contact sheets, and printing photos to size. Sometimes I set the type. Edmon and I both did the proofreading.
I hadn’t known any of the others before January. But time together and shared purpose bonded us in that unique way only college can.
NOW
WHEN: June 2025
WHERE: Cornell Grove on the UCLA campus
The eucalyptus trees are now much increased in girth. Alas, my girth has also increased. All the guys have beards now. Marty seems to find sitting on the grass as easy as he did half a century ago, while I am trying so hard to sit up straight that I forget to move my hands together. Edmon tilts his head in the wrong direction. Rick still wears light-adaptive lenses and still looks cool in them.
After months of planning, this photo shoot takes only minutes. Edmon lives locally; Marty and Rick moved up the coast to Washington state. My new home is Massachusetts.
But after working at UCLA close to 40 years, it’s me who knows the campus best. We have reservations at Plateia, in the UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center. Our lunch is leisurely. We talk about the yearbook, the Daily Bruin, our lives since. We have married, become parents, pursued careers, retired, embraced volunteer causes. Our choice to work together on the yearbook, and then on the Daily Bruin, has shaped us all.
When lunch is over, we aren’t quite ready to say goodbye. We linger in the hallways of the Luskin Conference Center, reveling in the art. One piece is a glowing green column by the artist Vasa (Mihich), who in our day was a professor of design. Richard Ehrlich’s collage portrait of Powell Hall uses roughly 3,000 images from art history slide carousels, the standard technology of that era.
In our student days, this site was Parking Lot 6 — not a structure, just a flat lot of asphalt or maybe gravel. Now this spot is a place of calm and beauty, housing more than 50 artworks by UCLA alumni and faculty, much of it museum quality.
Then is cause for nostalgia. But Now has its moments, too.
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Fall 2025 issue.
