Claremont Forum Inspires Wit and Warmth
John Maguire has certainly done it out in Claremont.
Six years ago, when the ebullient Maguire took over as president of the Claremont University Center and Graduate School, he turned down a fancy inaugural ceremony and instead set up a “President’s Forum.” Just Maguire’s style, to take a run-of-the-mill, one-time-only event and make it an annual hot item.
The yearly “intellectual house party,” as past forum participant poet laureate Robert Penn Warren labeled it, Friday night segued into a landmark dinner party, touched with wit and warmth.
Big-name guests, participants from the forum, were scattered among the six patio tables--former Solicitor General Archibald Cox, former U.S. Atty. Gen. Edward H. Levi, legal scholar Ronald Dworkin, Children’s Defense Fund founder-president Marian Wright Edelman and California Supreme Court Chief Justice Malcolm Lucas dined on salmon and capped the meal with touching toasts.
The day was a “unique occasion, where we could publicly engage in intellectual endeavor . . . a serious, passionate, and at times intellectual pursuit--hard to come by in the United States,” said Levi, talking about the discussion on “Liberty, Equality and the Constitution.”
Listening were members of the Board of Fellows of the University Center and Graduate School, a group that, since Maguire’s tenure began, has become representative of diverse and frequently up-and-coming power in Southern California.
They included the board chairman, attorney Ron Olson and his wife, Jane (she heads the Pasadena-based Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race), businesswoman Jane Arnault, Southern California Edison’s John and Louise Bryson, Orange County developer and political rainmaker David Stein, Elwell Averbeck’s Don and Betty DesCombes, former Brown Cabinet member Lynn Schenk and Cal Fed’s Henry Duque.
Board alumnus Jim Greene, longtime Claremont supporter Ben Winters, faculty and board member Peggy Smith and Ken and Betty Rhodes were there, along with incoming board members, broadcasting executive Luis Nogales, and attorney-philanthropist Haynes Lindley.
The party at the Maguire home in Claremont was so good that even the toasts came naturally. Olson praised the day, the participants, even the desserts, from lunch and tea and dinner--”I like only two kinds of desserts, the ones with chocolate and the ones without.”
San Franciscan Tory Atkins pointed out that he and Justice Lucas were both graduates of Woodrow Wilson High, and that the high court was “the balance of this checks-and-balance system.”
Perhaps the most poignant toast came from Maguire’s wife, Billie, saluting Marion Wright Edelman, the longtime advocate for children’s rights, for her “power from within rather than her power over.”
Winters then turned the praise on the hosts--”people who catalyze . . . if any of us were given the opportunity to design the specifics for what would be the perfect friends, it would be Billie and John Maguire.”
And there was even time for some kidding. Like Dworkin, the well-known legal scholar, being singled out as “one of Gary Hart’s professors at law school,” followed by a second quip from another table that “you can’t win ‘em all.”
CHANGE OF PACE AND PLACE--Operation California had announced that it would present Philippine President Corazon Aquino with its Human Achievement Award on May 29 at a fancy Bev Hills dinner. Because of elections, the invite explained, Aquino was unable to travel here. After the invitations went out, there were reports that an Aquino subordinate had turned down the award--but Op-Cal’s president Richard Walden insisted Aquino would indeed take the honor, not here, but in Manila just days after the dinner. Now the plan has been changed. Instead of the May 29 Hilton event, those already confirmed have been invited to Op-Cal’s eighth anniversary celebration at the home of actress Julie Andrews and film maker Blake Edwards on June 27. No award to Aquino at this point.
DINING OUT--There, indeed, in the glass-windowed Bocca’s on Melrose Avenue, was former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. Conversation between Jerry and those at his table was obviously not as interesting to Brown as the portable phone that belonged to attorney Alan Sigel. Passers-by could catch a good look at the now-bearded former chief exec trying to place a telephone call. . . .