Comrades in This Quest

Call it a quest, an adventure, an odyssey. What’s more unique than the Reed experience? Perhaps the relationships it fosters.

Elizabeth Rush ’06 remembers feeling like she’d fallen down a well without a bottom.

There were job prospects to consider. The pressure to now be a real “adult.” But, most of all, upon graduation, Elizabeth worried about losing touch with the friends and the life she’d made on campus.

Fortunately, it all worked out. Elizabeth became an award-winning author, started a family, and only grew closer to the friends she’d made in college. “I’d like to say very explicitly the good news,” Elizabeth told graduates at Reed’s 112th Commencement ceremony, “even though you are leaving this physical place behind, you get to keep the rituals and the relationships that have made it what it is.”

To this you can always return, she promised. To this place, where students work hard and play just as hard—building bonds from day one in Humanities 110; learning origami, wildlife tracking, and how to wield a lightsaber at Paideia; fighting over a slab of concrete meant to be an owl; and pouring themselves into a yearlong research project that is eventually thrown into a pit of fire.

Reed is a unique place. It attracts a distinct population of people. And thus, it creates one-of-a-kind relationships—the sort that last long after theses are burned and caps are tossed into the sky (or, rather, into the ceiling of a white tent).

William Trufant Foster, Reed’s founding president, coined the term “comrades of the quest” in the early 1900s to refer to friends of the college—a phrase that later inspired the name of the student newspaper. Today, “comrades of the quest” has come to mean something more: the idea that all who inhabit the Reed sphere are on a journey with a driving purpose—though that purpose may differ from individual to individual—and their friends and support system at the college serve as comrades on whatever that quest may be. Advait Jukar ’11 may have said it best in his Commencement speech to the class of 2025: “Reedies look out for each other . . . We are all comrades in this quest.”

The relationships chronicled here are just a few examples of how true that can be.

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The Prospie and Her Guides

One day in the late 1990s, Katie Rempe ’05 logged onto Café Utne, a bulletin-board-style web forum run by the magazine Utne Reader.

Katie’s dad hadn’t gone to college, and her mother was an immigrant from Korea. Neither of them knew how to apply to American universities, so Katie, like some before her and many after her, sought the information she needed on the internet.

Café Utne had already become a Reed hangout by then—after all, one of Utne Reader’s publishers was current trustee John Sheehy ’82. Alumni from all over the world, from Japan and Amsterdam to California and Portland, used the web conference as a way to stay in touch after graduation.

When Katie asked them, “What’s the deal with Reed?” they were more than eager to answer her question, and any others she had.

Andy McLain ’92 put it like this: “We just kind of adopted her.”

The group of alumni, including folks like Patrick Pruyne ’83, Keith Allen ’83, and Esteban Gutierrez ’94, guided her through the application process and wrote her recommendations.

After Katie got into Reed, the web conference kept an eye on her—especially Andy.

“I was sort of recruited by her dad to be her local contact,” Andy explains. So, in a way, he became her “Reed dad.”

To commemorate her arrival, the alumni gave her a folder full of handwritten advice. Gems included “Find the professor you like and follow them”; “Let college teach you”; and the standard “Don’t get too caught up in partying and forget about your schoolwork.”

Katie’s guides didn’t only advise her on college matters, but on general life matters, too. Once, when she had to catch a flight really early in the morning and worried about how to get a cab, Steve Falk ’83 told her to get a town car instead. “Baby girl, hire a town car,” she remembers him saying. “It will cost the same, and they’ll lift your bags for you.”

The web conference helped her and worried about her, too. Keith, near the end of Katie’s time at Reed, became concerned about her thesis project, which Katie says was the correct feeling to have. With some pushing and encouragement, her thesis got turned in—albeit at the last minute—and upon graduation, the group who had mentored her over the years gave her a McMenamins gift certificate and a card full of well-wishes.

As time went on, the web conference died with the rise of social media. But Katie stayed in touch with her Reed mentors and has continued to lean on them throughout her life.

In the early 2010s, Katie hit a turning point in her career. She’d been working as a child welfare caseworker for a few years and had hit burnout, looking for something different. Andy, who’d just begun his own family law practice, didn’t hesitate to hire her.

Andy says he knew such an arrangement would work in large part because of foundational principles they’d both learned and honed at Reed. “The honor principle is a huge piece of that,” he says.

In those days at the law practice, Katie and Andy listened to a lot of Game of Thrones on tape and discussed United States politics (at the time, Trump was beginning to campaign for his first term as president).

Katie later went on to change career paths—now acting as a program manager for First Tech Federal Credit Union—but she and Andy still talk all the time. And Andy has continued to mentor other Reedies interested in law or facing turning points in their work. “I have all these relationships that have turned out to be very valuable, and, for example, with Katie, cross-generational,” he says.

Outlets like the web conference allowed for those kinds of intergenerational friendships, Andy says, and his hope is that the college can find other ways to foster such relationships.

“It’s actually even better, I think, than having a sorority or fraternity connection with somebody,” Andy says about Reed friendships, “because we, as in the student body, we sort of think of ourselves as having an experience that is not one other people can relate to.”

Katie loves hanging out with Reedies so much, it inspired her to become the alumni board president. “I really dig Reedies,” she says. “I think Reed helps create friendships because Reedies are generally open-minded and smart, and I really feel like most Reedies are hilarious. They are people with a lot of wit.”

Andy, too, has stayed friends with lots of fellow Reedies since graduating over four decades ago. For many years, he was involved with Meat Smoke, and he remains closely connected to the college. He says it’s those conversations that take place outside the classroom—when students get together in the student union and discuss philosophy, art, and science. Even when their knowledge base isn’t grounded in the same discipline, they find ways to bridge gaps, debate, and connect across a unique, shared experience. In that way, Andy says, “Reed really holds itself apart.”

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The Farmer and the Baker

Tommy Celt ’19 walked into Laurelhurst Park one spring day in 2016 to find Jade Novarino ’16 there with her brown and white Indian runner duck, Penny.

They only had a brief interaction, one of just a few in their time at Reed. But you don’t really forget a girl with a duck.

Years later, Jade had picked up farming and Tommy had started baking in his parents’ kitchen, selling treats online and home-delivering pastry boxes to customers. A mutual friend reintroduced them, thinking Jade could provide some local ingredients for Tommy’s bakes.

On Valentine’s Day 2022, Jade ordered a box of pastries for herself. At the time, she lived in Forest Grove, and she insisted Tommy not drive all the way out there from Portland to deliver the box. Instead, she went to him. But when she showed up, Tommy was nowhere to be found.

“The communication fell apart at some point, and I didn’t know what time she was coming, so I’d gone out, done all my deliveries, stayed up all night baking, and had Jade’s pastries in the house,” Tommy explains.

“I thought they were gonna be on the porch,” Jade says.

Lo and behold, “They weren’t on the porch,” Tommy says.

For Tommy, the love of baking began with Paul, Prue, and a big tent in the English countryside. He’d just returned from a Reed study-abroad trip to Argentina when he started watching The Great British Bake Off. “I was having really strong reactions,” he says, “and noticing, like, ‘whoa, this is a feeling.’”

By then he was working late nights at Sizzle Pie delivering pizzas and coming to terms with the fact that when he left Reed, he might not want to pursue a career related to his major, Spanish literature, or eke out a living playing music as he’d always dreamed. Instead, he wanted a job that was both creatively fulfilling and dependable. The bakers in the Bake-Off tent seemed to experience that joy he was looking for.

So Tommy learned baptism-by-fire style how to bake for real at Portland bakeries. When the pandemic hit, he began his own bread-delivery business from his parents’ house: the origin story of what would become Babcia Bread.

Meanwhile, Jade traveled postgrad, trying to figure out what she wanted to do next. She lived in Italy for a month working on her art; studied stone carving in Iowa for a while; and worked at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery for a bit, too. But it was during the pandemic that Jade found solace in a job at an 11-acre organic vegetable farm. “I learned so quickly, and just really felt so in my body, and like everything clicked with farming,” Jade says.

Despite their differences and an origin story that included a miscommunication, something clicked for Tommy and Jade that Valentine’s Day in 2022.

“Like a normal person, he fell asleep after like 24 hours of baking,” Jade says. So she didn’t blame him for leaving the pastries inside. And besides, she had a way he could make it up to her. “How about we just hang out?” she asked him.

So they did. They cooked dinner together, and their chemistry in the kitchen was undeniable.

“We were very different people, but very compatible in the kitchen,” Jade says. “We had good communication, a lot of creativity, and trust.”

Tommy liked how comfortable Jade was in his kitchen—how she grabbed a cutting board and got right to work. Jade liked that he was so easy to talk to as they cooked.

As their relationship developed, Jade wanted to see his bakery, Babcia Bread, still in its infancy then, succeed. Taking skills she’d honed at Reed, Jade put her calligraphy pen to paper and drew up fliers for his business. Ever since, they’ve been both life and bakery partners—baking together, farming together, and Jade creating the visual art for the business.

Now, this fall, what was once a bakery mostly made up of deliveries, sales in Tommy’s parents’ driveway, pop-ups, and farmers’ markets, will find a permanent, brick-and-mortar home in downtown Milwaukie. Babcia Bread—“babcia” is the Polish word for grandmother, and how Tommy referred to his own grandma—will be more than a bakery, though. Tommy and Jade want it to be a community space for not just eating, but learning and gathering, too.

As a new business in downtown Milwaukie, Tommy and Jade will be part of an effort to revitalize a neighborhood that has suffered in recent years and is only now coming back to life. And they want Babcia to be an embodiment of the things they love most: food, friends, and giving back to the land. The bakery has always focused on seasonal and local ingredients—even their wheat is milled nearby—and they want to continue that when the permanent space opens.

“Within limitation there’s actually so much creativity,” Jade says. “...It’s just better, but it also makes you more creative.”

That creativity is something that Reed helped hone and has connected them, even though they only really got to know each other after graduation.

It makes sense they didn’t cross paths often until after college. Jade, originally hailing from California, spent the bulk of her time at Reed immersed in campus life—studying art, practicing calligraphy, and running a KRRC radio show with the Cooley’s education outreach coordinator and Calligraphy Initiative coordinator Greg MacNaughton ’89. Tommy, meanwhile, a Portland native, hung out a lot off campus, heavily involved in the DIY music scene, which is another influence for his approach with Babcia.

“That was kind of the guiding light for most of this time,” Tommy says. “It was informed by my playing music as a kid. There were so many DIY and all-ages spaces that went out of business and don’t exist anymore. I want to give back something like that.”

The pair say they spent so much time in the world of the mind while in school that they wanted to pursue careers that allowed them to use their hands—but they still lean on the theory, science, and history of practices like farming and baking in the ways a Reedie would. And still, they remain connected to campus, delivering produce they grow at the co-op they’re part of, Campo Collective, to Reed’s very own Commons.

When Babcia’s brick and mortar opens, Greg recommends the house bread—a rye and wheat mixture with nigella seeds—toasted and buttered with a thin layer of miso, or fried with some cheese and kimchi. Tommy and Jade, meanwhile, both have the same favorite: the chocolate almond croissant. Some of their ingredients come from the half-acre farm they run in Milwaukie. If you ever pass through, you’ll know it by the brood of Indian runner ducks waddling by.

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Queditor Enemies Turned Cohosts

When David Hyde ’88 moved out to Seattle from New York City, he emailed an old college acquaintance, Sandeep Kaushik ’89: Hey, I’m moving to Seattle. Wanna grab a drink?

Sandeep replied: Sure. But weren’t we enemies at Reed?

Ask David, and he’ll tell you he doesn’t quite remember it that way. Ask Sandeep, and he’ll tell you the whole story: How while running a campaign to spearhead the Quest for a third semester with friends, David and his buddies swooped in and stole the positions out from under them with a margin of seven votes. The event partially inspired Sandeep to leave Reed for a while to co-launch a Portland newspaper called The Free Agent, out of the basement of the infamous Frigidaire house on Southeast 39th and Woodstock.

David and Sandeep met up for drinks anyway at the Tin Hat—a dive bar in East Ballard that David still says has one of the best jukeboxes around—in 2004. Ever since, they’ve been best friends. And since half a decade ago, they’ve worked together as cohosts of two successful politics podcasts.

“It really is unusual,” David says of their friendship. “Alums of other colleges don’t often have the same connections. That’s something pretty special about what a Reed education does for people. “

It wasn’t just about conversations happening inside the classroom, David and Sandeep agree, but about the ones happening outside—after class, on the Great Lawn, in Commons. Despite their unorthodox origin story, they picked up where they left off with those kinds of discussions when they met for drinks. “We’ve been having the same kinds of lively conversations ever since,” David says.

And now, those conversations are recorded and distributed for thousands across the country to hear.

David and Sandeep originally started Seattle Nice, a podcast centered on Seattle municipal politics, in 2021. At the time, David still worked as a reporter for KUOW, Seattle’s NPR affiliate, covering people-focused politics. Sandeep had transitioned from journalism to political consulting, a job he still holds as a founder of the company Sound View Strategies. For both of them, creating Seattle Nice has been a way to scratch that reporting itch as they explore Seattle public transit, budget, housing insecurity, and its new mayor’s performance. (Mayor Katie Wilson herself called Seattle Nice “special”—the show was the only place to which she gave a local interview immediately after being elected last November.)

Before the 2024 election, David and Sandeep took it a step further with a new passion project: a podcast called Blue City Blues, about what they call the “urban archipelago.”

The idea is to think of local news as more of a national story. “To describe the ways in which all blue cities actually have everything in common,” David explains. “All the same political problems, the same political tensions. What if we treat it as a whole that blue city cosmopolitan people were all grappling with?”

Multiple Reedies have been featured on the Blue City Blues podcast, including New York University journalism professor Adam Penenberg ’86, New York Times economics journalist Peter Goodman ’89, and investigative freelance journalist Laura Jedeed ’19. The pair plan to feature more Reedies in the future.

Blue City Blues doesn’t just discuss urban America’s problems, but how to solve them, too. They ask key questions like “Do public-sector unions wield too much power in blue cities?” “Is abundance the answer to what ails blue cities?” and an always-important inquiry, “What would make blue cities cooler?”

David and Sandeep both cultivated a love of political science while at Reed as history majors. David was an involved political activist on campus and valued the opportunity to work closely with faculty, including Professor Richard Fox [history 1981–88] and Professor Casey Blake [history 1984–87]. “The fact that we had access to people like that is just remarkable,” David says. “I didn’t meet anybody in graduate school who had similar kinds of undergraduate experiences with their professors.” Another plus of David’s Reed experience was that he met his wife, Anitra Ingalls ’92,  who is now an oceanographer at the University of Washington, at Renn Fayre.

Sandeep, meanwhile, transferred to Reed in the middle of his freshman year. After his stint with The Free Agent, he returned to school and wrote his thesis on ecclesiastical politics in early 17th-century Britain under the mentorship of Professor David Sacks [history and humanities 1986–2015]. “It was very much an old Reed kind of experience,” Sandeep says. “It was countercultural, but it was also grounded in canonical knowledge.”

Aside from their podcast pursuits, David and Sandeep say they do the classic “middle-aged man stuff” together—dinner with their spouses, who are also good friends; golfing; and going to sports bars.

But their friendship still largely revolves around those cerebral conversations. “My closest friends are all Reedies, and they’re people like David—we had a shared experience and a shared kind of attitude towards life,” Sandeep says. “We came out of a particularly odd school that had a distinctive culture. I mean, I became the person I am at Reed College.”

Tags: Alumni, Campus Life, Reed History