So when I decided that my eyes, fortified by glasses, were not yet gone, and that I must go to school again, grandfather suggested that I try the new one at Pomona. “Of course it is pioneering, but seems genuine and worth trying,” he said. Consequently, on a hot August day, Aunt Martha and I went forth to investigate, and, perhaps beginning a long line of the mistaken, sought Pomona College in Pomona.
After some delay we found a man with an express wagon who took us to Claremont, an hour’s drive under a scorching noonday sun. We soon left the little settlement, passed the apricot and peach orchards that have since been replaced by oranges, and struck off in a diagonal through virgin land to the large building, gabled and turreted, standing alone in the distance. As we came nearer we discovered that there was more town than we had realized. The same Santa Fe station that is now in use was in its place—would that we had arrived there instead of at the Southern Pacific in Pomona!
On the sandy road, now Yale Avenue, there was one store, which contained the post office,—a primitive department store kept by Mr. Urbanus, whose name was the only suggestion of a city in the region. A little farther up the road was a spare, white, box of a house, which has since grown porches and a garden, where we found the principal of the school, Mr. Norton, with his wife and baby girl, Katharine. To the east was Mr. Biely’s barn; to the west Colonel W. H. Holabird’s two-storied house; and two or three other small empty houses peeked over the top of the brush.
