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91¶¶Òő News Alumnae Newsmakers Scripps Magazine: The Guarantee of the Unexpected

November 7, 2024

Scripps Magazine: The Guarantee of the Unexpected

By Ella  Murdock Gardner ’22 | Illustrations by Vivian Monteiro ’23
Originally published in the spring 2024 issue of Scripps magazine

When Ellen Richstone ’73 arrived on Scripps’ campus in September of 1969, the world was teeming with possibility, and she was eager to make her mark on it. NASA had put a man on the moon earlier that summer; the Vietnam war was underway, accompanied by protests and demonstrations; and up and down the California coast, “everyone was learning to be free,” as Richstone puts it. If you’d told her then that she would go on to join the leadership and governance teams for a string of Fortune 500 companies, “I wouldn’t have even known what that meant,” she says. “What was clear to me, as I began my years at Scripps, was that whatever field I went into, my goal was to contribute in a significant way.”

Richstone majored in economics and international relations with “visions of negotiating contracts for the United Nations” and cut her teeth in campus politics. In those days, she remembers, wearing skirts to class was compulsory at Scripps, and boys were not permitted beyond the lobbies of the residence halls. As student body vice president, then president in her senior year, her most popular initiatives included relaxing these rules. By the time Richstone’s graduation arrived, students could wear jeans around campus, and general optimism abounded. “We’d heard about glass ceilings in the working world, but I believe many of us simply didn’t accept them,” she says.

After Scripps, Richstone traded sunny Claremont for Boston, where she pursued two master’s degrees at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her first semester, she enrolled in a class in international business law that made “all the pieces fall into place,” she says. Electrified by the possibility of guiding business decisions on a global scale, she launched into a career doing just that, becoming the treasurer of a Fortune 500 company at 33 and the chief financial officer of another at 39. She’s since gone on to sit on the boards of many companies, both public and private, and has won national recognition for her contributions to her field.

Although Richstone “bashed through the glass ceiling earlier than you might have expected, given the time,” she grew accustomed to dealing with workplace misogyny that ranged from the subtle—board directors giving her the side-eye in meetings, for example, “wondering why I was taking the seat from a guy”—to the flagrant. One boss even told her that, rather than accepting a large promotion, she should leave the workforce to concentrate on having children. Indefatigable, she wound up with both—the kids and the high-powered career. Now she lives in Massachusetts, where she recently received a CFO lifetime achievement award from the Boston Business Journal. “In general, it’s a whole lot better for women now than when I started out,” Richstone says. “Still, there are barriers. But the key is to figure out how to work through them.”

Ever since Scripps was founded nearly a century ago in 1926, each crop of graduates has left the tree-lined campus at a unique historical moment and met a host of contemporary challenges and opportunities. Whether busting up the boys’ club like Richstone, finding an unconventional path into an emerging field like Leslie Gallagher ’85, or pursuing passions in an era of extreme economic uncertainty like Maggie Tokuda-Hall ’07, Scripps alums have leveraged their creativity and tenacity to find footing on shifting ground.

. . . .

Growing up on a sprawling ranch in the San Joaquin Valley surrounded by animals of all kinds, Leslie Gallagher ’85 always dreamed of becoming a veterinarian. However, there was one seemingly insurmountable problem. “I failed every math and science class I ever took,” she says. “I knew I couldn’t get into vet school if I could barely add or subtract.”

Gallager knew she’d have to pivot. She arrived at Scripps during the Reagan years and joined the Young Republicans club, guided by the lodestar of her parents’ politics. “These days, I’m a card-carrying feminist, an animal rights activist, a Democrat who wants to run Planned Parenthood,” she says. “But back then, in some ways, I think I was pretty insulated from the world.” In college, she set about expanding her horizons by majoring in international relations and studying abroad first in Oxford, then Seville, where she discovered a passion for the Spanish language. Upon graduating, she answered an advertisement in the newspaper for a position at the Peruvian consulate and worked there until another listing caught her eye: ‘Dynamic executive seeks bilingual secretary, must be willing to travel.’

The executive in question was Emilio Azcarraga Milmo, the head of Televisa—the largest media empire in the Spanish-speaking world. Gallagher showed up for her first day of work wearing a too-big suit she’d bought for the occasion and quickly found herself managing hundreds of employees across the company’s Los Angeles, New York, and Miami offices. She was 23. “On any given day, I’d have the King of Spain on line one, the President of Mexico on line two, and Rupert Murdoch coming in for a meeting at three,” she says. “It was like coming to work for God.”

Gallagher spent the next 10 years immersed in Azcarraga’s heady, glamorous world, with its rarefied trappings: a fleet of sleek luxury cars (“everything bulletproofed, of course”), a handful of private jets and megayachts, the largest private collection of contemporary art of the time, and five black German Shepherds that padded silently around the mogul’s silk-carpeted Los Angeles home. When Azcarraga died in 1997, Gallagher inherited one of those dogs and named her Sophie.

Feeling unmoored by the loss of a man she’d considered a second father, Gallagher was trying to figure out her next steps when she arrived at the groomer to pick up Sophie and found the dog paralyzed; no one would tell her what happened, but she surmised that the dog had slipped in the bath and ruptured a disc. Gallagher consulted a veterinary neurologist, an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, and a homeopath, all of whom advised her to euthanize. Unwilling to give up, she started trying to rehabilitate Sophie in a friend’s pool. Within weeks, she was walking again. “I thought, ‘maybe I could actually do this for a living, maybe this is my backward path into the veterinary field,’” Gallagher says.

It’s so clichĂ©, but my advice for today’s Scripps students is to not give up on your dreams

Gallagher traveled around the country taking classes in human massage, animal massage, and animal rehabilitation—an emerging field at the time. She studied to become certified as a veterinary technician (“that was hell for me, of course, because of all the math and science involved,” she says) and volunteered for an animal surgeon in Los Angeles, who began to refer his clients to her. Among the first to call her for help was American rock legend Bruce Springsteen. She panicked the whole way over to his Beverly Hills compound, wondering whether she was completely out of her depth. But she quickly got ‘the Boss’s’ paralyzed German Shepherd back on his feet.

Two decades on, Gallagher’s company, Two Hands Four Paws, is the gold standard for animal physical therapy on the West Coast, boasting facilities that can treat up to 70 animals a day. Gallagher, who credits much of her success to the business acumen she gained while working for Azcarraga, is considered a leader in the field. “It’s so clichĂ©, but my advice for today’s Scripps students is to not give up on your dreams,” Gallagher says. “I took a completely circuitous route to working with animals, but I have truly found my calling in life.” Pausing to pull out an inhaler, she smiles and adds, “The great irony is, I’m allergic to dogs.”

. . . .

When Professor of Writing Kimberly Drake took Maggie Tokuda-Hall ’07 aside after class one day in 2006 and handed her the application for the New York State Summer School of the Arts, she’d already filled out the first line with Tokuda-Hall’s name—a small vote of confidence that nevertheless made a huge difference. Tokuda-Hall applied and spent that summer attending workshops and lectures from literary giants like Robert Pinsky and Joyce Carol Oates. “It was such a deep and abiding pleasure for me to think about writing all day long,” Tokuda-Hall says. “I realized this is what I genuinely love and want to pursue.”

At Scripps, when Tokuda-Hall wasn’t writing short stories, listening to indie pop, and watching the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with “a slightly embarrassing regularity,” she was reckoning with the forces spinning the planet into a state of constant tumult. War was raging in Iraq; Hurricane Katrina devastated the southeastern United States; and sustainability was a hot topic on campus as people began to understand the existential threat posed by the climate crisis. By the time Tokuda-Hall graduated in 2007, she had a keen sense of the world’s cruel volatility. Still, the 2008 recession came as a shock. “I didn’t know if I was equipped to weather that storm,” she says.

Tokuda-Hall was pursuing an MFA in San Francisco at the time. While prowling Chestnut Street on the hunt for “any job, really,” she fortuitously landed one as a children’s bookseller, which launched her into a career spanning all corners of publishing—from organizing book events, to helping agents refine their slush piles, to marketing new titles. She eventually found her path into full-time writing in 2016 while traveling down the west coast of South America with her husband. Her first book, which she’d sold five years earlier, was finally hitting shelves, and Tokuda-Hall was afraid she’d never publish another. Driven by this anxiety, she wrote two more in rapid succession—all while living out of a Toyota 4Runner kitted out with a rooftop tent and a built-in refrigerator—and sold them in a package deal as soon as she was stateside again.

It was such a deep and abiding pleasure for me to think about writing all day long

Armed with the imaginative liberties afforded by the genre of children’s literature, Tokuda-Hall found ways to approach subjects that had long eluded her. Her graphic novel Squad, for example, confronts the pervasive rape culture at her former high school in Piedmont, California by channeling that darkness into a “goofy book about werewolves.” “It was the story I always wanted to tell in my secret, ugly heart—even back at Scripps,” she says. “My greatest hope for Squad is that someday people will read it and it will seem outdated.”

These days, when she’s not writing, Tokuda-Hall is pouring her energy into organizing the Authors Against Book Bans group, of which she’s a founding member. “We’re trying to be the author army that can show up wherever we’re needed,” she says. As the world continues to change at warp speed—constantly presenting new battles and opportunities—Tokuda-Hall’s advice to current Scripps students is to pump the brakes on “trying to define exactly who you are and what you’re going to do professionally at this very moment.” The path forward may not be linear. It may not even exist yet. But, Tokuda-Hall says, “you have time to figure it out.”

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