Calling it the beginning of a beautiful friendship might sound cliche, but certainly, Frederick “Fritz” Weis ’65 and Orme Wheelock Phelps developed a lasting rapport after meeting in a CMC classroom more than four decades ago.

Weis, who later would become treasurer and vice president of his alma mater, and Phelps, then the College’s star professor of economics, have shared much during their respective careers, including razor-sharp business and leadership skills, reputations as stabilizing forces in changing academic currents and administrative shifts, and—in matters of personal style—snappy bow ties.

Weis was one of thousands of students who passed through Phelps’ classrooms during the professor’s 33-year career. Recalling him as one of his favorite students, Phelps described the young Weis as the “business-like kind who wanted to know, ‘Why am I taking this course? What’s in it? And how do you prove it?’

“Those kinds of students,” notes Phelps, “helped me clarify my own thoughts and got some good ideas out there for discussion.”

Phelps, former dean of the CMC faculty and as fascinating a tale spinner as they come, turned 96 in July. Weis, meanwhile, is starting a new chapter, having decided last year to step down from his role as treasurer and vice president of the College after 20 years, although he will return next year as the newly appointed executive practitioner in residence in the College’s accounting program.

The campus legends recently reunited to reflect upon CMC’s growth over the past 55 years.

Phelps, who retired 26 years ago, has an enormous mental cache of CMC’s history at his disposal. He was one of the first faculty members recruited by founding President George Benson, who was intent on luring professors from prestigious eastern universities to raise the profile of the new Claremont Men’s College.

“It was 1946, when there were floods of students returning from World War II, and lots of teaching jobs,” recalls Phelps, who at the time held three degrees from the University of Chicago, where he was a distinguished young professor in its graduate school of business. “Not a week would go by without a dean of faculty calling us crying, looking for someone to fill a position. I’d never had an interview for a teaching job, so I decided to have one or two to see how they’d go.

“I signed up with a fellow named Benson from a place I’d never heard of, who was head of a new college. That was perfect, because I wasn’t going to any new college. I was going to go to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley—someplace like that.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Phelps arrived in Claremont in 1947 with his fingers crossed. CMC was just a year old at the time—and Phelps was going to feel much better once he made sure The Claremont Colleges actually existed. It was after he’d been hired at CMC that invitations to Stanford and UCLA arrived, but Phelps declined.

“There were about 230 students when I came in the second year of the College’s operation, and about two-thirds of them were on the GI Bill,” Phelps says. “I had the most wonderful classes I’d ever encountered. The next time I thought about leaving was 30 years later.”

Like Phelps, Weis came to Claremont more or less on a lark. “I hadn’t been west of Buffalo before I arrived here,” he says. “I thought I might be interested in international relations, so my college counselor in Connecticut handed me a catalog for Claremont Men’s College. What impressed me most when I read about the College was the faculty, who were not all just academicians, but had varied backgrounds as ambassadors, consultants, business people, accountants.”

One of the professors who combined scholarly expertise with business experience was Phelps, who worked some 40 different jobs between high school and college and continually drew upon that experience for his labor economics classes. One of his most significant employment experiences was working for the Ford Motor Company, first in Denver and later in Chicago.

“I used to enjoy telling my students how the foreman would periodically yank you off the assembly line, drag you to the window, show you all the people at the gate, and say, ‘Every one of ’em wants your job. Now lean into it!’ I don’t think I ever went any slower because of that.” The dichotomy couldn’t have been more evident. There was Phelps, a liberal democrat and pro-union man, working for a capitalist inventor who opposed labor organizers.

CMC former treasurer, Fritz Weis