Washington State Magazine :: Spring 2011

FEATURES

Outside In—Architecture of the Pacific Northwest :: Architecture in the Pacific Northwest has always had to contend with the environment. The results are enchanting. by Hannelore Sudermann

The Song is You—An Instinct for Music :: What is music good for, anyway? by Eric Sorensen

Back in the Earth—Putting ancestors to rest, or destroying the past? :: Over the last two decades, tribes have been invoking the Native American Graves Protection and Recovery Act to reclaim remains of their ancestors from museum and research collections across the country. But what if those remains are 10,000 years old? by Tim Steury

ESSAY

The Strength of Moral Capital :: For people living on the margins of U.S. society, struggling with both poverty and job loss,there is still a desire to conceive of themselves as inheritors of some version of the American Dream. by Jennifer Sherman

PANORAMAS

:: An art history
:: New threats, new science
:: Real investments return real experience
:: Gary Brinson ’68—Investing in the world
:: Digging the new EcoWell
:: Learn and use

DEPARTMENTS

:: FIRST WORDS: Nature Boy Reads On
:: LETTERS
:: SPORTS: Run to greatness
:: SPORTS: Hit or be hit
:: IN SEASON: Dungeness Crab
:: NEW MEDIA
:: LAST WORDS: Canjo

TRACKING

:: Nicole Braux Taflinger 66, 68 MFA—Season of Suffering
:: Kim Fay 88—Communion: A Culinary Journey through Vietnam
:: George Nethercutt Jr. 67—Knowing our nation
:: Alumni news

Cover photo: Architect Rex Hohlbein ’81 sits with clients Jim and Ann in an open sliding window of their home in Clyde Hill. by Michael Mathers

FEATURE

Outside In—Architecture of the Pacific Northwest

by Hannelore Sudermann

It’s a cool morning in October when the door to Rex Hohlbein’s Fremont studio swings open. Four Washington State University architecture students crowd into the small entry looking at once curious and nervous. 

Hohlbein ’81, solidly Seattle in a plaid shirt and fleece jacket, greets the group, which includes his daughter Jennifer. They have come to Seattle to make presentations in front of professional architects at a firm downtown. One carries an unwieldy printed display he needs to trim. Recalling his own days as an architecture student at WSU, Hohlbein urges him to open it up on the floor and crop it there. In the meantime, he and Jennifer talk about the students’ visit to the well-known Miller Hull Partnership that afternoon and the lecture they would attend that night. The other students soak in the office, visiting with one of Hohlbein’s partners and glancing at photographs of the firm’s completed homes on Vashon Island, in Ellensburg, on Orcas Island, and at Yarrow Point. In one example, an island cabin makes practical use of plywood in the kitchen. In another an Eastern Washington farmhouse radiates off a great room. In a third a traditional-style retreat nestles into a wooded hillside.

While the homes are all different, they share an aesthetic. There’s warm wood detailing inside and out, expansive glass windows, exposed structural components, and deep overhangs—all details of what could be described as Northwest elements of style. 

Hinoki HouseThe Hinoki House, designed by Rex Hohlbein ’81

The students are even seeing elements of the style in the 1906 house Hohlbein renovated to serve as his studio. The place sits on a one-way street tucked up against the ship canal. One of his first improvements was a floor-to-ceiling picture window to bring in the subtle Seattle light and feature the view of the Burke-Gilman Trail and the water, people, and boats outside. 

His design template includes natural materials, a simple and elegant aesthetic, and building in a way that is sensitive to the region, the neighborhood, and especially the site. It all comes out of the feeling he gets having grown up in the Northwest, he says later. “Seattle was a sleepy city most of my life. We’re not flashy. We’re quiet. We live in a gray world, with subdued, soft light. With such beautiful scenery around us, the thinking is ‘Hey, let’s be a little quieter. Let’s go out and blend in and take it all in.’”

The Hinoki House, a new view home in Bellevue’s 1950s Clyde Hill neighborhood, fits beautifully with the Northwest style. The owners themselves started with a list of classic Northwest desires that included creating an open-concept home within the older neighborhood, using natural materials, and capturing a stunning Lake Washington view. “It was going to be a bigger house to begin with, but I said, ‘Really, you should worry about it being too big,’” says Hohlbein. “There’s a coziness and connectedness that would be lost.” 

While the view across the lake is stunning, Hohlbein didn’t want the home to be just about the distant view. “We did not try to line everything up, and did not want to block the views of other people in the neighborhood.” He spent time on the property exploring. It required an approach from a busy street, through an alley, and then a courtyard. He saw it as a migration from a public self to a private self. While the view is the big payoff, he worked to create beautiful spaces and experiences in the house before arriving at the view. “The house should be able to stand on its own.”

A hallmark of the Hinoki house is walls made out of windows. It’s a tradeoff, says Hohlbein. It is perhaps less energy-efficient, but it does different things in different spaces. In the kitchen, it lets in light and views of the trees. In the dining room, it provides a serene scene of the pond and courtyard. But the most wondrous effect is in the living room, where the windows slide away and you feel as if you could walk right out onto the lake.

Hohlbein didn’t come to WSU to study archtiecture. “But I just fell in love with drawing,” he says. “At the end of that first year, I decided to switch.” The new direction gave school new meaning. He lived for his classes and projects. “And I couldn’t wait to get out and practice,” he says. 

He loves the process of working with residential clients. “You talk a lot about very personal and important decisions,” he says. “Besides raising kids, building a house is probably the most intense thing adults will sustain. Their hearts and minds are fully engaged.”

And if his clients are seeking to make a statement with their homes, he hopes that it is one of quiet, thoughtful design. “Houses and buildings should be backdrops to peoples’ lives, and secondarily, buildings should be subservient to the landscape.”

A STYLE OF OUR OWN

Architecture in the Pacific Northwest has always had to contend with the environment.

In many parts of the country, the builders of great cities started with flat planes and created their landscapes out of brick and stone, steel and glass. But in the West, a land of mountains, water, forests, and views, the natural landscape usually came first. Here the early architects had to nestle their structures in valleys and along shorelines. Then their neighborhoods climbed the hills of cities like Spokane, Bellingham, Tacoma, and Seattle, always looking to the views around them. 

The architects took climate into consideration, orienting to capture much-needed sunlight in winter, and designing sheltering overhangs to protect from the rain. Some might say they were building green long before the notion was in style.

When you see that iconic scenic photograph of the state’s largest city, says Phil Gruen, associate professor at the WSU School of Architecture and Construction Management, it’s the Space Needle with the mountains in the background. “Seattle is the metropolis in the natural environment,” he says.

The same description could easily be extended to other Northwest cities, he adds. Spokane, for example, has the slogan: “Near nature, near perfect.” 

Gruen, who teaches history of architecture, is loath to describe one type of architecture as specifically “Northwest.” For each detail there are many examples, and many exceptions. And some are not so great. Indoor shopping malls for an auto-centered culture, for example—Northgate Mall, which was built in 1950, was the first car-focused indoor mall in the country. It was an idea that first happened here, says Gruen, “But nobody would say that it is an example of the Pacific Northwest architecture.” 

Still, in other structures, there seems to be a Pacific Northwest idiom, Gruen admits. It’s a particular kind of consciousness that connects the materials, the structure, and the natural environment.

Architects from WSU like Hohlbein have had a hand in shaping the state’s built environment, and in incorporating it into the Northwest landscape, for nearly a century. But it was almost not to be. Decades ago, the fledgling architecture program at Washington State was nearly crushed.

In 1907, Washington’s agricultural college (now WSU) established one of the first programs to train architects on the West Coast (after the University of California at Berkeley). When the college’s early leaders started their search for a chair, architects from the Midwest and East Coast were coming west to help build the new communities. Kirtland Cutter (from Ohio) was designing Arts and Crafts mansions throughout the state, and James Stephen (from Chicago) was creating school buildings in Seattle and Everett after designing Thompson Hall in Pullman in 1893. The four-story Victorian building was constructed out of brick made from clay deposits on campus.

In drafting a plan to train architects in Pullman, the college’s leaders believed that architecture would fit in well among the mechanic arts. They also saw an economical route to building their campus. Rudolph Weaver was hired from the architectural staff of the University of Illinois and immediately took on the design of buildings for Pullman’s campus. “We looked upon it also as a measure of economy to combine these instructional and professional functions in such a department,” wrote President Enoch A. Bryan in his Historical Sketch of the State College.

Weaver’s first project was the president’s house. The thought, according to Bryan, was to try him out on a smaller, less essential structure. Its success is apparent since the Weaver-designed Wilson-Short and Carpenter halls followed in rapid succession. For a few years, both the program and the building progress held up.

But when Ernest O. Holland became president of Washington State College in 1916, the years of growth both for the curriculum and for campus were about to end. A legislative committee from Olympia had visited the college and was surprised to find graduate students in Pullman as well as strong liberal arts and architecture programs. Concerned that the state was already paying too much for higher education, the committee decided that the University of Washington should be acting as a university and that the college in Pullman be reduced to a trade school. To Holland’s dismay, an old friend, the UW’s president Henry Suzzallo, agreed. 

Suzzallo and Holland started their friendship as students in 1909 at Columbia University. Holland was best man at Suzzallo’s wedding in 1912. Suzzallo moved west to become president of UW in 1915 and almost immediately encouraged Holland in his pursuit of the Pullman job. At the same time, both men were urging an end to, in Bryan’s words, the “petty rivalry” between the institutions. 

But they were overtaken by politics. There were concerns that the schools were duplicating their offerings at great cost to the taxpayers.

In 1921, the state legislature created the Joint Board of Higher Curricula to oversee development of programs for the University of Washington and Washington State. In 1922, UW (which hadn’t established its architecture department until 1914) challenged the state college’s offering of an architecture major. As a result, it was one of several programs deemed “illegal” by the legislature, including commerce, journalism, and forestry. 

But according to school records, Pullman found a way around it. By 1928 the degree in architecture became “architecture engineering.” The students would study alongside the school’s construction managers and civil engineers. Because they studied and competed with students in other disciplines, the architects who trained at WSC had a rigorous grounding in engineering—something alumni say made them sought-after assets to their firms.

It took some redesigning on the part of the state college to keep architecture in the mix, but it led to training many hundreds of architects for the state.

While all this was taking place, a Northwest architectural style was emerging, says Phil Jacobson ’52, a retired Seattle architect and professor emeritus of UW’s architecture program. While much of the early building is derivative of architecture from around the country—with Arts and Crafts, Beaux Arts, and International styles—a Northwest aesthetic emerged in the timber framing, exposed wood beams, open spaces, and large windows designed to capture the Northwest light, he says. The developing style is also reflected in how the buildings fit within their site and landscape.

“There is a Northwest school for architecture,” says Jacobson. “In my judgment, it is primarily in the area of residential design. It’s much clearer there than anywhere else.”

After World War II a strong Northwest vernacular really took shape, he explains. Families settled into the Puget Sound region and the demand for new housing skyrocketed. The local architects, unfettered by their clients’ demands for a certain style, not limited to build within established neighborhoods, and freed to use new materials, started pushing further into the landscape. Some beautiful examples include Surrey Downs, a neighborhood of 1950s Northwest-style ranchers built with minimal disturbance to the land by architect Omer Mithün in Bellevue, says Jacobson. Others can be found in communities like Fircrest and University Place in Tacoma and the South Hill in Spokane.

Jacobson, who watched the movement develop, readily lists the key architects of the Northwest school. Among them: Paul Thiry, Omer Mithün, Paul Hayden Kirk, and Fred Bassetti. 

Thiry, who is considered a father of modernism in the Pacific Northwest, started off in the 1930s with International-style homes and apartment buildings. As times changed, so did he. By the 1950s and early ’60s his structures were like sculpture. He was the principal architect for the Seattle World’s Fair and can be credited with the Pacific Science Center and the Coliseum. By the time of the 1962 fair, the Pacific Northwest was getting international recognition for its architecture and buildings that connected with the landscape, captured light, and had attention to detail.

While most of their work centers on Puget Sound, Thiry and a number of other architects are represented in Pullman, says WSU’s Gruen. Thiry designed the Regents Hill buildings. Kirk’s trademark bands of windows are evident in the American Institute of Architects (AIA) award-winning red brick French Administration building. And Bassetti built Avery Hall to harmonize with the old quad.

The regional architecture that developed during that time used natural materials, brought in the outdoors, and incorporated some very early “green” practices like economy of materials and building to capture heat and sunlight, says Jacobson. It fits well with today’s Northwest and sustainable aesthetic.

A SUSTAINABLE AESTHETIC

“All local cultures contain an essence that must be discovered or preserved and which expresses the uniqueness of a place. For architects in the Pacific Northwest, that essence is the fundamental understanding of the conditions of ecology and their effect on architectural values and meaning. Significant aspects of this essence lie in local geography, climate, and customs and involve the use and transformation of mimicking of vernacular forms...” —David Miller ’68, Toward a New Regionalism, Environmental Architecture in the Pacific Northwest

Late at night, back when David Miller ’68 and Robert Hull ’68 were architecture students at WSU, they would sneak into the agricultural buildings around town. “We were interested in how those structures contrasted with the landscape,” says Miller. “We were impressed by the toughness, economy, and directness of this kind of buildings.”

“We wanted an understanding of why things are the way they are in any particular area,” adds Hull, who was fascinated not just with the technology of building the buildings, but how, with materials and orientation, people were adapting them to the area’s hot summers and cold winters. 

That and their separate tours in the Peace Corps creating buildings with local materials in Afghanistan and Brazil, helped them hone their practice of developing socially responsible, simple, innovative designs that respond to environmental demands. After working in separate firms for several years, the two in 1977 decided to create their own firm. Since then, it has grown to 50 employees and completed hundreds of projects, including the Shock Physics Lab at WSU and the Northwest Maritime Center in Port Townsend. They have received national recognition for their work. In 2003 the AIA gave them the Architecture Firm Award for producing distinguished architecture for more than a decade. “Miller | Hull has defined Pacific Northwest regional modernism in a way that inspires architects around the globe to respond to the unique characteristics of their own regions,” wrote their nominator.

While Miller and Hull had to sneak into barns and grain elevators to look around, last year 18 WSU graduate students were given an assignment to follow in their footsteps. They turned their focus to a grain silo 12 miles south of Pullman in the town of Colton. The silo soon after blew down, says their instructor Taiji Miyasaka, who had been consulting with the owner to find alternatives for the structure. It had been slated to be dismantled and the wood reused in other projects, but it had more than 130,000 nails, too many for salvaging. “I was not trying to advocate that we have to save the building,” says Miyasaka, “but it was an interesting space and interesting structure.” So he sent the students out to document and measure it in different ways.

The 18, including Jennifer Hohlbein and her classmates, logged many hours there inside and out, thinking of ways people might approach and experience it. Two camped on the property for 24 hours to record how light changed at the silo throughout the day. In the end they were all asked to summarize their thoughts and ideas and present them to professional architects at Miller | Hull in Seattle. The nervous students carried their models and displays into the office, which occupies the entire sixth floor of the Polson building downtown.

The studio project is designed to kick-start the students into their graduate thesis project, says Miyasaka. Their main objective is to just spend time on the site and get a feel for it. “These students are not contaminated by the practicality of a project. That gives them an opportunity to leap. It makes for some exciting ideas,” he says. 

“I try to get my students to explore by themselves,” he says. “I just hope they keep exploring.”

Jennifer and Rex HohlbeinJennifer and Rex Hohlbein

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Many elements of mid-century architecture are back in vogue. Ada Louise Huxtable, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, may have seen it coming years ago. “There is nothing so totally rejected that we cannot admire it now...,” she wrote in the New York Times in 1978.

That was the year architect Stephen Mathison ’67 started work to help preserve the state’s historic properties. A graduate of WSU’s architecture engineering program and UW’s art history program, he landed a job in the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation. For the past three decades it has been his responsibility, in part, to advise owners of historic and architecturally significant properties on how to rehabilitate and restore buildings in a way that won’t harm their historical integrity.

Mathison finds it interesting that there is a general interest in building sustainably today. “Many things about historic buildings are sustainable,” he says. Those that date back eight or nine decades have thicker walls and, because they were built before air conditioning, natural ventilation. “Studies have shown that early 20th century buildings are among the most energy efficient. 

“And preservationists have long pointed out that the best sustainable project is keeping the existing property,” he says.

The general cutoff for consideration for the state and national registers is 50 years, though certain significant buildings—the Space Needle, for example—may be considered sooner. “Some buildings from the 1950s and early ’60s are now entering the state and federal registries,” says Mathison. Among them are buildings in the brutalist and modernist styles. “There is an underappreciation for these buildings among the general public,” he says. “In many cases the owners would love for them to be removed or improved.” 

Just last year, one of Paul Thiry’s Seattle houses, a 1962 concrete and glass waterfront home that was once featured on the cover of Sunset Magazine, was torn down after preservationists failed to find someone who could pay to relocate it.

When the National Historic Preservation Act was created in 1966, it was in the wake of the destruction of the old Penn Station in New York. Now, with the 50-year lag, the eligible buildings are “exactly those buildings that were built that the law was enacted to prevent,” says Mathison. Is it worth saving and renovating those? he asks. “I think that question is going to come to the fore over the next several years.€

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Though Miller | Hull has been building in the regional style for decades, and though Miller wrote the book on the new Northwest regionalism, many other WSU alumni are out there exploring the idiom.

Consider some of the recent regional AIA award-winning projects—all with WSU architects in the mix: a Woodinville winery, a Northwest convention center, a Bellevue shoe factory, and Hohlbein’s Clyde Hill view home designed to fit into a 1950s suburb. 

FEATURE

The Song is You—An Instinct for Music

by Eric Sorensen

It’s been decades since Ed Hagen played trumpet in his high school pep band, jazz combo, and big band. He long ago lost the muscle tone needed to make a recognizable, pleasing note. He struggles to remember just a few titles from his repertoire—Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4” in the pep band, George Gershwin’s “Summertime” and Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” in the others. 

He might be forgiven for forgetting all but the outlines of some tune he heard or played in high school. But a few years ago, just such a tune came on his car radio. He can’t remember what it was, but he does remember grooving right along to it, instantly recalling the melody, tempo, and lyrics as if he had performed it yesterday.

“I could immediately sing along with the song exactly synchronized,” he says. “I remember all the words. And I thought that is incredible. I have such an incredibly poor memory in general. How is it that, in seconds, this one song comes back and I remember it perfectly?”

Hagen, an assistant professor of anthropology at WSU Vancouver, specializes in evolutionary medicine and mental health. But as he puts it, writing about depression can get depressing. It’s nice to take a break, academically speaking. So when he found himself singing in the car, he started thinking humans might have a specialized musical memory, and he asked the fundamental question of the curious person: Why?

In other words, just what is music good for?

It is one of the most evanescent things—here one note, gone the next, often with less apparent meaning than Bob Dylan’s most obscure lyrics. Yet we are awash in music, from the car to the supermarket to the mall. Including the music made from radio advertising, live performances, and audio equipment, the global music industry is worth something like $140 billion. Parades, sporting events, weddings, funerals, candlelit dinners, even some births feature music. It is the soundtrack of our lives.

“If you look cross-culturally, you’ve got music in just about every culture in some form or another,” says Steve Lakatos, an associate professor of psychology at WSU Vancouver who studied music history and theory as a Yale undergraduate. “It would seem that there is something universal about music in the sense that it’s not just pleasurable, but it’s almost a necessity of a culture.”

Even if you run from music, you cannot hide. Lock yourself into a quiet room, occupy your mind with a book or some paperwork, and rattling between your ears is a viral earworm: “It’s a small world” or “YMCA” or the theme from Mission: Impossible or “I want my baby back baby back baby back ribs.”

And when we seek music out, attending a concert or obsessively positioning ourselves just so between loudspeakers, the results are moving, both physically and emotionally. It’s as if we’re tapping into some deep reservoir of our being. This is what Ed Hagen started getting at when the song on his car radio came back to him in all its high-def clarity. It’s what Ellen Dissanayake ’57 thinks about when she ponders the cooing of mothers. Across the state, it’s what Jaak Panksepp, a WSU neuroscientist, sees when he probes the brain for clues to why music literally gives us the chills, or when he asserts that our musical natures are “deeply embedded in the evolved passionate nature of our minds.” 

Across the ages of evolution, music may well be integral to our deepest past and present self. In the resonant space between our ears, it is part and parcel of how we feel, the trembling string of our emotional core.

In the Days of the Caveman

In his 1997 book, How The Mind Works, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker asserted that music is little more than “auditory cheesecake.” That deft little expression, writing off music as “an exquisite confection” with no clear evolutionary foundation, helped inspire scores of rebuttals, including Daniel Levitin’s bestselling This Is Your Brain on Music. 

The phrase was also in Ed Hagen’s head when he found himself singing and syncopating to his car radio. In fact, he sang and syncopated so well, he started thinking Pinker was wrong, that this uncanny musical memory suggests a larger evolutionary benefit to learning music.

“And I thought: What could that benefit be?”

Charles Darwin, evolutionary theory’s tone-impaired progenitor, reasoned that music evolved with dance as a courtship display. The better your song and dance, the better your choice of mates and chances of reproducing. That’s a start, but Hagen wondered why singers often attract members of the same sex. 

“I like Led Zeppelin,” he says. “I don’t want to mate with them.”

A second theory is that music and dance build bonds between people, conveying benefits that can help others. But it’s unclear how or why that happens, or why someone might think a good singer would make a good partner with tangible benefits.

But the musical quality of a group’s performance, thought Hagen, does signal the quality of a group. 

“The question is: What is it about music that is a good signal of group quality?” says Hagen. “It goes back to this song on the radio. This ability to synchronize takes a lot of practice. It doesn’t just happen. To achieve that level of synchrony in real-life performance would take those musicians a lot of practice, individually and together, to get their music and their parts synched up.”

The group, he adds, “is willing and able to cooperate, and has done so for some time—the essence of coalition quality.”

To test his hypothesis, Hagen asked a friend and colleague, Gregory Bryant, to write a piece of music and record several versions. One had the instruments in synch. Another had 60-millisecond lags between the rhythm of the guitars, drums, and keyboard. A third had different instruments falling out of tempo. Then Hagen played tracks for students and asked several questions to gauge their perceptions of the music’s quality and the group’s quality: Did they like the music? How willing are the performers to help each other? How likely is it that the performers grew up together? How much did they practice? Do they like each other?

By every measure, the musicians who played in synch had the highest-rated relationships. With a few well-timed notes and beats over the course of a mere minute, they showed they had the motivation and ability to work together. More importantly, they signaled two things central to human well-being. One: If you come to hurt us, you better bring an army, because we’re the better group and we’ll lay you low. Two: If you would like to form an alliance with us, we’ll make it worth your while. 

That last feature is particularly important for humans, says Hagen. In nature, it’s extremely common for groups of animals to be antagonistic and rare for groups of animals to cooperate with other groups. But humans are the rare animals that form cooperative relationships between groups. 

And whether you’re promising a tough fight or forming a new bond, music helps make your case. It’s why you’ll find a marching band on the field when an opposing team visits and a band on the tarmac when a foreign dignitary comes to town.

“The point of the whole exercise seems to be to impress your guests with all of the things that you can do as a group,” says Hagen. “You’ve got great music. You’ve got great dance. You’ve got great clothing. You’ve got great food. You’ve got great women and men. It seems to be an exercise in signaling or demonstrating or exhibiting your qualities as a group, the things that you do as a group. And music is a big part of that.”

But as both scientists and inquisitive toddlers can attest, every answer begets another question. For Hagen, it was: How might this skill have evolved? What was music’s biological basis? He found his answer by looking across the animal world, summarizing his thoughts in the paper, “Did Neanderthals and other early humans sing?”

“If music has an evolved function, it is most likely as some sort of signal,” the paper begins.

As if to verify this claim, Hagen and I have come from Vancouver to the Oregon Zoo in Portland. Walking the grounds, Hagen notes that signals are, “ubiquitous at all levels of life—microorganisms, single-celled organisms, plant life, and animal life. And the signals may be chemical signals, visual signals, auditory signals.”

He picks up our own signaling story with the tetrapod—a four-limbed vertebrate whose appearance 400 or so million years ago marked the arrival of land-roaming animal life. One branch of the tetrapods eventually evolved into primates; another evolved into birds. When we walk into the din of the Howard Vollum Aviary, we get a small sample of how the terrestrial animal world got noisy as birds and other animals took to making sounds for all sorts of things: marking territories, finding and attracting mates, nurturing offspring.

The story continues as we visit the wild dogs and primates in the Africa exhibit. Back in the Miocene epoch, five to 20 million years ago, a large diversity of ape species lived in Africa, as well as Eurasia. But later, in the Pliocene and Pleistocene, environments got cooler and drier. Forest habitats gave way to grasslands. Now there were huge herds of herbivores and social carnivores like hyenas, lions, and wild dogs. To bring down the herbivores, packs of carnivores had to communicate and work together. They marked their spaces with howls, hoots, and roars. 

Naturally, Hagen can’t go back in time to see what noises they made and to what ends. But by looking at the sounds of animals with whom we shared this Plio-Pleistocene niche, he infers we were similarly vocal. Perhaps we drummed, like great apes. We could have had coordinated pant-hoots like chimpanzees, our closest modern relatives. Perhaps, like chimps and lions, we listened and vocalized to tabulate the most important aspect of coalition quality—size—and decide if we should encounter others of our species.

“If these guys did that, human ancestors did that too,” Hagen says. “We were territorial like these guys. We were hunters, or at least carnivores— we might have been scavengers... We’re doing it in groups. We’re defending territories.”

And we did it by developing coordinated vocal signals.

“And that,” says Hagen, “is what I propose is the origin of human music. The roots.”

From there, we developed what might be called modern music, relatively speaking. Some 50,000 to 150,000 years ago saw the emergence of modern ritual, symbolic behavior, art. Music, says Hagen, was probably part of that, advertising and lubricating the complex intergroup relationships and politics of an emerging humanity.

For Crying Out Loud

A few years ago, Sheila Converse, a vocalist and professor of music, performed in Giuseppe Verdi ’s opera, “La Traviata.” A few months later, she was in a California big-box store, staring at boxes of cereal, when the sensations of the performance vividly came back to her. She could smell the makeup and feel the texture of her wardrobe. Weirder still, the feeling seemed to come from nowhere. She had to think about it for a moment before realizing the opera’s score was playing on the store sound system.

“We react physically to sound before we react intellectually to sound,” she says one afternoon in her office, where she can practice on a baby grand piano looking north to Kamiak Butte. “Music uses those same channels, because it’s sound. So often it goes to our emotional centers and our motor centers at the same time or before it goes to our processing centers.”

To be sure, modern music appreciation is in many ways an intellectual, cognitive act: interpreting lyrics, tracking the flow of the melody and harmony. But music is most powerful when it reaches deep into the emotional core of our brain. In a way, it’s resonating with a fundamental part of our being. Jaak Panksepp has spent much of his career pondering and probing that special place. At times, as a form of what he calls “hobby research,” he’s done it through music.

Hobby or not, it’s challenging. The brain is a brilliant but mysterious organ; research in music and the brain is a particularly young science. But to see how music affects our hearts and minds, it can help to look at how the brain’s architecture is the embodiment of its evolution.

“You have to think about the brain as an evolved organ with layers,” Panksepp says. “What came first stays in the middle and farther back, deeper. What came more recently is added on, and there are expansions forward. So it’s an encephalised organ. We don’t see that in the heart or muscles.” 

Back in the 1970s and ’80s, Panksepp used electrical stimulation in different mammal brains to identify specific emotional networks with adaptive features aiding survival and reproduction. A brain region associated with what he called seeking makes us interested and engaged in our world. Fear motivates us to steer clear of danger. Lust ensures reproduction. Rage motivates us to preserve freedom and access to resources. Care nurtures the young; panic and separation distress stimulates cries that bring caretakers and other help. Joy stimulates social engagement, and we feel a particularly acute psychological pain when we lose things we value, particular people we love.

“We know that the fundamental feeling of an emotion is in the very low layers” of the brain, Panksepp says. “That’s what the animal research has told us. Of course, many people don’t like this because they experience their emotion with the full complexity of the brain.”

Once he found a social distress system built into the brain, he started to wonder if there might be a connection between separation distress, sadness, and grief with music, “the artistic language of emotion.” 

He had students listen to a variety of musical pieces, including Meatloaf’s “For Crying Out Loud, You Know I Love You,” and had them document when they felt chills. He found they were much more likely to grow out of music the listeners found sad or expressing loneliness or loss. Familiar tunes are among the best for the effect. High-pitched, sustained crescendos and single, crying voices, like Meatloaf bemoaning his lost love in the fifth minute of “For Crying Out Loud,” were ideal. 

When Panksepp used brain imaging to measure the reactions to chill-inducing music, the sad music was more likely to arouse the cortex, the outer area of the brain central to conscious thought. 

“When you’re happy, you don’t have any problem to solve, whereas if you’re sad, you do have a problem to solve,” he says.

But the biggest changes were subcortical, “in these ancient emotional regions of the brain. When music really grabs you, it grabs these ancient systems.”

Moreover, he sees a link between the frisson-inducing musical moments and the core emotional, adaptive moments of animal existence.

“The most powerful indicator of sadness is crying,” he says, “and when music stylizes the separation cry, that is what activates the chill. That kind of sound—like a crescendo, like a single trumpet coming out of a background score, those musical moments that have a dramatic impact on you—might be similar to a mother who has lost her child, hearing the child cry. It focuses the mind and tells you the child is lost. There is a musical moment that you can make beauty out of.” 

The chill could even be the brain’s thermoregulatory network sending a signal to reestablish the warmth, socially and thermally, of body-to-body contact. 

“Social connectedness is emotionally warm and comfortable,” Panksepp says. “That’s the way we envision love and attachment—this secure base. When you’re alone, you feel isolated. You feel cold. There’s a certain kind of internal pain, psychological pain. Another loving person alleviates that promptly.” 

The chill could even be a way of emotionally and physically motivating a mother to care for a child.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp with research subject.Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp with research subject.

Mother and Child Reunion

One or two million years ago, a woman gave birth. Then as now, it was difficult. The hominid brain had expanded. Baby heads were larger. To make it into the world, a would-be newborn needed a compressible skull. The mother needed a wider birth canal. Even then, it was a tight fit.

To ease the passage, the baby arrived before its brain was fully formed. If the baby was to flourish, and if the mother was to see her reproductive effort succeed, the baby needed to let its needs be known and the mother had to be fully engaged in the baby’s development.

As with her fellow primates, the mother had a repertoire of caring motions—touching, stroking, embracing, hugging. Now came something new: a set of emotional sounds, a musical dialog in which the mother and child could get and hold each other’s attention, bond emotionally, and, in the baby’s case, develop socially. Ellen Dissanayake calls this “proto-music.” A former WSU music major and an affiliate professor in the University of Washington School of Music, she hypothesizes that it was a core evolutionary moment of clear value to our species and the growth of what we now call music.

“Because this mother-infant interaction occurs everywhere—I mean, everybody does it—I can hypothesize that it’s an evolved, universal behavior,” she says.

After those early proto-musical moments, it’s easy to imagine successive millions of young mothers and babies building and refining sweet, intimate duets, cooing, calling, responding, and gesturing. It has a name: “motherese.” Like much of what we now call jazz, it is improvised in a rhythmic, coordinated call and response of high-pitched and exaggerated tones, often with split-second accuracy. 

“We don’t teach babies to like this motherese,” Dissanayake says. “We don’t talk that way to anybody else. They teach us to do it for them by responding the way they do. They smile and kick and look really cute and wiggle, and that rewards us so we keep doing it.”

One such reward is the increased flow of oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone” “that makes the mother unknown to herself love the baby. That’s the nuts and bolts of this interaction.”

It’s as if the music of mom is the ancestral food of love.

Dissanayake, the author of What Is Art For? (see spring 2009 issue), sees the mother-child duet eventually getting emancipated into a formalized and ritualized ensemble performance. The rhythms and tones that transfixed mother and child became the notes, chords, motifs, and beats that built, sustained, and shaped the emotions of performers and audiences—who in aboriginal cultures are often one and the same. Incorporated into ceremonies, they allayed fears, cushioned grief, encouraged romance, bonded lovers, and fostered the coordination and cooperation of people.

“Rhythm and doing things together also helps to allay anxiety,” says Dissanayake, “and there was a lot of anxiety in pre-modern life.”

Today, it’s possible to imagine music helping build bonds between groups of opera fans or disenfranchised, rebellious teens drawn to their chosen genre. A headphone-clad student may seem oblivious to the humanity walking by, but we might still see him or her as being locked into what Panksepp calls “a social domain.”

But to more fully appreciate music’s role, rewind the past few hundred or thousand years, what Dissanayake calls the recent modern “nanosecond of evolutionary time.” Then, she says, you’ll see music and the act of making music as an essential of human life. 

FEATURE

Back in the Earth—Putting ancestors to rest, or destroying the past?

by Tim Steury

The mood is decidedly upbeat on this beautiful June day on a bluff above the confluence of the Snake and Palouse rivers. Sixty or so people have gathered, a diverse bunch, tribal members from the Nez Perce, Colville, Yakama, Wanapum, the regional commander and other representatives from the Army Corps of Engineers, a number of archaeologists from across the Northwest. Earlier this morning, a few of the Indians had gathered in the basement of College Hall, the home of WSU’s anthropology department, with Wanapum leader Rex Buck Jr. as he blessed the remains of their ancestors they were about to rebury.

Now, on the bluff, while Buck and other elders sing, a couple of younger men pass boxes of bones to another man in a freshly dug grave. He gently sets the boxes down and covers them with tule mats. He climbs out and various men take shovels and start reburying the ancestors, this time they hope for good. Some of these remains had lain just upriver from here for 10,000 years. But their original graves are now deep under the waters backed by the Lower Monumental Dam. At least, say the elders, now they are back in the ground where they belong.

If you climb the rise to the east of the burial site and look down on the Palouse River, you can see a curved hollow of basalt, all that remains above water of the ancestors’ home. From the floor of the rock shelter, now 40 feet underwater, and the floodplain before it, WSU archaeologists in the 1960s recovered the remains of at least 45 people, some more than 10,000 years old. After measurement and study, the remains had been stored, under the authority of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, on the WSU campus.

Marmes RockshelterMarmes Rockshelter inside looking out before inundation.

Across the country, over the last two decades the movement of native remains has reversed, moving since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Recovery Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 from storage back to the Earth. NAGPRA legislation requires federal agencies and entities that receive federal funding to return human remains and cultural items in their possession to their affiliated people. According to NAGPRA figures, as of last year more than 38,000 human remains had been repatriated. However, it is estimated that another 118,000 are still in museum storage.

Although archaeologists now use careful protocols for handling human remains, earlier practice was not so discreet. Convinced that the collection of Indian skeletons could serve science, early archaeologists and other collectors gathered bones from battlefields and old cemeteries and sold them or sent them back east to the Smithsonian Institution. As Franz Boas, the “father” of American anthropology, wrote, “It is most unpleasant work to steal bones from a grave, but what is the use, someone has to do it.”

The Marmes remains were recovered and stored at WSU under less cavalier circumstances, part of an intense campaign to save them and other remains from inundation.

What also sets the Marmes remains apart from most repatriated remains is their great age. Most repatriated remains are relatively recent. It is not unusual for a modern Indian to have attended the reburial of his or her great-grandparents. The extraordinary age of the Marmes remains tested the NAGPRA language that requires establishment of “cultural affiliation” for the remains to be reclaimed by tribal representatives.

Nevertheless, in 2006, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, and the Wanapum Band joined in submitting a NAGPRA claim for the return of all human remains and funerary objects from the Marmes collection. The remains, under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, were stored at WSU. At first, the Corps denied the request for certain remains because they did not fall under the act’s definition of “Native American.”

The tribes disputed the ruling and insisted there was a clear affiliation to the Palus people—and therefore to the claimant tribes, all of whom had clear relations to the Palus, whose main village was long located at the confluence of the Snake and Palouse rivers.

The tribes commissioned independent archaeologist Darby Stapp, who has three decades of archaeological experience in the Columbia River drainage, to assess the Corps’s determination that the remains were not Native American. As the assessment was nearly finished, however, the Corps reversed its decision and determined that the remains were affiliated to the Palus people and were also “Native American,” though it should be noted that NAGPRA considers these as two separate designations.

The establishment of cultural affiliation is based on several factors. Geography is a major one. The Palouse River canyon, as Stapp points out in his report, is “one of the longest occupied and culturally rich landscapes in the southern Plateau.” The Palus have long occupied the area, and the main village at the confluence of the Palouse and Snake was still occupied at the turn of the 20th century.

Biological evidence for affiliation relied mainly on the simple description of remains by WSU physical anthropologist Grover Krantz:

“The remains are of modern Homo sapiens anatomy and do not differ in any determinable way from recent North American Indians. They are meso- to brachycephalic, rather thick vaulted, and had shovel-shaped incisors.” The “shovel-shaped” incisors are a trait shared by most American Indians.

In addition, cremation burial, which was practiced at the Marmes site, is recognized as a long tradition in the mid-Columbia River region. Other recognized practices found at the site are the use of red ochre and Olivella shells as adornment in burials.

Finally, an additional cultural artifact that led to determining affiliation was an owl foot. Perhaps some kind of talisman, the foot had a hole drilled at one end. As Brent Hicks argues in his 2004 report on the project, “Something must have held the bones together such that they remained articulated.” Not only was the owl foot obviously important to whomever had modified it, it was a common symbol throughout Plateau cultures. 

Archaeological and oral tradition also figured into the conclusion, and in June, the remains were reburied.

A late-Pleistocene Northwest

Authorized, along with the three other Lower Snake River dams, by the River and Harbors Acts of 1945, then blocked by President Eisenhower in 1953, but restored through efforts by Washington senator Warren Magnuson, construction of Lower Monumental Dam began in 1961. The next year, Washington State University archaeologist Richard Daugherty and his colleagues received a federal grant to explore the archaeological significance of the Palouse River Canyon, which would be flooded by the dam’s reservoir.

Daugherty had first explored the lower Palouse River in 1952 with local rancher John McGregor. McGregor showed him a number of rock shelters and caves. One of them was on land owned by Roland Marmes.

Daugherty began work in the canyon in 1962, with the intention of excavating the Palus village site near the confluence of the Snake and Palouse. But he soon decided that the village site was too disturbed to yield an accurate study.

After some further exploration Daugherty was drawn back to the Marmes site and, with geologist Roald Fryxell and a student crew, began excavating.

Over the next few field seasons, workers uncovered nearly 800 artifacts, food storage pits, and 11 human burials. In 1965, in order to better understand the timescale beneath them, Fryxell had Roland Marmes dig a trench with his bulldozer into the floodplain in front of the shelter. When the bulldozer had dug down 12 feet, Fryxell noticed a chip of bone.

He soon found a concentration of two dozen small pieces, some of them charred. Bones that deep must be very old. But there was no way to prove that they had not been dislocated by the bulldozer. Fryxell returned later with help, and they found more fragments, these clearly in their original context. Still, they were small and difficult to identify. But finally, a year and a half after the first bulldozed discovery, Carl Gustafson, the faunal expert on the dig, was able to identify many of them, including a skull fragment, as human. It was clear by now that this was a very old habitation.

Meanwhile, construction of the dam proceeded.

In 1968, Fryxell and students unearthed bone tools, animal bone, and human bones, between layers of Glacier Peak ash estimated to have been deposited 10,000 years B.P. (before present). Radiocarbon dating of shells in the same level was 10,750 +/- 100 BP.

By this time, the Marmes remains had become the best documented human remains of the late Pleistocene in the new world.

In a quest for more federal support, Daugherty and Fryxell took “Marmes Man” bones to Washington, D.C. An announcement of the find was made public through Senator Magnuson’s office.

Back at the dig, by August the ensuing publicity resulted in extensive media coverage and thousands of visitors to the site every week. This at a location that is not exactly on the road to anywhere.

Regardless, a federal supplemental appropriations bill for protecting the site was defeated in committee. But Daugherty and Fryxell enlisted Magnuson’s help to win support from the Corps of Engineers to continue the dig. Magnuson also persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to sign an executive order authorizing $1.5 million to the Corps of Engineers to build a coffer dam around the site to protect it from the impending flooding.

Unfortunately, a layer of gravel beneath the site compromised the coffer dam. When the Lower Monumental Dam closed in February 1969, the water within the coffer dam rose nearly as quickly as the main reservoir. The WSU crew frantically began lining excavation pits with plastic and then backfilling to protect the surfaces against the water’s turbulence.

An enormous amount of knowledge had been gleaned from the Marmes Rockshelter. Even with the tragic curtailment of its exploration, the site still gave an extraordinary picture of the region’s last 10,000 years of climate and environmental change and cultural history.

It can only be surmised how much more could have been learned had Lower Monumental Dam not flooded the site. On the other hand, the damming of the lower Snake River actually provided much of the impetus, both scientific and financial, for exploring the Marmes Rockshelter as well as other sites doomed to flooding. 

Now, 40 years later, the human remains that gave the dig its meaning are beyond further study, reburied on a hill just downriver from their original resting place.

Who owns the past?

Richard Daugherty, who retired from WSU in 1985 after an iconic career, now lives in Lacey, Washington, with his wife Ruth Kirk. Kirk was the first to chronicle the Marmes dig in her 1970 book The Oldest Man in America. With her then-husband Louis Kirk, she had built a career documenting the natural and native history of the West. In 1978, they had co-authored Exploring Washington Archaeology (revised edition released in 2007 as Archaeology in Washington, University of Washington Press), the most comprehensive treatment of the state’s remarkable archaeology. Following the deaths of their spouses, Daugherty and Kirk expanded their professional relationship into marriage. 

I visited with them at their home this summer. Even though I had explained the reason for my visit, it was clear that Daugherty had not known that the Marmes remains had actually been reburied, and a long silence followed my account of the reburial.

The Marmes remains, he began, with considerable emotion in his voice, shed light on “the population of the whole new world. And to destroy that evidence, to me, is just unacceptable.”

The Marmes remains were very fragile when they were removed from the site. Because of soil acidity and moisture, putting them back directly in the ground guarantees their final disintegration.

“I understand it if you’re looking at it from an emotional point of view. But look at it from the standpoint of cultural history, of Native Americans in the New World. These things should be protected at all costs.”

Daugherty suggests the idea of building a mausoleum, “where these things can be placed under proper conditions for survival.” Assign caretakers. Make the place sacred. 

Over his career, Daugherty has encountered many human remains. In fact, with the Ozette dig on the Olympic Peninsula, by working closely with Ed Claplanhoo ’56, leader of the Makah Tribe at the time, and other tribal members, Daugherty helped establish a new standard for cooperation between archaeologists and tribes.

“When we’d start on a project,” he recalls, “I’d make it clear that we were not looking for human remains, but there was a good chance we will find them.”

At Ozette, when the archaeologists encountered remains, “We would examine them for evidence of violence, of age, et cetera.” Then the Makahs would retrieve the remains for a burial ceremony.

There is a distinction, however, as Kirk points out. The Ozette remains were no more than 300-400 years old. The affiliation with the Makahs was clear, and many in Neah Bay were directly related to the residents of Ozette. Above all, Ozette was not a burial ground, as was much of the Marmes area. 

What if, asks Daugherty, we come up with a new analytical technique that could help place the Marmes people in a genetic context. If the bones were preserved, we could negotiate some protocol for re-examining them, possibly shedding more light on the populating of the New World.

“This is something I spent my whole life working on, and I can understand yes, when you get human remains, they become a sacred thing. But I think there can be an accommodation. If they build a structure, a facility that will house this material, it’s available a thousand years from now. 

“Thinking of it from the standpoint of the Indians themselves, I think they ought to be concerned that the remains of the earliest ancestors really should be preserved ... I can see what they might want to do is say, we should take care of these.”

That’s exactly the attitude of Rex Buck Jr., the Wanapum elder and spiritual leader who has been a leader in the repatriation of the Marmes and other remains. But his idea of taking care of his ancestors lends a much different perspective.

We visited at the Public Utility District headquarters near the Priest Rapids Dam, just downriver from the dam and the Wanapum village. The Wanapum (which means “river people”) band never signed a treaty and is not a federally recognized tribe. When Lewis and Clark traveled through the area, the Wanapums numbered more than 2,000. Now their numbers have dwindled to fewer than a hundred. Their traditional fishing grounds, Priest Rapids and the entire stretch of the Columbia between the Tri-Cities and Vantage, now lie deep under the backwaters of the dams. In exchange for that loss, the PUD provides jobs and housing.

Buck believes it is his and his people’s responsibility to “take care of the land, the resources, the ancestors, the things that are important.” Taking care of the ancestors means making sure they are safe in the ground.

“We believe we were put here, we have a responsibility here. We just want to take care of it, because it’s our law.”

Under NAGPRA, in order to repatriate remains, tribes have to show “cultural affiliation.” Establishing that affiliation over 100 or 200 years is one thing. Over 10,000 years is entirely another.

Admittedly, establishing cultural affiliation over 10,000 years seems something of a stretch.

“In our world view,” says Anthropology Museum director Mary Collins in agreement. Collins was the main liaison for coordinating the repatriation of remains held at WSU.

“Just for fun,” she continues, “I like to ask people where they would put that mark,” that is, of how far back one might accept some cultural connection.

“In my informal survey, people put it at about 2,000 years. Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but that’s the birth of Christ.”

Time weaves amongst all conversation regarding affiliation and repatriation, and its nature had long eluded me.

“We believe our knowledge goes way way back,” says Buck. “Time is not what we’re thinking about. We’re still here, still the same.”

Speaking of tribal elders, Buck says, “The deep ties they have to their ancestors are the same ties they have to their children. It’s no different.”

When the earliest of the Marmes people lived there, more than 10,000 years ago, the population of the entire Earth is estimated to have been no more than about 5 million. We have no idea how many people lived in the Americas. Even if the earliest migration models are correct, the North American population was still very sparse. Obviously, the scientific desire to answer the questions of origins and migration routes is a major point of contention.

However, says Michael Finley, business council chairman of the Colville Confederated Tribes. “We as a people know who we are. We don’t need science to tell us that. We know where we came from.

“For us, cultural affiliation goes back as far as it needs to go. We believe we’re here, we’re always here.” 

Deep time and a little respect

Having attended several repatriation ceremonies, having been given a glimpse of this very different culture that lives alongside ours, I can at least begin to understand this perspective. When the ancestors’ bones are returned to the earth, there is a very palpable sense of timelessness and empathy.

Still, like Daugherty, I can’t help but wonder what the bones could tell if some more sophisticated technique were developed. What is it about our craving to understand and put all the pieces together scientifically? Why do we so need to understand origins and migrations and the nature of these early inhabitants? What if the Marmes remains enabled us to understand, at least a little more, the deep time of this landscape? What if they could be tied genetically to populations elsewhere in North America, or to Siberian populations, or Ainu—or Kennewick Man? 

The remains of Kennewick Man were discovered by a couple of teenagers watching hydroplane races along the Columbia River near Tri-Cities in 1996. First treated as a possible recent crime victim, the remains were examined by independent archaeologist James Chatters ’71 and subsequently discovered through carbon dating to be more than 9,000 years old. Plateau tribes claimed the remains, but their appeal was rejected by the courts. The remains of Kennewick Man are stored at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington. A group of scientists examined the remains extensively in 2005. A final report is still pending.

The analysis of mitochondrial DNA has developed into a powerful tool for molecular archaeologists such as WSU’s Brian Kemp. I asked him by email if he believed anything had been lost to our scientific knowledge by reburying the Marmes remains.

Kemp replied from Denmark, where he was studying a new, more powerful variation on the technique he employs in his laboratory. He wrote that when he arrived at WSU a few years ago, he was intrigued by the Marmes remains. He studied photographs of the bones in Ruth Kirk’s Oldest Man in America and decided the bones were simply too old and too fragile to yield anything to his investigation.

But now, with new techniques? He suggests that maybe now, with a new tool in his toolbox, he might be able to tease more information out concerning their genetic links and kinship.

But that is moot, he points out. When the bones went back in the ground, that was the end of the story.

“Ten years ago, I would have come down on the Doc [Daugherty] side of it,” says Collins. “Very old remains, belongs to everybody, and so on.”

However, in spite of the seeming promise of such ancient remains, she says, “No one has given me a convincing argument of what they’re going to find.

“After all the argument, all we could say about Kennewick Man, he was a middle-aged man who lived a hard physical life and ate fish.”

The roots of disagreement regarding ancestral remains—whether recent or ancient—are deep. But the emotional impact is simple.

“Think about if someone went and dug up someone from your family and put them on a shelf,” says Finley. “We’re human, too. We just want the same respect.

“If someone went and dug up a person from this country’s history, George Washington, whoever€¦ Well, it’s been done with our chiefs.”

The conflict is infused with issues of race, says Collins. “It’s the ‘othering’ aspect.”

Collecting artifacts and bones was once a Sunday picnic kind of thing to do, she says. There was a big group in Pullman that collected with no sense that the activity was inappropriate. And because archaeologists craved the contextual information, they were willing to work with them.

The cultural disconnect extended to the salvage of sites, including cemeteries, from the dams. Corps of Engineers files contain letters from native people asking the Corps to please not move the cemeteries, their relatives. But the policy assumption was that since white cemeteries were being relocated, so should the Indian cemeteries.

“But then when they did move them,” says Collins, “they did not bring in morticians [as with the white cemeteries], but archaeologists.€ 

--

A climate retrospective

As Richard Daugherty and Roald Fryxell point out in their forward to Ruth Kirk’s The Oldest Man in America, the true significance of the Marmes Rockshelter “lies in the sequence of prehistory recorded: a detailed record of 18,000 to 20,000 years of geologic events with an interwoven record of human occupation spanning more than half those millennia ...” Not only did the archaeologists glean insight about the people whose remains they unearthed, but more comprehensively, about environmental and climate change over the past thousands of years, which in turn help us understand the evolution of the hunter-gatherer culture of the region.

Fryxell , a geologist, went on to interpret the enormous stratigraphic record revealed at Marmes as a record of fluctuating climate. Unfortunately, Fryxell died in a car accident in 1974, his work unfinished. Others, however, have contributed to our understanding of climatic and environmental history of the past thousands of years, drawing on both Marmes information as well as other investigations.

More recent interpretations agree in general with Fryxell’s inferences. Twelve thousand years ago, the climate of the region was cool and dry, with moisture increasing over the next 1,500 years or so. But around 9,000 years ago, the climate turned increasingly warmer and drier, with grasses gradually replaced by sagebrush and shrubs.

Between 4,500 and 3,500 years ago, the climate became cooler and wetter, with the period being optimal for salmon.

As the climate began to get warmer and drier about 2,000 years ago, the shrub-steppe started to turn to bunchgrass, with increasing frequency of fires, some set by humans to manage the vegetation.

For a more detailed analysis, see “Environmental change recorded in sediments from the Marmes rockshelter archaeological site, southeastern Washington State, USA” by Gary Huckleberry and Cynthia Fadem in Quaternary Research 67 (2007) 21–32. Also, Marmes Rockshelter, ed. Brent A. Hicks, WSU Press 2004.

ESSAY

The Strength of Moral Capital

by Jennifer Sherman

In 2003 I left my home in Berkeley, California, to relocate to Golden Valley,¹ a remote logging town in the northern forested region of the state. I would spend a year living in this isolated community of just under 2,000 people, surrounded by forests and mountains, and cut off from most of the urban conveniences to which I’d grown accustomed. Golden Valley, like many small towns in the Pacific Northwest, had been reliant on the timber industry for its economic base for nearly a century. However, like many other logging towns, its economy had collapsed in the mid-1990s, in large part due to the 1992 spotted owl ruling that resulted in a ban on timber harvesting in the region to protect the owl’s habitat. In the years following the ruling, logging jobs quickly evaporated in the area and local sawmills closed one by one. The last sawmill in Golden Valley closed in 1996, taking 150 of the most stable and best paying men’s jobs with it. Too isolated and remote for a tourist industry, Golden Valley was left to fend for itself with almost no economic prospects.

As a sociologist and ethnographer, I came to Golden Valley to study the impacts of job loss and poverty on rural families and communities. I was motivated by a series of questions that focused on how families survive troubled times. I spent my year there doing in depth interviews and participant observation with longtime residents, getting to know and understand the place and its people. What I found in Golden Valley was a community struggling to make sense of itself in the wake of economic, social, and personal upheaval. Its struggles and victories gave me a deep and intimate understanding of the interactions between structural conditions and cultural norms in the rural Pacific Northwest.

I chronicle my findings in my 2009 book, Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America. In it I explore the different ways in which individual families and the community as a whole adapted to the changes they had been through. Much of the book focuses on how people made sense of their lives in the dramatically altered environment, and in particular how they continued to conceive of themselves as personally successful despite losing their livelihoods and dearly held way of life. I discovered in Golden Valley neither hopelessness nor despair, but rather a thriving new set of understandings and discourses around economic survival and provision, family life and gender roles, and most importantly around morality. 

At the time of the spotted owl ruling, many people assumed that timber-dependent towns like Golden Valley would simply empty out, their populations scattering to places with healthier economies and labor markets. Although Golden Valley did experience some out-migration immediately following the timber industry’s collapse, such dire predictions failed to anticipate the deep ties to place, environment, family, and community that held its residents there. The majority of those with longer histories in the community remained, calling upon existing cultural norms and new understandings of morality to help redefine themselves as good workers, parents, and community members, despite often experiencing both unemployment and poverty.

Although I did not come to Golden Valley looking specifically for discourses around morality, I discovered that deeply entrenched belief systems around work ethics and family values greatly influenced people’s lives in the aftermath of the economic collapse. In the book I explore the ways in which discourses on these subjects structured both individual decisions and community-level reactions. I employ the concept of “moral capital” to help explain how moral understandings operated in the community, and the ways in which they provided both positive and negative influences on and control over people’s lives. The idea of moral capital is that outwardly exhibiting one’s moral worth can result in opportunities that are denied to those who appear to lack it. In the case of Golden Valley, morality manifests most clearly not with regard to religious doctrines and beliefs, but more commonly in the sense of uniquely American frontier values such as independence, self-sufficiency, hard work, and “family values.” I discovered that in this community being able to illustrate your moral fortitude in the face of struggle was as important as having a high income.

Why did morality come to be so important? My research suggests that for people living on the margins of U.S. society, struggling with both poverty and job loss, there is still a desire to conceive of themselves as inheritors of some version of the American Dream. To this end, conceptions of morality can help create new understandings of what it means to be successful.

In Golden Valley, notions of proper work ethics and morally acceptable activities helped create those definitions of success. At the same time, these moral understandings also influenced the choices people made about how to best survive unemployment and poverty, dictating proper behaviors and coping strategies, many of which might be surprising to people unfamiliar with small, cohesive, rural communities like Golden Valley.

As the local economy deteriorated, many residents feared that the community’s former workers would increasingly turn to welfare for their survival. In the decade that followed the spotted owl ruling, the opposite actually occurred. Despite widespread concerns about its use, welfare receipt in the community actually dropped in half from 1990 to 2000.² For many residents, the community’s moral norms, which included a strong stigma around means-tested programs like welfare, convinced them to find other ways to survive. For example, George Woodhouse, who had worked in the mill for 30 years before losing his job, explained why he and his wife chose subsistence activities like hunting and fishing to supplement their diet, rather than utilizing means-tested government aid programs:

We don’t try to get food stamps or welfare or anything like that. I mean, basically, we probably could. But I don’t know—we were always brought up that you worked for what you got, you didn’t have welfare and stuff like that. If you didn’t work, then you cut back on what you was eatin’ until you got a better job.

Rather than relying on the government to provide for them, Golden Valley residents relied heavily on the local environment and their own physical labor. In this new economic landscape, a man might no longer have a job, but he could still manifest his work ethics in other ways, often through informal work. Among the most respected of these informal survival strategies were those tied to the land, including hunting, fishing, gardening, and cutting one’s own firewood. Continuing to manifest one’s work ethics through these sorts of activities, even when lacking a paying job, signaled to others in the community that you were still an upstanding moral citizen, rather than a lazy, immoral “freeloader.” As a local woman explained, “You want people to think you’re a hard worker,” whether or not you can find paid work.

In this community, ties to morality through independence and hard work became a form of symbolic capital, tradeable for both economic benefits and social status. In such a small community, most people’s activities were visible and known. For those who manifested their work ethics and moral values through acceptable work activities—including paid jobs, subsistence work, and even through the receipt of “earned” government aid like unemployment insurance—there were payoffs in terms of both social support and economic opportunities. The community’s few remaining jobs, as well as the limited social and economic support it could muster for those in need, were reserved for those believed to be hard workers and thus “deserving” of help. For those who failed to properly illustrate their moral worth, either through the receipt of welfare or through involvement in illicit activities like drug dealing, both the labor market and the community’s informal charity were generally unavailable. As a result, the majority of Golden Valley residents did their best to avoid stigmatized coping strategies, regardless of how badly they might need them. Thus morality was both a positive force, helping people to access social and economic capital, and a negative control that helped discourage behaviors that were seen as damaging to the community and its families. Moral discourses also helped families to make sense of their lives in less concrete ways, including prioritizing family life and making sense of changing gender roles.

While the moral discourses upon which people based their understandings and decisions were based in preexisting cultural norms of the community, they included many new understandings and adaptations. Some of these new moral understandings, including judgment and stigmas around drinking, drug use, and domestic violence, undoubtedly helped protect Golden Valley residents from some of the worst problems associated with poverty. In other ways, however, moral principles resulted in increased struggles for the poor. For example, I found that in Golden Valley federal poverty alleviation programs like welfare were underutilized by those in need, who would rather suffer with hunger and low incomes than accept help that came with moral judgments attached. Programs with some tie to past work experience were preferred, not because the benefits were better, but because the moral implications were better. Similarly, informal help from friends and family was preferred to government-based aid, even though it might be limited and sporadic.

The case of Golden Valley provides an insight into the ways in which poverty and unemployment are experienced by rural populations, versus the urban ones that are more frequently studied by sociologists. It illustrates the importance of understanding social stigma and its power in different contexts. The research also illustrates the ways in which culture and community setting interact with public policies. The 1996 welfare reforms were designed with assumptions that jobs exist, but that poor populations lack a desire to work. The program ends up being ineffectual in a place like Golden Valley, where work ethics abound but jobs are scarce.

Thus our current poverty alleviation programs fail to help many hardworking rural families survive poverty or to improve their lives in any meaningful way. A program crafted with a better understanding of the norms of rural places would be able to more successfully address their needs.

Instead, Golden Valley, like remote rural places across the Pacific Northwest and across the nation, was left to fend for itself through a devastating economic crisis. What was perhaps most surprising about my time there was that this isolated community met its challenges with resilience and optimism. Although it may be struggling to survive and rebuild, Golden Valley continues to defy trends and predictions in its refusal to disappear. Its residents love their land and their community, and have not given up on themselves or their home. As our economic crisis deepens and encompasses more and more rural places like Golden Valley, the nation must respond with policies that address their needs with more informed understanding. Our charge is to not forget the people of Golden Valley and the struggles they endure to achieve their unique version of the American dream. Instead, we must recognize that their poverty is not of their own making and thus cannot be alleviated by punishing them for it, assuming they will leave in search of better prospects, or simply leaving them without the resources to improve their economy on their own. In learning to better serve the people of forgotten rural places like Golden Valley, we will make an important step toward creating a more equal nation.

1. All names of people and places have been changed in order to protect the confidentiality of research subjects.

2. A similar trend occurred across the United States, in large part due to welfare reform and the new restrictions that the 1996 law placed on the receipt of TANF, the replacement for AFDC. 

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Jennifer Sherman is an assistant professor of sociology at WSU Tri-Cities.

PANORAMA

An art history

by Hannelore Sudermann

Worth D. Griffin stepped off the train in Pullman in the fall of 1924 to find Washington State College’s art department barely four years old and with just one other full-time faculty member. Prior to that, the only art instruction offered was painting lessons for students with the pocket money.

But Griffin had come to help teach design and creative composition and build a program. The Indiana native had studied commercial and fine art in Indianapolis and at the Art Institute in Chicago. In addition to working as a magazine illustrator, he trained among American realists, artists focused on rendering unidealized scenes of daily life. His advanced studies were with portraitists including Wayman Adams and Charles Hawthorne. In Griffin, that training would surface in his paintings of scenes and people he encountered around eastern Washington: Pullman’s grain elevators, local homesteaders, Native Americans, and landscapes. 

Portrait of Felix Warren by Worth GriffinThis portrait of Felix Warren, on of the last Oregon Trail stagecoach drivers, is among more than 50 that Worth D. Griffin painted of Washington pioneers. Courtesy WSU Museum of Art

Many students today may have never heard of Griffin. They wouldn’t know that he stayed for 34 years. He taught painting and drawing. He served as chairman of the art department. He pushed the school to offer a master of fine arts degree. He co-founded a summer art colony in the 1930s. And he expanded the school’s course offerings to include sculpture, pottery, jewelry design, interior design, aesthetics, etching and lithography, mural painting, and art history and art appreciation.

But who was this man, and how significant was his contribution? Those were the questions of Dave Fitzsimmons ’71, a cousin by marriage on the hunt for more of Griffin’s story.

Fitzsimmons got caught up in the hunt a few years ago when a painting by one of Griffin’s early Washington State students and colleagues, Clyfford Still, appeared on the Antiques Roadshow television program. To the surprise of the painting’s owners, and many in Pullman, the work was valued at a half million dollars. The piece, an eastern Washington scene, was painted in 1937 while Still was teaching art at Washington State College and before his style changed to the abstract expressionism for which he later became famous.

Learning about Still and his Pullman connection started Fitzsimmons wondering about his own family. His mother’s cousin Vivian Kidwell had graduated in fine arts in 1929 and stayed on for a graduate degree. She taught in public schools and later became part of the art colony in Nespelem on the Colville reservation that Griffin and Still co-founded in 1937. She married Griffin in 1938.

Fitzsimmons had grown up surrounded by paintings by Griffin and Kidwell. His mother and his aunt, Sharon Seegers ’58, were their heirs. He also ended up with an assortment of Griffin’s drawings and paintings. Fitzsimmons invited me to come see them at his home in Pendleton, Oregon, and do my own research into Griffin.

I arrived to find a few surprises. The first was a simple charcoal portrait by Griffin of Clyfford Still, likely done during the time he worked at WSU. It was tucked in with several other portraits Griffin had sketched of students. 

The second was the person of Bob Brumblay, the son of WSU’s former athletic director Robert Brumblay ’28. “They had a strange relationship based on the fact that my dad was the student and Griff was the professor,” says Brumblay. “But they were both from Indiana.” In 1928, Griffin painted a wedding gift for Brumblay and his wife Hallie (a sorority sister of Vivian’s), a landscape that for decades hung in their home.

When the Brumblays returned to Pullman in 1949, the couples became close friends. As further evidence, Brumblay proffers another painting. “This Griff painted for my dad as a winning of a bet on a football game,” he says with a grin. It was Washington State versus USC. “If it came to pass that Washington State won the game, Griff would paint my dad a picture. If they had lost, my dad would paint Griff the picture. Well, you can see who won.”

Griffin often shared his work, using his paintings to build friendships not only for himself, but for the art department and the University.

In the mid-1930s, President E.O. Holland and the Board of Regents offered Griffin a leave of absence with salary and expenses to travel and paint 50 portraits of well-known eastern Washington people, including newspaper publishers, and business leaders like Frank T. Post, president of Washington Water Power. All of the 50 or more paintings were close to life size and “were made in homes, offices, hotel rooms, school buildings, or wherever convenient working space could be found,” according to a museum description of the works. 

Many of the initial subjects led to new ones. “I think he became very intrigued and followed this tree that led from one person to another,” says Keith Wells, curator of the WSU Art Museum. It also led Griffin to look around eastern Washington for more locals to paint.

After that first year, Griffin asked for more time and support to paint various Indian tribal leaders in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. “Many of these people were well beyond middle age and represented customs, habits of living, and dress that were fast fading from the contemporary scene,” wrote Griffin. That effort led him nearly 180 miles north and west of Pullman to Nespelem on the Colville Reservation where in 1937 he and other teachers guided students in painting tribal members in ceremonial regalia. 

That first year, Vivian Kidwell was invited from her teaching post in Wenatchee to help. She was a skilled and recognized artist in her own right. While earning her master in fine arts, she had been awarded two Carnegie scholarships to study at the University of Oregon. Then she taught art in Walla Walla, Ellensburg, and Wenatchee. 

She was her own person, says her cousin Sharon Seegers. Even as a child, she would go her own way, regularly getting into mischief. She had a dog named Ole who would growl at her mother whenever she tried to discipline Vivian. Her childhood precociousness carried through to adulthood. “You could say she was an eccentric,” says Seegers, who keeps many of Kidwell’s papers and both artists’ paintings in the home she shares with her husband Raymond ’58 in Olympia. 

Seegers remembers attending Kidwell and Griffin’s wedding, which was held at the Marcus Whitman Hotel in Walla Walla. “I was about six,” she says. “And Vivian wore a blue velvet dress.” And Griffin, “was pretty picky about how he looked. He was always a little bit formal.”

“They were very well-suited,” says Seegers. “I don’t think they could have gotten along better with anyone else.” They settled into a creative and productive life in Pullman, where they bought a duplex and Griffin worked on campus while Kidwell taught art in the Pullman School District.

“She was a real health-food person—long before it was in style,” says Seegers. Her husband laughed, adding that Griffin didn’t exactly embrace the effort. “Griff would call and say, ‘Would you like to go hunting or fishing?’” he says. “Then we’d stop on the way and buy all this junk food.” It was hard to tell if he was more interested in hunting or in getting to eat something unhealthy, he says.

The Seegers’ house is a gallery of work from both artists. A dark Kidwell landscape hangs in the dining room. Several of their watercolors hang in the den. And a colorful Griffin abstract, a departure from his normal style, hangs opposite the front window in the living room. While not strongly interested in abstract art, Griffin experimented with it. “He told us to enjoy an abstract painting, you’d have to find a focal point to get into it,” says Sharon Seegers. Her husband points to an area in the lower right near the signature. “Start here,” he says. “He thought that was a good point.”

Most of their papers and artwork stayed with Kidwell’s family. And while proof of Griffin’s contributions may be thin in the University’s archives, the vault of the Art Museum holds overwhelming evidence of his influence. The very first shelves are packed three levels high with more than a hundred of his paintings, primarily his portraits of settlers, community leaders, and Indians.

A few of these men and women were never photographed, and very little has been written about them. But for Griffin and the art colony students, they dressed up and were recorded. The brief histories he supplied on the back of his paintings are rare biographies of his subjects. “A quiet, unpretentious person,” he writes of one. And on another, the portrait of Yakama Chief Job Charlie Cowash, he notes: “A striking personality with long white hair and the ruddy complexion of a very young man.” 

“I think they are probably more historical than art historical,” says Wells of the paintings. But between Griffin’s pieces and the pieces from the collection of WSU President E.O. Holland, they became the foundation artworks of the WSU museum’s collection.

Cleveland Kamiakin painted by Worth GriffinPortrait of Cleveland Kamiakin by Griffin. Courtesy WSU Museum of Art.

PANORAMA

New threats, new science

by Eric Sorensen

Sure, Darwin had to battle seasickness aboard the HMS Beagle, and he spent nearly five years getting to and from the Galapagos Islands, and it took another 23 years to incorporate his findings into his seminal work on evolutionary biology.

But at least he lived in a slow-motion world of ship travel and isolated, slowly evolving species. Today, a scientist, or an exotic parasite for that matter, can get from London to the Galapagos in 24 hours. The parasite can start changing the biology of a place almost overnight. The scientist will have trouble keeping up.

Jeb Owen has seen as much, not by visiting the Galapagos, but by peering into drops of blood drawn from the species of finches that Darwin studied more than 150 years ago. Darwin saw how the birds’ beaks had slowly changed, supporting his view that they diversified, or evolved, into different species from a common ancestor. Owen has seen how the birds are responding to two introduced parasites, which are dramatically challenging the biological hand of cards they were originally dealt.

Through this and other projects, the assistant professor of entomology is helping pioneer the brave new world of ecological immunology. It’s a shift, he says, from traditional ecological thinking that concentrates on animals’ growth rates, size, territory, habitat, and predator-prey relationships—nature red in tooth and claw. Ecological immunology concentrates more on the deft, fleet-footed challenges posed by some of biology’s greatest survivors—parasites and pathogens.

The rise of the field highlights a growing interest in the roles of pathogens in shaping the ecology and evolution of a species, says Owen. 

“It’s not just what’s going to eat you,” he says. “It’s what’s going to make you sick. And more importantly—which is part of what this field of research is about—why are you going to get sick?”

In a way, ecological immunologists are following moving targets, plotting the shifting dynamics between predators and prey, or hosts and parasites. This concept was first raised in the early ’70s by University of Chicago biologist Leigh Van Valen, who said a species survives best by quickly responding to the adaptations of its adversary. Van Valen, who died in October, called this the “Red Queen Hypothesis,” after the Through the Looking-Glass character who says to Alice: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

It’s an arms race, and ecological immunologists are trying to figure out who is gaining on whom. Moreover, says Owen, are there other factors that will shape that arms race?

One way ecological immunologists get at that question is by testing the immune systems of varying creatures. At first glance, one would think that those with strong immune systems would be favored by natural selection, surviving better than other individuals and passing on this trait to their offspring. 

But Owen and other researchers find that there is a lot of variation among individuals and that their susceptibility to infection varies a lot, too. This is likely because an animal has a lot to do besides fight off infection, like get food and rear young. Animal life is a constant high-stakes calculus in which everything has a cost, and sometimes an organism has other, more pressing needs, like an overworked human saying, “I can’t afford to get sick right now.” Growing and reproducing can take precedence; they can in turn affect immune function.

“And so we want to know how that works, in part because we want to know what’s shaping the immune system,” says Owen. “But also we really want to know, what governs the occurrence of infectious disease?”

Last year, Owen and colleagues at the University of Utah published a study in the journal PLoS ONE describing how Darwin finches are responding to two exotic parasites, a virus and a nest fly. As far as they know, the study was the first to show wild birds developing a specific antibody response to multiple parasites.

The question now is what price the birds are paying to fight off the invaders. Such questions will be even more important in coming years as invaders travel the world. Lending an even newer wrinkle to the field is the effect of global warming, which can expand the range of insect-borne diseases traditionally confined to the tropics and sub-tropics.

Because global warming is destabilizing, says Owen, “we’re starting to see animals more frequently stressed. Their food availability, their refuges, are fragmented and are less consistent. And we’ve observed that when animal populations get physiologically stressed, they become more susceptible to disease.”

PANORAMA

Real investments return real experience

by Larry Clark

Stock symbols and percentages march across a long ticker screen, but it’s not a Wall Street brokerage firm. It’s the fourth floor of Todd Hall at WSU, and the eyes monitoring the stock market belong to undergraduates managing the Cougar Investment Fund.

The students invest $1 million of the university’s endowment—the Cougar Investment Fund—in a large capitalization equity portfolio. Under the supervision of Rick Sias, WSU finance professor and Gary P. Brinson Chair of Investment Management, the class has outperformed the S&P 500 since 2001.

Sias approached the WSU Foundation and suggested the program in 2000. “We wouldn’t charge any fee—unlike most managers. We take a very small portion of the portfolio,” he says. He based the idea on funds at other universities, such as Cornell, although those funds are often managed by MBA students.

Students take a year-long course, where Sias teaches them investing principles and how to analyze stocks and industry sectors. The students often conduct research in the state-of-the-art trading room, which was also made possible by MBA alumnus and financier Gary Brinson.

Two students act as portfolio managers for the semester, organize the presentation of sector and stock reports, and keep track of the fund’s investments. The other students become sector analysts.

“Sector reports tell what we hold in that sector and what happened to those stocks in the last couple of weeks,” says Sias. “For example, did Google beat the technology sector the last couple of weeks? If it did, tell us why.”

The students operate under several limitations to safeguard the university’s investment. After class discussion and voting, they present their buy and sell recommendations to Sias and then to WSU’s senior investment manager for execution.

Stacee Wilson, a senior finance major from Stanwood, took on the portfolio manager role last fall. She says the learning curve is very steep, but the hands-on approach pulls it all together. “It doesn’t make any sense until you practice it. A lot of it is learning the tools to tell you what a security is going to do in the future,” says Wilson.

Sias says the students absorb the knowledge and tools quickly, then learn how to write and present the information. “You get five minutes to present your stock and give your pitch, and then five minutes of questions and answers. One of the best parts of the class is the chance for students to present and know they’re going to get challenged, because that’s what happens in the real world,” says Sias. 

The “real” world is where Jeff Troxel ’09 now uses the skills he gained as portfolio manager of the fund in 2008. He works for a small Seattle investment management firm, Progeny 3, landing the job immediately after graduation.

“The analysis and reports [in the Cougar Investment class] are exactly what I do every day in my work,” says Troxel. “The reports we put out were sufficient for a professional recommendation.” 

Another former student and portfolio manager, Kari Miller-Pauley ’03, appeared on CNBC in 2002 to talk about the fund. The program, shot live at the Lewis Alumni Centre, was “a once in a lifetime chance,” she says. “We talked about our stocks that worked well, like Starbucks, and how we managed the fund.”

Miller-Pauley describes the Cougar Investment Fund class as the best one she took at WSU. “It’s a unique experience,” she says. “It’s like a real job, not paid, but you get to make decisions.”

She now works in Seattle as a vice president for international investment firm BlackRock. She coordinates divisions within the company to increase transparency, consistency, and quality, “like an internal consultant to improve our business’s integration,” she says.

Miller-Pauley continues her involvement with the College of Business, mentoring current students and remaining active in the business alumni group.

The investment fund experience has already paid off for current student Wilson as well. Her winter holiday was booked for six job interviews before the end of last November.

PANORAMA

Gary Brinson ’68—Investing in the world

by Larry Clark

As businesses became more international and markets around the world grew increasingly interconnected over the last three decades, a forward-thinking investor could succeed with a global portfolio. Gary Brinson was one of the earliest of those investors.

He recognized in the 1970s that the markets outside the United States were not, as conventional wisdom dictated, excessively risky. In the right balance, he reasoned, they could actually lead to greater diversification and solid returns.

Brinson ’68 received the University’s highest honor last fall, the Regents’ Distinguished Alumnus Award, because of his achievements in institutional investing and his pioneering approach to global markets. 

That investment acumen—worth an investment portfolio of over a trillion dollars, with a “t,” in the late 1990s—earned Brinson the highest honor of the Chartered Financial Analysts Institute, an award given to such notables as Warren Buffett, and a lifetime Horatio Alger Association membership in 2008.

Like the classic Alger story, Brinson didn’t begin life around huge amounts of money. He grew up in Renton in modest circumstances. His father, a Seattle bus driver, and his mother, a Sears store clerk, encouraged education even though they had no financial means, says Brinson.

He enrolled at Seattle University as an undergraduate, but couldn’t afford room and board so he commuted daily and worked before and after classes. Brinson paid for college through his job at Oberto Sausage on Rainier Avenue.

“I was in charge of cleaning the grease pits, which would encourage anyone to get an education,” says Brinson with a laugh. He also washed the Oberto trucks, smoked pepperoni and sausage, and vacuumed mold off the salami.

His day job was a world away from finance, his major at Seattle U. and eventually his concentration for his MBA at Washington State. WSU gave Brinson a teaching assistantship, enabling him to attend and complete his graduate work in finance.

At WSU, Brinson began developing his philosophies on investment, primarily the application of mathematical models to investing and an interest in global markets. “I was certainly involved in the incipient stages of quantitative analysis applied to investment management,” says Brinson. “People forget that prior to the 1970s most of investing was very qualitative, soft analysis.”

Under the direction of finance professor Omer Carey, Brinson distinguished himself with his interest in quantitative rigor. The MBA degree led to 12 years in an insurance company on the East Coast, followed by an offer to run a large Chicago bank’s investment office, which excited him because the bank had offices in London. “It gave me a chance to leapfrog into global investing,” says Brinson. 

In 1989, Brinson established his own investment firm, Brinson Partners Inc., a major asset management firm that represented some of the nation’s largest institutions and with offices in Chicago, London, and Tokyo. His success at money management drew acclaim, but primarily Brinson is credited with developing international investing as a viable strategy.

 He, along with two co-authors, also published findings in 1986 that showed large pension funds performed just as well or better with simple asset allocation—choosing various, diverse classes for investment—than professional pension managers making active choices.

Brinson shared some of his knowledge after receiving the Regents’ Alumnus award last fall, delivering the eponymous Brinson Distinguished Lecture in Finance. At the lecture, Brinson laid out the unpredictability of assets over time and warned of following the crowd. “Don’t assume that what might make an attractive investment today will be an attractive investment tomorrow,” he says.

Brinson left the industry in 2001 after 30 years in the money management business to concentrate on his private investment firm and the Brinson Foundation. The foundation, managed by Brinson, his wife, and two daughters and their husbands, awards grants for education, health care, and scientific research.

“We’ve made grants that have helped young people who had demonstrated success in the classroom,” but didn’t have funding to continue, says Brinson. “To provide funding for those people has been very rewarding, because we knew if we weren’t there, there was no way for them to go forward.”

Brinson’s contributions have also helped WSU’s education mission. In addition to the finance lecture, Brinson’s endowed professorship in finance led to the Cougar Investment Fund and its trading room for students.

PANORAMA

Digging the new EcoWell

by Larry Clark

Students and faculty develop a mighty thirst after working out at WSU’s Student Recreation Center, and now they have a new, healthy, and environmentally friendly option to quench it.

The EcoWell vending machine’s slick iPhone-like touchscreen lets users choose their water (purified, carbonated, or hot), add any percentage and mix of juices, and include energy supplements if desired. But thirsty patrons better have their own bottles. An EcoWell machine only dispenses drinks, not disposable containers.

EcoWell grew from the minds and efforts of Reid Schilperoort ’10, Brian Boler ’09, and Andy Whitaker ’09, now at MIT graduate school, when they were students in the College of Engineering and Architecture’s Harold Frank program in 2009. The Frank program brings together engineering and business students interested in technological entrepreneurship.

Schilperoort, who graduated with a business degree last spring, says Boler, an engineering student, had the idea of an environmentally friendly vending machine while he was taking a class from engineering instructor Don Tilton ’85. Tilton was enthusiastic about the idea and is now one of the EcoWell partners.

In the class, says Schilperoort, “We came up with a proof of concept for a refillable drink machine. We did a small version that only dispensed water and tested it around campus, then competed in the statewide business plan competition and won.”

After that, EcoWell began to take off. Caryn Parker, a San Francisco Bay area entrepreneur, had a similar idea, and joined the WSU students and Tilton. The team also began to build on their original concept for the vending kiosk.

“It started off as just a water thing, and then we thought well, let’s add hot water. Let’s add carbonated water, let’s add some flavors. So the next thing you know, it’s a whole customizable, personalized beverage machine,” says Schilperoort.

The machine works with an account set up by a user, who gets a small “touch” tag. When someone wants a drink, they touch the tag to the machine, which then accesses that person’s account. After using the touchscreen to customize a drink, the user places a container under the dispenser—like an old-style coffee vending machine—and gets the order.

EcoWell placed their first kiosk at Lincoln Middle School in Pullman, followed by machines at Avista corporate headquarters in Spokane, Moscow (Idaho) High School, Spokane City Hall, and a few other locations. 

The EcoWell team, currently made up of five full-time and several part-time employees, has plans to expand to Washington’s west side, and then down the coast to California.

“Corporate campuses are some of our targets. College campuses, high schools, middle schools, gyms are some of our initial targets for recurring traffic, rather than malls or areas where people might go through only once every couple of weeks,” says Boler.

They also want to provide the machines around Washington State, says Schilperoort. “We’d like to expand to WSU branch campuses, and to different buildings around WSU like the CUB, to create a network where people can fill their bottles all over.”

The nascent company has already begun to get recognition. Perfect Business Summit 2010, designed to bring entrepreneurs and investors together, has already selected EcoWell’s business pitch as one of the top 10 among more than 1,300 entrants. Greater Spokane Inc., devoted to regional economic development, gave its 2010 Catalyst Award for Emerging Innovators of the Year to Schilperoort and Boler.

The EcoWell founders also attended a prestigious TEDx innovation conference last fall, where participants developed ideas to reduce plastic waste. EcoWell’s combination of customer-driven and waste-free service attracted a lot of attention.

“A lot of nonprofits want people to pledge to stop using plastic. Until there’s some technology that can step in and replace that void, it’s really hard for people to change,” says Schilperoort.

He credits the Frank program, started in 2004 by engineering alumnus Harold ’48 and Diana Frank, for spurring the idea to success.

“It’s one of the best-kept secrets at Washington State University. We wouldn’t be here without it, because I never would have partnered up with my team,” says Schilperoort.

In addition to the business success, say Schilperoort and Boler, they are helping the planet. More than 80 million plastic containers are discarded each day in the U.S., and only 20 percent are recycled. They estimate that more than 10,000 containers will be saved each year by the Lincoln Middle School machine alone.

PANORAMA

Learn and use

by Joanna Steward ’86

Most days, Bryan Saftler ’08 looked much like any other student, shuttling between classes in Todd Hall, taking notes, water bottle close at hand. But away from campus, the outgoing Seattle native was a budding businessman, supplying his Pi Kappa Phi fraternity and the rest of the WSU Greek system with custom apparel, everything from triple-thread-count lettered sweatshirts to weekly date dash tee-shirts. His company, Free Inke, set up operations in the basement of Saftler’s house on Campus Street; he and his partners worked before class, after class, and in-between to fill the ever-growing number of orders. 

Despite his local success, Saftler knew he had a lot to learn. He’d chosen to attend WSU specifically for the entrepreneurship major and the hands-on opportunities the business program provided. His sophomore year, they entered Free Inke in the university’s business plan competition, but didn’t advance past the first round. “As an undergrad,” he recalls, “I had no knowledge of actual business practices.”

In his senior year, however, everything clicked. “I would learn a process or tool in class one day, then go and immediately apply it in my business and to the business plan with my team the next.” The team included Ali Arian ’08, Chris Henry ’08, and Jeremy Cross ’08. They expanded the enterprise model to serve the entire university community and signed up for the competition once again. 

Now in its eighth year, the WSU business plan competition has grown into a robust, two-stage, multi-category competition offering more than $100,000 in prize money. It’s a fitting tribute to the passionate alumnus whose gift was instrumental in starting the program.

In the 1970s, Jim Huber (’66, ’70 MBA) fashioned a successful business out of the basic need for clean clothes: His ATCON Services company provided and maintained washers and dryers for the numerous apartment complexes springing up around Seattle. He visited campus often, volunteered with the College of Business advisory council, and was an early member of the WSU Foundation Board of Trustees. 

Huber and five others were on their way to Pullman for the 1992 Apple Cup when the twin-engine airplane he was piloting iced up over the Cascades and crashed. Everyone on board was killed: Huber, his wife, their two teenage sons, and friends Jerry ’66 and Kris Schei. 

Huber was a seasoned pilot, an avid yachtsman, and a savvy entrepreneur; ATCON was only one of many business investments over the years. Friends described him as having a knack for putting deals together. The Hubers’ will provided that should there be no heirs, a portion of the estate assets would go to Washington State University and other nonprofit organizations. The Huber estate provided $2.8 million to WSU, with more than $1.2 million earmarked for the College of Business. Rom Markin, dean of the college at the time, used the funds to create the Huber Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship, several named scholarships, and the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, which in turn launched the Business Plan Competition in 2004.

“There was a whole team of people who recognized that entrepreneurship was something that needed to happen all across the campus,” says Len Jessup, director of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Information Systems* and former dean of the business college. At the undergraduate level, business and engineering combined resources three years ago to offer Entrepreneurship 490, a year-long, cross-taught project class in which students work in teams to identify a technology, build a prototype, and then write a business plan around the concept. Ideas run the gamut, from an inch-long USB-to-USB transfer device to the vending machine-sized EcoWell kiosk (see Digging the new EcoWell, page 18).

At the graduate level, all MBA students are required to write a business plan as their capstone project; those enrolled at the Pullman campus must also enter that plan in the competition. A step up from the undergraduate initiative, Jessup encourages them to seek out more advanced, patented technology not only at WSU, but at other universities and across the private sector as well. Jason Burt’s (’07, ’10 MBA) search led him and his team to QVET™, a rapid diagnostic technology for veterinarians similar to a home pregnancy test and developed at the University of Idaho. “One major factor was how close to market the product was,” said Burt via email. “While everyone thinks they have a great idea, if you really look at the market, there are at least ten other people working on something similar.” These sophisticated business plans are much more difficult to write, but offer the very real possibilities of scalable products and enormous markets, which in turn attract investors.

The WSU competition extends well beyond Pullman. All undergraduate team members must be Cougars, but they may be enrolled at any campus, including WSU Online. The top teams from concurrent competitions at the WSU business centers in Switzerland and China participate in the Pullman event each year, and up to half of each graduate-level team may include students from other universities. There are also two non-student categories: an open community league sponsored by the Port of Whitman County and a league for high school students.

Last April, more than 70 volunteer judges trekked to Pullman from all over the West Coast for the two-day competition—venture capitalists, angel investors, business owners, corporate executives, bankers, lawyers, accountants, even those habitual entrepreneurs looking for their next gig amongst the 52 entries. Jessup believes the experience of the judges and their willingness to spend their own money to attend is proof of the quality of the competition. 

Free Inke won the 2008 undergraduate division and went on to turn a respectable profit before closing in 2009 so that team members could move on to other opportunities. Saftler, now a product manager for Microsoft in London, uses his entrepreneurial skills every day. “The business course material and knowledge has stuck with me so much more because I got a chance to learn and use.”

The QVET™ technology is in the first stages of product development at BioTracking, a Moscow, Idaho, company. Meanwhile, Burt has caught the entrepreneurial bug and is working full-time on developing Uaddoo, a social media gift registry.  

*The Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and the Department of Information Systems recently combined to form the Department of Entrepreneurship and Information Systems.

FIRST WORDS

Nature Boy Reads On

by Tim Steury

We received a wonderful letter recently from Clarence Schuchman ’38 about tuition costs and music. 

Referring to published comments by President Floyd about rising tuition costs, Mr. Schuchman recalls visiting Bursar Kruegel’s office and “plunking down thirty-two dollars and some odd cents” for his second semester tuition, then finding a job—washing windows of the bursar’s office—for which he would receive fourteen and a half cents an hour.

Mr. Schuchman’s letter is just one of the many journeys into the past that frequent my days here.

The past indeed seems “a foreign country,” as novelist L.P. Hartley observed. “They do things differently there.” The Washington State past that Mr. Schuchman and others evoke, however, is foreign in an intriguing and beguiling way.

Maybe it’s my age, or my 21 years at WSU, that increasingly draws me toward trying to understand our past. On the other hand, it is also true that in tough times, we are drawn to the past—and not always just for nostalgic comfort.

Any time a story reaches beneath the surface, the past intrudes. Nothing, after all, emerges from a vacuum, and research about that past always leads toward understanding and insight. As Hannelore Sudermann notes in her story about Northwest architecture, what we are as a university and what much of the region looks like depend very much on President Enoch A. Bryan’s ambition—and continues in spite of the battles between one-time friends Ernest Holland and UW president Henry Suzzallo, who with a cost-conscious legislature tried fiercely to suppress WSC’s ambition. That was 90 years ago.

Hannelore also writes about Worth Griffin, who was head of the art program when Clarence Schuchman was a student here. Griffin was commissioned by President Holland to tour the Northwest and paint portraits of notable Northwesterners. His portraits included those of many Indians, and he organized a summer artists’ colony in Nespelem. What we’re left with are portraits of those who might otherwise have been entirely lost to memory.

Eric Sorensen and I reach into the deep past, he millions of years farther than the mere ten thousand years of my story. As indirect as the subjects might be, however, they became the subjects of study here, woven into the intellectual tapestry that makes a university.

Finally, a World War II memoir by French-born Nicole Taflinger ’66, ’68 tells the enormously romantic story of how she met her husband Gordon Taflinger, who had to ask General George Patton permission to marry her and eventually came to WSU to teach business administration, the two of them adding tremendously to the texture of our collective story.

His financial points out of the way, Clarence Schuchman actually spends most of his letter recalling his musical experience here. If you look in the 1936 Chinook, you’ll find him just in front of the timpani, one of three French horns in the orchestra.

After extolling the ear and talent of Harold Wheeler, Mr. Schuchman recalls a mysterious Mr. Havlicek who came to WSC, late of the Boston Symphony, which he had to leave because of an injured finger.

One day, Schuchman recalls, Mr. Havlicek borrowed a violin and played the Largo movement from Dvorak’s New World symphony, “while we all sat there with our mouths open. I have yet to hear a more wonderful performance from any concert stage.”

Thanks to Mr. Schuchman, now we can hear it, too, resonating through his memory across the decades, part of the score to a rich and wondrous story.

Tim Steury, Editor

P.S. And that bit about Nature Boy? See Larry Clark’s “HaiCoug.” He tells our story far more succinctly than I have. And read Clarence Schuchman’s letter at wsm.wsu.edu/OurStory.

LETTERS

Civility

Professor Cornell Clayton’s article in the winter issue, “Understanding the Civility Crisis” is thought-provoking. However, he betrays the liberal bias common to the majority of today’s college professors. All of the examples he mentions depicting “incivility” in political discourse are attributed to conservative commentators or politicians, as if the right had a monopoly on it.

Hardly. He fails to mention, for example, the current king of media incivility, MSNBC’s character assassin Keith Olbermann, who regularly violently trashes anything conservative and has in the past called President Bush a liar and told him to shut up. The current climate of political discourse was created by President Obama himself, who disastrously misread his election as a mandate to change America’s social contract and take a center-right country far to the left.

Most Americans fear for America (with good reason), and are reacting accordingly. Clayton’s own words undermine his article when he states that “ . . .those without power may often be excluded from making claims in a civil way.” The Republicans had no power in the first two years of Obama’s administration, and he did what he wanted, yet continues to blame them for obstructionism. This from a president who ran on a campaign of reaching across the aisle, yet when Republicans wanted to present their ideas during the first White House meeting told them that “elections have consequences, and I won.”

So let’s look at both sides of the current climate, and its causes.

Bill Scott ’68
Nipomo, CA

Situational ethics has given license to incivility in political debate, but it doesn’t validate character and ethnic assassination. We must come to agreement that Cain’s murderous behavior towards Abel was not justified. Politicians and individuals wounded from incivility battles have much to forgive before they can effectively serve the best interests of society. Civility in political discourse fueled by the media can set in motion how society collaborates in developing public policy. 

On the night of the 2010 elections, while channel searching elections results, I stumbled upon the 1964 classic movie The Best Man, starring Henry Fonda. Several men seek their party’s presidential nomination. The race narrows to two men. One resorts to mudslinging, the other acts with civility. The movie ends with a clear picture that character in politicians matters.

Keith Baldwin ’80
Silverton, OR

Your story of loud opinions expressed on Pike [St.] in the winter magazine was thought-provoking. No one has minded streets blocked, parades, and megaphones for liberal causes in Seattle. They are regular occurrences day and night.

Your friend was correct. Verbal dialogue is our democracy. Your conservative experience in Seattle was not the norm, but rather a voice from a minority. Any Hitler reference is ridiculous. The Hitler Bush references were ridiculous.

Students of the WSU Republican group erected a fence on campus and opened discussion on the border with Mexico. They were taunted and jeered...by professors! Where was the civility? Where was the freedom of ideas and expression? My son was telling me of this complaining that Republicans had made a symbol and talked of this issue. He recognized the teacher and was telling of his vitriolic abuse of the kids.

By the way, I’m a teacher, member of the NEA and WEA, and I’d like to dump our President and elect one who stays home on Veteran’s Day. I’ll say it civilly and not as a comedian on TV. I’ll hold a sign, write a letter, and vote. It’s the American way! We have a fine Republic.

Laura Kornelis ’79
Poulsbo

It’s suffragist

In your winter issue, in both articles about civility, you mention “Suffragettes” in a reference to being seen as “uncivil” in the past. Please do your homework here. Unless you were referring to the British women involved in the movement for women’s rights, this wording in incorrect. The American women were Suffragists. They were generally more “civil” in their approach to making their principles heard, and did not chain themselves to Parliament gates such as their Suffragette sisters in England. It may be a minor point, but I see this error repeatedly in the print media, and it is discouraging.

Sharon Dietrich ’72

The cultivated landscape

The fall 2010 issue of Washington State Magazine was full of interesting and informative, even captivating and surprising, stories on Northwest agriculture. Everything from onions to apples to camelina to codling moths and integrated pest management. Plus how Tree Top got started, city farms, and even a nod at the literature of pastoral. I read the issue from cover to cover!

Actually, I was humbled by the magnitude and scope of the agricultural endeavors pursued in Washington state described in this issue. Recently I learned that just in southeastern Washington alone over 600,000 acres are under cultivation for wheat. All the rest of the agricultural activities in this corner of the state—including that devoted to the world-famous Walla Walla Sweet Onion—does not exceed 7,000 acres!

Thanks for publishing a print edition of Washington State Magazine. If it were an online mag only, I’d never get this much benefit from it.

Edwin A. Karlow, ’68 MS, ’71 PhD
Walla Walla

Correction:
I would like to clarify the status of the “Road to Cottonwood” in the North Cascades National Park mentioned in the “Civility in Politics” article in the last issue. The bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009 but stalled in the United States Senate in 2010. I will continue to work with environmental groups and others to get this “correction bill” passed in Congress so this rustic road can be reopened and access to the North Cascades National Park from Stehekin be restored. I truly now understand what the expression means when people say, “it will take an act of Congress!”

Linda (O’Neal) Evans Parlette ’68
State Senator, 12th District, Wenatchee

SPORTS

Run to greatness

by Jason Krump ’93

On an overcast, frigid December afternoon, two-time NCAA 400-meter hurdles champion Jeshua Anderson is running with his track teammates in the Indoor Practice Facility. 

Anderson’s training regime today includes a 300-meter sprint, then four minutes rest during which he talks with hurdles coach Mark Macdonald and head coach Rick Sloan, followed by another 300-meter run. After just a minute’s rest, Anderson runs a 200-meter sprint, rests 10 minutes while he talks with the coaches again, then wraps it up with a 300-meter run.

At the end of each run, Anderson has led the way.

“If you’re looking to get pushed in a workout session, he is always there, and there is nobody on our team that can beat him,” Sloan says.

Very few times has anyone beaten Anderson during his collegiate career. 

Jeshua AndersonJeshua Anderson. Photo Kirby Lee/Image of Sport

“He’s probably one of the greatest athletes and competitors that we’ve ever had at Washington State University,” says Sloan, who has coached Olympic gold medalist Dan O’Brien and world champion Bernard Lagat ’01. “He is a remarkable talent.”

Anderson is just the third man to win the NCAA 400-meter hurdles title as a freshman and sophomore. He has won two NCAA Championships and is a three-time Pac-10 champion in the event. 

“You have a mindset that you are going to win,” the soft-spoken Anderson explains. “You know what’s going to happen because you’ve done it so much in practice. When you get to the race it is second nature ...

“The one big thing [about the 400-meter hurdles] is there are 10 hurdles in the race and anyone can get off rhythm,” Anderson adds. “Everybody has a little advantage. If you get off rhythm it’s kind of hard to get back into your stride pattern again.”

One of the few times Anderson fell off rhythm occurred at the 2010 NCAA Championships.

Vying for his third straight NCAA 400-meter hurdles title at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field, Anderson held the lead approaching the ninth hurdle when he hesitated for a split second.

South Carolina’s Johnny Dutch,whom Anderson had bested at the NCAA Champion- ships a year before, overtook Anderson on the straightaway to deny Anderson his third title.

That summer, Dutch decided to leave school to pursue a professional career. Anderson considered joining his friend and rival, but decided to stay at WSU.

“I finished the NCAAs and said, ‘Maybe I want to make this move to take my talents to the next level,’” says Anderson. “I don’t want to sell myself short, and I didn’t want to close any opportunities or doors that I like to be open.”

Ironically, the NCAA defeat provided an opening for Anderson that he may not have had otherwise for his senior season.

“It’s a blessing that it happened because, had it not happened, if I had won, I probably would have definitely gone pro,” he says. “For me to finish out my collegiate career here is a blessing. I don’t want to leave and not get that degree that I’ve been working toward.”

On this December day, six months removed from his disappointment at the NCAAs, Anderson is looking ahead six months and the 2011 NCAA Championships.

“This year, it is something that fuels me to work even harder,” Anderson says.

Though a four-peat is not possible anymore, Anderson still has a goal in his sights—to break the collegiate 400-meter hurdles record of 47.10 by Samuel Matete of Auburn in 1991.

“It gives me something to work for,” says Anderson, whose personal best is 48.47, set at the 2009 NCAA Championships.

“He’s a workaholic,” says Macdonald. “He will do anything. If I called now to say we have practice at five o’clock at Lewiston to run hills, he would be the first one there.”

The coaches watch that work ethic so he doesn’t overextend.

 “The No. 1 thing through every interval and practice session is seeing how he’s feeling so he comes out of it healthy,” explains Macdonald. “He can’t win anything if he’s hurt.”

“I adopted this philosophy with Dan O’Brien,” Sloan says. “I came to the conclusion that he’s so great, make sure he is healthy, get him to the track meet with his shoes, and the rest is going to take care of itself. 

“With Jess, we feel the same way,” Sloan adds. “He is very fit, but he’s got to be healthy. No matter how good you are, if you’re hurt, you become common.”

Common is not something Anderson is known to be on the track. Though he is soft-spoken, Anderson speaks loudly when he is in his venue of competition, and his reaction after winning races—shouting in celebration of victory—has been captured in photographs, one of which hangs in the track and field office. 

“Usually only in the big races does he react that way,” says Macdonald. “He just loves to win, and when he wins something big, he has that type of reaction.”

Anderson describes his exuberance as a culmination of the work he puts in, such as what he is doing on this winter day: “That fire is giving praise and glory to God.”

Anderson’s accomplishments include achieving one of the goals he set his freshman year.

“My biggest thing was to put Washington State on the map. As long as I was showing and wearing the colors proudly, and then doing the best I can performance-wise, that’s all I wanted to do.”

SPORTS

Hit or be hit

by Hope Tinney

Hit or be hit. It’s the essence of dodgeball.

“The feeling after hitting somebody,” muses Peter Brown, a senior finance major, after his Delta Upsilon team beat the Sig Ep Slingers on a cold night in November, “that’s like, I’m better than you. Yeah!”

“Dodgeball is a sport of violence, exclusion, and degradation,” explains a narrator in the 2004 movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. Though millions of American school children would probably agree with that description, the popular film helped usher in a new wave of interest for the old schoolyard sport.

In 2005 there was enough interest at WSU that dodgeball became an intramural sport, says Skyler Archibald, a graduate assistant in competitive sports. “[The comedy film] definitely did have an effect, a strong effect, on making dodgeball more popular,” he says. With 42 teams on the fall roster, the sport still doesn’t approach the participation level of flag football, which fielded 150 teams this year. But “Dodgeball is a good second sport,” Archibald says. “It’s a little more low-key, a little less strenuous.”

But that’s all relative. 

“Hands on the wall! Dodgeball!” calls the referee, and twelve players race to the center line to grab one of six red or yellow six-inch foam balls.

On this night in November, the cantaloupe-size spheres are flying fast and furious. The squeak of rubber soles on the hardwood floor keeps rhythm with the thwack of balls hitting the walls and the occupants of Smith 212. 

Several seconds of frenzied activity are followed by more seconds of silence and dirty dog stares across the court as players regroup and gather up balls. The game is officially “self-officiated,” so players who get hit leave the court and head to “jail” with no stop in the action.

The history of dodgeball is fuzzy. According to the International Dodgeball Federation, it was “elevated” from a playground game to a sport in 1997 and it is now played around the world. Rules vary from place to place, but the essence is the same—hit or be hit, and the last team standing wins.

At WSU, teams play best-of-seven matches and each game lasts a maximum of ten minutes for a total playing time of 40 minutes. Then, if neither team has won, it goes to sudden-death overtime. 

It is the second game of the WSU Intramural Dodgeball playoffs and the first game Delta Upsilon has fielded a complete team of six players. Still, their undefeated season has earned them a first-round bye in the men’s competitive bracket. “I’m hoping to come out of this with a championship,” says Brown. 

Delta Upsilon fields a team in every intramural sport offered at WSU, Brown says, except for the co-ed division of WSU’s dodgeball league. “We found that it’s actually really hard to get girls.”

“Hit girls?”

No, get girls. Girls like playing co-ed softball, he says, but dodgeball, not so much.

Still, 16 of the teams entered in this year’s dodgeball league were co-ed.

If the guys go easy on girls in the co-ed division, Haley Tellesbo hasn’t noticed. “If you’re out there, you need to know that people are going to be playing hard,” says Tellesbo, a sophomore pre-nursing major on the Clown Punchers. 

But Tellesbo, a three-sport high school athlete, is good at dodging. In the previous game she was one of two people standing for the sudden-death overtime, and she hit her mark to help win the game and advance in the playoffs. 

But on this night, the Clown Punchers fall to the Hoarders after Hannah Coughlin sinks a basket from the far side of half court to spring four fellow Hoarders from jail in the fifth and deciding game of the match. Though not part of the movie version of dodgeball, the sink-a-basket-and-free-players-from-jail rule is common in leagues that play on basketball courts.

“It’s a lot of fun,” says Coughlin, a former high school basketball player who scored a jailbreak in her previous game as well. “It’s really competitive, but it’s really easy. It’s something anyone can do.”

As Archibald says, dodgeball makes a good second sport. Virtually everyone on the court plays something else as well. An informal, entirely unscientific poll revealed that most dodgeball players were varsity athletes in high school. Some played football, some played soccer or ran track. And most, it seems, played baseball.

“We could have played small college ball,” says Derrick Hwang of The Redeem Team, which went on to win the 2010 league championship. “We’re all baseball players.” 

Jeff Donovan, a senior mathematics major and manager of The Redeem Team, says the attributes of a good dodgeball player are “tenacity, being athletic, being able to throw.” A pitcher in high school, Donovan says he’s tired after a forty-minute game. You can throw a lot of balls in forty minutes, he says. 

Which is what makes it fun.

“Being able to throw stuff at other people,” says freshman Jordon Beeman, a teammate on The Redeem Team. “It’s barbaric.”

IN SEASON

Dungeness Crab

by Hannelore Sudermann

A few weeks ago, Brian Toste ’99 and his three-man crew set out from Westport, in southwest Washington, in Toste’s 45-foot vessel Huntress in search of Dungeness crab. They spent the first few days tying line and setting out some 500 crab traps, circles of metal and wire about the size and shape of large truck tires. 

A few days later, when the traps were full, they returned to their buoys and pulled them out of the water. The crew quickly empties them by hand, says Toste. They toss the females and the male crabs smaller than 6-¼ inches across the back into the water, replenish the bait (usually squid and dead fish), and drop the pot back in before zooming off to the next one. 

For the first three to four weeks of the season, the trap is full with up to 20 wriggling brown crabs. Males of the right size are dropped into a live storage tank. 

All this is done pretty much regardless of the weather or the waves. “You have to keep track of the tide and the times, you have to take advantage of the weather windows,” says Toste. The peak of the Dungeness crab harvest is January and February, right smack in the middle of winter storm season. Toste and his crew are often out in 30-foot swells retrieving and emptying their pots.

 “It’s extremely miserable out there,” says Toste. It helps if you are aggressive and physical. “When you’re in the crab, the work’s easy.” It’s a race to tend all 500 pots in a day. Washington fishermen set pots anywhere between 12 feet and 200 feet below the surface, says Toste. He typically fishes up to 60 feet deep.

In Washington, the commercial fishing season usually opens in early December in an area 13 miles north of the Columbia River and south and a month later along the Olympic Peninsula. The tribal fishery starts earlier. While just 238 commercial fishermen are licensed along with 30 tribal fishermen to hunt for crab along Washington’s coast, there are tens of thousands of pots out there. “It’s extremely crowded,” says Toste. In some places at peak season, “we don’t have the width of a pickup between one string and another.”

“It’s like a gold rush,” says Steve Harbell, the WSU/UW Marine Fisheries coordinator. “A lot of crab is harvested in the first couple of weeks.” The season continues through the summer. But as the days grow longer, fewer and fewer crabs show up in the pots. Toste catches 85 percent of his crab in the first month, and he readies for the end of harvest somewhere in late summer after he starts pulling up empties.

While the crab is named for Dungeness Bay, an inlet along the Strait of Juan de Fuca near Port Angeles, its habitat includes the Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean Shelf, which runs from Alaska down to Santa Barbara, California. From the intertidal shore out to 300 feet deep, the crabs cover the floor by the millions, crawling across it on their sideways hunt for food. 

The commercial harvest can only open if the crabs are ready, says Brian’s dad, Ray Toste, head of the Washington Dungeness Crab Fisherman’s Association. “We do seasonal testing,” he says. Following a certain protocol, crab managers check for toxins and to see if the crab is in optimal condition, mature with strong shells and plenty of meat. 

“Crustaceans are kind of like insects, they have to shed their shells to grow,” says Harbell. The crabs you find at the market or store are likely four years old and may have shed their shells 12 times to get to harvestable size. “I say to kids, ‘How would you like to grow in the same clothes you have on?’”

Before and after molting, the crab develops its new shell. While the shell is still soft, the crab inflates it slightly with water, to make it a little bigger to grow into. Before and after the molt the meat isn’t the best quality, says Harbell. “And when you handle them with a soft shell, you can kill them pretty easily.” The major molt typically takes place in the late summer and early fall. During that time, crab fishing season is closed.

Even though they’re taking around 90 percent of the harvestable crab, by throwing back the females and the smaller males, the fishermen have been able to keep the Washington Dungeness stocks high, says Harbell. “Many years ago, we thought we were on a seven year cycle with peak years every seven,” says Harbell. But the last 20 years have changed that thinking. “The record catch for Washington was about 21 million pounds, and we’ve been in about 12 million, which is a good harvest, for the past three years.”

When the crabs are mature and the shell sufficiently hard, their meat yield is about 25 percent of their weight, one of the highest yield ratios of any food crab, says Harbell. If you don’t catch your own crab, he has this advice. “First it depends on what you’re going to do with it.” Some people like to serve crab in the shell, he notes. But for just the meat, you simply need to do the math. Remember that 25 percent meat yield. “If it’s $5 for the meat, versus $20 for the whole crab, you’re paying the same price, and you don’t have to do the work.”

Nonetheless, crabs are not so hard to clean, says Harbell. “All of us amateurs can shake a crab in five minutes,” he says. It takes a pro about a minute. The task of cleaning a cooked crab involves removing the back and flipping it over and pulling off the shell covering the abdomen. Then you pull off the visceral organs. A brown matter, called crab butter, will be present. Harbell likes to eat it with the crab, but most people wash it off. Then the body can be broken in half and the legs with attached body meat can be snapped off one at a time.

Dungeness is not like blue crab, which requires an intensive picking and cleaning, says Harbell. With the Dungeness, the sweet and delicate meat slides right out.

Jim Haguewood ’81, former director of the Clallam County Economic Development Council, has been eating and cleaning crab for as long as he can remember. His family owned the Haguewoods Restaurant in Port Angeles for 58 years. After graduating in hotel and restaurant management, he came home and ran the local landmark until 1998. Since then he’s turned his efforts toward economic development, but food isn’t far behind. “When you’re helping a community develop its economy, you look at what it has that’s truly unique,” says Haguewood. “For us, one of those things is Dungeness crab. We have the name and we have the crab.”

In 2002, the Port Angeles community kicked off its first Dungeness Crab and Seafood Festival. With the seafood, a growing local wine industry, and a burgeoning year-round fresh-produce business, the town couldn’t ignore its food assets. “With the festival, restaurants create their own unique menu items and they’re paired with wine,” says Haguewood. Crab cakes, crab rolls, crab dip, crab rangoon, crab Louis, crab cocktail, crab quesadillas, and crab bisque are just some of the offerings. Still, Haguewood’s favorite way to eat Dungeness crab is the simplest—cooked in salted water and then chilled. 

Locally, there are several ways to obtain crabs, he says. One is to boat out on the water and put down a crab trap. You go back at least half a day later and retrieve it. The second is to fish off a pier using a ring net with a box of bait inside. And the third requires less equipment. On certain low tides, anyone with hip waders, a sack, and a rake can walk out at night with a flashlight and spot the crabs just under the water and pick them up. “It’s quite a social event,” says Haguewood. To do any of these, you must obtain a state crab fishing license and complete a catch record card. 

You can also go out and look for a commercial fisherman selling crabs off his boat, says Toste. While he sells much of his catch to a processor, Toste will also sell to the live market and to locals who seek him out at the dock.

Toste grew up with his dad and brothers out fishing. He went to WSU and studied education and later found work in the Seattle area. But eventually he found his way back to Westport and on to a fishing vessel. In 2005, he bought his own boat, and in the past few years found a great crew, the key pieces to a successful crab fishing business. “I had to come back,” says Toste. “It’s in my blood.€

NEW MEDIA

Mexican Women and the Other Side of Immigration: Engendering Transnational Ties by Luz Maria Gordillo University of Texas Press, Austin, TX, 2010 :: Review by Hannelore Sudermann :: There are communities of people who live their lives in two places at once. Residents of Detroit, Michigan, and the small town of San Ignacio, Mexico, for example. In her book, historian Luz Maria Gordillo sets out to explain the history of this phenomenon, which dates back to the 1940s when the Bracero Program started bringing temporary Mexican laborers into the Midwest.

She hones that focus to women from San Ignacio who started moving into Detroit in the 1970s. Tracing the connections back to the first families to move to Michigan’s largest city, Gordillo explores how hometown and cultural connections helped the women become established in their new community—figuring out where to live, work, and send their children to school. Most have settled into an area called Mexican Town.

Looking deeper, she focuses on several women to see how their relationships and senses of identity are affected by the migrations. Because the men of San Ignacio left first to work in the United States, the women of San Ignacio had to take on the more typically male roles of local bread-winners and decision-makers. The changing gender roles carried forward when these women moved north to work and be closer to their husbands and families.

Though many of the families Gordillo writes about have moved permanently to Detroit, they still maintain ties to their old town, sending money to help their families, building themselves retirement homes and making improvements. Every January, the San Ignacians return home to reconnect with their families and communities. Both Detroit and San Ignacio “are integral to their everyday lives and should be considered parts of a whole,” Gordillo writes.

While the book is a scholarly historical and anthropological assessment, it’s of value to the general reader because it opens a view into the lives and ideals of the people, particularly women, who have migrated to the United States to work and be with their families. By telling the stories of real families, including one where the husband has a green card, the young son is a citizen, and the wife is undocumented, Gordillo shows us how complicated life for her subjects can be.

Luz Maria Gordillo teaches history and women’s studies at WSU Vancouver. Some of her classes center on women’s history and Latin American issues. 

Black Leapt In by Chris Forhan ’82 Barrow Street Books, 2009 :: Review by Angela Sams ’11 :: In Chris Forhan’s latest collection of poems, Black Leapt In, the writer draws upon his childhood in Seattle, using striking natural images and startling honesty and insight. He balances straightforward description of the environment he grew up in with an older, wiser voice that recollects, sometimes sarcastically, that time in his life. Forhan dedicated Black Leapt In to his father, who died in 1973, and many of the poems allude to him.

Religion and family weave their way through the pieces: “The priest sang in Latin. He didn’t ask my opinion. | The slim missal my mother pressed to my palm | she longed to offer to a better boy, | the twin I’d killed in the womb,” he writes in “Self-Portrait.”

Nature is also a prevalent theme, especially in poems like “Flowers of the World, with Full-Color Plates” and “The Woods.” In still other poems like “Last Words,” “The night sky’s a black stretch limo, boss in the back behind tinted glass.” And the “Slur of sunlight filling the backyard. August’s high wattage,” colors “What My Father Left Behind.”

The book won the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize in 2008. Overall, it is a poignant collection containing themes and subjects of family, nature, grief, and childhood to which many readers will relate.

Reprint of the poem “Black” from Black Leapt In by Chris Forhan

Sludge at the edge of the field, still water, slat fence

and its rickrack shadow. Trowel tongue.

Tulip rooted in black, cricket soaked in it.

Mask of the cedar waxwing. Snipe’s eye, fly’s face,

A nudge does it, if you’re young enough.

My jaw dropped and black leapt in,

black spleen, black brain, black car

pulling out of the driveway, turning at the top of a hill,

then noon, black in its blue suit. 

A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880–1941 by Suzanne Barta Julin (’01 PhD) South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2010 :: Review by Larry Clark ’94 :: The faces of four presidents gaze down on the Black Hills of South Dakota, a fitting vigil for a tourist destination carved, like Mount Rushmore itself, by public policy, political machinations, and private investments.

Historian Suzanne Barta Julin has documented the rise of the Black Hills tourism industry, which grew from the efforts of state and federal politicians at the shift to automobile-driven vacations in the early twentieth century. The themes of A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles reverberate far beyond western South Dakota to the growth of tourism as an industry and the alterations of natural landscapes to achieve it.

To tell the story, Julin focuses on seminal figures such as Peter Norbeck, a South Dakota governor and U.S. senator, and his near-obsession with creating a tourist destination out of the pine-covered hills. The book ranges across the patchwork of state parks, national monuments and parks, and “Wild West” towns, as they enveloped the caves, lakes, and wildlife of the area.

As more vacationers traveled by car, the Black Hills’ appeal spread beyond regional tourists after World War I. When President Calvin Coolidge spent three months there in 1927, even more people flocked to the canyons and winding roads. The completion of Mount Rushmore’s carvings by sculptor Gutzon Borglum furthered the region’s popularity.

Numerous historical photos portray the dramatic landscapes of the Black Hills, while Julin’s prose propels the story with details and insights. 

Friends of the Old Mill by Cody Beebe and the Crooks 2010 :: Review by Angela Sams ’11 :: This new roots-rock album has compelling lyrics, musical variety, and an overall upbeat feel. Cody Beebe and the Crooks (most of whom are WSU alumni) offer up twelve tracks with titles such as “Nine to Chain,” “Change of Pace,” and “Hurricane,” a pleasing assortment of rock/jazz/funk songs that contrast nicely in their use of instruments and varying tempos. Guitar is prevalent throughout, but piano can also be heard here and there, often adding a jazzy or syncopated feel. 

Some songs, such as “Nine to Chain” and “Much of Anything” incorporate fiddle and/or harmonica redolent of country music. The titles of the album’s songs don’t necessarily provide clues of how they will sound. “Fireworks” has a slower rhythm, while “Perfect Day” picks up the pace. 

“Friends of the Old Mill” is one of those albums that you can listen to any day. Whether you want to relax to a mellow tune or are looking for an upbeat song to work out to, this album has it. These are seven talented musicians whose unique combination of instruments and beautiful harmonizing are definitely worth listening to. 

Cody Beebe and the Crooks members are Cody Beebe ’08, Greg Floyd ’08, Tyler Paxton ’10, Chris Green ’08, Eric Miller ’06, Aaron Myers x’06, and Joe Catron. 

new & noteworthy

Betweener Talk

by Marcelo Diversi and Claudio Moreira Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA, 2009 :: Marcelo Diversi, an assistant professor of human development at WSU Vancouver and a native of Brazil, joins fellow Brazilian scholar Claudio Moreira in a dialogue about the contrasts in their biographies. One raised poor, the other privileged, the authors also reflect on finding acceptance in the U.S. academic world while they study poverty in Latin America and promote social justice. They won the National Communication Association Ethnography Division Book award in 2010. 

LAST WORDS

Canjo

by Larry Clark

You’ve enjoyed the cheese, but what do you do with a Cougar Gold can? 

John Elwood ’01 builds fine stringed instruments—dulcimers, mandolins, banjos, harpsichords— so using the iconic tin Cougar Gold can to craft a banjo seemed a logical choice. The Palouse-area resident created a canjo, a fretless, tunable instrument for all ages.

“These are three-string, robust instruments, have the scale dimensions of a violin, and are inexplicably pleasant to the ear,” says Elwood. “I blame it on the excellence of the cheese.”

His affection for WSU’s signature cheddar developed early as he helped his father, Lewis Elwood ’65, clean Troy Hall, the former home of Ferdinand’s.

Elwood was not alone in thinking to put strings on the musical can. Last year, the WSU Creamery received a canjo built by Dennis Skelton, an instrument maker in Georgia and father of Pullman resident Duane Skelton.

John Elwood with a canjoJohn Elwood '01 crafts banjos from WSU chees cans. Photos Zach Mazur

TRACKING

Nicole Braux Taflinger ’66, ’68—Season of Suffering

by Tim Steury

Nicole Braux (now Taflinger) was 13 years old when Germany invaded France in 1940. Years later, having survived the occupation with her mother, married an American airman, and moved to Pullman, she has written a lovely and moving memoir.

First written for her children, Season of Suffering: Coming of Age in Occupied France, 1940–45 (WSU Press) recalls the occupation of Nancy, the severe shortages, collaboration, disappearances, and despair and hope from the perspective of a teenage girl.

“The first week of the war ended my childhood,” she writes, “as if a fairy touched me with a magic wand.”

Stationed on the Maginot Line, her father was immediately captured and sent to Germany as a prisoner of war, where he would remain until the end of the war. He finally returned in 1945, emotionally broken and alienated by his captors’ cruelty and propaganda.

As German soldiers and civilians moved into Nancy, in the Lorraine province, the adolescent Nicole struggled with her feelings. In the beginning, “... many were the hours spent on the balcony waiting for father. There was no sign of him—no mail, no phone call, nothing! We feared the worst—either he’d been killed or was held captive. We prayed, we cursed, but mainly we hated. The hate of a woman losing a man is fierce. The hate of a daughter of 13 is immeasurable. My hate was fire, consuming me.”

But school started again in September, she writes, as if everything were normal. And resistance to the occupation began in various ways. Although schools were required to teach German, Nicole’s teacher, Madame Etienne, told the class on the first day that she had no intention of teaching it.

Nicole noticed that in spite of the pain and misery of everyone around them, the nuns at her school were happy, for they were married to Jesus. So she decided she would become a nun. To her dismay, she was declared too young, by both the Mother Superior and her own mother. At the conservatory where she studied music, she was drawn to the ballet being practiced nearby and decided to try out. But the ballet mistress declared her body not built for ballet.

“I couldn’t marry Jesus,” she writes, “I couldn’t dance, and I couldn’t fight the Germans. I was so helpless. ‘I couldn’t’ now became a litany in my mind.”

Friends convinced her that if she tried hard enough she could take up a musical instrument. She walked everywhere to save her tram money and arranged with her Aunt Suzanne to work in her garden to pay for a violin and lessons. 

As the region entered the worst winter in decades, cooking gas and other necessities were severely restricted, people ate bread extended with sawdust, and typhus killed many. Even so, the young Nicole was, for a while, happy with her violin and acting lessons.

But then the Germans took away her violin teacher and his family, who were Jewish. When she learned of this, she put her violin under her bed and never practiced again.

“Our deepest despair,” she writes, “came in 1942 and the first half of 1943, with England bombed, Russia losing, and America mostly silent except when invading North Africa, far away. When would they come to our rescue?”

People became collaborators out of desperation. Young men joined the Milice, the fascist paramilitary police. 

But not all was entirely as it seemed. Some of her neighbors were despised for collaborating, when they were actually working for the Resistance. And on rare occasions, resistance took on humor. A neighborhood butcher was widely disliked for catering to the Germans. Not until later was it revealed that he had been sprinkling a mysterious powder on their meat that gave them diarrhea.

At last, the B-17s and B-24s started flying over Nancy on their way to Germany. “Today, I can’t believe that at 16 years old I felt so much pleasure at the thought of those planes dispensing death, but I did—we all did!”

At last, word of D-Day arrived. Nicole, now 17, sewed Allied flags and hid them under the mattress in anticipation. American shells fell on Nancy, and the Germans began to leave. And then one morning, a neighbor returned on his bicycle to announce, “The Americans are in town.”

On September 18, 1944, Nicole stood at the kitchen window, a mirror hanging from the latch, combing her hair. The window rattled, she recalls today, and a small plane flew across the frame. When she ran, carrying her little neighbor boy, to where the plane had landed, the pilot was busy pacing off a possible landing strip.

She ran up to him and urged her charge to give the American a kiss. The boy was shy, so she did instead. The pilot was Lieutenant Ancel Gordon Taflinger, the commander of a surveillance squadron—and her future husband.

But even after their heady courtship amidst liberation, he would have to ask his commander permission to marry. That commander was General George Patton, for whom Taflinger served as personal pilot. With Patton’s blessing, theirs was the first American-French wedding in Nancy.

The couple moved to the United States following the war. Gordon Taflinger remained in the military for several years, then earned MBAs in three subjects from the University of Chicago in a year and half, testing out of the undergraduate requirements. He accepted a position at Washington State College in 1953 and taught business administration until his retirement in 1979. Nicole earned her master’s in fine arts and taught art and French in the Pullman schools. She started and ran the Nica Gallery in downtown Pullman for 17 years. The Taflingers raised five children. Gordon died in 1987. 

TRACKING

Kim Fay ’88—Communion: A Culinary Journey through Vietnam

by Tim Steury

Any prospective reader of Kim Fay’s book about Vietnamese food should be forewarned. Her descriptions are awfully good. In the city of Hue, following her first exposure to com hen, or clam rice, which was served to her Vietnamese-hot, well beyond the four-star scale, she returned the next morning for a lower heat version.

“It had not rained in the night,” she writes, “and so this com hen was topped with thin slivers of star fruit. Their tartness sparked against the dry crunch of the wonton sticks. The clams were light, and just a bit gritty from the alluvial bed of the Perfume River. The chili pinched through, roguish but painless, and then there was that cheeky spearmint, fighting for attention among the distinctive flavors. The pork crackling was clean and crunchy... .” In the process of describing her pleasure, Fay goes on to identify an emotion that is very familiar, but which I don’t recall ever having read an account of before: “There are rare and beautiful foods that I crave not only when I do not have them but also while I am in the process of eating them. My mother’s raspberry pie. Com hen. Foods I want to both devour and save for later. I lingered over a spoonful of rice, clams, coriander, and marinated banana flower.”

Well, I can conjure a pretty close approximation of her mother’s pie. But com hen? I can just taste it from her description, but I know I’ve never had anything quite like it. And so much for saving it until later. I want some right now.

Fay’s Communion: A Culinary Journey through Vietnam teases the reader like this over and over. But it’s a wonderful tease.

Fay’s culinary journey began during her five years following college, at the Elliott Bay Book Company. At one point, she writes in an email interview, she was in charge of the cookbook section. She started reading food books, so she’d know what to recommend to customers. A colleague recommended M.F.K. Fisher.

“I fell madly in love,” she writes. She devoured The Art of Eating, an anthology of five of Fisher’s books, then went on to Angelo Pellegrini, Elizabeth David, Laurie Colwin, and others.

Referring to Fisher, “I’d never experienced creative non-fiction before and hadn’t realized how the techniques of fiction— description, narrative—could be used in that way. Plus, Fisher writes with such an enviable blend of straightforwardness and sensuality.”

Then Fay went to Vietnam to teach English. But not write about its food. She figured she’d write a novel. Even though she already loved food, she did not learn to cook a single Vietnamese dish during her four years there. She was preoccupied, she writes in her introduction to Communion. 

“I was writing a novel. I was navigating a relationship...I was discovering myself as an entirely new person living in a foreign land. Also, I could just walk out my front door at any hour of the day and trade a few cents for an amazing bowl of beef noodle soup...or wander around the corner for the best home cooking in Vietnam.”

But when she finally returned to the states, she missed the food and so started to study Vietnamese cooking and plotting a return.

Fay was working as an editor for the travel website ThingsAsian.com. She started thinking about a food book. “I wanted to write something that would take readers beyond the war, which still dominated writing about Vietnam” she says, “and when I thought about the country, I realized how much of my life there had been dominated by meals.”

She became fascinated by “how intricately the food was entwined with the culture and history of the country.”

Indeed, that’s the beauty of Communion. This is an extraordinarily ambitious book. Though framed by a five-week culinary tour of Vietnam, Fay manages to not only hit more restaurants and food stalls than seems humanly possible, she brings a depth of cultural, political, and culinary history to the mix.

By the way, Fay and her entourage, which includes her sister Julie, who took all the photographs for the book, and her Vietnamese “sister” Huong, seem to eat all the time. They’ll grab a snack on the way to lunch. Or after lunch. Or both. But judging from the photographs, they are all slender. This is the wonderful thing about southeast Asian cuisine, as anyone who travels there will quickly discover. Composed largely of fruits and vegetables, the food allows the very slender citizens to eat all the time. My kind of place. 

Regardless, Communion is much more than a “foodie” book, thank goodness. Fay sets the diversity and bounty of contemporary Vietnam against a past of deprivation and famine.

Between October 1944 and May 1945, she writes, up to two million Vietnamese died of starvation, victims of food shortages exacerbated by the occupying Japanese diverting rice to ethanol production.

In Hanoi, “an entire generation was born into and raised in an environment where food as enjoyment was taboo.” Nearly all the restaurants in the country were shut down after 1954, when Vietnam declared independence from France. Restaurants and traditional festivals were abolished. “During the American war that followed until 1975, and the lean decade after the war’s end, dining out in restaurants in the north, even at street stalls, was almost nonexistent, except for the privileged few and visiting dignitaries...”

But now, with Vietnam’s food culture firmly reestablished, Fay tastes and evaluates grades of fish sauce, perfects her spring roll wrapping technique, and contemplates the originality of cuisine, exploring a country she clearly loves with a determined appetite. 

TRACKING

George Nethercutt Jr. ’67—Knowing our nation

by Hannelore Sudermann

George Nethercutt Jr. ’67 may not be in Congress anymore, but he still yearns to shorten the distance between Washington, D.C., and his home state of Washington.

The effort has kept the Spokane native busy since he left the House of Representatives in 2005, when he transformed a project from his office into the George Nethercutt Foundation, a nonprofit organization to promote civic literacy and foster leadership qualities.

“We as Americans just don’t know the story of our country. And it troubles me. As a citizen, it bothers me,” says Nethercutt as we meet one afternoon last fall in Seattle, where he’s visiting on business. He is legal counsel for the Lee & Hayes law firm in Spokane and BlueWater Strategies LLC, an energy, natural resources, and telecom lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. He is also on several boards of directors, including the Hecla Mining Company and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

Still, he makes time to think about, talk about, and engage others in U.S. history and politics. As a lawyer, former congressman, and parent, Nethercutt doesn’t want to see his children or their peers become disengaged from public policy. So every summer for the past three years, his foundation has awarded a group of college students scholarships to attend courses in economics, political science, and constitutional history. Then the Nethercutt Fellows embark on an expense-paid 10-day trip to Washington, D.C., where they visit the White House and the Capitol and meet politicians, business representatives, and government employees. 

Though a life-long Republican himself, Nethercutt says he tries to be non-partisan in choosing whom the students will visit. “We meet with Republicans and we meet with Democrats. That’s what we do,” he says. “I don’t proselytize to them. I just want to have their eyes open. I want them to learn about our system and participate.”

There is something about being in Washington, D.C., and walking in the footsteps of the nation’s founders, leaders, and decision-makers. Nethercutt knows that first-hand. When he was 28, he joined the staff of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, eventually becoming his chief of staff. It was a wonderful opportunity to live in Washington and a great way to learn the ropes, he says. “It was graduate school with pay,” he says. “And I loved working in that environment.”

In April of 1977, he and his wife Mary Beth moved back to Spokane to practice law and start a family. In private practice, he focused on corporate, estate and probate, and adoption law. He also participated in several community service organizations, including the Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery.

His time in the capital helped him as a lawyer, and in 1994, “It helped me become a better candidate when I decided as a first-time office seeker to run,” he says. “I didn’t feel afraid of Washington, D.C. I felt I had some sensibilities about it and I wasn’t fearful of giving it a try.”

Nethercutt was elected to the House of Representatives in 1994, unseating the Democratic Speaker of the House, Tom Foley. He served as a Congressman for 10 years. 

Nethercutt says that every young American should have a chance to at least visit the nation’s capital, if not work there. With his foundation, Nethercutt’s focus is college students, including those from WSU, Gonzaga, Whitworth, and Eastern. “I tell students this will change your life,” he says. 

He has also undertaken a video project called U.S. History by the Minute, in which he narrates brief clips on subjects that include Edward R. Murrow and War Correspondence, the Moon Landing, and Woodstock.

 Most recently Nethercutt’s efforts have manifested in a history book titled In Tune with America: Our History in Song. He wanted to write about America’s history, and he wanted it to be accessible and inviting, so he settled on history with, as he calls it, “a musical twist.” He looked for what music punctuated each era, which songs spoke to the times. Combining his lists, he came up with nearly 80 songs that fit with key moments in the development of our country. “I knew I needed to cover the Depression, I knew I needed to cover the World Wars, I needed the cover the military,” he says. Using lyrics of songs, including the Beatles “Revolution,” the text wends its way from talking first about the cultural revolution of the 1960s back to the American Revolution and “Hail Columbia,” the un-official anthem for our young country. Using songs like “Shine on, Harvest Moon,” Christine McVie’s “Don’t Stop (thinking about tomorrow),” and “Anchors Aweigh,” he matches the music with the history of the time it was created.

“It seemed to be the right combination to interest people of all ages, but specifically young people,” says Nethercutt. He co-wrote the book with his former press secretary Tom M. McArthur. “It was really fun to do it,” says Nethercutt. “I relearned a lot of history.” 

Last July 4, USA Today published an editorial he co-wrote with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor calling for civic literacy to be a national priority. “This basic knowledge of our past is critical to our present and to our future if we are to continue to enjoy the freedoms envisioned by the Framers (of the Constitution),” they wrote.

It all boils down to having an informed and educated citizenry, says Nethercutt. If you don’t know how our justice system works, how can you be a juror? If you don’t know how our country works, how can you be an effective citizen? It’s a non-partisan issue, he says. “I’ve found that Democrats and Republicans and Independents all warm to this idea of civic literacy.”

To read the opinion piece Nethercutt co-wrote with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the importance of civic literacy, visit http://usat.ly/eulOML.

WSU Alumni Association News

True to his school long after graduating

Robert Williams ’79, a banking executive, is the current president of the WSU Alumni Association. He started volunteering with the University in the 1980s by joining the advisory board for the College of Business and later found his way to the Alumni Association. He is also on the Board of Trustees for the WSU Foundation. Recently, Williams met with WSM’s Hannelore Sudermann to talk about his time as a student and what he enjoys about volunteering with the Alumni Association.

Why did you choose WSU? In high school, I was a four year track and field letterman. At that time, WSU had one of the best track and fi eld programs in the country. I came here because I was going to be on an athletic scholarship as well as an academic one.

Was there any adjustment moving from an urban west side to a rural Pullman? A little. But I thought it was just part of growing up and going to school. It was really quite cool. I learned how to drive in the snow. I saw wheat fields. It was this formative part of who I am. My parents drove over and dropped me off at Streit Hall. I have a son in school here now and I had that same experience of coming over and dropping him off. I felt a little sorry for him, leaving him here in a tiny dorm room.

Who were some of your greatest influences here? My coach John Chaplin was the type of person people either love or hate. He was a very expressive individual, and known internationally for his coaching. Through him, I was exposed to athletes from Australia, New Zealand, Africa, Venezuela, and Scotland. It was a real growth experience. He also taught me that you earn what you get. You earn respect from your actions and behaviors.

Anyone else? Wallis Friel was my business law professor. I really loved that class. If I wasn’t a banker, I would probably be a lawyer.

What made you reconnect with WSU? It was probably 10 years after I graduated. George Hubman ’65, asked me to get involved. He thought I would be a good fi t for the national board of advisors for the College of Business. I think I sat on that board through probably four different deans.

From that experience, I got involved with the Alumni Association, particularly the African American Alumni Chapter. I have Tony Hudson ’75 to thank for that. He was the Black Student Union president at WSU in the early 1970s. He was always a leader for African American student issues. When the University was seeking to diversify its alumni outreach in the 1980s, Tony got involved. He asked me and Jeff Bruce ’80 to become offi cers in the first alliance.

What is the biggest change you’ve seen in the Alumni Association? There’s even more organized focus on our mission—increasing membership, alumni outreach, and engaging more alumni. We’re running more effectively. I would say, it’s the lightning focus of engagement and how we execute that engagement.

What do you get out of volunteering here? I get to meet wonderful people who are alumni of Washington State all over the world. I get personal growth out of it. I’m serving on boards with so many interesting and accomplished individuals. I get so much out of that. It’s selfish, really.

What do you tell alumni who want to be involved? There are many ways to give back. You can reach out to high school students, get them thinking about WSU. You can support scholarships. And, of course, you can become a card-carrying member of the Alumni Association.

You graduated some years ago... Ouch. Do you have to say it like that? I just realized that in 2020 I’ll be a Golden Grad.

For a complete list of officers and more information about the WSUAA visit www.alumni.wsu.edu or call 1-800-258-6978.