Washington State Magazine :: Winter 2011

FEATURES
When Memory Fades :: With memory notebooks and smart apartments that use motion technology to track their residents’ daily behaviors, WSU neuropsychologists are exploring ways to help patients and their families cope with age-related memory loss. Meanwhile, two scientists have discovered a means to restore neural connectivity. by Tim Steury

Attention! :: Cell phones, Internet, car horns, children, commercials—all carry information and all work together to create in us what social scientist Herbert Simon calls “a poverty of attention.” How do you rise above the din to capture what is most important? You may be surprised to learn that one of the oldest forms of communication is still one of the best. by Eric Sorensen

All About Everett :: The blue-collar Snohomish County city just 25 miles north of Seattle recently asked WSU to take over the University Center where graduates of its community college can go on to complete four-year degrees in a variety of disciplines, including engineering. Snohomish, Skagit, and Island counties have been underserved by the state’s four-year programs. by Hannelore Sudermann

ESSAY
Collegiate athletics in the 21st century :: by Thabiti Lewis

PANORAMAS
:: A Coug’s numbers, a Hollywood story
:: Tolerance in an intolerant time
:: Bringing history and historian together
:: The lost and found flourmill
:: An evolutionary myth is dismissed
:: Homes for art
:: A power shortage

DEPARTMENTS
:: First Words: Outsmarting dementia
:: Reader Survey Results
:: Letters
:: Sports: John Olerud: Faith, hope, and horses
:: In Season: Wheat: A 10,000-year relationship
:: Last Words: Are our pictures worth a thousand words? (Washington State Magazine 2012 calendar)

TRACKING
:: Jim Dunlap ’70—Tugs, tides, and time
:: LaToya Harris ’03—Standing out
:: Chance McKinney ’94, ’96—Country music working man
:: Alumni news

NEW MEDIA
:: The Man Who Dammed the Yangtze: A Mathematical Novel by Alex Kuo
:: Building New Pathways to Peace edited by Noriko Kawamura, Yoichiro Murakami, and Shin Chiba
:: Montaña Y Caballo by Yarn Owl - Tyler Armour ’10, Tim Meinig ’10, Ted Powers ’09, and Javier Suarez ’10
:: New & Noteworthy: Standing Above the Crowd by James “Dukes” Donaldson ’79; Eliminate the Chaos at Work by Laura Leist ’91; Pick Up Your Own Brass: Leadership the FBI Way by Kathleen McChesney ’71 and William Gavin; The Itty Bitty Guide to Trees: A Children’s Identification Guide to Trees of the Inland Northwest by Jaclyn Gotch ’07 MED, Lisa Bird, and Amy Ross-Davis; The Alpine Tales by Paul J. Willis ’80 MA, ’85 PhD

Cover photo: William Lipe, PhD, Archaeology, born 1935 — came to Washington State University in 1976. (See First Words.) By Robert Hubner

First Words

Outsmarting dementia

We used to believe, says neuropsychologist Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe, that if a person lived long enough, he or she would develop dementia. 

Now we know better, she says. Whether caused by Alzheimer’s or other disease, dementia is not a normal aging process. Many people, such as G. Roger Spencer and colleagues pictured here, remain completely alert and engaged well into their 80s and 90s and older.

G. Roger Spencer
G. Roger Spencer, DVM. Veterinary pathology. Born 1916—came to Washington State College in 1950. Photo Robert Hubner

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, the chance of someone over 85 having the disease is nearly 50 percent. Other dementia-causing diseases raise that risk even higher. So what is it that enables someone to escape the dementia odds?

Besides age, there are a number of factors that indicate a higher risk of dementia: obesity, diabetes, smoking, poor nutrition. And low education level.

Conversely, the higher the level of education, the more rigorous the engagement of the mind, the lower the risk of dementia.

Indeed, the one thing these good people pictured in our photographic essay have in common, besides defying the dementia odds, is a rich life of the mind and long tenure at Washington State University. 

Obviously, the benefits are not exclusive to WSU. 

According to one recent study, each additional year of education translates to an 11-percent decrease in one’s risk of developing dementia. 

How education and intellectual engagement protect against loss is intriguing. Does a vigorous mind protect against the onset, or does it help the individual compensate, through a quality known as “cognitive reserve”?

Recent research indicates the latter might be the case. A 2010 article in Brain by researchers from the United Kingdom and Finland reported the assessment of participants followed for up to 20 years. Participants completed extensive questionnaires and interviews regarding their education and cognitive health. Following their death, their brains were examined for pathologies. What the researchers found was that years of education did not prevent brain pathology, but rather helped individuals mitigate the effects.

The study suggests not only the importance of continuing education toward developing a cognitive reserve, but the strong effect of education early in life as a defense, indicating the value of early education as an investment in public health. 

Unfortunately, statistics can be cruel. No matter the odds, someone loses. Intelligence and education are no guarantee against dementia. Many of us know a wonderful scientist here at WSU who fell on the negative side of the risk ratio and, tragically, lost his memory and self to the ravages of early Alzheimer’s. 

Such an anomaly makes the research at WSU on cognitive decline and dementia particularly personal. But it’s personal also in a broader sense, touching nearly everyone. If we do not yet have a family member or friend suffering cognitive impairment, we very likely will at some point. Or we might suffer it ourselves.

But hope is not only infectious, it’s justified. If higher education gives us a cognitive reserve and helps fend off loss, researchers such as Schmitter-Edgecombe, Diane Cook, Dennis Dyck and others are striving to develop ways to compensate, while Jay Wright, Joe Harding and others have their sights set on outsmarting the affliction ultimately, by repairing the connections destroyed by dementia-causing disease.

Tim Steury, Editor

Marianna Matteson
Marianna Matteson PhD. Foreign languages and literature. Born 1932--came to Washington State University in 1962. Photo Robert Hubner

Donald Matteson
Donald Matteson PhD. Chemistry. Born 1932—came to Washington State College in 1959. Photo Robert Hubner

David Stratton
David Stratton PhD. American history. Born 1927—came to Washington State University in 1962. Photo Robert Hubner

Gen De Vleming '48
Gen De Vleming ’48. Aide to Presidents French, Terrell, and Smith and Acting President Beasley Born 1926—joined president’s office in 1954. Photo Robert Hubner

WSM Reader Survey Results

So what do you think?

Most of you really like us. Some of you don’t. A very few of you (2 percent) ignore us, but hardly anyone outright hates us. That’s the gist of the reader survey many of you recently participated in. Either way, we’re listening. And the most striking point of the survey was that you do indeed read us. 

We haven’t done a reader survey in quite a while, not because we’re not interested, but because they’re expensive. There comes a time, however, when an editor needs something a little more systematic, even more than your informal comments and letters, in gauging his readership. Fortunately, that time coincided with the offer of a free survey. Well, free in the sense that the Council for Advancement and Support of Education covered the costs, but we’re dues-paying members. They offered it to member magazines for comparative purposes. So readers of every participating magazine got the same questions.

The survey was conducted by Qualtrics, Inc., an industry leader in online surveys, using a random sample of 25 percent of our readership.

So, a brief synopsis:

Sixty-three percent of you read every issue, while another 24 percent read most issues. 

Sixty-six percent read most or all of each issue, and 80 percent of you keep it around for a month or more.

As far as what you like to read about in the realm of academics and intellectual life, you are most interested in faculty research. You’re not particularly interested in stories about curriculum or individual classes, but you are interested in student research and academic experience. 

Regarding alumni life and activities, you are much more interested in the professions of fellow alums than you are in their personal lives or in individual profiles.

You are very interested in institutional history and traditions, as well as campus facilities and growth.

Thirty-nine percent of you believe the magazine covers the institution accurately and objectively, while 37 percent believe we spin things a little but are generally accurate and objective. One percent of you do not find us an objective source.

When it comes to general interest topics, you are most interested in science, technology, and engineering. You’re quite interested in issues facing the local community, but even more interested in issues facing higher education.

But percentages aside, you were quite voluble with your written comments:

“Even though I live far away (in Tennessee) and rarely get to the state of Washington, it keeps me connected to the University and makes me glad to be a consistent donor.”

“It keeps me connected to the school.”

“Reminds me how I am connected to the University and the State ...”

Get the drift? Of course I’m picking these comments out because of the theme, but that theme was constant, and that’s what excites us most about your response. Back to the numbers, 57 percent agree and 30 percent strongly agree that WSM “strengthens my personal connection to the institution.”

That’s what we aim at, and we’re glad it’s working.

Thank you.

Letters

Which way was that again? 

Your article “When wildfire comes to town” locates the Dishman Hills west of Spokane. The Dishman Hills actually are located near the west city limits of the City of Spokane Valley and are southeast of the City of Spokane. I used to hike in the hills as a boy.

John Vlahovich ’62

Spokane

A second look

I have always looked through the magazine, but for some reason I read it this month. I don’t remember it being this good. Very informative and gave good insight. The Moos article, Judy Morrison, “A Fine Thin Skin,” “Billions Served,” and the story on Mr. Johnson’s Logo design is always fun to revisit. Thank you, I will read the next one as well.

Rick Judy ’62

We have just finished reading the latest issue of the Washington State Magazine and feel compelled to tell you how fabulous we found three articles. They are “A Fine Thin Skin,” “Above and Beyond,” and “Billions Served.” Each one was incredibly interesting to us and fascinating. They have given us a far greater understanding of the issues and possible solutions to problems we all face. These are the best articles we have read in many years of receiving the magazine.

Thank you for such an enlightening and interesting issue.

Dave and Jan Welch

Class of ’63

Randall Johnson

Gene Miller ’68 took us to task for not including a photo of Randall Johnson himself with the article in our last issue on the 75th anniversary of the Cougar Head logo. With admirable follow-through, Mr. Miller also sent photographs. 

“These pictures were taken on April 15 of 2005,” he writes, “outside Randall and Jeanne’s small apartment on Spokane’s south side. They were visited by three anonymous Cougars, one of whom snapped the pictures.”

By the way, we did produce a slideshow of Mr. Johnson and the evolution of the Cougar Head on our website: wsm.wsu.edu/extra/coug-logo.

—Editor

Randall JohnsonRandall Johnson. Courtesy Gene Miller '68.

Correction: 

Due to a miscommunication, we mistakenly printed an In Memoriam notice for S. LeRoy Whitener (’54 DVM). It was his brother Keith Whitener (’60 DVM) who passed away on March 25, 2011.

Panorama

A Coug’s Numbers, A Hollywood Story

by Eric Sorensen

By traditional baseball standards, Scott Hatteberg’s big league days were numbered.

He had been a Cougar standout, team captain, Most Valuable Player, and catcher for future All-Star Aaron Sele, with whom he went to the Red Sox in 1991. But in his fifth year in the majors he ruptured a nerve in his elbow. An operation left him unable to hold a baseball. In the words of Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, he was “a second string, washed up catcher.”

“I couldn’t throw as hard,” Hatteberg x’91 recalls. “My accuracy had gone. As a catcher, you lose that part of your game and you’re really limited.”

As it was, Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane had been eyeing Hatteberg for several years, seeing a statistical diamond in the rough that was being overlooked by the rest of baseball. Most judges of baseball talent concentrated on running, throwing, fielding, hitting, and hitting with power. Typical of catchers, Hatteberg didn’t run well and his fielding was graceless—“I didn’t field ground balls, I tackled them.” His Red Sox batting average was a very average .267. He hit only a few home runs a season. And now he couldn’t throw.

But Beane measured Hatteberg with a different yardstick. It was based less on casual observation and limited, antiquated statistics and more on objective analysis linking a player’s performance to what really mattered: winning games. Baseball fans know this as sabermetrics, from SABR, or the Society for American Baseball Research.

Beane surmised that a player’s greatest contribution came through not making an out, be it by hitting, getting hit, or walking. A cardboard cutout could serve as a player, says Hatteberg, as long as it could get on base.

Hatteberg himself was a better-than- average student of the game, a thinking man’s hitter. He had studied Yankee great Don Mattingly’s approach, which emphasized reducing strikeouts and maximizing walks. He knew the most powerful part of his swing was in a small area of the strike zone, low and in the middle. Patience and an eye for pitches in that spot had him going deep into the count, drawing walks and wearing out pitchers in the process.

“I never analyzed my numbers,” he says. “I really wanted to hit for average, obviously, and I hated striking out. It felt like the ultimate failure in the game. Now, looking back, according to the A’s and the sabermetrics thing, it was the ultimate failure.”

Beane and Paul DePodesta, assistant manager and holder of a Harvard University degree in economics, did analyze the numbers and concluded that getting on base was three times more important than slugging. They had also seen that Hatteberg’s on-base percentage was about 25 points higher than the league average. He walked far more often than he struck out. With some coaching, he could be moved to first base. And because the traditional metrics of baseball devalued Hatteberg’s skills, his salary was light on the A’s modest pocketbook.

“To the Oakland A’s front office, Hatteberg was a deeply satisfying scientific discovery,” Lewis writes in Moneyball. “The things he did so peculiarly well at the plate were the things only science—or, at any rate, closer than normal scrutiny—could turn up.”

Readers of Moneyball and viewers of the new feature film it inspired know how the A’s thinking paid off. At the end of the season, DePodesta figured that if the A’s had nine Hattebergs in its lineup, it in effect would have had the best offense in baseball.

Not bad for a broken-down catcher.

That was 2002. The next year, the Boston Red Sox hired the dean of sabermetrics, Bill James, and went on to win the World Series in 2004 and 2007.

But there are corners of the game in which sabermetrics do not appear to be reaching. For his senior honors thesis, Bryce Bircher ’11 looked for a correlation between the salaries of top players and key sabermetrics statistics. The link, he says, is “erratic at best.”

“I just don’t think contracts that are being given out today are based primarily on sabermetric statistics,” he says. “I think that there’s something to be said for marquee value, if you will... The big name players, whether or not they’re getting top ranks in their sabermetric stats, are still getting paid because they are the big name players.”

Craig Parks—WSU psychology professor, lifelong fan, statistician, and advisor on Bircher’s thesis—says James and his fellow sabermetricians are trying to “move the evaluation of baseball talent away from the intuitive and towards the quantitative. And there’s a good basis for that.”

But the field has its limits, he says. Among other things, it does not measure a player’s mindset, which changes in different situations. It can also make cold, calculated suggestions out of line with the sentiments of fans. So while it might be time for the Mariners to move Ichiro from the leadoff batting spot, or for the Yankees to have Derek Jeter pinch hit, managers know they make such moves at their political and vocational peril.

“The bottom line is that baseball first and foremost is in the entertainment business,” says Parks. “They need people to come to the games and they need people to tune in on television. A strict sabermetrics approach isn’t going to accommodate that.”

Panorama

Tolerance in an intolerant time

by Tim Steury

In 1530, a group of Lutheran princes composed a statement of faith, requesting legal recognition, and presented it to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Although the Emperor rejected it, the Augsburg Confession would become the statement of belief that defined Lutheranism. Toward the middle of the century, the Catholics followed with their version, the Council of Trent. Indeed, a succession of churches that emerged from the breakup of the monolithic medieval church during the Reformation distinguished themselves through statements of faith that became known as confessions.

Not coincidentally, the Age of Confessionalism is also known as the Age of Religious Wars.

Gradually, says assistant professor of history Jesse Spohnholtz, confessionalism led to separate subcultures within cities, the distinct tenets of fractionalized beliefs determining not simply how they worshipped, but every aspect of people’s lives. Conflict, he says, grew not only out of belief, but from politics, community, family, and identity. 

In a general sense, says Spohnholtz, confessionalism characterized cultural and religious shifts all across Europe. The French Wars of Religion stretched from the 1560s through the 1590s, spawned by a similar confessional logic. One of the worst manifestations of religious strife was the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which Catholics, encouraged by Catherine de Medici and her son King Charles IX, slaughtered thousands of French Protestants, known as Huguenots, gathered in Paris for the wedding of Henry of Navarre. The massacres then spread throughout France.

Similar tensions occurred throughout Spain, though conflict there was more between Muslim and Jewish populations and the prevailing Catholics. 

The Holy Roman Empire—including most of today’s Germany, Austria, Bohemia, the Czech Republic, and the Low Countries—was different, says Spohnholtz. Led from the court in Vienna by Charles V, the Holy Roman Empire comprised over 200 political entities, including duchies, counties, and knights’ sovereignties. In contrast to more manageable monarchies elsewhere in Europe, the empire presented a constant struggle between the emperor’s claims to power and his inability to consolidate it. 

Wesel, a north German town on the Dutch border, far from Vienna, was more different yet. The town’s unusual tolerance and diversity during a time of intolerance and religious war is the subject of a new book by Spohnholtz, The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars (University of Delaware Press, 2011).

Wesel was a wealthy city on the Rhine with strong autonomy both from the emperor and the duke who claimed sovereignty over it. Although imperial law gave legal status only to Catholics and Lutherans, the magistrates of Wesel could run their city however they wanted. They determined that Wesel would be Lutheran, but in practice allowed all sorts of people into the city, including people fleeing the religious wars that had broken out in the neighboring Low Countries. Because of such unusual political circumstances, says Spohnholtz, Wesel became one of the most religiously diverse places in Europe. 

Often in our modern period, says Spohnholtz, we tend to think of premodern people as strictly obedient to the king and loyal to the church.

“That’s what princes and political leaders would have liked to have believed,” he says. What he found in his study of Wesel is a much more diverse and tolerant approach.

“I found there were a lot more attitudes that allowed peaceful coexistence between people of competing faith despite the rhetoric of their leaders.”

The people of Wesel were able to coexist because their sense of Christian piety and unity in the end outweighed their confessional differences. Spohnholtz’s conclusions highlight “the essential role of individual choices in shaping the confessional landscape of early modern Wesel. The fact that Wesel did not fit the patterns of confessionalization is not merely a result of widespread resistance to a top-down effort to enforce religious conformity, though it surely is part of the picture. But it was also a result of the variety of decisions that residents of Wesel made about the ways in which they would express their religious identity.”

In other words, says Spohnholtz, the people of sixteenth-century Wesel were far more complex than we tend to believe from our modern perspective.

Although many studies of Wesel have preceded Spohnholtz’s, they are generally oriented toward very different stories, he says, stories of the triumph of Protestantism over Catholicism, a “long narrative that generally involves good guys winning.

“But not a lot of serious scholarly attention to the city itself.”

Modern secular scholarship tends to explain religious toleration in terms of rationality and political and economic advantage, he says. Political power, economic success, and rationality lead to peace, whereas faith leads to violence.

“That assumption, which underpins a lot of explanations about why you get peace, lacks explanatory power to me,” says Spohnholtz.

In fact, he finds this explanation simplistic and condescending to people in the past.

“It also depends on certain assumptions of what religion is, privileging leaders of faith without considering the practitioners. Critical to my methodology has been to divorce as much as possible the authoritative claims of religious and political authorities from the actual actions of ordinary people.”

Those actions are often based on a sense of common piety, he says. One’s neighbor may take the Mass wrong, but he’s decent to his family.

Indeed, the bulk of Spohnholtz’s research and insight into sixteenth-century Wesel come not from officially nuanced history, but from public records.

Spohnholtz scoured city records, marriage records, baptism records.

“I started by cataloging names of people who were buried, who married and had children. I created a database and cross-referenced everything.”

And patterns started emerging. Patterns of who married whom, what people named their children, and so forth. 

Then he delved into church archives, into the records of Calvinist church council and official records of Lutheran ministers, their correspondence and petitions.

Calvinist church authorities would call people in for doctrinal and moral infractions. Someone cheats on his wife, he is called before the council to apologize, reconcile with his wife, and repent.

“Church financial records turned out to be really cool,” says Spohnholtz. “There is no commentary, but there’s a discrepancy between what people say about religion and what they are doing.”

In essence, what Spohnholtz found in his study of Wesel was the extraordinariness of the ordinary.

“What was important about Wesel is there wasn’t much violence or conflict in a world that was rocked by it. There was no important treaty there, no major offensive. It was just people sitting down like you and I managing to have a civil society.”

Village Fete by Hans Wertinger. Courtesy State Hermitage Museum Digital Collection
Village Fete by Hans Wertinger. Courtesy State Hermitage Museum Digital Collection

Panorama

Bringing history and historian together

by Hannelore Sudermann

Historian Douglas Brinkley recently visited Seattle to interview William D. Ruckelshaus, the founding head of the Environmental Protection Agency and advisor to a variety of Northwest clean water and community groups.

Ruckelshaus first made the connection between the environment and public health shortly after graduating from Harvard Law School when he returned to Indiana as a young lawyer. In the office of the Indiana attorney general, Ruckelshaus was assigned to the Indiana Board of Health, where he noticed that many of the state’s health issues were tied to air and water pollution, he says. It was a foundation for his work a decade later defining the mission and organization of the EPA. 

“He’s really the long shadow of that institution,” says historian Brinkley, who interviewed Ruckelshaus for a book on the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Brinkley sought details about Ruckelshaus’s own story, and about the history surrounding the formation of the EPA during the Nixon Administration, as well as his time as acting director of the FBI and as deputy attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice.

William D. Ruckelshaus is sworn in as administrator of the EPA in 1970. Charles Tasnadi/Associated PressWilliam D. Ruckelshaus is sworn in as administrator of the EPA in 1970. Charles Tasnadi/Associated Press

Ruckelshaus has no plans for a memoir. Instead, this will be the sum of his experiences for posterity. “Nobody tells a story better than Bill,” says Brinkley. And the hours of video from the interviews will be available to the public and for historians and scholars to use for years to come, he says.

Brinkley recently published Wilderness Warrior, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt and his creation of federal laws and national parks to protect wildlife. “He saw that protecting natural resources was directly in line with protecting America,” Brinkley says. “Ruckelshaus reflects T.R.’s approach.”

This is an interesting time for the focus, since there have been calls to eliminate the EPA and to open discussions of drilling for oil in the Florida Everglades. When the EPA was created the country had major problems with pollution coming from large, specific sources, says Ruckelshaus. For example, some cities had no sewage treatment at all. But since then, point source polluters have been brought under social control. Today, the problem comes from harder to control non-point sources like runoff from streets and farms. “And people forget how bad smog was,” he says. “That’s what makes the current assault on the EPA so difficult.”

While it benefits our nation to capture and chronicle this history, it is also of special value to Washington, where Ruckelshaus has made his home and has served as a volunteer leader in water quality and salmon recovery issues, says Michael Kern, director of the William D. Ruckelshaus Center, a joint project between Washington State University and the University of Washington to resolve conflicts surrounding public policy issues. 

The Ruckelshaus Center supported the efforts to record the extensive interviews and will maintain them in its archives.

Sports

John Olerud x88: Faith, Hope, and Horses

by Jason Krump 93

John Olerud as a Mariner. Rich Kane/Icon SMIRich Kane/Icon SMI

John Olerud was not enamored with New York City during his playing days with the Toronto Blue Jays. Every time we went there and played I was so intimidated by the city. he recalls. I just thought, man, it was just a matter of time before I get mugged on the streets.

So imagine Oleruds thoughts when he learned he was traded to the New York Mets in 1997.

Sure enough I get traded to them and my wife (Kelly) says, Lets just try living in the city and see what its like.

We did that and just had a great time.

I think [God] took me to New York to have me face my fears, says Olerud. It looked like the worst thing but it actually turned out to be a great thing.

Reflecting back on his career at his Bellevue home, Olerud pauses, and then says, A lot like the aneurysm.

The aneurysm that nearly ended his career before it had a chance to begin.

As a sophomore at Washington State in 1988, Olerud earned collegiate player of the year honors.

But less than a year after earning college baseballs highest honor, Olerud suffered a seizure on a January morning while jogging on the WSU campus.

After undergoing numerous tests, Olerud was diagnosed as suffering a subarachnoid hemorrhage. Given a clean bill of health, he was set to return to the Cougar baseball team. But his father, John 65, a medical doctor and faculty member at the University of Washington medical school, recommended one more test.

I remember my Dad calling and saying, John, we want you to come back.  Olerud says.

At the time, Olerud thought it was a bad decision.

I was really upset that he wanted me to come back because I thought it was unnecessary. We had already done all of that stuff and this is going to put me back a couple of weeks.

What was discovered changed his view.

I remember the doctor putting the slide up and I could point out the aneurysm. It turned out it wasnt a bad decision at all.

Olerud underwent surgery three days later. Although a lengthy recovery process was anticipated, less than two months later, Olerud was back playing for the Cougars. But he had yet to completely regain his strength.

With the Major League Baseball draft fast approaching, Olerud was intending to return to WSU for his senior year.

Im telling everyone Im not 100 percent so Im going back and finish up, Olerud recalls. I might as well finish up my school and come out when Im 100 percent.

At the time John, his dad and (WSU Coach) Bobo (Brayton) probably had a closed mind [about] signing because he didnt get the exposure his junior year in college that he should have, then-Toronto General Manager Pat Gillick remembers. They were very honest with the other ball clubs that John was going back to the Cougars and probably wouldnt sign.

We decided to take a flyer and draft John and see if he would be at least open to signing, adds Gillick.

That summer, Gillick assigned scouts to watch Olerud. One reported back that he watched Olerud play in 11 games and when Olerud swung he never missed a pitch.

The Blue Jays started talking to me a couple of weeks before school started, Olerud says. One of their big attractions was they would bring me up as a September call-up when they expanded the rosters.

And there was another attraction. At that time the Blue Jays were in a pennant race.

I remember my Dad saying there have been a lot of good players who never got to experience a pennant race, Olerud says. And it was an awfully great offer to sign. I ended up signing and went straight to the big leagues.

In the span of nine months, Olerud ran the gamut of suffering a life-threatening aneurysm to beginning a 17-year major league career highlighted by 2,239 hits, three Gold Gloves, two All-Star selections, a batting title, and World Series Championships with the Blue Jays in 1992 and 1993.

As with New York, Olerud knows the reason why.

The Lord spared me. It could have gone completely the other way and it could have been a really bad thing.

Six years removed from his playing career, Olerud is confronted with another medical challenge. This time with his daughter, Jordan.

The middle child of John and Kellys three children (older brother Garrett, younger sister Jessica), Jordan was born with a chromosome disorder that prevented her from walking, feeding herself, and communicating.

Initially, Olerud used the same attitude he employed for his own medical challenge years earlier.

My attitude was like the aneurysm, its not ideal, and its a chromosome issue, but give it a couple of years well get it worked out.

Its been a lot longer haul than the two years, he admits. Im glad I had that perspective in the beginning. It has definitely been a challenge.

Just as he did during his playing career, Olerud, along with his wife, is working to confront the challenge. One avenue they are confronting it with is through hippotherapy.

Through Kellys lifelong interest in horses, the Oleruds learned of hippotherapy (hippo is the Greek term for horse) that the nearby Little Bit Therapeutic Riding Center offers. They have taken Jordan there since 2003.

When a horse moves forward, it moves in the same three-dimensional pattern as if you or I are walking, Little Bit Executive Director Kathy Alm explains. Just by sitting on a back of a horse those muscles get worked. The core is strengthened.

She has made a lot of improvement on her walking, Olerud says. Shes real close to walking independently.

Seeing firsthand how hippotherapy has benefited their daughter, the Oleruds, who serve as chairs of a capital campaign to expand the Little Bit facilities, realized how other parents with special needs children need the same help, but dont have the means to provide it.

The thing that really hit us about having Jordan and a special needs child is that we had the financial means to get help and to get as good as care as we could get for her, Olerud says. We have family and friends around to help us out and its still really hard.

We just thought how do people do it?

For this reason, they started the Jordan Fund.

We came up with the Jordan Fund, because that was our desire to help kids and families with special needs, Olerud says. If there were things we could do to help out families we wanted to make sure that we could do that.

They are so willing to help in any way that they can and they are so caring [about] how the world is for other people, says Alm. Faith is very genuinely a part of their life each and every day.

In Season

Wheat: A 10,000-year relationship

by Eric Sorensen

A while back, George DePasquale visited the ancient Italian city of Pompeii, not far from his ancestral home of Sorrento. Looking at a 2,000-year-old oven, DePasquale could easily imagine how its baker prepared and baked bread much as he does today at Seattles Essential Baking Company. He could feel he was part of a long, human continuum, a river of history, with bazillions of people behind me, bazillions of people to come.

But even the oldest rivers change, forming new channels, and sometimes doubling back on themselves.

Thousands of years after people turned a wild seed into a cultivated grain, the fundamental process of raising wheat and fashioning it into bread is being reassessed. The elements remain the same: flour, water, leavening, and heat and voilà, a seeds fuel reserve is now a lofty festival of texture and flavor. But wheats path to the table  from growing to milling to the chemical symphony of kneading and baking  is now being subjected to the craftsmanship of its fermented brethren, wine, cheese, and beer. Even the word terroir can be heard as growers, millers, and bakers apply ancient techniques and modern science to locally nurtured wheat varieties and breads.

DePasquale himself noticed this when he tried bread made from Bauermeister, a hard red wheat bred by Stephen Jones, director of the WSU Mount Vernon Research and Extension Center and leader of its western Washington small grains breeding program.

I was knocked out, DePasquale recalled late this summer at the Kneading Conference West, the West Coast version of the nationally recognized bread workshop started five years ago in Skowhegan, Maine. One variety in particular, said DePasquale, was literally the best flour Ive ever tasted.

His notes are fit for a review in Wheat Spectator, if such a magazine existed : Nice controlled acid flavors. Strong hit of spice, strong hit of chocolate. Very easy to work with, very nice flavor, good crumb color, a little tricky in the oven but well worth it.

For the longest time, virtually all wheat was local. As recently as 1919, nearly every state had at least 1,000 acres or more in wheat production, plus local mills to process the harvest. Ebeys Prairie, on Whidbey Island, grew a world-record 119 bushels of wheat per acre, says Jones. But over time, wheat production disappeared from western Washington. Fueled by federal commodity programs and industrialized baking, it concentrated in a handful of states.

Now wheat is among the local foods consumers seek out as they try to focus on their local economies and the fossil fuels consumed in shipping food long distances. Farmers are growing wheat for nearby markets and to break up weed and disease cycles. Among them: Nash Huber, who has tested dozens of varieties for Jones on his Dungeness Valley farm outside Sequim.

Wheat gets you in your gut, says Huber. Its an energy storage mechanism that weve had a relationship with for at least 10,000 years. Its kind of like watching a campfire burn at night and getting the same feeling. Its part of what makes us who we are.

The artisan bread movement is a mix of past and future. Many techniques  long rising times, sourdough starters, hand-formed loaves  go back centuries. But now they are fueled by an intense knowledge of breads molecular-level transformations: the interplay of sugars, enzymes, and other proteins, the structural contributions of starch and gluten, the physical change from solid to liquid, foam to sponge, and chemical changes like caramelization and the Maillard reaction, which makes proteins and sugars take on what Andrew Ross, an Oregon State University cereal chemist, calls the roasty, toasty notes of meats and coffee.

Add to that a growing awareness of how local climate, like the mild, wet climate of western Washington, can affect the wheat that so thrilled DePasquale.

For aficionados like Richard White of Forest Grove, Oregon, wheat can even be as local as the backyard tomato. He started growing it four years ago, broadcasting some Red Fife from his food co-op and harvesting about ten pounds. This year, he planted Maris Widgeon, a British variety often raised for its thatch. He threshed it in a bucket, using a hand drill equipped with a paint stirrer and chain, then winnowed it by pouring the bucket out in front of a large fan.

The result was an earthy, open-holed round loaf that would look at home in ovens across the ages.

Carving thick slices from a loaf during a Kneading Conference goat cheese tasting, White said it gave him the feeling of ownership, the feeling that I know where it came from, the feeling that youre growing something besides grass. The taste is exquisite, even more exquisite because I made it.

Panorama

The lost and found flourmill

by Larry Clark ’94

Steve Fulton grew up in the 1960s with his uncle Leonard’s flour milled with a process called Unifine. Fulton ate whole wheat bread baked by his mother Lee x’38 from the flour. His father Joseph x’39 promoted and delivered the flour all over the Northwest. But the Spokane area mill closed in 1986.

So in 2008 when Fulton started researching the family mill—built at Washington State University—he was surprised to learn that Oregon company Azure Standard was using the Unifine name for its flour.

He emailed Azure Standard’s president, David Stelzer. “David called my cell phone and said, ‘I know where your uncle’s mill is,’” says Fulton. Stelzer purchased the mill in 1999, fixed it, and had three more fabricated.

The rediscovery of the mill inspired Fulton to contact WSU researchers and learn more about the Unifine mill history and its unusual process to make fine whole grain flour.

Flour milling has come a long way from the stones used by our ancestors to grind and better digest the wild grains they found. Societies developed agriculture, and a desire to make bread and other baked goods drove the invention of grist or stone mills to further grind grains into flour.

Roller mills developed in the nineteenth century refined the flour and created an industrial-scale process. These mills use a series of rollers, first with corrugated surfaces to strip the outer hull—the bran and the germ—from wheat, and then flat rollers to reduce the endosperm into fine white flour. To make whole wheat flour, the bran and germ are processed and blended back into the white flour. Most mills still use this system for producing the flour on supermarket shelves. 

The Unifine mill takes a different approach. The wheat or other grain is blown into a high-speed flywheel, which pulverizes the grain against the rough surface of the container. After one pass, the exploded material blows into a sifting system, producing whole grain flour with a very fine particle size.

The result has higher protein content, more nutrients, and a longer shelf life. Roller mills require added moisture to process wheat, which could explain the reports of less rancidity for the drier Unifine flour.

Englishman John Wright first developed the Unifine mill in England during the late 1930s, only to have it bombed during World War II. He took the idea to the United States, eventually meeting with Washington State College engineers about the technology. The mill could not be patented, but WSC controlled the registration of the name “Unifine” until 1975.

WSC researchers built a prototype and studied the milling, baking, and consumer acceptance of Unifine products from 1950 to 1958. That’s when Leonard Fulton entered the picture and secured a Washington State Grange grant to build three commercial-grade Unifine mills, which were completed in 1961. He ran one of them in Fairfield, Washington. Joseph Barron later built and ran a Unifine mill in Oakesdale.

Another mill on campus was sold as surplus in 1981 to WSU food scientist Mary Stevens ’49, who had worked on the original Unifine studies as a graduate student, and a group of WSU faculty and other investors. They started producing and selling flour as the Unifine Milling Company and the “Flourgirls” brand out of a converted chicken coop. 

Eric Wegner ’79, a Pullman area farmer, joined the company as manager in 1987 and worked there until 1995 when the company went out of business.

“They needed someone who was handy and knew wheat,” he says. “I learned on the job and from scouring the old WSU technical documents.”

Wegner, who also holds WSU degrees from 2002 and 2010, now works for the USDA Western Wheat Quality Laboratory at WSU. Thinking back on Flourgirls, he says, “We were just a little bit too early for the major whole grain movement.”

Byung-Kee Baik ’94 PhD, a cereal chemist with WSU’s crop and soil sciences department, first heard of Unifine in the late 1990s after he started working at the university.

“I got a call from a lady in Seattle asking ‘Where can I find Flourgirls flour?’ I had no idea what it was,” he says.

Baik asked around the food science department where he worked and learned about the milling system from Beverly McConnell ’72, ’80 PhD, one of the original Flourgirls investors. A decade passed before he heard the name Unifine again.

In 2009, Steve Fulton contacted Baik, Wegner, and assistant research professor Pat Fuerst about Unifine after he heard about Azure Standard using the mill. The idea intrigued the three researchers and they began to examine the Unifine-produced flour’s particle size, storage potential, and quality compared to roller mill and stone mill flour.

“The anecdotal evidence was that Unifine flour goes rancid slowly. We decided to do a test of that,” says Fuerst.

They made flour from two types of wheat, hard red and soft white from single lots, on a roller mill, stone mill, and the Unifine mill at Azure Standard. The samples were tested for hexanal—a byproduct of fatty acids oxidizing that causes bad smell and taste in flour—for a year and a half.

“You could clearly see that roller mill flour turned rancid more quickly with both types of wheat, Unifine was in between, and the stone mill had the least rancidity,” says Fuerst.

Baik says the moisture content and particle size are primary factors for the difference. He points out that water is added during the roller mill process, and a stone mill’s coarse particles lowers rancidity. The Unifine flour particles are similar to the roller mill’s flour and produces similar bread, says Baik.

Fulton also gave a $10,000 grant to WSU’s engineering department to study the Unifine mill and see if they could make efficiency improvements. Engineering professor Chuck Pezeshki and his Industrial Design Clinic students made some changes and manufacturing specifications for the mill.

Azure Standard now produces about a million pounds of organic flour a year from a variety of grains and legumes for sale across the western United States. Their customers respond very positively to the ultrafine quality and nutritional benefits, particularly in the pastry flour.

Stelzer has also witnessed the storage life of the Unifine flour. “We’ve had flour sitting at room temperature for a couple of years and it seemed fine,” he says.

The shelf life, nutritional quality, and baking properties of Unifine-produced flour give Fulton hope for a bright future of the process.

“It makes no sense to mill whole wheat flour using the roller mill system that has dominated the flour industry for the last 150 years,” he says. “The time is coming when new flour mills are put on line, the compact, efficient Unifine mill will most certainly be chosen over the roller mill system.”

The market for whole wheat and other whole grain products continues to expand quickly. In 2010, whole wheat sliced bread surpassed white bread in sales for the first time.

Wegner, Fuerst, and Baik think the milling process could be ideal for smaller, local operations. They aspire to continue their research on Unifine flour, possibly with a mill on campus.

Baik and Fuerst speculate that a Unifine mill could also be built at WSU to make a whole wheat Cougar flour with extra grain from the Spillman Experimental Farm.

Panorama

An evolutionary myth is dismissed

by Tim Steury

Even though a paper on guppy senescence by evolutionary biologist Donna Holmes and her colleagues has circulated for several years, the “grandmother hypothesis” still persists.

And understandably so. One of those rare feel-good stories from evolutionary theory, the grandmother hypothesis attempts to explain menopause in humans as an evolutionary adaptation. Menopause is adaptive, the argument goes, in the sense that women’s reproductive capacity is cut short barely two-thirds of the way through their lives so that the grandmother can help raise the grandchildren, thereby improving the survival of her lineage.

In spite of its appeal, however, “I’ve always thought that was a dumb theory,” says Holmes.

Much of the impetus for the grandmother hypothesis stems from the assumption that menopause is unique to humans.

It’s not, says Holmes. Guppies, for example, also experience menopause and then have a post-reproductive lifespan. Something like menopause occurs in many mammals, some birds, fishes, “animals where you wouldn’t expect care of your grandchildren to play any part in reproductive aging.”

A colleague of Holmes, David Reznik of University of California, Riverside, had long studied the evolution of aging in guppies.

They were having lunch one day at a professional meeting, “And I said, ‘Well you know, selection by predation should shape reproductive lifespan, but it shouldn’t shape the post-reproductive lifespan,’ ” says Holmes.

The post-reproductive lifespan is “evolutionarily irrelevant,” she proposed.

“Evolutionary theory predicts that if animals evolve under certain mortality pressure, it will shape the evolution of their reproductive lifespan,” says Holmes.

Reznik selected two populations of guppies to test that idea, one that had evolved under heavy predation pressure and another that had evolved under light predation pressure.

Once they analyzed their data, the researchers found that the two regimes did have different impacts on the guppies’ lifespans: “But it wasn’t quite the direction you’d expect,” says Holmes.

If an animal like a guppy lives in a stream with lots of other fish that want to eat it, says Holmes, one might assume that the population is selected to mature more quickly and have a shorter lifespan.

For some reason, the guppies that evolved under the heavy predation pressure not only started reproducing earlier, but actually lived longer.

However, as Holmes predicted, the mortality selection did not have an impact on their post-reproductive lifespan.

In other words, post-reproductive lifespan “seems to be a random add-on at the end of the life history.”

Although the appeal of the grandmother hypothesis is strong, the impulse to care for one’s grandchildren apparently is simply cultural rather than evolutionary in scale. “From an evolutionary standpoint,” says Holmes, “it doesn’t make any sense that you give up your own reproduction to promote the reproduction of your kin. The selection is too weak.

“It was good to get that paper published,” she says, “because a lot of people claim that menopause is unique to humans, and it’s not...

“The grandmother hypothesis is popular because feminists like it, it’s very woman friendly. When evolutionary biologists critiqued it, they were accused of being sexist. So it’s good to have my name on it.”

Panorama

Homes for art

by Hannelore Sudermann

Architect Jim Olson’s work is featured at the WSU Museum of Art. Photo Zach MazurArchitect Jim Olson’s work is featured at the WSU Museum of Art. Photo Zach Mazur

Few of us will ever see inside the homes of some of the Pacific Northwest’s major art collectors. But this fall we get a glimpse when the Museum of Art at Washington State University hosts an exhibit of internationally-known architect Jim Olson’s houses built for art.

Olson’s clients collect works by Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, and Henri Matisse, and they seek out modern sculpture, pre-Columbian artifacts, and antique Southeast Asian artworks. Some of them are sharing images of their homes, as well as art from their own collections, with WSU.

With large photographs dominating the gallery space, it will be almost as if you are standing in a doorway looking into the room of a Jim Olson-designed house, says Chris Bruce, the director of the WSU Museum of Art who thought of creating this exhibit as a way to showcase not only great works of art, but the internationally-known architect who builds to suit them, their owners, and the natural landscape of the sites. 

“For me it’s a great opportunity to work with somebody I’ve admired for such a long time,” says Bruce, who encountered Olson through other Northwest art collectors and patrons. While the Northwest is blessed with a very talented pool of architects, “there are only a handful that really focus on what art does in a space and what a space does for art,” says Bruce.

 It’s something that art lovers will enjoy, but also that students of both art and architecture can learn from, says Bruce. A shelf runs throughout the gallery, displaying ephemera—sketches, photographs, letters to and from the clients, and objects Olson collected at the sites, providing a sense of the architect’s process and experiences. “I always study the art and think about where it came from,” says Olson. He then works elements of that into his designs.

The exhibit came together with help from Olson and his team in the Pioneer Square offices of Olson Kundig Architects, particularly associate William Franklin.

Olson made waves in the Seattle architecture scene in the 1980s with a mixed-use residential project at Pike Place Market. It was there, visiting the Hillclimb Court condominiums, that the first major art collector client met Olson and commissioned him to design a home with the collection in mind. “In some way, they are the most important clients I’ve ever had,” says Olson of the owners of their home, Gallery House. “Your first break is really important,” he says, adding that is one of the messages he hopes to convey to students visiting the exhibit. Another is to follow your instincts—his was for both art and architecture. “The decisions you make as a student are very important for your entire life.”

While art is dominant in his latest work, the other key character on Olson’s canvas is nature. In the home where he grew up, as with many Northwest homes, there was a picture window with a view to Mount Rainier, which Olson calls “our big monument.” He learned early to include the natural surroundings in his designs. “The interior, art, architecture, and landscape can be all one continuous thing,” he says.

The exhibit is a retrospective of five decades of Olson’s work, referencing 30 different projects (a few of which have been featured in Architectural Digest), and featuring large-scale exhibits of four residences of major collectors, three from the Seattle area. Those clients are loaning artworks from their personal collections to show alongside the displays in the museum. They include a Spanish Colonial portrait, a Malcolm Morley painting, a John Chamberlain sculpture of a crumpled car, a mural by Seattle’s Mary Ann Peters, and pieces from Olson’s own collection.

The exhibit also features Olson’s two residences where he has explored and experimented as an architect: his downtown Seattle apartment and his cabin tucked into the trees on Puget Sound. The cabin is one of his first projects, which he started in 1959 while still an architecture student and updated and improved through 2003.

Selecting the projects and digging out the notes, drawings, and materials he once used has been an education in itself, says Olson as he flips through one of the old notebooks crammed full with his writing and sketches. “This has given me an opportunity to look back on my life and think about what really did happen and how did one thing influence the other.”

The exhibit in Pullman runs through December 10. Then in the fall of 2012 it moves to Bellingham’s Lightcatcher Museum, a fitting site since Olson designed it as well.

Panorama

A power shortage

by Tina Hilding

Don Kopczynski ’91 first noticed the power industry’s newest problem around the year 2000. The vice president for Avista Corp. counted 100 engineers on his team. Looking ahead, he realized that half of them would be retiring simultaneously. It made sense, since they all came out of school and entered the workforce at the same time. “We’ve been together our whole careers,’’ he says. 

The looming shortage of engineers, though, is not limited to Avista. It’s a national issue, according to a recent survey by the Center for Energy Workforce Development. Fifty-one percent of engineers working in the power industry, including electric, natural gas, and nuclear utilities, could leave their jobs by 2015. That rate of retirement and attrition has slowed a little because of the downturn in the economy and losses in retirement savings plans. But that is only buying us a little time.

Today there are several key concerns for managing our country’s power resources: the aging workforce, the lack of energy training in the current pool of engineers, and changing technology. The utilities in our region “fattened up on this work force,’’ says Paul Wiegand, senior vice president of energy operations for Puget Sound Energy, and now that block is heading to retirement. 

Furthermore, the number of programs to train power engineers has diminished. Only five university power engineering programs in the country have more than four full-time faculty members. Washington State University is one of them, with seven. And many of the existing programs do not have the resources to incorporate into the curriculum the rapid advances in technologies, both in clean energy and in the smart electric power grid, says Anjan Bose, professor of electric power engineering at WSU.

Then there is the issue of training in new technologies like the smart grid—an electric power system that uses computer-based remotes and automation to anticipate and meet power needs. Efforts to develop the smart grid started back in the 1990s, says Bose. When he came to WSU in 1993, Bose and other faculty members were focusing on using computers to manage power distribution. “We didn’t call it the smart grid back then, but that’s what it was,’’ he says. 

In 2010, the Department of Energy gave $2.5 million to a group of WSU researchers to develop a program for training engineers in clean energy and the smart grid. Bose has also been working with Avista to develop a live test bed for the smart grid in Pullman. Avista received two significant grants through federal stimulus dollars, including a $40 million grant to update the electric power grid in the Spokane area and support for a smart grid regional demonstration project. Last spring, smart meters replaced the typical electric meters at 13,000 homes and businesses in Pullman and Albion. Instead of requiring monthly readings, the meters have wireless internet transmitters that collect and send data to Avista about the times and amounts of energy consumed at each residence. 

The smart grid is going to be the most significant change for the power industry in the next 50 years, says Kopczynski. “None of us that have been here for 30 years are prepared to lead that.’’

Washington State scientists and engineers are also focused on increasing the reliability and security of the power grid and have investigated the causes of major blackouts, such as the 2003 power outage that affected 55 million people in northeast United States and Canada. 

Fortunately, both industry and individuals are striving to update and bolster the workforce. Recently, Puget Sound Energy provided a $150,000 grant to WSU to train students in renewable energy, and Avista is funding a $10,500 annual scholarship program for students in power engineering as well as fostering a strong faculty at WSU by supporting the Power Professorship Development Fund. 

We need to strengthen the research and the training our universities can offer, says Kopczynski. “The only way we’re going to keep our electric facilities working well is if we have well-trained engineers.”

Feature

by Tim Steury

As our population grows older, so grows the incidence of mental impairment and dementia. Researchers at WSU are searching for means of not only coping with, but of curing it.

What it comes down to is, who we are is what we remember. Identity, consciousness in its broadest sense, is memory. And thus, our great fear of losing it.

And for whom is it worse, the person who forgets who he is as memory fades, or the partner who watches helplessly as the person she loves disappears?

Dementia, the end of memory, is not a disease. It is a condition caused by a number of different diseases: Pick’s, Parkinson’s, and the most common, Alzheimer’s.

Dementia is a relatively new affliction, simply because we live longer. Dementia was relatively infrequent until the last half of the twentieth century because so few people survived to old age. But now, 12 percent of our population are 65 or older. Five and a half percent are 75 or older. These numbers will only continue to grow. 

And with age comes dementia. Currently, 5–10 percent of those 65 or older are believed to have dementia. Of those 85 and older, that likelihood is 40–50 percent. This translates to between four and six million people in the United States with Alzheimer’s disease. Since Alzheimer’s represents only about half of dementia patients, the total number is approximately eight to twelve million. Those numbers are expected to double by 2050.

However, even though the incidence of dementia correlates with our rising age, it is not a normal part of aging. And thus, one of our great modern hopes is to find a cure, or short of that, better ways to cope.

Psychology graduate students Chad Sanders and Christina Low guide groups of memory-impaired people and their partners in adapting compensatory techniques. Photo Robert Hubner
Psychology graduate students Chad Sanders and Christina Low guide groups of memory-impaired people and their partners in adapting compensatory techniques. Photo Robert Hubner

As a guest, I’m the only one around the table without a partner. Half of the assembled company at the WSU Visitor Center in Pullman one morning this summer are having memory problems. The other half are spouses, children, good friends, who are here to help their partners cope with fading memory. There are 13 of us, including Chad Sanders and Christina Low, graduate students in psychology who are leading the group.

As each person introduces him- or herself, I am struck by their familiarity and humor. Louise (I am using pseudonyms for the sake of privacy), who sits next to me, announces gravely, “My name is Louise, and I have no idea why I am here.” Following a well-timed pause, she winks at me and laughs.

Carl, on my other side, is amiable, but less jovial than Louise. He introduces himself, matter-of-factly, as having recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. 

Across the table is Marie, impeccably dressed in a crisp tailored blouse with a silver broach, who nursed a memory-impaired husband for 15 years until he died. Now, her own memory slipping, she is here with her daughter to learn how to compensate.

Today, their fourteenth session, after general conversation and reporting on their weeks, the participants will work on using their memory notebooks for daily scheduling.

The group is part of ongoing collaboration between neuropsychologists Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe and Dennis Dyck combining two intervention techniques to provide a compensatory strategy and social connections for patients and caregivers.

Schmitter-Edgecombe brings to this collaborative table what she calls “cognitive rehabilitation.” Her main tool is the memory notebook as a memory aid. The notebook consists of a daily log section, including an hourly log and to-do-today list. Each session the participants are given assignments and asked to report on how they used the notebook since the previous session.

 “We’re not trying to make memories better,” she says. “The neurons are dying. We’re trying to help them function better in their everyday lives, with external aids and prompting technology.”

 With various techniques that help reinforce memories and an emphasis on healthy lifestyle behavior, the goal is to help patients maintain functional independence, thus delaying diagnosis of dementia.

 Schmitter-Edgecombe and Dyck have received funding from the Alzheimer’s Association to combine her methodology with an approach Dyck has long expertise in called multi-family group intervention.

 Multi-family group intervention started with work by psychiatrist William McFarlane with schizophrenics. Dyck, who at the time was director of the newly formed Washington Institute on Mental Illness, was drawn to McFarlane’s work. He invited him out for presentations on the approach. 

 As the name suggests, multi-family group intervention brings together a critical number of “dyads,” patient and caregiver pairs. Dyck was particularly interested in using the treatment in community-based settings because hospitals were discontinuing their treatment programs do to cuts in federal spending.

 “We started thinking,” says Dyck, “schizophrenia is unique, but shares lots of commonalities with other chronic problems, things for which there is no cure.”

 Dyck adapted the approach for participants who had suffered brain and spinal cord injuries and then for veterans with traumatic brain injuries suffered in Afghanistan.

“All along, we had been talking with Maureen and others, about helping families cope with dementia,” says Dyck. “The challenge now is to combine the two things.”

“We want to give people a place to come back to,” he says. Given the progressive nature of dementia, at some point caregivers will have to make tough decisions, from when to take away the car keys to when their loved one can no longer be cared for at home.

Weaving together the multi-family group and cognitive rehabilitation approaches gives the participants a powerful tool, in the form of the memory notebook, and both patients and caregivers a supportive network. It is also an intricate process.

“This is one of those things that looks seat of the pants, but is well-structured,” says Dyck of the group session. I had realized about halfway through the session that it was indeed far more tightly scripted than first appeared. Sanders and Low were relaxed and conversational, but persistent, heading off wayward conversations, bringing the discussion back to the matter at hand—how to use the memory notebook to remember. It’s great that we all like each other, they imply, but there’s work to be done here.

Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe and Dennis Dyck have combined their methodologies to help memory-impaired people maintain their functional independence. Photo Robert Hubner
Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe and Dennis Dyck have combined their methodologies to help memory-impaired people maintain their functional independence. Photo Robert Hubner

After explaining in general what we’ll be doing over the next three hours and orienting me to the “smart apartment,” Courtney McAlister and Jennifer Walker disappear up the stairs.

“Mr. Tim,” comes McAlister’s voice over a small intercom on top of the television. “Are you ready?”

McAlister is a graduate student working under Schmitter-Edgecombe in the memory lab, and Walker is manager of the lab. A couple of weeks earlier, McAlister had run me through a battery of “neuropsych” tests, at my request, so I could better understand the issues at hand.

At 59, I had no reason to worry about my memory, other than the periodic forgotten names and other temporary blank spots. Yet I was surprised by my anxiety over taking the test. What about that last word in a recalled series? Why can’t I remember it? Does it mean I’m losing it?

Now, in the second part of my testing, I am sitting in the “smart apartment.” Tucked away in one of the university’s student housing blocks, the apartment is part of a collaboration between neuropsychologist Schmitter-Edgecombe and Diane Cook, a computer engineer.

There are two things going on here. One is they are testing me and my ability to conduct certain everyday tasks. They are also developing the ability of the apartment to help people live on their own longer.

 Cook and Schmitter-Edgecombe are refining algorithms that identify the activity that an inhabitant is performing based on the sensor data collected during the activity. Although the goal is to monitor a person’s activity, the researchers set out to keep the monitoring noninvasive. Rather than invade a person’s privacy by videotaping or otherwise observing, they are developing a system that uses motion and temperature sensors that will be able to tell when a person is having problems or has deviated from his normal routine. The apartment is wired throughout with motion and temperature sensors, as well as analog sensors that monitor water and stove burner use. 

My first task is to wash my hands. Sensors record the water flow.

Activities of varying difficulty follow: selecting clothes for a young friend’s job interview, sweeping the floor and dusting the living room, cooking oatmeal, fixing noodles for my imaginary friend’s lunch.

I watch a DVD (which I have to figure out how to turn on) of Good Morning America.

I write a birthday card to my sister (who will be amazed that I remembered) and write her a check (which will surprise her even more).

I sort pills for the day’s consumption, call Safeway for a recipe, file bills.

After I finish planning a trip to the museum with a friend, for whom I’ll later fix dinner, for which I gather ingredients from the cupboard, I am finished. 

Just about. I am quizzed about the order of tasks, about how difficult I found them. Or maybe that was earlier?

Regardless, Jennifer and Courtney tell me I have moved through the tests and tasks the quickest of anyone who has gone through the smart apartment routine. Following an initial flush of pride, however, I realize that I am probably 20 years younger than most of my compatriots. And maybe I skimped a little on the dusting.

Jennifer Walker (left), manager of WSU’s memory laboratory, and graduate student Courtney McAlister conduct a regimen of tests in the “smart apartment.” Photo Robert Hubner
Jennifer Walker (left), manager of WSU’s memory laboratory, and graduate student Courtney McAlister conduct a regimen of tests in the “smart apartment.” Photo Robert Hubner

My wife and son are out of town, so I am having dinner with my mother-in-law. She is 92 and has just been through the same tests as I have. Not only has her cat just died, she has just received the report of the testing in the mail and is disheartened, but not surprised, by the results. Then again, she can’t remember any of the specifics.

“I’m losing it,” she says.

She scrutinizes the menu, a deliberate and repetitive process. The waiter offers to return in a few minutes.

“Where are Diane and David?” she asks. 

“That’s right,” she says in frustration when I remind her. “I need to have it written down.”

Our conversation somehow moves to religion. She recounts, as she often has, how she and her brother asked her hitherto secular parents why they couldn’t get dressed up and go to Sunday school like all the other kids in Jamaica Plain.

So her mother took her to the Christian Science Mother Church on Huntington Avenue in Boston and enrolled her in Sunday school.

Now, she is reciting at length Mary Baker Eddy’s tenets of Christian Science, searching only briefly for a missing phrase. The recitation is eloquent and lucid, beautiful in its phrasing and depth.

Then she repeats a story she had told me 15 minutes earlier.

When her salad arrives, she comments, in German. Why did I use German, she asks, then reaches into her memory for the equivalent comment in French, then Spanish.

Although I haven’t yet read the results of her testing, I assume they are different from mine, as is natural since my mind and my memory are 33 years younger. And in spite of her frustration, and fear, in spite of the obvious loss of short-term memory, her mind is remarkable in what it produces, from events 50 years ago, from books long ago enjoyed, from distant conversations, detailed recollections.

 “By means of an image,” wrote Colette, “we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.”

Biochemist Joe Harding and neuroscientist Jay Wright started out a couple of decades ago working with angiotensin, a peptide normally considered to be involved in regulating blood pressure. But then they discovered the AT4 receptor, which turned out to be involved not with blood pressure, but with memory acquisition and consolidation.

They started experimenting with different things, different animal models. At one point, they were working with a stroke model, conducting experiments in which they simply applied drugs that interfered with the key neurotransmitter involved with memory. One procedure involved cutting half the neural inputs to the hippocampus, which is key to spatial orientation and short-term memory.

In every case, the angiotensin restored much of the neural connectivity to the hippocampus. All they could think, says Wright, was, “How the heck did that work?” 

Intrigued, they continued down this so-far mysterious path.

Obviously, they were on to something: A drug that restores memory.

Exciting as the possibility might be, however, the molecules of the angiotensin they were working with at the time had no clinical potential, says Harding. They were huge, far too large to pass through the blood-brain barrier, a filter that protects the brain against toxins. 

“The only way you could get them in a person was to drill a hole in their head and drop them in,” he says.

But new forms of angiotensin analogs kept getting smaller, down to just a few amino acids.

“And then we got lucky,” says Harding. 

What they had stumbled on is that those few amino acids that make up the small angiotensin molecule look like part of a growth factor that stimulates neurons to expand the number of connections they make to other neurons.

“It happens to be a critical part of the protein. We started seeing all these behaviors and things that didn’t jive with angiotensin. It took literally close to a decade to figure out how it worked. 

“Part of it had to do with the fact that the growth factor we eventually identified as analogous to wasn’t even discovered at the time.”

Now, 20 years later, they understand that the angiotensin they work with will restore neural connectivity in their animal models—restoring connectivity destroyed by dementia.

“One of the big problems with the mouse models,” says Wright, “is whether you’re dealing with a symptom or a cause. And it’s probably not one disease. There are at least six categories. Five besides Alzheimer’s. And Alzheimer’s might have several causes.”

“Our interest is more in dementia in general,” says Harding. “None of these models is perfect. Our bottom line is they [animal models] have a learning deficit.

“Our drug will work on any of these systems.”

In most dementia, Harding explains, the main problem is not so much a loss of nerve cells, though there is some, but rather a loss of connections. Thus, Harding and Wright’s focus, once they realized what they were working with, was using their drugs to renew connectivity.

Even in spite of neuronal loss, they have repeatedly found a direct correlation between expanding neural connections and improvement in learning.

“Some of our best drugs,” says Harding, “can literally double the connections within 24–48 hours.”

These drugs do not, he says, correct whatever disease causes dementia. Rather, they are ameliorative, correcting some of the connectivity damage.

Although their work is very exciting, there is no guarantee that their drugs will work in humans. They are filing patents, creating a new biotech company with the help of WSU’s Intellectual Property office, and are ready to begin toxicity trials and then test the drugs on humans. They have five papers coming out over the next few months that will lay out the whole story. They are also currently in discussion with a couple of pharmaceutical companies.

“In a perfect world,” says Harding, “if a pharmaceutical company licensed this right now, we could have clinical trials in about 12 months.”

Not only could these drugs be a powerful weapon against dementia, the procedures Harding and Wright have developed may also make it possible to work backwards regarding the theory of memory, says Wright.

“It seems to me if we can identify dysfunctional memory in animal models and then fix it by correcting the connections, synapses, and going in to check what behaviors have improved and what hasn’t ... maybe we can start plotting where in the brain these memories are being stored and how they’re being stored.”

Jay Wright (left) and Joe Harding have discovered that drugs they work with will restore neural connectivity destroyed by dementia in animal models. Photo Robert Hubner
Jay Wright (left) and Joe Harding have discovered that drugs they work with will restore neural connectivity destroyed by dementia in animal models. Photo Robert Hubner

Feature

by Eric Sorensen

The deadline approaches. 

I’ve seen it coming for weeks but keep getting pulled away by the incessant distractions of my modern, connected office life: desk phone, cell phone, window, and the eternal promise of serendipitous discovery offered by what I call the TV on my desk. At any moment, my email inbox, blog reader, news sites, social networks, and several hundred fellow Twitterers might thrill me with a heretofore unknown fact.

The late Mariner’s broadcaster Dave Niehaus was the first to call Alex Rodriguez “A-Rod.”

Alaskan sled dogs perform best at 0 degrees F.

A Facebook friend in a Dallas diner has posted a picture of his breakfast “schnitzel”—a breaded pork medallion with grits, sautéed spinach and hollandaise.

This just in: NPR has a books page.

It’s almost enough to make me miss the days when a writer’s main distraction was a pencil in need of sharpening. But not quite. Unstated in most complaints about distractions is that we like many of them, which is why we let them distract us.

But they do cut into a precious but largely unappreciated sector of human capital: our attention.

Attention is the portal of our experience, the gatekeeper of all we know and love and hope to avoid. It keeps us alive, tipping us off to tempting foodstuffs and warning of dangers hurtling at us from the corner of our eye. It alerts us to possible mates.

All while weeding out billions of bits of information a second to focus on just enough to think, react, and remember.

The “skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life,” writes Winifred Gallagher in Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, “and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships.”

Our attention is also central to our economic and political life. Whole industries exist simply to bring products to your attention. Our democracy is based on the premise that, when you raise your voice, someone will listen.

But now it seems our attention is atomized among an ever greater set of options. 

 “There’s so much more coming at us all the time from so many different kinds of communication platforms,” says Erica Austin, a Murrow College of Communication professor who has looked at the ways marketers catch the eyes of children. “You think about it: If you’re just walking down the street, people have their iPods. There are cars going by all the time. Some of them are vans that have advertising emblazoned on them. You’ve got billboards. You may be walking into a store where they’ve got stuff playing, promotional end caps of merchandise. There’s just stuff everywhere.”

Our growing attention deficit is insidious: It’s hard to know you’re not paying attention to something when, well, you’re not paying attention to it. That’s how you get scads of people talking and texting while they drive. They think they’re paying attention to two things at once. They aren’t. They can’t be. They could drive past a gorilla and not see it.

We might have seen this coming. The social scientist Herbert Simon did in 1971, a quarter century before the flowering of the Internet, when he noted “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Information is the new coin of our realm, but we see it in a fleeting, superficial, “ooh, shiny” way. Vast quantities of knowledge wash over us and we lie mute and mouth-breathing on the couch, our hand paralyzed on the remote. We may even be witnessing the defeat of the information age, but only if we are paying attention.

Erica Austin. Photo Robert HubnerErica Austin. Photo Robert Hubner

Calling All Neurons

Some things require little or no attention, like tying a shoe for the 4,000th time.

Then there are situations in which attention must be paid, like when a siren passes outside the window, activating our automatic orienting response. Try to ignore it, but it’s already caught your attention. The modern world is lousy with such distractions, distractions for which we are not quite evolved.

 “You have sounds, you have smells, you have sights that are all going to command and fight for your attention,” says Craig Parks, a professor of psychology whose work on groups has him interested in the role of attention in social settings. “In prehistory you just didn’t have that. And one argument at least on the socio-psychological side that you sometimes see is that, in an evolutionary sense, our ability to adapt to competing demands on our attention has not evolved as rapidly as those competing sources have evolved.”

Between the extremes of minimal, automatic attention (shoe tying) and mandatory attention (sirens) lies a world in which our attention is, millisecond by millisecond, weighing its options. It can only handle so much, so it plays the odds.

Craig Parks. Photo Zach MazurCraig Parks. Photo Zach Mazur

This is a big concern of Lisa Fournier, an associate professor of psychology whose research focuses on selective attention, perception, and action. When she told test subjects that the odds were even that they would see an object in one of two places, they divided their attention evenly between the two. But when the odds went to 70–30, they tended to focus on the higher probability place. 

“There seems to be some biases in the system that you can actually set up in terms of what it is you’re going to attend to and then those things you’re more susceptible to see,” says Fournier. If you’re driving a car, she says, you might expect oncoming traffic. Or in a rural area, you might expect an animal to jump out into the road. 

But if things get challenging—an unexpected bicyclist appears, or an angry friend calls on the cell—it’s going to get harder to see.

In a widely cited Science study, British researchers had subjects watch a screen on which dots expanded outward. When the dots froze after a minute or so, the test subjects got the illusion that they had changed direction. This is called the motion after-effect.

Then researchers put words over the dots and asked participants to press a key when upper-case words appeared, or press a key when a two-syllable word appeared.

The second task was harder—a “high-load linguistic task”—as each word had to be read and evaluated. And that’s when researchers saw the motion after-effect decrease. Through functional brain imaging, they also saw reduced motion processing when subjects were busy recognizing the two-syllable words.

The study, says Fournier, shows that the cells sensitive to motion are actually less sensitive when you’re attending to something else.

This could have implications for driving, where more than one-third of accidents are due to inattention or errors of perception. If you’re engaged in something a bit challenging, like a cell phone conversation, you may be less sensitive to motion outside the windshield, says Fournier. You may try to give equal weight to watching the road and talking, but talking is a high-load linguistic task and can be a complicated act of social navigation.

“It can be very engaging,” says Fournier, so you have a lot less of your attention dedicated to driving. “We do know that when someone is super-engaged with a cell phone, his or her driving is similar to that of a drunk driver.”

In a practical sense, the cell-phone yakking driver may be functionally blind.

One form of this is “change blindness.” When test subjects look at a series of pictures with subtle changes between them, they have a hard time picking up differences that don’t alter the picture’s meaning. You can perform this test yourself. Watch a movie, then look up its “goofs” page on the Internet Movie Database. Dozens of mistakes will have eluded you: sudden changes to Richard Gere’s wardrobe in Pretty Woman, an electric lamp in the nineteenth century setting of Gone with the Wind, a ’60s era Cessna in the ’40s era Godfather.

“What this suggested to researchers is that attention itself is very important for perception,” says Fournier. “It’s not just what hits the eye and hits the visual cortex. What you select out, what you’re looking at, how you’re interpreting the picture, etc., is very important.” 

Then there’s “inattention blindness.” In one of the most popular attention studies ever, test subjects watched videos of people passing a basketball and were told to count the passes of either a team in white shirts or a team in black shirts. Afterwards, they were asked if they saw anything unusual.

One-third of the time, they had not noticed a woman walking across the screen with an umbrella. More than half the time, their attention was so absorbed by the ball passing that they didn’t see a person walk by in a gorilla suit.

Fournier likens attention to a spotlight centering on one thing. The more demanding the task, the narrower and more concentrated the light’s focus, to the exclusion of things on the darkened periphery. 

“There’s only so much you can process at one time,” she says. 

In other words, we have precious little attention to give—much less than we even think we have. 

Compounding this is how our high-tech world is throwing things at us at a greater rate.

“Sometimes it can be just overwhelming to stay on a certain task, particularly when you have to write, to really focus,” says Fournier, whose own distractions include seven-year-old twins. “When you have an idea, and you’re interrupted, that idea can just be lost.”

Lisa Fournier. Photo Shelly HanksLisa Fournier. Photo Shelly Hanks

Attention Shoppers

This spring, Erica Austin’s son got a video game that flashed a lot. It was a study in that automatic, unavoidable orienting response, over and over and over.

“You’re constantly reorienting, reorienting, reorienting,” says Austin. She figured the game makers meant to do that, the better to hold the player’s attention. 

“We actually had a malfunctioning unit,” she says, “and didn’t realize it for a week.”

As our world has filled with attention-grabbing technologies, the people whose job relies on getting our attention—TV outlets, radio stations, websites, advertisers—have been scrambling to, as they say, cut through the clutter. A lot is at stake, from whole product lines to the education of students to the marketplace of ideas in a democracy. But oftentimes, the clamor for eyeballs has only added to the clutter. In some instances, like the video game, media have succeeded in drawing our attention to the shine and not the substance, catching our eyes while our minds stay stuck in neutral.

“It makes it hard for you to process information,” says Austin. “If you’re orienting all the time, you’re not actually doing any deeper processing. There’s a balance between getting people’s attention and being able to keep sustained attention and get people to think about whatever the message might be.”

It’s the Tower of Babel, with a light show, and it poses problems for both consumers and those who want their message seen and heard.

Consumers, children included, can be the first to suffer.

Austin keeps by her desk a necklace with a small, beer-bottle light at the end. There’s no name on the bottle, but it’s a dead ringer for a Corona.

“It’s shiny,” says Austin. “It flashes. It was given to a five-year-old on a field trip.”

It’s also an example of “cradle-to-grave” marketing, which tries to capture the attention and loyalty of consumers early on in the hopes they will stay with the product for life. Much of Austin’s research has looked at how even tobacco and alcohol companies will target young people toward this end.

Meanwhile, young children lack the judgment to tell if an ad is for their benefit or someone else’s—information or persuasion.

“Young people pretty much think everything is information,” she says.

Moreover, says Tom Power, chair of WSU’s Department of Human Development, attention regulation is not completely developed in children.

Tom Power. Photo Shelly HanksTom Power. Photo Shelly Hanks

The children’s television show Sesame Street picked up on this and was among the first to figure out how to hold a child’s attention by keeping segments short and changing them often. Power sees yet another technique in video games, which can hold a player’s attention for hours by scaffolding the action, luring participants from one level to the next.

Keep in mind, Power is the holder of a doctoral degree, a class of person with phenomenal powers of self-direction and focus. He also sees a model of attentiveness in Thomas Edison, whose superhuman attention to thousands of possible light bulb filaments led at last to one that worked.

But he has a point: Attention is often borne out of an individual’s values and motivations. In the case of a scaffolded video game, it’s the machine that maintains attention, not the person. 

“So you’re becoming a pawn that’s being manipulated by this machine,” Power says.

There is one place where it is generally accepted that it’s good to get your audience’s attention: the classroom. It’s becoming a tough room to work.

“There’s a whole range of things that are in play,” says Olusola Adesope, an assistant professor in educational psychology whose interests include learning with multimedia resources. 

“Nothing is controlled,” he says. “You have hungry kids. You have kids whose parents have just broken up. You have kids who, maybe their sister just had a kid last week and they’re thinking about that. You have someone who was just asked out on a date last night. You’re dealing with these varied abilities in terms of interest.”

On top of that, students can text on cell phones and take notes on wirelessly connected laptops.

When I visit Adesope, he has up on his computer screen a paper called, “How seductive details do their damage.” Seductive details are basically the carnival barker that gets you into the tent—interesting, but of little educational value. But such research is generally done in controlled laboratory settings without the distractions of social lives or technology. To punch through that, says Adesope, teachers need to rise above the muted technique of the cool, gentle professor who “runs the risk of losing these kids.”

As a child in Nigeria, Adesope himself learned the periodic table of elements from a chemistry teacher who translated it into songs.

“I’ve seen professors, I’ve seen good teachers, interject their lectures with music,” he says. “They’re singing, or they start playing. These are little tricks that could potentially work. Dealing with these students, we can’t force them to shut up their computers. We can seduce them.”

Olusola Adesope. Photo Shelly HanksOlusola Adesope. Photo Shelly Hanks

Now That I Have Your Attention

Laura Sample ’89 runs a Yakima advertising firm called Attention Marketing and uses many of the latest tools and techniques to be seen and heard: websites, TV commercials, social media. She knows a bit about giving and getting attention and appreciates an ad that, Sesame Street-style, moves fast between edits.

 “Two seconds is about right,” she says. “It’s about the attention span of adults today.”

But it could be that the fast-moving stream of media images and ideas can only do so much to get its point across, even when it does catch our eyes and ears.

In 2003, Paul Bolls (’95 MA Comm.) and Darrel Muehling in the College of Business looked at how the number of visual cuts in a television commercial affected viewers’ attention. They showed subjects 12 30-second advertisements—six fast-paced ones with 11 or more cuts and six slow-paced ones with three or fewer cuts. The participants’ automatic orienting response was monitored by electrodes that could detect subtle changes in sweat, an electrolyte and indicator of arousal. Afterwards, they were asked to recall what they saw. 

The faster paced the commercial, the more it captured the viewers’ orienting response. But it was only drawing attention to the ad’s execution, as the viewers struggled to recall its content. The medium’s flash had overwhelmed its message.

If an advertiser aims “to clearly communicate product benefits,” the authors wrote, “a slower-paced advertisement (i.e. one with fewer ‘bits’ of information presented) would appear to be the advertisement execution of choice.”

“If you’re in the business of trying to get people to learn information, you have to be careful trying to have that, ‘oh, shiny’ road too much,” says Bolls, now an associate professor of strategic communication at the Missouri School of Journalism. “While that strategy is good at capturing this short-term working memory attention, oftentimes, particularly in the media world, it actually interferes with learning.”

Bolls is now working on ways to make journalism rise above the din by being more compelling, engaging, and memorable. In unpublished research presented to an International Communication Association conference, he found that some of the most captivating and memorable political ads “consisted of a candidate just simply talking to the camera, having a discussion.”

He was surprised, extrapolating from the early work showing faster pacing captured attention.

“In terms of media production, one thing that will also reliably, automatically engage attention is someone looking at a camera as if they’re talking to you,” he says. “We’re hard-wired to pay attention when it looks like people are talking to us. Which makes perfect common sense. And that carries over into the media world.”

While machines seem to be overloading us in an arcade of lights and noise, a human face and voice can cut through the din and actually be memorable. It’s a hard-wired thing: Our brain is designed to focus attention on social things, so even if something is fast-moving and electronic, we respond if people are at the end of it.

 “Facebook is an example of that,” says Bolls. “Twitter is an example of that. LinkedIn. All forms of social media. That’s why that’s so compelling.”

It’s a reassuring thought: The original social media—a person looking you in the eye and talking—still works. Especially when we look away from the screen, or the person talking to us stops texting and puts away the phone.

Paul Bolls (left) and Darrel Muehling studied reactions to a different screen — the TV — and found fast-paced commercials drew attention to their execution but not their content. Photoillustration Zach Mazur/Staff

Essay

Collegiate Athletics in the 21st Century

by Thabiti Lewis

“Just Win, Baby!” was the motto made famous by legendary Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis. His philosophy was that simple. Along the way the Raiders gained a reputation as one of the dirtiest, most penalized, but successful teams in professional football. Collegiate athletics seems to have adopted Davis’s philosophy as compliance and education are threatened by the very big business of college sports. 

In Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America, I contend that the system of college athletics no longer works for the realities of the 21st century. There is simply too much media exposure and money at stake. For example, teams playing in Bowl Championship Series football bowl games earned their conferences from $5 to $18 million. The coaches at most top schools earn $1 million or more annually. 

Mark Emmert, who two years ago replaced the late Myles Brand as president of the NCAA, has been winning serious revenue for college football and basketball programs. In 2010 he signed a new television contract for its annual March Madness basketball tournament, extended its field of teams, watched the realignment of several storied football conferences and rivalries, and encouraged lucrative network deals for new conferences and in some cases teams. Meanwhile, at Ohio State University, University of North Carolina, Auburn, USC, West Virginia, Miami, and Oregon, serious violations have either occurred or been charged against athletes in the revenue producing sports. I predict this is just the beginning.

With so much money at stake, compliance and educational goals will never exceed the importance of winning games to generate revenue. I do not blame coaches and players caught up in recent violations. I blame a system that willfully ignores a changed world. 

Football and basketball generate more revenue than all other sports combined. These sports are also loaded with African American athletes who comprise most of the star power, especially basketball players. They also have the worst graduation rates among collegiate athletes.

The only way to protect them and student athletes in general from being financially exploited and jeopardizing their education is to allow them a much greater financial remittance plus a three-year guaranteed scholarship commitment instead of the current one that is renewed annually. 

What primetime college athletes produce is extremely valuable. A recent study, “The Price of Poverty in Big Time College Sport,” jointly produced by the National College Players Association and Drexel University professor Ellen J. Staurowsky, reveals that the average Football Bowl Subdivision player, if allowed access to the free market, would be worth $121,000 per year, while the average basketball player at that level would be worth $265,000. 

 The primary mission of the university is education, not football or basketball rankings. This is difficult to remember when sports drive such a large part of the economic engine of modern universities. Former NCAA and University of Oregon president Myles Brand revealed the importance of sports as early as the 1980s when the University of Oregon was facing federal cutbacks. He grew the popularity of Oregon’s big-time sports programs, which drew increased out-of-state tuition dollars. It became a proven formula that will be difficult to change. 

But change it must. The truth of the matter is that media exposure makes college athletes celebrities, and they should be able to share the profit from their celebrity. This is not the 1970s. In the 21st century student athletes must receive ample compensation. If the athletes at Ohio State, USC, or Miami were being properly compensated, they would not sell rings, signatures and jerseys, or take money from agents and friends of the programs. 

People forget that the Ivy Leagues once were what the Southeastern Conference and Big Ten are today—titans of collegiate football. In 1905, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton presidents and football coaches, shocked by the level of violence in college football, met with President Theodore Roosevelt to discuss restoring the nobility of the game.[1] (This group would form the core of what is today known as the NCAA.) 

Today, the NCAA should convene equally crucial meetings with university presidents to address the new reality of collegiate athletics: It is a business that exploits an amateur labor force that is expected to train and produce like professionals. And while the solutions they will have to reach—such as paying athletes far more money, prioritizing academics over athletics, making lengthy scholarship commitments, and rewarding coaches for academic performance—will be economically painful, it will restore the integrity and nobility of football and basketball. 

Let’s face it, the money will only grow. Many students looking for a college want to attach themselves to a winner so they choose institutions with successful athletic programs.[2] Ask the admissions directors of Auburn and Oregon or teams that made the men’s basketball Final Four how high the out-of-state admissions jumped (the average for schools in BCS championship games is roughly 30 percent), or how many points the SAT profiles climbed.

Sport is both a great marketing and economic tool. Even our own Washington State University athletic department gained a $20 million network windfall for being a member of the powerful new PAC-12. This money will go toward building facilities that will allow WSU to compete and grow its sports brand, which will help market other aspects of the university and the research of its faculty. 

Everyone, in fact, stands to benefit except the players who generate this enormous profit. The state of college athletics in the 21st century has to be about more than winning at all costs. The new motto that should emerge from a gathering of the NCAA and university presidents should be “Just Learn Baby” and the new promise, “We Will Pay You an Equitable Share of the Pie You Helped to Bake.”

This I am ready to tailgate and cheer for.

[1] See my discussion of the history of college sports and the culture of greed in Chapter 5 of Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America, pp. 177-182.

[2] See Murray Sperber’s intriguing discussion about this in Beer and Circus: How Bigtime Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education.

Thabiti Lewis teaches English and African American Studies at WSU Vancouver. He is the author of Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America (Third World Press) and of the forthcoming book Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara (University Press of Mississippi).

Feature

by Hannelore Sudermann

Last spring a crowd gathered in the ballroom of the historic Hotel Monte Cristo in downtown Everett to weigh in on plans for the city’s future. The focus was expanding higher education in Snohomish County, home to the Everett Community College and outpost for eight other private and public colleges and universities.

Everett is a port town rich with history, natural resources, historic structures, a strong industrial base anchored by Boeing, and a diverse community. But for years it has aspired to be something more.

It could be a regional center for education, said Mayor Ray Stephanson. It wants a four-year research university. Since 1988, access to higher education in Snohomish, Skagit, Island, and north King counties has been a concern for the region and the state. It is essential for Everett and the rest of the north Puget Sound region to move ahead, Stephanson told the crowd. “Only a research university can provide engineering training to keep Boeing growing in this community.”

His Marysville counterpart Mayor Jon Nehring took the microphone and echoed his comments, emphasizing that this was more than an issue just for Everett. “I think times are changing and the county is coming together.”

Plans to provide the growing community with a higher education resource offering baccalaureate and postgraduate degrees have dragged on for more than two decades. Disagreements over where to site a campus, what courses to offer, and how to fund it have complicated and deterred local efforts. At one point, the University of Washington was going to build an $800 million science and engineering campus in Snohomish County. In light of the economic downturn and a variety of other reasons, that isn’t going to happen any time soon, said Stephanson. That is why he approached WSU last January and asked if the state school might simply and quickly take over the University Center of North Puget Sound, a collection of state and private schools offering associates, bachelors, and masters degree programs, housed on Everett Community College’s campus and managed by EvCC since 2005.

The meeting was organized to bring the townspeople to meet WSU President Elson S. Floyd and make more public the hurried discussion about handing the University Center over to the Pullman-based state university. This is something WSU knows how to do, Floyd assured the crowd. With branch campuses in Vancouver, Spokane, and the Tri-Cities, the University has a wealth of experience working with community colleges and other local institutions to find ways to serve the communities.

Still, there was tension in the room. At that point, it was uncertain that the state legislature would approve the plan. And some from the community and community college voiced concern that this would drain resources from Everett Community College and the other schools that are part of the University Center. “I feel like David in front of Goliath,” said Christine Kerlin, Everett Community College University Center vice president. She noted that University Center under the management of EvCC already offers a number of masters and bachelors degrees and has worked diligently to meet the demands of the community. She asked: “What will we lose because resources are limited?” With statewide budget cuts to higher education, money to build or enhance the University Center will certainly be scarce. 

But there was enthusiasm, too. The region’s state legislators had been arguing that the region has been too long lacking in higher education opportunities. “Promises have been made and promises have been broken repeatedly to this community,” says Floyd. “The bottom line is that this community deserves to have a very strong research education partner. We can form new partnerships to extend the reach of our university into this community. WSU does that exceedingly well.”

Associate professor of education Paul E. Pitre, pictured here in downtown Everett, is on assignment to lead the development of WSU’s educational programs at the University Center of North Puget Sound. Photo Matt Hagen

Port And Potential

Everett has been built on aspirations.

It was settled in the 1890s on a north pointing peninsula wrapped by the Snohomish River on the east and bordered by Port Gardner Bay to the west. The early settlers were lured by the fishing and the seemingly endless amount of timber that they could harvest and transport out of the mountains and down the rivers to the port. They could see themselves as the hub of Puget Sound. They platted out their city and divided up the land in speculation and preparation for the Great Northern Railway pushing its way across the Midwest, the Cascades and to the sound.

Fairhaven and Anacortes were also vying to be the West Coast terminus, but it seemed Everett had won. Then “Everett happened overnight, immediately,” says historian Larry O’Donnell, author of Everett: Past and Present and longtime Everett resident. Those other cities had years to develop. But when it appeared that Everett could be the terminus for the railroad, the land was platted and parceled, and buildings sprang up on the hillside.

Getting the railroad and investment from the East Coast was only a partial success, says O’Donnell. “It did come here. Everett is where the rails met the sails.” 

Then the tracks turned south to Seattle. Everett wasn’t the end of the line but more a stop along the way.

O’Donnell tells this story on a drizzly Saturday in downtown Everett, where about 25 locals have collected for a tour of the town’s Hewitt District, which joined the National Historic Register in 2010. “Welcome to ‘Ever-wet,’” O’Donnell says with a grin. He leads us down Hewitt Avenue, one of the city’s main streets, which runs, as Hewitt wanted, from the river to the marina. 

The avenue is lined with three-, four-, and six- story historic buildings, and as we peer up at them and listen to O’Donnell, we are transported back to a town built by mill barons, bankers, and timber industrialists, where immigrants from the Midwest and Scandinavia came for the promise of a better life, and where people plotted their days out by the plant whistles. Hewitt Avenue parallels the train tracks, and 100 years ago was the chain along which hotels, banks, bars, theaters, and restaurants typical of a railroad neighborhood were strung.

In 1900 Weyerhaeuser had purchased 900 million acres of timber from the Northern Pacific Land Grants and built in Everett what was at the time the largest timber mill in the world. A second mill, this time built by another investor from Minnesota, produced red cedar shingles. The Great Northern railroad brought in migrants from the Midwest and New England, and immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia to work in the mills and factories and populate the town. 

Our first stop, “Speaker’s Corner,” is a landmark for labor history and another example of the townspeople seeking a better life. At the intersection of Hewitt and Wetmore avenues, it played a part in one of the most significant events in the labor movement of that era. Here, in November 1916 in the midst of a shingle weavers’ strike over working conditions, Industrial Workers of the World volunteers arrived to speak about safety and pay and the general workers’ concerns in Everett. According to John L. Miller, who traveled there with the IWW to support the striking workers, the group from Seattle was rounded up by the sheriff and his deputies, taken out of town, and roughed up. “They beat us over the head and shoulders as we ran,” he wrote in an account now housed at the University of Washington archives. 

What we now know as the Everett Massacre took place the following Sunday. Miller joined more than 200 volunteers to return to Everett and demonstrate for unionized labor again. As the Verona, the steamer boat they rode in, tied up to the city dock, the sheriff and a group of deputies were there to meet them. The sheriff told them they couldn’t land. “The hell we can’t,” was the reply. Then the sheriff turned around and a single shot was fired, according to Miller’s account. Then came a volley. In the ensuing battle, five members of the IWW were killed on the Verona and two deputies were killed on the dock.

Miller took a pragmatic approach to the tragedy. “Was our fight worth-while?” he asked in his account. “Well we organized the Lumber workers in the woods won improved living conditions there, and was [sic] able to make working conditions somewhat safer for the loggers. Perhaps more lives were saved that year of 1917 than were lost in the Everett Massacre.”

But all was not acrimonious. The millworkers eventually improved conditions inside the mills. And out in town, they and their children and grandchildren helped build a community.

“It’s a very friendly, pretty blue collar sort of town,” says Connie Niva ’62, a WSU Regent who was born and raised in Everett and who returned to the area after college. “It’s a small town that has slowly gotten bigger.” When she was a teen there were about 50,000 residents, and just one high school serving not only Everett, but Marysville and Mukilteo. Today it’s home to more than 100,000, and Niva and many of her high school classmates have returned to guide its growth. Niva herself served on the city council in the 1980s, served as a Port of Everett commissioner for three years, and has volunteered with and advised local nonprofit organizations. She even ran for mayor in 1989. 

Everett has a strong and frugal city government, she says. “It’s very up-by-the-bootstraps.” That’s not to say there aren’t resources in the community to support locals in need. When Niva was on the city council she supported the early efforts of Housing Hope Snohomish County (which occupies one of the historic structures on O’Donnell’s tour) and Cocoon House, a place for kids thrown out of their family homes. 

Though she now lives in Seattle, Niva regularly returns to her hometown for community events. On the day of our visit, she had attended the swearing-in of the new Police Chief Kathy Atwood. I remember years ago when she was just starting as an officer, says Niva. “I told her someday she could be chief.”

The Everett of Niva’s childhood was a mill town, tied to the timber industry. As that faded, new industries emerged. “Boeing came in the 1960s,” says Niva. “That changed everything.”

The Washington-based aeronautical company had a big new project—a behemoth jet called the 747. It would be the world’s largest commercial jetliner. When the company decided to build it in Everett, the community had a “Boeing boom.” Housing prices rose, stores opened up, and a work force of about 10,000 was expected to move into the community. More came. When the plane made its maiden flight in 1968 for an exclusive invitation-only crowd, everyone in town could watch it from their rooftops. 

By the late 1970s, many of the lumber and pulp mills had closed. But the losses were balanced by bonuses along the way, including the development of Boeing’s 767, 777, and now the 787. The mills were replaced with a military station in 1985 when Everett became a Navy homeport, bringing 15 ships and about 6,000 sailors and support workers into the community.

So today, you have a blue collar town, with a historic downtown, a Naval station, a large commercial marina, a railroad connection, and a whole lot of potential, says Niva.

Paul Pitre, a professor based out of WSU Vancouver, has been tasked with working with Everett, Snohomish County, the college, the other players at the University Center, and WSU to determine just what WSU can do for the community. “It’s not just Everett,” he says. “It’s really the north Puget Sound.” Skagit County and Camano and Whidbey islands are all underserved in terms of higher education, says Pitre. 

This summer, President Floyd visited Everett again with a cadre of WSU deans along. “He wants to show that we’re committed to making this work,” says Pitre. Don’t expect a new campus, he says. There’s no state money for that. But underneath, there will be changes and enhancements. “We’re building on what is already there,” says Pitre. “We’ll build a coordinated effort at the four-year level.” To get a sense of it, just look at the branch campuses that WSU has built.

Ultimately, there will be more faculty, more students, and more degree programs. “We will depend on the community college to do it,” says Pitre. Right away, WSU must build up the engineering offerings, having a program in place by 2012 to help meet Boeing’s stated need of new engineers to fulfill new contracts and replace an older workforce ready to retire. By July 2012, WSU must have a plan to expand other educational opportunities and coordinate with the other education providers at the University Center.

Provided the plan is approved by the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Board, WSU will take charge of the center the summer of 2014.

That WSU will be taking the lead is a good thing, says Niva, admitting an affinity for both her alma mater and her hometown. She would have been happy with any of the state’s universities stepping up, she says. But serving this community fits with the school’s land grant mission. Because it has strengths in engineering and science, it can provide research and training that fits with Boeing and other local industry. Niva says she has great love for the Everett community and great love for WSU. “I am so confident we can do this, and we can do it right.”

Everett Mayor Ray Stephanson atop City Hall. Photo Matt HagenEverett Mayor Ray Stephanson atop City Hall. Photo Matt Hagen

WSU Regent Connie Niva ’62 in front of Everett High School. Photo Matt Hagen WSU Regent Connie Niva ’62 in front of Everett High School. Photo Matt Hagen

---

Everett by the numbers

Workers wanted :: Boeing is Everetts largest employer. Its followed by the U.S. Navy homeport and then by local government, since it is the largest city as well as the seat of Snohomish County. Besides more engineers for Boeing, the north Puget Sound region needs nurses, teachers, and people trained in math and science. WSU is charged with working with the community and university partners to determine the higher education needs of the area and expand offerings.

Everett Community College :: The school was established in 1941. In 1958 it moved to its current main campus site on 47 acres in north Everett. Today it serves about 20,000 students (around 7,700 full-time equivalents) per year.

The University Center of North Puget Sound :: The state-supported center is charged with serving students in Snohomish, Skagit, and Island counties. Eight colleges and universities including Western Washington University, WSU, Central Washington University, and Saint Martins University offer online and satellite classes through the center. Students with associate degrees can complete bachelors or masters degrees. Created in 1997 and located at the Everett Station on the east side of downtown, the University Center had a rough start, producing a low number of degrees its first few years. In 2009, the state handed the centers management over to Everett Community College and the center was moved to the EvCC campus. In the 2010-2011 academic year, the center served about 500 students.

WSU is tasked with establishing a hybrid engineering program at the University Center by the fall of 2012 and with creating a plan for meeting the academic needs of the region the following year so it can take over management of the center in 2014.

Boeing scholars (left to right) Shannon Byler ’09, Danny Navarro ’10, Anne Zaremba ’09, and Michelle Boyer ’09. Photo courtesy Michelle Boyer.
Boeing scholars (left to right) Shannon Byler ’09, Danny Navarro ’10, Anne Zaremba ’09, and Michelle Boyer ’09. Photo courtesy Michelle Boyer.

Tracking

Jim Dunlap ’70—Tugs, tides, and time

by Hannelore Sudermann

Jim Dunlap followed a family route into the business of tugboats on Puget Sound. Photo Matt HagenJim Dunlap followed a family route into the business of tugboats on Puget Sound. Photo Matt Hagen

Jim Dunlap ’70 says he learned the family business “from the mud up.” 

Today one of several Dunlaps in the water transportation business runs a tugboat and freight company with ports in Everett and LaConner. But his first job working for his Uncle Gene’s towing business came in the 1960s when Jim was just a teen. 

His task was to “dog” deadhead logs mired in the mud flats around Fidalgo Island. At low tide, young Jim would wade out and chain empty barrels to the logs. When the tide came in, the barrels would float to the surface and pull the logs loose. Then at high tide, he would go out in a boat and round up the timber and tow it in. “It was terrible work in the summertime,” says Dunlap. When his father Jim Dunlap ’36 and uncle brought him out of the mud to work for Dunlap Towing as a deckhand, “It was heaven to come to work on a tugboat.” 

Gene Dunlap started Dunlap Towing in 1925 with three small tugs and several scows. At the time, almost all the traffic and transportation in the region took place on the Sound and the rivers that ran into it.

Jim’s father was Gene’s younger half-brother. He started spending time on the Dunlap boats when he was just 12. The story goes that the crew would put him to work steering while they rounded up logs from the water. 

The senior Jim attended Washington State College in the mid-1930s. “He went over there and it was the middle of winter. It was snowing,” says his son. He was worried to be so far from home. But then “a Sig Ep met him at the train station” and took him to the house, says Dunlap. That was the start of three generations of Dunlaps going to Washington State and several of them joining the Pullman chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon.

After graduating, the senior Jim Dunlap returned to Puget Sound to work for his big brother Gene and the towing company. At that time, the Dunlaps had a growing business transporting logs and grains down the Skagit River Delta and off to Seattle, and taking provisions up from the Sound to Mount Vernon. He worked on the boats until 1947, when he moved into the office and took on more management responsibilities. 

The story of the Dunlap’s tugboat business is the story of maritime Puget Sound, built early by the timber business and fishing industry, and then expanded by agriculture and development. 

In 1962, the older Jim and some of the other employees bought the company from Gene, and Jim became president. In the 1970s, when the company expanded into Everett, which had a deep-water port, “It opened up a lot of opportunity,” says Dunlap. With new business partners and more ocean-going tugs, as well as a number of lumberyards, the company grew. The younger Jim and his sister Gretchen followed their father’s path to Washington State. Jim returned to the business after graduation and took over from his father in 1987.

Today, out of ports in LaConner, Seattle, Olympia, and Everett, Dunlap Towing pulls plenty of business.

With its partners, Dunlap transports freight-laden barges to Hawaii and Alaska. The line-haul ocean towing tugs, including the Phyllis Dunlap, named for Jim’s mother, are up to 121 feet long and have as much as 5,100 horsepower. The Phyllis Dunlap requires a five-member crew and carries 153,000 gallons of fuel.

A team of smaller tugs works around Puget Sound transporting logs and assisting other vessels.

All three of Dunlap’s children have had some connection to WSU and to the family business. His daughter Tamsyn ’06, worked out of the Everett office for several years. His daughter Meghan ’04 is a dispatcher for Northland Services out of the Port of Seattle. And his son Jim ’09 is working for Northland in Alaska.

Tracking

LaToya Harris ’03—Standing out 

by Hope Tinney

Coach LaToya Harris ’03. Photo Shelly HanksCoach LaToya Harris ’03. Photo Shelly Hanks

When coach LaToya Harris stands with her team on the volleyball court at Lewis and Clark State College, here’s the remarkable thing: She doesn’t stand out. 

Sure, she is the only one wearing black crop pants instead of blue shorts and a white tee, but, suddenly it hits you—this is the woman who tallied 1,459 kills during her WSU career and still holds the record for service aces.

Her Cougar teammates voted her the team’s most valuable player in 2000, 2001, and 2002, and she remains the only WSU player to ever earn that award three times. In 1999, as a freshman, she was an honorable mention on the Pac-10 All Conference team, and was named to the All Conference First Team every year after that. She finished her collegiate career by leading her team to a remarkable Elite Eight appearance at the 2002 NCAA tournament, only the second time WSU has advanced that far.

Harris is still fit, still wiry and athletic. But she’s also still just 5’ 7”, diminutive by volleyball standards.

It’s 3:30 in the Activity Center at LCSC on a warm August afternoon and just two days before Harris and her team leave for California and their first tournament of the season. This is her first year with LCSC. She is taking over for another Cougar volleyball veteran, Jennifer Stinson Greeny ’98, who moved on to Pullman last spring to coach the WSU volleyball team.

After graduating from WSU, Harris did a short stint as an assistant coach before moving to Sam Barlow High School in Portland where she coached her teams to a 55-28 record in conference play and advanced to the state tournament two times in five years. Leaving her Portland players was one of the hardest things she’s ever done, she says, but she had set her sights on college coaching long ago. 

Once the workout begins, the gym is a cacophony of voices: “Mine, mine, mine. Tip, tip, tip”—as they run, literally run, through the drills. Harris’ voice is constant as well. “There you go Chelsea! That’s the way, Kelli!” But 20 minutes in, Harris decides her players are losing focus and she lines them up for sprints. “You stop talking, you run,” she says. 

Finding time to visit with Harris is not easy. A pre-season poll of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) picked LCSC first in the Frontier Conference and seventh in the nation. She’s in the hunt for a national title.

At LCSC, she says, the level of play is comparable to mid-Division 1. Players choose LCSC because it offers high-caliber play in a less pressurized environment. “I want to develop student-athletes,” Harris says, and she also wants to create teams that bond like family, creating life-long friendships. It goes without saying that she also wants to win. 

“She’s a driven person no matter what she does,” says her former WSU coach, Cindy Fredrick, who now coaches at UNLV. When you’re the shortest person on the court, you have something to prove, Fredrick says. Harris responded by developing a 31-inch vertical leap and a wicked left-handed slam, useful for service aces as well as kills.

“LaToya works really, really hard,” Fredrick says. “That’s one of the qualities about her that’s always going to be there.”

Harris was a high school superstar, earning 12 varsity letters in basketball, softball and volleyball. She came late to volleyball, she says, but it combines the best of the others: the focused, adrenaline-fueled teamwork of basketball with the satisfaction of smacking the ball hard. You know those highlight tapes of baseball players making spectacular catches? In volleyball, digs requiring that kind of athleticism might happen three times during one point.

When Harris was 15, a club volleyball coach told her there is always someone out there doing what you’re doing, working just as hard as you are. “I never let that go,” she says.

Especially not after a cadre of elite schools, including Stanford (which has had 19 Final Four NCAA appearances in the past 30 years) scouted her and then passed her over, explaining, politely, that she wasn’t tall enough.

 “Cindy didn’t care how tall you were,” says Harris. “She looked for something inside of you.” And so, Harris came to WSU, along with four other freshmen who had what Fredrick was looking for.

“They called us the Fab Five,” Harris says with a smile. Adrian Hankoff ’03, Holly Harris ’03, Kortney Jamtaas ’03, and Chelsie Schafer ’03. “I miss those girls.”

“The remarkable thing about them was their unremarkable-ness,” says Frederick, laughing. No one on the team was over six feet, she said, but they played, and beat, teams where it seemed like everyone was. On November 16, 2002, when Harris’ team upset No. 1 ranked Stanford 3-1, 10 of 13 players on the Stanford roster topped six feet. 

(That same year WSU advanced to the NCAA Elite Eight and lost to Florida in Gainesville. Florida went on to win the national championship by defeating Stanford.) 

 “Whatever you do, we’re going to do it better,” Harris says. That was their attitude. “It was amazing to have teammates who felt the same way I did. We were very competitive.”

As a coach, it’s her job to help the LCSC team reach higher. At WSU, Harris says, she learned from two of the best—Fredrick and her assistant coach and husband, Mashallah Farokhmanesh. “They shined you up and made you something you didn’t know you could be.” In 1999, Harris’s freshman year, the only year she didn’t win the MVP award, the coaches chose her for the Strength and Conditioning award.

Maybe you don’t need to stand tall or stand out to be outstanding, but you do need to work hard. That’s the attitude she hopes to find, and foster, in her players at LCSC. “The majority of the game is mental,” she says. “It’s up to the players and how bad they want it.”

Tracking

Chance (Chad) McKinney ’94, ’96—Country music working man

by Larry Clark

Chance McKinney. Courtesy Stephen Sexton PhotographyCourtesy Stephen Sexton Photography

It’s vacation season, mid-August. A light breeze off Lake Chelan wafts over Manson, where Chance McKinney and his band Crosswire prepare to open for country music star Dierks Bentley at the Mill Bay Casino.

For McKinney ’94, ’96—an all-American javelin thrower at Washington State University, former high school math teacher, songwriter, and country music artist—it’s a working day. “We don’t have a full team like these artists that are coming out of Nashville. It’s running a small business,” he says.

McKinney wears a baseball cap, t-shirt and jeans, and his rich voice and country-boy good looks have an edge of exhaustion from days, weeks, and months on the road.

He’s been touring extensively since 2009, when he won Country Music Television’s “Music City Madness” contest. He barely made it into the contest, in which viewers pick their favorite original song in a tournament-style elimination, submitting his video for “Be Real” with minutes to spare before the deadline. 

Since then, McKinney has opened for country stars Blake Shelton, Kenny Rogers, Dwight Yoakam, Taylor Swift, and others. Explaining his appeal, McKinney laughs, “When you’re trying to sell out venues, I can reach fans.” McKinney’s followers often buy up presale tickets through his website or Facebook. “My music touches the same people as these big acts that are way more popular than me.”

Backstage at the new Deep Water Amphitheater, McKinney and his band quickly set up, do a sound check, and prepare for the show. McKinney bounces from task to task. Connecting his own orange laptop to the stage’s big screens to show photos during their set, McKinney chats with the video tech. Then he’s off with Dena Jackson ’00, marketing manager for the casino, to scout for a place to set up and sell merchandise.

The Lolo, Montana, native has been working hard for a long time. After graduating summa cum laude in mathematics, he started on his master’s degree while assistant coaching on the Cougar track team. It was then he started singing.

“I went out with some of the other graduate assistants one night in Pullman to a place called the Rathaus that would host karaoke. That was my first singing experience in front of people,” he says. “I was hooked.”

After coaching at WSU, McKinney taught math at Colton High School before heading west to do administrative work for the Seattle Seahawks. In a couple of years, he was teaching at Skyline High School and coaching track at the University of Washington. He kept up his singing and branched into songwriting. It was on a trip with the track team that McKinney composed his breakthrough ballad “Be Real.” 

“I was riding in a van back to the airport, and I had nothing to record it on and it kept running through my head,” he recalls. “I was such an amateur songwriter back then that if I didn’t write it down or record it immediately, I could lose it for good. I recorded it on my old Nokia phone under a blanket as we headed down the runway.”

Showtime arrives. McKinney and his band take the stage in the rapidly filling amphitheater. He has changed into a black cowboy hat and a black buttoned shirt with sleeves rolled up. They launch into a raucous version of “Beach Billies,” McKinney’s song about surfers and the beach life, to the appreciation of the roaring crowd.

McKinney points to a number of familiar concert-goers while he sings. Many of them sing along with “Dirty Rotten Pirate,” “Be Real,” and McKinney’s other songs. Between numbers, he banters easily with the crowd.

He calls them “frans,” a combination of friends and fans who follow him on Facebook and Twitter, and he acknowledges their role in his success. “After a show they ask, ‘How can I help?’”

The band mixes country with rock, pop, even metal in their performance. As McKinney says of his own music, “This is not the country music you and I grew up with.” They finish with the riotous “When Rednecks Get Together.”

Even as Dierks Bentley takes the stage for the main event, McKinney and the band don’t have time to rest. They head to tents near the entrance to sign autographs, take photos with fans, and sell CDs and t-shirts.

Then they’re backstage again, packing up guitars, amps, drums, and other equipment while Bentley plays “Feel That Fire” for the excited crowd. They load everything into a trailer and their cars.

As the sun sets, McKinney reflects on the real joys and trials of music. “When you finish writing a song, when you step on stage, when you finish recording something, it’s a pretty incomparable feeling ,” he says. “It’s hard work, maybe not by coal miners’ standards, but mentally exhausting.”

For his next move, McKinney says he’s considering several offers from labels and sponsors, even as he juggles a home life in Utah with his wife and 18-month-old daughter.

“I probably have 600 songs from Nashville that were pitched to me and I’ve written over 200 songs,” he says. “So far I’ve recorded 22 songs. I’ve only got 800-some left to go.”

WSU Alumni Association News

Awards and Recognition

Each year, the WSU Alumni Association acknowledges alumni and volunteers who have made significant contributions to their professions, their communities, the world, and the University. The WSUAA Alumni Achievement Award was created in 1970 and of the nearly quarter of a million people who have attended WSC/WSU since 1890, only 495 have received it. 

We salute the following Cougars who received the Alumni Achievement Award over the past year and thank them for the prestige they bring to their alma mater: 

Robert Berry, ’50, Political Sciences

Drew Bledsoe, Former Student

Gordon W. Davis, ’68 & ’69, Agriculture

Holly Whitcomb Henry, ’78, BPH-Pharmacy

Tom Pounds, ’81, Electrical Engineering

Thomas Tidwell, ’76, Forest & Range Management

WSUAA Alumni Ambassadors

The WSUAA Alumni Ambassador Award was established in 1999 to honor former WSUAA presidents, members of the Board of Directors, local chapter leaders, and Alliance representatives for their outstanding volunteer service to the WSUAA. We extend our thanks to this year’s award winners for making a positive difference for WSU and the WSUAA.

Rob Ellsworth,’97, Social Sciences—6 years, WSUAA President, Board of Directors member, and Tri-Cities Chapter President

Chris Hill, ’07, Comparative Ethnic Studies—3 years, African American Chapter President

Malia Karlinsky, ’92, Communications—2 years, Asian Pacific American Chapter President

Mike King, ’06, Business Administration, Finance—3 years, Greater Inland Empire Chapter President and Board of Directors member

Lory Logan, ’81, Sociology—5 years, South Puget Sound Chapter President and Asian Pacific American Chapter President, and Board of Directors member

Jay See, ’96, Business Administration—6 years, King County Chapter President and Board of Directors member

Eric Strom, ’88, Mathematics—6 years, Oregon Chapter President and Board of Directors member

Jan Tanner, ’84, Recreation & Leisure Studies—6 years, Snohomish County Chapter President

WSUAA Adopted Cougar Award

Any person who exhibits genuine loyalty and affection for Washington State University and fully knows and understands that special allegiance known as “Cougar Spirit,” may be sponsored by any alum for adoption by the WSU Alumni Association. More than 600 honorees have received the Adopted Cougar Award since 2004. If you know of a good candidate who you would like to bring into the Cougar Family, please call 1-800-ALUM-WSU or visit www.alumni.wsu.edu/awards.

New Media

The Man Who Dammed the Yangtze: A Mathematical Novel
by Alex Kuo
Haven Books, Hong Kong , 2011
Review by Larry Clark 94

Ge and G, mathematicians in northern China and Oshkosh, Wisconsin, respectively, navigate parallel academic paths at the beginning of this unique and challenging novel by WSU English professor Alex Kuo. The two characters dont know each other, but their lives reflect a common experience over the course of 30 years.

The Chinese woman Ge and Chinese-American man G share a disgust for the emptiness of their teaching and the revolutions they witness from their academic institutions in the late 1960s  the Cultural Revolution for her and the official reaction to the civil rights movement for him.

Disillusioned, Ge joins the Three Gorges Dam project in southern China, and G takes a position with Westinghouse in Pennsylvania. Both soon begin to chafe at the corporate monoliths they are helping to build. For Ge, future sediment loads behind the huge dam being built on the Yangtze River represent a threat to history and human life, all in the name of progress.

Gs work at Westinghouse and his need to find his history drive him to explore the colonized and mythical American West, eventually leading him to the Grand Coulee Dam.

Dont expect a formula to this fiction. This is not the standard mystery or vampire novel-by-numbers you might buy at the airport. Alex Kuo the storyteller and poet gradually inserts himself into the narrative, urging readers to rethink their suspension of reality required for the tale.

You can expect to start thinking. Through the text, even as the plot shifts and washes into a flood of ideas both absurd and unexpected, seemingly every page presents an interpretation of corporate, political, and cultural traits of the world and questions conventional understanding.

Kuo calls this a mathematical novel, and the purity of finite numbers within the fiction contrasts with the tricky and fluid nature of novelistic words, sentences, paragraphs. With a faith in those numbers and an understanding of the shadiness of words, the mathematicians in the novel and the writer Kuo take a stand against The Man, who dammed both the Yangtze and the Columbia.

Alex Kuo is writer-in-residence and a professor in English. He teaches creative writing, Native American literature, and western American culture.

Building New Pathways to Peace
edited by Noriko Kawamura , Yoichiro Murakami, and Shin Chiba
University of Washington Press , 2011
Review by Larry Clark 94

The idea of peace in our complex and conflicted world sometimes seems out of reach or even antiquated. The authors in this collection recognize these realities and make a concerted effort to build a new theory of peace studies.

Noriko Kawamura, a WSU assistant professor of history, co-edited the volume, which includes contributions from a number of Washington State faculty along with their colleagues at International Christian University in Tokyo.

A five-year collaboration between the two universities crossed several academic disciplines, and Building New Pathways to Peace is one of the fruits of that effort to embrace the intricacies of modern peace studies.

The title of the book uses pathways because, as the editors point out, achieving peace is a process and journey that can take multiple routes. Whether you call it shalom, justice, kyosei, or tolerance, human security and safety have moved beyond traditional national security concerns and the simple dichotomy of peace and war. The depth of research from WSU and ICU deftly tackles many facets of peace and security.

T.V. Reed, from WSUs English department, looks at influencing peacebuilding through high and low culture in a global context. WSU English professor Susan Ross analyzes the medias role in promoting peace.

From WSUs political science department, Martha Cottam uses the tools of political psychology as possible remedies to impediments in human security, and Otwin Marenin reviews past peacebuilding efforts to learn lessons for moving from peace theory to practical policy.

WSU sociologist Gregory Hooks delves into the past problems in states that led to conflict and explores alternatives. Raymond Sun, associate history professor at WSU, discusses memory of WWII in Germany, while Kawamura writes about Japanese and U.S. memories of the Pacific War and how to transcend them.

Montaña Y Caballo
by Yarn OwlTyler Armour 10, Tim Meinig 10, Ted Powers 09, and Javier Suarez 10
2011
Review by Kyle Whitmus 12

For fans of earthy, Northwest indie-folk in the vein of Seattles Band of Horses and Fleet Foxes, Pullmans own Yarn Owl delivers a lush and satisfying debut. Montaña Y Caballo, the bands first full-length album, was recorded in a barn just south of Moscow, Idaho, and every song evokes the varied scenery of the Pacific Northwest. The opening track Go begins with a bright mandolin hook and develops into a rousing calland- response anthem that leads seamlessly into standout track Seashell Wind Chime. Developing in musical waves, the song begins with a steady drum beat and is soon joined by a big outdoor rock riff followed by a wonderfully catchy melody and reverberating vocal work.

Other standout tracks include Dark Air whose melody calls to mind Silent Alarm-era Bloc Party. Album closer Will You Be features a slow buildup of complex instrumentation giving way to a layered and breathtaking vocal harmony similar to Sigur Rós at their best.

Yarn Owls impressive debut captures a sense of place better than most of their contemporaries and for just $5 on the bands bandcamp page, listeners more than get their moneys worth with every listen.

Singer Javier Suarez, drummer Ted Powers, bass guitarist Tim Meinig, and lead guitarist Tyler Armour make up Yarn Owl.

New & Noteworthy

Standing Above the Crowd
by James Dukes Donaldson 79
Aviva Publishing , New York, 2011

Donaldson mines his experiences as a former Cougar basketball and NBA star, entrepreneur, mentor, and community leader not just to tell his own story, but to motivate readers in achieving success and confidence in their own endeavors. A profile of Donaldson appeared in the Winter 2003 issue of this magazine.

Eliminate the Chaos at Work
by Laura Leist 91
John Wiley and Sons , Hoboken , NJ, 2011

Noted organizational consultant Laura Leist offers proven techniques to tame outof- control office spaces, information overload, and frantic work schedules. She gives 25 realistic and practical methods to increase productivity and improve the bottom line for businesses. Leists work in saving time and improving efficiency was featured in the Summer 2003 issue of Washington State Magazine.

Pick Up Your Own Brass: Leadership the FBI Way
by Kathleen McChesney 71 and William Gavin
Potomac Books, Dulles, Virginia, 2011

McChesney and Gavin, former assistant directors in the FBI, deliver advice to leaders in any organization through stories and anecdotes from their time in the bureau. McChesney spent 24 years in the FBI, rising to the third highest position in the agency. She also served as an officer in King County, has held executive positions in the Disney Corporation and U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference, and is currently CEO of a management consulting firm.

The Itty Bitty Guide to Trees: A Childrens Identification Guide to Trees of the Inland Northwest
by Jaclyn Gotch 07 MED, Lisa Bird, and Amy Ross-Davis
Inkwater Press , 2011

Although the authors call it a childrens guide, anyone can benefit from this well-designed and entertaining aid to identifying Northwest trees.

The Alpine Tales
by Paul J. Willis 80 MA, 85 PhD
WordFarm , Seattle , 2010

Combining four fantasy novels into this volume, Willis, the poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California, constructs an alternate and troubled world just beyond the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. He wrote the first book in this series, No Clock in the Forest, while working on his dissertation at WSU.

Last Words

Are our pictures worth a thousand words?

You decide. With 12 months of photos from our magazine

We selected some of our best photos from the past few years and created a calendar of scenes from around the state for you to savor all year long.

Sizes range from a small 7" x 5½" desk version to the huge 14¼" x 11" wall hanger. Order your Washington State Magazine 2012 calendar online through zazzle.com at the web address below.

Order your calendar today at wsm.wsu.edu/extra/2012calendar.