Refreshing
Thank you for continuing to publish Washington State Magazine at such a high level. I read the Fall 2015 issue from cover to cover and rate it as outstanding in every respect. The redesign of the magazine with sustainability in mind is commendable. Mostly, however, the content was what gave me the feeling that I am still connected to WSU almost 50 years after I graduated.
As it happens, there were also multiple articles that connected with me personally. I took an ecology course from Rexford Daubenmire and continued to refer to his classic texts on autecology and synecology during my own 40-year teaching career in plant science. Although I did not meet Lorenzo Pablo Martinez, the knowledge that he and I were on campus at the same time is special. John Olerud’s recollections of Bobo Brayton brought back my own memories of baseball games at Bailey Field where I watched Olerud play and Brayton coach. And I still recall reading about Dan Doornink’s contributions to Cougar football in the 1970s. Even Dr. Universe’s piece on what makes a great chocolate chip cookie took me back to my own visits as an undergraduate in agronomy to the Western Wheat Quality Laboratory and to my own interactions with legendary wheat breeder Orville Vogel.
I look forward to many more fine issues of Washington State Magazine.
John Phillips ’67
San Luis Obispo, California
Props on moving to recycled paper. Appreciate it.
Roger Crawford ’86
Pullman
I love the new art direction of the pub. It feels much fresher and younger than it did a couple of years ago.
Richard Blakley ’76
Lake Union
No tea with Jackie
The article about the teas was very interesting, but let me put one rumor to rest.
Jackie Kennedy did not come to Pullman with her husband in 1960. I know because my father, Verner L. Johnson, the Whitman County Democratic Party chairman at the time, was the host for Kennedy’s visit. He met JFK at the Pullman-Moscow airport, and then escorted him to Bryan Hall for a talk to an overflow crowd, which I attended while a Pullman High School freshman.
Politics was a hobby for my dad. His full-time job was associate professor in the WSU College of Veterinary Medicine. He died on a Saturday morning in December 1964 in Pullman.
Owen V. Johnson ’68
Associate professor emeritus, IU Journalism
Indiana University
Studying with Daubenmire
I enjoyed the article “Traveling ecologist Rexford F. Daubenmire” by Adam M. Sowards. I was a graduate student, botany major, at WSU from 1953 to 1957. The very best class I took there (or anywhere else, for that matter) was Dr. Daubenmire’s class, “Field Ecology.” Besides classroom activities, he led us on field trips many weekends to various ecological areas in the Pacific Northwest. After each trip, he asked us to write down what we had learned. I believe his semester grades were based mostly on what we had written. I learned more about plant ecology from this one course than from all the other botanical classes I had taken, both as an undergrad and in graduate school.
F. Douglas Wilson
Tempe, Arizona
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