It was the late 1930s when teenager Luana (Boner) Sever decided she wanted to study forestry at Washington State College. The problem: She lived on the south side of Chicago and didn’t have much money. But she had plenty of gumption.
Sever got on her bicycle and rode 2,000 miles from Chicago to Pullman to start school.
(Courtesy Sever family)
“She packed up what she could and started off on the bike from Chicago,” says Pat Helland, Sever’s daughter. “If she ran out of money, she would stop in a town and do some odd jobs. She asked farmers if she could sleep in their fields or their barns along the way.”
Her father wasn’t happy. At one point he contacted the police and asked them to find her and send her home.
“The police did talk to her, and she said, ‘I’m just riding my bike to college,’” Helland says. “That’s the power of a woman who is determined and has a goal and a purpose.”
The Evergreen student newspaper said Sever arrived in Pullman after the 24-day trip “tired and windburned.” By the time she reached Pocatello, Idaho, she had 12 cents to her name and lived on stale bread and milk until a letter arrived from her parents with additional funds.
Sever was interviewed by the Spokane Chronicle after she arrived. She told the reporter that she’d commuted long distances by bicycle in Chicago: 24 miles a day round trip to her junior college. She added, “I’ve never tackled a trip like this, though, and I would never do it again.”
Sever’s Washington State story doesn’t end there, though.
In 1939 she and Virginia Weldert (’41 Hort.) assisted graduate student Thomas Rogers (’41 MS Botany) in collecting plant specimens along the Columbia River before the area was submerged behind the Grand Coulee Dam.
“Their collections and photographs are all that remain to document the vegetation below the 1,290-foot level of the river,” says Walter Fertig, collections manager at the Marion Ownbey Herbarium on WSU’s Pullman campus. One of the species they collected was Columbia locoweed, a rare plant found only along the Columbia and Methow Rivers in Washington and the Flathead Lake area of Montana. To this day, the herbarium has more than 100 specimens attributed to “L. Boner” from the late 1930s.
Sever graduated with a bachelor’s of science in botany in 1940, then worked in a seed factory and oil refinery while her husband Buel (’40 Gen. Stu.), whom she met at WSC, attended medical school in Illinois.
The couple lived for most of their married life in University Place, near Tacoma. Luana Sever went on to become an expert weaver. Then in her 60s she took up hot-air ballooning, becoming an FAA-certified balloon pilot and instructor, and opening a balloon-repair business in her basement.
The Severs frequently visited Pullman and maintained their ties to their alma mater. Buel’s brother Elmer “Shorty” Sever served as custodian of the university’s athletic grounds for 42 years.
Luana Sever died in 2012 at age 93. Her husband Buel died two years after that.
Says Helland, “She just loved learning. She was really ahead of her time.”