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Spring 2024

Hope Tinney

Winter 2011

LaToya Harris ’03—Standing out

When coach LaToya Harris stands with her team on the volleyball court at Lewis-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 … » More …

Summer 2011

Bill ’69 and Felicia ’73 Gaskins—All in stride

Bill Gaskins says he knows exactly when Felicia Cornwall fell in love with him. On a snowy day in 1963, the two were walking arm-in-arm along WSU’s Hello Walk.

Felicia, a sophomore from Tacoma, was taking mincing steps through the icy slush when Bill, a freshman from Spokane, told her she needed to be more bold.

“Look Felicia, you need to stride like this,” he said, stepping forward with the athletic gait of a running back, which he was. At that exact moment his feet flew out from under him and he landed on his backside.

Bill is laughing, filling the room with his … » More …

Spring 2011

Hit or be hit

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

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

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

In 2005 there was enough interest at … » More …

Spring 2010

Gangs of Chicago

Fifty years ago James F. Short Jr., a young sociologist at Washington State University, was asked to lead a study of Chicago gangs.

In smoky pool halls on Roosevelt Road, the baseball fields of Douglas Park, and the windy street corners of Lawndale, Short and a team of youth workers and sociologists spent three years trying to figure out if boys with monikers like Smack Daddy, Duke, and Commando were so very different from their counterparts in wealthier parts of the city.

The resulting groundbreaking analysis opened a window into the everyday experience of the Vice Lords, the Egyptian Cobras, the Imperial Chaplains, and … » More …

Winter 2009

A century of friendships

The 1909/1910 Chinook yearbook devoted a full page to “The Installation of the Kappa Sigma.” In the text W.M. Coulter, a founding member of the first national fraternity at Washington State College, notes that the event “marks a new epoch in the fraternal life of the College.”

Indeed, according to William Stimson’s student history of WSU, Going to Washington State, by 1918 there were seven national fraternities on campus and four national sororities, in addition to a handful of local fraternal groups. Concerned that students were spending more time on their social lives than their studies, the faculty created a committee in 1911 “to regulate … » More …

Fall 2009

Kary Lamb Lee—Telling stories

Husky purple isn’t normally in Kary Lamb Lee’s palette. The Pullman-based illustrator was born in Pullman, and her family’s ties to Washington State University go back 80 years.

Still, she was happy to pull out the purple to create the souvenir poster for the 2009 Windermere Cup, a premiere boating event in the Pacific Northwest and a signature event for the University of Washington.

In fact, Lee’s poster says UW crew like no other. While previous Windermere Cup posters have highlighted the grace of rowing, or the beauty of Montlake Cut, or even the storied history of the UW rowing program, Lee’s captures all of … » More …

Winter 2007

Jazz Down the Middle

A little before 8 a.m. one Tuesday last spring, the jazz band at Pullman’s Lincoln Middle School, a bit bed-headed and bleary-eyed, was working on a tricky rhythm. Standing at the whiteboard in Room 806, the director, Joe Covill, wrote out the notes and sang the syncopated notation.

“This is how it looks,” he said, “and this is how it sounds.”

It was only a refresher lesson, one they’d heard before, not only from Covill, but from the composer himself.

Greg Yasinitsky, a music professor at Washington State University, has been the middle school’s composer-in-residence for the past four years. In two days’ time, this … » More …

Summer 2009

Nadia Daud–No place like home

Nadia Daud spends nearly 80 percent of her time living abroad, traveling to some of the most troubled regions of the world. When she’s not overseas, she has an apartment in Washington, D.C. But ask her where her home is, and she’ll tell you—Pullman, Washington.

The 31-year-old refugee officer with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security grew up south of Pioneer Hill in Pullman, graduated from local schools, and then matriculated to Washington State University. It was a remarkably stable childhood for someone who now lives out of a suitcase and spends her days interviewing refugees.

“In this last year and a half I … » More …