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Winter 2009

Yolandé McVey ’07—Taking life back

The heroine of Love’s Secrets puts on perfume, goes to a barbecue, and meets Rod: caramel skin, wavy hair, muscles, and commitment issues.

The author of Love’s Secrets can never do two of those three things. Exposure to perfume or barbecue smoke could kill Yolandé McVey ’07, who suffers from severe asthma and allergies. “I’m so allergic to everything that when I was given an allergy test, I went into shock,” she said. “They had to call an ambulance to take me to a hospital.”

McVey began to lose ground in her lifelong battle with respiratory problems in 1997. She had just moved to … » More …

Winter 2009

Nöel Riley Fitch ’65, ’69—At Julia’s table

As a graduate student at Washington State University in the late 1960s, Noël Riley Fitch found her calling in an issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. A two-page story about Sylvia Beach and her little bookshop called Shakespeare and Company in Paris in the 1920s sparked her interest.

Her professor, John Elwood, encouraged her to pursue Beach as a subject for her master’s thesis. Elwood had long had a love for French café society. When he was in the armed services in World War II, he met writer and critic Gertrude Stein in Paris. He loved that period of literary history, says Riley Fitch.

She … » More …

Winter 2009

Florence Wager ’54—Vancouver park activist without par

Florence Wager bought a set of golf clubs when she wrapped up her career in arts and education.

“I had this preconceived notion about retirement,” says Wager, 81, who earned a bachelor’s degrees at WSU in speech in 1950 and education in 1954 and spent most of her career boosting the San Francisco Symphony. “I thought you played golf, played bridge, went to tea parties.”

Then, after moving back to her native Vancouver in 1990, she volunteered for the Chinook Trail Association. Then she volunteered for the YWCA. Then the parks and recreation department. Then the Fort Vancouver Regional Library District. She joined boards … » More …

Winter 2009

Grover Krantz (1931–2002) and Clyde

I’ve been a teacher all my life, and I think I might as well be a teacher after I’m dead,” Grover Krantz told the Smithsonian’s anthropology collections manager David Hunt as they negotiated Krantz’s proposed donation of his skeleton to the Smithsonian’s natural history museum. As a physical anthropologist specializing in hominoid evolution, Krantz gleaned his understanding and ideas by studying the bones of apes and humans. Following his death, his own bones would become available for study.

Odds were, however, that his bones would remain in a drawer, alongside the bones of his three Irish wolfhounds, which he had already donated, waiting for whatever … » More …

Winter 2009

Clams

Displaced by the salmon and eclipsed by the oyster, the clam is perhaps the forgotten star of the Puget Sound. But once it was the main seafood symbol of the region. Even before restaurateur Ivar Haglund made his “Acres of Clams” restaurant a Seattle landmark, the clam’s status was lodged on the shores of Northwest Native American lore. In fact it had a role in the origin of man. According to Haida tradition, Raven discovered a large clamshell on the beach and looked inside to find dozens of little people. Lonely for someone to play with and trick, he coaxed them out of the shell … » More …

Winter 2009

Doubling back

Drew Bledsoe may be best remembered by Washington State fans for what he accomplished on a snowy day in November 1992.

And while visions of Bledsoe, receiver Phillip Bobo, and a snow bank are foremost in their memories, these days, Bledsoe wants Cougar fans to know him not only for great plays but for making great wine.

“It is very important for me that people know that this is a true passion of mine,” he says. “We are very committed to producing only the best wine that we can.”

On a sweltering July day in Walla Walla, Bledsoe’s passion is on display.

This day … » More …

Winter 2009

Track to the future

It was only a few decades ago that Northern Pacific Railroad ran daily trains from Spokane through Pullman and down to Lewiston. And train cars loaded with students and steamer trunks came over the Cascades delivering their lively loads to packed stations filled with eager classmates awaiting their friends.

Bob Scarfo, an associate professor with Washington State University’s Interdisciplinary Design Institute, and his landscape architecture students have evoked some of that romance with a project urging the reintroduction of passenger trains to the Palouse. Only now, along with the romance of the rail, they’re citing contemporary reasons like oil scarcity, climate change, an aging population, … » More …

Winter 2009

Letters in the Winter 2009 issue

We want our print edition

I doubt that I pull up the Summer 2010 version of Washington State Magazine, though I may. I generally read the magazine over lunch, when I’m taking a break from a day in front of the computer — I don’t want to have lunch with the machine! I may pick it up some other time, but that’s pushing it. I have no doubt of the economic necessity of only putting the issue on line — I’m only glad I went to WSU 40 years ago when I could afford it! — but it doesn’t work well for me.

Ruthann … » More …

Winter 2009

Cultivated thought

Cultivated thought :: Near the end of an otherwise lackluster speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in September 1859, Abraham Lincoln suddenly shifted gears heading into his peroration.

Having compared two conflicting theories of labor, he continued, “This leads to the further reflection, that no other human occupation opens so wide a field for the profitable and agreeable combination of labor with cultivated thought, as agriculture.”

Although my son would likely question the intellectual appeal of spreading manure, Lincoln’s observation resonates, at least in moments when the laborer/scholar is not exhausted.

Lincoln went on to suggest what fields might provide food for agricultural contemplation. … » More …

Winter 2009

Fast boat

It may look like a child’s model, but the four-foot boat skimming the surface of the Snake River is a prototype of a new kind of watercraft—a boat that can run up on shore to be unloaded, scoot over marshy ground without tearing up the sensitive vegetation, and zoom over snow on its way to remote outposts.

Designed and built by Konstantin Matveev, an assistant professor in Washington State University’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, and mechanical engineering students Zach Malhiot ’07, Ryan Soderlund ’08, and Alex Ockfen ’07 B.S., ’08 M.S., the vehicle can go much faster than conventional cargo boats carrying the … » More …