Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Article

An even playing field - WSU hill
Fall 2013

An even playing field

Anyone who has negotiated the Pullman campus in winter will hardly be surprised that students dependent on wheelchairs tend not to select Washington State University. Only about five wheelchair-using students currently brave WSU’s hills. Among them is Svetlana Lockwood, a graduate student in computer science.

 

Lockwood, who has cerebral palsy, married a Pullman resident and moved here from Latvia. Her description of life in the former Soviet country illuminates a stark contrast.

Teachers there discouraged Lockwood’s parents from bothering to pursue further education for their daughter. She was largely confined to a third-floor apartment with no elevator. Even when she emerged, streets and sidewalks … » More …

Fall 2013

A fitting business

Growing up, Loralyn Young ’62 heard different versions of her Grandma Lucy, her grandmother’s mother. She was a Pennsylvania-born girl from a large family and for some time was apprenticed to a tailor. She married a homesteader more than 30 years her senior, and was widowed in Kansas with a young child at the age of 35. She later married Civil War veteran John Stevenson and started her second life. Then they moved to Washington where, at the age of 60, Lucy opened her own hat and dressmaking business in Issaquah. From some accounts, she was clever and hardworking. From others, precise and demanding.

“My … » More …

Stronger may not be better
Fall 2013

Stronger may not be better

A pack of seventh grade soccer players huddles around a makeshift batting cage inside WSU’s Sports Science Laboratory one Friday last March. One by one, they step inside the black netting to stand under bright lights and high-speed cameras.

 

“3 … 2 … 1,” a voice calls out.

An air-pressurized cannon shoots a soccer ball 30 feet across the cage and the 13-year-old tries to head the ball back in the direction from which it came.

The purpose of such madness? Kasee Hildenbrand, associate professor in the College of Education, is exploring the roll the neck plays in the incidence of concussions.

Her … » More …

Phil Marston
Fall 2013

The tractor beam has arrived

Capt. James T. Kirk: You left spacedock without a tractor beam?

Capt. John Harriman: It doesn’t arrive until Tuesday.

—from Star Trek: Generations

Phil Marston is not a Trekkie, nor has he given much thought to the Star Trek tractor beam that can use focused beams of energy to attract and repel derelict spacecraft or, in one case, USS Enterprise Capt. James T. Kirk.

He was just intrigued by something, in this case, the way an acoustic beam is scattered by a sphere.

“Basically, it goes into the category of a problem you solve because it would be curious to see what … » More …

WSU Vancouver building
Fall 2013

Posts for Fall 2013

 

The story behind the sign

Many signs display Cougar pride on the way to Pullman, but only one stands 27 feet high and 400 feet long. The “Go Cougs” shed 12 miles east of Othello on Highway 26 was created in 1998 by Coug brothers Orman and Gavin Johnson.

“We needed to build a potato storage,” Orman says.

It was that simple.

“We’d drive to football games and we’d see small signs,” he says. “We thought, ‘we should do that’.”

And so the process began. Orman and Gavin say they knew they wanted to use sheet metal so there wouldn’t be any upkeep, but … » More …

Fall 2013

First Words for Fall 2013

Uncle Sam took the challenge in the year of ’33

For the farmers and the workers and for all humanity

Now river, you can ramble where the sun sets in the sea

But while you’re rambling, river, you can do some work for me

—Woody Guthrie, “Roll, Columbia, Roll”

In the early 1950s, Washington State College and the Bureau of Reclamation published a Farmer’s Handbook for the Columbia Basin Project. Written for new farmers breaking ground in the newly irrigated Columbia Basin Project, the handbook offered advice on everything from what crops to grow to what kind … » More …

Jeff Groat with cougar license plate “ARRRGH.”
Summer 2013

Cougars pounce on new plates

Frequent sightings of the new Cougar license plates all around Washington prove that the WSU Alumni Association’s three-year endeavor to get the plate approved has paid off.

Since the release of the crimson-colored plates with the WSU Cougar logo in January 2012, more than 7,000 alumni and friends have purchased them. More than half are first time WSU plate holders, 4,200 and counting.

That’s good news for Cougar fans and even better news for students. The new plates have generated more than $110,000 in new scholarships.

While many sport letters and numbers assigned by the state, a number of Cougs and fans have doubled up … » More …

Dan and Val Ogden
Summer 2013

Dan ’44 and Val ’46 Ogden—Staying activist in older age

Last fall in Vancouver, with the voter registration deadline looming, Dan Ogden ’44 wasn’t about to be held up by Parkinson’s disease or two artificial hips.

He pushed his walker around his new apartment complex and through a recently completed cul-de-sac to make sure his neighbors could take part in the November general election. At his side was Val Ogden ’46, his partner in Democratic Party politics and wife of 66 years. She was spry enough to negotiate steps and stairways to ring doorbells beyond her husband’s reach.

The Ogdens are in their seventh decade of political and social activism—with roots going back to their … » More …

Summer 2013

Waiting for the Rain

In the impenetrable Dogon highlands of Mali, the storm of war is coming.

An excerpt from We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali

Washington State University English Professor Peter Chilson happened to be in Mali in March 2012 when a military coup ended the country’s two decades as a model democracy. Within days, the Malian army in the troublesome northern part of the country collapsed. As a result, Tuareg and Islamist fighters claimed 60 percent of the country, creating a safe haven for al Qaeda and other Islamist forces and threatening West African stability and European security.

» More …