“Twenty years ago, the City Club of Tacoma approached the city with a plan to unify the waterfront and build a walking path from the Tacoma Dome to Point Defiance. The painstakingly researched report urged that the entire waterfront be redesigned as a people place. Lara Hermann ’95 was thrilled when a city hall worker handed her the document. ‘It was like a present just lands in your lap,’ she says.”
Photos by Ingrid Barrentine (Click on a marker to see photo)
A series of videos introducing WSU’s Conner Museum and its work in research, education, and public service. The Charles R. Conner Museum features the largest public collection of birds and mammals in the Pacific Northwest, and the scientific collection used by researchers houses over 65,000 specimens.
Education and Public Displays at the Conner Museum
Why is lead shot bad for birds? Is it possible to bring a mammoth to life using fossil DNA? Director Mike Webster tells how new displays and public lectures at the Conner explore these and other questions.
In the rough-hewn world at Columbia Vista Corp.’s lumber mill near Vancouver, the sight of Joseph “Joey” Nelson ’00 pushing spectacles into place might invoke visions of Clark Kent there among the conveyor belts and screeching saws.
But if the workers around him knew that it’s Nelson’s laser-scanning equipment–technology he started developing as a high school kid–enabling their mill to convert raw logs into perfect lumber within seconds, they’d recognize a technological Superman in their midst. Nelson founded his company, JoeScan, from his dorm room in Washington State University’s Streit Hall in 1999, the year before earning his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.
When Carol Edgemon Hipperson was growing up in Coulee City, the eastern Washington community was too small for a library. However, every other Thursday during the summer, the Bookmobile from the North Central Regional Library pulled into town. “I was allowed to check out as many books as I could carry,” says Hipperson ’75. “I’d go straight home and curl up with my books until dinner time.”
The idea that one day books with her name on the spine would appear on library shelves and in book stores didn’t occur to her. “I never intended to become a writer,” she says. “I just wanted to … » More …
Sonny Spearman ’86 has traded technology for toys. As co-founder and chief marketing and operating officer of Matter Group, she leads a company focused on creating products to foster awareness of the environment.
Spearman started her career in technology and media, riding the wave of the Seattle-based tech boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She’d still be in the tech sector if she and company co-founder Amy Tucker hadn’t decided develop a business focused on sustainability.
Their first product, which was released in 2006, is Xeko, an award-winning eco-adventure game for children eight and older. With a force of “secret agents” intent … » More …
STRANGE THINGS sprout in Skagit Valley’s fields: Monster plants with six-foot stalks covered with yellow flowers, delicate ferny-leaved things with round white heads holding hundreds of tiny blossoms, and unruly tangles of leaves, spears, and spikes.
John Roozen ’74, whose family’s name is synonymous with Skagit Valley tulips, keeps careful watch on these fields. He swings his pickup over to the side of the road and dives into a field, a curly, hairy mess of green. He plucks off the tip of a plant and hands it over. See that, he says, pointing at the dozens of small green nuggets clustered along the stem, those … » More …
I am one of the lucky. After years of looking out onto a sea of suburban rooftops, my husband and I have been gifted the opportunity of returning to Cougar Country with our three boys and now watch nature at work as the seasons change the fields of the Palouse from winter gray to roborant green to an elegant and rich gold that glistens as it dances to the tempo set by the winds.
The winds and colors change and so do I. In this return to Pullman, I am learning to appreciate a saying I heard many times from my mother’s … » More …
The workers in the office of Washington State University’s school of communication didn’t know what to expect when the first of two shipments arrived from New York last spring. But they opened the box, took out the old doorknob and passed it around, wondering what sort of door it belonged to, wondering whose hands had touched it.
A few weeks earlier Darby Baldwin, an assistant in the dean’s office, had called two CBS retirees on the East Coast because the husband had written a thoughtful opinion piece about his time working with Edward R. Murrow. It turned out that Joe … » More …
On a raw, wet fall afternoon in Eugene, Oregon, in late October 1984, Rueben Mayes’ feet carried him to what was at the time the greatest accomplishment of any NCAA running back.
Just a week earlier, Mayes ran for 216 yards at Stanford in a rally that brought Washington State University from a 28-point third quarter deficit to a 49-42 win.
“The game against Stanford was one of his greatest efforts as a college player,” says Mark Rypien, quarterback of the ’84 team. But then he did one better. “The numbers that he had against Oregon were unbelievable.”
Little of what goes on at a university is the stuff of breaking news. The general formula for what gets reported about a university is pretty much the same as for politics and world affairs: money gained and lost, a result here, a conclusion there, a gaffe, a little scandal now and then. But the really interesting stuff, the stuff that matters, seldom gets much attention.
Yet on any given day here on campus, a reknowned herpetologist might, as Ken Kardong did earlier this fall, summarize his life’s work to a good-sized and feisty crowd of faculty and students. He demonstrated how over evolutionary time, … » More …
