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Summer 2011

Don’t be a stranger—use Coug connections to break into a new community

In 2006, when David Cox ’05 moved 1,200 miles from Pullman to Phoenix, he didn’t have many ties to the community. Hungry for new friends, he emailed the Washington State University Alumni Association and learned that Lisa Steele-Haberly ’99 in Tucson could help him track down local alumni. It turned out that she was head of the area’s chapter of the alumni association. Cox immediately offered to help organize outings. “We just started coordinating,” he says. “She would plan alumni events in Tucson, and I would organize things in Phoenix.” He helped pull together networking events, game viewing parties, and Northwest wine tastings at local … » More …

Summer 2011

Kristine (McClary) Vannoy ’87—The⁠ facts⁠ of⁠ fudge

“I’m easy to spot. I’m six-foot-two,” says Kristine (McClary) Vannoy, as we plan our meeting at an upscale grocery in Seattle. But when she appears, it’s not her height that’s eye-catching, or even her long red hair. It’s the packages of freshly-made fudge that fill her hands.

Vannoy (’87 Comm.) is the founder, owner, and main employee of Fat Cat Fudge, a company that makes three different varieties of fudge sold in 20 grocery stores in the Puget Sound area.

“It’s a fresh fudge,” she says. “It’s not meant to sit on a shelf for six months in a candy … » 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 …

Summer 2011

Arun Raha ’91—The good, the bad, and the budget

When Arun Raha ’91 started work as the state of Washington’s chief economist three years ago, his new staffers welcomed him with a gift: an official Magic 8 Ball.

“I said ‘OK, great! Now I have a forecasting tool,’” he recalls.

If only it were that easy.

At 51, Raha is the E.F. Hutton of state government: When he talks, people listen. He speaks at more than 100 events a year, from universities to small-town chambers of commerce. His quarterly revenue forecasts are broadcast live on TV.

That’s because the forecast, once approved by a bipartisan council that Raha reports to, frames the state … » More …

Summer 2011

The Perfect Hunt

Nearing total exhaustion from my janitorial labors, I plopped my 19-year-old bones down in the cushy leather office chair of Dr. Seymour Slick, Dean of Science. Had I been of a thoughtful nature, I might at that moment have reflected that the way of life I so desperately clung to no longer existed for me. I was now a student and a janitor at a university. That other life was gone. Vanished. Evaporated. Had being in denial existed back then, I would have been a classic case. I simply couldn’t believe that my former life had slipped away like a thief in the night, taking … » More …

Summer 2011

From Burma to the Blazers

Richard Cho ’89 was born in Burma (Myanmar), an impoverished Asian country on the United Nations’ list of least-developed nations. When he was just three, his family moved to the United States, saving and economizing for a better life.

Four decades later, Cho has landed his dream job as a general manager in the National Basketball Association. Today, the first Asian American to become a GM leads the Portland Trail Blazers, the only remaining NBA team in the Pacific Northwest. Now he hires players, offering salaries in the millions.

“When I was growing up, when we emigrated here, my family was … » More …

Summer 2011

Somewhere in France

The latest posting on our Coordinates website is from Margrit von Braun ’89 PhD, who writes from Nigeria. Margrit and her husband, Ian von Lindern, founded TerraGraphics, an environmental engineering company, in the 1980s. They have since developed an expertise in remediation of sites contaminated with heavy metals and are currently working to clean up lead contamination resulting from gold mining in Nigeria’s Zamfara State.

Over 400 children have died from the contamination. With no other income as lucrative as gold mining, the residents of Zamfara brought ore into family compounds, where women, many of whom are not allowed to leave … » More …

Summer 2011

Current events—engineering power in the Pacific Northwest

When electricity first came to Washington in September of 1885, just a few electric lights illuminated downtown Spokane. By the following March, Seattle had them, too. From those early days, Washington State College had a role in helping spread and improve delivery of electricity throughout the state, with many graduates active in the power industry.

The chief engineer for Washington Water Power (WWP) at Long Lake Dam, completed in 1915, and Little Falls Dam, completed in 1911, was a WSC graduate, as was the superintendent of construction. Nineteen students and graduates worked on the Long Lake job. On the Skagit River Project for the City … » More …

Summer 2011

Buddy Levy: Historical investigator

In a fabulously snide review of the first episode of Brad Meltzer’s Decoded on the History Channel, a reviewer for The New York Times refers to investigator Buddy Levy, “who could be a bus driver but who is in fact an English professor at Washington State University and a freelance writer of magazine articles about adventure sports.”

Levy himself thinks that’s pretty funny.

“I’m cool with that,” he says. “I’m a bus driver who can write a narrative history of the Amazon.”

That narrative history, which our charming reviewer neglected to mention, is Levy’s latest book, River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana’s Legendary Voyage of … » More …

Summer 2011

Revolutions are televised by Arab journalists

The world watched people rise up this year against dictators and authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and northern Africa, their protests aired by satellite television and the Internet. In Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, and other countries, journalists televised, twittered, and spread the “electronic virus,” as Lawrence Pintak calls the media revolution, around the Arab world.

Pintak, founding dean of the Murrow College of Communication and a former Middle East correspondent for CBS, says satellite TV plays the critical role in the protests. Eighty percent of the Arab world gets its news from television, and international news in Arabic, produced by … » More …