Resources and Offices

Spring 2015

Down “The Drain” in the TUB

In the 1950s Patty Ernst and Marian Baldy Kenedy would pass time between classes at the TUB. The former women’s gymnasium, built in 1901, became the Temporary Union Building while a new student union was being built. A structure of many uses, it had also served as an ROTC armory, a bookstore, a bowling alley, and temporary housing for a surplus of students just after World War II.

Playing on the bath-like name, the building even had “The Drain,” a basement café and hangout filled with booths and a jukebox. Friday and Saturday night dances there were very popular, with more than half the student … » More …

Spring 2015

A new field of dreams

In November under the lights of their newly renovated field, the WSU women’s soccer team competed in their fourth straight NCAA tournament, a first for the Cougars. They played tough against Seattle University in the polar chill, losing by one goal in double overtime.

The debuts of both the rebuilt Lower Soccer Field and head coach Steve Nugent came back in August with a 3-0 win versus Texas Christian University. Nugent and the team went 10–4–4 for the season, led by a group of seniors that boasts 48 victories, the most in school history during a four-year span.

Among them was goalkeeper Gurveen Clair, who … » More …

Winter 2014

Mapmaker mystery

The Palouse, in its way, is a perfect place. A land of soft, rolling hills framed by rivers, mountains, forests, and desert, this agricultural hinterland feels all four seasons fully, and in all likelihood grows enough food to feed its inhabitants and visitors with ease. It’s home to scholars and farmers, and its story begins in the ice ages and continues today with an unrelenting flow of research from two major universities.

Despite such beauty and bounty, the Palouse has not received the artistic consideration that has Yosemite or Hudson Valley. I’ve never seen anything like that, at least until a day last winter when … » More …

Winter 2014

Art in public places

In the late sixties, Harold Balazs ’51 helped build a public arts tradition in our region. Along with several members of the Washington Arts Commission, including artist Jacob Lawrence, he created Washington’s Art in Public Places program. Starting in 1974, the program began directing one-half of one percent of all state building budgets toward purchasing contemporary art. The pieces would be owned by the state but could reside at the site of the project.

Having traveled in Spain and Italy, Balazs had realized that the United States could easily support more arts and culture. “Countries in Europe do so much more than one percent,” he … » More …

Winter 2014

A place for faith and support

For many, the Interfaith House was a home away from home, whether it was through the services offered by the Common Ministry, a place for meetings for student groups, or just as a hangout in the coffee shop.

The building on the northern edge of campus at 720 NE Thatuna has served the University and its students from the time it was built in 1925.

But time and circumstance bring change. Last spring the Presbyterian Synod put the building up for sale, and sold the Interfaith House to Washington State University for $1.2 million. Citing its location and connection to campus, the Board of Regents … » More …

Winter 2014

Hair and history

On the first day of class this semester, Kristine Leier, a senior majoring in history and anthropology, returned one of the more macabre items owned by the WSU Libraries: a lock of hair from the murdered missionary, Narcissa Whitman.

Hair is not something we at WSU’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections still collect. And how it came to be here, and where it has been for the last half century, turned out to be an intriguing story.

Narcissa Whitman’s name is familiar to many in the Northwest. She and her husband, Marcus, established their mission to the Cayuse Indians near Walla Walla in 1836. … » More …

Fall 2014

Video: A tour of the Cougar Football Complex

Washington State head football coach Mike Leach tours the Cougar Football Complex in May 2014.

» More ...

Fall 2014

Extension in Washington

The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 provided a system of extension services supplied in cooperation by the land-grant universities around the country. It was a very good idea. So good, in fact, that Washington state had already thought of it. A year earlier…

In 1913, Washington’s legislature passed an act enabling counties to hire agents and established an office of the director of extension at the State College (now WSU). Even prior to that, the college’s faculty would travel out to some of the state’s more remote communities like Omak, Waitsburg, and Fairfield in a train with cars filled with demonstration materials, visual aids, even animals. … » More …

Fall 2014

For the health of a city

For decades the fifty acres at the bend of the Spokane River just east of downtown was a forgotten freight yard, a pocket of blight. Originally an industrial complex dotted with warehouses and laced with train tracks, the city made it a dumping ground for incinerator waste.

By the 1980s, Spokane was also in the weeds. The mining and timber industries that had built the city and sustained it for more than a century were collapsing. Commodity agriculture, the third leg of the city’s economic stool, wasn’t much better.

“This was having a terrible impact on our economy,” says Dave Clack, former chairman of Old … » More …

Fall 2014

Follow the red brick road

In the early 1910s the town of Pullman saw its first automobiles, the city’s women were being instructed on how to exercise their new state-approved right to vote, and the Northern Pacific Railway had a busy depot along the South Fork of the Palouse River.

It was time to improve the precarious dirt roads from downtown to the Washington State campus.

A century later, a group of architecture students tackled a project to get those early paved roads formally recognized as a vital and worthy piece of history, not just for the community, but for the state’s University as well.

In a 1913 article in … » More …