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Winter 2006

Jeff Clark: Elegant antiques

The object of Jeff Clark’s desire once belonged to the Shah of Iran. The shiny black 1939 Bugatti Type 57C was originally commissioned by the French government and given to the Shah as a present on the occasion of his first marriage. Today the roadster is part of the Petersen Automotive Museum collection in Los Angeles, and in September spent a night in a covered concrete parking garage in Kirkland.

Clark is there when a driver brings it in and parks it next to Fred Astaire’s Rolls-Royce, just up the ramp from the Porsche 917 Steve McQueen drove in Le Mans.

“It’s my favorite,” says … » More …

Winter 2006

Vicki Owens: Into Africa

Twenty-one years ago Vicki Owens stepped off an airplane into the hot air of Kampala, Uganda, thinking she had come for a brief stay, just long enough to help Christian missionary pastors start a primary school.

“I thought I’d do my little thing for humanity and then go home,” she says. It was her first time traveling overseas, and she really had no idea of what she would face in this country in the center of Africa.

Owens, who admits she was naïve to the culture, dangers, and challenges of living in a place like Uganda, had arrived two months after one military coup and … » More …

Winter 2006

An American in Albania

 

Adapted from a series of e-mail messages from the author to friends and associates.

 

Introduction

Since serving three terms as ASWSU president as an undergraduate, I have never lost my passion for the process of student representation. I’ve tried to be a help to as many student leaders as possible, and I have wound up speaking at a lot of conferences around the nation, and even helped found the American Student Government Association (the only professional association for student governments) in 2003.

Earlier this year, I was asked by the State Department to do a speaking/training tour in Albania … » More …

Winter 2006

When trash reveals history

From October 2005 through March 2006, I worked with ephemera in one of the great libraries of the world, the Bodleian at the University of Oxford. A cheeky person might say that “ephemera” is just a fancy term for trash. However, given the passage of time, even trash can become terribly interesting.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ephemera as something that has a transitory existence. Printed ephemera may be items, such as broadsides, chapbooks, bus tickets, menus, playbills, and lists, to name just a few categories, that were not intended survive their immediate use. As most printed ephemera were not saved, what does remain can … » More …

Fall 2006

A great sail: Scott Carson '72

The meeting happened a few weeks after Scott Carson had accepted his new job.

In December 2004, Carson (’72 Bus. Admin.) was put in charge of the Boeing Co.’s Commercial Airplanes Group sales team and mandated to recapture the lead in the worldwide airliner market, which had been seized by European rival Airbus. It was a tall task—Airbus had out-sold Boeing in three of the previous four years.

To complicate the problem, says Carson, he had to deal with some lamebrain sales procedures installed by a previous chief financial officer. Carson was reviewing the procedures with his top sales executives. He couldn’t believe some of … » More …

Fall 2006

What I've Learned Since College: An interview with R. Dale Storr

On February 2, 1991, during the first Iraq war, Capt. R. Dale Storr (’83 Mech. Engr.) was captured by Iraqi soldiers after his A-10 Thunderbolt was shot down near Kuwait. The 29-year-old Air Force pilot from Spokane was a prisoner of war for 33 days, spending a portion of that time in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, while his friends and family believed he had died in the plane crash. He was regularly beaten and interrogated by the secret police, but used techniques taught to him at the survival school at Fairchild Air Force Base to get through it.

Now a lieutenant colonel in the Washington … » More …

Fall 2006

All that glitters: The shimmering nano-alchemy of Lai-Sheng Wang

Lai-Sheng Wang places a tinker-toyish thing onto a visitor’s palm. Many such toys line the Washington State University physics professor’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory office in Richland. The object at hand—12 steel balls hinged to red plastic tubes twisted this way and that—form a perfectly symmetrical, 20-sided icosahedron.

Wang also displays a daughter-fashioned Father’s Day card that testifies to his paternal greatness. He spends time with the family, washes dishes, cooks, and is always kind. Mixed in there is a gilded item that truly separates Wang from all other pops on earth: he fathered the gold buckyball.

The word “buckyball” derives from “Buckminsterfullerene,” a hollow … » More …