As most caregivers would predict, it was a rough year. "I got so desperate, I read my own book," Lustbader, an affiliate associate professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Washington, said of "Taking Care of Aging Family Members," her 1994 work on caregiving co-authored with Nancy Hooyman, professor in the UW School of Social Work.

A part of the book on loneliness had particular relevance. Lustbader's mother-in-law had her rich community of friends back home, and Lustbader and her husband had been trying to make up for that loss by spending all of their leisure time with her.

"I read in the book that no matter how hard you try, no matter how much of your life you give up, you can't take away another person’s loneliness," Lustbader said. "The guilt that kept getting in the way of our going out on our own Saturday nights lifted. We were released."

Lustbader is a nationally known speaker on how to cope with aging, disability and end-of-life issues. She draws upon her caregiving experience and her expertise as a counselor to give lectures and workshops for caregivers around the United States and Canada.

She'll speak at the Washington state ''Challenges in Caregiving: Giving Care, Taking Care" conference, to be held June 4 in Tukwila, Wash. (Pre-registration is required and space is limited. See sidebar for more details.)

"No one understands like a fellow caregiver, and this event will be a chance for people to experience an incredible community of family caregivers," Lustbader said of the conference. "It's a marvelous relief to be with others who really understand how you feel.”

Lustbader will give practical advice on how caregivers should take care of themselves, something caregivers often neglect. One caregiver proudly told her, "I kept a slice of selfishness for myself." Lustbader agrees. "I'm going to advocate for people to keep that slice. That reduces bitterness and resentment," she said. "And, who wants to be taken care of by someone who is resentful?"

She suggests that at least one day a week caregivers should set aside time when they're "back in life somehow." It could be a weekly card game, a part-time job or something else. "We get patience from the perspective which comes from getting away," she said.

Caregivers should also hold on to their hopes and dreams, which is the topic of Lustbader's keynote talk at the June 4 conference. To this end, she advises caregivers to understand how guilt and resentment can bubble up when people have to put their own lives on hold.

"It helps people be honest with themselves, that it is natural to feel thwarted and captive when they can't pursue their own aims. Everything is for the sake of the person whose illness has taken center stage," Lustbader said.

Wendy Lustbader

Grief can arise during situations of giving and receiving care, stemming from many sources, she added. Spouses of people with Alzheimer's often yearn for the personality their partner once had. Sometimes people coping with chronic pain turn inward and become entirely self-oriented, leaving family caregivers bereft with the feeling that the person they love and have depended upon has vanished.

Lustbader urges caregivers to attend support groups where they can grieve openly and receive comfort.

In her 1993 book "Counting on Kindness: The Dilemmas of Dependency," Lustbader describes caregiving from the recipient's point of view and gives insights on what ill people wish their caregivers knew. One caregiver gave the book and a yellow highlighter to her mother, asking her to highlight anything that expressed how she was feeling.

"It spurred them to talk deeply, for the first time in their lives," Lustbader said. "Many people use this book as a tool of understanding. Some even read it long after the person they took care of is gone, and it helps them comprehend what went on during those difficult times.”

Lustbader will use humor and storytelling to convey her knowledge at the caregiver conference. “People don’t remember didactic material,” Lustbader explained. “They remember stories, and then the wisdom contained in the story comes to mind when they need it the most.”

Caregivers who seek Lustbader's counsel frequently have these questions:

I feel so guilty thinking ahead to when the caregiving will be over; does this mean I’m insensitive or unloving?

Lustbader says that caregivers should keep thinking about their own lives. "Think about how there will be life after caregiving, and don’t feel guilty about it." She encourages caregivers to think about what they will do after the responsibility is over, even though that time will bring sadness. "Looking forward to when you're free is totally natural and people should indulge quietly in this; it brings perspective. Lift your head from your labors and see life as a whole."

Why does my mom yell at me when I'm being so good to her?

"Don't take it personally when a dependent person takes out their anger and frustration on you. This is a universal problem: we bite the hand that feeds us," Lustbader said. "We do it because the caregiver is the safest person. We have nowhere else to let out the frustration of being dependent."

I'm resentful toward family members who aren't helping – what do I do?

Emotions often run high between siblings in caregiving situations, especially when old rivalries and resentments present themselves. Lustbader says, "You never regret the care you give, but people do regret the care they didn't give." She points out that research shows that the grief process is relatively simple for those who have provided care to a loved one, but it's more complicated for those who weren't involved. Also, there is solace in knowing that our children are learning from our caregiving. "I think that's why the Fifth Commandment says you will get length of days when you honor your father and your mother," Lustbader said. "Caregiving gives you hope that when your time comes, people might go out of their way to help you."

###

For more information on Lustbader's work: www.lustbader.com.

Such was likely the case with an Emmy-winning female bandleader who rose to fame in the 1930s and led bands until the 1960s. Known as "the blonde bombshell of rhythm," this sex symbol hailing from Chicago had security to protect her from the men who mobbed her performances.

See why they were so enchanted:

Ina Ray Hutton, who died in 1984 at age 67, also had a secret that could have damaged her stardom.  A reporter from KUOW radio, with help from the UW libraries, recently revealed the secret. It turns out that the blonde bombshell had more than hair-dye to hide.

The ‘blonde’ as a brunette

In 2007 Phyllis Fletcher, now an editor at KUOW, was choosing music for the radio program "The Swing Years and Beyond," hosted by Amanda Wilde. A CD by Hutton caught Fletcher's eye. On one side of the CD's cover, Fletcher saw a curvaceous blonde. On the other side, Hutton appeared as a brunette.

"That chick is black," Fletcher thought. Hutton is known as white, and her Wikipedia entry claimed an Irish American ancestry.  But the shape of Hutton's face, her big cheeks and round lips, struck Fletcher as black features.

She should know. Blue-eyed with curly light brown hair, Fletcher is half black and half white. When Fletcher saw a brunette Hutton, she saw traces of herself.

"I have that big ol' forehead; I have big cheeks and round lips," Fletcher said in her radio story that divulged Hutton's secret. "White people think I'm white all the time, but I'm white and black."

Fletcher will receive a Gracie award for her radio story, "Secrets of a Blonde Bombshell," this spring. She did the story for "Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen," a public radio program on pop culture and arts.

If Hutton were indeed black, that is not how she is remembered. And this bit of trivia was probably not known to the white men who swarmed performances during her heyday as a bandleader.

Revelations from the library

Curiosity piqued, Fletcher began looking for records of Hutton’s race. She started on Ancestry.com, and purchased her own account on the genealogy site to do the research (she later learned that UW libraries has a subscription, too). She found census records, which become public after 72 years. (Next up is the 1940 census, to be released April 2.) She also unearthed birth certificates and a marriage license.

Fletcher examined the 1920 and 1930 census records, the two from Hutton's lifetime that are public. She found inconsistent listings for Hutton's race, because the Census Bureau changed the terms used for race. In the 1920 census she is listed as "mulatto," which was then dropped in later years. Then in 1930 she is recorded as "negro." Her parents' records also showed inconsistencies in race.

Fletcher tried another direction to determine Hutton's race. She used Hutton's birth name, Odessa Cowan, to search for records of Hutton as a child.

She examined archives of the Chicago Defender, a national black newspaper in circulation since 1905, for the birth name. If the star-to-be or her family members were mentioned in this newspaper it would indicate that they were part of the black community. This turned out to be the key to revealing Hutton's race.

Fletcher typed "Odessa Cowan" into the archive and up popped a list of articles mentioning the starlet as a child. There she was in articles about her recitals – she started her career as a tap dancer. And in 1924, the paper published a "Dancing Beauties" photo of the budding star at age 7 with two other black girls, all wearing dance costumes.

ProQuest

The mentions of Hutton and her family in the Chicago Defender showed that they "socialized as black in a segregated city in a segregated time," Fletcher said. "You didn’t have to be a big shot" to be in the Defender, she said.

Along with The New York Times, the Chicago Defender was the first fully digitized newspaper collection the UW libraries bought, said Glenda Pearson, head of the library's microform and newspaper collections. Ethnic and minority newspapers reveal how  communities view particular issues that affect them. "It makes a difference who's writing the story," Pearson said.

In 1925, when Hutton was 8, mentions of her in the Defender ceased, according to Fletcher's findings. That's around the time when a white vaudeville producer discovered Cowan and she became Ina Ray Hutton.

Hutton's skin color was light enough to pass – that is, let people believe she was white. Within the black community, Hutton's black ties were an open secret during her life. Back then "so many people know that you're passing for white, but they aren't talking about it," Fletcher said.

Family surprised by black heritage

But though it may have been a widely known and kept secret back then, it wasn't known to everyone, such as Hutton’s closest living relatives.

Fletcher tracked down obituaries for Hutton and her sister using the UW libraries' access to The New York Times digital archives. She found that Hutton did not have any children. But her sister June had a daughter.

June’s daughter is white and lives in Oregon. Did she know that she was part black?

One Sunday night in January 2011, Fletcher called her. The niece did not know about her black ancestry. She reacts to this surprise in Fletcher's radio story.

"Ina's mother's choice for her and June to pass is part of a historical context – it was a reaction to Jim Crow, in a very real way," Fletcher said. "The fact that someone would make this choice for her child before she could make it for herself is dramatic."

Fletcher clarified the bandleader's record. She changed Hutton's Wikipedia entry to indicate her African-American, not Irish-American, descent. Fletcher also wrote about Hutton's black heritage on BlackPast.org, directed by UW history professor Quintard Taylor.

Her discovery highlights how some secrets that once seemed so important to hide can eventually become non-issues. "Discrimination against blacks still exists, but it's not codified in a way that has the potential to destroy a career, or quash it before it starts," Fletcher said. "You don’t officially lose access to, say, an audience or a venue or a hotel or a restaurant simply because you're black. But back then, you did."

Other secrets, like out-of-wedlock children and single motherhood, were once shunned too. Fletcher added that these days there could be other forms of "passing," such as concealing disabilities, sexuality and certain ethnicities.

Hutton hid the truth of her race "to the grave," Fletcher said. At that highly segregated time, she was a black woman hiding as white in plain sight: up on stage, performing for white audiences and waving a baton as well as her behind.

"I don't care what her ethnic background was – she was smoking hot!!!!," summed up one commenter in response to a video of Ina Ray Hutton and Her Melodears performing "Doin' the Suzy Q."

And as Hutton is credited as saying, "I'm selling the show as a music program, not on a sex-appeal basis. … But if curves attract an audience, so much the better."

Rachel Vaughn

Mary Levin

Ask Rachel Vaughn about her new job as director of the Carlson Leadership & Public Service Center — or her own recent honor from the ROOTS Youth Shelter — and she’s likely to talk more about the center’s hard-working students and staff than herself.

She’s just not eager for personal credit. At the Carlson center, where service learning and community partnerships are key, Vaughn feels it’s the students and staff that really deserve the praise.

“There’s an incredibly dedicated group of staff here who strongly believe that partnerships between the university and the community are a really critical piece of the University of Washington — both educationally and who we are as an institution,” she said in a recent interview.

The mission of the Carlson center, which celebrates its 20^th anniversary this year, is to develop “service-learning, community-based participatory research and leadership opportunities for UW students that sustain reciprocal partnerships, deepen learning, advance civic engagement and contribute to our greater community.”

Vaughn said the center has engaged 20,000 students in service learning over its two decades, and doubled the number of students engaged in service learning in just the last two years. “And that’s in a time of budget cuts,” she said. “It’s overwhelming in some sense, but it’s also exciting because the students are really engaged.” The staff achieved that increase in part by streamlining processes and moving to an electronic database.

Vaughn came to the center in the late ‘90s, and worked as a graduate research assistant while earning a master’s degree from the School of Social Work. She served as the first academic adviser for the then-new Program on the Environment from 1998 to 2001. After that she joined the  Community Campus Partnerships for Health, a national nonprofit based at the UW that also focuses on civic engagement and service learning. Vaughn returned to the center as assistant director in 2004, became associate director in 2007 and took over as director in November 2011. She remains a part-time consultant for the nonprofit health organization.

Vaughn gets praise from the woman she succeeded as director, Michaelann Jundt, a longtime friend who is now an assistant dean for undergraduate affairs. “I loved working with Rachel for seven years, and her integrity and commitment were inspiring” Jundt wrote in email. “I consider her one of my mentors in service-learning. I am so excited for all the students, faculty and community partners that will be able to work with Rachel as the leader of the Carlson center's work."

Vaughn has also long been the center’s liaison with the ROOTS Shelter on 43^rd Street, which serves homeless youth of the University District and holds “Friday Feast” each week, feeding anyone who stops by. She was among six people honored by the center in a December volunteer appreciation event — an honor she quickly deflects, saying it was more for “the longevity and depth of our partnership.”

She added, “I felt like I was accepting it on behalf of the Carlson center for the  hard work the center staff have been doing for years.”

Colin Knight, program manager for ROOTS (which stands for Rising Out of the Shadows), said Vaughn and the center are vitally important to their work. “ROOTS relies almost exclusively on volunteers to make the shelter and the Friday Feast happen. It really couldn’t happen without the Carlson center’s involvement, Rachel Vaughn being the primary contact,” he said.

The center’s staff is fairly small. Vaughn is one of four professional staff who she said work varying percentages of time due to recent budget cuts, and there are two graduate student staffers, two undergraduates, two interns and an AmeriCorps member.

With the center’s 20^th anniversary comes some thought about the future, and Vaughn has a number of ideas. One question being pondered, she said, is whether it’s realistic to set a goal of engaging another 20,000 students in service learning over the next 10 years, doubling the past pace. That would be a challenge, to be sure, but Vaughn said simply, “I suspect that we will achieve that.”

In addition, she said, “One of the things we’re hoping to do is think critically about what opportunities we could provide students that maybe look different than our traditional service-learning model — and meet some of our U-District partners’ needs during the summer.”

Summer does present challenges. The shelter continues to need help, but most UW students are too busy, in the shortened quarter, for any service learning. The staff will have to “think creatively” to solve that problem, Vaughn said.

“The foundation of our work is reciprocity,” she said. “We really are working to make sure we have a mutually beneficial relationship with our community partners. Another piece of that reciprocity is respecting and honoring that our partners are helping educate our students.”

She feels strongly, and teaches students, that “you engage in the community with an open heart, an open mind and a learning attitude, not ‘I am here to solve all your problems or save your community.’ There’s some humility in how they enter into community service.”

In foreground, from left, are advisers Rob Egbert, Justin Siegel and Ingrid Swanson Pultz, who mentored the iGEM team. In the back are team members Mathew Harger, Sydney Gordon and Liz Stanley.

Mary Levin

For three graduate students, who have sometimes let their own work languish while volunteering as coaches of a championship science team – this principle is vivid. Next year, all three will be moving on to post-doctoral or professor positions.

Over the past four years Ingrid Swanson Pultz, Justin Siegel and Rob Egbert have worked hundreds of hours with more than 50 students, who competed in November to win the championship in iGEM, a competition in synthetic biology that involves genetic engineering of microbes.

“I love working with them,” Pultz said. “When my thesis isn’t working, I just walk over to the lab and see their enthusiasm and I feel better.” She first created a much smaller team that competed in 2008, and talked Siegel and Egbert into joining her among the five advisers. Siegel has received his doctorate in biomolecular structure and design and has applied directly for faculty positions at several universities. Pultz expects to complete hers in microbiology by June. Egbert will finish his in electrical engineering in the summer.

“After 2008, I swore I would never do it again,” she recalled. Funny how she forgot to quit.

Our reporter and photographer saw some of the team in a laboratory in the Health Sciences annex, where the chaotic symphony of their discussion illustrated a special camaraderie. The scrum of people could barely fit between the lab benches, where a silver-taped cabinet door became an impromptu desk. The undergrads hummed and bubbled with questions, teasing and discussion.

In the lab were: Sydney Gordon, Liz Stanley and Austin Moon, all seniors; Sean Wu and Lei Zheng, sophomores; and junior Matthew Harger. The whole team can be seen at their website.

In the hours and hours of work in the laboratory over the summer, Harger said he felt as if everyone was equal. He could ask a question or bounce an idea off his advisers, just as if they were peers. Gordon says doing real science with applications that could help people was a contrast to “moving termites around” in a class-based lab project.

“I can't imagine my life without science and research now,” Gordon said, “and it's all due to the three wonderful advisers.”

During summer, Pultz and Siegel watched the team working 12-hour days, combing the scientific literature to try to find an enzyme that would help them in their quest to engineer a microbe to produce diesel fuel, and a novel enzyme to help digest gluten. Another subset of students was supervised by Egbert and worked on a project about getting bacterial cells to grow nanomagnets, this was called the magnetosome project.

“They are amazing,” Pultz said of the team, which included students majoring in many different subjects and some with no science experience. When interviewed after their win, team members expressed shock. But Pultz thinks they are too humble. She believed they were something special months before their big win.

Siegel, who learned a lot about proteins from his own research-oriented father, said being an adviser to this team has been “one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.” He skipped the regional competition in September, where the UW team won the “Americas” trophy, because his own first child – Josefina Amara- was born just a few days earlier. But Siegel made it to the Boston competition and brought his own father, Brock Siegel, along.

For his part, Egbert explains he feels lucky to be a mentor, because it is so satisfying to see students understand and “become independent.” Alicia Wong, who graduated with a degree in materials science in June, said she found the summer’s iGEM work with Egbert highly rewarding, especially getting to know others in the lab environment and hearing about their research.

People who study the science of education may puzzle just a bit about this team’s success. There doesn’t seem to be much incentive – in terms of grades or money.  But the mentoring chemistry spells l-e-a-r-n-i-n-g.

Judy Ramey

Mary Levin

“I asked for volunteers on my blog,” Ramey said. “But I didn’t get much response, so I asked Wallyhood, my neighborhood blog, to run an announcement.”

Before long, her UW department, Human Centered Design and Engineering, had also run an announcement, and so had the Seattle PI.com. Suddenly Ramey had so many volunteers she wondered where she would put them in her small house. But she rose to the challenge.

“I’m not an engineer, but this brought out all my engineering instincts that have been honed by being in the College of Engineering,” she said before the fateful day. “I now have flow charts. I have task dependencies worked out. I’ve divided these people into two shifts. We’ll see how it goes. That’s the kind of thing that I really enjoy doing.”

To hear Ramey talk, she enjoys pretty much everything in her life. Fun is one of her favorite words — used to describe not only the cooking and gardening she does in her spare time, but the teaching and research she’s done in her career. Yet, but for a few happy accidents, she might have had a very different career.

Laki and Darivanh Vlachos and their sons, Vasili, left, and Suriya, make cornbread dressing for the Thanksgiving feast.

Judy Ramey

Ramey grew up in a small town in South Texas, and was fascinated with all things from the Middle Ages. At the University of Texas, she majored in English, and went on to graduate school in medieval studies. Then she took a break from school and moved to Portland, Ore., where she cast about looking for work. She’d worked on a magazine and was interested in publishing, so when she heard of a job with a small publishing company in Forest Grove, she applied.

“This person had a bunch of small presses — including a computer-related imprint called Dilithium Press,” Ramey said. “I worked for him for a year, and we put out a whole bunch of books around computers. This was in 1978, so we’re talking about soldering irons and things like that.”

When she returned to graduate school, she applied for a teaching assistantship and her experience in technical publishing was noticed, so she became a TA in technical writing. And then Texas Instruments came knocking. The company had decided, Ramey said, that what they really needed was a bunch of English majors to work for them as technical editors. She applied and was hired.

Marcel Blonk and his wife Charlotte Lee prepare sweet potatoes.

Judy Ramey

“As a TA at UT, I was making about $300 a month,” Ramey said. “At Texas Instruments I was making the lavish amount of $1,500 a month. I couldn’t believe it.”

Ramey was writing her dissertation at that point, on the influence of Boethius on 12^th century Provencale love poets. Boethius, she explained, was a very late classical Roman philosopher who wrote a famous book called The Consolation of Philosophy.  It might seem to have little to do with Texas Instruments in the early ‘80s, but Ramey thinks otherwise, because the IBM PC had just come out.

“What I was studying in my dissertation work was cultural clashes, and what I was encountering at TI was cultural clashes,” she said. “The engineers were really under a lot of pressure to design products that ordinary people could use and to write documents that ordinary people could understand. There was a lot of feeling among them, ‘If they don’t know enough to understand a computer, they shouldn’t be buying one and they shouldn’t be using one.’ Trying to cope with that…it was a very confusing time…people were very passionate about all of this.”

And in the midst of it, Ramey saw an advertisement for a position at the UW in technical communication. “I thought, ‘Wow, you can actually study this stuff?’ I hadn’t known that before.”

Plymouth Housing Group employees Brian Hatfield and Alan Berliner take Ramey’s food delivery at the Gatewood Apartments near the Pike Place Market.

Judy Ramey

So the decision was made. Although she finished the dissertation, Ramey abandoned the medieval world for something much more contemporary. She arrived at the UW in 1983, a time when her students majored in general studies with a concentration in technical communication. Since then, she’s seen a department, Technical Communication, form and offer first an undergraduate major, then a master’s and finally a doctorate. And a few years ago, it changed its name to Human Centered Design and Engineering.

Ramey herself has been human-centered all along. When she arrived at Texas Instruments, she explained, she had to learn to use a computer for the first time and found it difficult. So it dawned on her that if you wanted to help users, you had to consult with them as you designed your product.

That’s why, from the first time she taught computer documentation, she required her students to do a field study in which they sat down with somebody who matched the profile of their intended user, handed them the documentation and noted any problems they had.

That kind of user research is common now, but was in its infancy then, Ramey said. Her career has included plenty of it. Most often she’s worked with industry, helping them design systems that work for people.

“It really interests me to look at work,” she said. “I ask, ‘Who are the people who do this work? How do they do this work? What do they care about?’ People are terribly thoughtful and clever about how they work. They always have these stratagems that they’ve come up with to do it a little bit better. That’s fascinating to me. In designing a system, I want to make it about people and what they can do rather than about technology and what it can do.”

When she isn’t working, Ramey said she loves to cook (like that Thanksgiving dinner), and not quite a year ago she started a food blog, EatTheBestFoodInTheWorld.com. Subtitled “about beautiful food and the people who make it,” she says the blog is a clearinghouse where she writes about whatever interests her. She also gardens, though not very successfully, she said, “because my yard isn’t sunny enough.”

She’ll have more time for both pursuits come fall when she retires from the University.

“It’s hard to say what’s been most satisfying about my career,” Ramey said. “I guess there are two things. One was being chair of the department and really working with people to enhance its reputation, grow it, improve its quality, keep it current. That has been hugely gratifying.

“The other is taking students and helping them build themselves into top-quality professionals. When I go out to places like Microsoft and see the work some of our alums are doing I’m just completely blown away. They really are taking the field in directions we couldn’t have imagined when they were here in school. They are the big reward.”

Ark Chin

Chin was born in a small village in Tai Shan, China, and came to the United States at the age of 10. He received both a bachelor’s (1950) and master’s degree (1952) in civil engineering from the UW. His initial schooling at UW was interrupted when he left to fight in World War II, where he was wounded twice and awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. After the war, Chin went to Hong Kong where he met and married Winifred Chung. They moved to Seattle and Chin returned to his studies at UW to complete his degrees.

Chin was president and CEO for the Seattle engineering firm Kramer, Chin & Mayo, Inc., until his retirement in 1989. Active in the community and a strong advocate for education, he was named the First Citizen of Seattle in 1989. Along with his wife of 64 years, Chin established scholarships for students in need at the UW (civil engineering) and Western Washington University. He was a champion for diversity and a long-time supporter of the UW Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity (OMA&D), contributing to OMA&D’s Educational Opportunity Program Scholarship Fund over the span of two decades.

Chin led the fundraising efforts to establish the Kin On Nursing Home that serves elderly Asian-Americans in Seattle.  His philanthropic endeavors extended beyond the local community, as he built an orphanage with Winifred in China near the village where he was born.

The recipient of several accolades, Chin was named the Engineer of the Year by the American Council of Engineering Companies in 1987 and Engineer of the Year by the Washington Society of Professional Engineers in 1990. He received the Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award from the UW College of Engineering in 1992 and the Spirit of America Award by the Ethnic Heritage Council in 1999.

Chin is survived by his wife, six children, 16 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. A memorial service will be held at Butterworth Arthur A. Wright Chapel (520 West Raye Street, Seattle, WA, 98119) on Sat., Nov. 19, at 11 a.m.

A full obituary is available on the Seattle Times website.

And he got here 50 years ago.

Ashley Emery, professor of mechanical engineering, has taught at the UW for 50 years now and has no plans to stop.

Mary Levin

Thoughtful, soft-spoken and often bemused, Emery looked back over the decades in his office in the building where, but for some interruptions, he has worked since John F. Kennedy was president.

The UW he came to was a little more formal and a lot less technology-driven, he said. Computers were still room-sized and slide rules still poked from pockets. It was the days of mimeograph machines, chalky blackboards and typing pools.

“I wouldn’t make it now, because nowadays you have to have a postdoc,” Emery said. “Practically speaking, if you don’t have a lot of experience and a lot of papers, it’s pretty hard to get hired.”

In fact it seemed far from certain he’d get the job when he applied in 1961 on the advice of a friend, with a doctorate fresh from the University of California, Berkeley. Mechanical engineering back then had an executive officer instead of a chairman in Bryan T. McMinn, who didn’t seem eager to hire Emery. “Finally, I guess the dean prevailed,” Emery said, noting that his starting pay was about $650 a month.

“So I came here and I can remember we had teacher rating polls, the same thing as we do now. They were by decile ratings, and I was just crushed when my first rating was a 2,” Emery said with a chuckle. “I went to see Professor McMinn and he said, ‘Well, this is fantastic! For a new person to have gotten a 2, this is great!’”

Emery was promoted to associate professor in four years and shopped for a house even though salaries seemed uncertain because the Legislature, as seems often the case, “was having difficulty coming up with money.”

You rarely saw senior faculty on campus on weekends back then, he said, and when you did it was usually because of a promotion meeting, the results of which were kept private until they made the papers in late spring. “You’d look for your name and if your name was there, you had been promoted. And if you didn’t you had no way of finding out why you didn’t make it,” Emery said.

He said teaching was heavily emphasized then and most courses had two or three sections, often in the same quarter. “There were virtually no TAs,” he said. “We did everything ourselves.”

The informality of the late-1960s and ’70s was still a few years off. “You didn’t teach without a tie, and you didn’t teach without a suit,” Emery said. “And … every day when we went home — you had yellow chalk — and so the back of your suit was always covered with yellow chalk, typically right at the hip, where you’d back up against the chalk tray.” He laughed, adding, “I think I kept the dry-cleaners in business.”

He recalled the pre-computerized UW of punch cards and 35 mm. projectors. The arrival of computers brought certain efficiencies, he said, but they also ushered in an era of rewriting research papers 10 or 15 times over.

“Seattle was a very, very different place. A strong union town.” Before long, Boeing would slump, slowing the Northwest economy. “There was a lot of uncertainty, but I don’t think that we were that worried about it. The Space Needle, of course, had just been constructed, and things looked pretty good.”

He recalled of that Cold War-era time, “Relatively speaking, there was a lot more money than there is now for research, since there was a lot less competition,” he said. “The National Science foundation (where he was later to work distributing grants) had just begun and engineering was a small part of it, not even recognized.

“Engineering science had just really begun — the first of the engineering science classes were coming on line.”

Collaboration often came easier then, he said. “Because almost every course had two or three sections, you’d find yourself meeting with other faculty members and discussing how to teach, what to teach. As a result of those meetings there were opportunities to talk about the research you were doing …it was much easier to collaborate with others. Now, you have to set up and seek collaborations.”

Still, he said, working across disciplines is “not only important to the University, I think it’s more valuable to the participants. But by the same token I think the average faculty member now is — how to say this? — more egotistical. They feel a greater sense of their own ability to do things, and less need to work with others.”

These days, Emery said, he’s frustrated with those who use initiatives to increase certain spending even while purporting to reduce taxes. And he’s worried about the health of the middle class as university tuitions rise.

The students themselves are different than decades back, he said. “It’s changed dramatically, the sense that, formerly, most of the people came out of  a background where they had a lot of practical experience and now we see more purely academic students.”

And though he said chemical and civil engineering programs have done fairly well recruiting women students, “My impression is that we don’t see the underrepresented students here as much as we should.”

The highlights of his 50-year career are lengthy indeed, and include chairmanship of the UW Faculty Senate. Per Reinhall, chair of mechanical engineering, said Emery was “one of the early key faculty members who put the department on the national and international research map” and has remained “an incredibly active faculty member over the years both in teaching and research.”

Reinhall added, “After 50 years on the faculty (Emery) is not slowing down. He is currently the faculty adviser of our highly successful Formula SAE racecar project and a key member of the FAA Joint Advanced Materials and Structures Center of Excellence. Ashley is also an active cyclist and continues to impress everybody by completing the annual Seattle to Portland bike race in one day.”

At 76 (for a few days yet), Emery still commutes by bike and says he has no plans to retire.

In fact, he’s preparing for yet another year of teaching — wearing a tie, of course.

Career highlights

• President of the Faculty Senate.
• Chair of Mechanical Engineering Department
• Program manager, National Science Foundation
• Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
• Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
• Fellow of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers
• Puget Sound Engineer of the Year, 1990
• Best paper award, ASME, 1993, 2004
• Chair, editorial board, ASME Applied Mechanics Review

Since that New Years Day in 1960, 58-year-old Heyamoto has either attended, watched on television or listened on the radio to all but two UW football games. Those two he later watched on tape.

From left, Dan Lepse, Gary Heyamoto and Craig Heyamoto look down on the field shortly before kickoff at the Cal versus UW football game Sept. 24.

Dan DeLong/Redbox Pictures

And for the last 34 years, Heyamoto has headed the crew that keeps statistics at UW home football games. He also leads the crews that keep stats for UW men’s basketball and Seahawks football. And he keeps statistics at road games for UW football play-by-play announcer Bob Rondeau and UW women’s basketball radio broadcasts.

As if that weren’t enough, he also helps keep statistics for the Seattle Storm women’s professional basketball team and Seattle Sounders FC soccer.

Heyamoto holds both math and law degrees from the UW. Of the two, he said, law is more valuable for his work as a sports statistician because he must often interpret NCAA guidelines.

But it’s both time-consuming and demanding, albeit a tad different from Heyamoto’s job as senior counsel for Boeing’s commercial airplane division. Along with his work as a lawyer, Heyamoto serves as a liaison between Boeing and UW Bothell, facilitating such things as research, recruiting for jobs and internships, and sponsorship of events and student groups.

On game days, Heyamoto typically shows up at Husky Stadium about four hours ahead of kickoff. With a backpack that includes a row of 16 pens – among them a different color for each quarter of the game – he hikes briskly to a booth at the west end of the press box that has just enough room for 10 chairs, two narrow work tables and a red phone to Jeff Bechthold, UW director of athletic communications.

As soon as he’s hung his backpack, Heyamoto tacks up player lists and lays out worksheets for each member of his team. He tries to anticipate as much as possible so that the unforeseen is manageable. “I’m very process driven,” he said while setting up for the California game Sept. 24.

From left, Craig Heyamoto, his brother Gary Heyamoto and Dan Lepse are ready to keep statistics for another Husky game.

Dan DeLong/Redbox Pictures

When play begins, members of the statistics team call out and record information in pre-assigned order, often five to 10 entries per play. At the Cal game, UW alumnus Dan Lepse was responsible for offensive calls (passes, receptions, rushes) and backup stats. Gary Heyamoto, Craig’s brother, who has both undergraduate and dental degrees from the UW, called defensive statistics (tackles, fumbles, interceptions). Bryan Thorn punched data into a computer while Susan Reid kept a manual record. Two UW students tracked who played for each team, a Ballard High School student put stats on the stadium scoreboard and an announcer relayed information to the press box while another person relayed statistics to the broadcast truck.

Heyamoto is the conductor, ensuring that each crew member supplies information in the correct order. His most important job, however, is to remember and apply NCAA guidelines. For example, during the Cal game, a center hiked the ball poorly to a quarterback, leading to a fumble and loss of yardage. Calculating lost yardage was simple. Assessing the loss to the team, not the quarterback, took more knowledge.

Rooting isn’t allowed in the statistics booth. Too distracting and not considerate – the visiting athletic director and guests are next door.

“But we still cheer,” Thorn said. “We just do it so nobody notices.”

This upcoming January, at least one UW team will be at the Rose Bowl. In 2008, Heyamoto’s crew was selected to be official statisticians for the game.

On his own time, Heyamoto often watches other games, learning how other statistics crews do their jobs. But unlike the Peter Brand character in the recent film, Moneyball, Heyamoto does not analyze statistics for coaches or managers. He’s happy to leave that to them.

By Heyamoto’s own account, he’s not a particularly good athlete, so he got his start by keeping score for kids teams coached by his father, Hiromu Heyamoto, who lettered in UW baseball.

Heyamoto worked into the UW statistics job by compiling football and basketball statistics for his high school in Burien, and that led to a couple of NCAA events at the UW and odd jobs at Husky games.

In a 1975 business course, Heyamoto wrote a software program for basketball statistics, and coupled with his other experience, it earned him the job as stat crew chief. He was only 24, and, everybody else in the statistics box seemed older. “So I was a little scared,” Heyamoto recalled. “A crew member took me aside and said, ‘Not every call you make is going to be perfect, but you have to call ’em with conviction. You’ve got to lead, or the crew will eat you up. Don’t be afraid to make a call.’”

The results obviously matter: "We study the opponents' numbers for tendencies and strengths, and try to attack accordingly," said UW football Head Coach Steve Sarkisian. Asked what statistics are particularly important to him, he said, "I look at turnover margin. I look at third-down efficiency. I look at red-zone scoring opportunities and production. And lastly, I look at time of possession.”

These days, the Internet means sports statistics can be compiled and spread a whole lot faster than they could years ago. So does it mean overload for fans? More statistics than necessary? Maybe, acknowledged Heyamoto, but fans seem to want more statistics. And fantasy football people, he said, they’re a whole other level.

For his trouble, Heyamoto is paid $50 per game, which he donates to the university. He sees his legal training and ability with numbers as a way to give back. “I also like the collegiality,” he said. “I love sports, and it’s fun to be in the booth.”

But Ostergren, 48, is curious by nature – she’s studying for a UW doctorate in information science. Most recently, she helped create a sustainability dashboard which reports on UW Seattle’s efforts to be environmentally responsible.

The house became Ostergren’s personal project. Only 300 square feet on a one-acre plot, the house is very simply finished and decidedly low-tech. Ostergren likes it that way.

The daughter of a Bellevue engineer, Ostergren took a shop course in junior high school because she likes to build things. She is also a keen believer in sustainable architecture, aware how some modern buildings permanently disrupt the landscape. Compare those buildings, she said, to lovely ruins of old stone structures. “I wanted to build a house such that if it were ever abandoned, it would degrade gracefully rather than leave a permanent scar,” she said recently.

To begin, Ostergren read books and talked with people knowledgeable about sustainable architecture. Straw-bale houses attracted her because straw is a simple, low-impact product that insulates well. Straw structures have been around since the Paleolithic age. In several Nebraska counties between 1896 and 1945, about 70 straw-bale buildings — homes, churches, schools, office, farm structures – were constructed. In 1990, nine were reportedly still standing.

Ostergren’s design work included laying a string footprint in the yard of a farmhouse where she was living as a caretaker, and building a scale model from paper, sticks and string. Instead of a rectangle, which Ostergren felt would be boring, she chose a cruciform layout.

Her architect, Terry Phelan of Living Shelter Design in Issaquah, who has designed about 20 straw-bale structures, thought a timber frame would be too expensive. So Ostergren located Salisbury Woodworking on Bainbridge, where owners agreed to create a mortise-and-tenon timber frame from locally-milled douglas fir priced within her budget.

“I wanted to be involved as much as possible. I wanted to understand everything about the house, and do as much of the work as possible,” Ostergren said. “When I didn’t know how to do something, I went and found someone who was willing to teach me.”

She also continued reading, including books on electrical wiring.

When the timber frame was finished, Ostergren hired other professionals to guide her. A builder who advised Ostergren wound up buying the parcel next to hers. Friends helped with tasks that required more than two hands – stacking straw bales eight feet high and installing roof panels, for example. She even visited the farm where 120-plus bales of straw, each 18 inches thick, came from.

When it came time to apply three layers of lime plaster over the straw, Ostergren had learned what to do by reading. And she did it.

The house has an on-demand hot water heater and wall-mounted heaters, but Ostergren doesn’t want anything more complicated. When it’s cold, she bundles up, drinks tea and works from a platform bed raised about four feet from the floor. She rigged another platform in the middle of the house so it can be used as a table or raised to the ceiling, out of the way. Ostergren heats food in a rice cooker and buys lots of fresh items rather than have a refrigerator. Some things – this season, mainly fruit such as plums, apples and raspberries – come from her garden, watered from a cistern that catches rain from the roof. She has a wringer washing machine, and dries clothes on the flat roof made of plywood and synthetic rubber used in inner tubes. Near French doors at the front of the house is an upholstered easy chair, a reading lamp and a cello with Bach’s Minuet No. 2 on a music stand.

All told, the house cost about $90,000, the land another $80,000.

And Ostergren is content. “I think about what I can do without rather than what I can add,” she said. “And what I have feels like plenty.”

In releasing a print version of his book Storyteller Uprising, Hanson Hosein did what he often encourages his students to do — stop waiting for institutional approval and just make it happen.

Hosein, director of the UW’s Masters in Digital Media program, writes in Storyteller Uprising of his experiences moving away from NBC and CNN-style broadcast journalism to the community-empowered approach he calls “trusted communication.” And he points a way for others interested in following a similar path.

The uprising he refers to is the global transformation of news and information content — “people seizing control of communication by building ongoing, credible connection through story and digital technology.” These are ideas Hosein promotes in the graduate program and his own news and documentary film work.

So when Oxford University Press, the intended publisher, moved at a glacial speed, Hosein decided to change his approach. “I just felt, no, that’s not the way to go. This stuff is too important and too current for me to wait.”

So he released it himself — online, as an e-book, a PDF file and cell phone app, as well as through the University Book Store’s espresso book machine. It’s a similar path to the one he took with his first film, Independent America. The change was emblematic of the newer, more fluid way of information distribution, he said, but also of his own personality: “I don’t ever like to sit around and wait for an institution to pass judgment on my work.”

But even now, the manuscript isn’t really done. “It’s an unfinished book — a book in progress. To me it’s kind of like a blog in published form, that as I have ideas I need to share with my various communities, I'm going to put it together and have an artifact that they can use as a resource,” he said.

Hanson Hosein

The book is just another step in a varied career that has taken Hosein from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism to network news, prized work as a freelance filmmaker, and finally to academe at the UW, where he appears to have flourished.

“All content is commodity now, so this book is a calling card that allows me to increase my credibility when I’m on the speaking circuit, or at the University.” Hosein is currently writing the next chapter, “which is about engagement strategy after you’ve created this story. It’s coming directly from some work I’ve done with Microsoft, MasterCard and the University of Washington as clients.”

It’s all part, he said, of the transition from a communication strategy to a storytelling  and community-building strategy. “It’s no longer convincing people of storytelling, it’s now implementing the storytelling strategy.”

Intimately connected with this are what he calls the “Four Peaks” of the graduate program’s curricular focus: entrepreneurship, innovation, community and story. In his blog about the book and related work, he wrote that he sees the Four Peaks “as the core elements that all communicators must now draw upon if they wish to engage with trust and persuasion in this noisy, chaotic digital age.”

He refers with pleasure to Clay Shirky’s 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody and its use of the phrase “publish, then filter.” He writes, “In the digital age, it means barriers to entry, costs, and content distribution platforms are all so accessible that the traditional mass media model of ‘filter, then publish’ is no longer the norm.”

That gets back to how he tends to advise students, especially those who consider entering the shopworn establishment of professional news. “I have so many students — especially undergrads — who come to my office and say, ‘Should I go to journalism school? I’ve got this film I want to make but I feel like I ought to go to journalism school first.’ I say, ‘Absolutely not! Do you really want to put yourself in debt to an industry that’s dying?’” The study of journalism remains “a great pursuit,” he added, though not as an expensive process that sends students off to “a dying business model.”

He said if they have an idea they believe in and the tools and time to do the film, he tells them, “You should just go do it! If you have a story and you think there’s a community you can connect to, the time is now — just go do it.”

But he also tells them that “the competition for ideas and for attention now is worse than it’s ever been, it’s almost like the survival of the fittest, or the most entertaining, when it comes to messages and stories getting out there. You’ve got to think of ways of being as compelling as possible.” He makes no apologies if the message doesn’t promise pure objectivity and conform to an older style of news delivery. “It’s not going to happen uniformly or universally, but there’s a lot of fact-checking going on there.”

He and filmmaking partner Scott Macklin — also associate director of the graduate program — recently completed a short film called Detroit Uprising that comprises a third part of the Independent America series. It stemmed from their attendance at a Journalism That Matters conference in Detroit where the two learned of the strong negative local reaction to a previous Time magazine piece on the city. It was the sort of boots-on-the-ground filmmaking that is at the heart of Storyteller Uprising and Hosein’s other recent work.

With a book published — or under way, depending on how you think about it — and a new cohort of students headed to the graduate program he heads, Hosein is  comfortable in his role as change agent and voice for empowered community storytelling.

“I’ve had the ideas before, but didn’t necessarily have the track record or credibility, so I kept shifting around from institution to institution to create a career,” he said. “Now I feel this wonderful nexus between creativity and credibility — I’m really enjoying myself and feel people are actually listening to what I’m saying. It doesn’t get any better than this.”

And that’s what happens in Jane Meyerding’s new book, Mapping Charlie. But Meyerding’s heroine, Kay Schneider, isn’t focused on clearing her name. She’s trying to correct an irrational idea.

“She has a need for things to be rational,” Meyerding said. “For her to be suspected of murder just seems totally irrational and therefore unbearable.”

Jane Meyerding has written a book featuring a character who has autism and face blindness, both of which she herself has.

Mary Levin

It isn’t the reaction one would expect of the typical person accused of murder, but this person is anything but typical. Kay Schneider has autism, and along with it, a little-known disability called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. And so does her creator.

Meyerding, a program coordinator at the Jackson School of International Studies who has worked at the UW for 30 years, has had both disabilities since birth, but she didn’t know it until she was in her 40s. She’s hoping that her novel will help make adult autism more visible.

“Most people don’t seem to know that there are adult autistics, because all the things you read in the popular press are focused on children,” she said. “But children with autism do grow up.”

And when they do, they turn into adults like her and her heroine, Kay. As the book opens, Kay is taking a Latin class and one of her classmates is found murdered. Another student tells police that she saw Kay talking to the murdered man (the Charlie of the title) on the bus, and it turns out that Kay was the last to see him alive, making her a suspect.

When a detective asks her why she sat next to Charlie on the bus, she says, “I didn’t know he was him. I only talked to him because of the wolf….”

“What wolf?...”

“On his shirt. That’s what I saw when I got on the bus. The lovely picture of a wolf….”

“So when you sat down next to him and started talking, it wasn’t because you had been in the same class with Charlie for six months, it was because you liked his shirt?”

“Yes.”

The conversation illustrates Kay’s face blindness, a disability that means she finds it difficult to recognize people by their faces. Kay had been in a 30-student class with Charlie for two quarters, but she didn’t recognize him on the bus because of her face blindness and the fact that he was was out of context in that setting. Naturally, it’s difficult for the detective to believe this.

Meyerding has had similar difficulties on a smaller scale in her own life. Although she says those with face blindness learn to recognize people in other ways — by their posture, movements, voices, etc. — there have been times when she’s caused misunderstandings when she’s failed to recognize co-workers. In fact, years ago when she saw news of a study on face blindness published in University Week, she sent email to her colleagues, referring to the article and saying, “If I’ve ever seemed to snub you in the past, this is why.”

Meyerding said the character Kay is like her and not like her. Kay’s disabilities are the same and she lives in Seattle and works at the UW, but other things are very different. She’s physically different — tall and chunky where Meyerding is petite — and her family background is different. Meyerding was blessed with a supportive family, while Kay was not. In the book, Kay’s mother and sister live in Philadelphia and spend most of their time scolding her over the phone.

In real life, Meyerding said her family “did not consider normality necessarily a good thing or a status to which one should aspire.” They were also devoted members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), so that Meyerding was always surrounded by a group of people who “accepted me as I presented myself.” She was, she said, a “little professor” who related better to adults than to other kids.

But that doesn’t mean she’s always found living with autism easy. As a child she was isolated from her peers and had no friends “unless another oddball adopted me.” When she first went to college, she was lost without the structure she was used to and decamped with a visiting sister, leaving behind the scholarships she’d been granted. She finally got her degree at age 44 while working at the University.

Although Mapping Charlie revolves around solving the mystery, it also shows Kay — a middle-aged woman — discovering and grappling with the issues presented by her disabilities. Like Meyerding, she first gets her information on the Internet. Meyerding initially found a listserv for people with Tourette’s syndrome because she thought she might have that. As she participated, one of the listserv members pointed her to an article on autism through the lifespan and she recognized herself. She later sought out a doctor for a formal diagnosis.

Similarly, in the book, Kay learns about autism and face blindness (there is a higher incidence of face blindness among those with autism than among the general population) on a listserv and begins to understand for the first time why she relates to others as she does.

“I was very fortunate in my life to have two older sisters who taught me a great deal [about human relationships],” Meyerding said. “The character in my book did not have that and remained much more isolated and unable to understand why social interaction happens and what it does for people.”

In the course of the book, Kay reaches out to the partner of the dead man and, with his help, not only solves the murder but finds ways to relate to people that are comfortable for her.

Meyerding has done that too. She works part time because “I have a sense of responsibility that is a problem because I can’t turn it off. I don’t want a more ‘important’ job because it would overwhelm me.”

And she’s managed to develop friendships by working over a long period of time with others on common projects. In her case, the projects were two small feminist journals.

Mapping Charlie isn’t Meyerding’s first book. She had another murder mystery published by a small press back in the early 90s, and she’s contributed essays to books about autism. But when she became captivated by making teddy bears, she stopped writing to do that. Then the character of Kay appeared in her mind, and she knew she had to write about her. She used National Novel Writing Month in 2009 to crank out the first draft and decided to publish it herself in order to get it out quickly. She’s since written a sequel.

“I wanted the book out to see if it could do any good for people,” Meyerding said. “There’s a strong need for books with realistic autistic characters.”

She’s already had responses from people with face blindness, who have told her, “Finally, something that shows what life is like when you can’t recognize people.”

Autism has more visibility now, Meyerding believes, because of activist parents whose autistic children are now about to enter adulthood. “With the combination of people diagnosed as adults and these younger people coming up with their parents — I’m hopeful there will be more awareness and more accommodation and more acceptance,” she said.

Lois and Barb both have Crohn’s disease. Lois is one of about three-quarters of a million Americans living with an ostomy due to colorectal cancer, birth defects, bladder cancer or inflammatory bowel disease.

The ribbon for inflammatory bowel disease and ostomy surgery awareness.

Mary Levin

Dr. Tim Zisman, assistant professor of medicine, Division of Gastroenterology, noted, “She uses her own personal experience as a patient to connect with other patients and to encourage others to overcome their fears they may have about speaking openly about their disease.”

When Lois was a girl in Pittsburgh, she was extremely thin, had repeated bouts of fever, leg cramps and abdominal pain, and made frequent trips to the bathroom, even at night.  As Lois entered her teen years, her mother became worried because she wasn’t going through the usual physical changes of adolescence.

Trips to the doctor resulted in her condition being dismissed as nervousness, or to invasive diagnostic procedures for which the young girl was not properly prepared.  No one could figure out what was wrong.

To avoid more humiliating doctors’ visits, she tried to hide her symptoms at home and at school. Not until she passed out at school and was taken to the hospital with suspected appendicitis did a surgeon see the inflammation characteristic of Crohn’s disease.

Eventually she reached a point where she couldn’t accept a job she wanted because the restroom was on a separate floor. Her world narrowed. She mostly stayed at home, reluctant not to be more than a few steps away from a familiar bathroom.

When her doctor suggested ostomy surgery, she cringed at the idea.  Then a confident, stylish woman who had an ostomy met with her to answer her questions about the procedure.  At her first sight of an actual stoma and pouch, Lois was surprised, “Why, that’s nothing to be concerned about!” Undergoing the procedure, Lois said, “Was one of the best things I ever did for myself.”

Because she no longer had to fear an episode of incontinence, she was free to leave her home. Her life opened up before her. She traveled to places she had always wanted to see.  She has a job she loves, and people she enjoys working with, at the UW Speech and Hearing Clinic.

Barb’s diagnosis of Crohn’s came after six months of testing. She was worn out from frequent bouts of diarrhea, and was forced to take a leave of absence from work. After a year of treatment, she began to feel normal again. She said she was helped by meeting with others with IBD who understood the pain and embarrassment.

“Patients often view their disease as a choice between intolerable symptoms or intolerable side effects from the medication,” said digestive disease physician Zizman. “In reality, the treatment options for IBD have improved dramatically over the past few years. Patients should now expect to be in remission and enjoy a high quality of life.”

Lois Fink works at the UW Speech and Hearing Clinic and volunteers in her free time to encourage people affected by IBD.

Mary Levin

They volunteer with “Get Your Guts in Gear,” a biking and camping expedition for people who have one of these disorders. They are also involved in an IBD Quilt which gives expression to the thoughts and experiences of those who have the disease.

Barb and Lois talk honestly and directly with people to help them understand IBD from a personal perspective, to remove the shame that makes people reluctant to talk with their doctor about their symptoms and to help those affected find ways to live a satisfying life. They also help health professionals to improve their approach to bringing up the topic and to educating patients about managing the disease in day-to-day life,

“Patients need to be active partners in their disease management,” Zisman said, “and need to engage their physicians in dialogue about their symptoms and concerns. IBD is a multidisciplinary disease and patients benefit from a team approach to its management at centers of excellence.”

In addition to Zizman, several UW health-professionals are sporting the brown ribbon as a way of starting discussion with patients, who ask what the ribbon color means or who smile because they have already caught on. Wearing the ribbon also shows their concern for those who have these conditions.

Lois and Barbara laugh about their initial attempts to make the ribbons on their own and inadvertently gluing their fingers together.  Now they are hearing from a variety of clinics and physician practices, as far away as Australia, who want the ribbons on hand for themselves and their staff.

“We try to help people get beyond the taboo that one doesn’t mention such things in polite company,” Lois said. “People have suffered in shame and silence for too long.”

The Ribbon has taken on a life of its own. It has a Facebook and a website which convey its dauntless personality.

Its creators hope the education and awareness The Ribbon personifies brings  greater freedom to many people who previously had been held back by fear, and by what they saw as the insurmountable constraints of their conditions.

Lois and Barb have inspired and comforted others by going forward with a sense of adventure, courage and perseverance.  Lois’s story is featured in the book, Great Comebacks from Ostomy Surgery, compiled by former National Football League placekicker Rolf Benirschke. The book features the success stories of 15 individuals who thrived after the procedure. Benirschke picked himself up after a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis followed by an ileostomy. He returned to the game to play seven more seasons.

Staying engaged in the world can be life-enhancing.  Zisman pointed out the numerous opportunities for patients and others affect by IBD to get involved with fundraising and community building through local chapters of national organizations concerned with gastrointestinal diseases.

He said, “This is a great way to get involved, make a difference, and meet some amazing people (like Lois).”

As a teenager an angry Lois shouted to her father, “Why me?”  Her dad, who has since passed away, replied gently. “Perhaps later in life you will be able to encourage someone else because of what you are going through. You’ll know what to say and how to help.”

Lois recently received a distinguished service award from the Northwest Chapter of the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of North America for her work on the Restroom Access Act bill.

Laurino, who hails from the Philippines, has long maintained a clinical and research interest in the Asia Pacific region.  There are only seven medical geneticists serving 92 million people in the Philippines, she said. And there is an increasing demand for trained genetics specialists to provide clinical diagnosis, management and support of vulnerable patients with genetic conditions.

UW's Mercy Laurino, second from left (bottom row) with colleagues and students from the University of the Philippines -Manila.

Kathryn Ty

Dr. Carmencita Padilla, a medical geneticist from the Philippines, asked Laurino to help develop a training program for the country.  She accepted, after considerable thought about how this might change her life, at least temporarily.  “I vividly remember when Dr. Padilla offered me the opportunity to collaborate with her to create the first genetic counseling training program in the country,” said Laurino.  “We initially met in San Diego in 2007 at the American Society in Human Genetics Meeting, and I was apprehensive to accept the offer without speaking with my family and colleagues.”

At the time, Laurino had worked as a genetic counselor for five years at the UW and was conflicted about making a major change.  “I enjoyed my job, but I also had a personal urge to bring the field of genetic counseling to my home country,” she said.

Laurino said that she sought advice from Peter Byers, UW professor of pathology and medicine and director of the UW Medical Center’s Medical Genetics Clinic. “He eloquently said, ‘Do what you love. It’s that simple,’” she said.

In May 2008, Laurino contacted Padilla in the Philippines and accepted her offer.  With advice from other colleagues, Laurino also decided to enroll in the PhD program at the UW Institute for Public Health Genetics.  “I knew that it would enhance my knowledge on the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics, from clinical and research perspectives, in our society,” she said.

In summer 2009, Laurino, Padilla and others began developing a curriculum to train genetic counselors. Laurino returned to Seattle in the fall, and started required courses for her doctoral training.  After multiple conversations over Skype, email and telephone, and visits to the Philippines, the University of the Philippines in Manila approved the proposed curriculum in February 2011.

The young counselor said that she can barely contain her excitement about what’s being accomplished.  “This big step is timely, too given the recent inception of the Philippine Genome Center,” she said.  In June, 10 genetic counseling students began training in the program.

Bethany Staelens sings at downtown nightclub Tula's on the first Wednesday of each month.

Josephoto and Design

Bethany Staelens is a lifelong performer, and jazz is her chosen language.

She has sung at New York’s famed Algonquin Hotel and Birdland, in New Orleans, touring Europe and in shows, nightclubs and jazz festivals over many years.

These days, Staelens is an administrative assistant in UW Educational Outreach, capably guiding that office’s affairs — but the first Wednesday evening of each month she still sings and swings away with her husband, Bruce Staelens, and a big band at the downtown jazz club Tula’s.

You could say she’s an example of how you don’t have to cast your dreams aside just to settle down a little in life.

Staelens chatted about her performing career one recent afternoon at her desk high in the UW Tower, a spectacular view of Seattle in the background. Tall and blonde, she’s an alto/contralto who can hit high notes “for fireworks” and a wickedly funny mimic. On stage, she is Bethany Smith Staelens.

Josephoto and Design

Her website says she was “bitten by the show business bug” when first hearing audience applause in second grade. But Staelens took up her own story in the 1990s in New York, where she was a working actress and singer — and things began to change.

“I had booked, like, five commercials back to back — it was like, wow! I’m finally getting my foot in the door.” Then her union went on strike and the jobs vanished, along with many production companies. Afterward, many casting directors she’d known had been replaced by younger newcomers who saw her in a different light. (One, when told Staelens was a “young Bette Davis type,” asked, “Who’s Bette Davis?” Staelens just sighed.)

“I had been the ‘older mom,’ but now I was being sent out for the grandmother role,” she said, laughing. “Mind you, I was in my mid-40s. I’d go for these auditions and there’d be me and two or three people my age, and then a room full of old ladies — and the old ladies would always get the gig! It was like, really? Do I have to put on old age makeup for an audition?”

Getting cast in a production of the 1940s-style musical Swing Time Canteen seemed perfect, at first. “About halfway through rehearsals I said, ‘This is fun.’ And then we opened and I realized: I like rehearsing. And I really just didn’t enjoy performing anymore.”

Still, work kept coming, including an enjoyable European tour in a production of 42^nd Street, where she was treated like a star and met her future husband, trumpeter and bandleader Bruce Staelens. They’ve been collaborators in life and music ever since. An experienced jazzman, Bruce Staelens has played for several Broadway shows, including Chicago and Wicked, as well as in clubs.

Bethany has a great view from her office in UW Tower.

Mary Levin

Staelens decided her “starving artist” days were done and snagged a good-paying regular job — she always had day gigs, even working a while in the office of Rolling Stone Keith Richards — but commuting though Grand Central Station felt “like going through hell 10 times a week.”

The city seemed different, too, angrier since 9-11 (Staelens was 20 blocks away that day). “Or maybe it was that I was aging, or a combination of both. A lot of the jazz clubs were either going out of business or converting to cabaret, so there was less work for both of us.”

There were highlights, though — such as when Bruce gathered together “18 of the most amazing jazz musicians in New York” for a big band to back her singing. They had fun and repeated the event every year for a while, swinging with lush arrangements of tunes like “I Got it Bad and That Ain’t Good,” Duke Ellington’s classic “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing” and the hauntingly sad “Here’s That Rainy Day.”

She decided to record the songs, “If only for the sake of when I’m 90 to be able to say, ‘I used to sing really well.’” The project emptied her savings but they had a great time (and many of the musicians quietly handed back their checks when she tried to pay them).

Still, they knew it was time to relocate, but where? The answer came when they traveled west to see their friend and mentor, composer Steve Sample in Bellingham. He fell ill and canceled, leaving them in Seattle on a crisp, sunny day. “We fell in love with it. We liked this area culturally and politically, and it’s beautiful.” She swept a hand toward the splendid view. “I mean, just look at it!” They moved here in June of 2008.

She applied for the job with Education Outreach, run by Vice Provost Dave Szatmary, who saw the famous name on her resume. It happens Szatmary is also a rock and roll historian whose book, Rockin’ in Time, is still in print. They both recall that he told her, “I figure if you can keep Keith Richards organized you could keep me organized!” He hired her and she flourished, providing, Szatmary said, “a highly professional, extremely organized and upbeat face” to the office.

And so here they were, but they still had a bunch of swinging big band tunes recorded, so decided to press CDs, get a band together and hold a release party. This they did at Tula’s in January 2009. They did good business, the owner offered them a regular spot, and they’ve been there every month since.

“Every month it’s a scramble for Bruce to come up with 17 guys who don’t have another gig,” Staelens said. The results, she said, can be “fabulous … when we get musicians who work well together and really listen to each other, and are in the mood.”

One such musician is UW music major Collin Provence, a pianist with whom the Staelens are very impressed. “Occasionally you find this gem,” she said. “I’ve worked with a lot of the great accompanists out here and they don’t have anything on him. He’s got a great feel.”

Asked her favorite song to perform, she said, “From a lyrical standpoint I think the favorite — one I probably do too often — is ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.’” She also loves the songs of Cy Coleman (author of “The Best is Yet to Come”) and confesses a fondness for “Cry Me a River” and other of what she smilingly calls “poor helpless mistreated woman songs.”

Some of the sadder songs cast her mind back to other times and lost friends and family, but singers must deal delicately with emotions. “Sometimes you have to shut off what gets you there and let the technique take over,” Staelens said, “but somehow let those emotions kind of bubble up around the edges.”

What’s next? She has several ideas, and a growing love of gardening, too.

Staelens and a collaborator wrote a gently bawdy, hourlong revue back in New York called Sex Because it Sells that she feels might work well in a casino, where people tend to need cheering up. “I’d like to get that musical back on its feet,” she said.

She also appears for pledge drives on the public television station KBTC, which helps her maintain her “on-camera chops.”

Regrets? Too few to mention, really. “All the years I was working my voice wasn’t as good as it is now,” she said. “I’ve finally got the voice I wish that I had 20 years ago. I’ve known singers who have finally gotten their voice when they are 70 years old.”

She even wonders if she’d have survived the nonsense and excess that often accompany a life pursuing stardom. “Another part of me says, ‘Wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to find out?’”

But Bethany Staelens is content, and The Smith-Staelens Big Band, their regular gig, continues each month at Tula’s — bringing her, in a very real sense, the best of both worlds.

And for a girl singer, that’s a happy ending indeed.

Randal Beaton is an expert on occupational stress among first responders.

The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies invited Beaton to speak at the workshop. He will present information on resiliency training programs and related interventions. He will discuss the effect of the training on long-term resiliency as it applies to Department of Homeland Security's  operational and law enforcement personnel. The two day workshop will  set priorities and identify next steps for the development of a workforce resiliency program.

Beaton has studied the causes and effects of traumatic and occupational stress in firefighters and paramedics. He has also developed and evaluated the benefits of organizational interventions designed to prevent or deter the harmful effects of stress for Fire Departments with funding from NIOSH and FEMA.

Beaton's studies of resiliency in firefighters and paramedics has led to new training programs.

Leila Gray

More recently Beaton's research has focused on the psychosocial parameters of disasters, disaster behavioral health  and disaster preparedness. He currently co-directs the Disaster Nursing Emergency Preparedness Certificate Program offered by the UW. He is also member of the Nursing Emergency Preparedness Coalition.

Beaton has been with the Department  of Psychosocial & Community Health in the School of Nursing since 1977.  He has a career total of 60 publications in peer reviewed journals and book chapters, was the principle or co-principle investigator on 20 funded grants and contracts, and taught or helped teach 19 courses in the School of Nursing.

After retiring June 30,  Beaton continues his affiliation with the School of Nursing and the School of Public Health through consulting, teaching, training and working with student on certificates.

“We are very proud of Dr. Beaton’s outstanding work for the School, the University and the greater community over his extensive career,” said Dr. Karen Schepp, interim chair of  the Department of Psychosocial & Community Health..