Track WSU alumni in 'Evergreen Collection'

Washington State University alumni will tell you that their classmates have fascinating careers and are doing wonderful things in every part of the state. As if to prove how varied these callings and careers are, in 2023 WSU Press published the "Evergreen Collection," essays detailing accomplishments of graduates and faculty first printed in Washington State Magazine over the last 20 years.

The Skagit Valley is represented by the Roozen family and their Washington Bulb Co. The succeeding generation of ownership, after founder William, are all WSU alumni, the four, John, Leo, Richard and Micheal, gaining degrees between 1974 and 1985. In the 2002 article, Leo concluded, “The quality of life is higher when you like what you are doing and when you can make a decent living at it.”

Their chapter, “Of Bulbs and Blooms,” is in the “Around the Sound” section, with 13 of the 44 stories. Highlights include the Washington State Ferry system, which in 2003 was headed by Mike Thorne, a 1962 WSU graduate; and “the Urban Extension,” WSU’s Cooperative Extension, providing the “practical and relevant expertise communities need, particularly as they face diverse and increasingly complex challenges.” Working with land-grant university partners from Alaska to Colerado, WSU created a regional research center focused on metropolitan issues in 2014.

The anthology is arranged geographically and thematically under the following headings: across the state, around the sound, along the river, in the mountains and on the plateau. Listing the chapter titles would fill a review

Food, farms and wine could have been a section. The first chapter, “A Place at the Table, from 2003, is an early recognition of the local food movement.

“It’s reclaiming taste. And place” noted WSU sustainable marketing specialist David Granatstein. Mike and Jean’s Berry Farm, run by Mount Vernon’s Jeane and Mike Youngquist, 1967 and 1966 alums, became an example of working with The Food Alliance, farmers coming together regionally to develop certification and brand loyalty.

The 2005 story, “Washington’s Wine Crush,” is not about “the 1960s, when Washington State University researchers convinced fruit farmers in the Yakima Valley they could successfully grow wine grape,” but August 1975, at a specific house on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill. Five wine experts conducted a tasting. The German expert, “’near the end, he started showing me glasses and giving me the thumbs up. I realized he wasn’t spitting it all out,” recalled Chas Nagel, a bacteriologist who made the first wines tested at WSU.

Nagel’s first two vintages were made in 1964 and 1965.

The unique chapter is Tim Steury’s 2012 “The Atomic Landscape: Seven decades later, we consider our plutonium legacy,” and not because he opens it with a vignette of a 1943 visit by a military officer to the office of the Pasco Herald and gets a pledge of secrecy to not publish anything about what would become the top-secret Hanford site producing plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.

Steury bases his piece on a history, a masters thesis and a volume of poetry, “Plume,” by Kathleen Flenniken, a 983 WSU alumna. Her father worked there as a Ph.D. chemist.

Steury quotes her poem, “Rattlesnake Mountain:” … Our families all came from elsewhere, / and regarded the desert as empty, / and ugly, which gave us permission / to savage the land. …

The chapter’s penultimate sentence: “A plume of radioactive waste moves inexorably toward the Columbia, underlying a stark and transformed terrain with a legacy against which we seem powerless.”

A surprising feature throughout are the photographs, mostly mountains and vistas, all in color and wonderful.

“The Evergreen Collection” is edited by Larry Clark and Adriana Janovich.