English Retirees Newsletter

31st Edition, September 2021

Chair’s Note

We hope that 2021 has already been a happier and healthier year for all of you. Throughout the past year, we depended more than ever on the generosity of our alumni and friends. As we had to rely more heavily on digital technologies, we were able to use your contributions to update equipment for our faculty and graduate students, pay for online conferences, and support a variety of online and outdoor projects that benefited our majors.

For example, your contributions helped support the Washington State University Interdisciplinary Conference on Social Justice (WSU SJCON), an annual event organized by our graduate students and sponsored by the College of Education, the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the departments of English and Sociology. And, as always, your gifts provided scholarships and other opportunities for greater student success.

Although the job market is more uncertain this year, our undergraduates continue to give us hope. While international travel plans were put on hold (the trip for the inaugural recipient of Nick and Karen Kiessling’s wonderful international travel scholarship had to be canceled), our students benefited from opportunities closer to home, such as Linda Russo’s “EcoArts on the Palouse” project. They also pursued various poetry projects. Allyson Pang, our 2020 Civic Poet, created a “Happiness Project” and recorded a beautiful collaborative poem called “Forward,” which you may view on her YouTube channel.

WSU English alumni also have much to be proud of in the department’s outstanding quarterly, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. As part of its mission, ESQ supports graduate and undergraduate students, helping them gain scholarly editing experience through internships, research assistantships, and participation in the Year in Conferences feature. Recent and forthcoming special issues feature Emily Dickinson, Sarah Piatt, pandemic- era teaching and scholarship, and Transcendentalism. Contributors have recently won several national awards, including the Hennig Cohen Prize, the SLSA Schachterle Prize, and the especially coveted 1921 Prize in American Literature (multiple wins). Internationally renowned for excellence, the journal advances the English department’s reputation.

I continue to be impressed with all of the ways our faculty, staff, and students have managed to move forward in the midst of these trying times, and thanks to the generosity of our donors, I have no doubt that they will continue to inspire.

All my best,
Donna L. Potts

Professor and Chair
Department of English
Washington State University

Paul Brians (WSU 1968–2008)

Bainbridge Island continues to be a place of refuge from the Covid-19 pandemic, with most of the population immunized and cautious. Just across the bridge in the rest of Kitsap County the cases and deaths continue to rocket to new highs, as does vaccine resistance. In Seattle, it is reported that more hospital beds are available lately—because so many Covid sufferers have died. We are grateful every day to have landed in such a beautiful—and rational—spot.

A couple of weeks ago I posted this picture of our front yard on the “View from My Window” Facebook group, created to let people show where they’ve been during lockdown. The picture got 15,000 “likes” and hundreds of nice comments about Bainbridge.

Activities with the Land Trust were restricted during the first half of the year, but donors continue to give more generously than ever despite our fundraisers being confined to mail and computer contacts. Lately I have been able to photograph volunteers out working on restoration projects, including on a beautiful newly acquired forested area high on the hill overlooking Eagle Harbor.

Last October, Arts and Humanities Bainbridge invited me to be their featured photographer, creating an exhibit on a different theme to be mounted on their website every month. It has been a lot of fun. You can find the exhibits on the Arts and Humanities Bainbridge website.

Paula made a trip back east to join her relatives in remembering a much-beloved cousin who died recently. Our travels have been quite restricted otherwise, though we have enjoyed visiting the gardens at the Bloedel Reserve and Heronswood, not to mention the garden of our neighbor Phyllis Sigmond, whose backyard I photographed through their dining room window.

Our own yard continues to give us great pleasure, especially when a family of four deer visits almost daily.

Paula has continued taking online Renaissance dance classes as well as regular exercise classes and some group singing. We have both participated in online readers’ theatre events, and one in- person performance on a deck overlooking the harbor.

Jana Argersinger visited for a few days, and we had a nice dinner with former WSU piano prof Susan Chan, on sabbatical from Portland State University where she is now a full professor.

We survived the “heat dome” in June by keeping our heat-pump delivering cool air and enjoying the huge trees surrounding us which cut the temperature by 14 degrees. This climate change process is really scary.

Reluctant to sit in the dark with masks on, we have not attended the newly reopened movie theaters on Bainbridge but continue to find edifying, diverting, and amusing shows on various streaming services, most recently the outrageously silly Hunderby on Amazon Prime, a sort of lavish spoof of Victorian gothic fiction, including a parody of Rebecca in the second episode with more than a little Monty Python flavor.

Other light/learned entertainments: I am reading a chapter a day in French by the 19th century comic novelist and graphic artist Albert Robida; and each evening Paula and I read a few pages from the lavish Italian Disney comic book parodies of classic works such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (featuring Mickey Mouse as both) and War and Peace (with Scrooge McDuck salvaging his fortune in gold by concealing it inside cannon balls). Our favorite contemporary novel this year has been Popisho by Leone Ross, a brilliant sort of Jamaican fantasy with a warm heart.

I have also subscribed to Amazon Music Prime, which allows me to stream samples from my want list of classical recordings to determine whether I should buy them as CD—which I continue to collect though streaming has taken over 80% of music sales and LPs now outsell CDs.

Today I am making an Afghan lamb and rice dish for friends, feeling more than a little guilty about being able to do so when so many Afghan people have been exploited and abandoned by the US military’s wrong-headed adventures in their country. It drives me nuts to hear commentators saying that at least we got Bin Laden by invading Afghanistan when in fact the initial invasion force let him escape. He was finally captured many years later in Pakistan when we used a doctor supposedly conducting a childhood vaccination drive, to determine Bin Laden’s whereabouts, which in turn led to a campaign by Islamic anti-vax extremists slaughtering health care workers who are attempting to wipe out one of the few remaining pockets of polio in the world.

But in this time sickness and disaster we still take comfort in the affection, generosity, and courage we see every day as people of good will push back. One my favorite recent Facebook posts shows the statue of Robert E. Lee being hauled off on a truck from its pedestal in Richmond, with the caption “Virgil, quick come see: there goes the Robert E. Lee.”

Leota Day (WSU 1970–1988)

Hello, folks,

I did not expect another pandemic year to follow the first. In general, things are better since most of our family is vaccinated. The one exception is still too young. Both grandchildren are back at in-person school and they are delighted. Our grandson, Isaac, brought up one of the oddities of on-line learning: kids could sit at their end of the Zoom connection with their cameras turned off. The teachers could not require them to turn them on because that would be an invasion of their personal home. Most of the students chose to keep the cameras off. The year was tough on the students, but the teachers definitely struggled too.

I am nominating “an abundance of caution,” as the Phrase of the Year. “You are on mute,” is a close second.

Our granddaughter, Evy, had a slumber party over Zoom for her 10th birthday. I was curious how it would pan out. The girls all convened at a set time and, after some chat, raced off to their bedrooms to get their jammies on so they could stream the same movie at the same time. After that, they decided to play an online group game so, once again, raced off to their bedrooms for appropriate costumes. I understand the party went on until the wee hours, as usual with slumber parties. Such creativity!

The grandkids usually help us decorate our interior and exterior house for Christmas, but last year they only worked on the outside. Our usual holiday dinner became a Holiday Take-Out. We cooked our usual feast and packaged it up. Then Chad and Kecia came by to pick up their portions and exchange gifts. We are hoping this year is much more normal. With constructive criticism from Dutch, I made these commemorative Christmas ornaments.

We had no foreign trips this year but did manage to get to the Bay Area in May during that brief, hopeful time when Covid restrictions were being lifted. The end-of-June heatwave decimated the blooms in our west-facing garden. Our hardy fuchsia was so covered in blooms the branches were dragging on the ground. After all the blooms fried, dried and dropped, the branches lifted back up to about 2 feet above the ground. The plants themselves will recover, but the overall color has been missing this year. Even our tomatoes, which usually produce more than we can eat, are barely putting out any fruit. Fortunately, we are not subsistence farmers. Our lawn, which we usually let go dormant anyway, is rock hard.

It has been 34 years since we left Pullman; 36 since I transferred out of the English Department. I am grateful that you include me in this annual newsletter. I love hearing all that is happening in your lives.

To close, here is another nomination for Phrase of the Year: “Take care and stay safe.”

Leota and Dutch Day

5653 11th Ave NE
Seattle, WA 981065
Email: carvil@comcast.net

Diane Gillespie (WSU 1975–2001)

Not much has changed over the past year. We are doing even less traveling although glad to have done so much in pre-pandemic times. It is difficult now to know what destinations and modes of long-distance transportation are safe and who is allowed to travel where. Because I carefully timed vaccinations between treatments for an autoimmune disease, I assume I have some immunity. Still, existing research is inconclusive or contradictory.

Dick and I did drive to Baker City, OR, to spend a pleasant Fourth of July with his son Dan and wife Lynne. The parade in neighboring smaller-town Haines had no high school bands to remind me of when I used to march in parades in Minnesota. As my father used to say in Finnglish, “Lotsa funnia fortsulaina.”

Publication of my paper from the Twenty-ninth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (held in 2019) is still delayed by earlier pandemic shutdowns. The June 2020 Woolf Conference (the 30th) was postponed until 2021 and “zoomed” successfully from the University of South Dakota. I presented a paper that way.

National and international “Woolf pack” scholars continue to meet twice/month on Zoom, once to socialize, and once for an academic “salon” on Woolf’s writing. The 31st conference in 2022 is supposed to be at Lamar University in Beaumont, TX. I am wishing for conferences again in the UK, or at least in healthier US states that are more attractive politically.

As for Dick’s and my other activities, we are waiting to see if the Palouse Dance Club dances and Washington Idaho Symphony concerts are able to resume. Since I broke my wrist and had surgery to repair it on July 23rd, I have been mostly exercising by walking, light gardening, and physical therapy.

My Pleiades Investment Club (founded in 1997) continues to meet successfully on Zoom. Dick, who plays golf or works in his garage workshop, recently had an exhibition of his decorative, small wooden-and-fabric chests at the Arts Center in Uniontown. We have done most socializing out of doors. That included a brief visit in June from former grad student Nikki Diederich and husband Mike on their way back to Ohio.

My 60th high school reunion was canceled this summer. If it occurs as a 61st year reunion (we graduated in 1961), I hope we can drive back to Minnesota and see a few remaining classmates and relatives.

Thanks always to Paul for organizing this newsletter in the midst of constant news of national and international political and natural disasters. In spite of heat domes, wind, and occasional smoke, we feel lucky to live where we do.

Diane

945 SE Glen Echo Rd.
Pullman, WA 99163
Email: gillespie@pullman.com

Alex Hammond (WSU 1975–2009)

The continued pandemic has kept us largely confined to our 1937 house on Pullman’s College Hill during the past year. Lockdown has, however, allowed us focus on completing renovation projects on our kitchen and the long-postponed removal of old carpet and restoration of the hardwood floors in our living room and upstairs computer room, along with some much-needed interior painting.

After postponement by the pandemic of a planned cruise with friends to Japan, Russia, and Alaska for yet a second time—now to September 2022—our travel has been limited to a few minimally risky trips. In June we began a car trip to see Barbara’s family in northern California, a journey aborted by that state’s wildfires and my uninteresting health problems in Ashland, although Barbara was able to do a plane flight later that month to visit our son and his family in Los Angeles.

We have regularly escaped Pullman to the relative safety of our near-by lake cabin in Idaho’s Heyburn State Park. In July and early August, our daughter Elizabeth and her partner Carlos Means spent a month at this 1930s cabin doing much-need painting and repair and wood-chopping, as well as finishing the removal of the remains of five huge trees that came down in a massive windstorm in January and destroyed stairs and a storage hut.

We sailed our aging Catalina 22 with Elizabeth and Carlos, both expert sailors, on the lake, and she arranged for several of her old friends and acquaintances who were in Pullman for a high school reunion to visit us, notably for this newsletter John and Sue Erhstine’s daughters Anne and Amy. When Elizabeth and Carlos returned home to Mexico, I am glad to say, they were fully vaccinated thanks to the State of Washington and the Biden administration.

My son Alec, a production designer in feature movies, spent much of the year managing multiple designs for a TV series made in British Columbia, then scouting for a film projected for production in Georgia and Puerto Rico, only to have to shift recently to designing a vampire movie to be filmed in New Orleans. His wife Amy’s consulting firm in film and TV continues to grow in spite of the downturn in the industry. Our older grandson Maxwell is entering his third year of college with remarkable success in mathematics and music, while our younger grandson Christopher is now a senior in high school, pursuing art and economics while doing multiple sports after accepting an offer from basketball recruiters for college next year.

Barbara keeps her private practice going with one last client while doing consultations and chairing the board of Palouse River Counseling. She is secretary for the Leaseholders Board at Heyburn State Park, and now what I would call a long-term member of Pullman’s Fortnightly book club. I continue doing work with the Whitman County Democrats and serving as treasurer of the College Hill Association, the latter of which seems to have failed after much effort to keep WSU from selling its four Heritage and Culture Houses as well as the Adams Mall in the College Hill neighborhood.

I have also been active with WSU’s Emeritus Society, largely made up of retired faculty still doing research. I am pleased to say that last winter the group instituted a new undergraduate grant in the Arts and Humanities (see WSU Emeritus Society Arts and Humanities Grant) and gave Nick Kiessling its Legacy of Excellence Award. For a description of the award, visit this page, and Nick’s 20-minute lecture for the honor, which focuses on the Department of English and his scholarship in the 1970s through the early 1990s on Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Finally, I am finishing, especially now that the WSU libraries have reopened, what may be my final research project on Edgar Allan Poe, the last stage of an online guide to the Poe source collection in Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections.

With thanks again to Paul for doing this newsletter,

Alex (and Barbara)

1110 N.E. Indiana St.
Pullman, WA 99163

Rich Haswell (WSU 1967–1980)

This year Jan and I did not leave the state. I think that is a first for us. We made up for it, however, by camping in remote campgrounds and exploring new back roads. We get by with a two-burner Coleman stove, a Lodge dutch oven, a cooler, and a tent. The few campers around us scrimp much the same. The behemoth camper trailers and motor homes can’t fit into these unassuming campgrounds, some of which are little more than hunter camps.

Two weeks ago we drove the county roads from Del Norte to Platoro—61 miles of very back country. The stretch of the road from Elwood Pass to Platoro was built in the 1890s, a piece of the military road connecting Fort Garland (east of Alamosa) with Fort Lewis (then in Pagosa Springs). Back then it was such a primitive road that in some places when wagons met, one of them had to be taken apart to allow the other to pass. It is not a whole lot better now, long stretches worn down to the bedrock.

My inventory of the flora of the Rio Grande watershed in Colorado is now up. By intention it will always be a work in progress, because the flora itself is a work in progress. I add information and photographs to the site daily.

Not much about English studies here, I am afraid. Jan and I are happy to see that our work on potentiality and hospitality is being used as theoretical framework for several dissertations. The professional establishment has pretty much ignored our work, but young graduate students sense something useful in it. We talk a little about that in our chapter “‘Bottomless Mysteries’ on the Margins: A Dream Interview” in Talking Back: Senior Scholars and Their Colleagues Deliberate the Past, Present, and Future of Writing Studies (eds. Norbert Elliot and Alice S. Horning, Utah State UP, 2020).

Rich

Del Norte, Colorado

Nick Kiessling (WSU 1967–2000)

Thanks, again, Paul, for editing the Newsletter.

Yes, the requirements apparently issued by the Governor, and interpreted in a rather bizarre way, have become a WSU bureaucrats’ reason for existence. Lucky them, unlucky us. It took me over two solid days to get my Workday verification. I now regret having done it, but I am not going to waste any more time protesting an insane requirement. For the context, see Paul Brians’ email of September 18, 2021.

Outside of that lost two days, the year has been fine for us. I have had to give up pickleball – too much stress on the knees. Now it is walking, which does not hurt. Karen is now an adept on Zoom, a requirement which was made necessary by the cancelling of her physical presence at Spokane and Seattle meetings of the Council of Aging, and I was able to re-engage on projects which began in the nineties, then were put aside until 2019, and are now almost finished with only final proofing left to do. A highpoint for me was the Legacy of Excellence Award for 2021 presented to me by the Emeritus Society at WSU. Because of COVID, my hour-long talk was reduced to a recorded eighteen minutes, given in March over Zoom.

Travel outside the country has ended long ago, but we managed trips to relatives in Montana, Pocatello, Boise, Wisconsin, Cannon Beach, Oregon, and Michigan. Our last visits to Priest Lake were in August. The property was sold by Emmett Avery’s grandson to a relative and we are happy that the cabin is staying in the family.

A brief trip to McCall with a bunch of Rico’s reprobates (me included) tested our bike riding stamina and toleration for hot springs, single malt, and beer. When COVID was seemingly under control, in mid-May, we had our ‘annual’ two-week visit to New York City and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. In the Big Apple we, as usual, had a lunch at a French restaurant with Hongbo Tan, a PhD in 1989. She wrote her dissertation under the direction of Al von Frank. She is now a very successful employee of Maurice ‘Hank’ Greenberg at Starr Insurance, whose billion dollar suit against the US government is still pending.

We have been in touch with very few other PhDs. from our Department. We had wanted to visit Bethany Blankenship, PhD 2005, in Dillon, Montana, in early July, but she was still suffering from a long- term case of COVID which she contacted just before vaccines became available. When in Wisconsin in August we passed within seventy-five miles of Stevens Point, where we have three PhDs, Jim Stokes (1979), Michael Williams (1985), and Becky Stephens (1996), but we did not have time to see them. When on the way to Cannon Beach we spent a night with Lynn Gussenhoven Coleman (MA about 1981) and Craig Trygstad in Vancouver, Washington.

Hope this Newsletter continues, with the addition, perhaps, of more recent retirees. I would like to hear from Victor, Alex Kuo, Joan Burbick, et al.

Take care,

Nick Kiessling

510 SE Crestview St.
Pullman, WA 99163
Email: kiesslin@yahoo.com

Dick Law (WSU 1970–2009)

The very quiet life Fran and I were leading before the pandemic became an almost reclusive existence thereafter. Fran’s worsening spinal condition preoccupied us for several months in 2020 and 2021, as we feared she would soon become bedridden. Last winter, however, our son David, who is surgical nurse at Harborview Medical Center, persuaded us it was time for her to seek a surgical solution. Her two procedures at Harborview on March 17 and 23 fused ten lumbar vertebrae and added titanium rods to support her spine. Much to our surprise, the surgeries fixed problems we had thought were beyond repair. She has had a remarkable recovery and has returned to a normal life. She walks regularly with a group of women friends and enjoys a group of friends in her book club; I read avidly as if preparing for exams, garden in the summer, while savoring friends and family.

In early August, we had a family gathering of our grown children, spouses, and grandchildren on Lake Coeur d’Alene, and in spite of the heat and smoke, it was a joy to get back together. We have had five grandchildren for over a decade, but we now have a sixth on the way. Our son David and his wife Julie are expecting a son in November, which is a cause of much happy anticipation. We held an impromptu baby shower during the gathering.

At this moment, the members of our extended family are all doing well, as are we.

Best wishes to all my old colleagues.

Dick

Fred Schwarzbach (WSU 1987–1992)

I think everyone would agree that this past year has been a strange and challenging one. Michele and I were fortunate to be vaccinated relatively early (February), and, in the afterglow of inoculation, at least until the recent rise of Delta, we were much more active and loving it – we ate inside a restaurant, we went to the movies inside a cinema, and we took a few weekend trips in upstate New York and New England and stayed inside hotels. All of that was immensely cheering and we had hoped that we might be able to travel internationally as well. That hope was in vain: we made and cancelled reservations several times, but we remain hopeful that at some point in this academic year we will have been able to visit Europe again. In the meantime we did travel in upstate New York and southern Vermont over the summer.

We also had some excitement this summer that we could well have done without. In May, we took advantage of falling rents in Manhattan to move to a larger, nicer, and less expensive apartment. Alas, after only a few weeks, we discovered that the building was infested by rats (yes, rats). The critters were in the walls and the ceiling, and they had also found a way into our kitchen. We had to move out of the new place on short notice and we spent 3 weeks in hotels, living out of the proverbial suitcase, but finally we were relocated by the landlord, as it happens, to an apartment only short walk from where we had been living before this all began. So a happy ending, all things considered, but I will never forget the sight and sound of a gigantic rat chewing its way through a wall in our pantry.

I continued teaching full-time last year, but entirely remote. Eventually I learned to tolerate Zoom, but I never warmed to it. To be sure, it does have advantages – for example, it obviates the need to learn students’ names – but it also flattens the classroom experience in so many ways. It was also possible to see that many students were forced to study in very difficult circumstances – “zooming” from a family kitchen or a shared bedroom or even outdoors in a public park – and I think quite a few struggled with depression and anxiety. I certainly gave out more Incomplete grades than I have ever done before.

This autumn, NYU is holding its classes on site, and I must say it feels incredibly good to be back in front of a “real” classroom. (This year is my forty-seventh year of teaching.) And as near as I can tell, my students are as happy to be back as I am. I am teaching sophomore classes and for them, this is the first time they have been in a real college classroom. All students, faculty, and staff at NYU were required to be fully vaccinated by early August, and there is mask mandate for all interior spaces, and there is robust contact tracing whenever anyone tests positive. So I am hopeful it is a safe environment.

I was very fortunate that our admissions office has continued to sponsor my high school project. We had to pivot to “remote modality” but we made the transition seamlessly and enrolled the highest number of students to date.

This academic year is going to be my last of full-time teaching. I plan to retire in August, 2022, though if all goes well I will still be teaching one class a semester as an adjunct. Our plan, if our health holds steady and the pandemic subsides is to travel, travel again, and travel some more.

Fred

Albert Von Frank (WSU 1984–2006)

When cabin fever drove us out, we went no farther than Spokane or Pomeroy—to each once, but most often to Lewiston or Clarkston and the Costco there. Cruises and leisure travel abruptly gave way to resupply missions, and things began to take on an old-timey Western look. Jane and I were pioneers in our new Chevy Equinox, dodging fogs (real or imagined) of aerosolized Covid-19, masking up here and there as appropriate, and keeping our distance. Every time I put my mask on, I felt like robbing a bank.

At first, I welcomed the shut-down, the quiet time; but it soon becomes apparent that none of us is designed to be a hermit or a jailbird. I had heard stories of heroic reading and writing done in prison and thought I would never again have a chance like this. I discovered that Barack Obama is a mighty fine writer for a president. Robert Macfarlane (Underland) showed me what the buried parts of the planet look and feel like. The author managed to import the surprise of this new acquaintance into the book’s language, fresh and precisely correct as it was at every point. Tara Westover’s Educated I took up on the supposition that it expressed a positive view of its increasingly maligned subject. As it turned out, it did much more by showing in a very circumstantial way how an education both fits itself into and fights against antecedent life.

Something similar happens in a great overlooked older novel, Stoner, by John Williams. I had trouble believing that I had not earlier been aware of this work, set as it is in the English department where, long afterwards, I put in my years of graduate study. Finally, there was Lewis Hyde’s Primer for Forgetting, which reminded me of a favorite fascination of my younger years, The Golden Bough, both smart in ways I could not have predicted. I read a few more specialized books, but these were the highlights and the recommendations.

There is something about being in jail that keeps one from hurrying: I spent the last eighteen months desultorily working on an essay (not yet finished) meant to show that the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison exercised an important, wholly unsuspected influence on Emerson as early as 1830, a full nine years before they were supposed to have been first in meaningful contact.

I have come to understand that taste in music varies vastly more from person to person than taste in books does, so that literary recommendations are always more worth making than musical recommendations. But having thought more than once over the past year that YouTube was helping wonderfully with the cabin fever, I venture to point out a few of my favorite vocalists—all pandemic-era discoveries. So Hyang, from South Korea, is probably the best pure singer on the planet; a younger Russian woman, Diana Ankudinova, is nearly as interesting given her rare (and stunning) contralto voice; and Beth Hart is the best of the blues singers, distinguished for her collaborations with guitarist Joe Bonamassa. A capella singing is making a strong comeback with groups like Pentatonix, Home Free, and Voctave, who have collectively reinvented the form—all worth checking out, starting, perhaps, with Pentatonix, “Hallelujah” and “Amazing Grace.” Or Home Free, “A Man of Constant Sorrow.”

Albert

Nelly C. Zamora (WSU 1976-2003)

Greetings, former colleagues and friends. Cesar and I still reside in Pullman and in the same house we bought 44 years ago. Time flies!

While we were both working at WSU, a group of students let us know of their desire to form an association of Filipino American students on campus. Under the umbrella of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Student Center, the Filipino American Student Association (FASA) became a recognized student association. At FASA’s request, Cesar and I were the group’s advisors for 10 years (1993 to 2003), and we are still in touch today with quite a few alumni. We have attended numerous alumni gatherings in the Seattle area and some of the former members have even requested us to be sponsors of their weddings. Many of their own children have even attended and graduated from WSU over the past seven years. Currently, there are four children of former FASA members enrolled at WSU this year.

Over the past two years, former FASA members who have helped their own kids settle in at WSU have dropped by for visits. We have met them in front of our house (wearing masks and social distancing) for short chats. It has been nice to see their younger children in tow so as to expose them to WSU culture.

I have also been in touch with some of our undergraduate and graduate alumni. It is so heartwarming to receive their cards or sometimes a phone call asking about my family and me.

We were very thankful that we were able to do some of our travels while both employed at WSU and did many more excursions following retirement. We had a few trips in North America, two in South America, many in Europe, four in the Middle East and Africa, nine in Asia, and two in Oceania.

We have not seen our relatives and friends in the Philippines for two years due to the pandemic. This includes our daughter, Pauline, and her husband, Andreas, in Sausalito, CA. Our daughter Jen, who lives in Renton, WA, has come to visit us in Pullman twice this year. The best we can do at this time is to meet with our family every week via Zoom or Facetime.

I hope all of you are staying healthy and safe. Best wishes to all of you.

Nelly Zamora

1710 NW Deane Street
Pullman, WA 99163-3508
Email: nellyczamora@hotmail.com