WSU tennis players Bayerlova, Sato/Mylonas duo
chosen for NCAAs
May 1, 2019 Moscow Pullman Daily News
Washington
State tennis’ Michaela Bayerlova and the pairing of Tiffany Mylonas and Hikaru
Sato have been selected to compete respectively in the singles and doubles
fields at the NCAA women’s tennis championship, which begin May 20 at
Winstom-Salem, N.C., the week after the team championship.
The school
announced the selections Tuesday.
Bayerlova,
WSU’s No. 1 seed sophomore from Krumbach, Germany, has now reached the event
twice in a row. She’s ranked 39th nationally and holds a 22-6 record. She’s the
fifth WSU singles player to make the NCAAs.
“Michaela
continues to improve her game and having competed at the NCAAs last season will
benefit her greatly this season,” Wazzu coach Lisa Hart said.
The Cougs’
doubles team of senior Mylonas — from Belgium — and freshman Sato — from Japan
— boast a 25-6 doubles record. They are the first WSU doubles team to make the
NCAAs since 2002. The two began the year 12-0, and eventually defeated the
14th-ranked pairing in the country (Stanford) and No. 5 duo (UCLA).
“Tiffany
and Hikaru have really come on late in the season and developed into one of the
top teams in the Pac-12,” Hart said. “Their ability to compete has permeated
our lineup and for them to reach the NCAAs is a testament to how hard they have
worked this seaso
:::::::::
Nearby
History: History in a handful of ink drawings
By Mark
O'English
May 1,
2019
Moscow
Pullman Daily News
In the
early 1960s, with the 75th anniversary of the 1890 founding of Washington State
University just a few years away, Richard Thornton hit upon the idea of a
combined art/history book about campus and the town.
There had
been previous books about the school’s history, notably President E.A. Bryan’s
1928 “Historical Sketch of the State College of Washington” and William
Landeen’s 1958 work on President Holland’s administration. However, the two
were historical works first: 450 to 550 pages each, with no photographs in
Landeen’s book, while Bryan’s had relatively few.
Thornton
felt there had to be a market for something combining the beauty of the campus
with its history.
Thornton
had moved to the Palouse in 1960 as a newly hired instructor in the art department.
Previously employed as assistant art director at the Ford Motor Co.’s
advertising department, and having a newborn son and a 3-year-old daughter to
raise, Thornton was looking for ways to bring in extra money beyond his WSU
salary.
Putting
together a handful of pen and ink drawings, Thornton went to the Alumni
Association with his idea for an art/history book. Struck by his drawings, they
agreed to fund it. Thornton recruited Sally Adams, editor of the campus alumni
magazine, to write the history. While some of his drawings were taken from
historic photographs of the school, the modern images were all drawn from life.
Richard would park his 1958 VW bug in an aesthetically satisfactory spot and
draw the campus and town from the driver’s seat, with his pad perched on the
dash or steering wheel. In this manner, he put together about 115 renderings of
the area. As part of his contract, he retained ownership of the original
drawings, which he sold for extra income.
“WSU: The
Hill” was published in 1963 and was quite successful. A second edition was
published in 1966, with some newer campus images replacing a few of the
outdated ones. It has been out of print since. Copies do occasionally turn up
in local bookstores or at online retailers, but you have to know it’s there and
go looking for it to find it. It was put online in 2018, and can today be found
through WSU’s digital collections or at https://archive.org/details/wsuthehill.
Thornton
left WSU in 1979, and taught for the rest of his career in Connecticut; today
he’s enjoying retirement in Poulsbo, Wash. Later WSU campus publications echoed
his template, some almost all photographic (2006’s “Picture WSU”), but most
being balanced between text and imagery. In an era where photographic images,
both modern and historic, can be found online through image search engines,
Thornton’s nearly 60-year-old drawings provide a simplified and streamlined
elegant look at our campus and town.
Mark
O’English is the university archivist in Manuscripts, Archives & Special
Collections at Washington State University.
::::
Pullman Barber
shop owner, car swept by flood; said he floated on street
‘It’s
definitely not my fault I got hit by a river’
BY DYLAN
GREENE, Evergreen
April 10,
2019
Some
people used air mattresses to float the raging river down Grand Avenue Tuesday
night. But Jonathan O’Brien one-upped them when he rafted down the street in a
Kia Optima.
“I
legitimately f-cking floated,” he said.
O’Brien,
the owner of Cave Cutz, 362 S Grand Ave, Pullman, was driving north on Grand after work when he
hit about two to three inches of water covering the roadway.
He was
following a pickup truck that was clearing the path and allowing his mid-size
sedan to trek on. Unfortunately, once O’Brien reached the laundromat on Grand,
the water was about 4-feet deep and he quickly realized he was in trouble.
Things
became even worse when the pickup took a left and all the water it had plowed
out of the way rushed onto O’Brien’s Kia, nearly submerging it. Then he started
to float near Nye Street and was along for the ride.
“It’s the
craziest sh-t I’ve been through in a long time,” he said.
When
O’Brien realized he had no control of his car, he turned it off, cranked up the
radio and lit a cigarette. He then dialed his girlfriend, Sylvia Aguila, and
informed her about his precarious situation.
“I called
her while I was floating,” O’Brien said. “She said she had a burger waiting for
me and I was like just throw the f-cking thing out.”
O’Brien
was not scared or nervous but there was one thing on his mind.
“All I
could think about was my insurance better cover this,” he said.
O’Brien
took photos as his car spun aimlessly without any water entering the vehicle.
He floated for fewer than five minutes and about 100 yards before his car came
to a rest just before reaching Ritchie Street.
He sat in
his car another 10 minutes before the fire department came and told him he
needed to exit the vehicle.
Wading
through shin-deep water, O’Brien made it to shore safely. He stood there for
another 10 minutes and realized there was nothing he could do to rescue his
car, so he went home and tried to relax.
“I went
home, lit up a joint and just jumped on [Call of Duty: Black Ops 4] because I
just wanted to zone out and forget,” he said.
O’Brien
called a towing company and told them what happened to his car, but they just
laughed and hung up the phone.
Just past
midnight, O’Brien headed back to retrieve his car. The water had receded, which
allowed O’Brien to reach his vehicle with ease. The problem was starting it.
Muddy
water shot out the tailpipe as he turned the key about 10 times before it finally
started. With a weed-filled front bumper, O’Brien managed to drive his car
home, but he was surprised by the durability of his Kia and that it even
started.
“Kind of
makes me want another one because the thing is a tank,” he said.
O’Brien is
getting a rental car from Enterprise while he sorts out the damage to his
vehicle. He hopes his insurance company determines his Kia is totaled because
he isn’t to blame.
“It’s
definitely not my fault I got hit by a river,” O’Brien said.
::
Spokane
Ed
Schweitzer joins legends with induction into National Inventors Hall of Fame
Wed., May
1, 2019, 1:43 p.m.
By Amy
Edelen Spokane S-R
Further
Review: The Idea Man
Edmund O.
Schweitzer III remembers one of his early inventions and the potential it held
to revolutionize the electric utility industry.
He recalls
the exhilaration when his first potential customer requested a demonstration of
the device and the anticipation as he traveled more than halfway across the
country to make his pitch.
Only to
see it fail with a flip of a switch, and then succeed because of the glitch
that highlighted its promise and ultimately led to his recognition as one of
the country’s greatest inventors.
The device,
the first microprocessor-based digital protective relay, was developed by
Schweitzer as part of a thesis project during his doctoral studies at
Washington State University in the late 1970s.
The SEL-21
relay – which Schweitzer subsequently brought to market in 1984 after founding
Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories in Pullman – revolutionized the electric
utility industry by making it safer, more reliable and economical.
Schweitzer’s
relay was able to self-test, record data and pinpoint faults to the exact mile,
allowing power lines to be repaired and returned to service quickly, at a time
when utility companies relied on bulky relays made of springs, magnets and
coils.
“The
problems that we were able to solve were kind of interesting. Instead of taking
a whole refrigerator-size panel of electro-mechanical things, we could do the
whole job in the size of a space equal to a couple of shoeboxes,” said
Schweitzer, president and chief technology officer of Schweitzer Engineering
Laboratories. “I like to say that the result was an eighth of the size, a tenth
of the weight and a third of the price. Plus, we could do things that nobody
had ever done before.”
Schweitzer
is being honored Thursday for his revolutionary invention, joining more than 19
inventors who will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in
Washington, D.C. He will be among the ranks of more than 560 legendary
inventors who have received the honor, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and
Nikola Tesla.
The
National Inventors Hall of Fame, which works with U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office, is dedicated to honoring legacies of patent holders as well as
advancing innovation and entrepreneurship.
Schweitzer,
who holds more than 200 patents relating to electric power system protection,
was sitting at his desk at SEL headquarters in Pullman earlier this year when
he received a phone call that he was nominated for the National Inventors Hall
of Fame.
“I was in
complete shock,” he said. “I still don’t know how it happened. It’s been
surreal.”
In the
family
Schweitzer,
who is from a family of inventors, was born in Evanston, Illinois. His
grandfather developed the first reliable high-voltage fuse and his father,
Edmund Schweitzer Jr., invented several fault-indicating devices and founded
E.O. Schweitzer Manufacturing in 1949. Schweitzer merged part of his father’s
company into Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories in 2004.
As a
child, Schweitzer often read biographies about famous inventors such as Thomas
Edison, Eli Lilly and Marie Curie, and occasionally assisted his father with
inventions in his home workshop.
“I was
always out there helping him do something,” he said. “Even when I was pretty
young, I was helping him make some of his products. He had a very strong role
in my life.”
Schweitzer
graduated from Purdue University with a bachelor’s degree in 1968, followed by
a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1971.
He recalls
the first day of engineering school at Purdue in 1965, when students were asked
to write down why they wanted to become an engineer.
“I
remember writing down I want to be an engineer so that I could take science,
math and technology, and hopefully put them together and somehow make the world
a better place,” he said.
After
graduation, Schweitzer worked for the U.S. Department of Defense at Fort Meade,
Maryland, and a Bay Area defense contractor before choosing to pursue an
advanced degree at Washington State University in 1974.
“I drove
up here from Northern California – the Bay Area – to interview as a grad
student, and when I was coming up to Walla Walla and crossing the Snake River,
coming into the Palouse Hills, I couldn’t believe anything could be this
beautiful. I was just struck by the natural beauty of it,” he said.
Schweitzer
taught electrical engineering at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, for two years
before returning to WSU in 1979 to become a professor.
“I loved
teaching. I loved being a professor. It was a lot of fun. But, I was still
really hankering to fulfill a dream,” he said. “I really felt the need to
invent, design, manufacture, sell and see these things that we were making with
our minds and our hands come to life and be used by people and know that it was
appreciated because people were benefiting from it.”
The start
of SEL
Schweitzer
launched Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories in the basement of his Pullman
home with $2,000 in 1982. He began most days at 5 a.m., making phone calls, and
wouldn’t stop until he spoke with a potential customer.
The
company garnered interest in the SEL-21 relay from Fergus Falls, Minnesota-based
Otter Tail Power Co., which invited Schweitzer to conduct a product
demonstration. The inventor arrived for the presentation with a Doble F3C test
set, which looks like a large guitar amplifier, and switched on the fault
current, but the relay was unresponsive.
“So, then,
everybody sits back in their chairs, folds their arms and looks at me,” he said
at a company event earlier this year. “So I’m thinking gosh, what am I gonna
do? This was really the first demo I had ever done to try to sell anything.”
Schweitzer
triggered an event report to examine voltages and currents, and with a
technician’s help, they diagnosed the problem: one output on the test set had
failed.
“Then the
guys leaned in again and they said, ‘Wow, the relay tested the test set, not
the other way around!’ So, they got really interested. They bought three units
and figured out where their faults were, and they’ve been a wonderful customer
ever since,” he said.
Schweitzer
moved the company from his basement to its first building on Merman Drive in
1984. Four years later, the company grew to more than 34 employees and
relocated to a building on the site of the company’s current campus on the
north side of Pullman.
The
company, whose products prevent power outages from spreading by detecting and
isolating problems on the grid, has grown to more than 5,200 employees around
the world with customers in 164 countries. The company eventually expanded
beyond protective relays to metering, communications, equipment and
cybersecurity. It owns and operates three manufacturing facilities in Pullman,
Lewiston and Lake Zurich, Illinois.
A
rewarding aspect of operating SEL is hearing positive feedback from customers
about its products, Schweitzer said.
“It’s the
ultimate reward. One time, a customer called and said, ‘We bought these things
for a particular purpose but we are finding out we can use them for more,’ ” he
said. “ ‘We had no idea of the benefits we would be experiencing using your
products.’ It was particularly rewarding.”
Schweitzer
said a particular challenge early in his career was navigating how to run a
business for the first time.
“I didn’t
know anything about human resources, about sales, about business, so it was a
continuous pattern of challenge that I guess appealed to me. Still does,” he
said.
‘A rock
star’
Dave
Whitehead, SEL’s chief operating officer, has known Schweitzer for more than 25
years.
“If you
were to travel with Ed to the technical conferences we go to, he’s like a rock
star,” he said. “I think after 25 years of working with him, I almost take that
for granted. He’s just a great friend of mine.”
Whitehead
said Schweitzer is not only a prolific inventor, but is generous, pointing out
the many donations Schweitzer and wife, Beatriz, have given to the community.
“He’s a
great engineer, a great businessman and has just a big heart,” Whitehead said.
Schweitzer
said he loves spending time with his family as well as coming to work,
inventing and inspiring people toward simplicity and creativity.
He aims to
continue being productive and patenting inventions.
“My
favorite (patent) will probably be the next one, especially if it leads to a
product and people use it,” he said.
::::
WSU
football
Miami
Dolphins waive former Washington State QB Luke Falk
UPDATED:
Wed., May 1, 2019, 4:12 p.m. by Theo Lawson, S-R of Spokane
Seven
months after he was waived by the Tennessee Titans, former Washington State
quarterback Luke Falk is looking for a new home in the NFL once again.
The Miami
Dolphins, who recently acquired former UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen from the
Arizona Cardinals, waived Falk and two other players Wednesday afternoon.
The former
walk-on who became the Pac-12’s all-time leading passer while playing for the
Cougars was selected by the Tennessee Titans in the sixth round of the 2018 NFL
draft. Falk played with the Titans in the preseason, but was waived on Labor
Day weekend and immediately claimed by Miami.
Falk had a
spot on the team’s 53-man roster until sustaining a wrist injury in October,
which prompted the Dolphins to place him on their injured reserve. The Logan,
Utah, native leaves Miami having never thrown a pass for the Dolphins.
In his
four years as the Cougars’ starter, Falk amassed 14,481 passing yards, breaking
the previous Pac-12 record held by Sean Mannion and completes 1,403 passes. He
threw 119 touchdowns compared to only 39 interceptions.
/////
WSU
basketball
Elleby
signs with agent, schedules workouts with five NBA teams
UPDATED:
Tue., April 30, 2019, 6:56 p.m.
By Theo
Lawson of Spokesman-Review/Inland Empire
PULLMAN –
Washington State freshman forward CJ Elleby has hired an agent and plans to
work out for a handful of NBA teams in the coming weeks while still preserving
his college eligibility, The Spokesman-Review learned Tuesday.
Elleby
declared for the NBA draft without an agent on March 29, going down an
increasingly popular road for college underclassmen who wish to obtain feedback
from professional teams while maintaining their eligibility.
The NBA
permits players to “test the waters” of the draft and return to school as long
as they withdraw their name before May 29. Up until last year, the NCAA
prohibited players from hiring an agent and then returning to school, but a
bylaw that was passed in 2018 changed that rule, allowing NBPA-certified agents
to represent college prospects as long as they request an evaluation from the
NBA Undergraduate Advisory Committee.
According
to a source, the agency Elleby signed with will be revealed later this week. He
has five workouts lined up before the NBA Combine takes place May 15-19, and is
expected to have a few more after it.
Elleby, a
Seattle native who played at Cleveland High School, was WSU’s second-leading
scorer and rebounder as a true freshman, averaging 14.7 points and 7.1 rebounds
per game. The 6-foot-6, 185-pound small forward earned Pac-12 All-Freshman
honors last season after starting in 28 games – a team high – and passing Klay
Thompson and Steve Puidokas to secure WSU’s freshman scoring record.
Elleby’s
name isn’t listed on any mock draft boards, and it’s widely expected that he’ll
return to Pullman for his sophomore season. He has participated in every
practice for new coach Kyle Smith to this point, and should be the focal point
of the Cougars’ offense next season, with senior forward and Pac-12 leading
scorer Robert Franks having graduated.
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