Nine years on from Michael P. Anderson's death on the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia, the fund-raising effort to ensure continuation of the annual program at Seattle's Museum of Flight aimed at inspiring at-risk children of color to dream big dreams is nearing its final stage.

In fact, the effort launched for a hometown hero by Spokane business leaders following the Feb. 1, 2003, shuttle disaster, along with the major assist from African-American pilots of Alaska Airlines and a financial commitment from the airline itself represents fulfillment of a big dream in its own right.

As the Museum of Flight prepares to host the third annual Michael P. Anderson Memorial Aerospace Program on February 4, final selection is in progress for the group of 10-to-14 year olds who will receive support from a special fund to attend the day-long session.

The goal of the program has been to create an enduring memory of Anderson and to make his achievements an object of aspiration and inspiration for young people, particularly the African-American students who would seek to emulate him. It's intended to help inspire an interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and careers.

Avista Corp. CEO Scott Morris, motivated in part by the fact Anderson's father was an Avista employee, assigned the firm's director of community development, Anne Marie Axworthy, and communications manager Jessie Wuerst lead roles in the project, with a goal of  raising funds for a statue of Anderson in his hometown. That was soon after the shuttle disaster. But with completion of the larger-than-life bronze statue in Spokane in 2005, the vision expanded.

That meant doing something on the west side of the state and that led to a focus on a second statue at Seattle's Museum of Flight, which was dedicated in June of 2009, as well as a program to bring African-American children an awareness of Anderson and his accomplishments. That led to the creation of the Michael Anderson Memorial Aerospace Scholarship for Children of Color, which is administered by the Museum of Flight.

The campaign to raise the final $50,000 to ensure that the Museum of Flight program and the scholarships continue will also get a boost next month when the person credited with being the key figure in making the Seattle portion of the program a reality retires from the Air Force and returns to Seattle.

Maj. Gen. Harold L. "Mitch" Mitchell, Deputy Inspector General of the Air Force in the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, retires this month after two years on active duty and will resume his role as an Alaska Airlines pilot, which is what he was doing when he was first approached about involvement.

"The goal has been to do more than merely put up a statue," Mitchell explained in an e-mail exchange this week. "It's important to leverage Anderson's legacy to help students have a chance to do similar things."

In an effort to put together a group to focus on the goal, Mitchell turned to other African-American pilots at Alaska, then realized "we needed some funding to make this happen so we thought it was an idea worthy of sharing with the company."

He says they didn't expect Alaska to be as supportive as it was, but the airline agreed to put up $100,000 as matching funds over four years.

"To be honest, we've struggled on our side of the match, but they have been outstanding," Mitchell said.

Wuerst of Avista said the campaign has raised $190,000 thus far and needs to raise a final  $25,000 to get the last $25,000 of the Alaska match.

Anderson was 43 when he and the other six crew members of the Colujmbia crew perished as the shuttle broke apart on re-entry.

But in an interview from space earlier in the 16-day  mission, Anderson expressed a thought that became the quote on the plaque on each statue: "This is what I wanted to do since I was a little kid.  If you apply yourself, work hard to be persistent, and don't give up, you can achieve anything you want to achieve." 

It's that commitment that supporters of the Museum of Flight program hope to bring to a growing number of children of color from all parts of Washington State.

Former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels' likely decision to seek the Democratic nomination for Washington Secretary of State may represent a sobering reality to the three Democrats already announced and campaigning. But it's also a bit of cold water on the hopes of those who figured he'd seek to regain the city's top elected position next year from "the accidental mayor."

While Nickels has given himself until Valentine's Day to make up his mind about a race that he says he didn't really begin to contemplate until "over the Holidays," it was clear during a telephone interview that he's already thinking about what he would seek to accomplish in the office. The chances that he will decide not to run are remote.

"I think this office, where all businesses documents have to be filed, can be a place for someone to act as an ombudsman for small businesses all across the state," said Nickels, who would be seeking, along with the other Democrats, to be the first from their party to win the Secretary of State job in this state in 50 years.

The other Democrats include Kathleen Drew, a one-time State Senator who now works for Gov. Christine Gregoire and who is the only woman seeking the Democratic nomination. She has already received some important endorsements. Those include former King County executive Ron Sims, who recently returned from a stint in an Obama-Administration post, and King County Assessor Lloyd Hara, who is holding a fund-raiser for her next month.

The two Democratic legislators who have filed are Jim Kastama, a state senator from Puyallup who chairs the Economic Development, Trade and Innovation Committee (EDTI), and Rep. Zack Hudgins, a former employee of both Amazon and Microsoft.

The lone Republican in the race, and the first of any of the hopefuls to announce, is Kim Wyman, protégé of outgoing Secretary of State Sam Reed for a decade in the Thurston County assessor's office before being elected to replace him eight years ago when Reed decided to seek the state office.

Wyman notes that she has "already demonstrated the ability to perform the functions of the Secretary of State's position, like elections supervision and business filings, at the county level." She, of course, has the endorsement from Reed to replace him.

If the others of both parties hoping to succeed Reed were taken aback by the prospect of campaigning against Nickels, many Seattleites who were hoping he would seek to reclaim the mayor's job in 2013 were surprised and disappointed.

There was a sense on the part of business leaders and others that Nickels, who actually finished third in the 2009 primary, was merely supposed to be getting a signal from many who wished to send him a message about a perceived arrogance, not oust him from the job.

For those, who had no interest in having Mike McGinn as mayor but didn't care for businessman Joe Mallahan, it was an interesting lesson in not wasting your vote to send messages. So as McGinn's relations with the City Council, the governor and the business community have soured, many took to referring to him as "the accidental mayor" and were awaiting Nickels' effort to win back the office.

Nickels, 56, admitted in our telephone conversation that "in the back of my mind there is a sense of some unfinished business" for the job he held for two terms. "But it's time for me and for the city to move on."

Since being rejected by the voters, which Nickels describes as "a very humbling experience that gives you a different perspective on things," he has had a teaching fellowship at Harvard, served as a public delegate to the United Nations and traveled to the Ukraine to advise mayors there.

He describes those experiences as "two years of experimenting" to determine what he'd do next. Now, he says, the role of Secretary of State would be "a logical continuation" of his 35-year love affair with public service.

Wyman, who says she expects a number of other candidates to emerge before the filing period begins in June, has already visited 15 counties around the state and is "starting to build" a strong campaign team. She has so far raised about $25,000, noting that "as you get into races down the ballot, it's much harder to raise money."

Drew became the first Democrat in memory to be elected to her east King County seat in 1992, unseating eventual GOP gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi before losing to him four years later. She has since been involved in higher education at the UW Bothell campus, wrote the state's ethics law, worked closely with tribes and been involved in governmental reforms efforts.

Drew offers frankly: "I think I will have a lot of support from women."

The two Democratic legislators, Kastama and Hudgins, would have expected to draw from a traditional base of financial support for Democrats in a down-ballot contest that stands to draw less attention than the high-visibility race for the open gubernatorial seat, for president, U.S. Senate and congressional races.

Nickels, whose entry will change that fund-raising dynamic, addresses in advance what's likely to be a key political shot others take at him, saying "I'm not looking at this as a stepping stone to any other office."

There's nothing that could make residents of places like Washington, Oregon or Montana feel better about how their states are being run than to be plunked down for a few weeks in California and get an amusing and bemusing look at the dysfunctional workings of the nation's most populous state.

Everything about California is big, and that includes the massive budget deficit that has been the focus of governor-again Jerry Brown since he was sworn in a year ago as the literal political-comeback kid.

Now comes what may be the biggest challenge ever faced by local governments and economic-development entities in California. More than 400 redevelopment organizations around the Golden State are scheduled to go out of existence on Feb. 1 and some of their financial obligations will be absorbed into the general funds of local governments in those areas where the EDAs now exist.

Part of the predicted fallout will be that states like the aforementioned Northwest ones will be cranking up their California recruitment efforts looking to woo businesses away from a place where they don't seem to be wanted.

That would be an unfortunate misimpression about California because local communities and economic-development organizations across the state strive mightily to create jobs in their areas with innovative ideas and initiatives, despite the image the state policies have fostered.

Four of the largest redevelopment agencies in California are all in the job-hungry Coachella Valley. Those are La Quinta, Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert - communities well known to Northwesterners who trek south to the desert each winter in search of sun.

Redevelopment agencies provide funding for road, sewer, lighting and affordable-housing projects across the state under a 65-year-old law that allowed a city or county to create a redevelopment area to address urban blight. RDAs receive related property-tax revenue increases, known as tax increments.

All this chaos came about because a legislature-approved plan conceived and proposed by Brown sought to coerce the RDAs to give up $1.7 billion in increased property-tax funds if they wanted to continue to exist. It was branded the "pay-ransom-or-die redevelopment system" by the California Redevelopment Association.

Part of the reason that the governor and legislature viewed the RDAs as a good place from which to divert revenue is that for all the good works done by the RDAs in creating opportunities for developers to invest in communities and transform downtrodden areas, examples of excess and abuse occurred.

To be sure, there have been blatant instances of excess on the part of some RDAs as eminent domain was sometimes used to seize private property that was then transferred to developers along with cash subsidies.

But even if sometimes developers seemed to get deals that smacked of favoritism,

many local officials and economic-development leaders would contend that the RDAs usually fulfilled their promise of revitalizing decaying communities and creating jobs.

Billions were invested over the decades to dramatically rebuild dilapidated downtowns, creating millions of jobs for Californians and hundreds of thousands of low-income housing units for growing numbers of homeless families.

Defenders of the value of redevelopment might logically suggest that killing RDAs is a little like saying examples of Medicare excess or fraud mean that Medicare should be abandoned.

During his first stint as California chief executive, Brown's mantra involved a focus on creating lower expectations for his state's citizens. In this new era of spending realities, he's being forced to impose lowered expectations rather than just urge their acceptance.

Part of his implementing lower expectations by fiat was to have local development entities settle for less and divert their funds to education, roads and fire departments as he sought to balance priorities while dealing with the $20 billion deficit.

The California Supreme Court, in a two-part decision, ruled late last year that the state had the right to kill the agencies. But it didn't have the constitutional right to condition their continued existence on their agreement to pay the state an annual fee based on their portion of property tax revenues.

So, unless there's an unlikely 11th-hour reprieve by the legislature, which even the governor's allies say he doesn't seem interested in achieving since it was the RDA organization that took him to court, the RDAs close up next week.

So what happens then? The real estate assets of the RDAs need to be sold off. But some obligations of longer-term nature that must be satisfied will become the obligation of city general funds.

That's likely to be the start of an extended period of financial uncertainty for cities and counties, as well as for the real estate market that will be flooded with several thousand commercial properties that will need to be sold at fire-sale prices.

George Skelton is a Los Angeles Times' political columnist who joined the newspaper the same year Brown was first elected in 1974 and thus has the unusual perspective of having covered both Jerry Browns.  

Skelton was a long-ago political-writing colleague at United Press International before he joined The Times so I emailed him last week to ask if we could visit about "the two Jerry Browns."

He followed up by writing a column on the subject following Brown's second State of the State address. Skelton recalled Brown's 1976 State of the State as "best remembered for one depressing, if prophetic, line: 'We are entering an era of limits.'

The state's current situation is clearly an immersion in an era of limits.

The now-73 year old Brown, during his 1974-82 tenure, was tagged as "Governor Moonbeam" for proposing that the state develop its own communications satellite.

Skelton says the old "Gov. Moonbeam" still exists. And Brown certainly proved that's true when, despite the financial travails of his state, he made it clear that reduced expectations don't apply to his unwavering support for a $100 billion bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Brown summed it up with: "government should pursue ambitious ventures even during times of economic strife."

Local economic-development leaders might well shake their heads in frustration, agreeing with the premise of a state that needs to be "ambitious" in times like these, but not in pursuit of a bullet train.

Stuart Anderson, successful cattle rancher, restaurateur, author, television personality and entrepreneur, is finding that a comeback at the age of 89 is turning out to be more challenging than he had expected. It's not because of age so much as it is the economy and changes in the restaurant business.

The man who built Stuart Anderson's Black Angus from a single location near downtown Seattle in 1964 into a chain of 110 steakhouse restaurants across 19 states before selling the chain in the late 1980s was lured out of retirement by a shuttered Black Angus in Rancho Mirage, CA.

The appeal of reopening and rebranding a restaurant that he had originally opened in 1980 when his California expansion of Black Angus/Cattle Company restaurants was in full swing proved too much of a temptation, despite the protestations of his wife, Helen, who recalls saying: "Over my dead body."

"It was tough to see that restaurant go away, along with a crew we had come to know," Anderson says of his reaction when he learned in early 2009 that the restaurant he and his wife frequented had closed

"We thought we could help the economy by creating some jobs there," Anderson says. "And I thought Helen and I had the experience needed to reopen the restaurant."

But he concedes it has been more difficult than they had anticipated, originally convinced that "with my 60 years of experience, I felt we could overcome all the difficulties posed by this economy. But it's amazing how much you forget at the age of 89."

Helen, who has been Anderson's partner and spouse for almost 40 years and describes his comeback from a stroke three years ago as "miraculous," admits "we knew it would be costly, but it has been more of a financial drain than we thought it would be."

Anderson says "the restaurant business is more competitive and demanding than it used to be, with government regulations and additional costs we were unfamiliar with. It has been challenging," he admitted.

Many of those rooting for him to succeed again will be those from his home state. Not just Seattle, where the chain was headquartered as one of the most respected in America,  but also Spokane, where Black Angus number three became the most successful in the chain, and Ellensburg where his 2,400-acre ranch sprawled along Interstate 90. It was the ranch with its black angus herd, as well as the signature mustache and cowboy hat, that  made him the icon of cowboy country.

Over the course of nearly a quarter century, Anderson created a restaurant company with 10,000 employees and annual revenue of $260 million.

Shortly before Anderson's retirement in the late '80s with the sale of the company, industry publication Restaurants & Institutions, in a national survey, judged his chain the nation's best full-service restaurants three years out of four. And USA Today judged the chain best in the nation in the category of casual dinner.

He tried his hand as an author when he produced Here's the Beef! My Story of Beef, a book he describes as "fun and informative" that sold thousands of copies in the Black Angus restaurants. The book was a follow on to the highly popular McDonald's commercial in which an elderly lady asks: "Where's the Beef?"

And his stint as a television personality was as spokesperson for Seattle's Senior Housing Assistance Group's low-income senior housing developments.

Part of Anderson's concern for the amount of time and effort he and Helen are having to invest in their restaurateur entrepreneurial encore is that she doesn't have as much time as she'd like for her commitment to Umbrella Ministries. The Palm Springs-based national 501c3 is focused on helping mothers who have lost children.

The two spend "three or four nights a week" greeting customers and making the rounds of the restaurant, Anderson says. 

"I've seen tough times before and some of my restaurants didn't make it," says Anderson, noting the failures included the Tacoma restaurant that opened following Seattle.  

While noting his conviction that "the general economy has to change around here" and "there are too many restaurants," Anderson insists he and Helen will make Stuart's Steakhouse a success.

Helen McGovern, who three years ago put asidea career as elected official and prominent real estate executive to become the head of a non-profit engaged in fighting hunger in Pierce County, chuckles at the idea that a third career as Harlequin Heroine might await her.

While it may not actually turn into a "career" with the publishing house best known for its pervasive romance novels, McGovern and her role as what Harlequin describes as "making a positive difference in the lives of others" will be the inspiration for an ebook fictional short story.

McGovern received word a few days ago that she was one of three women voted winners in an online and Facebook competition to determine recipients of Harlequin's "More Than Words" award.

Seems that Harlequin, as one of the world's leading publishers of books for women, turns out more than romance novels. And the Toronto-based publishing house has as an aspect of its social corporate responsibility an annual award aimed at "celebrating the lives of women who make a positive difference in the lives of others."

McGovern, a woman from Ohio and another from Toronto were voted winners by Harlequin readers, 111,000 participating online and 7,800 via Facebook, and each will receive $15,000 for their cause and be "the inspiration for three fictional short stories," according to Harlequin. It was the first time in the eight years of the event that readers, rather than staff members, did the selecting.

The short stories on the three, written by Harlequin authors who are donating their time to talk with the women and gain inspiration to create stories based on their experiences and contributions, will be available in 2013 in ebook format and can be downloaded then at no cost.

As a Harlequin spokeswoman explained, when I called her in Toronto, the contest and awards "are to publicize to the women who read our books the causes of women worthy of being publicized."

Forsaking the corporate world and elective office for the dramatically more modest trappings as executive director of Pierce County's Emergency Food Network was a move McGovern had long anticipated as a focus on "a more purposeful life" when she made the move in April of 2009.

As a result of a column I did on her a year ago, McGovern was invited to speak before Seattle Rotary, which she did last week. And leading into her comments about guiding the nonprofit that distributes 1.3 million pounds of food each year to Pierce County food banks, she disclosed, with a chuckle, that she had received the Harlequin honor

But the jokes about being a romance-novel heroine, which is possible but not really the likely outcome of the short story she'll have written, didn't change the fact of this being an important recognition, following one a year ago with a Second Half Champions award.

That's was statewide award presented each year by Wells Fargo Advisors, along with ArtsFund and Seattle Community Colleges, to individuals who have "completely repurposed the second half of their lives to make significant contributions" after the age of 50.

It was after finishing her "most financially successful year ever" at Colliers and with her decision not to seek re-election after eight years on the Lakewood city council, including two years as deputy mayor there, that she decided the time had come for her move to a non-profit career.

So she learned of the opening at Emergency Food Network, set up a meeting with the board, and when she was asked if there was anything she would like them to know about her, she calls saying: "Yes. This was meant to be. I was meant to have this job."

Social Venture Partners (SVP), the Seattle-based organization that describes itself as the world's largest network of engaged philanthropists, approaches its 15th anniversary with a couple of major initiatives about to unfold. One will extend the organization's international footprint and the other will enhance its impact nationally. 

First is an expansion into India next fall and second is creation of a "mezzanine fund" that will offer more philanthropic cooperation among member cities, allowing them to function much the way angel investors do in syndicating deals. Beneficiaries of that fund will be philanthropic organizations "with great models" who will be able to expand their reach into multiple cities.

Paul Shoemaker, who has guided SVP since 1998 when founder Paul Brainard convinced him to leave his position at Microsoft as group manager for worldwide operations to become SVP's first president, says the organization is coming off its best year for new members since its expansion year of 2000.

Shoemaker, now referred to on his business card and SVP website simply as Executive Connector, might suggest that the initiatives to be undertaken this year could expand the numbers dramatically.

The move into India, which will launch in Bangalore later this year, is driven both by the fact that "there are some basic forms of philanthropy there already" as well as by the large number of citizens from India who are drawn to the high-tech companies located in the Seattle area. Many could be attracted to SVP membership by the India initiative.

"There are so many connections between India and Seattle," Shoemaker observed. "And we're confident we've found the leaders there to make us confident of success, even if SVP will look different than it does here.

"It will undoubtedly be a different monetary level for members," he said, "and the social system in India is different but we'll bring the same core principles."

With respect to SVP's creation of its mezzanine fund, it will operate somewhat like syndication so that SVP cities into which a non-profit would expand will participate in the financial and personal support for that non-profit.

"What we are creating is a fund from cities across the system evaluating the strongest local grantees that have the interest and the best opportunity to expand into multiple cities," says Shoemaker. He explained it as "helping nonprofits with great models replicate and reach next level funding opportunities."

"They might now be operating in one or two cities and want to grow into three or five cities," he said.

The applicants for support from the mezzanine fund are currently being evaluated and those selected as grantees for the new program will be announced in the next month or so, Shoemaker said.

Shoemaker, who was named last August as one of the "Top 50 Most Influential People in the Non-Profit Sector" by The NonProfit Times, recalls that expansion into other cities helped spur the initial growth to what is now about 2,100 members around the country, plus Canada and Japan.

It was in 2000 that SVP, then only beginning to expand beyond Seattle, had its first surge of young partners. Many of them were successful techies, answering Brainard's and Shoemaker's call to get involved in a new model for philanthropic focus on creating a better non-profit sector.

Each agreed to donate $5,000 a year to SVP and become personally involved with one or more non-profits. The amount is now $6,000 a year.

The first cities into which SVP expanded were Phoenix, Vancouver and Dallas. Since then, the organization has expanded only into cities that sought to become SVP locations, but that is another thing that's changing this year.

"Up to this point we've been reactive, waiting until someone from a community contacted us to express interest in forming a group," Shoemaker said. "Now we're actively pursuing cities where we should be represented and most likely locations this year, in addition to Bangalore, are Austin and Raleigh/Durham."

There are currently 25 venture-partner cities in which SVP operates in the U.S., Canada and Japan. As of last January, the SVP network had contributed nearly $41 million in grant investments to 500 nonprofit organizations and provided tens of thousands of volunteer hours in service and counsel.

One of the more interesting developments in the evolution of SVP is the number of partners forsaking the private sector and stepping into leadership roles in the social and public sectors. In a large sense they are following the model established by founder and desktop publishing creator Paul Brainard and Shoemaker himself.

They include:

-- Lisa Chin, a former Amazon executive who stepped out of the private sector to become the first executive director of Year Up Seattle - helping urban young adults reach their full professional potential.

--Tim Schottman, who two years ago left behind a 17-year career guiding Starbucks international development to become chief global officer at Sightlife, building a network of eye banks to support corneal transplants with the lofty goal of eliminating blindness for 10 million people in the developing world.

--Peter Bladin, formerly of Microsoft, who headed up Grameen Foundation's technology Center for 10 years.

Shoemaker says "this is definitely a trend we are fostering, hopefully leading it, because it is significant for bringing people with key organization-building skills from the private sector into the non-profit world."

Diane Karle is out to prove that, despite the seeming unbreakable bond between beer promotion and sports events, wine and sports have become the most likely - and profitable -- pairing. She's already made a believer of one National Football League team, and is in negotiations with four others.

The conviction about wine and sports led her to launch Wine by Design LLC, aiming to guide profits for not just NFL teams and other pro sports franchises but also for college sports activities from tailgate parties to alumni gatherings.

Karle's belief that she can promote "wine as lifestyle" for clients, keying off of sports and entertainment events, guided her to relocate from her New York-based practice in sports and entertainment marketing to California wine country.

Making wine a key to brand development for clients is the goal of the four-year-old company that she launched in California after being immersed in the sports and entertainment marketing business in New York for 15 years. She was vice president for business development at-sports-and-entertainment giant IMG World, leaving in 2003 to start her own sports and entertainment marketing business, before the move to Napa.

Karle concedes that her expertise is in marketing and events, not wine. But as she comes to understand wine and what she describes as "an industry fragmented unlike others," she has grasped that working with wine means working not just with the industry in California, but also Oregon and Washington.

Thus Northwest wineries stand to become beneficiaries as she seeks to develop new brand relationships among sports teams, winemakers and corporations.

She admits to "fits and starts" when she first opened her business before getting traction in 2010 by signing the New York Jets, opening a wine bar at the team's MetLife stadium, doing pre-game tasting and creating the team's own label.

Ironically, part of the process of her creating the name, packaging and design of what  became" Jets Uncorked" was having the team's executives come to Napa to go through a tasting process with various winemakers before selecting Marco DiGuilio to produce the limited release.

 "The decision to use the tasting visits in our hunt for the best Napa cabernet was the outgrowth of a wine choice based on Jets' fan research, the first time something like that had been done," she adds. 

I asked Karle if it was possible to measure the success of her project with Jets Uncorked and she pointed to the fact that the team sold 5,000 cases of their wine the first year. Plus that relationship led her to meetings at the Super Bowl and negotiations with four other NFL teams, which she logically declines to name.

"We're seeing a lot of teams want to be more into wine and want to have their own brand," she adds. "Wine inevitably has to come, and not just to the NFL. Teams are about generating revenue and our goal is to be the bridge to help wineries learn how to leverage that association.

"When you go to an Oakland Raiders' game, you see the fans all painted up but they're drinking chardonnay," Karle says. "People having a little wine and cheese isn't how you might have thought of socializing at a Raiders game."

She calls her company "the first lifestyle marketing agency to create business opportunities and brand loyalty through the world of wine."

When I asked Karle to explain "lifestyle marketing" and its importance to the bottomline success of companies, she replied: "Lifestyle is what people get involved in when they are not working. And Coca Cola is the ultimate example of how its importance is viewed by successful companies, since 80 percent of their marketing budget is tied to lifestyle commitments."

"WBD," she adds, "applies the same successful marketing principles and practices used for years in sports, entertainment, music and other lifestyle categories."

But now she's looking to move her firm beyond merely being hired by teams "for retainers and commissions," and instead transitioning into buying the sponsorship rights at various stadiums, a step for which she'll need an infusion of capital.

"We need the money to buy the rights," she says. "I know what the rights are worth. If  we can raise $4 million, we can get 10 venues lined up to build our own wine-tasting rooms, do signature wines and build sponsor relations as well. We are making money now, but we need the investment to grow."

Meanwhile, her company remains focused on its main business areas of sponsorship development, licensing deals and event consulting. And it's expanding the role of wine in existing relationships.

"We will continue to introduce a variety of wine-tasting options to suite holders, sponsors and fans and those introductions will absolutely include wines from Oregon and Washington," she said.

The uncertain future course of national health care is retarding fledgling efforts to expand what's known as "compassionate care" for cancer patients as hospitals in Seattle and elsewhere are proving reluctant to launch new cancer programs that drain rather than enhance revenue.

Matt Loscalzo, who helped develop the concept of "psychosocial" programs as the underpinning of "compassionate care" for cancer patients and their families, laments that major hospitals around the country have been reluctant to incorporate it into their treatment programs.

But Loscalzo. executive director of the Department of Supportive Care Medicine at the respected City of Hope in Duarte, east of Los Angeles, is careful not to criticize the major hospitals, including those with highly touted cancer-care programs, for failing to move toward psychosocial treatment programs.

"All hospitals and institutions are holding their collective breath over the challenges they face," Loscalzo says. "These hospitals represent a lot of good people under a lot of stress. First they have to keep the lights on, then attract good people, then meet a tremendous amount of regulation, insurance challenges and Medicare cutbacks."

Loscalzo is a pioneer nationally in the development of  psychosocial programs and he has guided development of a touchscreen tablet that allows cancer patients to deal with the mental and emotional issues beyond their medical problems.

The device, called SupportScreen, is a cornerstone of City of Hope's leading-edge focus on compassionate care. The device, which is programmed specifically for each patient, is designed to electronically record distress levels, through answers on touchpads, by asking cancer patients to identify and rate their practical, social and emotional problems along with medical information.

Patients reveal concerns that might otherwise go unrecognized, such as mental health imbalances, stresses over personal finances or insurance coverage concerns, or suicidal thoughts.  The information, which the patient knows will be shared with the entire healthcare team, allows that team to immediately provide integrated treatments and crises interventions.

And because of the efforts of a philanthropic couple who maintain residences in both Los Angeles and Seattle, visibility for SupportScreen will be coming to Seattle and, with it, a heightened awareness of what compassionate care actually means to cancer patients' outcomes.

Loscalzo's other role at City of Hope is as administrative director of the Sheri and Les Biller Patient and Family Resource Center, created nearly four years ago through the vision and financial support of the Billers to create an international model of compassionate care. His psychosocial program, including, the touchscreen tablet, is a major part of the Biller Center's unique offerings.

The reach and influence of the Billers has given Loscalzo's efforts a major boost. Sheri is chair of the City of Hope board and Les is retired vice chair of Wells Fargo and current board chair for Spokane-based Sterling Savings.

Loscalzo's goal is to move the psychosocial program concept, complete with the SupportScreen, into the mainstream of cancer care, expanding its reach well beyond the handful of cancer hospitals where the program is now being introduced. The only other one in the West, in addition to the City of Hope, is the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, which Loscalzo describes as "a fairly new center that is really trying to get is program up and running."

"The number of cancer survivors nationally is nearing 12 million and for them, psychosocial is going to be a part of the rest of their lives," Loscalzo says. "There are humanistic and financial costs for ignoring the psychosocial needs of patients and their families, as well as of cancer survivors."

In the nearly four years since their philanthropy allowed the Biller Center to open, the Billers have made the City of Hope's focus on compassionate care, including the SupportScreen, their cause.

It was because of a friendship with the Billers and a personal interest in the cancer initiatives there that I was able to get a first-hand look late last year at the programs of City of Hope and its almost unique focus on compassionate care. thus I had a chance to meet key players there, including Dr. Michael Friedman, who is president an CEO, and Loscalzo.

Because the Billers are givers, they share the willingness of all practiced philanthropists to also be askers, tapping friends, colleagues and associates to support their cause with personal involvement and financial support.

For three years, Sheri Biller's "ask" has been on behalf of a team of what she calls "Resource Racers" in an all-women's half marathon in New York City to raise money to augment the basic support for the Biller Center at City of Hope that's provided by the Biller Family Foundation.

This year, the call has gone out from both Sheri and Les Biller for "generous" contributions to her Resource Racers, including men as participants for the first time, for the Rock 'n Roll Marathon/Half Marathon in Seattle in late June. The donations this year will go specifically to expand the use and the number of SupportScreens available to City of Hope's cancer patients.

That may well bring visibility for the first time to cancer-care supporters in the Northwest, who may legitimately ask "why not here," given the cancer-care reputations of major hospitals in Seattle and Portland.

Meanwhile, Loscalzo's vision is to develop a touchscreen specifically aimed at children suffering from cancer. But that may be a ways off.

"We want to incorporate things like animation into the software of the SupportScreens we develop for youngsters," Loscalzo says. "A rough estimate is that we'll need about $1 million for development of those children's screens."

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For four decades, it was the place where three children grew to adulthood and where their laughter and tears, and those of eight grandchildren, echoed from walls and windows that were always decorated by Betsy (mom and grandma) for the appropriate holidays.

But the big old four-bedroom colonial in Seattle's desirable Mount Baker neighborhood had become too large for a now-aging couple, so the time to find a retirement apartment had arrived.

The attraction of moving into inviting new downtown-view quarters at Horizon House, one of Seattle's more sought-after facilities for retirees (and those not yet retired), eased the challenges of the move, particularly since familiar faces from Seattle's business community appeared around each corner.

But with the unfolding challenge of rapidly, and not easily, downsizing to take 40 years of accumulated items from 2,500 square feet plus basement into a place half that size, the memories surrounding the rooms, and many of the items, hung in the air.

In one bedroom, there was the bitter-sweet memory of the arrival of the daughter, born a year after our arrival back in Seattle from the Los Angeles area, who too briefly slept in her crib there.

Sarah Elizabeth, born four days before Christmas in 1973, gave a special meaning to that holiday season. Her brother and sister would sit on the couch and push as close as possible, looking on with smiling fascination while mom held or fed the baby.

Two months to the day later, we found Sarah dead in her crib, a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). In an effort to bring meaning from her death, Betsy and I became involved in the state SIDS organization, first taking support in our pain, then eventually giving back by supporting other SIDS parents who needed help coming to grips with their loss. We learned you take, give back, then move on, once the realization comes that painful memory is replaced by loving memory.

The pain of Sarah's loss found a counterpoint two years later with the excitement of the arrival of Eileen, who bore the burden of being the "subsequent child," a description hung by psychologists on children born following the death of a sibling.

I made a point of being the one to check the sleeping Eileen each night as she lay in the same crib, though different bedroom, so that if she too had died, I'd be the one to discover it this time. As she passed the "at-risk" first year, the fatherly fears passed. But she retained, as the years passed, a special place in the family.

An enduring image for me was of the nightly routine we had when the children were young, of my singing them songs after they had been tucked into bed. I can still hear: "One more song please, daddy!" and Betsy admonishing: "You're being taken advantage of."

Those songs of childhood became part of our family culture, particularly when Michael grew into a young man and learned to play the guitar. As he would be sitting in the living room, in the final years before he married and began raising his own family, he'd be playing and singing to himself and dad would walk in and say: "play me a song, Michael."

Inevitably, it would be one of those songs I sang to Meagan, Eileen and him.

But sometimes it was Dan Fogelberg's "Leader of the Band," which Michael had learned to sing and play. And since it was one of his father's favorite songs, we'd sing it together. And again.

Then there was the room where Meagan and her Brownie troop gathered for their Monday afternoon activities under the guidance of her father, who turned out to have been the first male Brownie leader in the state.

That came about because when Meagan and a couple of friends found there were no Brownie groups they could join, her father said "let's see if this equal opportunity thing flows both ways. Is a man acceptable to lead a troop of girls?"

When I volunteered, the Brownie moms, to Betsy's amusement, called my bluff, welcomed me to the Brownie leaders' team, gave me the largest group of girls. But the moms were constantly supportive and available for questions from the rookie leader who was frequently panicked about creating projects and keeping a dozen second-grade girls focused. And Michael became a member of the group, possibly the first male Brownie in the state.

The empty spot by the front French doors after movers had cleared the area made it harder to picture the Christmas tree that occupied the spot each holiday season, to be surrounded by excited children, or grandchildren and their parents. And the absence of the sofa and chairs made it difficult to recall the candy-filled plastic Easter eggs that were inevitably hidden in and around them.

As we returned in recent days to check out the now-empty house, with its unfamiliar echoes as we moved through each room, an important reality for us, and for all those making large life changes, became clear. The memories don't remain behind in the place where they were made. Rather they travel with us, an essential part of the experiences we gather and carry through the years. Memories to be recalled and savored. Forever young.

John Stanton and Mikal Thomsen were in their late 20s when they teamed up at McCaw Cellular to become part of the birthing of a fledgling communications technology whose growth globally they helped guide through several major companies over the next 20 years, becoming iconic figures in the wireless industry.

Now just into their 60s, both have parlayed their business success into owning and guiding professional baseball teams, what they might well agree is a passion that rivals their business focus.

A business focus remains, however, as they continue to manage their Bellevue-based wireless venture and investment firm, Trilogy Equity Partners, formed by a collection of long-time wireless partners after the sale of their Western Wireless to Alltel Corp. in 2005.

Thomsen once told me that the opportunity six years ago to create the ownership team that bought the Tacoma Rainiers was like his “dream come true.” He would be owning his hometown team that he had grown up rooting for from the time his dad took him to his first game at age three. That was the year that the then-Tacoma Giants returned after a 55-year absence.

Stanton, who will soon assume the role of CEO of the Seattle Mariners after the ownership group he leads completes its purchase of the team from Nintendo of America, also recalls attending the games of his hometown team with his father. That was in 1969 when, as a teenager he became a fan of the Seattle Pilots in their first and only year of existence and recalls crying when they left town for Milwaukee.

Thomsen would undoubtedly echo Stanton’s “I am first and foremost a baseball fan” comment  that he made to the media gathering at Safeco Field when he was introduced as the leader of a 17 member local group that would become 90 percent owner of the team and he become the CEO, once Major League Baseball owners bless the deal.

Thomsen and his wife, Lynn, and Stanton and his wife, Terry Gillespie, are all alums of McCaw Cellular in the ‘80s and are now on the team of co-owners of the Tacoma Rainiers, though the oversight of the franchise, including attending many games and spending about 10 hours a week in the office during the season, falls to Thomsen.

The owners are fortunate that the baseball team acquisition included Aaron Artman as club president, a former Microsoft executive who oversaw the $30 million renovation of Cheney Stadium and remained with the new owners in the role of president.

Stanton’s and Thomsen’s baseball involvement extends across the state and all the way down to the West Coast League, an amateur collegiate summer league, where they are among owners of both the Walla Sweets and the Yakima Valley Pippins.

But it was when Thomsen had the opportunity to put together the purchase of the Tacoma Rainiers in 2011 that he turned to Stanton and his wife, an avid baseball fan herself, to become part of the ownership group.

Thomsen has immersed himself in his hometown baseball team and has enthusiastically committed to its increasing success, despite being the smallest market in far-flung Pacific Coast League and being the closest Triple-A team to a major league city.

In fact, the Seattle Mariners and the Rainiers are not only geographically close, which Thomsen admits may sometimes cost the Rainiers attendance of fans heading for Seattle, but close in that the Rainiers are the Mariners’ triple-A farm team.

As Thomsen puts it: “Most of the Rainiers fans are Mariners fans who enjoy keeping up with both teams and hearing about the players they saw in Tacoma performing with the major league club. I think the nearness of the M’s cuts both ways.”

In addition, the relationship is good for the Rainiers’ bottomline since the Tacoma roster is determined by and players’ salaries paid by the Mariners.

A lot of the changes brought about since Thomson’s group bought the team relate to community things, but he is pleased about what has happened in the stands and on the field.

At this point, atop PCL pack, the Rainiers seem headed for their first playoff appearance since Thomsen’s group bought the team, though Thomsen cautions that “it’s a long way from certain. We are only three games up on Fresno.” Plus the team appear on the way to another franchise attendance record, though beating the 352,000 attendance mark of last season is well behind the nearly 680,000 of the Sacramento River Cats.

In addition, Thomsen notes that the decision by the ownership group three years ago to build a new set of stands in left field “has been a stunning success,” adding that he celebrated his 60^th birthday there in early May this year “with a couple hundred friends.”

He says the change of the team’s logo two years ago to “the now somewhat iconic ‘R’” has helped drive merchandise sales “through the roof.”

In terms of community involvement, he says the Rainiers “teamed this past off season with Tacoma Parks, the Cheney Foundation and Mary Bridge Hospital to add a playground behind the right field berm that includes a whiffle ball stadium,

“It is packed for most games and open as a public park when games are not going on in the stadium,” he adds.

“The community views this as a partnership and we go out of our way to be great partners,” Thomsen says with obvious pride.

Alaska Airlines’ goal of winning friends and influencing people in the Bay Area, whose hometown airline is about to be absorbed by the Seattle-based carrier, began in earnest Tuesday night in San Francisco as Alaska executives and board members hosted a gathering for local leaders.

Some 250 business, political and community leaders were on hand at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco for an event whose theme was “Flying Better Together.” The goal of the gathering of Bay Area who’s who was for them to meet and begin to get to know the leadership of the airline that is buying Virgin America, the Richard Branson-founded carrier that began service as San Francisco’s hometown low-cost airline nine years ago this month.

During that nearly a decade of service, Virgin built what many in the Bay Area have described as “almost a cult following,”with many regular flyers enthusing that they “love Virgin.”

Aware of that challenge, Alaska CEO Brad Tilden and his executive team have sought to express sensitivity to the cultural issues and the initial backlash from Virgin fans. That awareness was pointed up a few weeks ago when Tilden told the Wings Club, a group of aviation professionals in New York, that he was thinking of running the Alaska and Virgin as separate airlines within Alaska Air Group.

Such an outcome may or may not still be a possibility, but when I asked Joseph Sprague, Alaska senior vice president, after the Tuesday event, about Virgin continuing to function as a third carrier, he said: “ Initially it will be a third airline but by 2018 it will be merged into Alaska.”

But Alaska leadership is playing up a cultural fit they see existing between Alaska and Virgin, rather than addressing the different styles.

Sprague said “a lot of the integration pre-planning work has revealed an encouraging number of similarities from which we can build.” 

He noted that Tilden, in his comments to the group Tuesday, pointed out three such similarities: “both have an obsessive focus on the customer, we both want companies that are employee-driven and we both have a strong leaning towards innovation around the customer experience.”

Alaska’s San Francisco community gathering came exactly s week after shareholders of Virgin America approved the acquisition by Alaska Air Group, with Virgin’s chairman announcing the voting results at a brief shareholders meeting on July 26.

That Virgin shareholder approval was the next-to-last major hurdle for the takeover, with the remaining step being U.S. Justice Department approval. Closing by October is expected for the $4 billion deal ($2.6 billion in cash and the rest in assumed debt and other costs) that Alaska had to put together to beat out Jet Blue.

It’s quite possible that the shadow of Delta Airlines’ seeming predator pursuit of Alaska that left key Alaska supporters concerned Delta was seeking to force a takeover played a role in Alaska’s decision to acquire Virgin America for a very large premium.

But in addition to likely ending concern about Delta coveting a takeover, Alaska also gets Virgin’s lucrative California routes as well as keeping Jet Blue, the losing suitor in the Virgin bidding contest, from acquiring the routes.

In fact, it’s perhaps amusing to consider the community response if Delta, after a hostile takeover of Alaska, held a reach-out event with the theme “get to know us.” They’d have faced a ferociously hostile audience in Seattle.

But obviously Alaska, which has been successfully serving the Bay Area from three airport for years, isn’t perceived as a bad guy, more just a carrier that locals don’t know a lot about other than it has an excellent record in all the areas airlines get rated.

In fact, as Phyllis Campbell, Alaska board member and Pacific Northwest chairman of JP Morgan Chase, put it after the event: ‘I think it is emblematic of Alaska Airlines to reach out to the community in a spirit of collaboration and collegiality. Having dinners like this send the message that we want to be the best airline going forward for the Region and also the best citizen in terms of community partnership.”

In fact, the event was apparently successful enough from Alaska’s perspective that Sprague said “we will likely do additional events, both of our own and sponsoring others.”

Still there are Virgin supporters whose love affair with the airline was partly due to the fact it was the Bay Area’s hometown airline. And the takeover will mean not just the end of Virgin’s “hometown” ties, but also that California will no longer have an airline based in a state that has served as home to a variety of important carriers over the years.

As Mary Huss, publisher of Puget Sound Business Times, summed up when I asked her about it: “I think people were very proud that Virgin chose to locate and start up here when it did.”

But while Jet Blue lost the bidding to Alaska, it is seeking to woo Virgin fans away before Alaska can convert them by looking for ways to exploit what it senses as uncertainty of flyers about the transition. It has been touting giveaway deals to potential frequent users of Jet Blue’s longhaul service from New York to San Francisco and Los Angeles, including its tongue-in-cheek wooing of Jet Blue “virgins,” those who haven’t previously tried Jet Blue.

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Mother's day is a time to reach out to moms across the room or across the miles. But for many of us the connections need to be made through memories of moms departed. Or perhaps spiritual connections.And so it is that with another Mother's Day approaching, a decade and a year on since my mom died surrounded by her grandchildren and great grandchildren, I am reminded anew about a column I wrote a few days after her death in July of 2004.

I keep the column in a desktop file and open it around Mother's Day to reflect on her passing and the why of the relationship that often comes to exist between moms and sons, different than between moms and daughters. When I reread the column, I'm reminded of reactions from many who said they were moved by the column to call their moms, drop a note, or wish that their moms were still around to stop by to visit. So I share the column again.)

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My mother was a boys' mom, not only playing baseball, football and tag with her three sons and counseling us on our ability to succeed if we did our best, but also providing "mothering" for dozens of young men she kept her eye on in the St. Aloysius neighborhood in Spokane where we grew up, encouraging, scolding, guiding us all toward manhood.  

One of those boys, now a prominent Spokane businessman, recalled in a note to me a few days after her funeral that she had been one of the "angel moms" who kept him from straying very far from the right path.

It was at the age of 82, three days after the sudden heart-attack death of her 94-year-old husband of 19 years while she was hospitalized for a heart problem of her own, that she decided there wasn't a lot of reason to go on alone in this life and that she was, as she told a caregiver, "ready to go home." She had said "goodbye," one by one, to each of her grandchildren and great grandchildren who had gathered at her Spokane home, then went to sleep for the last time.  

Time allows the pain of loss to transition into perspective, though each of us deals with that process in his or her own way. Thus a couple of months after her death, I asked my brother, who had lived closed enough to Mom to stop by most days, how it felt to drive by her house now that she was no longer there.  

"I just say to myself, 'I don't have time today, but I'll stop in for a visit tomorrow,'" he said, then realized sheepishly he'd been more candid in his response then he had intended to be.

The photos of her sons, seven grandchildren and 16 great grandchildren filled her home, and their accomplishments filled her heart. Those accomplishments frequently came about, I was convinced, by her incredible faith in the outcome when she prayed to her patron saints, asking for their help.  

A convert to Catholicism, It was early on that she discovered St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. He and St. Anthony, patron saint of lost items, became the saints who heard from her the most, likely because her three sons frequently seemed like they needed the former and our antics led to the need for the latter.

She had a phenomenal record of success in having her prayers "answered," probably because those patron saints never heard her ask for anything for herself. To this day, I am convinced my track scholarship to Marquette was due to her prayers rather than my abilities.

Hazel Flynn was a working mom at a time when that was much more unusual than today. But our family needed the income supplement that her hours at the local IGA store in the St. Al's neighborhood provided.  

She was pretty hard-nosed about teaching us to be the best we could be. Thus, on occasion in my early years when I'd come home crying from being struck or harassed by neighborhood kids, she'd march me back to the scene and force me to have a proper fistfight with the offending kid.  

I can't remember ever losing one of those fistfights. Even on the occasion when I begged tearfully: "But mom, there are two of them!" She marched me back anyway and made the bigger kid stand aside until I had sent his pal home crying after our fight, then she motioned him to step in and get his drubbing.

Even from the perspective of almost seven decades, I still view that "battlefield education" by my mother as a remarkable, perhaps even unique, chapter in my early development. And many who have heard the story have remarked cryptically: "That explains a lot, Flynn."

She never had the opportunity, as a mom, to know the joy of daughters. But she did with the arrival of female grandchildren and great grandchildren, and she lavished her love on them perhaps even more than on the boys, perhaps to make up for her not having had a daughter.

She loved heading off to Nevada, where she had such phenomenal success on the dollar slots that she would be quite upset that she had wasted her time if she failed to come home with enough winnings to cover her trip costs, and have some left over for a gift for one or more of her family.  

I always suspected that part of the reason she had such uncanny success with the slots was that she wasn't trying to win for herself, but had other uses in mind for any money she won. I have never heard of a patron saint of slot machines, but I became pretty convinced that she had discovered one, and prayed to him before each trip, and that her winnings were prayers being answered.  

In fact, she was in contact with her patron saints so regularly that no matter who the heavenly greeting party normally includes, I'm quite sure in this case St. Jude and St. Anthony were on hand when Mom arrived that Friday afternoon in July of 2004, curious to meet the woman they had heard from so much during her lifetime.

Stephen Vella, a congenial Brit who spent his career building airlines before turning his attention to creating flying mansions for the global elite, is the man whose Kestrel Aviation Management oversaw creation of the first VIP interior on a 787-8 Dreamliner.

The first VVIP outfitted BBJ, as its officially referred to, has gotten global visibility for those who partnered with Vella’s company, which had turnkey responsibility for the project from purchase of the plane to planning and design of the special interior to meet the requirements of the Asian client who will operate the aircraft. The partners included Greenpoint Technologies of Kirkland and Pierrejean Design Studio of Paris.

The specially outfitted Dreamliner is back in Moses Lake, where the work to install the unique interior was done, as it awaits final signoff by the FAA and final closing of the sale to an undisclosed owner.

“Undisclosed owner” is the usual description of individuals, countries or companies who decide they wish to own a castle in the sky and contract with Vella and Kestrel to manage the purchase, design and delivery of the aircraft. Nohl Martin, Vella’s vice president for business development and communications, says outfitting the special interiors can cost as much as the airplane itself with the finished product, once the widebody is aloft, sometimes described by buyers as airborne oases of peace.

But these are oases that are reserved for the elite, both in stature and resources, and the fact they seek out Vella has made him a valued relationship for Boeing, but also for Airbus, since the contract for design and implementation of one of these widebody interiors begins with the purchase of the plane itself.

I had an opportunity recently to interview Vella while he his partner Martin, a longtime friend of mine, were on a visit to Kirkland, where she has family.

The Dreamliner, representing the first conversion of a composite and nearly all-electric aircraft to incorporate a high-end cabin and thus requiring virtually the entire focus of the Kestrel team for the past two years, is the 11^th widebody conversion that Vella’s team has managed from purchase through entry into service. The company has also done 10 narrowbody VVIP cabin conversions.

But as communications vice president Martin points out: “Sadly it is a sector that rarely allows us to publicize our work -- until this 787 project.”

Visibility was not a problem for Vella when he was turning around airlines, particularly the nearly 15 years he spent helping turn Qatar Airways from a struggling, five-plane regional airline into one of the handful of the world’s Five Star airlines.

When Akbar Al Baker, Qatar’s group chief executive, was tapped by the Qatar government in  1997 to take over the failing airline, he contracted with Vella, who functioned for the next 15 years as basically the airline’s COO, doing the long-term planning, fleet management, overseeing brand development as well as mergers and acquisitions.

By early this decade, Qatar Airways was operating 150 planes with another 200 on order, producing billions of dollars in sales for Boeing, but also for Airbus since the fleet, Vella estimates, is about half from each manufacturer.

Vella, 62, is a native of Gibraltar, the British Overseas Territory at the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula, and he explains that, despite being a citizen of the United Kingdom, Spanish is his first language.

His upbringing in Gibraltar and his fluency in Spanish, along with a healthy dose of self confidence, allowed him to build his reputation in the airline-turnaround business early.

He recalls that he was still in college when he took time off to visit with an official the prime minister back in Gibraltar and convinced him to grant Vella a Masters scholarship in return for assisting the City architect in redesigning the airport terminal.

After graduation, he approached executives of British Caledonia and pitched that the fact he was bilingual would allow him to launch the airline’s Latin America routes.

He recalled with a chuckle that the pitch allowed him to land a job at a time when there were no jobs to be had and while he worked for peanuts, he was able to see the world.

By his early 30s he had become general manager of British Caledonia’s fleet management division, but at that point left to start his aviation consulting firm and early on helped Richard Branson acquire his first 747.

Vella has turned around eight airlines, including Qatar and the Spanish airline Air Nostrum, a Iberia affiliate, which is now the largest regional carrier in Europe, and started several airplane leasing companies, including one for Rupert Murdoch.

I asked Vella to give me a sense of what he thinks the future holds for the industry and he offered a couple of predictions. One, Asia is a fertile field for new airlines to come into existence. And he suggests that in this county we’ll see consolidation bring the industry down to four large airlines. He declined to name those he thinks will compose the final field of four.

If a company deserve to be judged by the leader it keeps and leaders by the companies they build, then Alaska Air Group and its chairman and CEO Bill Ayer should be judged well.

Ayer, 57, who steered the company for the past decade through an increasingly successful flight while for the rest of the "legacy" airlines the 10 years proved an image-scaring and scary ride, has announced that he is officially turning over the CEO reins to Alaska president Brad Tilden.

Ayer, who has spent more than 30 years in the industry since launching his own little start-up airline in his mid-20s, offered some reflections this week on his career from entrepreneur through leadership of the nation's seventh largest airline. And those reflections by its leader, shared in an e-mail exchange of questions and answers, indicate why Alaska has remained a favorite of investors, its customers and its communities.

Two of Ayer's convictions are that you learn from, rather than make fun of, your competitors and that a small-company feel makes it easier for employees to work together and be open to change, no matter how big the company.

The former is perhaps best exemplified by an email exchange we had several years ago after Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary suggested his lowest-cost Irish airline (frequently also referred to as the cheapest airline) might consider charging for use of airborne restrooms.

I suggested to Ayer that it might be time to revive the amusing television ads from years ago that showed the travails of a passenger who needs a 25-cent fee for entry to his plane's restroom and proceeds to try to obtain the quarter for an increasingly high price from passengers on the plane.

"You never want to make fun of competitors' actions because you never know what steps you might be required to take yourself," he e-mailed back.

I asked him this week about that exchange and his reluctance to criticize competitors.

"Sometimes what seems like a lousy idea from a competitor turns out to be pretty

Smart," he replied. "If we have a 'we're better than you' attitude, we won't take the time to evaluate it.

"Our focus has been on controlling what we can control and not simply hoping that something bad happens to a competitor to improve our situation," Ayer added. "We were surprised at how controllable our business was once we started to really focus on what we could do differently."

The fact that Ayer was an entrepreneur, then executive of a fast-growing start-up airline before joining Alaska in 1995 as vice president of marketing and planning has undoubtedly guided his belief in the need to retain a small-company feel.

He was in his mid-20s, a regional manager for Piper Aircraft Co., when he launched Air Olympia, a small commuter serving several Washington cities that operated for two years.

He jokes that "we didn't go broke, but probably would have if we had stuck with it."

Instead, he was lured to close up his little carrier and join the late Milt Kuolt and his team at the fledgling Horizon in 1982, the relationship that eventually led to Ayer's role atop the parent company of both airlines. Alaska acquired Horizon in 1987, along with Ayer.

Bruce McCaw, a Kuolt confidante and one of his key advisors, recalls that "Milt was quite impressed with Ayer, even though he was very young at the time. He knew Bill was smart and had a lot of good ideas."

"I liked Bill from the moment we met and we worked well together," McCaw recalled.

Ayer remembers Air Olympia as "a great place to start, although it felt like a leap into the

deep end of the pool. That experience convinced me that I had a passion for

this business which I should pursue."

He recalls the days with Horizon as "difficult. We were always worried about having enough cash to make payroll. But (it) shaped our conservative approach."

The shaping of that financially conservative approach undoubtedly helped guide Ayer's decisions as he steered Alaska basically unscathed through a decade of airline-industry turbulence that saw all of its legacy competitors go through bankruptcy.

So now Ayer turns the reins over to Tilden, expressing the conviction that "a CEO can overstay his or her welcome" and "there should be different leaders for different times."

He and the Alaska board, which Ayer says he's had involved over the past couple of years in the planning of the transition to Tilden, view him as "exactly the right leader to take us to the next level." The skills that Ayer and others see in Tilden may indicate that a company is also judged by the leadership-successor it picks.

John Torrance, whose vision for a retractable-roof stadium in Seattle led to the eventual construction of Safeco Field, has come up with a detailed plan for construction of a new arena and convention center on the Seattle waterfront.

Torrance, a senior vice president for CBRE, the commercial real estate giant, has guided creation of a plan that would turn 88 acres of Port of Seattle's Terminal 46 into a convention center and an arena, with provisions for a new cruiseship terminal and waterfront park.  The arena could house the NBA and NHL teams that Seattle covets and the convention center would be designed to catapult Seattle up the list of convention cities.

Torrance is unveiling his idea as an advisory panel prepares to deliver a report to Seattle City Council and King County Council on a plan by Chris Hansen, San Francisco hedge-fund manager and former Seattleite, to build an arena on property he has acquired south of Safeco Field.

And it also comes in the wake of word last week that the port is suffering a major loss of business to Port of Tacoma in July when three shipping lines, representing 20 percent of Port of Seattle business, relocate south.

Torrance suggests that the shift of major port business may help make the case that development rather than maritime represents the Seattle waterfront activity of the future. He hasn't yet discussed that with port officials or commissioners, on whom pressures to maintain the maritime focus come from longshoremen who would face the loss of jobs and traditionalists who wish to retain the working-waterfront character.

While Torrance's plan may seem like an eleventh-hour idea given the discussions of recent weeks about the proposal Hansen recently unveiled and has been vetting,  it's actually something he began investigating about two years ago, he says. And he's worked with architects and planners to put together detailed drawings in recent months.

He's already had early discussions with city and county officials and port representatives

and hopes to make contact with Hansen as well to outline the plan and seek to gather support.

"The Seattle area has twin needs to help ensure its long-term economic vitality. One is an arena that has the capacity to attract NBA and NHL franchises and the other is a convention center with the capacity to boost Seattle into major-league convention ranks," Torrance offered.

"Hansen deserves credit for coming up with a possible plan to address the arena issue but what we're hoping to do is address both arena and convention center on a potentially world-class site, without any risk of taxpayer obligation.

Ironically, the plan details he will be unveiling for the first time late this month before Seattle's 101 Club comes as the city prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World's Fair whose U.S. Pavilion became the arena that his father intended would be the venue to lure an NHL franchise.

His father, the late Torchy Torrance, knew the NHL required a 15,000-seat arena for any hoped-for franchise, and thought the new arena that would be left after Century 21 concluded would meet that requirement. But to the horror of the senior Torrance and NHL proponents, the completed facility seated 12,200.

It was the younger Torrance, a longtime leader in the commercial real estate industry, who first proposed a retractable-roof stadium for Seattle in the early '90s after visiting Toronto and conferring with officials there about that city's Skydome.

I remember when he first mentioned to me back in 1993 the idea of the retractable-roof stadium to replace the enclosed Kingdome, I was among those who muttered a quiet "good luck."

But Torrance is a dreamer with follow through and influence. He soon came up with the name "StarDome" for the retractable-roof concept and that helped provide a vision and thus momentum, and believers. Those included owners of the Seattle Mariners, who by the mid-90s realized the Kingdome would not be sufficient as a baseball facility into the future and began pressing elected officials for the new stadium..

Torrance's Terminal 46 plan may catch the interest of Seattle and King County elected officials edgy about any assurances from Hansen of taxpayer safeguards into the future. The one certainty for those public officials is that taxpayers in the county have made it clear they don't want to pay for an arena or a convention center so elected officials know not to go there.

While Torrance's idea for the project and in-depth discussions in Vancouver, Boston and San Diego were at his own initiative, he would undoubtedly have the resources of CBRE, a national player that is the largest commercial real estate firm in the state, to support his efforts.

"We hope we'd attract financing and CBE has access to a lot of clients who could wind up involved in a program to develop the site," Torrance adds.

Development that could create thousands of jobs and bring in millions of dollars in tourism revenue, plus open the door to two major league sports franchises, rather than continued maritime use of the pier, should be a preferred option, Torrance says.

While the idea for the project and in-depth discussions in Vancouver, Boston and San Diego were at his own initiative, Torrance would undoubtedly have the resources of CBRE, a national player that is the largest commercial real estate firm in the state, to support his efforts.

"We hope we'd attract financing and CBE has access to a lot of clients who could wind up involved in a program to develop the site," Torrance adds.

He says he's seeking to have conversations with Hansen, who has already invested in the site he's proposing for an arena, in the hope of "moving him over to the site we're proposing, since our development idea would add enough value to the property he's buying to allow him to recover his investment."

Torrance estimates that the port could generate up to $25 million annually from leasing activity and hotel developments, based on what's generated for the Port of San Diego. "That's about 10 times what the container business generates," he says.

As his original retractable-roof idea and the stadium that came about saved major league baseball for Seattle, his newest concept patterned after developments in Vancouver, San Diego and Boston could turn out to be the most workable plan for new hockey and basketball franchises. And along with that a dramatic new major convention facility.

Concern among Republicans that the prolonged battle for their party's presidential nomination could have a lasting negative impact on the eventual nominee is intriguing given how struggles for the nominations of both parties used to unfold.

There is some understandable hand-wringing among GOP leaders who would like to see a wrap on the nomination battle so a presumptive nominee can begin to focus on campaigning against the president. But a look back would suggest it's the nature rather than the length of nomination battles in either party that wears on the voters.

And a student of history might reflect that something has been missing in recent presidential-election years. The process of presidential-preference primaries, born in Oregon in 1910 and originally viewed as empowering the people to choose their parties' candidates, has become a boring march to the inevitable for the past generation.

But 2012 may provide a revisiting of those campaigns in which the trail to the nomination led through Oregon in late May and on to the primaries' climax in California in early June.

It's the first time in 20 years that a June date in California and the quest for its huge pot of delegate gold has been possible. In 1996 California decided that its primary had become anti-climactic and moved it ahead to March so it could catch the heat of action.

Last summer, pronouncing that the experiment for California to compete for election dollars, high profile candidate appearances and perhaps also an increase in political clout had failed, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation to restore the state's primary to June.

So ironically, the decision may have put California and its 172 delegates back in the eye of the campaign hurricane, a week after Texas bestows its 155 delegates, and the two, plus Oregon and a handful of other states in late May, could explain why all of the four candidates insist they are staying in the race.

An ironic reflection on past presidential-nomination contests is provided by the one in which Mitt Romney's father was a vital early figure. I haven't seen as much recollection as I thought there might be on the fact that Gov. George Romney wasn't only a hopeful for the 1968 GOP nomination, but had been viewed as almost the pre-emptive favorite heading into that year.

And had he not made the disastrous slip of explaining his change of heart to become an opponent of the Vietnam War as having been "brainwashed on Vietnam," Mitt Romney might now be running as part of a family political dynasty, ala the names Kennedy or Bush. And it might have been a campaign in which the issue of a Mormon in the White House had long ago been resolved.

The '68 campaign was also one in which, as I reflected several years ago, prominent figures from Washington state played key roles, a campaign that, as a young political writer, I had the opportunity to cover.

There were still three nomination hopefuls in the Democratic-nomination race by the time of that '68 Oregon Primary. And there would still have been three by the disastrous Democratic convention in Chicago had Robert Kennedy not been assassinated a week after Oregon, moments after acknowledging victory in the California primary.

Everest-conqueror Jim Whittaker of Seattle was an ever-present figure by Kennedy's side until the fateful moment in a hallway of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Sirhan Sirhan shot Kennedy.

Washington's former governor and U.S. Senator Dan Evans still well remembers the GOP convention in Miami and his role as the keynote speaker whose support was sought by both eventual nominee Richard Nixon and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who still had a chance at convention time. Nixon even suggested the vice presidency might accompany an endorsement from Evans, who chose instead to endorse Rockefeller.

The Republican primary effort that year, despite enduring up to the convention, as did the Democrats', was a much more gentlemanly affair than the bitterly divisive, Vietnam-fueled Democratic struggle. And most students of history would suggest that campaign  bitterness had an influence on the fact Richard Nixon won in November.

Four years later, the decision about the Democratic nominee also stretched to the Oregon and California primaries. Eventual Democratic nominee Sen. George McGovern beat former Vice President Hubert Humphrey by 44 percent to 39 percent in California to assure himself the nomination.

Washington Sen. Henry M. Jackson was a distant third in '72 but didn't drop out until early May. And he was a more serious challenger in'76 in what was still a four-man race for the Democratic nomination when he dropped out May 1 after losing the Pennsylvania primary to eventual nominee, then president, Jimmy Carter.

As those and other campaigns make clear, there's nothing inherently undesirable about a prolonged primary campaign that exposes the candidates to an electorate that deserves the opportunity to get to know as much as possible about the person who could wind up as their president.

If the candidates' comments and pronouncements make their shortcomings as presidential timber obvious, that's beneficial to the voters, if not necessarily to their party. It's only when the unending barrage of negativity from opponents paints a picture of shortcomings that may not even exist that a prolonged campaign does damage to the political process.

When the Puget Sound Business Hall of Fame was created 25 years ago to recognize business leaders from the past who had contributed to the economic growth of the region, some quietly expressed concern that the event might soon run out of past leaders to honor.

A quarter century on, as Junior Achievement of Washington and Puget Sound Business Journal prepare to induct four new laureates into the Hall of Fame, it's become clear that the region had no shortage of business leaders to celebrate.

In fact, while the event retains the name "Puget Sound," it has grown in the past couple of years to include Eastern Washington business leaders among those eligible for selection.

Thus at a time when the quest for heroes in business is perhaps more important than it has ever been, the number of business leaders chosen over the years to be honored at this unique annual event passes 100 Thursday evening when the following four laureates are inducted:

 Jim Douglas, who created Northgate as the nation's first shopping center designed as a mall, helped launch Seafair as part of the celebration of Seattle's 100th anniversary and and became the "pitchman" for the vision that became the Space Needle, symbol of Century 21.

Edie Hilliard, A radio pioneer as one of the first female general managers of a major market station, who then built one of the nation's largest independent radio networks.

Budd Gould, founder and principal owner, and still president, of Anthony's Restaurants, who brought the essence of waterfront dining to communities from Bellingham to Spokane and Richland to Bend.

William Ruckelshaus, perhaps the nation's leading environmental figure of the past half century. who served two presidents as administrator of the EPA and also fashioned a career in the private sector as CEO of Browning Ferris Industries and senior vice president of Weyerhaeuser Co. He now is strategic director at Madrona Venture Group.

It was the late Jack Ehrig, Seattle ad-agency head and a key supporter of Junior Achievement, who in 1986 approached me, as publisher of PSBJ, about creating a local event that would parallel the national Business Hall of Fame event for which FORTUNE Magazine was the partner of JA.

FORTUNE chose the laureates for JA to honor in those years, producing a special insert in the magazine to introduce them to its readers and JA honored the national laureates at a prestigious annual banquet that cities competed for because it attracted some of the biggest names in business nationally.

In a similar manner, laureate selection became the role for PSBJ and JA produced the first banquet to honor those selected in 1987.

FORTUNE's rule was that honorees had to be retired from day-to-day involvement with the companies where they had built their reputations. That sounded to me like a good way to ensure there wouldn't be any lobbying on behalf of a currently active CEO so that became our rule as well. That also has changed a few years ago with the induction of Eastside business leader and developer Kemper Freeman, still very much active in his business.

From the outset, I populated the selection committee with people who were not only business icons in their own right, but also understood far more about business history than I did. Thus each annual selection gathering became a lesson in local business lore.

And it was the insight of those members of the selection committee, including from the outset longtime community and business leader Jim Ellis, who personally knew more than half a century worth of the prospects, that brought forward well-known and not-so-well-known names from the past.

Because of the prominence of JA Seattle in the national organization, particularly because we had built what many viewed as the best local hall of fame program in JA, it became logical for the Seattle JA leadership to seek to have the national event in Seattle.

That finally occurred in 1992, which happened to be the year that Steve Jobs, then between jobs since he had been edged out of Apple a few years earlier, was a laureate. But Jobs, with typical unpredictability, apparently decided he didn't care to head up to Seattle from Silicon Valley for the event and the word spread the day of the banquet that he wouldn't be there.

But by late afternoon, to the relief of all, it was learned that Jobs had changed his mind and would, in fact, be on hand to accept his award. Only a few insiders were aware that FORTUNE publisher Jim Hayes, a high-visibility figure at the national banquet, had telephone Jobs to advise him that if he failed to show up, his name would never again appear in the magazine.

The business leaders of JA Washington in 2008, led by longtime venture capital executive Woody Howse and wine-industry leader Michael Towers, began building a case for the return of the national event to Seattle.

But it soon became clear, as the Great Recession got its grip on the nation's financial throat, that the world had changed. National gatherings of business leaders for something like a Hall of Fame banquet, and the significant corporate financial support necessary to carry it off, soon seemed unrealistic. None has been held since then.

But the JA Puget Sound Business Hall of Fame remains a viable and important reminder each year of the role successful business leaders can play in representing role models for the business leaders of today and the young people of JA who will be the business leaders of tomorrow.

Now that the so-called crowd-funding measure has whipped through Congress with a speed and level of bipartisan support unheard of in recent years, the effort to make it fulfill its promise of creating new companies and jobs begins. And that may prove more challenging than its passage.

Before any entrepreneur with a can't-fail idea rushes to the Internet in hope of attracting a crowd of investors, the Securities and Exchange Commission must first set the rules on how provisions of the law will be permitted to play out. The agency has 180 days to fulfill those duties.

The legislation, called the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS) will dramatically expand the way new companies can raise money and the reduce the oversight for smaller companies doing initial public offerings.

After quick congressional approval last week, President Obama, who admits he first learned about the proposal in early March, will be signing the bill Thursday.  

Supporters view it as a major breakthrough for funding entrepreneurial startups and thus eventually creating jobs. Critics are convinced it is a funding disaster in the making. Both will have to wait to see what the SEC comes up with.

That process that will draw its own critics as it unfolds and the fact it's now in the SEC's hands will likely create some apprehension for friends and opponents alike.

More than a few cynics have suggested that the bill's acronym, JOBS,  is a key reason few in Congress dared oppose it despite a lot of whispered reservations.

What the bill seeks to achieve is the opportunity for people (crowds) to organize via internet websites to fund companies. Using the internet to raise money is a process that's long been utilized for charitable and entertainment purposes.

 The crowd funding approach would open the way for people to invest as little as $500 and up to $10,000 in startups, eliminating the long-time steep financial requirement for investors, other than what's known as "friends and family" investors.

The kind of hype that has marked the rapid progress of this legislation through Congress is nowhere better displayed than on the website of Crowdfunding Offerings, which pitches its ability to provide an investment platform for "the crowd."

So here's the firm's pitch:

"Crowdfunding investing will allow start-ups and existing businesses to raise funds for their companies directly from the public who will invest small amounts of money in return for shares in the company. Americans will finally have the opportunity to invest in ways that have historically been reserved only for the wealthy. Together, America's entrepreneurs and investors will launch the next great ideas of our time!"

When I write occasionally about angel-investing issues, I turn to friends from Montana to California who are leaders among angel investors, with an occasional venture capitalist thrown in. Their collective insights inevitably create a better understanding of the issues, but disagreements among them frequently abound. And so it was with the crowd-funding measure.

The most vocal and opinionated among my angel friends on this issue is Bill Payne, who summers in the Flathead Valley of Montana and winters in the Las Vegas area. Payne, who gets to a conviction about his views because of the respect he receives from angel investors across the West and beyond, describes the bill as "a train wreck waiting to happen."

"Lots of investors will get scammed," Payne suggests. "Just give it a couple of years and Congress will be asking the SEC how they ever let this happen!".

Mike Elconin, San Diego-based leader of the major Southern California angel-investor organization Tech Coast Angels, sums up a concern that even some proponents share.

"The danger is that this new law will engender an expansion of boiler rooms in which slick sales people convince unsophisticated investors to put money into companies at highly inflated valuations," says Elconin. "Whether you think this is a problem for government to prevent, or a matter of buyer beware, depends on your political philosophy."

Dan Rosen, a respected Seattle attorney-investor and a policy director for the Angel Capital Association (ACA), is among those who supported the legislation and helped author an ACA internet post to help inform angels on the bill

Rosen, at the invitation of the White House, will be on hand at the bill signing Thursday. 

Liz Marchi, who presides over the Kalispell-based Frontier Angel Network, frames why many supporters have looked beyond those concerns at what many perceive as the underlying importance of the legislation.

"While there will inevitably be some hiccups in the execution of crowd-funding, I think it's a major breakthrough for early stage seed capital," she said.  "Congress has certainly allowed some risk with this bill, but it drives private capital down the food chain where it is desperately needed to seed innovation."

Tom Simpson, former venture-capital leader who now heads the Spokane Angel Alliance, sees the new law as "not perfect, but a step in the right direction."

"But I agree with Payne that the more investors a new company has, the more the likelihood for problems," he added.

Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who conceived the measure, offers perhaps the most compelling argument in favor of it.

He explained that the long-time practice of people funding their new businesses by mortgaging their homes is basically no longer possible. So a new source of start-up capital was necessary, particularly in the face of the disappearing hope of bank financing.

My own sense is that the typical congressional supporters of the bill went through the following conversation with themselves:

"Job creation is so politically important today that if it costs investors a few thousand dollars each down the road, it's worth it. Somebody has to pick up the tab for creating jobs and we certainly can't. Poor people buy lottery tickets all the time taking risk far greater than investing in a start-up company. So let's get on with it."

John Ellis, who was a reluctant CEO looking forward to retirement when he was called on 20 years ago to help find local owners to save the Seattle Mariners' franchise, admits that he wasn't even a baseball fan when he undertook the almost-lost cause of saving baseball for Seattle      

              __________________  

        Then-Gov. Mike Lowry recalls  

        legislative solution to fund what

               became Safeco Field 

                         (See sidebar below)  

               ___________________ 

"I didn't know much about baseball and wasn't really a baseball guy," Ellis admits, reflecting back on the events of late '91, early 1992. And he didn't really understand how deeply

embroiled he would become when he undertook the role that Seattle Mayor Norm Rice, and subsequently other business leaders, urged on him, a role in which he soon found how challenging saving the franchise would be.

 "I'm not sure if, to this day, anyone really knows how close we were to losing this franchise," says Ellis, who eventually served as chief executive officer of the Seattle Mariners and remains, 13 years after retirement, the team's primary representative to major league baseball.

It's a tale that deserves to be retold at a time when, rather than preparing a celebratory anniversary event for the Mariners to applaud what was achieved two decades ago, community leaders and baseball fans seem intent on railing against the Mariners for a variety of  perceived shortcomings.

It was in the midst of last week's outcry over the Mariners' push back on the idea of a new arena that they legitimately pointed out could bring a couple hundred more traffic-generating events a year to the Sodo neighborhood that I visited with Ellis over lunch. It was a visit scheduled several weeks ago so the controversy itself wasn't the topic of conversation, other than a brief, frustrated reference to it by Ellis.

I wanted his reflections on those tense days in late 1991, early '92, when an unlikely alliance of a dramatically wealthy Japanese businessman, a group of wealthy young local tech executives and a couple of senior community leaders was cobbled together to keep major league baseball in Seattle.

Ellis, as CEO of Bellevue-based Puget Sound Power & Light Co., had agreed to serve as an advisory board member to Mariner owner George Argyros, then to succeeding owner Jeff Smulyan, both commitments made as a community leader rather than baseball devotee. Thus he was logical member of a special advisory group Seattle's mayor turned to when it became clear Smulyan intended to sell the team.

"Norm's idea was for us to go out and find someone to buy the team, which at that point was appraised at $100 million," Ellis recalled. "After poking around for awhile looking for a possible buyer, we finally told the mayor we couldn't find anyone crazy enough to put up $100 million to buy a baseball team."

At that point, Ellis figured he could go ahead with his plan to retire as CEO of the  region's largest investor-owned utility, get on his boat and set out on a leisurely cruise to Alaska, as he had long planned to do.

But over that late December of '91, Sen. Slade Gorton's own efforts on behalf of saving the Mariners uncovered, to his astonishment, in a visit with Nintendo of America President Minoru Arakawa, an interest by his father in law, Haricho Yamauchi, purported then to be the third richest man in Japan, to buy the Mariners.

Ellis was quickly sucked into a furious effort to figure out how to get major league baseball, whose antipathy to any foreign ownership but Japanese ownership most of all, to even consider Yamauchi's offer while averting a sale to someone else that would render meaningless any Seattle effort.

After an aborted effort by "a totally naïve local group, led by the most naïve guy of all (referring to himself)" to meet with commissioner of baseball, Ellis found himself summoned to a what he describes as "a secret meeting," a "cloak-and-dagger"-like, assumed-name visit in St. Petersburg, FL, with unnamed major league owners.

Ellis arrived at the designated hotel and checked in for a meeting that never occurred with a small group of owners whose identity he never learned. But what did occur told him how close Seattle was to having the team leave before the efforts to save the franchise could even gain traction.

"I looked at the hotel shop across from the front desk and saw they were selling Tampa Bay Mariners shirts and hats," he said. "That experience and a couple of others that followed made it clear that the deal to move the team to Tampa Bay was already in the works.

"the simple fact is that if we hadn't put this together when we did, beating Smulyan's contractual deadline to get out of his Kingdome lease, the team would have been gone," Ellis said.

So as the Seattle-ownership deal began to gain traction, both the group of owners who had been brought together to join Yamauchi and Arakawa, and later, major league baseball executives as their opposition eased, insisted that Ellis be a part of the leadership of the team.

"At the June meeting of the owners, after all their conditions for our ownership group had finally been met, they told me they had two remaining conditions," Ellis recalls. "First they said they wanted me to serve as the team's rep to major league baseball, the person each team has who is empowered to act without anyone else's approval.

"The other condition floored me," he said with a smile. "They said they expected the owners' rep to have a significant financial interest in the team. I replied 'can you tell me what you mean by significant?' and they all broke out laughing because they had gotten to know me and knew the extent to which I could be involved. My financial role ended up being not very substantial."

But his involvement as CEO, between then and his retirement at the age of 71 at the end of the '99 season, was extensive and, as he recalls, every time he thought he'd be able to hand over the reins and head out on that boat trip to Alaska, a new challenge emerged.

First task was finding a new manager who would represent a statement. So after convincing Chuck Armstrong to come aboard as president and retaining Woody Woodward as general manager, he asked the two of them who should be the new manager "The guy atop both their lists was Lou Pinella."

The events that unfolded between then and his retirement included the Kingdome roof collapsing, the players strike, the memorable end-of-season race to the league championship series in 1995, the struggle to get voter approval for a new stadium, legislative alternative when the vote failed.

Although he retired in 1999, the stage had been set with the players and team executives who would two years later set the American League record for victories in a season at 116.

Since 2000 he has been the franchise's chairman emeritus, but has remained on the executive committee of major league baseball and has continued to be the Mariners' representative to MLB and on the ownership committee.

He remains a one-of-a-kind in major league baseball: as the team's retired top executive who never had more than a tiny piece of ownership but who is still viewed by the other teams' owners as the most important voice of Seattle baseball.

 
             -----------------------------------------

Mike Lowry recalls '95 legislative pact that

cemented franchise with stadium funding 

While John Ellis gets legitimate credit for his role in saving the Seattle Mariner franchise in 1992, of equal importance was Gov. Mike Lowry's role three years later when he brought the franchise back from the edge by getting the Legislature to agree on a new-stadium funding package.

A 1995 ballot measure to impose a sales-tax increase to fund construction of a new stadium was pushed from hopeless to near passage by the miraculous late-season dramatics of the Mariners that included a memorable victory over the New York Yankees before a championship-series loss to Cleveland. 

"After that sales-tax ballot issue failed by the razor-thin margin of about one-tenth of a percent, I remember Ellis calling a news conference to say the team would be put up for sale because it was losing a lot of money in the Kingdome," Lowry told me Tuesday in an e-mail exchange.

Lowry recalled that he was approached by his longtime friends, public-relations executive Bob Gogerty and Boeing's chief of governmental affairs, Bud Coffey, as well as the mayor and county executive, asking him to call a special legislative session to find a stadium-funding solution.

"I frankly wanted to do that," Lowry said, "because they had run a great campaign in their narrow sales-tax ballot loss. It was a media campaign that featured tremendous commercials that had young kids who were playing baseball morphing into the actual Mariner players, like Ken Griffey with a tag line that I think went like 'Heroes need a place to grow and become real.'"

Lowry says he called Ellis to ask if the owners could hold off on seeking to sell the team until he had a chance to see if he could get the lawmakers to agree to a brief special session limited to the Mariners' issue.

"I frankly got a positive reaction from the legislative leaders," Lowry noted. "I guess they didn't want to lose the Mariners either."

Thus in something that could probably have only happened in the political environment of yesterday, Lowry was able to work out a deal with key Democrats and Republicans from both houses on what he remembers as "a totally new funding package that was importantly different from the sale-tax measure."

"It was composed of taxes that were mostly on the users and beneficiaries of the new stadium, like admission taxes and sports bar taxes," he said. "As I recall, the only new tax in the package that was a stretch to say it was a beneficiary of the stadium was on rental cars."

In recalling his feelings in undertaking the legislative initiative, Lowry said "I simply did not want Seattle and the state to have the image of losing that major sports franchise. That struck me as Rust Belt."

The Washington Legislature ensured that the controversy over charter schools will become a focus in the state's gubernatorial campaign by specifically rejecting charters as part of any education-reform efforts in a bill that creates a handful of what will be called "collaborative schools."

The manner in which the legislation was conceived and approved, at the request of Gov. Christine Gregoire after she specifically warned that she would veto any bill authorizing charter schools, has "controversy" written all over it.

Passed in the midst of an extended session aimed at resolving the state's budget crisis, the bill is titled "collaborative schools for innovation and success pilot program." It calls for a five-year program involving six elementary schools, each of which will be operated by pairing to-be-determined school districts with colleges of education in the state.

The bill basically does two things that, for sure, won't make proponents of dramatic change in the state's education system very happy. It requires, basically, that all parts of the current schools infrastructure -- administrators, teachers unions and what's called "the professional education standards board" - must sign off on any innovative programs conceived for the handful of schools permitted to participate. And it ensures that no wholesale changes would be possible until the five years of testing for those few schools provided for in the bill have been fulfilled and evaluated.

One of those left unhappy is Rep. Eric Pettigrew, the respected African-American Democrat whose House district includes some of Seattle's at-risk neighborhoods and who had co-sponsored a bill to permit charter schools in Washington State.

"This bill isn't even close," Pettigrew told me in a telephone interview. "We have been doing things the same way for too long and accepting a certain failure rate and I don't think that's acceptable."

"Charter schools provide the flexibility to be nimble in seeking education changes," he added. "Probably the most frustrating thing about the entire experience is that discussion of what's best for the kids never seems to really conclude before it trails off into organizations that will need to be involved."

The comment frames the reason for controversy over charter schools in this state, one of the last nine in which charters are prohibited. Whether what's best for the kids is the unquestioned number one issue inevitably collides with many teachers and teacher advocates who will insist that even if kids' needs are the priority, what's good for teachers is also an issue. The stronger the teachers union in a state, the more that conflict comes into play.

The Seattle Times, in a January editorial on the bill proposed by Pettigrew and Sen. Steve Litzow, a Republican from Mercer Island, said: "Political courage is often lacking in Olympia, making Pettigrew's willingness to buck the Democratic Party's usual fidelity to the Washington Education Association all the more striking."

"Expect contentious debate," The Times editorial continued. "In particular, the teachers union sees charter schools as a threat. Yes, Washington state voters rejected charter-school proposals three times. But we know a lot more about these innovative public schools since the last failed measure in 2004."

Indicating that his "courage" isn't likely to wane in the coming months as likely Democratic gubernatorial standard-bearer Jay Inslee picks up the education ball his party has crafted for him and runs with it, Pettigrew said "if the unions or even my fellow Democrats want to come after me, fine."

Atty. Gen. Rob McKenna, the presumptive Republican gubernatorial nominee who has promised to make education reform and funding a focal point of his campaign, says of the collaborative-schools idea "There is no evidence that they will actually work. Moreover, it will take years before we know if they do."

"I support trying new approaches to improve education for our children right now," he added. "And a smarter approach would be to adopt models that have a proven track record of success, like high-performing public charter schools that are working in 41 other states." 

McKenna says both collaborative schools and charter schools should be "tools in the toolkit" for those seeking a new education model.

Inslee, in a wide-ranging blueprint for education reform to create "An innovative, accountable education system: building a better future for every child and a stronger economy for Washington," called for change in most aspects of the economy that might impact education funding.

Thus his plan for educational reform and adequate funding calls for "reinvigorating the economy..." "Reverse the trend of healthcare inflation eating into education spending..." "Sunset corporate tax loopholes that have outlived their purpose..." and "Expand a system of quality improvement to all government agencies..."

Inslee says his "vision for an education system by 2020" includes that "achievement and opportunity gaps among students are eliminated."

An ongoing challenge for Inslee and Democrats in rejecting the idea of even having charter schools on the education-reform table is that some prominent, long-time Democrat supporters appear reluctant to get aboard.

Perhaps most challenging for them is Nick Hanauer, the venture capitalist and avowed "lifelong Democrat and committed progressive," who views Republican positions on social issues and taxation as "misguided," but says "McKenna is on the right track and we are not" on school reform.

"We may be headed in the right direction, but we aren't in the right lane," Hanauer told the head of the state teachers' union in a February e-mail exchange. "It is not classroom teachers who are afraid of change and innovation, it is their union." 

While charter schools are anathema to teachers' unions, they have gathered supporters from among some of those who toil in the classrooms, including Erin Gustafson, who grew up on Mercer Island but began her teaching career in one of California's poverty pockets.

"My path to supporting charters began 16 years ago when I taught fifth grade at a high-poverty school in Vallejo," Gustason told me. "I became disillusioned with the poor teaching, union rules that protected that, and the restrictions of operating in a large system."

Gustafson, now married and the mother of children 9 and 7 and a substitute teacher, became involved in a new teacher-created education-reform non-profit called Teachers United, born a year ago with the goal of "giving teachers a voice in policy debates."

 She is now policy director for the group, which advocated last session for charter schools as one of the choices that need to be available in Washington State. She was among teachers from the organization who testified before the legislature's education committees on behalf of charter schools.

"After doing a lot of research and visiting several public charter schools in California, I have come to believe that successful public charters are an effective way of closing the achievement gap," she said. "We took teachers who were interested to visit high-performance charters across the country and, for those teachers, seeing was believing so they decided to advocate for charters."