As craft beer comes to rival quality wine as a palate pleaser for the discriminating, the hop industry whose bitter green cones give the beer its special taste is surging and thus playing an increasingly important role in the economy of the Valley and also Washington State.

The fields of grapes for Washington's successful and growing wine industry are spread across the Yakima Valley while the fields where the hops are grown are far less visible and the acres less numerous. But the fact is that hop growers and their industry, by far the largest in the nation, predate the wine industry by several decades.

Now the hop industry, after years of ups and downs that were mostly downers, is riding a growth wave thanks to the surging popularity of craft beer, most of which is brewed with hops from the Yakima Valley.

"The hop industry is booming right now and adding huge value to the Yakima Valley economy," says David McFadden, president of the Yakima County Development Association. "We are seeing hop processors purchase new buildings, add new equipment and boost local payrolls. Agriculture is very strong right now and hops are complementing our farmers' livelihoods." 

Ann George

For comparison, it's important to note that the hop industry's approximately $160 million annual contribution to Washington's economy is only 14^th on the state's agricultural-products values and just a slice of the $2.25 billion annual production of the number one apple industry. But as McFadden notes, the industry's surge is bringing other benefits as well.

"The past few years have been an exciting up and thus a nice change for the industry," notes Ann George, who has been the chief administrator for the Washington Hop Industry association for 27 years and also serves as the chief administrative person for the Hop Growers of America.

"The success of the industry in the past few years has attracted back some of the young talent that had moved away from the farms," she adds, noting that many of the farmers are adding hops to their agricultural-product mix, with the acreage dedicated to hops being between one-quarter acre and 10 acres.

George is in Austria this week for the annual summer gathering of the International Hop Growers Convention, the global organization for hop growers where she chairs what may be the most important commission, called the Commission on Regulatory Harmonization. She thus is the global organization's key person in dealing with the trade and pesticide rules that are the primary challenge for craft brewing as the industry becomes ever more attractive globally, thus adding countries into which hops are sold.

George, one of whose duties is tracking statistics for the industry, says 74 percent of the 2014 hop crop will be from acreage in Washington State, 14 percent from Oregon (virtually all of that produced in the Willamette Valley) and 10 percent from Idaho.

Almost 90 percent of the U.S. hop production is exported to other countries, where craft-brewing industries are either already in existence of where the industry is beginning to take shape.

Most hop farmers in the Valley are third or fourth generation and one of the largest and best-known of those is B. T. Loftus Ranches, which began in 1932 when the first five acres of hops were planted by the great grandparents of current owners Patrick Smith, Meghann Quinn, and Kevin Smith.

The Bale Breaker Brewery, smack in the middle of the Lofus hop fields, opened in April of 2014 as the latest Loftus venture.

Germany, which produces 60 percent of the world's hops, and the Yakima Valley, which produces 25 percent of the world crop and 80 percent of the U.S. hop crop, are the two most noteworthy geographic areas for hop production.

Pete Mahony

Thus it's natural that there would be a convergence in some manner for the two most noted hop-producing regions. And the convergence is the decades-long presence in the Yakima Valley of the U.S. arm of the Barth-Haas Group, the world's largest supplier of hop products and services. Barth-Haas, founded in 1794, is now managed by the seventh and eighth generations of the Barth family and has roughly a 30 percent share of the hops market in Germany.

The U.S. arm of the company, John I. Haas, Inc., which owns and operates its own hop farms, warehouses, pellet and extraction plants and has been a fixture in the Yakima Valley hop industry for some 70 years, next month celebrates its 100th birthday.

Peter Mahony, who is Director of Supply Chain Management for John I. Haas, Inc., and has been with the Washington, D.C., based company for 28 years, explains that hops are "the spice of beer," giving the brew its flavor. And craft brewers use about 6-to-8 times as much hops as major brewers and their brews use one of the variety of what are called aroma hops, that magnify the beer flavor, whereas brewing used to involve what is known as alpha hops, still the primary hop for major breweries.

Mahony notes that acreage devoted to aroma hops in the Yakima Valley has become about 60 percent of the annual harvest, which extends from late August to early October and involves about 29,000 acres in the Yakima area with the average size farm about 450 acres on which hops are one of several crops grown.

Mahony, who says the 1,500 acres that Haas farms in the Valley is one planted in hops, expects that the growth of craft brewing and thus the health of the hop industry and its aroma varieties will continue, "but for how long is the million-dollar question."

He points to the attendance at the annual craft-brewers conference as a cause for long-term optimism for hop growers, noting "attendance at this year's crafters' conference was up 40 percent over the year before, to more than 9,000 attendees."

If there is any doubt that craft brewing is attracting a whole new generation of beer consumers around the globe, it should be dispelled by the advise from a beer sommelier at a Barth tasting event in Germany.

To those who might not be familiar with the fact there are beer sommeliers, Ann George makes the point that "more and more hospitality groups have a beer sommelier as well as a wine sommelier."

As the sommelier quotes puts it: "You shouldn't drink our beers when you're thirsty. Our beers should be drunk in small quantities on special occasions."

Some are seeing the sea change in the leadership styles of the new CEOs of both Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as evidence that even the region's most competition-driven company might be acknowledging that the collaborative focus of workplace millenials could be superseding the competitive trademark of boomers.

Among those sharing that sense of a possible dramatic shift at Microsoft is John Buller, who has spent his life in sports and retail environments where keeping score and winning were the keys to success. But he admits now, as he observes what he perceives as a major workplace shift, that he was always dogged by the sense that somehow collaboration had a place in the success equation.

Anna Liotta

Buller was a top executive at the old Bon Marche retail chain, as well as successful restaurateur, president of Tully's Coffee, and in his collegiate days in the late '60s a Husky basketball star then an assistant coach.

He sees the ascendance of Satya Nadella to the top role at Microsoft and the hiring of Susan Desmond-Hellman as CEO of the Gates Foundation as significant.

So does Anna Liotta, Seattle author and speaker who counsels businesses on unlocking generational codes to enhance workplace effectiveness.

John Buller

"I think it's fundamental for Microsoft, it if is to have exponential growth again, to shift from combative to collaborative in its workplace environment," Liotta said. "Microsoft employees don't now talk with pride about working at Microsoft, and this newest generation will need attitudes and beliefs they share and need to be proud to be where they work and work together in a collaborative environment in order to want to stay."

As a recent article in Puget Sound Business Journal pointed out, "Nadella is a very different man from (Steve) Ballmer. Where Ballmer is bombastic and over the top, Nadella is understated and thoughtful."

Buller makes the point that a similar shift in thinking could have had a role in the selection of Susan Desmond-Hellman, M.D., plucked from her role as chancellor of the University of California San Francisco to be the first non-Microsoft CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Of course Microsoft isn't the only regional company where must-win attitudes have been the key to success. It's merely the major local company whose recent eye-catching changes in command at the corporate and foundation have sparked the opportunity for conversations about what lies ahead in the workplace culture.

It would be difficult to think of many successful companies in the Seattle area for which competitive juices haven't played a ke y role in their success.

Teri Citterman

Thus the thoughts about boomer competitiveness giving way to millennial collaborations inevitably stir conversations where doubt or disagreement are sometimes as much in evidence as agreement.

Buller, in fact, is an interesting persona to be focusing on the transition, which he is doing to the extent of packaging a seminar and producing a blog to help guide corporate executives.

Buller is intimately familier with culture changes since his role as senior team leader for Federated Stores and its The Bon outlets was to engineer one, guiding a shift from "a clerk culture to a sales culture," as he describes the charge.

It was 20 years ago that his Survival Guide for Bureaucratic Warriors was published, with chapters written on first-class flights as he crisscrossed the country to train employees on changing their culture.

"Warriors work for a passion in their lives while soldiers just take orders," Buller said, summing up the premise for the book, and suggesting that "the way to make millenials more passionate and engaged, becoming warriors, is to let them have ownership."

"It's a fallacy to suggest that competition and collaboration are diametrically opposed," Liotta said. "Millenials do love to win, but within that they love to also know their part in the winning, meaning millenials want a lot of feedback on how they are doing," Liotta said of the generation that numbers 76 million in the workplace. That number, incidentally, compares with 80 million boomers.

"A winning attitude is absolutely in line with an attitude of collaboration," she added. "Millenials just don't accept the bankrupt strategy of win at all costs."

Liotta comes by her generational savvy from birth on since she notes in her book Unlocking Generational Codes that "as number 18 in a family of 19 children, I started to experience generational impacts on life at a very early age."

She is CEO of Resultance Inc., where her consulting services and guidance on generational issues have brought her before business organizations around the country.

Another person who has explored workplace issues, but from the CEO's viewpoint, is Teri Citterman, whose recently publishedFrom the CEO's Perspective is a collection of interviews with CEO's from a range of companies on the challenges of leadership.

"A characteristic of millenials is that they expect their ideas will be heard or appreciated, even though they haven't necessarily earned the right to be heard or appreciated," said Citterman, also a GenXer.

"Yes, collaboration is replacing competition as a workplace theme, you can see that everywhere," she said. "competition is a four-letter word."

This discussion is likely to become more pervasive at lunch meetings and cocktail visits, particularly for boomers, or the even older generation tagged Traditionalists, who would have to change the codes of a lifetime to believe companies can win out over competitors without competition being the mantra.

As Buller and I discussed this over coffee for our interview, together we came up with the tagline: "In today's world you will have to learn to collaborate in order to win." 

It's been a quarter century since the unusual team of an academic prof and a medical doctor was lured to Seattle to launch what would became the Institute for Prostate Cancer Research (IPCR), where a world-class team and leading-edge initiatives have made Seattle a nexus for prostate cancer research and care.

Paul Lange, M.D. and Robert Vessella, PhD, had already been a team at the University of Minnesota for a dozen years when they decided in 1989 to accept an offer to come to the University of Washington to launch the collaborative effort that a few years later would officially become IPCR. By then it would be a collaboration between University of Washington Medical Center and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Paul Lange, M.D.

In a sense, Lange and Vessella were medical opportunists in deciding to focus on a cancer for which they thought "there might be a light at the end of the tunnel," despite the fact that at that point there was basically no funding available for prostate-cancer research. "No one really cared at the time about an old man's disease," Lange recalled.

Appropriately but coincidentally, the 25^th anniversary of the Lange-Vessella partnership in Seattle comes as IPCR is in the midst of a $20 million fund-raising campaign aimed at creating an innovative program for individualized treatment of prostate-cancer sufferers around the state.

Plus it was recently announced that IPCR will be part of a team of prestigious institutions to participate in a $10 million grant from the Stand Up to Cancer program, which is supported by the American Association of Cancer Research and the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

Robert Vessella, Ph.D

IPCR will be partnering with Harvard, University of Michigan, Sloan Kettering and London University, names that indicate the role that IPCR has come to play in prostate-cancer research around the world.

The image that has developed since the UWMC and The Hutch collaboration became formal as IPCR in about 2000 is such that there's a growing sense that it could well be the place where a cure for the disease, now certainly when rather than if, comes about.

IPCR ranks third in the country for federal funding, with about $10 million in 2012, and is in the top five in prostate-cancer funding, Lange says. Over the years, he estimates, at least $60 million, mostly from NIH, has come to IPCR, a number made more impressive by the fact it doesn't include the 50 percent "institutional overhead" that UW takes from the original grant amount. The Hutch takes 60 percent.

But ironically, IPCR has dramatically lagged in raising the private funds that the NIH views as a key to its own funding decisions.

"We are significantly behind the eight to 10 prostate-cancer research institutions in the country in keeping up with private fund raising, which is essential if we are to retain a world-class team and explore new ideas that need to be developed because they are not yet primetime enough for the NIH to fund," says Lange.

Thus the importance of the fund-raising campaign now under way called ACT-SMART, which seeks to raise $20 million over five years from private sources to create relationships with a dozen or more medical facilities around the state in developing individualized treatment programs for residents of various communities.

The goal of ACT-SMART is to sequence the whole genome of patients and their prostate cancers, focus on the most important abnormal genes in the cancer and then devise a targeted individualized treatment program, then patients are sent home to have their individualized treatment carried out in their hometown medical facility.

"We are going to use genomic medicine to determine what the patient's genes show, then develop targeted therapies aimed at the specific cancer," Lange said, noting that eventually the program will be extended to Oregon, then Idaho and Montana.

A couple of developments in the early '90s assured IPCR's emergence as a world-class institute in the field of prostate-cancer research and cemented a pre-eminent role for Lange and Vessella as globally recognized leaders in the quest for answers to prostate cancer.

One of those developments came in 1992 with an innovation called "rapid autopsies" that has attracted the attention of researchers both nationally and internationally as well as pharmaceutical companies. It's a process in which cancer tissue that has metastasized is removed from the bodies of a deceased prostate-cancer victims with the same speed and precision as organs are removed for transplant.

The roughly 100 such autopsies that Lange's team has performed since the process was pioneered at IPCR, and which are conducted at only one other institution in the county, allow harvested cancer cells to be implanted in mice. Lange says about 15 percent of the implants take, becoming what are referred to thereafter as "tumor avatars," and producing thousands of samples.

Another key development in 1992 was a partnership that emerged with Leroy Hood, who had recently arrived at the University of Washington, with funding from Bill Gates Jr, to found and chair the Molecular Biotechnology Department.

Hood, already internationally prominent as developer of the automated DNA sequencer that was the key to the human genome project, recalled in an interview how he and Lange, both heading departments at UW, got together at a retreat to discuss how genomics could be applied to prostate-cancer research.

"We decided to work together and I outlined on a napkin at dinner a genomic approach to prostate-cancer research," Hood recalls. "Then Paul and I agreed to help Michael Milkin, as he created a series of seminal meetings on the genomic approach to prostate cancer."

"Lee was hugely instrumental in putting us in the national spotlight," Lange said. "Thanks to a variety of influences, Lee decided to devote a large part of his translational research efforts to prostate cancer. The support of the Michael Milkin organization to the tune of about $12 million over the years was largely due to the participation of Lee and his group in our research efforts."

Hood continued to work with Lange and Vessella until he left UW in 2000 to found the Institute for Systems medicine, which he still heads.

It was in 1993 that Lange and Vessella began discussing with researchers at The Hutch the idea of teaming to form an institute. And that was also the year that the first grant, from the NIH O'Brien Center, was received, for $2.8 million in direct costs over a five-year period, at the end of which it was renewed again for another five years.

Lange routinely ascribes human characteristics to the cancer he seeks to conquer, possibly viewing the opponent whose ways occupy much of his attention as a worthy foe. Thus he characterizes the PSA test, which he helped gain approval for in testimony on its benefits before the FDA on several occasions in the early '90, as "allowing us to know what the cancer is thinking."

And in explaining to a listener that the prostate cancer his team deprived of the testosterone it needed to survive soon began a comeback, Lange's voice rises to exclaim: "It learned to live without it!" Then he continues to explain, replaying the excited frustration he likely felt at the time, as further research determined "no, it learned to make its own testosterone! Like the cancer said 'hey guys, we're going to get really sick if we don't do something about this!.'"

But that finding was a research victory because it indicated that the understanding that cancer needed testosterone to survive was accurate.

Perhaps by attributing those human characteristics to his foe, the victory over prostate cancer, when it comes, will feel more personal and thus more satisfying for Lange, whose personal battle included his having to undergo surgery for his own prostate cancer a few years ago.

Although the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) hasn't yet proposed an increase in the financial resources required for an individual investor to be accredited, the Angel Capital Association (ACA) fears such a move may loom ahead and has been pressing its members to collectively protest such a step.

The ACA sees the issue as having the potential to dramatically deplete the ranks of what are officially called accredited investors, individuals who are free to make the kind of high-risk investments that fuel the funding of financially risky early stage companies that are key contributors to job creation. All angels are accredited investors

Dan Rosen

The issue is front and center right now because when Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act four years ago, it retained the long-time "accredited investor" threshold of $1 million net worth and $200,000 of annual income but ordered the SEC to do a quadrennial review of the qualifications. The first of those four-year reviews is to be due to conclude next month.

Angel-investor groups successfully overcame an attempt to include in Dodd-Frank a change that would have basically disqualified what by some estimates would have been up to 50 percent of angel investors by boosting the accredited minimums to $2.5 million net worth and annual individual income of $400,000.

But Congress did include in what is officially the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act a change to preclude primary residences from the $1 million-net-worth calculation.

The ACA website plays the job-creation card in preparing for a possible campaign by urging members: "Do you believe in preserving the health of early stage companies and their role in job creation? Then join the Angel Capital Association campaign to 'protect angel funding.'"

Dan Rosen, chairman of the Seattle-based Alliance of Angels and a longtime leader in ACA, says "a change to make the accredited investor definition more restrictive is exceedingly bad public policy."

"This is a time when America needs to unleash innovation and create exactly the kind of jobs that high-growth startups provide," argues Rosen, who until a few months ago chaired the ACA public policy committtee . "Angels fund most of these high-growth startups, investing well over $20-billion per year." 

"We are not financial institutions in New York or Boston, we are individuals in every major city and town in the U.S. who invest not only our money, but also our knowledge and experience, to help these high-growth startups get off the ground and flourish," wrote Rosen, who is CEO and president of Dan Rosen & Associates, a technology investment and advisory firm

Although the multi-part mission of the SEC includes helping facilitate capital formation, the agency makes clear its "investor protection mission" has become most compelling, particularly after the excesses that led up to the "Great Recession."

Thus there is an amusing bit of irony as the SEC may move to "protect" a major segment of the high-net-worth angel-investor category by removing their "accredited" status while preparing to remove protections for scores or "unaccredited" investors by opening the door for them to do crowd-funding investment in startups.

Crowd funding is a concept spawned by legislation known as the JOBS Act, passed by Congress four years ago to permit entrepreneurs or a start-up business to raise up to a $1million a year by selling equity on the internet to up to 500 "unaccredited" investors. Some described passage of the bill and its signing by the president as a "democratization of investments." In essence, Congress felt those across the financial spectrum should all have a chance to own a piece of a company.

The ACA says a survey of its 12,000 members, who are the most active angel investors in the country, found that if the definition of accredited investor was changed to add an inflation factor, which is the standard being urged by those pressing for a change, more than 25 percent of its members would fall below the new threshold. The inflation factor would relate to the inflation that has occurred since 1972, when the accredited regulation first came about.

ACA, whose campaign to bring pressure against the change includes form letter and email template on its website, says such a change would be "devastating," particularly outside the angel-heavy population centers of New York, California and Boston. It claims the number of angel investors across the country outside those three areas would fall by one third.

Even so, not all angels oppose raising the bar for individuals to quality as accredited investors.

Steven J. Schueth, president of First Affirmative Financial Network in Colorado Springs, who has been a leader in the sustainable and responsible investment industry for more than 20 years and created the prominent SRI Conference that rotates annually around the West, is one who isn't sure a change would be bad.

"With my fiduciary duty hat on, I could make the argument that an investor with only $1 million in liquid, investable net worth is probably too small to be investing in private deals," Scheuth said in an email exchange. "I don't think someone with only $1 million has any business playing in this game."

I have assumed that increasing the qualification for accredited investor might have a large impact on sustainable and renewable startups seeking investment and asked Schueth if there might be less S-R investing.

"Perhaps there would be, but would that be bad?  Maybe for entrepreneurs who are looking for capital from less-than-the-most savvy investors," he said. "But would it be bad for investors who now only meet the minimum accredited investor threshold?  Not in most cases.  There's a reason those rules were promulgated in 1972-to protect some people from themselves."

There are some investors who with some portion of their portfolio seek higher positive impact and care less about risk adjusted returns," Schueth added. "When I talk with these people, I try to help them think about making these kinds of investments out of their philanthropy budget; or at least know that the likelihood of making little or no financial return is a high probability."

I asked Schueth, whom I had quoted in previous columns because of his reputation in the sustainable and renewable investments arena, whether he thought it was interesting that while Congressional direction may guide a boost in what it takes to be qualified investor, crowd-funding is opening the door, also at congressional direction, to let everyone in.

"I don't believe I have ever heard anyone claim that Congress is a rational beast," he replied. 

There won't be a liquor-privatization initiative on the ballot in Oregon this fall and there seems to be a growing sense that Oregonians have decided Washington voters signed off on a bad deal when they passed Initiative 1183 in the fall of 2011, taking their state out of the liquor business.

Officially, the Oregon-ballot effort died last week because major grocery chains that wanted the opportunity to sell liquor said they were giving up on any hope of collecting the necessary signatures to out the initiative before voters this fall. Those proponents of the Oregon initiative said they will continue seeking privatization of liquor sales through the Legislature or by putting a measure on the 2016 ballot.

But as Oregonians look north across the Columbia River, they apparently perceive that what Washington voters bought themselves was dramatically higher liquor taxes, a dramatic rise in alcohol-related emergency-room visits and small businesses being squeezed out of business.

When Washington voters approved the privatization of liquor sales, they did so with the promise of lower prices. Instead, they got sticker shock at the checkout counter while the state got a $200 million windfall.

Meanwhile, many of Washington's independent spirits retailers and craft distilleries, viewed as important economic engines in many local communities, were being squeezed out of the market.

And perhaps significantly, Costco, which put enough money behind the effort to pass the Washington initiative that some media stories referred to the ballot measure as "the Costco initiative," decided not to participate in the funding for an Oregon initiative campaign.

One aspect of the fallout in Oregon from passage of the Washington initiative has apparently been some change in the approach of the Oregon liquor control agency, which some have described as "loosening a bit" in its relations with private liquor sellers. Some of those retailers contacted in one survey said the agency was "doing a good job."

Plus, the agency has made friends, in part, by leaving the distinct impression that it views part of its mission as an economic development role with small businesses involved in producing or selling liquor, in marked contrast to the fact the new world liquor order in Washington has made clear that basically there are two distributors that control the flow of liquor nationally.

That prompted one Oregon observer to remark "who is likely to do a better job for consumers, the state or two big national companies?"

Meanwhile, a recent study noted just what Washington residents bought themselves by passing the initiative.

The most striking part of the study focused on the increase in alcohol-related emergency room visits in King County, which was chosen because it had the most available data. In the 16 months following liquor privatization, more than 5,500 alcohol-related visits were made to emergency rooms, 50 percent more than they expected, and an increase most significant among teens and young adults.

Plus there are now four times as many liquor outlets in Washington state as there were before the initiative's passage.

I am not really an objective observer in this discussion since I voted against the initiative, solely because I vote "no" on any complex initiative, as this one was. I have voted for only one initiative, a measure years ago that rolled back a sales-tax increase that the legislature had approved. It was a simple question: should the sales tax be rolled back.

My argument about initiatives has always been: measures that become law should emerge from the give and take of the legislative process, whereas most initiatives are basically written at a kitchen table by a half dozen people who have a cause, and a contrary voice is never permitted at the table. So a ballot measure emerges that represents only one side of an issue, And frequently hidden within its provisions is the excess that comes from single-sided discussion.

Welcome to a review of what happened with Initiative 1183.

And with respect to the view of Oregonians about what they see happening north of the Columbia River, there seems to be a growing sense that Washington residents screwed up in passing the initiative. And with that comes a satisfied sense that those Washington voters have no one to blame but themselves.

As I've noted in previous columns, the idea of writing the power of citizens to initiate legislation was considered for possible inclusions in the U.S. Constitution.

But Thomas Jefferson turned back the effort with the simple admonition that if the people had the power to legislate, governmental chaos would result.

Those who provided for the initiative process, primarily western states, weren't listening.

The Washington News Council, the nation's last media-watchdog organization, shuts its doors this month at a time when the proliferation of social media, bloggers and self-styled online "journalists" may make the need for some sort of "critical observer" for their offerings more important than it ever was with conventional media.

John Hamer, who founded the organization in 1998 through one-on-one conversations with some of the area's most prominent community and business leaders to create his founding board, in many ways became a national torch-bearer for the concept of media oversight.

John Hamer

After 16 years of overseeing the News Council's successes and challenges, Hamer decided at the age of 68 it was time to step down, but a successor didn't emerge and so the board, guided by Fremont businesswoman and longtime chair Suzie Burke, decided it was time to shutter the organization.

He doesn't plan to retire so much as "change the method" of seeking to advance his cause, and suggests "the public needs to find new ways to engage in media oversight and maybe take the news council concept to the next level."

"Oversight has to become much more democratic, with much more public engagement," Hamer said. "If everyone can be a journalist in this social-media era, then everyone needs to become a media critic, or at least a media skeptic. They need to hold their social-media favorites to be accountable."

During WNC's early days, Hamer guided it to become the key to growth of the concept nationally, getting a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to sponsor a nationwide contest to start two more news councils. California, which has since closed its doors, and New England, which metamorphosed out of a watchdog role, were launched by WNC.

And he created the concept of a "TAO of Journalism pledge," which provides for media, whether conventional, blogger or Facebook poster, to promise its audience that they will be "Transparent about who you are, Accountable for your mistakes, and Open to other points of view."

Hamer says the pledge has come to be adopted, including use of the TAO of Journalism seal, by a large number of high school and higher education publications. He hopes to pursue broader awareness of and commitment to the pledge.

"Basically what the News Council sought to promote was accountability, which incorporates all the key issues like truthfulness, integrity, accuracy," said Hamer, adding that those are the things that the public must now demand of the media entities they support.

But the News Council always operated on a financial shoestring, with Hamer having to serve as the equivalent of development officer as well as guiding day-to-day operations.

And the end might have come sooner had it not been for a $100,000 matching grant from Bill Gates Sr., an initial board member and constant believer in the importance of WNC's role, in each of the past three years.

One who isn't so sure of a process by which the public becomes watchdog for whatever their favorite media happens to be is workable is Ken Hatch. As a member of Hamer's founding board and a retired broadcast executive who as head of KIRO Inc., when it was a television-and-radio property owned by one of the nation major broadcasting corporations, was one of the most powerful media people in the region.

"This is a major loss to a civil society that believes in a balanced freedom the press," Hatch told me in an email exchange. "The loss of WNC allowed unchecked forces with money to have a power not healthy for our society. I fear for the future when there is no 'point-counterpoint' to create reason."

I was a member of the WNC board for several years after my retirement as publisher of Puget Sound Business Journal and Hamer and I discussed on various occasions how the organization might move beyond keeping an eye on conventional media and look to watchdogging the new media filled with journalistic wannabes.

The concerns about internet and social media integrity and accountability are not much different than concerns that have always existed about newspapers, broadcasters and similar communications entities.

A key challenge is knowing what motivates the writer ofsomething on the internet. One that routinely concerns me is when bloggers or others are paid to write something and there is no indication for the reader that "hey, I got money to write this."

Of course that sometimes happened, and still does, in what Hamer refers to as "legacy media," for example as when a newspaper might write a story that the subject paid for. Some in what I view as media myopia, might ask "Why does that matter," as if integrity should somehow not be a part of accuracy.

I once suggested to the publisher of a daily newspaper that there was an ironic opportunity for those in legacy media to carve out an indispensable role for themselves by occasionally, perhaps weekly, doing a review of new-media or blog sites to offer "trustworthy" and "non-trustworthy" blog sites. Perhaps using a panel of experts to evaluate those sites.

My sense was that those who really care about the legitimacy or accuracy of what they are reading might well look to experts for guidance.

As Hamer summed it up for me:

"In my view, everyone needs to become part of a new 'Citizens News Counsel,' or some such name, to hold ALL journalists (mainstream, bloggers, Facebookers, Tweeters, etc.) accountable for accuracy, fairness and ethics," he said.

"It's time to 'crowdsource' media ethics. But citizens need guidelines to know who they can trust."

(Editor's note: This week's Harp is actually an entrepreneur-focused column dealing with my two favorite types of entrepreneurs - women entrepreneurs and Irish ones. Both are in the spotlight with developments this week and next.)

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Seattle-area women entrepreneurs came into sharp focus Tuesday evening at the Zino Society's first ever investment forum devoted exclusively to women entrepreneurs seeking angel capital. And a band of Irish enterpreneurs takes center stage in the Seattle area next week with an array of visits to local companies and a reception hosted by Seattle's Irish mayor.

The audience for the Zino event at the Columbia Tower Club was evidence that female entrepreneurs as well as female investors are no longer a rare breed in this area.

But Zino CEO and founder Cathi Hatch noted for the audience of mostly woman that national statistics indicate that companies with at least one woman on their founding team are about 18 percent less likely to attract equity investors than their all-male counterparts.

As the number of female entrepreneurs guiding start-up businesses in search of capital grows, the panel of expert judges that Hatch assembled to be on hand made it obvious that entrepreneurial success stories for women is not a totally new phenomenon.

Fran Bigelow opened her first European-style chocolate shop in Seattle 32 years ago and has over time become known by her industry organization as "the best overall chocolatier in the United States.

Renee Behnke brought her retail and food background together with her husband, Karl's, business background, to launch Sur La Table almost 20 years ago and grew it into a national company that they recently sold.

Although since neither Bigelow nor Behnke needed start-up capital, they differed from most of the entrereneur hopefuls in attendance last night. But the successes of both gave evidence that women have all the skills necessary to build hugely successful businesses.

The fact there's no shortage of female entrepreneur hopefuls was pointed up by the fact a dozen companies were selected to give elevator pitches to the attendees and eight had the opportunity for five-minute pitches.

The winning firm was Byndyl, "a digital media and payment platform delivering payments, ads, coupons and surveys to unattended retail," has already raised money

As for the Irish business part of this column, next week will find a delegation of about 100 Irish entrepreneurs visiting Seattle, with the highlight a reception hosted by Seattle's Irish mayor. Ed Murray, with a couple of local Irish bankers, as well as Mick McHugh, proprietor of Seattle's iconic Irish pub among the welcoming audience.

All the Irish entrepreneurs visiting Seattle, as well as Vancouver next week, are winners of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year competition in Ireland, including the 2014 crop of 24 entrepreneurs.

Frank O'Keeffe, the E-Y Ireland partner who first envisioned the program of annual visits a decade ago, notes that while "joint ventures, new projects and investment have most certainly come out of the retreats," the goal was to boost Irish entrepreneurs to compete better at home with multi-national companies that have located in Ireland.

"Through our interaction with the very best Irish entrepreneurs, we began to notice the increasing threat (the multi-nationals) posed to our indigenous businesses to attract the best talent and maintain their market position," O'Keeffe explained.

"At the time, there was a need for a greater industry-led support system that could assist Irish entrepreneurs in growing their businesses both at home and in the global marketplace," he added.

"We realized that E-Y Entrepreneur of The Year (EOY) could develop beyond the award to become a strategic development programme for Ireland's leading entrepreneurs," O'Keeffe said.  

The entrepreneurs on the Seattle trip, which follows one last year to Chicago, Notre Dame and New York, are guiding companies from multi-million dollars in revenue to fast-growth startups.

John Keane, the retired Seattle-area businessman who has been the Honorary Irish Consul since 2009, describes the business connections between Washington state and Ireland as "strong and growing."

"That's not just because companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Paccar, Expedia have operations in Ireland, but also because there are over a dozen Irish companies that have operations in Washington state, such as Kerry Group, CRH, Sentaca, lotusworks and Sentaca," he added.

Most of the reception attendees are being invited by Irish Network Seattle, whose members of work in all the major business fields in the area, mainly high tech, but also in the areas like medical.

 "I hope the entrepreneurs will be encouraged by those they meet and what they see and hear to consider Seattle and Washington State they think of locating in America," he said.

Patrick Patrick's retirement as president and CEO of Seattle Bank, which was on the financial precipice when he arrived on the scene in September of 2010, has now completed the latest chapter in a career of turning around troubled banks.

Patrick, now 72, figures he'd be interested in another turnaround opportunity and is quite certain there will always be banks in need of turnaround. And he thinks that perhaps what he sees emerging in the industry may continue to produce more of them.

Patrick Patrick

"There will always be troubled banks," said Patrick in an interview following his retirement. "The question is the degree of trouble in determining if they need to bring an outsider in."

It took Patrick less than a year at the helm of Seattle Bank before he put together an unusual team of non-bank people, prominent local business executives who put up $50 million to recapitalize the bank. That provided the capital for Patrick to start bringing the bank back out from under the weight of soured real estate loans that had brought the bank under the thumb by regulators since July of 2009.

Since its establishment as Seattle Mortgage Company in 1944 by Ben Smith Sr. to help veterans returning from World War II to buy homes, the bank had been a highly regarded, family owned financial firm.

It became Seattle Savings Bank in 1999 but changed its name to Seattle Bank in 2009, shortly before the bank and its Seattle Financial Group holding company were placed under a cease-and-desist order and told to create a capital-infusion turnaround plan.

Now that he has turned the bank around and stepped, perhaps briefly, into retirement again, Patrick sees a familiar, troubling pattern re-emerging.

"We're going back to doing the same things we did when the financial industry got into trouble. Because competition is fierce and interest rates are extremely low, some banks are making loans on terms we shouldn't be considering," Patrick added.

Patrick's perspective extends back over four financial crises, with his first opportunity to assume the role of turnaround CEO coming after the savings and loan crisis of the early '80s when, in 1983, he was asked to take the helm at Seattle-based Prudential Savings, which was in danger of being closed.

Two years later, he found himself also overseeing Westside Federal as well, running both thrifts simultaneously for a year before melding Westside into Prudential and, on "Black Monday" in 1988, selling Prudential to Tacoma-based Pacific First Federal.

Thus the role Patrick played at Seattle Bank is one he's been playing over the 30 years, a role that could be characterized as the financial version of an old television western series called "Have Gun, Will Travel" in which the hero went from town to town to resolve problems created by the bad guys.

As I pointed out in a column on Patrick soon after he stepped in at Seattle Bank, in his case the "bad guys" have been those who've taken actions that jeopardized community banks thus putting at risk the important role such institutions have traditionally played in the economic health of their communities.

Not all his assignments have been successful, as his role immediately preceding Seattle Bank, guiding the hoped-for turnaround of Towne Bank of Phoenix, failed as the bank went down four years ago next month, two years after Patrick came in with the bank under the cloud of federal oversight.

"It was the target of one of the first cease-and-desist orders in the country and had one of the highest amounts of non-performing assets I'd ever seen," Patrick said. "In the end it wasn't possible for the turnaround effort to succeed."

As a career-long believer in community banks, Patrick expressed concern about their future in the 2010 interview, and retained that concern in the interview following his Seattle Bank retirement.

"Community banks are the framework of any town or city and the framework is in great jeopardy," he said in the 2010 interview, "even though not one dollar of taxpayer money has been spent on any problems that individual community banks have encountered. Any money that's gone to community banks has come from assessments and insurance premiums."

He has similar concerns still, noting that "many of the new regulations put forth in the past couple years have made community banking much more difficult."

"Sometimes the law of unintended consequences makes the cure worse than the issue," he said. "Without community banks, who is going to help the small businesses that drive our neighborhoods?  We can't doubt the sincerity of those who want to provide protection for everything, but there is a point where we create even bigger concerns."

Washington State securities regulators intend to make sure that entrepreneurs anxiously awaiting adoption of the rules that will permit them to begin raising capital under new state crowd-funding law won't face any of the frustrations and disappointments that have followed passage of similar legislation at the federal level.

The bill under which entrepreneurs can raise funds up to $1 million a year in small amounts from in-state investors passed the Legislature, was signed by the governor last month and goes into effect June 12. But officials of the State Department of Financial Institutions have until October 1 to put in place the rules and the process under which the fund-raising can get under way.

Joe Wallin

In an effort to ensure that everything is done on schedule, Scott Jarvis, director of the Department of Financial Institutions, says even before the legislation goes into effect, his agency has begun the planning process for how the rulemaking will unfold between now and October.

Washington is now one of a handful of states where lawmakers have decided the promise of a new source of fundraising for entrepreneurs won't likely come about in any meaningful way at the federal level and thus have decided to act locally.

It's becoming increasingly likely that what Congress, with an election-year flourish two years ago, passed as the JOBS Act to open the door for entrepreneurs to fund their start-up businesses by attracting average investors on the internet will remain a promise unfilled.

It's now been almost two years since Congress passed the bill and gave the Securities and Exchange Commission 180 days to put together the rules for how entrepreneurs could fund their start-up companies via the internet to allow selling equity to large numbersof average investors.

Well, entrepreneurs around the country are still waiting for those rules to emerge from the SEC, which must pass rules to implement the legislation officially titled Jumpstart Our Business Startups.

And there is a growing sense that the details of compliance, once the SEC finally acts, will be so onerous on entrepreneurs that the costs of starting to raise capital on the Internet will deter many if not most would-be entrepreneurs.

One of those cost factors imposed under the federal act involves a requirement that entrepreneurs must use what are called "portals" basically a new kind of SEC-regulated website with unique responsibilities to oversee the entrepreneurial fund-raising activities, investor risk and monitor money raised.

Under the state legislation, economic development organizations and ports will serve as portals for the entrepreneurs at the outset, with the legislation's second deadline being methods of qualifying other portals by next April 1.

But unlike with the federal legislation, Washington state entrepreneurs raising funds won't be required to use a portal.

The bill allows eligible businesses to raise up to $1 million during any 12-month period and repeat the process in subsequent 12-month periods with accredited and non-accredited investors allowed to participate, up to the investment caps imposed by the federal legislation.

Joe Wallin, the Davis Wright law firm attorney who had the leading-edge role in bringing about the state crowd-funding statute, sees it as "potentially a good avenue for companies to raise capital."

Wallin, who wrote the first draft suggestion the legislation and included it in a blog post later testified on its importance in making the state more business friendly.

He suggests, as others have, that having a crowd-funding law in place to allow entrepreneurs who are residents of this state to sell small amount of equity to investors who must also be Washington residents could attract entrepreneurs from other states to move to Washington.

"States are vying to get businesses to move to their states to bring jobs and entrepreneurs who build businesses through crowd-funding will eventually also create jobs," he adds.

Rep. Cyrus Habib, the King County lawmaker who sponsored the bill, said "we're putting our state in a place to attract entrepreneurs, and to capitalize on their energy and brainpower. And ordinary people get to buy a piece of the action."

Since the Internet has been viewed as the vehicle of choice by entrepreneurs and crowd-funding advocates to reach large numbers of average investors most effectively, the fact that only Washington residents are eligible to invest in the Washington state-based companies creates an outreach challenge for the startups.

Wallin says "companies will have to be very careful" how they conduct their equity offerings, using either portals that only allow investors of a particular state to view offerings, or "work connection to connection in a manner that doesn't involve generalsolicitation to non-residents."

Part of the role of portals will be to ensure that a firm's annual fundraising via crowd funding doesn't exceed the legal $1million restriction.

If there's any doubt that optimism is the byproduct of entrepreneurism, witness the fact that venture capitalists and other investors are rushing into the creation and development of the companies whose business is serving as portals and helping provide services to those who will be hoping to raise equity under the eventually implemented federal act.

The VC's have poured millions of dollars this year into companies like Indigogo, Crowdbit and Teespring and other such crowd-funding support companies.

Wallin, the Davis Wright attorney, think portals will attract funding from experienced investors. "They are Potential great investments," he said. 

Unlike most rule-making hearings by state agencies, the crowd-funding hearings may draw substantial and boisterous gatherings.

As DFI Director Jarvis put it, "this is a crowd of young and enthusiastic supporters who have little knowledge of the process of rulemaking."

Part of the challenge for the agency as the rulemaking moves ahead is that some entrepreneurs may fail to understand that, as Securities Administrator Bill Beatty emphasized, "our mission is a dual mission: to protect investors and promote small business capital formation."

More than a quarter century after he left the restaurant business, former western cattle rancher Stuart Anderson's name remains the iconic brand on the concept of affordable steakhouses.

And on April 1, Anderson, now 91 and retired with his wife, Helen, to a condo in Rancho Mirage, CA, will mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of the first Stuart Anderson's Black Angus near the Seattle waterfront.

Stuart Anderson

That first restaurant, in 1964, became a chain of 110 steakhouse restaurants across 19 states, each restaurant bearing the Stuart Anderson's Black Angus name and menus with the icon that became known affectionately as "the square cow," a squared cow's head inside a square frame.

The image has changed but the Black Angus part of the name, as well as the explanation of Anderson's philosophy in launching his steakhouse concept, are still touted on the menus at the 45 Black Angus restaurants, now owned by Los Altos, CA-based American Restaurant Group in six western states.

Famous "Square cow" logo.

I visited a couple of weeks ago with Stuart and Helen, his wife of more than 40 years, at their condo, looking west toward the San Jacinto Mountains. Anderson sported his signature mustache and cowboy hat, anxious to discuss his new book, which won't be out in time to mark the half-century milestone.

In fact, neither was certain what kind of a celebration of the special anniversary might be planned by the owners, but both enthused about the opening last month of the latest Black Angus in Brentwood, CA, where the chain brought him to be on hand and introduced.

"They still remember me," he laughed. "He was the star of the event," said Helen.

He wanted to talk about the book, Corporate Cowboy, the story of how he built the restaurant empire that became a national company with 10,000 employees and annual revenue of $260 million. It's actually a longer official title: "Corporate Cowboy Stuart Anderson: how a maverick entrepreneur built Black Angus, America's #1 restaurant chain of the 1980s."

Anderson speaks and moves slowly from the effects of a stroke he suffered five years ago but retains a firm gaze under the brim of his cowboy hat and a sharp mind. Helen refers to the recovery by the man she refers as "my cowboy" as "miraculous."

The book unfolds, as did his first one a couple of years ago, by his dictating to Helen or, if she's not there at the time, using a recorder from which she later transcribes.

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

Anderson recalls that he was already in the business in Seattle, owning a hotel and a restaurant, but says he much preferred the restaurant part of the business.

So his strategy for his Black Angus concept was simple:

"A one-price steak, with six choices of cut, for $2," he recalls. "We got the meat from Australia, which had to be tamed a bit when it got here. We soon raised the price to $2.95 for a full dinner with a good steak."

The second Black Angus was opened in Anderson's hometown of Tacoma and it turned out to be a disaster, what Anderson now describes as a "dumb decision."

But the third, in Spokane, proved the validity of the concept and it remained for years the most successful restaurant in the chain.

Expsansion to other states followed, starting with California where San Diego was the launch city.

It was in 1987, after five consecutive years of his Stuart Anderson's Black Angus restaurants being named the top steakhouse chain in the nation in a poll by industry publication Restaurants & Institutions, that Anderson retired from the business.

By then the chain he had sold to Saga Food Services more than a decade before that had been in turn sold to Marriott Corp., which decided it didn't want the restaurant part of Saga's business and the unbundling made it not fun for Anderson any longer. He said he was working too much and traveling too many hours.

So he and Helen retired to his 2,400 ranch sprawled along Interstate 90 west of Ellensburg. He had bought the ranch in 1966 with the intent of raising the black angus cattle that would be served at his restaurants. But it turned out to be too great a challenge, for various reasons, so he continued to raise the cattle until he sold the ranch to Taiwanese interests, though to most travelers going past, it remains the Stuart Anderson ranch.

Anderson sought a comeback a couple of years ago, driven not by the desire to get back into the business in his late 80s but rather to try to save the jobs at a Black Angus he had opened in Rancho Mirage in 1980 when the California expansion was in full swing but had closed during the financial downturn

It was an effort that didn't last long, with Helen recalling that "after the Black Angus closed, Stuart thought he'd be helping the economy and jobs by re-opening the restaurant."

"After negotiating the lease, we opened in late February of 2010.  Stuart decided he was definitely too old to be back in this business," she said. "He jokingly said he forgot more than he knew, so in 2012 we were approached by a group who wanted to buy our lease and we were happy to accommodate them."

With a growing number of states enacting laws that allow companies to put a social purpose as a higher corporate calling than shareholder benefit, there's an emerging disagreement among proponents of such legislation over whether it should require, or merely permit, companies to have the social purpose dominate in executive decisions.

The initiatives to allow a higher purpose than shareholder value was in response to the traditional corporate-law constraints that make it the fiduciary duty of officers and directors to operate with the underlying assumption that their role is to maximize shareholder profits.

Washington was one of the first states to provide for-profit companies a legal status for a social focus, under the legal designation Social Purpose Corporations. As of March 1, 89 companies had filed as SPCs under the two-year-old legislation that permits companies' decisions to go beyond maximizing financial results to include positive social or environmental impact.

And Oregon's legislature passed a law this session to provide for "B Corps"(benefit corporations) and state Rep. Tobias Read of Beaverton, co-sponsor of the legislation, described it as designed to "legally protect companies that want to strive for more than just profits." The law imposes much tougher requirements on companies to make the social purpose pre-eminent.

The two Northwest states point up the different approaches to the goal of allowing otherwise traditional for-profit corporations to have a higher standards of corporate purpose, accountability and transparency.

California actually has two social-benefit statutes, one called the "flexible purpose corporation" that emphasizes companies may take a stated social purpose into account in corporate decisions, and the other providing for a Benefit Corporation, imposing a requirement for the role of stated social purpose in decisionmaking.

Proponents of the flexible form of legal filing say it seeks to "unleash directors from the risk of liability while permitting them to experiment more broadly with the right mix of doing well and doing good, without concerns of personal or corporate suits."

The benefit corporation law, under which virtually all California companies have filed, is based on the model Act created by a 501C3 called B Labs, co-founded in 2006 by Andrew Kassoy, who sought to create a "social hybrid" corporate structure movement.

Kassoy, who had a career as a private equity investor and most recently was a partner at MSD Real Estate Capital, part of the investment vehicle for the assets of Michael and Susan Dell, says his goal was to make it easier "for all of us to tell the difference between 'good companies' and just good marketing."

All states require, as part of the benefit-corporation filing process, a third-party certification and verification for the chosen social purpose of a company and B Labs plays that role for businesses in 19 states with the Benefit Corporation model, which is a legal status like C Corp, S Corp of LLC.

Benefit corporation is often confused with Certified B Corp, which is a certification conferred by third-party organizations like B Lab that a company has achieved appropriate levels of social or environmental performance, accountability and transparency

Every benefit corporation is required to publish publically an annual benefit report that includes "an assessment of [its] overall social and environmental performance against a third party standard."

Kassoy is critical of both California's flexible purpose corp. legislation, whose sponsors are now seeking to amend it, and Washington's statute.

"I think that both miss the mark because by creating a 'may' instead of 'shall' standard and by failing to require transparency about the overall impact created by the company, investors and other stakeholders don't have something clear to rely on," Kassoy said in telephone interview. "That creates confusion, suspicion of potential 'greenwashing,' (a term used to deride bogus environmentalism or social causes) and therefore impedes market adoption."

But Peter Smith, a partner in Seattle-based Apex Law Group, disagrees, while saying he is "a big fan of what B-Labs is saying and doing," but adding "I think Washington got it right by making it about flexibility, making the legislation permissive rather than prescriptive."

"What this legislation really is about is providing officers and directors legal cover in the event they make decisions based on the stated social purpose of the company," he added.

What the Washington legislation provides is that officers and directors of SBCs shall act in the best interest of the company, but may take into account social purposes.

Paul Shoemaker, who founded Social Venture Partners and now carries the title Executive Connector, suggests the emergence of the ability of companies to provide for a social purpose is part of an expanding array of ways "to fund, invest in and sustain social programs in the community."

"The most exciting, potentially impactful thing about all this is it's part of a more diverse, wider range of capital and funding mechanisms coming into play for businesses," he said.

Preston Thompson, guided a variety of global-enterprise units or Boeing, ranging from production and supply chain operations to international development, last year founded VentureScale to help with a focus on "accelerating the sustainable growth of ventures."

After leaving Boeing, Thompson had already founded a non-profit to create education opportunities in Afghanistan and a business making clean cook stoves for the developing world when Washington's legislation was signed into law.

Thompson founded VentureScale as one of the first 50 businesses formed under that legislation with the goal of helping to accelerate the sustainable growth of social ventures.

"Gauging the success of a business strictly by evaluating standard bottom-line profit isn't enough," says Thompson. "Maximizing shareholder value and evaluating overall contributions should include social and environmental returns in addition to financial returns."

None of the nearly 1,000 social-purpose designated companies in the nation is publicly traded, but advocates of the designation insist that as the trend continues, companies seeking equity capital and focusing on eventual exit strategies will become increasingly appealing to investors.

Stephanie Ryan, B Lab's senior associate in the Northwest, sees banks as particularly attractive candidates for Benefit Corp status because of the traditional focus of community banks on serving their local areas. She says she is currently in conversation with an Oregon bank about converting to that legal status, which requires a two-thirds vote of shareholders.

Kristopher Lofgren, owner of an Oregon business called Bamboo Sushi, commented after passage of the Oregon law on its importance to the image of business as well as its community value.

"What a lot of people don't realize when they look at the CEOs of companies as despicable people who make these decisions about money, money, money is that the laws are actually written so that's all they can do legally," Lofgren said. "They can be sued and lose their jobs, and the company can go under if they don't. B corp is allowing another voice to come into that fray."

Renowned blown-glass artist Dale Chihuly is creating an exclamation mark for the role of the 12th Man in the Seattle Seahawks' Super Bowl victory by crafting a dozen Seahawk-color seaform pieces to be sold or auctioned to benefit Seattle Gilda's Club and its cancer-support network.

And the Seahawks will be closely involved, led by star wide receiver Golden Tate. With a grandmother who died of breast cancer, Tate quickly became a supporter of Gilda's Club after learning of its work, and then attracted his teammates to play in the annual Gilda's golf-tournament fundraiser.

The Chihuly dozen will be replicas of the blown-glass piece by Chihuly that was a key in the wager between Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and his Denver counterpart and was to be auctioned off to benefit Denver homeless in the event the Seahawks lost.

The sale of the Chihuly pieces will be the pizzazz for Gilda's club visibility this year. But visibility of a different and more lasting sort is growing within the healthcare community in the Northwest in the past couple of years because of the club's focus on the emotional impact of cancer on the sufferers and their families.

Cancer-care medical centers are coming under increasing pressure to provide services beyond the medical to the whole patient, as well as patient families. And that has opened a new door for Seattle Gilda's Club, which now has contracts with three area hospitals to provide those services, often referred to as compassionate care.

Anna Gottlieb

"We now have contracts to provide services to Overlake and Children's hospitals and the Muilticare system, which encompasses Auburn, Gig Harbor, Puyallup and Tacoma," Gottlieg noted, adding that the arrangements represent 20 percent of last year's revenue for Gilda's Club.

And the programs Gottlieb's organization is putting in place, both in the community and with the hospitals, are bringing a much broader awareness of Gilda initiatives that have been unfortunately little known to the general public until recently.

Seattle Gilda's Club was founded in 1996 by Anna Gottlieb and the doors to its building opened five years later, the first Gilda's Club in the West.

Gottlieb explains her commitment to the Gilda's cause, including weathering the years of financial struggle, by recalling that her mother had breast cancer "and no place to go, no one to talk to. I was 12 at the time and that sort of thing sticks with you."

It was the bond of both having endured their mothers' cancers that brought Dr. James Bianco, the CEO of Cell Therapeutics Inc. (CTI), to become the major business-community force behind Gilda's, including bringing business practices to the operation of the non-profit.

He had known Gottlieb from her involvement with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where Biano had been a doctor working with Nobel Laureate Donnell Thomas before he launched CTI, which is seeking to create a range of oncology products.

Mike Kunath, A principal in the Seattle-based investment advisory firm of kunath Karren Rinne and Atkin LLC, was among those introduced to Gilda's Club by Bianco and he has helped Gottlieb with the business focus.

 "Until now Gilda's Club has been largely unknown and under loved, but that's changing," said Kunath. "Now when cancer strikes a family, the second call is likely to be to GC."

Now back to the Chihuly glass pieces. Bianco developed a close friendship in recent years with Chihuly and in a dinner conversation that included Golden Tate about an event to provide financial support for Gilda's Club, Bianco threw out the idea of doing 12 glass pieces in honor of the 12th man. Tate quickly bought into the plan, Bianco recalls.

"I asked 'what if your studio could do 12 of the Seahawk-color seaforms and announce that Golden Tate, Russell Wilson and Richard Sherman invite you to a special event?'"

He said Chihuly instantly agreed, but wanted to get the $10,000 price the seaform pieces usually go for.

"I said we needed to start the prices on them at $12,000, keeping with the 12th man theme of it all," Bianco added.

A date for the event hasn't been pinned down, but will likely be in May. They also don't yet know whether they can do an auction of any of the pieces because of uncertainties relating to use of the 12th Man beyond the Seahawks reach.

In discussing the challenges facing hospitals, Gottlieb says "Health care systems do not do a good job of assessing distress in patients and need to pay more attention to the whole patient. We can help with patient satisfaction and help medical centers keep their own patients. We can take the burden off hospitals and workplaces."

"Patients are unhappy with their care and are demanding more services," she says.

With respect to the emerging program opportunities for Gilda's, Gottlieb says "Our strongest programs are in the education arena. We have lectures, put together symposiums on all cancers, facilitate workshops and we take lectures out in the communities. We have been to Bellingham, Bremerton, and all over the South Sound."

"We run the only summer day camp in the Northwest for families living with cancer," she added. "We do camp for three weeks in the summer for kids, ages 5-12, who have a parent with cancer or have lost a parent to cancer, and we do a cancer program for the kids. We are now doing the camp in in Tacoma and will soon branch out to other locations around the State."

In addition to overtures from cancer-care hospitals elsewhere in Washington, and in Oregon, a group in Eugene has been pressing Gilda's Club to extend its presence there. And Gottlieb says she has now been in communication with cancer-care facilities beyond the Northwest.

And one program Gottlieb is hopeful of taking nationally.

"We started a writing contest for teens with cancer or who have a parent or friend with cancer," Gottlieb said. "We have collected over 1,500 essays and we have given out scholarship money, over $75,000 in the past seven years." My goal is to take this to a national level.

Looking ahead, Gottlieb suggests "Our biggest area of future growth may be in the survivorship area, which is screaming out for help. Particularly with what patients call 'lost in transition.'"

"Patients are released from care with no plans, no idea of what is next and symptoms can linger for years and years," she says.

"Cancer is now a chronic illness for many and they still need help long after diagnosis, areas where we can really step in and help with more education and address many issues, since patients need help finding their new normal and navigating their way back to work and relationships and life in general."

As the winter Olympics unfold in Russia, a group of prominent Washington State residents has gotten behind an effort now in its final stages to attract Olympic Games of a far different sort to Seattle.

Seattle is among a handful of cities that have submitted formal bids to host the 2018 Special Olympics national summer games, which would represent not only a major economic impact for the Seattle area but provide a fitting showcase for Special Olympics of Washington (SOWA).

Special Olympics Washington is a national trendsetter of the organization founded in 1968 by Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation as a movement to change the world's view of the intellectually disabled. Special Olympics has since become the largest sports organization in the world, involving 3.5 million athletes in 160 countries.

Beth Wojick

 Beth Wojick, who in December marked her fifth anniversary as CEO of Special Olympics of Washington, has brought an evangelist's conviction about the role sports can play in enhancing the lives of the intellectually disabled. But she is also a tough-minded critic of those who would diminish the importance of the organization's mission and she has done battle to grow the Washington organization's impact across the state.

As a result of her single-minded focus, Special Olympics of Washington has distinguished itself among its peer groups from other states, prompting special praise from Robert Gobrecht, regional president for the U.S.

"Beth has transformed Special Olympics of Washington and is one of the rising stars in the movement," said Gobrecht. "In her five years, Beth turned around the chapter's finances, engaged the major school districts in the state to actively promote UnifiedSports and personally developed a North American partnership with MLS ( Major League Soccer) for Special Olympics international."

The MLS reference was to an arrangement Wojick worked out with the Seattle Sounders that represented the first partnership between a Special Olympics group and a Major League Soccer team.

In essence Wojick's organization and the Seattle Sounders wrote the playbook for what has become an international partnership arrangement after the two organizations held seminars for MLS teams and Special Olympics groups on how to carry out the partnerships.

Last spring a tournament was held in San Jose, Costa Rica, for Central American teams composed of both intellectually disadvantaged and typical players, with the U.S. squad featuring eight Special Olympics athletes from Seattle and Portland and eight Seattle Sounders FC development players, who serve as the Unified Partners in the tournament.

Teams made up of intellectually disadvantaged athletes and typical athletes are called Unified Teams, a concept that has become the trademark for successful Special Olympics programs around the county.

The concept has been around in the Special Olympics organization for eight years, but Wojick and her state organization have taken the concept deeper and wider than in other states.

And the depth of Wojick's belief in the importance of the Unified Teams program is evident when she talks about it.

"I've seen firsthand that when typical kids play on the same teams as intellectually disabled kids, magic happens," she enthused.

"When pep rallies occurred in the past, our guys would be sitting in the back in the dark. Now they have uniforms on and they have friends in the school who are going to protect them. Now they are somebody."

Two youngsters in Young Athletes event

Special Olympics Washington has also become a leader in a program called Young Athletes that engages both parents and athletes at a very early age, aimed at getting the athletes between the ages of 3 and 7 playing in a sports environment. The Washington program is the second largest in the country, involving 4,000 young participants.

The formal bids for the 2018 national games went in on January 31 to the national organization. Seattle's thick binder contains supporting letters from, among others, Gov, Jay Inslee, Sen. Patty Murray and two members of the state's congressional delegation, Rep, Dave Reichart, who has been involved with Special Olympics for more than 20 years, and Rep, Cathy McMorris Rogers, who has a son with Downs Syndrome. In addition there are letters from business and community leaders.

The bids site committee will visit Seattle in April and decide in May on the city that will host the 2018 games, a prize that Wojicksays will carry significant economic impact.

'This takes four and a half years to organize, is a $10 million event that, by comparison, is twice Seafair's size, and is estimated to have an economic impact of almost $120 million," she said. The seven-day event involves 3,500 athletes and 1,000 coaches in 16 sports.

Winning the bid for the 2018 games would be a fitting reward for what Wojick has built since assuming the post for which she got a personal request from Gobrecht, to undertake.

Gobrecht, then president of Seattle Seafair, had hired Wojick out of college in 1988 and she followed him to the Seattle Mariners when Gobrecht became marketing vice president. Wojick returned to Seafair as president when Gobrecht left the Mariners and she was later lured by the Seattle Seahawks to head corporate relations.

Wojick recalls that when she first assumed the CEO role, she asked what we were doing in public schools.

"The answer was nothing," she says. "They didn't want us. They said they couldn't do Special Olympics. So I began what amounted to hand-to-hand combat."

What changed, she says, was that she started approaching the athletic directors rather than the administrators and took a Special Olympics athlete from another school district who was wearing a letter jacket.

"The athletic directors would instantly have a sense of 'why aren't we doing this?' and they became our spear carriers for the program," she says. "What they understood was the Unified Program offered a chance for everyone to play."

"Now the school districts that have signed off view it as a program they thought of, and that's fine," she smiled. "We have programs year-round in 16 Unified sports and most of the state is involved."

Asked if there was anything that surprised her when she first took the CEO's role, Wojick said there were two things. First the size of the organization internationally.

"Second was that the athletes quickly learned my name," she said. "They all know who Eunice Shriver is, and they all know who I am. I am a hero to them, which is strange because they are my heroes."

When the ski jumping competition commences at the Sochi, Russia, Winter Olympics, some in the Bavarian-themed town of Leavenworth will recall the role their Cascade-mountains community once played in preparing U.S. participants for competition in that event. And at least one long-involved resident thinks that Leavenworth's historical ski jumping role should come again.

The keeper of the ski-jump flame for Leavenworth is, appropriately, Kjell Bakke, 80, whose father, Magnus, and uncle, Hermod, Norwegian immigrants, built the original 90-meter ski jumping hill in 1933, designing the jump and overseeing the volunteers who constructed what has ever since been known as Bakke Hill.

With its critical point of 73 meters, Bakke Hill was then one of the largest ski jumps in the country and was enlarged several times thereafter, gaining a reputation as the best ski jump in the western U.S. and hosting its first U.S. championships in 1941.

Kjell Bakke and wife, Georgia Bakke-Tull

Then after an unusually heavy snowfall caused the collapse of Bakke Hill in 1956, its reconstruction by community volunteers opened the door for hosting the U.S. championships in 1959, 1967, 1974 and 1978. But emerging new standards and development of other areas as year-round facilities left Bakke Hill to go into decline and disrepair in the years following.

Leavenworth, now a bustling tourist town of 1,900 that hosts thousands of visitors, went through its own long decline before reinventing itself as a Bavarian village, with all buildings in town fitting that theme in the community nestled amid the Alps-like surrounding peaks of the North Cascades range.

Rebuilding the nationally known ski hill on the mountainside north of town may prove to be a more elusive dream. But Leavenworth's rich skiing history will be appropriately celebrated February 8, just as the Sochi Winter Olympics get under way, when the Northwest Ski Hall of Fame will be opened in temporary quarters at the lower lobby of the Enzian Inn in Leavenworth.

As Bakke's wife, Georgia Bakke-Tull, who is heritage director of the Leavenworth Ski Hill Heritage Foundation and current project director for the Northwest Ski Museum & Northwest Ski Hall of Fame, notes, there will finally be a home for the hall of fame honorees. A total of 70 from around the Northwest, including Oregon and British Columbia in addition to Washington, have been inducted since 1990.

Five of the inductees are from Leavenworth, her husband, Kjell, and his father and uncle among them.

In fact the Bakke brothers, along with a ski promoter named Earle Little, are in the national Ski Hall of Fame. As Bakke-Tull notes of Little: "Though no one can affirm that Earle was ever on skis, his business management abilities brought enormous impetus to the early days of ski jumping," including working to invite international ski jumpers to Leavenworth and working with coaches across the Northwest to bring ski-jumping exchange students to the U.S.

As to the possibility of restoring the ski jump, it was in 1999 that Bakke looked into the feasibility of rebuilding the 90 meter jump and learned that the cost to rebuild it entirely and make it the year-round facility required to compete with other ski-jump facilities in the West was an unrealistic $5 million. So the dream went on the back burner.

But still Bakke nurtures the dream as the area's youngsters and others participate in jumping activities that his efforts have made possible.

Training hills of 15 and 27 meters that Bakke conceived and oversaw construction of after his retirement and return to Leavenworth in 1993, along with a cable lift for the jumps funded by prominent Leavenworth resident Harriet Bullitt, have provided training for jumpers since 1997.

And three years ago the first Bakke Cup was held to foster competition among the Leavenworth children and teens in alpine skiing, cross-country, and importantly, ski jumping. Bakke himself began skiing around Bakke Hill at the age of three, beginning in 1936, the year the year the Leavenworth Ski Hill Lodge was built by the CCC.

"Leavenworth has always been an ideal location for ski jumping,"says Bakke, adding "many of us would like to see jumping return to Leavenworth, but there are feasibility concerns."

"Today's standards would require a year-round-use hill, probably snow-making abilities, and the cost of reconstructing the hill to current standards and the annual maintenance and operations costs would be sizable."

"

"Certainly not impossible, but it would take sizable effort and funding," he said. I'm hopeful the younger generation will be inspired to regenerate what was here in the past and make it even better."

Leavenworth has had strong connections with the Olympics beyond the pre-Olympics jump competition events it has hosted. It has had a number of Olympic team members, most recently, cross-country skier Torin Koos, who qualified for the past three U.S. Olympic teams.

And perhaps the most famous ski jumper from Leavenworth is former United States Olympic team member Ron Steele who was the best-placed American jumper in the 1972 Sapporo, Japan Olympics.

Meanwhile, Bakke-Tull continues the quest for a permanent museum-quality facility in Leavenworth for the NW Ski Hall of fame.

"We are in conversations with another recreational group inLeavenworth in hopes of working together on the development and building of a facility that would be green built, self-sustaining and serve as a museum and an educational facility to be used for educational endeavors including climbing and rescue/medical assist training," she said.

A proposal that would permit entrepreneurs to raise up to $1 million a year from small investors through what's known as crowd funding, which is seen as a tool to both facilitate the launch new companies and create jobs, will get its initial hearing before the Washington Legislature the end of this week.

Washington is among a handful of states where lawmakers have decided that no matter what finally happens with long-awaited implementation of a federal crowd-funding law, they want to move ahead at the state level to open new funding doors for entrepreneurs and startups. And the scheduled hearing Friday may suggest there's some momentum to get the bill passed soon.

The bill (HB2023) is viewed by legislative supporters, and there is no visible opposition, as "a tool for small-business growth all around the state" as well as a potential lure to attract would-be entrepreneurs in other states to move here to launch their business. Only state residents could raise equity under the proposed law and only state residents could buy shares in the companies.

Rep.  Cyrus Habib

The federal crowd-funding legislation was passed by Congress in the spring of 2012 as the JOBS Act and directed the Securities and Exchange Commission to come up with the rules that would allow entrepreneurs to begin raising funds under the act. The SEC has moved at a glacial pace in implementing the rules and may still be as much as a year away from final approval to allow crowd funding to begin.

If supporters of the bill in the Washington Legislature are successful, the state measure will become law and create the opportunity for entrepreneurs in this state to begin using crowd-funding to raise money from large groups of small investors, primarily on the Internet, before the federal legislation even becomes operative.

The fact that Washington and a handful of other states are pressing ahead without regard to what happens in Washington, D.C., is an example of a growing realization that it has become more workable for legislation and regulation to be done at the state level. The reason for that emerging sentiment isn't just the gridlock that allows little to get done in Washington, but also the brainlock that occurs when something does get approved in Congress and is then turned over to the bureaucracy and regulators to implement.

Rep. Jeff Morris

HB2023, sponsored by Rep. Cyrus Habib, whose 48th District spans Redmond, Bellevue and Kirkland, would like the federal act allow companies to raise up to $1 million a year from small investors. The Internet is viewed as the most likely vehicle to reach large numbers of those small investors, who would be permitted to invest a maximum of $2,000.

Rep. Jeff Morris, D-Mount Vernon, a key supporter of the state legislative proposal, is one who thinks state legislation will serve the needs of both start-up entrepreneurs and small investors who would like to have equity in such companies better than the eventual federal act.

"The federal crowd-funding law, even once rules are in place, is going to require companies to work through an intermediary and is likely to have compliance expenses that will be cost-prohibitive for many start-ups," said Morris.

Morris, who is a co-founder of the Northwest Energy Angels and former director of the Northwest Energy Technology Collaborative (NWETC) at the Washington Technology Center (WTC), is an angel investor far more knowledgeable on the topic of funding start-ups than might be expected of legislators.

The SEC has produced more than 500 pages of proposed rules as it nears the point, more than 18 months after the legislation was approved by Congress, of clearing the way for entrepreneurs to actually begin raising money under the act. But observers think the

90-day comment period will likely produce voluminous comments that will cause the SEC to extend the time when the rules actually go into effect until late this year or early next.

Habib says flatly it would be "highly undesirable" for entrepreneurs to have only the federal legislation to deal with in seeking to employ the crowd-funding concept of raising money and selling equity.

"I think it will be far easier for start-up entrepreneurs to deal with local regulators who, can design rules that fit our culture, that are less burdensome to issuers, and give us the opportunity to create our own fund-raising product," said Habib, a Seattle attorney who works with many small firms.

Habib's first attempt at the bill last session would have imposed an excise tax of 3 to 5 percent, a tax of up to $50,000 on a $1 million fund raise, with the explanation that it was necessary to cover costs the state would incur in things like more consumer protection for investors and added costs for state oversight of the crowd-funding activity.

But he has backed off of that in the current version, saying thatrather than imposing an excise tax, "we will give authority to regulators to decide what kind of a fee to impose on the entrepreneurs. The program has to pay for itself, but we decided it's best to leave that to the Department of Financial Institutions to determine what's necessary to achieve that."

It was Habib who made the observation that the bill would be a tool for economic development for all parts of the state.

"Using equity crowd funding for those who can't just start a business without money and don't happen to know a friendly millionaire will be a way to raise capital for small businesses anywhere in the state," Habib said.

And he and Morris both suggested that small economic development organizations or chambers of commerce could serve the role of gatekeeper, meaning someone to fill the legally required role of an entity to sign off on the legitimacy of the fund-raising effort, to say it wasn't a scam or fraud. Otherwise the gatekeepers would be attorneys, accountants or similar professionals who would be involved in reviewing the legitimacy of would-be entrepreneurs.

Scott Jarvis, director of the state Department of Financial Institutions, which has been working closely with lawmakers as the legislation has taken shape, says it is "closely monitoring the SEC's final action to be sure the state legislation avoids conflict with it or sends confusing messages."

He said lawmakers and his department must also provide some sort of cost benefit analysis to ensure that any costs incurred by the state or the agency must be provided for and that will depend, in part, on the size of the group of entrepreneurs seeking to raise money through crowd funding.

"To steal liberally from 'Field of Dreams,' there is a question as to'If we build it, will they come in sufficient numbers as to justify the costs,'" Jarvis quipped.

Among angel investors in favor of the proposed state legislation is Tom Simpson, longtime venture capitalist now head of the Spokane Angel Alliance, who suggests "it will broaden the capital-formation alternatives for certain unique, early-stage enterprises not otherwise candidates for traditional angel or v.c. funding."

In fact, Simpson shares the view of many angel investors that traditional funding won't likely follow crowd-funded businesses but adds "as long as everyone knows the pros and cons, I expect this form of fund raising to stimulate the growth of new, innovative businesses in this state."

Sportswriters who gushed at Washington Husky halfback Bishop Sankey's performance this season that included tying the school record of 38 career touchdowns probably took no more than a moment to wonder about the guy who set that most enduring of UW football marks back in the mid-'20s.

The deeds of George Wilson, who might legitimately be described as UW's first football star for his career from 1923-25 that included leading the Huskies to their first two Rose Bowl appearances, are shrouded in gridiron antiquity for most fans, who view the deeds of stars of their great-grandfathers' or even grandfathers' era with disinterest. After all, his record was established almost nine decades ago, but the curious or those hungry for a bit of history can learn about him on various websites.

Those who take the time to delve into history are left to ponder Wilson's story, which epitomizes the fleetingness of fame and the fickleness of fate, as for a mere half a decade his star shone brightly on the national football stage, first as a collegian then as a highly publicized pro football player.

Then, unlike some of his high-visibility football peers who managed to parlay fame into later successful careers, he personally faded rapidly from the scene, doing some professional wrestlingfor a for a few years, working in the Texas oil fields, then as a longshoreman in San Francisco, dying on the dock there of a heart attack in 1963.

But in an example of the often strange links in the chain of fortune forged by fate, Wilson, at the highly publicized outset of his pro football career, set the stage for a little-noted player from Gonzaga College named Ray Flaherty to launch a professional career in which he went on to become one of the most successful coaches in the history of the NFL.

Wilson, nicknamed "Wildcat," was a kid from Everett who had already fashioned a name for himself as a high school player who guided his Everett team to what was acknowledged to be the nation's best high school football two years in a row, before arriving on the UW campus.

Although the Huskies prior to Wilson's arrival had some noteworthy accomplishments, including the record of Gil Dobie, whose pre-World War I teams posted a remarkable 58-0-3 record,performances in those early days in the West got little national visibility.

Wilson, however, brought national recognition to the Huskies. In addition to guiding UW to those first two Rose Bowl appearances,he was a first-team All-America selection in his senior year in an all-star backfield that might vie for the best ever, a backfield that included "Red" Grange, the "Galloping Ghost" from Illinois, and Stanford's Ernie Nevers, plus Wilson.

Upon his graduation in 1926, Wilson was enticed to join the just-forming American Football League (not the AFL of later decades) by the league's co-founder, who had already lured Grange to join the league as his partner but wanted a name player to compete with Grange on the field.

Wilson was named president of the league's traveling team, the Los Angeles Wildcats. The league actually paid the bills and filed the franchise ownership papers for the team known as "Wilson's Western Wildcats," actually based in Chicago because of the travel difficulty of being based in Los Angeles in those days.

Grange's traveling all-stars and Wilson's Wildcats actually met on the field once that season, in Los Angeles before a crowd of 70,000. While Grange's squad, which later became the Chicago Bears, won the game, 17-7, Wilson outgained Grange, rushing for 128 yards to 30 for grange.

Wilson stocked his team with players from the West, including two from Gonzaga College in Spokane. In addition to Flaherty, an end, he tapped Matty Bross, a halfback, to be part of the western stars' team.

Ironically, as Wilson's star would quickly fade, Flaherty, who hadn't gained much attention as a collegian at a small school removed from high-visibility opportunities, went on to make pro football his career. After his year with the Wildcats, he moved to the New York Giants, where he was an all-star end, then became head coach of the Washington Redskins, where his four trips to the NFL title game and two championships earned him acknowledgement as one of the NFL's all-time best coaches.

Choosing Flaherty for his Wildcats and thus earning credit for setting the stage for what followed is a contribution not mentioned in the sports history books, and perhaps not other than this column.

The AFL didn't last and Wilson joined the Providence Steam Rollers of the NFL, where he played for three seasons, including 1928 when Providence won the NFL championship and Wilson scored five touchdowns and had four interceptions to lead the team that year.

There is still another irony, or perhaps small-world aspect, to Wilson's story. It's that another Gonzaga College player, Houston Stockton, was guiding the Frankfort Yellowjackets (later the Philadelphia Eagles) to the NFL title in 1926 while Wilson's Wildcats were gaining attention.

Stockton's statistics as a collegian were almost as impressive as Wilson's, including a 77-0 Gonzaga victory over Wyoming in which Stockton scored six touchdowns and kicked 10 extra points.

In that era when players played both offense and defense, both Wilson and Stockton were viewed as stars on defense as well as offense and were regarded as punishing tacklers.

But Stockton's exploits got scant attention, being played out at a little school in out-of-the-way Spokane. His national recognition was limited to twice being named an honorable mention All-America.

Stockton, grandfather of NBA hall-of-famer John Stockton, had joined the Steamrollers and was a teammate of Wilson's for the 1929 season, before he returned home to Spokane to go into business and Wilson left football to begin his mysterious decline from fame and attention.

Wilson's years away from the limelight were interrupted only twice for reminders of what had been, once when he was inducted into the football Hall of Fame and in 1959 when he was invited home to UW, by Post-Intelligencer Sports Editor Royal Brougham, to be honored prior to the Huskies Rose Bowl victory over Wisconsin.

This offering of holiday art as once generated by wire-service teletype machines has become my annual way of sharing Christmas and holiday greetings to those who have been kind enough over the past more than five years to allow the Flynn's Harp column into their e-mail 'bag'.

The most important "gift" that came following Sarah's death was that two years after she died, we had another baby girl, one who might not have been planned if there hadn't been a void for us that needed filling.

A unique example of the Magic of Christmas will be in evidence in Spokane on Saturday when 66 disadvantaged kids plus their personal elves and a supporting entourage board one of Alaska Airlines largest and newest 737-900s, designated "Santa 1," for a Fantasy Flight to the North Pole.

But the excitement that surrounds Spokane International Airport for this annual event transcends even this special holiday and instead represents the "magic dust" of human caring that settles over airline employees and the local volunteers who make the kids' trip of a lifetime possible.

This will be the sixth year that an Alaka plane, with employees

Alaska pilot Eric Hrivnak and friend

 from both Alaska and Horizon Air joining the organizers, has taken off for a 40 minute flight with the kids ages 4 to 10 who are chosen from shelters and community programs in Spokane and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

And it will be the third year that Eric Hrivnak, an Alaska pilot for more than 13 years, has been the cockpit guide for the flight to Santa's home.

He says he decided early on that "I could make it a lot more fun," but confesses he's "never seen anything like what happens with these kids. I saw a counselor crying as she told me of one of her foster kids, 'It's the first time I've ever seen him smile.'"

Steve Paul, "Elf Bernie," and fan

Steve Paul, president of Northwest North Pole Adventures, the 501c3 that he has guided for more than six years as the organization that puts on the event, explained that the children selected each year are homeless or from transitional living centers or adoption groups.

Each child, as they all get off the bus that has picked them up for their trip to the airport, is greeted by their personal elf and given a t-shirt that says "I believe" on the front and "I've been to the North Pole" on the back. Each also receives a special-issue passport with their picture and the picture of them with their elf.

Paul, who is "Elf Bernie" at the event, explains that Hrivnak, the pilot, once the plane has been aloft and is ready to land, helps bring the children into the process of breaking through the North Pole 'protective barrier.'

The kids pull down their window shades, do a chant, each waves a magic light wand they were given as they boarded and then Hrivnak deploys the engine thrusters when Santa and Rudolph appear on the radar screen, providing the confirmation that the "Santa 1" flight has entered North Pole airspace.

Minutes later, the plane lands and the kids have arrived at the North Pole -- in reality, a decorated hangar at the far end of the Spokane airport.

The kids leave the plane and walk with their elves down the red carpet, lined with more elves on both sides, and then encounter a fantasy come true: a magician, musicians and face painters, as well as an endless supply of snacks, games, and arts and crafts, plus live reindeer. And, of course, each child receives some specialone-on-one time with the Man himself.

That visit with Santa is made forever memorable for each child because, as Paul explains, they were all asked for a list of what they'd like from Santa, and "we took those lists and bought each of them a toy from that list. So as each child tells Santa what they want, he can reach into his bag and pull that present out for them. The looks on their faces as he hands it to them is just priceless."

Bobbie Egan, Alaska's media relations director who participated in the flight last year for the first time, said "I was moved beyond words. Once you see how the lives of these kids are impacted by this experience, the temptation is to want to do it everywhere."

Local Spokane area visibility for the annual event has helped grow cash and in-kind donations to a budget of $175,000 this year, with Alaska remaining the largest corporate donor, but to that has been added a new $10,000 donor and "many new $3,000-$5,000 donors," Paul said.

The Spokane Fantasy Flight isn't the only one that occurs. In fact, United Airlines, which conducts such flights in 20 cities and has been doing them for 23 years, most for children with life-threatening or terminal illnesses, had 2013's first North Pole flights last weekend in Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Antonio and Cleveland.

But Spokane is the smallest city in which such Fantasy Flights occur and has thus brought a community focus that would be difficult in a major city. And this is the only Alaska Airlines North Pole flight.

United had actually launched the Spokane Fantasy Flight in 1998, but the jetliners didn't take off, rather just taxiing around

the airport. But the event had virtually no visibility beyond the non-profits involved, at first the Spokane YWCA, and the kids and elves who participated.

In 2008, Alaska leaped in to take over the event after a United snafu left no plane available for Spokane. Employees of Alaska, which of course is more familiar with the North Pole than any airline, asked "why can't we actually take off with the kids?" So in fact they did, carrying 60 kids and their elves aloft for a 40 minute flight to Santa's home.

Alaska CEO Brad Tilden says the carrier loves its involvement with the event. "Reaching these deserving children in this special way touches the hearts of every one of our employees who participates."

Despite the uniqueness of the event, it got no visibility until two years later when my friend, Blythe Thimsen, editor of Spokaneand Coeur d'Alene Living, told me about her excitement at getting to be an elf that year and that she'd be writing about in her magazine, providing the first media look at the event. But she was kind enough to let me upstage the magazine's publication date with my first column on the event.

Two years ago, KCPQ-TV, Channel 13, in Seattle sent a crew to cover the event and produced a version for CNN, which thus brought national visibility.

The first Fantasy Flight occurred in London, England in December 1991, when United Airlines donated a 727 to fly one hundred children from an orphanage to Lapland, Rovaneimi Finland for reindeer sleigh rides and a visit to "Father Christmas Village". The success of the "Fantasy Flight" concept gradually expanded to over forty six cities, providing needy and ill children with an experience of a lifetime.

Few have summed up the Spokane event better than Gail Spaeth, an Alaska flight attendant who was part of the crew for the first Alaska North Pole flight: "This didn't just make our Christmas, this was our Christmas," she said. "These kids don't have much, so to be a part of something that will provide such a great memory for them is just amazing."