Bree Yager, who has been in and out of foster care her whole life, is about to do something no one in her family has done – graduate from high school. The 17-year-old Clover Park senior had never considered college because of the cost, then she landed one of 50 Washington Governors’ Scholarships for Foster Youth.
Everyone has a mother who worries, and Anthony Chen’s mom gets nervous when he bicycles to work from Federal Way to his office in Tacoma’s South End. Chen, 51, is an occasional bicycle commuter and the full-time director of the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department. Last week, in honor of National Bike Month, he pedaled the 15 miles each way for the first time in 2013.
With offices in Tacoma, Olympia, Renton and Kennewick, Jay Haynie drives just over 500 miles a week. And that’s since he slowed down.
Next week, Peter Wimberger will load daughter Elena, 22, and son Gus, 18, into the car, drive them to the Mexican border and leave them. By mid-October, give or take a month, the siblings should make it home. The Pacific Crest Trail, at 2,663 miles, is a challenge few people take on all at once. Gus, Elena and her boyfriend, Carter Chaffey, are nothing if not ambitious.
Ian Fox is a serious fellow, a University of Puget Sound junior majoring in English, with a sub-focus in writing, rhetoric and culture, and minoring in religion, politics and government.
Tim Nevarez saw his life taking a turn for the better last month, which often means trouble is looming. He had been unemployed for close to a year, laid off when the landscaping company for which he worked went bankrupt. But now Nevarez and wife Debbie were expecting their first child together on April 29.
Being a Buddhist monk is no shield against life. Dr. Barry Kerzin was reminded of that fact this week as he dealt with his father’s death.
Barbie Lumbert admits it. When her children were young and the family went camping, she’d read to them aloud with a voice that changed and did sound effects.
Not long after we wrote about the Spanaway House of Rats in January, the television reality show “Hoarding: Buried Alive” sensed ratings among the rodents. Coupled with filth and a touch of craziness, rats proved irresistible to the producers of the Discovery Channel-backed TLC series. On Tuesday, they descended upon the home with camera crews.
It’s been close to three years since Lon Cole was diagnosed with younger-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Today, the Puyallup man will add another title to a long list of them. Already a former soldier — a combat medic — he is a husband, father, grandfather. Today, Cole becomes a published poet.
Herman Botnen is 85 and has lived his whole life on Fox Island, spending more time there, he calculates, than anyone still on the planet.
The invasion of Graham last weekend – with people from Montana, Kentucky, Oregon and Texas – was Peggy Scheid’s fault. Family and friends made a big deal of her turning 100, but the guest list at son Bill’s 5-acre spread for four days was 21. The party itself? That came close to the 80 invited.
There are 1,820 rubber ducks at the Children’s Museum of Tacoma, and within 30 minutes of his arrival, 6-year-old Mateo Cordero seemed to have touched them all.
Marsha Brandenburg Doodigian never knew her mother, rarely saw her father and was raised by paternal grandparents believing she had only two half-brothers.
Kate Andrews watched the Seattle Mariners’ home opener Monday on television, surrounded by grandkids, a husband named Jim, a cat named Baby Kitty and close to 50 Tacoma Rainiers jerseys with no names at all.
A month after graduating from Clover Park High School, Brandon Hambrick had an internship with a Tacoma youth-outreach program and a scholarship to attend the University of North Carolina.
Karlee Cossette has twice taken the lectern with a speech that includes an “aha!” moment that seized her audience and required no exaggeration.
Sam Daniels held a steady hand three feet off the floor of his Hilltop barbershop, and laughed. “I’ve been cutting hair since I was about this high,” he said. “And the last haircut I gave was Saturday – to a Mr. Glover.”
The day Michael Tassin sent his application to Goodwill, his family’s response was, “You’re kidding.” Tassin had just finished an eight-year stint in the Army, was pursuing a degree in psychology, and no one could figure why he’d want his first job out of the military to be with … well … a thrift store.
Chuck Jackel and Jayne Ashby were born in Tacoma General Hospital a year apart, met in a Stadium High journalism class and married in 1987.
The column was called “The Curious Psychic,” and it ran in The News Tribune for more than a decade. It was an apt description of Shirlee Teabo, who teamed with writer/sister Jacquie Witherrite as she looked into paranormal activities — from UFO sightings to reading tea leaves. After a fall led to her hospitalization, Shirlee Teabo died last week. She was 80 years old.
Joel Stumph crafts canes and walking sticks in his basement workshop, cutting, sanding and polishing branches and pieces of driftwood his family and friends bring him.
Little Red Riding Hood is sick, Paul the Woodcutter is fighting to overcome shyness, and the Three Little Pigs blow their exit by running almost all the way home.
Nancy Vernon touched a photo of herself holding son Drew as a baby, her fingers rubbing it lightly as if to free a memory.
Michael Kagan never played baseball in high school or college, instead sticking with soccer and rugby.
The band and dance troupe at the MultiCare Adult Day Health Center is a work in progress. When each hour-long session begins, a large activities room is half filled with tables, and most of the performers seated around them are in wheelchairs.
Whatever Bill Coyner did as a youngster growing up in Lakewood, it stopped whenever an airplane passed overhead.
When she was a little girl, Skip Young was given two trains by her father one Christmas. She wasn’t allowed to touch either.
Putting a pet down hurts. To take the edge off the pain, many pet owners are embracing in-home pet euthanasia, where a vet makes a house call.
Alexander Kozlowski died in his Tacoma home Monday, an 81-year-old retired car salesman with many friends. Few of them knew his life story. That was intentional. Kozlowski’s earliest memories included being beaten by Polish children for being Jewish. Before the start of World War II, his country was invaded by Germany from one direction, Russia from another.
Greta Brackman grew up working with the homeless of Puyallup and other Northwest communities. Her parents made sure of it. "I was serving meals to the homeless when I was 9," she said. "I adopted my parents’ passion. I wanted to be a voice for justice."
Axel Moeller has never stayed in one place too long, seems to have been everywhere and done about everything. While he paints, the 86-year-old storyteller will be happy to talk to you.
They lost her in the minutes before New Year’s Day 2006, a 2-year-old who seemed so close to overcoming a congenital heart defect.
Any story about Janine Prindle eventually becomes a dog story. When Prindle’s 27-year fight with retinopathy left her legally blind in 2007, she stopped raising guide dogs after 15 years and was given one – Cranberry, a yellow lab.
When Mike Kelly was mayor of Fife, he and other city officials would get frustrated with the bureaucracy that accompanied each move they wanted to make – a frustration summed up by fellow Councilman Richard Godwin.
There are times not even Terry Miller can recall all the turns his life took before he was named the Pacific Lutheran University dean of nursing 15 years ago.
In many ways, Louden Miller is a typical 8-year-old boy. He plays with his dog, Mackey. He ignores his sister’s cat, Cupcake. He loves fishing with his grandfather.
Camryn Ramirez was 34 years old, and her past was wreckage. She’d left school in sixth grade, got pregnant at 13 and spent most of the next 20 years high on whatever was available – marijuana, meth, crack cocaine. With hard work, the help of a local church and the staff at Bates College, Ramirez turned her life around.
They are the last generation of Americans who contracted polio as children, and after fighting to live normal lives, they have found themselves stalked as senior citizens by a condition many doctors don’t recognize.
The day of Bryce and Kenzie Williams’ wedding, the groom was so nervous at the church he forgot the bride’s diamond ring, so he called his younger brother. Corbin Williams stopped by Bryce and Kenzie’s central Tacoma place and picked up the ring. And accidentally dropped it in the middle of the street.
Emma Miller wasn’t about to wait to see the world. Over the past four years, she has been to Switzerland, South Korea, Mexico, England, France and Italy, along with stops in New York, Washington, D.C., Boston and Skagway, Alaska.
Don Brittain rediscovered his trumpet and the nobility of taps. His nightly playing has touched the neighbors, and it's helped Brittain honor our troops and cope with his the death of his wife.
When National Public Radio wanted to test the National Rifle Association’s claim that the “only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” it went looking for one man: Dan McKown of Tacoma.
Alice Schibig grew up in Parkland with history all around her. The home where she was raised was built in 1900, part of what had been a working farm since the 1850s. When her father paid $12,000 for 110 acres in 1929, he ran it as a working dairy farm.
The man no longer had a driver’s license when he slid behind the wheel of his silver BMW, though he didn’t understand that he shouldn’t be driving.
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