The Human Genome Project (HGP), the blueprint that represented a vital global contribution to the advancement of human health, marked its 20th anniversary this year with little notice or reflection.

Except, perhaps, for the publication by Leroy Hood, one of the key architects of that landmark project, of his book, The Age of Scientific Wellness, which may help open the door to HGP2.

Launched in October 1990 and completed in April 2003, the Human Genome Project’s signature accomplishment of generating the first sequence of the human genome provided fundamental information about the human blueprint. It has since accelerated the study of human biology and improved the practice of medicine.

It opened new avenues for research in fields such as personalized medicine, gene therapy, and genetic counseling. It has also helped us better understand the genetic basis of diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

Hood is actually Leroy Hood, M.D., and PhD. He got his medical degree at Johns Hopkins between undergrad and doctoral education at Caltech in Pasadena.

Hood was a professor at Caltech in the 1980s, where he developed automated methods for sequencing DNA, a process that was essential to the Human Genome Project, for which he was involved from the first meeting in 1985 at UCal Santa Cruz.

Hood was not some kid from a remote small town in Montana who found his way to a little-known small college near the mountains northeast of Los Angeles.

Caltech, officially the California Institute of Technology, is among a small group of institutes of technology in the United States and is ranked among the best academic institutions in the world. Hood, who had been guided by his grandfather and father to focus on science, was induced to go to Caltech by a teacher at Shelby High who had graduated from there and sought to convince his best students to consider going to Caltech.

And appropriately for the outcome, Hood took his advise.

Lee Hood envisions a healthcare future guided by AI that will bring years longer healthy life.
Hood, co-founder the Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology, also coined the term “P4 medicine,” which is the idea that healthcare should be “predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory.”

Hood envisions a healthcare future and his book details the path, with his Human Phenome Initiative mapping the way, to achieve his goal: “I want to see people move into their ‘90s (and beyond) excited, creative and functional.”

He sees the key change from healthcare of today to the healthcare of the future hinges on the optimization of individual wellness and early detection of wellness-to-disease transitions, offering the potential for reversal before the emergence of clinically diagnosable disease.

The 13-year Human Genome Project was launched by the U.S. Department of Energy, which pitched it to Congress in 1987, and the National Institute of Health. Both funded the $2.7 billion cost, with support from organizations in other countries.

Now Hood offers a look at HGP2, and he might suggest the 20th anniversary of the original HGP as a logical time to launch “2,” The Human Phenome Initiative.

That’s an ambitious plan conceived at Phenome Health, the nonprofit that Hood founded in 2021 to advance a science and data-driven approach to optimize the brain and body health of individuals.

This Project would analyze the genomes and phenomes of one million individuals across the US over 10 years with the individuals selected to reflect the racial and demographic diversity of the U.S. It’s an enormously ambitious endeavor that he believes will demonstrate to the world the power of P4 healthcare.

Hood notes that the realization of P4 health will depend on many moving parts, but no tool will be more important than artificial intelligence.
Systems are already transforming healthcare. But Hood sees those changes accelerating to such a degree that “AI will soon be as much a part of our healthcare experience as doctors, nurses, waiting rooms and pharmacies.”

“In fact,” Hood suggests, “it won’t be long before AI has mostly replaced or redefined all of those.”
And Hood’s view of the future is of one built on scientific wellness in which interaction with artificial intelligence will be a normal part of healthcare.

It’s no longer news that the medical profession is expecting AI to be part of the future of medicine.
But in his book and in a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal headlined “The AI will see now” and co-authored by Nathan Price, Ph.D., the co-author of his book, the pair make the point that doctors are turning to AI tools to help them make the best decisions for patients.

Price is Chief Science Officer of New York-based Thorne HealthTech, a health intelligence company focused on leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to map the biological features related to an individual’s health.

Offering interesting imagery to those aware of the mythological half-horse, half-human centaur, Hood said “We are fast approaching the time of centaur doctors. They will combine the best parts of human intelligence and AI assistance and be empowered to make bold medical decisions with far fewer unintended consequences.”

What Hood may have had in mind is that the most famous centaur in Greek mythology is Chiron, who was known for his wisdom and knowledge of medicine.

The Human Genome Project came about because of a fortunate convergence of focus of two important government departments whose leadership convinced the Reagan Administration and Congress of the project’s importance.

Hood will face an equally daunting challenge in the quest for funding for the Human Phenome Initiative. But we live in a different era in two important ways, one challenging and one fortunate.
Getting an administration and a Congress that are more focused on disruption than anything resembling cooperation and progress on something important to the future seems maximum difficult, in fact unlikely.

But on the plus side, we live in a philanthropic time when two women could either or both sign a check to match the cost of HGP2 with little pause and without the need for government,
With McKenzie Scott’s net worth of $64 billion and Melinda Gates’ $10.7 billion and both spending freely on worthy causes, it may be that all Hood needs is an audience to tell his story because he tells it well and with the authority of his accomplishments.

But congressional concern about keeping up with China has actually given the lawmakers something to agree on and may open another opportunity for Hood’s initiative.

The Global Technology Leadership Act is a bipartisan AI bill aimed at keeping up with China. It would establish an office that analyzes how the country is keeping up with China and envisions billions being spent on crucial technologies like AI,
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Hood, who was a star high school quarterback in the small Montana town of Shelby and played halfback on Caltech’s football team, is proud of his athletic ability and his staying in condition. He has shared that though he is 85, his doctors say his biological age is 15 years younger.

He joked to me he actually played in 16 Rose Bowl games, to which any football-knowledgeable person would say, “can you explain that?”

Hood answered: “Caltech’s home field was the Rose Bowl, so each home game, we could look at the 200 or so fans on our side of the stadium and the 100 or so on the other side and focus on the thousands of empty seats and say ‘we’re playing a game in the Rose Bowl—a Rose Bowl game.

Arthur Harrigan, the Seattle attorney who, with little fanfare or thanks, used his legal prowess to save the Seattle Mariners and Seahawks, has retired from the firm he founded in 1986.

But Harrigan, now 79, shouldn’t be permitted to ride off into the sunset without belated acknowledgment by the community whose professional teams remain here because of him, despite credit having been legitimately shared with several others.

In essence, Harrigan’s legal victories over Jeff Smulyan and Ken Behring that prevented their moving the teams to other cities paved the way for finding local owners for their teams. In the case of the Mariners, that allowed the late Sen. Slade Gorton to emerge as a hero for finding local ownership in Nintendo and owner Hiroshi Yamauchi.

Harrigan is having trouble finding the sunset as he remains involved as a funder, organizer, and chairman of an energy project designed to help save the planet.

The legal battles with the owners of two of Seattle’s professional sports teams came about because they were tenants of the Kingdome, having leases with King County, which was a longtime client of Harrigan’s law firm. So it fell to him to keep the teams from moving.

The venue for resolving the future of the Seattle Mariners franchise was what amounted to an arbitration hearing before Arthur Andersen, the national accounting firm that both sides agreed to have decided some key issues relating to the lease.
Since it wasn't a court process, which would have gotten large visibility for the battle between attorneys over the fate of the Mariners, the outcome got no media attention.

So it was amusing to both Harrigan and me that after I first wrote a column about seven years ago on his success in keeping the two teams, he told me his staff, in reading the column, asked, “How come no one knew of this back in 1992?”

Harrigan's maneuvering over the meaning of wording in Smulyan's contract regarding an attendance clause accepted by the Andersen firm was key to the final outcome,

So Smulyan was required to give a four-month opportunity for a local buyer to be found. And of likely equal importance, Harrigan successfully argued that there should be a local value lower than the open-market value.

The accounting firm agreed and set a "stay-in-Seattle" valuation at $100 million, rather than the national open-market value of $135 million that it had determined.

That created the opportunity for Gorton and others to lead the effort to keep the team in Seattle to find a local buyer for $100 million, rather than $135 million, within four months.

No one knows if, at $135 million, Nintendo's owner would have opted to pick up the cost of saving the Mariners for Seattle.

More visible was the effort to save the Seahawks since the battle with Ken Behring included a decision by the State Supreme Court.
King County hired Harrigan's firm to keep Behring from fulfilling his widely publicized intent in the winter of 1996 to leave Seattle and move the team to Los Angeles.

Behring made the argument after some tiles had fallen from the Kingdome roof, that he had concerns about the seismic security of the Dome as he announced that he was moving the team to Los Angeles.

Harrigan recalled the meeting at which he, King County Executive Gary Locke, and his assistant and chief civil deputy Dick Holmquist met with Behring and his attorney, Ron Olson, who Harrigan noted was also Warren Buffet's attorney.

He said Olson read from a yellow pad, explaining that the team, fearing earthquakes might impact the Kingdome, had to be moved to the comparative safety of Southern California and the Rose Bowl.
“Holmquist and I were trying not to laugh," he said.

"We were poised to file a temporary restraining order the moment the meeting ended, Harrigan said. “In the meantime, the trucks had already begun the moving process.”

"So when Behring and Olson left the room, I made the call, and the restraining order was filed," he added. "Had that not happened, we would have had to go to California and ask a California judge to send them back."

In the same timeframe, the NFL owners were holding their annual meeting in Boca Raton and wanted to hear what both sides had to say," Harrigan said. "I brought along Jon Magnusson and two other renowned structural engineers with West Coast seismic design expertise who explained that the idea that Southern California was safer than the Kingdome in case of earthquake was ludicrous."

The legal maneuvering all came to an end when it was announced that Paul Allen had purchased the Seahawks.

Now that the man responsible for this little-known piece of Seattle sports history has retired, there needs to be some recognition of what he accomplished.

There’s also an interesting piece of far-reaching legal history for Harrigan from when he was a young attorney in 1975 and spent a year as senior counsel to the Church Committee, the original Senate Intelligence Committee.

Chaired by Idaho Sen. Frank Church, the U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence was looking into all federal intelligence activities, including IRS activity.

Harrigan discovered that other intelligence agencies were obtaining tax returns from the IRS and using the information for their own purposes. In one instance, the goal was to prompt an IRS audit of a Minnesota citizen to take place during the 1968 Democratic Convention so that the individual could not attend.

Harrigan determined the IRS wasn’t initiating its own audits of individuals but was responding to requests from other federal for the returns of individuals whose activities the agency was concerned about.

He said when he appeared before the full committee, Goldwater, Church, Mondale, and others, to tell them what he had learned, Mondale was outraged that one of his constituents was among those abused by the process.

“Mondale called a full-day committee hearing,” Harrigan remembered. “In the meantime, I had already told the IRS Commissioner what we had learned, and before the Senate hearing, he had already adopted new regulations to ensure nothing like that could ever happen, installing audit rights against any agency that has sought tax information from the IRS. We had the hearing. The Commissioner reported that he had already stopped this in its tracks. Frontpage NY Times the next day.”

As to the climate-aiding energy project that is still on Harrigan’s business plate, where it has been since he first got involved a dozen years ago, it's called Advanced Rail Energy Storage (ARES),

It’s basically “highly efficient’ electric rail cars running uphill and generating energy, converting electric power to mechanical potential energy, which is delivered when the cars are deployed downhill.

Harrigan and prominent Bellevue business leader Spike Anderson provided much of the initial and continuing funding for this system which CEO Howard Trott, another Seattleite, has in recent years led. The ARES system has already attracted attention from utilities around the country.

It’s been seven years since I did a column on the project, headlined “Seattle investor friends focus on ‘The Holy Grail of Energy’ train project,” indicating their long-term commitment to the time and cost of bringing the project to final deployment.

As Northwest hockey fans thrill at the play of their playoff Kraken and media explore every aspect of the young team’s performance, I thought I’d offer a look at the restaurant at Kraken headquarters that fans are flocking to.

The 32 Bar and Grill overlooking Kraken Community Ice Complex at Northgate may well become the most popular family restaurant in Seattle as the NHL playoffs unfold. And beyond.

Certainly, Kraken President and CEO Tod Leiweke and his management team might say a special family-friendly place to watch the record-setting young hockey team is an important part of what’s taking place this year.

Tod Leiweke(R) and Buoy mascotAnd 32 is destined, as the Kraken hockey team set an NHL record for victories in an expansion team’s second season in earning a playoff berth, to fashion memories present and future to go with the memories built into it.

The restaurant's east side is huge windows overlooking two ice rinks, one of which is the Kraken practice. Both are busy much of the day with hockey players of all ages or just skaters.

The man the Kraken hired as a consultant to create the food and beverage experience at the restaurant overlooking two ice rinks a floor below is Mick McHugh, whose iconic F.X. McRory’s Steak Chop and Oyster House in Pioneer Square epitomized The Irish Pub.

McHugh, who closed McRory’s in 2017 after 40 years of capturing the loyalty of baseball, football, and soccer fans, was told by Rob Lampman, now Kraken COO, “We want to do McRory’s hockey bar.”

McHugh took that to mean not that he was to create an Irish pub but rather a food and beverage experience like that which made McRory’s unique for those who became the regular crowd,

And since 32 opened in the fall of 2021, its “regular crowd” has come to feature families with youngsters from grade school on up, most clad in Kraken soccer gear, many of the kids to be on the ice rinks below before or after joining their parents to dine. And McHugh is on hand most lunches cleaning tables and picking up dishes.

And the man responsible for already building Seattle sports memories as the guy who, as CEO of the Seattle Seahawks, guided the NFL team to its first super bowl in 2006, is excited about the memories to come with the Kraken.

“This team is a really big deal for Seattle,” Leiweke enthused as he brought the Kraken mascot, Buoy the sea troll, to meet me and take my picture with him. Leiweke’s office and those of other executives and employees are down the hall from the restaurant in the $90 million state-of-the-art practice facility. It's their eating place as well.

“This is the largest improvement in wins, with 19, and points, with 40, for any team from its first to second season in NHL history,” Leiweke offered.

It hasn't seemed to get visibility in all the media attention focused on the Kraken locally or nationally, but two other teams that Leiweke served as CEO are also in the playoffs this year.

Leiweke was the head man with the Minnesota Wild, third this year in the Central Division when Paul Allen plucked him in 2003 to be CEO of the Seahawks. He guided the Seahawks to their first Super Bowl two years later, though they lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

He was hired in July of 2010 to become CEO of the Tampa Bay Lightning, Tampa Bay Storm and run the Tampa Bay Times Forum

The Lightning are in these playoffs as third-place finishers in the Atlantic Division.

I recall that in 2012, as Leiweke and I were trading emails about the Seahawks, one of his emails included a photo of the sun setting on Tampa Bay with his comment: “This is my paddle board space.”

No back to McHugh and recalling that while his McRory’s bar boasted a Guinness World Record designation as the establishment with the most bottles of public spirits, more than 1,600 brands of whiskey, 32 features 1,432 hockey pucks from around the world embedded in the bar top.

“I wanted to establish the spirit of McRory’s, so I worked hard with getting the back bar zigged and zagged and got its mirrors up to the ceiling,” McHugh said.

“It was Lampman’s idea to do the pucks in the bar top,” McHugh said. “So we sent a letter to the International Ice Hockey Federation seeking to spread the word to send us pucks.”
“I also encouraged them to hire a food and beverage manager and had one in mind,” he added.
Mick McHugh (L) and Ken Moriarity, the 12-restaurant team

Mick McHugh (L) and Ken Moriarity, the 12 restaurant teamSo Ken Moriarity, who had worked with famed restaurateur Victor Rossellini as a teenager and then later opened his own Classic Catering that had been forced to close during COVID, was the man McHugh wanted. McHugh had also worked with Rosellini early in his career.

Moriarity was hired near to the opening of the facility, a little ahead of when he was budgeted, McHugh said, “to avoid his being hired by one of the big food firms.”.

But Moriarity has an unusual added responsibility in that the Kraken Center has a second restaurant on the first floor, necessitated by an NHL rule that facilities owned by teams have breakfast and lunch available for players.

In addition, NHL food facilities must have a nutritionist. Thus the nutrition focus required for the player's restaurant, provided by a person under contract who works with the players on training as well as nutrition, benefits the offerings of the family restaurant on the second floor.

McHugh said he urged management to buy a pizza oven, which he described as “a good bang for the buck for parents and kids, providing for things like pizza parties.”

As I visited with McHugh and Moriarity at 32 as they prepared for the opening-night TV-viewing crowd for what turned out to be the victorious playoff opener in Denver, I suggested to Moriarity that the 300-person capacity of the place was going to be strained.

That will be increasingly true as fans headed for games at the Arena are discovering the best parking is at Northgate, where they can stop in at 32 before or after games that are a light rail trip to the Arena.

Plus, Moriarity noted that one of the ice rinks was going to serve as a skating-party facility where skaters could watch the playoff games at the same time as they skated.

And I kidded McHugh, actually semi-kidding, that the last missing factor in the 32 bar is the eye-catching wall-sized portrait of the McRory bar itself by the late renowned sports artist LeRoy Neiman.

McHugh relishes the retelling of the Neiman-painting story. The artist was being featured at a showing of artwork in Seattle and was brought to dinner at McRory's.

McHugh recalls Neiman's enthusiasm that evening, saying, "I've seen all the great bars and never seen a bar like this! How many bottles do you have?" "I told him we had maybe 800 bottles on the back bar and then asked him, 'Why not paint it for us?'"

"After some back and forth, he finally said it would cost $100,000, two first-class plane tickets from New York to Seattle and being put up at the Four Seasons, and he'd agree to do the sketch and painting the following St. Patrick's Day," McHugh recalls. "But after doing the bar, he hit an artist's wall about how to do all the bottles," he added.

While McHugh goes on in detail with enthusiasm about how the final addition of the bottles came about. The short of it is they arrived at Neiman's apartment in Manhattan with two gold bars worth $25,000 as the down payment on completion of the painting. Neiman still resisted because of his block over how to do the bottles until his wife suggested a collage of labels that McHugh would soak off the bottles and mail them back to Neiman. That's how the painting finally emerged.

As we talked on the phone this week, he said, “I’m looking at it right now on my condo wall. We’ll see.”

Awaiting the next word on Jimmy Carter, the 98-year-old former president now in hospice care at his Georgia home, may stir some reflection on his 1976 campaign when voters in western states’ primaries all wanted someone else to be the Democratic standard bearer.

And Sen. Henry M. Jackson of Washington was actually the favorite to win the nomination when the’76 campaign for president began. It was a role Jackson might already have held had the script of fate been written differently 16 years earlier.

The challenge in the West for the former Georgia governor wasn’t that his disarming “Hi, my name is Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President” didn’t sell as well with western voters as with those in other parts of the country. Rather it was that 1976 was a year of western favorite sons or favorite sons of neighbor states.

In fact, two of the favorite sons, Sen. Frank Church of Idaho and Rep. Mo Udall of Arizona, were considered to be in the running, along with Carter, through the primary election season and collected delegates at the party’s national convention.

JIMMY CARTER'S 1976 quest for the presidency found a challenge with western primary votersChurch and Udall were longtime opponents of the Vietnam War with Church’s opposition dating back to 1963, well before the escalation began under Lyndon Johnson. The opposition was part of the Church’s criticism of American policy in Southeast Asia.

And though the final day of the war had been in 1975, the campaigns of most presidential hopefuls had begun by then and its political impact on the electorate still echoed into 1976.

The other favorite son was California Gov. Jerry Brown, then only two years into his first term as California chief executive, who won both his state’s primary and the Nevada primary.

Udall, who won the Arizona caucuses, finished second to Carter in the delegate contest at the Democratic National Convention and Brown third. Church won Idaho, Montana, and, in an upset, Oregon.

Jackson was a long-prominent Senate Democrat, including having been chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1960 and had been on the short, short list for the vice presidential role with John F. Kennedy before JFK decided to pick Lyndon Johnson because of his Texas and southern ties. Thus Jackson might have already been president before 1976.

Jackson’s appeal rested on his political beliefs that were characterized by support of civil rights, human rights, and safeguarding the environment. He was one of the few members of Congress who sent his children to D.C. public schools.

But his equally strong commitment to oppose totalitarianism in general and communism in particular and support for the Vietnam War as the focus of his campaign against communism brought a hostile reception from the party’s left wing.

Jackson’s run for president in 1972 drew little support but by the time of the 1976 campaign, he was viewed as the frontrunner. He received substantial financial support from Jewish Americans who admired his pro-Israel views.

HENRY M. JACKSON was actually favored to win the Democratic nomination when the 1976 presidential campaign beganUltimately, Jackson’s decision not to compete in the early Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary spelled doom for his presidential aspirations as Carter took the largest percentage of caucus votes in Iowa and won the New Hampshire primary over four other candidates.

Jackson won the Massachusetts primary but after losing the key Pennsylvania primary to Carter by 12 points, he dropped out of the race.

I had the chance to help cover the 1976 Oregon primary for United Press International as a political reporter and so had the opportunity to see Carter, Church, and Brown on the campaign trail in that state.

One of my favorite memories from my political writer days was when I was sent to the Portland airport to interview Church as he arrived on election night, with returns showing he was on the way to a substantial victory over Carter.

So as I walked up to a smiling Church as he walked from his plane to the airport, introduced myself and asked: “So, are you going to be viewed, senator, as the new “Lion of Idaho?”

The question was a reference to Sen. William Borah, who was affectionately, and widely, known as “The Lion of Idaho” during his 33 years in the Senate, elected in 1907 as a Republican and establishing himself as a prominent progressive with fiery independence.

“I’d be fine with that,” Church responded with a smile, “as long as I don’t also become known as "'the stallion of Idaho,’”: apparently an amused reference to a lesser-known aspect of Borah’s reputation.

Despite losing the western primaries and caucuses, Carter went on to win the nomination and defeat Gerald Ford in the 1976 general election and become the nation’s 39th president. And it was losing four years later to Ronald Reagan that the door was opened in his post-presidential decades to become known for a life of service, which will be his lasting legacy.

Jackson died on September 1, 1983, of an aortic aneurysm at the age of 71, in his 30 in the Senate.
Jackson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. President Ronald Reagan called him "one of the greatest lawmakers of our century.”

And as a closing note, it’s difficult for a one-time political writer not to offer the following observation: For a man with Carter’s experience and background to defeat three highly respected and qualified members of Congress like Jackson, Church, and Udall is an indication of the role of timing and circumstance in fate's scripting.

But the important role Carter came to play after his single term as president may be taken as evidence that fate, in whatever form, does have a plan.

The story of two boy baseball fans whose business success led them to own their hometown teams

The tale of two boys whose fathers took them to watch their hometown baseball teams and who grew up to be iconically successful in business and thus were able to become owners of those hometown teams could be the most heart-warming story in all of sports.

Except for the story of John Stanton, majority owner of the Seattle Mariners, and Mikal Thomsen, majority owner of the Tacoma Rainiers, and life-long business partners, isn’t a story that’s well known in detail. And it needs to be.

So before a luncheon audience at the Columbia tower club this week, Stanton and Thomsen fielded questions and shared stories and memories.

I told them, at the outset, that we’d be doing a three-part interview. First, their memories are tied to attending games with their fathers and their youthful affection for their Tacoma and Seattle teams.

Then recollections of their days as early hires of McCaw Cellular Communications, much of whose story is the lore of a company that Craig McCaw, with a key assist from Stanton and Thomsen, built over the course of the 1980s into a major player in the cellular industry.

Then their ability to become owners, in Stanton’s case, the Mariners, of which he eventually became majority owner and CEO, and in Thomsen’s case, the Tacoma Rainiers, which Thomsen described again, as he did for me in an interview a few years ago, as “a dream come true.”

Thomsen’s childhood recollections began when his father took him, as a three-year-old, to see a triple-A team play its first game in more than half a century in Tacoma. That was the first of many.

That ignited a life-long affection of a kid, then a man, for his hometown baseball team.
John Stanton (L) and Mikal Thomsen (R)

And thus, although he grew up to make his name and fortune over two decades as he became a leading figure in the cellular-mobile phone industry, Thomsen's "dream come true" is played out each year as CEO and, with his wife, Lynn, the major investor in the Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers.

And Stanton’s recollections were mostly of being a teenager going with his dad to see the Seattle Pilots in their lone season, 1969, before “a used-car salesman named Bud Selig moved the team to Milwaukee and became the brewers.” He recalled he cried when they moved.

I spent most of the interview tapping their recollections about being early hires of McCaw Cellular, both in their twenties in the early ‘80s.

Stanton, who was McCaw’s first hire and was soon vice chair of the company, and Thomsen, who joined McCaw soon after, became leaders of that emerging industry. And they met their wives there. Theresa Gillespie, chief financial officer at McCaw, and Lynn, who was a paralegal running stock options and handling board relations.

McCaw was really born as a cable business but, with the entrepreneurial instincts of its people, came along at just the right time with the break-up of AT&T ordered by federal court degree in 1982 and completed in 1984 with the creation of seven “baby bells.”

John Stanton (L) and Mikal Thomsen (R)The opportunity for McCaw was in the federal designation of 734 markets, including 428 rural ones, where newly formed wireless carriers like McCaw could apply for and buy spectrum licenses to service those areas.

By the late 1980s, Stanton had focused on the opportunities created by those hundreds of rural licenses, many of which were being returned to the FCCs by those who had applied to provide service, and pitched Craig on going after them.

But Craig made it clear he was too immersed in the metro-area opportunities and urged Stanton to go do that if he wished, so Stanton Communications was born, and a two-decade story of wireless success followed.

First was co-founding Pacific Northwest Cellular with Theresa and Thomsen in 1992, then the founding of Western Wireless, of which Thomsen became president, and the birthing of VoiceStream, which was later sold to Deutche-Telecom. That became T-Mobile, whose name is now on the stadium as the Home of the Mariners.

During our question and answer, it was clear that the audience wanted to focus mostly on their baseball ownership, which brought early indication of the financial role his wife, Terry, has played in Stanton operations.

Stanton recalled when the local Mariner ownership was being put together in 1991; he really wanted to be among those owners. But he noted that Theresa advised “no way.”

“She pointed out we were dipping into our own account every two weeks to make the Western wireless payroll,” then 100 employees.

In 2001 Stanton bought out John McCaw’s small ownership share. In August 2016, he led a group of minority owners to buy out Nintendo’s ownership and became the majority owner and CEO.

Reminded that the name Rainiers had belonged to the Seattle Triple-A team before the Mariners arrived, Thomsen offered with a smile, “yes, but they were named after a beer, and our team is named after a mountain.”

The audience questions clarified the obligation both Stanton and Thomsen feel toward their communities and the role their businesses are expected to play.

When Stanton was asked about how he feels when criticism is directed toward him about a Mariners issue or decision, he said: “The worst thing that could happen to us is if people no longer cared. And criticism of our decisions means people care.”

“We have to care about our community, and that means we have to have a role in addressing community issues and challenges,” he added.

Putting an exclamation mark on that comment was the fact that attendees included Sharon Mooers, senior director of philanthropy for Year Up Puget Sound, which came into existence in Stanton’s office in 2011.

He’s been a key supporter and is chair of the organization whose mission is to "close the Opportunity Divide by ensuring that young adults gain the skills, experiences, and support" leading to careers or into higher education.

“This Fantasy Flight experience always resets my faith in humanity,” said Eric Hrivnak, the pilot who usually is at the controls of Alaska Airlines’ annual flight from Spokane’s airport to the North Pole with a 737-900 filled with needy kids, and their elves, to visit Santa Clause.

The 15th year of Alaska Airlines’ Fantasy Flight, with this year’s flight taking place Saturday, December 10, with 61 orphans and foster kids and 108 elves aboard, got a special Seattle airing before a Columbia Tower Club audience at an interview with the “elf” who has guided the event for 22 years and two key Alaska employees.

For the Club members and guests on hand last Wednesday to hear from Steve Paul, known as Elf Bernie for this event, and pilot Hrivnak and cabin attendant Carole Scallon, it was a heart-warming experience to hear about what all three described as “the basic goodness of people.”

Or as Hrivnak described it to me before the luncheon interview: “Seeing this incredible group of volunteers help these children experience Christmas makes you believe in Santa Clause.”

“The basic goodness of people” and “faith in humanity” are, unfortunately, phrases that are less likely to come to mind these days. That makes the event all the more important to the adults who make it possible and those who hear of it as to the kids, four to 10, who experience it.

Scallon has actually been involved in the Fantasy Flight since before Alaska became the participating airline in 2008, replacing United, which merely filled one of its Spokane planes and taxied around the airport.

She was aboard in that 2008 initial Alaska Fantasy Flight but told me “before Alaska took over from United, I helped my niece, who was a United Flight attendant.”

“This opportunity has been a gift to me,” she added. “A chance to give back. And I love being with the children laughing, dancing and having fun.”

Pilot Eric Hrivnak - "It makes you believe in Santa Claus."United Airlines actually did the fantasy trip from 1999 to 2007 but it was a commitment of the local United team rather than the company itself, with United’s Spokane team corralling an airliner overnighting in Spokane. But because there was no provision for the “flight” to carry the kids aloft, the plane taxied around and stopped at a hangar for the Santa visit.
 
It was while he was traveling for Itron, the Spokane-based global energy and water management company, that Paul saw a poster at the airport promoting United’s “flight” in 2000, and with that, he was hooked and thereafter took charge of overseeing all the planning and resolving the challenges.
 
He was asked to step into a leadership role in 2006, and his first crisis came as they prepared for the 2007 flight only to learn that United had no planes available in Spokane. So he recalled, “we had to revert to school buses on the field surrounded by emergency escorts with flashing lights. Actually, it worked because all the windows were fogged up, and the flashing lights as we headed to the North Pole made it very magical.”
 
“After the 2007 problem, I reached out to United about more of a commitment, including a plan for a plane and a flight,” Paul said. “They had no interest. The Fantasy Flight leadership approached Southwest. They had no interest either.”
 
“My neighbor knew some people in Alaska’s marketing department, and when I reached out, they were enthusiastic about providing a plane and crew and were quick to say, ‘of course, we can take off.’”

Paul has been president and CEO of Northwest North Pole Adventures, the 501c3 that oversees everything related to planning and carrying out this special event. In his other life, he is a digital IT program manager at Engie Impact, a Spokane energy management company.

Steve Paul, a/k/a "Elf Bernie," has guided the event for 22 years.For longtime readers of The Harp, this story will be familiar because I’ve written of it in each of the past dozen years, since I first learned of it from my friend, Blythe Thimsen, then a Spokane magazine editor who wrote a story on her experience being an elf.

I’ve come to describe the spirit that settles over all those involved as the Magic Dust of Christmas Caring. That magic dust is evidenced by the Spokane residents who help prepare for months for the flight, the businesses that donate all the products that make the event happen, and the Alaska employees who participate as crew and elves. And the airline itself for making its now 15-year commitment to plane, crew, and a large slice of the caring.
 
Once the flight unloads the children and the elves at the North Pole, it comes time for each child’s personal visit with Santa, who will have received their lists ahead of time. A gift will be selected for each from their lists so Santa can reach into his sack and say, “I got your list. Look here!”

And when I asked Hrivnak for some of his memories of the children and Santa, he left a few dry eyes in the Tower Club audience. So the rest of this column belongs to him in his notes to me:

"2011 was the first time I was involved with this charity.  I picked up the 'turn,' which is a single, one-day trip.  I was just looking for a little extra Christmas money.  A day prior to the turn, I received an email stating I would be flying the Spokane Fantasy Flight for 60 children. I was not sure what this was about, but I knew it was related to Christmas. (Thankfully, I at least had a Santa tie.)
 
On the way over to Spokane, Carole briefed me on the flight.  I decided to come up with a flight profile that would be entertaining for the kids.

Flight attendant Carole Scallon - 'This opportunity has been a gift to me'After experiencing the 'North Pole for the first time, I was hooked and knew I had to be involved with this charity.  It was a life-altering experience that made me thankful for how good my life was from being a professional Pilot.  I felt a duty to give these kids the proper experience of flight.
 
The following year, I learned how to work with the kids before the flight.  I gave them red and green beads from Carole, signed their passports, and asked them about their flight experience.  I’d make sure to help the ones that are really nervous about flying. For most of the children on this flight, it is their first time in a real airplane.
 
Since 2011, I have flown this Fantasy Flight eight times as a First Officer and once as a Captain.  Each time, there was a story that affected me from a touching moment of the day.

• - The 'Elf' counselor who needed a few minutes to cry in the first class LAV, because this flight was the first time she saw her child smile.
• - The 10-year-old girl who wanted to return the ornament with her name on it, because she never had a Christmas tree before to hang an ornament.
• - The little girl with pigtails who told Santa, 'there’s no way you have a bike for me; that would be too much.'  Santa directed her to look behind a Christmas tree. She found a new bike with her name on it.  Her excitement and joy from that bike brought tears to us watching.
• - The kids at the North Pole tossing the fake snowballs at everyone that Carol had provided.
• - Seeing the kids get fitted for new winter boots.
• - Watching the kids snuggle in their new blankets during the last event of the evening, listening to Mrs. Claus read Polar Express.” 

There used to be other airlines that did Christmas flights to one extent or another for needy kids, but 2020 halted all. And a search in preparation for this column didn’t turn up any such holiday trips, an indication that Alaska, which resumed the flight in 2021, is now alone in providing this annual trip for children.

I’ve known Lynn Brewer to be a disruptive influence since I first met her two decades ago, soon after she had left the then-iconic energy company Enron and become an in-demand speaker on why she became a whistleblower before the Houston-based giant’s bankruptcy.

But it’s intriguing to see her attention now focused on the kind of disruptions that could bring the type of changes that would have a positive impact on the crisis of global warming as well as the more imminent crisis of helping restore a war-torn Ukraine.

First, the global crisis, where her current effort is for sure disruptive in a globally beneficial manner, for the creation of what she has named the Autonomous Climate Technology Ecosystem (ACTE), for which she has a patent pending. ACTE was invented as part of her effort to focus on hemp for climate crisis easing.

ACTE, she explained, was created based on her days at Enron and her knowledge of trading carbon credits in the regulatory markets. The invention is designed to use technology to generate uniform carbon credit certificates.
 
“The uniformity of the certificates automatically generated using artificial intelligence and other climate technology to quantify and qualify the carbon sequestered allows these certificates to be actively traded by Wall Street.”

She foresees the use of drones, satellites, and probes to detect carbon data from grassland, forestland, cropland, settlements, wetlands, and agricultural by-products derived from industrial hemp, like straw, corn, or any other agricultural waste, to allow anyone who owns or leases land to request carbon credit certificate.
Lynn Brewer seeks to create focus on growing hemp to help fight global warming and related project to aid Ukraine's restoration
“Rather than clear-cutting the trees and receiving, for example, $200,000 for the timber, someone can keep the timber and sell carbon credits derived from the carbon dioxide sequestered in the trees and potentially receive more than $1,000,000 for the carbon credits,” she said.  
 
The patent is key to a multipart effort Brewer has found herself immersed in this year and is an initiative to draw this country in line with the rest of the world in the growing of hemp, a plant that grows to be 15-to-18 feet tall with the majority of the leaves and flowers being grown at the top.

The hemp plant, used by humans for about 10,000 years as a source of food and building material and at one point the most dominant cash crop on the American landscape, was made illegal in the late 1930s because the plant is the source of cannabinoids and THC and an anti-marijuana campaign across America in the ‘30s culminated with the plant being classified as illegal.

One of the uses of hemp fibers is in industrial products, including building blocks, basically called Hempcrete, that resemble concrete blocks for construction but are deemed to be carbon neutral because they sequester carbon.  

Growing hemp is a process already years in development in many parts of the world, promoted by the EU across Europe, but legalized in this country only four years ago after more than 80 years as an illegal plant because hemp and marijuana both come from the cannabis plant. The industrial hemp plant must contain less than .03 percent of THC under regulatory guidelines.

In those countries where building with hemp is well underway, including South Africa, two Cape Town businesses are partnering to expand a five-story building to 12 stories by adding levels constructed with blocks from Afrimat Hemp.

“Our hemp is like bamboo, growing tall shoots that are not allowed to produce more than .03 percent THC and is not smoked!” Brewer explained.

In fact, developments relating to her hemp-growing initiative have come in a rush this year, including her patent, which she says will revolutionize the way carbon credits are generated.

First was the planting of 52 acres of industrial hemp in the town of Kittitas, not many miles from her home in Easton. By the time of the first harvest in a month or so, the stalks will have grown to 18 feet or more.

Peter Whalen will partner with a Ukrainian Hempcrete builder in the first veteran's rehab center to assist Ukraine orphan-refugeesThen this spring, she was appointed to the State's Task Force for the creation of a Hemp Commodity Commission, whose launch is an indication that there is a monetary future for growing the hemp plant that has only been legal since the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill.

An indication that her work isn’t going unnoticed is that she received an invitation to compete for Elon Musk’s Carbon Removal X-Prize of $100 million for carbon removal innovation, which is what hemp does in spades, sequestering two to three metric tons of CO2 per acre in the soil and up to 6 tons per acre in the plant.

“And,” Brewer explained, “These amounts accumulate in 90 to 120 days in the hemp, whereas a forest takes a minimum of 10 years to have the same sequestering effect.”

Evidencing an intriguing perspective on the profit value of helping save the planet, Brewer told me: “Buying and selling carbon credits should be as easy as ordering a product off Amazon.com. And anyone should be able to purchase a carbon credit certificate, whether it is a company that needs to offset its greenhouse gas emissions, a trader interested in market speculation, a broker selling climate-risk hedges, a young adult who wants to invest in the carbon credit market, or a grandfather who wants to buy a carbon credit certificate for his newborn grandchild.”

Now the Ukraine aspect of her focus. Brewer has put together a strategic partnership with Peter J. Whalen, a veterans advocate I’ve also written about, and who is proposing that his Invictus Foundation build treatment Centers of Excellence across the country for veterans’ rehabilitation from traumatic brain injuries. He is looking to use his wounded-veteran status to bring federal funding to a project in Ukraine.

Brewer contacted Whalen, a Vietnam veteran, after reading my column on him and learned he had been approached by someone in Turkey who sought to partner with him for building projects in Ukraine using Whalen’s wounded-veteran status to gather available federal funds.

Turns out that people around the world are looking for ways to get their hands on some of the millions of U.S. dollars that will go to aid Ukraine’s restoration.

“Why should we work with turkeys rather than directly with people in Ukraine,” Brewer remembers joking to Whalen. And thereby hangs the opportunity for her to introduce a Ukrainian builder named Sergiy Kovalenkov as a sort of new American hero once he gets to be known, as he will, as a co-founder of the U.S. Hemp Builders Association and now at work on building a facility in Ukraine to house orphans and homeless victims of the war.

Completion of his facility requires another $230,000 that Brewer has committed herself to raise, telling me she hoped to find opportunities to get people to donate pennies, dimes, or dollars to be part of aiding the Ukrainians.

Kovelenko is a Kyiv civil engineer builder who built the first hempcrete home in Australia.

Brewer describes him with a chuckle as “looking like he just walked off the beach at Malibu.” He's been building hemp homes for a dozen years with his company, Hempire, and will help develop a hempcrete building for Whelan’s first veterans center, which he hopes to locate on a 200-acre spot near Orting that is owned by the state.

In addition, Kovalenkov will be Brewer’s technical advisor for her hemp farm and negotiate deals, as with the French company that manufactures the block-making machine that Swiftwater will use to manufacture hempcrete blocks to use in building hempcrete homes that are pest resistant, mold resistant and fire resistant.

Brewer said her Swiftwater SPC (social purpose corporation), which is a division of her Swiftwater Holdings, “will take an investment position” in Whalen’s first center with her hemp to come from the acreage in Kittitas “sufficient to manufacture enough hempcrete to build the 15,000 square foot center from the 52 acres grown this year.”

“And the 200 acres that Whalen’s Invictus Foundation brain trauma centers will sit on would be sufficient to grow, with an agricultural designation, hemp that will be used for building transitional housing for veterans, with the first target being veterans among Seattle’s homeless population,” Brewer said.