As Ann-Marie Anderson and her clients and friends celebrated the 25th anniversary of her Ideal Exercise gyms and her exercise model of 10 minutes of high-intensity a week, she has begun to focus on helping the anti-aging effort by enhancing awareness of exercise to combat a muscle-wasting disease called sarcopenia.

Ann Marie AndersonOver the quarter-century, since she and her late husband, Greg Anderson, founded the first of their gyms, the concept of 10-to-15 minutes of resistance training once, or for some twice, a week may have seemed amusing to many, until those who chuckled tried it and became believers. And some of the "believers" have been clients for as long as she has had the gyms, now one in Seattle and one in Bellevue, while I've been a client and believer for three years this month.

Now she is turning part of her attention to teaching a population that is living longer than the process of aging can have an "anti-aging" flip side, which she sees as the outcome of creating a better understanding of sarcopenia.

Sarcopenia is defined as "a disease associated with the aging process. Loss of muscle mass and strength, which in turn affects balance, gait and overall ability to perform tasks of daily living, are hallmark signs of this disease."

Until recent years it was thought to be an irreversible part of the aging process. Now the medical profession has come to be aware that it is treatable, and that "The primary treatment for sarcopenia is exercise, specifically resistance training or strength training, activities that increase muscle strength and endurance."

"People, not merely those who are aging, since we all are, need to know more about this disease, which even health care workers as recently as the mid-90s viewed as muscular deterioration that was just a part of the aging process," Anderson told me at a recent workout.

"Now we know that it is a muscle deterioration process that can be combated and reversed by exercise," she added. "That's why I want to begin to focus on seniors."

"People need to stay functional and my vision and purpose is to train people to exercise in a safe way so they stay functional for a long time," Anderson added.  

High-Intensity Training is taken from the "SuperSlow" process devised more than 40-plus years ago by high-intensity guru Ken Hutchins, who defined and popularized his trademarked SuperSlow form of resistance-training exercise and developed methodology, trainer certifications and exercise equipment. He worked specifically with Nautilus, the exercise-equipment manufacturer that had developed: "strength training principles."

SuperSlow workouts, which are actually high-intensity, slow-motion strength training, typically consist of one set on each of five or six Nautilus units, each set carried out to complete muscle fatigue. Hutchins recommended performing each set for between 100 and 240 seconds, depending on the exercise and the subject's capability.

The bible of the high-intensity disciples is Body by Science, co-authored by Doug McGuff, M.D., who throughout his medical career maintained a focus on high-intensity exercises culminating in the late '90s with his opening Ultimate Exercise, his own high-intensity gym.

This may seem like a column to promote a particular and unusual training regimen and in a sense it is, and I'm in good company. My high-intensity trainer's routine is supported by an array of healthcare leaders, most of alternative healthcare, though McGuff's longtime focus indicates believers among conventional medical practitioners. And Anderson says she has had orthopedic surgeons, dentists, gynecologists, "every type of doctor over the years." 

Among those prominent fans is Jeff Haller, a nationally known teacher of teachers in the Feldenkrais Method, which is about being sensitive to your body and coming to understand that your brain has the ability to guide healing.

I asked Haller, who played college basketball at Oregon State and whose Bellevue-based Inside Moves is the outgrowth of his studying directly under Moshe Feldenkrais in the early '80s, about his view of the importance of high intensity to healthy aging.

"High-intensity training makes great physiological sense and there is no more efficient way to retain lean muscle mass while aging," said Haller, who still plays basketball in his early '70s and has been working out with Anderson for five years.

Or as my friend Bob Greszanik, whose clients at his Energetic Sports Lab for acupuncture, sports medicine and energetic technologies in Bellevue include college and professional athletes, put it: "It provides more strength in less time without the risk of injury. It's the new paradigm of training."

Greszanik, who takes Fridays off most of the year to spend the day playing basketball, added: "I personally gained 15 pounds of muscle. It's hard for people to comprehend that less can be a lot more."

Dr. Joe Pizzorno, founder and 22-year president of Bastyr University and one of the nation's most respected naturopaths, has been a client of Ann-Marie's for virtually the entire quarter century since she and Greg first opened their Gym.

I asked Pizzorno to explain what 25 years working with Anderson have done for him.'
"My wife, Lara, began working out with Ann-Marie. I didn't pay much attention as I had been happily working for three years with a trainer who had me doing one hour sessions three times a week.

"But about six months, Lara mentioned how much weight she was now lifting I was shocked. Despite my being bigger (and male) she was lifting almost as much as I was! So I decided to give Ann-Marie a try and in only three months I had increased my strength by a remarkable 40 percent.  

"Of particular significance to me is that as an avid basketball player, jumping height is critical to me. While monitoring the amount of weight a person can lift is the standard way of tracking efficacy, vastly more important to me is a virtual leap," said Pizzorno, now his mid-70s. "That 40 percent improvement translated into a real world four more inches of elevation! Working out just once a week."  

In fact, the training model has long been known, but unfortunately not widely publicized, to be a way to aid those suffering from osteoporosis.
The way osteoporosis came into the equation is when Hutchins and his wife, in 1982, conducted the "Nautilus osteoporosis study" at the University of Florida Medical School and found that the slow-moving, controlled-exercise approach was effective in building bone density in elderly women with osteoporosis.

Entrepreneur Sandy Wheeler, the founder of equipment maker Bowflex, which owned Nautilus for a number of years, recalled in an interview a couple of years ago that the company did a project with Tufts University to measure how the use of the equipment improved the bone density of people in their 80s and 90s.

The impediments to popularizing High-Intensity training are two: since it is one-to-one training for a brief time each week, it's not likely a sports or health club is going to promote it to its members, and the fact is exercising to the point of failure on five pieces of equipment is painful.

Memorial Day inevitably provides a reminder for me of the journey that my friend Joe Galloway has been on conducting interviews over the past six years across the country with veterans of the Vietnam War to preserve their memories as part of the 50th Anniversary Vietnam War Commemoration.

His interviews have been the soul of the 50th Commemorative that was launched seven years ago this Memorial Day to honor those who fought in Vietnam but were never thanked when they returned to a divided nation.  

Joe GallowayGalloway, one of the best-known correspondents of that war as a reporter for United Press International, was selected by the Defense Department unit charged with administering the program to do the interviews to preserve for future generations.

This column was to be an update of Galloway's interview travels as he gets back on the road, after two spinal surgeries In February, off June 9 for Florida with July in upstate New York, then in August to Louisville to do a week of interviews at 1st Marine Division Association. Reunion.

Then I learned of a coming reunion for a different war, the Korean conflict, whose returning veterans were celebrated for their contributions to the nation rather than reviled. The reunion is June 13 in Reno for the approximately two dozen "Chosin Few" remaining survivors from the battle at Chosin Reservoir in North Korea in November of 1950.

So I decided to make this column a two-part Memorial Day week offering, part on the correspondent collecting the stories of Vietnam veterans and part on one soldier's story as one of the Chosin Few, survivors of a battle that was the subject of a 2010 movie that was featured on PBS a couple of weeks ago.

Michael Kavanaugh's walker sports the decal declaring "Chosin Few" and he talked about it a bit at a Memorial Day event at The Bellettini retirement community in Bellevue where he lives.

Kavanaugh, who grew up in Omaha, fell in love with the idea of being a U.S. Marine as an early teenager and became a Marine reservist at 16 and after boot camp was assigned to train recruits in rifle proficiency.

But as the Korean War broke out in June of 1950, and United Nations forces marched deep into North Korea, Kavanaugh, then 19, soon found himself and his 1st Marine Division as part of X Corps advancing in a way that had the high command and Gen., Douglas McArthur hoping to end the war by year's end.

Kavanaugh was hit in the leg at the front by a piece of shrapnel, a development that likely saved his life. When he got out of the Army MASH unit hospital and visited the army commissary he was asked "Do you want a cold weather cap? How about a jacket? How about cold weather trousers?" His answer to all was "yes."

He likes to relate with a chuckle that before he hitched a ride back to the front, he was told he would guard the regional commander that night. The commander turned out to be Chesty Puller, who was to become the most decorated U. S. Marine in history. "He came out every two hours to make sure we weren't asleep."

It was Puller, then a colonel but eventually a lieutenant general, who offered what became a timeless quote at the Chosin Reservoir battle. "We've been looking for the enemy for some time now. We've finally found him. We're surrounded. That simplifies things."

In a couple of days, after bumming a ride back to the front near the port city of Wonson that allies had occupied in the early months of the war, Kavanaugh would find himself among the 30,000 United Nations Command troops encircled and attacked by 120,000 Chinese troops at the battle of Chosin Reservoir.  

It was a brutal 17-day battle in temperatures that plummeted to 35 to 40 degrees below zero. Many of the 17,000 casualties in U.N. forces were wounded or killed or froze to death as they were without proper clothing. That's how Kavanaugh's visit to the commissary for warm clothing paid off.

Had that number of U.S. casualties occurred in a Vietnam battle, it would have caused riots in the streets across America. But it was a different era with a war viewed differently by the American public.

Michael KavanaughKavanaugh left the Marines two years later and began a 33-year-career with the British American Tobacco Co., mostly as a resident of California.

He and his wife, Lorayn, have returned to various gatherings of "the few" over the years, including in 1987 when they were among about 130 who were invited by the South Korean government to return to ve recognized Korea to be recognized, although of course there was no visit back to the site of the battle. He and the others, at an event attended by the Marine Corps Commandant as well as South Korean government officials, all received the Korean Marine Corps Service Medal hung from a ribbon carrying a small version of the flag of each country in the U.N. force.

Now back to Galloway, a UPI reporter decorated for battlefield heroism at the battle of Ia Drang in November of 1965, spent a week doing interviews in Seattle in the spring of 2015, after I urged him to come to Seattle and found KCPQ TV willing to make its studios available for his interviews. He returned to Seattle for another round of interviews two years later.

I've written several columns on Galloway and his role in the 50th Anniversary Commemoration, partly because we were UPI colleagues (he in war zones and I as a political writer and later a Pacific Coast executive for the company). But in a broader sense because of a fascination with his perspectives on the war in articles and speeches, and the import of the battle in the Ia Drang Valley that Galloway and the late Gen. Hal Moore, then a lieutenant colonel in command of the U.S. Army forces in that battle, made famous in their book and a subsequent movie.

The battle became the subject of Galloway's and Moore's book, "We Were Soldiers Once...and Young," and the resulting movie, "We Were Soldiers," as well as a second book, "We are Still Soldiers... A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam" when the two returned to the battlefield years late.

In an email exchange this week, Galloway told me: "Earlier this year I interviewed a veteran who had suffered a debilitating crippling stroke two weeks before...but he so wanted to tell his story that he came in a wheelchair. He died two weeks after the interview."

In an earlier column, I quoted Galloway about his time on the battlefield, particularly at Ia Drang: "The men I met and the time we spent together fighting for one another was a life-changing experience that transcends the bonds of friendship and brotherhood."

During one of our interviews, Galloway said of the Vietnam veterans: "They are not bitter but I am bitter in their behalf. It makes me angry that those who came to hate the war came to hate the warriors who were their sons and daughters."

Shabana Khan's rise to national and global prominence as the queen of promoters of the sport of squash has come with a few giant steps while her progress toward recognition in the local community that she has put on the international squash map is happening in small steps.

One of the reasons she has gained high regard from youthful squash players, their coaches and parents are the national College Showcase that she put on last week for nationally ranked students, 16 men and 16 women, aged 15 to 18, playing before coaches of the top schools where squash is a scholarship sport. It was the fourth annual Showcase event.
Shabana Khan and Yasmine

The fact the young competitors were all from Washington and California while the coaches eyeing prospective scholarship talent were from schools like Amherst, Middlebury, Vasser, George Washington, Bates, and Brown points up the difference in focus on the sport on the East Coast and the West, including the Puget Sound area.

But another difference, one for which Khan deserves significant recognition, is the fact that similar tournaments on the East Coast cost the young competitors, or rather their supportive parents, between $3,000 and $5,000 to participate in one of the four-day events while the students competing here pay nothing.

Part of Khan's stated goal is bringing an awareness of squash to young people of all backgrounds rather than merely the children of the squash affluent, whose demographics are men and women, both players and fans, with median incomes of more than $300,000 and an average net worth of nearly $1,500,000.

A quest for awareness for youth squash is exemplified by her thus-far unsuccessful effort to convince the City of Bellevue that there should be a park for squash courts so that, as she puts it, "kids of ordinary means can learn to play without having to have their parents be members of a club."

In fact, as the mother of aspiring youth squash star, 13-year-old Yasmine, she knows the challenges of youth-squash competition.  

Readers of The Harp will recognize that I've written about Khan before. Beginning when she brought the Men's World Squash Championship to Bellevue, the first time (ever) in the U.S. The reason is because of a conviction that what she is seeking to do for Bellevue and its young people in particular merits far more attention than she is getting.

A couple of significant developments for Khan and her squash initiatives await in the coming months. One brings particular pleasure to the now 50-year-old former national women's squash champion.

That's the fact that her world invitational squash tournament in August for top squash talent, six women and six men, will be an event whose sponsors have decided to name the event, the only one of its kind in the country, after her late father. There are no other squash events in the country like it.

Yusuf Khan, who brought the sport of squash to Seattle from his native India a half-century ago and, as one of the world's top squash professionals, proceeded to bring Seattle to the attention of the national and international squash establishments and see two of his daughters become women's national champions, died last October at the age of 87.

The invitational event that will be held August 25-30 at the Hidden Valley Boys & Girls club in Bellevue will be named "PMI Dave Cutler Presents The Yusuf Khan Invitational."

The "PMI Dave Cutler" portion of the title is for the two men, both internationally known in their respective professions, who have become the financial support for YSK Events, the little non-profit through which Khan carries out her squash events.

One is Dave Cutler of Microsoft, universally acclaimed as the key technical brain behind the Microsoft Windows NT and all the subsequent windows versions. A decade ago he was recognized as a National Medal of Technology and Innovation laureate, perhaps the most prestigious honor in the country for developers of new technology.

The other is Robert Harris, founder, and CEO of PMI-Worldwide, a Seattle-based brand, and product-marketing company with offices in seven cities around the world whose corporate philanthropy has only recently begun to be recognized.

The two have come to team up for a $150,000 donation that for the past several years has allowed Khan to put up the prize money, which this year will total $300,000.

"Every player participating is ranked inside the top 10 in the world," Khan noted. 'The only one, not world ranked is our local player, Reeham Sedky, who has just recently begun her professional career."

I got to write about Sedky, though sadly it was her only local visibility, after the then 21-year-old who was born and raised in Bellevue and became the nation's best women's high school squash player as a student at Forest Ridge, upset one of the world's top women at last year's Invitational.

Sedky has begun her squash pro career after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania where she was women's national squash champion.

The fact that her father is Egyptian works for Amazon and played squash, is an example of the role the growing international diversity of the Puget Sound region can play in bringing squash, among the top sports in many countries, into greater prominence among activities for young people.

It's particularly appropriate that the PMI Dave Cutler event will be named this year for Yusuf Khan since it was 20 years ago that he and Shabana teamed to bring to Seattle the first women's world squash championship ever held in the United States.

Khan is adding a fun factor to the invitational event this year in the form of a tech company tournament that she explains will be called the Tech Challenge and will involve 12 teams, with four from Microsoft already committed. Each team of top squash players from their companies will put up $5,000 to compete.

"We need about $110,000 from the 'Tech Challenge' to fill out our $300,000 prize money," Khan said.

And a few weeks after the invitational event, Khan's plan for a new series of western youth squash tournaments called West Coast Squash will debut as a competitive Junior Squash series involving teams from Vancouver, Portland, San Jose, San Francisco, and the Los Angeles area. She said Orange County, "which has an excellent squash facility," could be added.

In the face of an apparent lack of interest, from the Eastside establishment, in what Shabana is doing for the image of the area in the global squash community and the many countries where squash is a top sport. I was struck by the answer that Harris gave me last year when I asked why he was such a strong supporter of Khan. It bears repeating here.

"It's pretty simple. In a world beginning to look inward rather than building international alliances and global partnerships, I believe it's increasingly important to support sports that are global in nature and connect people from around the world. This is the only way humanity, and our planet are going to survive and prosper."

It's a comment that leaders of the business and civic communities that have "other causes" than Shabana's might ponder.

Donald Bonker, one of this state's most respected experts on international trade across the past half dozen presidential administrations, suggests that when trade agreements become more about politics than economics, the stability of economies comes to be at risk.

In focusing on the current trade crisis with China, Bonker, a former seven-term Democratic congressman from Washington's Third District, suggests that "China has a historical and long-term perspective that is lacking in America. 

Donald Bonker"They have a five-year economic plan that enjoys strong support while America has presidential elections every four years, with incoming presidents often reversing the course of their predecessors," he said.

Bonker's trade credentials, both those he earned during his 14 years in Congress from 1974 to 1988 and from his involvements thereafter, have gained him broad respect in this country and abroad for his trade and foreign investment knowledge.

He was a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and chairman of the Subcommittee on International Economic Policy and Trade. Bonker served on the president's Export Council and headed former House Speaker Tip O'Neill's Trade Task Force, which led to the passage of the 1988 Omnibus Trade Act.  

I knew Bonker well when we were both in our early 30s, he as innovative auditor of Clark County, laying the groundwork for an intended but unsuccessful run for secretary of state, and I as a UPI political writer in Olympia. And later, after his first unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate, I had him write a regular trade-issues column for Puget Sound Business Journal.

In fact, I have had fun telling friends occasionally that after he left Congress, at one of our meetings, he gave me a photo of us that had been taken at a 1968 political fundraiser for Sen.Martin Durkan and that had hung on his wall during his years in Congress. After sharing the story, I then add that the reason it had hung on his wall was because of the other person in the photo, then-Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana, one of his heroes.

Bonker, 82, travels back and forth regularly from his Bainbridge Island home to Washington, D.C., where he is an executive director and on the international advisory council of APCO Worldwide, global public affairs & strategic communications consultancy.

We hadn't visited for years when I suggested recently that we have lunch so I could learn about his newly published autobiography called Dancing to the Capitol, which begins with what the foreword describes as "a wry take on his brief stint as a dance instructor, which gives the book its title and its spirit."

The foreword, by former Los Angeles Times editor Shelby Coffey who is now vice chairman of the Nuseum, describes Bonker as "a man of faith--often struggling with being both a Democrat and a Christian," and noting that Bonker helped bring the National prayer breakfast to international prominence.

"He has been a key, if quiet, force for others of faith who contend in public life," Coffey wrote.

In fact, our luncheon discussion quickly turned from his autobiography to the issue of trade and politics. Bonker would like to see Democrats turn trade discussions away from the punitive to the progressive, meaning they should focus on building the opportunity for exports that could create jobs rather than be focused on trade barriers in the hope that approach can retain jobs.

During his tenure in Congress, Bonker authored and was a principal sponsor of significant trade legislation, the Export Trading Company Act and the Export Administration Act.

"The trade issues are very difficult for Democrats," Bonker said. "In their hearts they are global but labor has become so against trade that Democrats are left in a difficult political position."

"We should match what our competitors -- Japan, China, Germany - have been doing for years. They have ambitious government programs that give their exporters an advantage in this increasingly competitive global economy," Bonker suggested. "The U S., by comparison, is so preoccupied with limiting imports that there is little or no attention given to boosting exports. That is the real problem."
My alternative would be to export more, not import less," Bonker said.

"One example is the Export-Import Bank, which provides essential financial guarantees that allow U.S. corporations to compete with their competitors (Boeing versus Airbus)," he added.  

"This respected financial entity remains idle now, even though it does not require Federal funding," Bonker said. "Meanwhile, across America, there are about 50,000 domestic companies that are competitive but have difficulty pursuing foreign markets because the help that should be there isn't."

Bonker offered a bit of history on the political back and forth that has characterized this country's trade positions, starting with the passage in 1928 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that hiked tariffs, often up 100 percent, on 20,000 foreign imports.

"That prompted our allies and dozens of other countries to retaliate, causing the collapse of the world trading system that led to the Great Depression," Bonker said.

"Hoover was booted out, replaced by FDR, who championed pro-trade policies to repair the damage to international trade," he added. "Again, the political dynamic changed around the 1960s-70s, where Democrats, driven by labor unions, started to embrace protectionist policies, and Ronald Reagan arrived to champion free trade.  

"Trump's campaign rhetoric and subsequent actions are more in sync with Democrats and Bernie Sanders," Bonker added, with a jab at both. "Republicans are puzzled and frustrated.  It is contrary to their fundamental beliefs, alignment with their business support base."

As to the China trade concern, Bonker said: "whether China will retaliate to the latest round of tariff threats remains to be seen, but in long term, you don't mess with China, even if your name is Donald Trump."

Bonker, who specializes in Chinese investment in the United States, offers a criticism of both houses of Congress for their reactions to the Administration's tariff initiatives, saying"Senate Republicans remain muted and House Democrats discretely like what the President is doing, adding, "if we continue down this path of protectionism, it will be a repeat of Smoot Hawley."

Having reacquired Spiral Genetics, the genome sequencing company she co-founded fresh out of college a decade ago, Adina Mangubat has taken a couple of key steps to pave the way for a fund-raising effort she intends will move the company onto the global stage in the rapidly emerging DNA testing field.

Adina Mangubat To refer to Mangubat as a seasoned and tested CEO at the age of 32 might be a surprising description to those unaware of the path she's taken for the company she launched at age 22, fresh out of the University of Washington.  
Adina Mangubat 

But it's an apt description, given her process over the past couple of years. Or maybe more accurately the last couple of months. Two years ago she guided her company into a merger with a Bay Area bioinformatics company, then a few weeks ago did what she describes as an "un-acquisition" that paved the way for putting together a partnership with Microsoft that will dramatically expand Spiral Genetics' impact, internationally as well as nationally.

Closing the Microsoft partnership, the goal for which is to train algorithms to predict which people may be at risk of cardiovascular problems later in life," followed Adina's participation, along with her team, in Silicon Valley's Y Combinator, which she describes as "the number one start-up accelerator in the world."   

The fund-raising effort soon to get underway will permit Mangubat to scale up a broader international presence for her company as dozens of countries are undertaking large-scale genome sequencing of their populations. The company's first raise was a $3 million venture-led series A round in 2012.  

"This creates a unique opportunity to be able to find correlations between people's genomes and their medical history, which will lead to the discoveries that massively impact drug development and disease diagnosis in the future," Mangubat says of the growing effort to sequence the genomes of large populations.

"Ultimately, comparing genomes at scale will power novel discoveries that lead to new diagnostics and drug discovery," she added during an interview.

I asked Mangubat to give a layman an understanding of what widespread genome sequencing could bring about.

"DNA is life's chemical alphabet and if we could read and decipher what our DNA says and does, it would be a massive leap in our understanding of how to help our bodies overcome disease," she explained.

"The first step to read DNA is sequencing, which turns this chemical signal into a digital alphabet. The technology to read all 3 Billion letters of each person's DNA fast at not a lot of cost," she added. "The next challenge is figuring out which combinations of letters do what. Today, less than 1 percent of the function of genetic variations in humans are understood."

"Spiral Genetics has built tools for comparing large groups of people's DNA against each other to help decode the mystery," she said. 

In reference to the new fundraising, Mangubat said: "The pitch is that we make large scale genomic data mining possible.  There is a unique thing happening in history where we have reached a point of critical mass for sequencing. 

"To date, the globe has sequenced 1.5 million people's whole genomes.  And now there are 50 countries that are doing large scale sequencing of their populations to optimize their healthcare systems," she said.

"With just those groups alone, they have committed to sequencing 20 million people over the next five years and this creates a unique opportunity to be able to find correlations between people's genomes and their medical history," she said.   

"That will lead to the discoveries that massively impact drug development and disease diagnosis in the future.  Existing tools are not built to handle this scale of data.  We are making it possible to mine through this data to find the answers we've all been looking for."

With a successful raise, we are going to scale up multiple countries we are working with,' said. Spiral Genetics has been working on small projects with four countries but will look to dramatically scale up its genome work with two of those will the additional funds

With a father who was a doctor and a mother who ran the business details of the practice, Mangubat was exposed to medicine from her earliest years.

But her degree was in psychology and her exposure to the idea of genome and DNA came from a classmate in the entrepreneurship program at UW, who co-founded the company with Mangubat and remained for a time as a partner with Mangubat in growing the company in its early years, 
 
I couldn't help but wonder what kind of challenges she had to overcome in starting a company as complex as Spiral Genetics as a kid just of out college.

"The toughest challenge is not the lack of experience but the lack of network," she quickly noted. "Experience can be supplemented when needed and (in some cases) experience can be detrimental as one can have pre-existing ideas about what is or is not possible."

"But the power of a strong network makes such a massive difference for doing anything, whether it's fundraising, recruiting, connecting with potential customers, finding a good lawyer, etc. ," she said. "At 22, I had a very small network to pull from and after 10 years of actively building relationships, it's a completely different game."

Development of her network was undoubtedly enhanced pretty dramatically when she was named a Forbes Magazine 30 Under 30 For Science and Healthcare seven years ago at the age of in 2013 and in 2017 a Forbes All-Star Alum for 30 Under 30s.

Disagreement between Washington's Democratic House of Representatives and the Democratic Senate over a proposed capital gains tax will likely keep the tax from being included in the state's operating budget for next biennium.

And that could be well for both those for whom the lawmakers should be seeking to provide opportunity and for the wealthy that many legislators would merely like to squeeze.

With Sunday's sine die adjournment of the 2019 Legislature's regular session looming, there appears virtually no likelihood that the two houses can resolve their differences over the most controversial piece of the tax increases they seek to impose.

There is obvious business pushback over any new taxes the lawmakers might pass in an economic environment in which state forecasts of surging new revenue already provide the lawmakers with $5.6 billion more to spend in the coming biennium without new taxes.

And the protests over a possible capital gains tax provision is the most logical for business to oppose, particularly now because of the impact an ill-thought-out version of such a tax could have on the opportunity for future job creation.

The "opportunity" I'm referring to is the Qualified Opportunity Zones created by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 with those zones basically being census tracts designated by the governors of each state where development could occur and where those putting up the funds to seize those opportunities would get capital gains reduction or deferral.

Gov. Jay Inslee, with the help of Lt. Gov. Cyrus Habib, was an early and enthusiastic advocate for picking census tracts that could best serve the goal of supporting the economic opportunities and creating jobs in less well to do parts of the state. Each opportunity zone is selected from the state's census tracts.

So it would seem that if Inslee thought through what's at stake in imposing a capital gains tax now, he would be saying "don't pass that now." But some would suggest urging Inslee to "think it through" might be an issue in itself.

Over the past year, professional firms and wealth management companies have been promoting their OZ expertise to clients and prospects while states have begun to compete to lure investors to projects coming about or envisioned on their lands where the benefits of the new federal tax law could come into existence.

A key issue, beyond the fact that all states that impose a capital gains tax acknowledge that it is a tax on income and an income tax is unconstitutional in this state, is that states with a capital gains tax have moved or are moving to bring their state capital gains tax provisions into harmony with the new federal one.

Meanwhile, the IRS has been tinkering with the rules, issuing proposed changes several times in the past year and leaving uncertainty for those seeking to be early users of the tax advantage for projects ranging from hotels to manufacturing facilities.

The tax rates on capital gains range from California's 12.3 percent to North Dakota's 2.9 percent. Oregon's rate is 9.9 percent, above but similar to the 8.9 percent proposed for the Washington capital gains tax.

Most all of the states understand that failing to give a capital-gains break similar to what the federal tax law will provide is likely to put them behind the eight-ball in appealing to those seeking projects that will maximize their benefits.

And since the federal law will permit anyone anywhere owing tax on capital gains to invest those dollars in a project in any Opportunity Zone in the country, the example I share with people is the guy in Keokuk, IA, who needs to find an Opportunity Zone somewhere in which to invest his gains. He will go looking for a project he likes in Montana or Oregon or Washington, make his investment watch the tax-break dollars pile up.

If he's going to give up 10 percent of tax savings on his gain by investing a Washington zone rather than an equally interesting project in Montana, why would he do that?

Thus the importance of a state staying in the herd of states that are adding state tax breaks to the federal ones. But that takes planning and such planning isn't possible during what's left of this legislative session.

Bobby Brett, the long-time owner of the major-junior hockey Spokane chiefs who is heading into the Western Hockey League finals this weekend, is convinced the advent of National Hockey League (NHL) play in Seattle come 2021 will create a family among the Northwest's local hockey teams.

Brett, part of professional baseball's best-known band of brothers who bought Spokane's class A short-season professional baseball team, the Indians, in 1985 and added the junior hockey team in 1990, says the yet-to-be-named Seattle NHL team "will be the region's team."

Bobby Brett
Journal of Business photo"The time will come when players drafted by the Seattle NHL team will be assigned to one of the region's junior-league teams and develop a following and then wind up being called up to Seattle, and people will follow the deeds in the NHL with a 'that's our guy," Brett predicted.

Brett uses the easy example of Tyler Johnson, a local Spokane kid when he was drafted by the Chiefs in 2005 at the age of 15. Three years later he began a three-year starring role with his hometown team before he was drafted by the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2011. In his 2014-15 rookie season where he was named to the NHL All-Rookie team.

Had a Seattle NHL team been around and been the team to draft Johnson and help him move to stardom, he would have been the embodiment of every teen-age hockey hopefuls dream and his fans firm fans of Seattle's NHL team.

This column was meant to be about Brett's more than three decades of ownership of the Spokane Indians, which the Brett brothers bought after a seven-city search for a minor league baseball team they would buy. They bought the team for less than $150,000 and grew it into what has been described as "a gold standard of minor league ball" in its value today.

As we sat down in the office of our mutual friend, Spokane angel-investment leader John Pariseau for an interview this week, it was meant to be focused on baseball. But Brett's hockey team and its performance and its role in Spokane sports since Brett bought the team in 1990 drew my attention.

The Chiefs begin their best-of-seven WHL Western Conference championship series against the Vancouver Giants this weekend.

Bobby and his brothers have been about baseball their whole lives. Ken, drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 1966, was an athletic phenomenon, equally gifted as a hitter or a pitcher. And while he wound up as a journeyman pitcher playing for 10 teams, several teams had considered drafting him as a left-handed center fielder.  

Ken, who was a co-owner with his brothers when they finally settled on Spokane, died of a brain tumor in 2003.

Younger brother George played 21 years for the Kansas City Royals as a perennial American League All-Star who was eventually named to baseball's Hall of Fame.

Bobby played in the minor leagues in Billings and San Jose before deciding he could make more money in business, building and owning apartments in Southern California.

Of the brothers' search for a baseball team to buy, Bobby explained the process: "I'd looked at seven cities, and Spokane just happened to be my seventh stop. With the first six places I visited, the town wasn't right or the ballpark wasn't right or something wasn't right. So I was very discouraged."  

"I landed in Spokane. We wanted to buy a team, and this was the place I liked. There was a real airport, a real downtown with a beautiful downtown park," He told an interviewer a few years ago. "I went out to the baseball park, and it was all run down, but I thought, geez, you just need a little paint, a little of this and that. So, Spokane was the one we bought."

And Bobbie, with the support of his brothers, quickly created a winner with the Indians winning the Northwest League title in four consecutive years from '87 to '90 and winning four more titles since then.

Although Bobby was involved in the Spokane community from the moment the Bretts bought the team (they also own the Class-A Rancho Cucamonga Quakes in California and the Tri-City Dust Devils, also of the Northwest League), Bobby remained an absentee owner, visiting maybe four times a year.

But that changed with the purchase of the Chiefs.

"I had gotten married in 1988 and we had a kid a year later," Brett explained. "We lived in Manhattan Beach, which is a great area to live in if you're single or married with no kids. But it's hard to raise a kid with all the stuff that happens at the beaches in California."

"I thought, if we buy the hockey team, maybe I'll move up there for six months and get it off the ground and see how I like it," Bobbie explained. Six months has turned into nearly 30 years.  

He's become more than a sports-teams owner.
Major junior hockey, for those not familiar with it, becomes not just a community thing but a family affair. And that's part of his community commitment.

"We draft the kids when they are 15 and they can play on our team at 16 and continue until they are 20 so some kids are with us for four years," Brett explained, noting that the team helps find homes for the kids to stay in and families to live with and makes sure they become part of their high school environment.  

"Fully 70 percent of the players in the NHL came from major-junior hockey." Brett said.

There are 60 cities in three leagues of the Canadian Hockey League with the four Northwest cities of Seattle, Everett, Portland and Spokane part of the Western Hockey League.

His involvement in real estate since he was in his mid-20's and has continued into today is a focus that has also benefited Spokane.  

As one Spokane business leader explained to me: "Bobby is a master preservation person."
When I asked Brett about that, he explained: "We own 13 or 14 buildings downtown, older properties in need of renovation for which we got property-tax abatement.

So in some respects, it might be said that Brett is not only at work building Spokane's sports future but with real estate investment expertise, helping preserve its past.

Advancing age brings with it the desire to pause at certain benchmarks to assess how the trip is going, Thus the pause to celebrate today's benchmark as the birthday that brings the last year of pre-octogenarian status and to reflect on things related to healthcare that became a theme over my 70's decade.
 
The healthcare issues that added interest to my 70's decade did include the most likely kinds of healthcare issues for someone of advancing years as I had to overcome two cancers.
 
But what made healthcare memorable these recent years is that it has been the connection point for the people I am writing about in this column who have joined the ranks of friends important to me. They are friends from conventional medicine, friends in alternative medicines of forms many people seem only vaguely or maybe not at all familiar with, and close friendships with the leadership of a biotech company likely to change the world.
 
And amusingly to some, the relationships with practitioners of alternative forms of healthcare have become a form of bonding because we share the same workout guru and all met through her.

Lisa Brown

As states begin to compete to create the most attractive Land of OZ to lure investors and create new businesses and jobs, the state of Washington and the Port of Seattle have taken key steps in the past few weeks that could put them at the front of the pack employing the benefits of new federal tax law.
 
OZ refers to what is officially called Qualified Opportunity Zones that come about under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The QOZ provision in the legislation approved by Congress will permit those owing capital gains tax to delay, reduce or even totally avoid those taxes by investing in special funds designed to start businesses and provide other steps to help economically distressed communities.
 
Virtually every major accounting or law firm or wealth management company in the country has been inviting clients and prospects to learn all about the details of what have become known simply as Opportunity Zones, or OZ.
 
And while the message in many of those explanatory sessions by professional firms has been the prospect to create funds for investment in real estate projects, funds could be particularly appropriate for energizing the prosperity of small and diverse firms that have not had access to equity capital to grow and expand.
 
And that's where the recent separate initiatives by the State Department of Commerce and the Port of Seattle come into play in a manner that gives this region a leg up in that competition among states for attracting new investment to job creation.
 
Ralph Ibarra 
The development for the state was Spain's first-ever Memorandum of Understanding with a state to promote economic cooperation to benefit trade relations and boost business opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses in both Spain and Washington State.  
 
The agreement was signed in Madrid March 1 between Lisa Brown, the new director of the state Department of Commerce, and Maria Pena Matcos, chief executive officer of the public agency attached to Spain's Ministry of Industry.
 
The Port of Seattle's initiative was issuing a "Request for Qualifications" for a $200 million renovation of 29 acres near Pioneer Square in Seattle to provide for the port's fourth cruise ship berth that would accommodate super-size cruise ships.  
 
That parcel, for which the Port is seeking a partner, is located within an Opportunity Zone that extends across the property on which T-Mobile Stadium and CenturyLink Field are located and extends into the International District.
 
The Port's Request for Qualifications intriguingly contains the sentence: "It should be noted that Terminal 46 is located within a Qualified Opportunity Zone," suggesting it intends to use the tax-break incentive in seeking to attract a wide array of businesses to develop on the site, or nearby.
 
So what kind of developments are being created in other regions with Opportunity Zone funds? A potentially appropriate example was the announcement by a Scottsdale, AZ, based wealth development company called Caliber of plans for a new hotel development at Tucson Convention Center, which is in a designated OZ.
 
For Ralph Ibarra, president of DiverseAmerica Network, the agreement with Spain and the Port's announcement represent important steps to dramatically benefit small and diverse businesses.    

To Ibarra, a consultant to the public and private-sector corporations and institutions who has brought long-standing support of small and diverse business to his consulting activities,
the agreement with Spain and the Port's announcement represent important steps to benefit small and diverse businesses.  

He sees both developments as important steps"particularly appropriate for energizing the prosperity of small and diverse firms that have not had access to equity capital to grow and expand."

In fact, Commerce Director Brown said her immediate priorities include helping address the sustainability of infrastructure financing programs and enhancing the agency's outreach activities - especially with rural and underserved areas - to ensure communities in need can access Commerce programs and services.
 
The statement put out following the signing of the agreement noted that it 'builds on a foundation of approximately $9 billion in trade activities currently taking place between Spain and the State of Washington. It acknowledges common strengths in aerospace, information and communication technology, cybersecurity, clean energy technology, life sciences, maritime, agriculture, and other sectors, and formalizes plans to explore opportunities for Washington companies in the Spanish market and establish future opportunities for Spanish companies to create jobs in Washington."

Ibarra, who chairs the Washington District Export Council, suggests Opportunity Zones "hold great promise to accentuate and expedite beneficial outcomes" from the Agreement with opportunities for Washington companies in the Spanish market and for Spanish companies to create jobs in Washington.

Ibarra brings some awareness of the extent of potential represented by the state's agreement with Spain since some years ago he prepared and escorted an aerospace manufacturing firm from this state to various meetings with Spanish aerospace companies at a U.S.-Spain Aerospace Industry Summit.

"And now, whether its Spain or Washington State, any individual relationship that comes about is going to need some sort of facility, whether distribution or manufacturing, in place and that's where Opportunity Zones can come into play to facilitate those relationships," Ibarra said.

 

Jimmy Kimmel's late-night comedy bit at the start of this year's NCAA tournament insisting that Gonzaga is "an imaginary university" with a team created for its annual tournament appearance has set off what bloggers have dubbed a "faux feud" (which mean fake news in political language) between the comedian and Gonzaga's hometown and state.

The ongoing routine is now making Gonzaga and its basketball team well known beyond the sports world with Kimmel jabs like: "Now people from Spokane, Washington, are claiming Gonzaga is real and it is located there."  

The dean of the Gonzaga law school and Washington attorney general even got involved in the humor, sending Kimmel a video of law students swearing the university is real.  

Kimmel responded with a bit featuring comic actor Fred Willard pretending to be the chancellor of Gonzaga, named Dr. Gonzo Aga who, after his story fell apart, allowed Kimmel to use that as proof Gonzaga is a myth.  

In fact, there really is something almost mythical about the rise and continuing role atop basketball's collegiate ranks for the little Jesuit school with an enrollment of just over 5,100 students. That's less than a third of the enrollment of Duke University, which is frequently referred to as the small school with the powerhouse collegiate basketball reputation.

In fact, if Gonzaga should finally prevail and win the tournament this or some future year, they will be the smallest school to ever do so.

This is the 20th anniversary of Gonzaga's continuous run since 1999 as a part of the March Madness that is the NCAA tournament. And it's the 20th year of head coach Mark Few's leadership of the program he inherited after Dan Monson rode the Zags' shocking Elite Eight appearance to a head coaching job at the University of Minnesota.

There are a couple of lesser-known, or maybe lesser remembered, things about Gonzaga basketball before moving on to answer the question of "is there more to know about Gonzaga than basketball?"

First, there was the African-American young man who, fresh out of the U.S. Army and with family at 26, walked onto the basketball court as an unknown to try out for the team in 1959. He soon became the star and two years later, in 1961, Frank Burgess led the nation in scoring with an average of 32.4 points per game.

It would be 45 years later that the Bulldogs produced another nation's leading scorer, in 2005 when Adam Morrison averaged just over 28 points a game.

Then, of course, there was home-grown John Stockton, who starred for the Zags in the early '80s before winning a spot on the 1984 U.S. Olympic basketball team then going on to a career with the Salt Lake City NBA team and eventually becoming an NBA hall of famer.

Whenever Stockton's name is mentioned to those familiar with Gonzaga sports lore and the fact that the school pursued a delusion of becoming a football power like that other small Catholic school, Notre Dame, there's a knowing smile at the fact another Stockton was prominent in that 1920s effort.

That was John's grandfather, Houston Stockton, who was one of the finest backs in the nation from 1922 to 1924. In '22 he not only scored 46 points in one game when he had six touchdowns and 10 extra-point conversions as Gonzaga swept over Wyoming, 77-0, but he guided the school that year to its only bowl game, That's right, the school with then a couple of hundred students became the smallest school to ever compete in a bowl game, the first and only Christmas Day Classic in San Diego.

The game was envisioned as a marketers dream, matching the Notre Dame team coached by Knute Rockne against the Gonzaga team coached by Gus Dorais, who had been the passer who teamed with Rockne in the Notre Dame playing days to popularize, if not invent, the forward pass.  

But the dream match never came about because when Notre Dame lost its last game of the season, Rockne decreed that they didn't deserve a post-season game so the promoters of the San Diego game had to race to find a replacement and found one in West Virginia, which actually had beaten Rose Bowl-bound Pittsburgh that season.

Gonzaga lost, 21-13, but the game and Gonzaga's performance earned a front-page headline the next day in the sports section of the New York Times. "Hous" Stockton went on to a pro career as the star quarterback of the Frankfort Yellowjackets, forerunner of the Philadelphia Eagles, in the latter years of the '20s.

Interestingly, Stockton wasn't the only Gonzagan to star in the NFL. Ray Flaherty, who had played at the same time as Stockton, went on to be an NFL All-star with the New York Giants.

Then in 1937, Flaherty was tapped to be the coach of the team nicknamed the Redskins, who were just relocating that year from Boston to Washington. It was there st Washington that he became one of the most successful NFL coaches over the next six years, until he went in the Navy in World War II, winning the NFL championship in 1937 and 1942 and being league runner-up in 1940.

So what of non-sports things about Gonzaga? Well, There was its likely most famous grad, Harry Lillis Crosby. So what was he famous for? Oh, forgot to add his nickname, "Bing," which answers the question.

Then there was Tom Foley, whose five years as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives ended with the Republican congressional sweep of 1994.

Then there's the fact that Betsy and I met there in freshman math class, which I was taken as a super-senior (beyond four years) because I had to have the course and even though I didn't care for math, there was no more time to wait. We were married two years later so I tell people "don't say nothing good ever came out of math class.

So back to basketball and Coach Few. It could be that the respect the school has gained on the basketball court may not be the success most other colleges would like to emulate. Rather the "nice guy" image that Few has legitimately earned and the "family" characteristics engendered by Few, the school and its supporters may be the most envied part of what Gonzaga has brought to college basketball.

Longtime King County land developer and 20 year Regent of Gonzaga Jack McCann of Jack McCann Company once summarized the Gonzaga story for me as "a magic carpet ride for all the segments of the 'family.'"

"I always wondered if Few and (athletic director) Mike Roth were just lucky or were incredible people. Well, I think the last 20 years have answered that question," McCann told me for this column.

Oh, and as for Kimmel, he said in explaining his pick of Gonzaga to win it: "I figured if these are so good they can concoct an imaginary university, and get almost everyone to go along with it, they could easily win a basketball tournament. So, go Zags!"

A LinkedIn entry from my son, Michael, noting the 20th anniversary of the launch of 
eastside business journal brought back memories of the effort to create the "local" business voice for Bellevue and other Eastside communities as they were starting to emerge as economic entities more independent from Seattle.

Eastside Business JournalMy decision, as publisher of Puget Sound Business Journal, to create a separate weekly business publication with its own staff, readership and highly focused coverage of business on the Eastside, as well as involvement with its business community, was a realization that a Seattle-based and focused publication couldn't build close relationships east of the lake.

Michael was an experienced young public relations and marketing professional when I convinced him to leave the public relations firm, The Fearey Group, to become general manager and overseer of a weekly start-up business newspaper.  

Microsoft was already more than a decade along in turning out young millionaires with its stock, as well as new software and computer products from its Eastside headquarters, and in fact, that year spun out its Expedia division into a separate Bellevue-based public company.

And the Eastside had become the global mecca for the rapidly growing telecom and cellular industry as home to not just McCaw Cellular and Nextel but also Western Wireless, which in 1999 spun off its star telecom subsidiary, VoiceStream, which has since become T-Mobile.

Willows Road, along with the west side of the Redmond Valley, had actually become the region's high-tech highway more than a decade earlier with a number of companies like Physio-Control and Rocket Research building their headquarters along the west hillside above Willows Road.

And of course, Kemper Freeman had already, for a couple of decades, been scaling the retailers' mountain and reigned as the most prominent retailer developer in the region.  

By 1999 he was on the way to creating a retailing center that would make his Bellevue Collection of Hotels, retailers, and restaurants leap past Seattle as a destination for shoppers and diners.

Of course, the EBJ launch came two years after Amazon's IPO changed the nature of Seattle's ability to compete with the tech growth on the Eastside, and soon surpass all in growth of revenue, profits and employment. Of course, now Amazon seems intent on possibly turning the Eastside into a second headquarters now that New York has been jettisoned.

Thus 1999 was an interesting time to seek to create a successful and impactful special-interest (business) publication in Bellevue and the Eastside, a time when two Seattle daily newspapers, The Times and Seattle P-I, made life difficult for the much smaller and profit-stretched Eastside Journal in the quest for readers and dollars from the Eastside.

So I told Michael to come up with some events that EBJ could put on to attract visibility and support and promised to make sure PSBJ didn't do the events as a counter to keep EBJ from gaining a foothold, which interestingly PSBJ adverting and editorial leadership hoped to do. It was a competitor, after all.  

Thus I took the unusual business role of holding the big dog back so the puppy had a chance to grow.

For a newly minted young newspaper executive with a twenty-something staff and seeking to carve out readers and advertisers from a young, partly tech, audience, the logical event for Michael to create was one honoring youth.

So he launched Eastside 40-Under-40, geographically designated even though there was no other 40-Under-40 event in the Northwest. In fact, I don't think there was one on the West Coast at that time.

That eventually became the regional event run by PSBJ, with the "Eastside" dropped from the 40-Under-40 name.

One day in summer of 1999, I wandered over to Bellevue from my PSBJ office to check in and found folks on the staff en route to a day-long Going Public seminar that attracted a large audience of entrepreneurs, prospective investors and wealth managers to listen and learn from a panel of experts Michael had assembled.

Then Michael came up with a CEO interview breakfast event he dubbed Eastside Executive Forum, with his first interviewee being the region's then Beer Master, Paul Shipman, creator of Redhook.

Another CEO interview featured HomeGrocer.com CEO, Terry Drayton. Do you remember that Bellevue based company that sprang into existence with the first fully integrated Internet grocery that grew across the West and across the south before being forced by tight cash for growth to sell out in the fall of 2000 to competitor Webvan?

It wasn't long before the reality of having created a direct and growing competitor in basically the same market began to sink in for the parent company and EBJ and its staff were folded into PSBJ. Michael soon departed the media business to focus on a business-development career in other industries.

And with the demise of the P-I and the closing of the Eastside's daily newspaper, by then renamed the King County Journal, in 2006, and the recent dramatic cutbacks by profit-focused Sound Publishing as owner of the area's shrinking pool of weekly newspapers, memories of the local business newspaper that was have been stirred anew.

"A lifetime ago and yet there isn't a day I'm not reminded of something I learned in those years," Michael wrote in his LinkedIn message. "Thanks, Pop and EBJ Peeps."

The LinkedIn message got several thousand views and many comments, including this from the head of an Eastside wealth management firm.

"Michael: you and your team's work had a huge impact on the Eastside at a critical juncture of growth along every path - business, economic, community, stature, maturity, and poise. I miss the voice of EBJ. I relish my fond memories of all of your events and the friendships forged over robust dialogue."

Rhonda Rhyne, whose leadership as president of an innovative cardiovascular medical device company made her one of the most honored biotech CEOs in San Diego for over a decade until she guided the sale of the publicly traded company, may be headed for a repeat performance, this one on Seattle's Eastside.
 
Rhyne is now CEO, president, and director of Prevencio Inc., a Kirkland company that has developed a test that is purported to be "significantly more accurate than stress treadmills for diagnosing obstructive coronary artery disease." She has guided the company since August of 2013, a few months after its conversion to a C corporation.
 
Rhonda RhyneRhyne's San Diego honors over 12 years at the helm of publicly traded CardioDynamics included the 2003 Entrepreneur of the Year award for medical products and Deloitte's Fast 50 Award for 50 Fastest Growing Tech/Life Science Companies in Southern California for nine consecutive years from 1999 to 2007. It was exactly a decade ago that she led CardioDynamics into a sale to Bothell-based SonoSite at a 69 percent premium.
 
This past year was one of the significant developments for Prevencio, with major presentations on its series of cardio-related tests in which Prevencio's focus has been on demonstrating improved diagnostic accuracy and helping keep patients from undergoing unnecessary, expensive, and invasive tests.
 
This year is a key one for the company as Rhyne has just returned from major presentations at a Biocom event in San Diego where Rhyne says she had an opportunity to advance discussions with potential partners and to "educate the biotech, medical device and venture capital worlds on what Prevencio is doing to advance cardiac medicine."
 
Now she heads to New Orleans late this week for sessions at the American College of Cardiology where researchers from Europe and from a major U.S. healthcare system will present accuracy studies which she says "further validate the robustness of our AI-driven, multi-protein novel HART blood tests." HART is the company's trademarked name for Heart-related ARtificial Intelligence-driven, multiprotein Tests.
 
The studies, Rhyne says, 'help drive awareness and adoption, partnerships, and eventual exit."
 
In the short term, the American College of Cardiology sessions will pave the way for the company's next fund-raising round in April when its B-1 round of $7-$9 million, which will include conversion of a $4 million note that is part of Prevencio's total to-date $11 million funding, is planned.
 
Prevencio's product explanation is complex to the layman. But Rhyne explains the company "utilizes Machine Learning (Artificial Intelligence) plus Multi-Proteomic Biomarkers plus Proprietary Algorithms to deliver cardiovascular diagnostic and prognostic tests that are significantly more accurate than standard-of-care stress tests, individual biomarkers, genetic markers, and clinical risk scores."
 
Study results announced last year, including by the European Society of Cardiology, credit Prevencio's diagnostic testing with producing promising results for an array of cardio-related diseases, including those relating to kidney disease and to peripheral artery disease (PAD) in diabetes mellitis.
 
The company's lone competitor for diagnosing coronary artery disease was a Stanford spinout whose lab tests had what Rhyne describes as "significant limitations" that led to Medicare canceling coverage late last year and thus the company went out of business after raising and spending more than $300 million.
 
"Our plans for partnering with other companies for licensing and commercialization will keep our burn rates low and facilitate partnerships, widespread dissemination, and exit," Rhyne said.
 
Rhyne's introduction to the medical instruments industry and coronary testing came early in her career when, after quickly tiring of being a pharmacist, she went to work for Quinton Instrument Co., the Bothell-based company that was a pioneering innovator in medical devices.

The devices she sold for Quinton ranged from stress treadmills to cardiac diagnostic equipment.
 
So she sports a smile when she suggests that her company is positioned to replace the diagnostic treadmill systems that were the medical devices with which she started her career in that field more than 30 years ago.
 
I asked Rhonda, during one of our interviews, why she had returned to Seattle after establishing a dominant Biotech presence in San Diego.
 
"My husband was in Seattle so after 12 years of being a couple (met, dated, engaged, and married) and not living together I thought it was prudent for our relationship and marriage," she replied.

New York Gov Andrew Cuomo has laid to rest any doubt that the political fallout from Amazon's decision, in the face of loud but relatively small opposition, to abandon its plan to bring its HQ2 to New York will drift across the national Democratic party landscape heading toward the 2020 elections.'
 
An open letter released last Sunday on Cuomo's web page was written by New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica who basically derided those whose opposition led to Amazon's decision as either stupid or liars.
 
As Mujica ungently said of opponents of the project who claimed Amazon was getting $3 billion in government subsidies that could have been better spent on housing or transportation: "This is either a blatant untruth or fundamental ignorance of basic math by a group of elected officials."
 
Mujica, whose letter has become fodder for blog comments across the political and economic spectrums, said there were three reasons the Amazon deal fell apart.
 
"First, some labor unions attempted to exploit Amazon's New York entry. Second, some Queens politicians catered to minor but vocal local political forces in opposition to the Amazon government incentives as 'corporate welfare.' Third, in retrospect, the State and the City could have done more to communicate the facts of the project and more aggressively correct the distortions."
 
On the third point is where Mujica took opponents of the project to task for his charge of "blatant untruth or fundamental ignorance."  
 
He explained that "The city, through existing as-of-right tax credits, and the state through Excelsior Tax credits -- a program approved by the same legislators railing against it -- would provide up to $3 billion in tax relief IF Amazon created the 25,000-40,000 jobs and thus generated $27 billion in revenue."
 
The fallout from Coumo's withering criticism of Amazon critics, through Mujica's superbly crafted narrative, coupled with the emerging influence of newly elected congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, could make New York ground zero for a major rift among Democrats, and not just those in New York.
 
Those elected officials scorned by Cuomo through Mojika's commentary, included Ocasio-Cortez, who has gathered growing support from elected Democrats on the left as well as left-leaning groups around the country, particularly after she promised that candidates like her will be on the ballot in an array of locations next election.
 
I looked through a variety of political and economic blogs about the Amazon debacle and found several that made compelling reading.

But the one that I found most compelling, though politically partisan, was from an economics blog called Marginal Revolution done by a couple of economics professors at Gorge Mason University in Virginia.
 
"I can only think that this is some sort of cognitive dissonance that prevents people of a certain politics slant from mentally processing words that go against a deeply held stereotype," wrote the prof, Alex Tabarrok. "Amazon is big. Bezos is rich. Obviously then the state gave them unique benefits. That's the only message that the left wing brain is neurologically capable of hearing, even though, in this case, it is the opposite of what happened."
 
His comment made me think his "certain political slant" likely fits both political fringes and it was then I realized it's been exactly a decade since the modern-day Tea Party came into existence, in either February or April of 2009, depending on which event its fans took to be the launch.
 
There obviously isn't going to be a liberal Tea Party, even if "neurological incapacity" can be found far out on either fringe. But what's happening in New York in the Amazon aftermath makes it clear there could be a mirror image of the Tea Party with the mirror folks shouting "yes, taxes!" in reply to the "no on taxes!" Or "more government" to"no government."
 
That's the "balance" of equally potent fringes which, even if each appeals to about 15 percent of their parties, will be reflected in pressures on the middle as the next election nears.
 
And because the liberal "Tea Party" mirror is coming about a decade on from the original, it will be affecting political positions more than in the past for Democrats. And thus it will be interesting to see how the positions of Washington State's two presidential wanna be's, Gov. Jay Inslee among the Democrat hopefuls and Starbucks' Howard Schultz as an independent, might change.

Watching the free-for-all of analysis and commentary over Amazon's misadventure romance with New York City, we're talking about the company now, now its CEO, over a second headquarters made me think of my senior-sprinter friend and author Steve Robbins. Although he is acknowledged as the most prolific author of management textbooks, he may now have an outline for one he's never written.
 
I'm referring to Amazon's unprecedented suddenly announced decision that it was no longer planning to build a second headquarters in a section of New York City's Queens neighborhood of Long Island City.  
 
I say suddenly announced because no one can be certain that Amazon's decision to turn away from New York was as quickly made as the announcement might suggest. Like the world third's richest company may have begun to have a change of heart soon after its early November announcement that unexpectedly there would another "second headquarters", adding Northern Virginia in the announcement that New York was the pick.
 
Is it possible Amazon execs hadn't thought things through about New York until Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill de Blassio pointed out, as they welcomed the company, that New York is a union town? That fact had assumedly already been digested by a company that doesn't go for union organizing.
 
The business fallout from this may simmer for a time but will likely disappear. Bu the political fallout will likely continue for New Yorkers into the next general election and maybe beyond.

Meaning from a business sense, Amazon will likely be able to go on as if nothing happened. As a former top Amazon executive told me, "the world is a very big place. If one doesn't want us, others will."
 
But politically, the rift between the New York Democratic party power structure and the newly emerging powerhouse of left-wing forces, some elected and some not elected, will echo down the coming months.
 
I called my roommate from college days at Marquette, who retired after fashioning a prominent New York legal career, to ask him his thoughts.
 
"A lot of the politicians who were against the Amazon deal didn't represent the district so they had no skin in the game and Governor Cuomo is outraged at the politicians who had no constituent reason to get involved but screwed it up," he said.
 
"Regarding the idea that unions opposed Amazon, a non-union giant, coming to New York: that doesn't make sense," he said. "The municipal employees union was very opposed because they feared the multi-billion dollar package the city had put together for Amazon would come out of their salaries and future raises.
 
"But a majority of the unions are upset that Amazon walked away. Do you think any of the construction-related unions weren't excited about what the future held for them?"
 
The Amazon-New York situation represents the conundrum that areas seeking to attract new business face. If a city or state don't offer the incentives, they are often out of consideration.  If they do play the game, they are open to public pressure to back off.
 
A longtime business leader in this state, when I asked about that conundrum, told me he thinks the days of corporate incentives or breaks are coming to an end.
 
"This movement among millennials to the left is going to reset the political system, including things like corporate incentives," he said.
"The selection process was, in my judgment the height of corporate arrogance in a time when the tide is going the other way," added my business-leader friend.
 
"The variables which help strengthen public support for a company's actions are the goodwill a company builds in the community and the public support they build," he added. "Boeing has been a master at that, something they learned after the 1972 cutbacks from the demise of the SST."
 
So back to Steve Robbins and his management textbooks. I haven't seen Robbins, who moved from Seattle to Cleveland a few years ago and turned 76 last month, for a decade but was caused to recall his leaving me far behind in various 100-meter races in masters and senior games events. But fortunately, I got to talk with him after or over coffee about both writing and running.
 
I'd love to get hold of him now to get his view of the management aspects or lack thereof, that might have been in evidence in the non-dramatic drama of Amazon's decision.
 
I flipped through his nearly three dozen titles, of which he has sold 10 million copies and that have been translated into 20 languages, to see if any of the titles, all available on Amazon, might suggest he's already been there in the discussions and lessons in his management textbooks.
 
Robbins' books focus on conflict, power, organizational politics and interpersonal skills. Which of those were in evidence or absent, and to what extent, would make interesting cocktail lounge or boardroom, discussion.
 
I was intrigued at the title of one of Robbins' books: "Divide and Conquer: The ultimate guide for improving your decision making."
 
It occurred to me that the way Amazon left the New York political scene in taters definitely demonstrated an ability to divide, as was also evidenced in the embarrassing snafu of the Seattle City Council and its aborted head tax.
 
I'll leave the "conquer" to those cocktail lounge conversations.

A most interesting, and broadly important, corporate takeover battle is taking place in full national view but unfortunately, it's apparently attracting only modest attention from the general public, perhaps because of declining numbers of the public view the issue at stake as all that important.

Lawmakers in both Washingtons are in the consumer-privacy crosshairs amid a growing awareness, and thus anger, of how little people are able to keep private about themselves.  
 
While both the Washington Legislature and Congress are deliberating bills the lawmakers hope can be crafted to satisfy both tech giants and consumers, there is an increasingly uncomfortable sense among legislators at both the state and federal levels that they had better not rile consumers further on the privacy issue.
 
And interestingly, part of the script for how this struggle between the tech industry and individuals over privacy plays out may be written in Washington state, either with the legislative tax hammer that is almost uniquely available in this state or by an emerging Bellevue company that hopes to take the privacy issue out of the hands of the tech giants.  
 
The tax tool is the state's business and occupation tax, a use tax on gross receipts rather than profits, which can and has been imposed in a punitive manner. The business start-up company is Helm, which has created a relatively inexpensive device, about the size of a router, that lets consumers send and receive emails from their own domain. More on both the b&o and Helm later.
 
At the federal level, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is proposing sweeping new legislation that would empower consumers to control their personal information, create radical transparency into how corporations use and share their data, and impose harsh fines, even prison terms for executives at corporations that misuse Americans' data.
 
As Wyden has put it: "Today's economy is a giant vacuum for your personal information - Everything you read, everywhere you go, everything you buy and everyone you talk to is sucked up in a corporation's database. But individual Americans know far too little about how their data is collected, how it's used and how it's shared,"  
 
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said he expects the state legislature to address privacy in the upcoming session, saying he has begun discussions with tech leaders in the state "about a privacy policy that is consistent with innovation and also consistent with fundamental rights of privacy." And Inslee expressed confidence about getting a policy, probably in this session, that will be pleasing to innovators and consumers."
 
"Pleasing" to the big tech companies like Facebook, Google and hometown Amazon is an almost amusing word for a governor to use when "acceptable" to the tech giants is the best that is likely to happen with any state legislation that constrains the manner in which personal information is being collected and used.
 
That's particularly true with citizen pressure on lawmakers here and in other states after California's Assembly and Senate overwhelmingly passed a far-reaching piece of legislation called the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). The measure largely mirrors protections offered to European citizens under the recently implemented General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is likely to drastically change the ways that American companies store and trade in consumer information for Californians.
 
The law allows Californians to ask firms collecting and selling data: what do you collect, why and with whom do you share it? And it allows California residents to opt out of the sale of their data and to request deletion of their data.
 
And in addition to Wyden's zeal on behalf of privacy, the passage of CCPA is spurring the tech industry to seek Congressional action on something they could at least reluctantly accept to avoid what they are protesting as a possible "patchwork approach to privacy policy" if each state enacts its own version.
 
So in the event Washington lawmakers approve legislation that makes its citizens happy about new state protections for privacy, and then Congress approves a law that offers dramatically less protection that supersedes what states like California, and Washington, have put in place, how can this state preserve the protections it will have given its citizens.?
 
A suggestion, borne or my political-writing background: The state, led by its Democrat Atty. Gen. Bob Ferguson, could put in place a privacy policy that companies would be told they must comply with or a special B&O tax rate of some compelling amount, maybe even 25 percent, will apply to those firms not honoring our privacy policy.  
 
Would Ferguson have the courage to confront major tech companies either located here, like Amazon or having a significant presence here like Google and Facebook? Given the fact that he'd like to be Inslee successor as governor and that his key role is first and foremost "preserving the rights of the individual," he could fatally impact his political hopes if he failed to follow the public demands on this issue. And in fact, if he failed to take a protective step demanded by citizens, they could use the initiative process to create a special b&o tax rate themselves.
 
This wouldn't be a law, since the federal government if Congress passes a privacy act, would likely have pre-empted states passing laws governing privacy. But legislation imposing a different b&o tax and the significantly higher rate has a long tradition protected by decisions of the Washington State Supreme Court.
 
Would what I am talking about be legal blackmail? Consider that there are almost three dozen B&O classifications with rates often unexplainable, like parimutuel wagering having a rate of .0013 and gambling contests of chance, .015. The latter, incidentally, is the rate for "service and other activities," which includes professional firms like attorneys as well as consultants-the rate I pay.
 
And how law firms came to be taxed at the highest rate is instructive for how lawmakers in Washington can use the b&o. In the 1993 session, lawmakers sought to extend the sales tax to the legal profession but the attorneys brought their lobbyists to the fray and successfully defeated the effort. Presto, came the highest b&o tax suddenly applying to attorneys, just about tripling their tax.
 
I once asked the late Gov, Mike Lowry if that came about as punishment by a Democratic governor (him) and Democratic legislature and he let out one of his classic shoulder bouncing laughs.
 
When I discussed the privacy issue with Bellevue-based research analyst Jim Hebert, he noted that Congress has been through a major privacy-invasion crisis and solution before. He was referring to the reforms in consumer credit law to combat excesses of the credit agencies.  
 
"The agencies collected information on you, kept it and sold it to banks and others, with statistics disclosing that 40 percent of the information was wrong and no one knew it," Hebert said.  
 
The outcome was legislation enacted requiring that all such data the credit agencies collect is now turned over to a third-party organization that polices the data's accuracy and makes it available to consumers.
 
"Credit bureaus weren't put out of business or even really damaged by the corrective legislation," Hebert noted.
 
So back to Helm, the Bellevue company that was the idea of  Giri Sreenivas and Dirk Sigurdson, two entrepreneurs who had sold a security startup and raised a $4 million seed round from top venture capital firms last year.
 
"Right now, nearly all of the data that comprises your online life is stored in a massive data center," Sreenivas wrote in a blog he posted. "You don't own it. You can't see it, you can't touch it - and you don't know who can. That dream of a device that would make data 'ownable' to the individual - not a stranger - is what led to Helm."
 
Their device connects to a home network and pairs with a mobile app that lets users create their own domain name, passwords, and recovery keys. Helm supports standard protocols and works with regular email clients such as Outlook or the Mail app, with encryption protecting the connection between the device and the apps.
 
A key challenge for privacy champions is the apparent uncertainty about the extent to which younger generations will care enough to get into the fray as opponents of the big tech data collectors, although a recent survey I saw said there's growing disillusionment among people in their twenties and thirties surrounding social media.
 
But in a comment that leaders of the privacy battle would find disappointing, one of the millennials in the survey was quoted as saying "I feel like our generation has been raised to not be so worried about online privacy because it just feels like there is no alternative. Ultimately I do value privacy in theory, but it feels like it's a cost of participating in society. Not just online."

-0-

An amusing post-script to last week's column
 
An email from a Russian friend provides a post-script to last week's column in which I suggested the formation of a business that, for a fee, could crowd the fringe in congressional or legislative races, helping ensure the re-election of moderates of either party.
 
Natalia Blokhina, who helps guide a Moscow-based fund management company that invests in U.S. companies, as well as companies elsewhere, sent me an email saying it was an interesting column.
 
Because I sought to help introduce Natalia to companies in which her fund might invest, I emailed her back asking if her fund might be interested in being an investor if the idea of a Save Our Middle LLC took hold.
 
"It would be interesting to tell people we have Russian investors in our company," I joked to her.
 
"We wouldn't want to be involved in a political company," she replied quite seriously.
 
You can search the column I did about Natalia at Flynn's Harp: Natalia Blokhina.

Lawmakers in both Washingtons are in the consumer-privacy crosshairs amid a growing awareness, and thus anger, of how little people are able to keep private about themselves.  
 
While both the Washington Legislature and Congress are deliberating bills the lawmakers hope can be crafted to satisfy both tech giants and consumers, there is an increasingly uncomfortable sense among legislators at both the state and federal levels that they had better not rile consumers further on the privacy issue.
 
And interestingly, part of the script for how this struggle between the tech industry and individuals over privacy plays out may be written in Washington state, either with the legislative tax hammer that is almost uniquely available in this state or by an emerging Bellevue company that hopes to take the privacy issue out of the hands of the tech giants.  
 
The tax tool is the state's business and occupation tax, a use tax on gross receipts rather than profits, which can and has been imposed in a punitive manner. The business start-up company is Helm, which has created a relatively inexpensive device, about the size of a router, that lets consumers send and receive emails from their own domain. More on both the b&o and Helm later.
 
At the federal level, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is proposing sweeping new legislation that would empower consumers to control their personal information, create radical transparency into how corporations use and share their data, and impose harsh fines, even prison terms for executives at corporations that misuse Americans' data.
 
As Wyden has put it: "Today's economy is a giant vacuum for your personal information - Everything you read, everywhere you go, everything you buy and everyone you talk to is sucked up in a corporation's database. But individual Americans know far too little about how their data is collected, how it's used and how it's shared,"  
 
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said he expects the state legislature to address privacy in the upcoming session, saying he has begun discussions with tech leaders in the state "about a privacy policy that is consistent with innovation and also consistent with fundamental rights of privacy." And Inslee expressed confidence about getting a policy, probably in this session, that will be pleasing to innovators and consumers."
 
"Pleasing" to the big tech companies like Facebook, Google and hometown Amazon is an almost amusing word for a governor to use when "acceptable" to the tech giants is the best that is likely to happen with any state legislation that constrains the manner in which personal information is being collected and used.
 
That's particularly true with citizen pressure on lawmakers here and in other states after California's Assembly and Senate overwhelmingly passed a far-reaching piece of legislation called the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). The measure largely mirrors protections offered to European citizens under the recently implemented General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is likely to drastically change the ways that American companies store and trade in consumer information for Californians.
 
The law allows Californians to ask firms collecting and selling data: what do you collect, why and with whom do you share it? And it allows California residents to opt out of the sale of their data and to request deletion of their data.
 
And in addition to Wyden's zeal on behalf of privacy, the passage of CCPA is spurring the tech industry to seek Congressional action on something they could at least reluctantly accept to avoid what they are protesting as a possible "patchwork approach to privacy policy" if each state enacts its own version.
 
So in the event Washington lawmakers approve legislation that makes its citizens happy about new state protections for privacy, and then Congress approves a law that offers dramatically less protection that supersedes what states like California, and Washington, have put in place, how can this state preserve the protections it will have given its citizens.?
 
A suggestion, borne or my political-writing background: The state, led by its Democrat Atty. Gen. Bob Ferguson, could put in place a privacy policy that companies would be told they must comply with or a special B&O tax rate of some compelling amount, maybe even 25 percent, will apply to those firms not honoring our privacy policy.  
 
Would Ferguson have the courage to confront major tech companies either located here, like Amazon or having a significant presence here like Google and Facebook? Given the fact that he'd like to be Inslee successor as governor and that his key role is first and foremost "preserving the rights of the individual," he could fatally impact his political hopes if he failed to follow the public demands on this issue. And in fact, if he failed to take a protective step demanded by citizens, they could use the initiative process to create a special b&o tax rate themselves.
 
This wouldn't be a law, since the federal government if Congress passes a privacy act, would likely have pre-empted states passing laws governing privacy. But legislation imposing a different b&o tax and the significantly higher rate has a long tradition protected by decisions of the Washington State Supreme Court.
 
Would what I am talking about be legal blackmail? Consider that there are almost three dozen B&O classifications with rates often unexplainable, like parimutuel wagering having a rate of .0013 and gambling contests of chance, .015. The latter, incidentally, is the rate for "service and other activities," which includes professional firms like attorneys as well as consultants-the rate I pay.
 
And how law firms came to be taxed at the highest rate is instructive for how lawmakers in Washington can use the b&o. In the 1993 session, lawmakers sought to extend the sales tax to the legal profession but the attorneys brought their lobbyists to the fray and successfully defeated the effort. Presto, came the highest b&o tax suddenly applying to attorneys, just about tripling their tax.
 
I once asked the late Gov, Mike Lowry if that came about as punishment by a Democratic governor (him) and Democratic legislature and he let out one of his classic shoulder bouncing laughs.
 
When I discussed the privacy issue with Bellevue-based research analyst Jim Hebert, he noted that Congress has been through a major privacy-invasion crisis and solution before. He was referring to the reforms in consumer credit law to combat excesses of the credit agencies.  
 
"The agencies collected information on you, kept it and sold it to banks and others, with statistics disclosing that 40 percent of the information was wrong and no one knew it," Hebert said.  
 
The outcome was legislation enacted requiring that all such data the credit agencies collect is now turned over to a third-party organization that polices the data's accuracy and makes it available to consumers.
 
"Credit bureaus weren't put out of business or even really damaged by the corrective legislation," Hebert noted.
 
So back to Helm, the Bellevue company that was the idea of  Giri Sreenivas and Dirk Sigurdson, two entrepreneurs who had sold a security startup and raised a $4 million seed round from top venture capital firms last year.
 
"Right now, nearly all of the data that comprises your online life is stored in a massive data center," Sreenivas wrote in a blog he posted. "You don't own it. You can't see it, you can't touch it - and you don't know who can. That dream of a device that would make data 'ownable' to the individual - not a stranger - is what led to Helm."
 
Their device connects to a home network and pairs with a mobile app that lets users create their own domain name, passwords, and recovery keys. Helm supports standard protocols and works with regular email clients such as Outlook or the Mail app, with encryption protecting the connection between the device and the apps.
 
A key challenge for privacy champions is the apparent uncertainty about the extent to which younger generations will care enough to get into the fray as opponents of the big tech data collectors, although a recent survey I saw said there's growing disillusionment among people in their twenties and thirties surrounding social media.
 
But in a comment that leaders of the privacy battle would find disappointing, one of the millennials in the survey was quoted as saying "I feel like our generation has been raised to not be so worried about online privacy because it just feels like there is no alternative. Ultimately I do value privacy in theory, but it feels like it's a cost of participating in society. Not just online."

Mike Heavey is a decorated Vietnam veteran, former Washington State legislator and retired King County Superior Court judge who each year marks his now 15-year remission from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma by climbing a mountain, with his 30-year friend, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, sometimes among the climbers.

But it's likely Heavey, 72, will want to be best remembered for his creation of an organization called Judges for Justice, which he formed in 2013 to identify wrongful convictions that leave innocent people imprisoned who can only be freed if someone makes the effort to have them exonerated.

Heavey's comments and the phrases that pepper them leave little doubt that the man who spent 14 years in the Washington State legislature and a dozen years as a superior court judge views the conviction and imprisonment of people who turn out to be innocent as a scar on the face of a nation.

It was a decade ago that what I like to refer to as the "magic dust of caring" was first sprinkled on a planeload of orphans and homeless kids from the Spokane area, and on their elves, aboard an Alaska Airlines flight to the North Pole for a visit with Santa Claus.  

Steve Paul - Elf BernieThis "Fantasy Flight" to the North Pole has been an annual event in Spokane, with only occasional visibility, for almost 20 years. But it wasn't until Alaska got involved in 2008 at the request of Steve Paul, President, and CEO of the 501c3 that he guides and who has personally overseen the event since 2000, that the real magic arrived as well.
    
Thus, last Saturday, 57 of the Spokane and Coeur d'Alene area's most needy children, each with an elf personally assigned to them, hurried aboard an Alaska 737-900 for a 20-minute flight to visit Santa and Mrs. Clause at their North Pole home, in reality a specially set-up hanger on the other side of the airport, for their memorable visit.

This 10th anniversary year for Alaska involvement included a special gift to all involved as the airlines' Alaska BEYOND magazine had its cover story for this month about the event in an article filled with photos as well as the story so Alaska's passengers across the system learned of this unique event and their favorite airline's role in it.

This year was also marked by a special "first." As Paul was pleased to share.

"In 2018, we had our first Escort Elf (this is an elf that is assigned to a child) that had attended as a child, back in 2003. Today, she is an employee of United Airlines. We have come full circle!"

Thus when the Spokane area orphans and homeless kids and their elves take off on a December Saturday each year from Spokane International Airport aboard flight 1225 for the North Pole to meet Santa, it's proof of both the "impossible things" that Paul, officially Chief Elf Bernie, believes in, as well as evidence of that "Magic Dust of Caring."

I first wrote of the event in 2010 when I learned of it from my friend, Blythe Thimsen, then editor of a Spokane magazine, who was to be an elf that year, an experience she shared with me then subsequently wrote about and sent me a copy of the article.
 
Retelling and updating this story has been my holiday gift to readers of The Harp since then because it's a story of human caring and compassion that not only won't get old but perhaps becomes more needed each year.
 
Paul, president of the non-profit Northwest North Pole Adventures (NNPA), is senior IT Project Manager at Engje Insight, an energy management company rebranded a year ago from Ecova. But he spends much of the year preparing for the flight. He works with social agencies that select the children, gathers sponsors and oversees details like elf selection, all on a budget of about $200,000 that includes in-kind, like the Alaska flight.
 
Alaska Beyond CoverPaul, who was 43 in people years when he first got involved in 2000, says his elf age is 907 years, but that is really only middle age for elves so he still has a ways to go.

United was the airline partner for the first eight years and provided the little organization that was then called North Pole Adventure with a plane that, once loaded with the children, taxied around the airport before coming to a stop at Santa's place.
 
But when United was unable to provide a plane in 2007, Paul recalls: "we threw together the 'magic buses' to get from the Terminal to the North Pole."
 
For the 2008 flight, Paul approached Alaska, which he notes "is, of course, more familiar with the North Pole than any other airline." Those he contacted at the airline said "sure," and asked, "why can't we actually take off with the kids?"
 
So it began. Before boarding their plane, the children are fed and receive backpacks filled with school supplies, winter woolies and a T-shirt that says, "I Believe" on the front and "I've Been to the North Pole" on the back. Then their "passports" are validated with the "North Pole Approved" stamp and they're on their way to a magical time the elves, Elf Bernie and Alaska's employees will try to make unforgettable.
 
Perhaps the most visible in his commitment is Alaska pilot Eric Hrivnak, who has been the pilot at the controls for a half dozen or so years by being at the front of the line as Alaska employees sign up for roles. He was beaten to the request by another pilot a few years ago so made sure that wouldn't happen thereafter.
 
Hrivnak and his Alaska crew are part of the magic since as the flight nears its conclusion, the passengers are told to pull the window shades down and chant the magic words that will allow them to land at the North Pole.  
 
As the kids pull down their shades and do a chant, each wave 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.
 
The jetliner taxis to a hanger on the other side of the airport, where the passengers are greeted by a group of elves, with live reindeer milling about, and are they taken to meet Santa and Mrs. Clause. 
 
"When we send out invitations to the kids, we have them give us a wish list of what they want for Christmas," explains Paul.
 
 Pilot Eric Hrivnak
and friend"We take those lists and buy each of them a toy from that list. So as each child tells Santa what he or she wants, Santa can reach into his bag and pull that present out for them," adds Paul "The looks on their faces as he hands it to them is priceless."
 
I asked Paul for some thoughts to sum up his role of almost 20 years with this event.
 
"This is my 19th year as a volunteer and my 12th year as Chief Elf and each year, the event improves from the years before and even though we've done this many times, we can continue to do better," he said. "Leading an organization that embraces change for improvement's sake makes this position fulfilling and humbling at the same time."
 
"The Fantasy flight is a chance to share the joy and the magic of flight with those who need it most," said Diana Birkett Rakow, Alaska's vice president for external relations. "The volunteers, including many of our employees, are incredible, and while we set out to lift the spirits of our littlest guests on the way to the North Pole - inevitably, they lift ours."

The state Department of Commerce is convening a day-long session in Seattle next week to help an army of accountants, attorneys, developers, and investment advisors get a better grasp of the unlikely new Federal tax tool that will allow the wealthy to make money while making a difference.