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Today's Featured Biography

 
Charles Causey

I went to EJC after high school, an art major working with some of the best teachers on the west coast. There was part-time work as a pitchman at a girl show at the Seattle World's Fair too. Kind of fun. Remember �The Girls of the Galaxy�? Well, I do. After four more years at U W, and a BA in Art Education, I couldn�t hold the army off any longer and was drafted in 1967. A year later I was in Vietnam, which was very instructive. I trained infantry extensively; qualified on just about every weapon the army had but was immediately assigned to a typewriter in a helicopter unit as soon as I arrived. I couldn't type but the job was great until, of course, we came under attack and I found myself surrounded with clerks who hadn't seen a weapon since basic training. Not so great. Still, I came to love them. I proposed to my girlfriend via shortwave radio, met her in Hawaii on my R&R, married, and had a great 6-day date and before going back to the war. Coming home months later, she and the world both seemed to have changed. It was a hard adjustment. Nothing in the "real world" seemed very important. Even so, two years of grad school, teaching part-time at SPU, led to an MFA in Painting and then, to a teaching position at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Hilo was a great place, great students, great community, great environment, but horrible, nightmarish campus politics. And I went through a divorce there. I suppose the divorce was easy by some standards, but the relationship continued to reverberate in my life for a long time. Eventually, I left Hawaii to teach at Everett CC for a few years, which was more temperate in its politics but still, beyond the pale. Then there was a year at Humboldt State in Arcata, CA, a strange place, and an effort to freelance. But by then the whole field of art seemed, to me, to have lost its way, devolving into some preoccupation with art as commodity, which I found untenable. Art had always seemed more like a process of ferreting out some physical manifestation of a philosophy, with a kind of moral imperative to capture the aesthetic zeitgeist of our times. But as a commodity? I decided to get out for a while, took a job at Boeing designing and locating placards for commercial 747's and 767's. I have to say that it was interesting to be doing "real" work, but before long I moved over to a group that was trying to figure out "organizational development" and quality improvement, the later basically an import from the Japanese. I became an internal consultant to teams trying to design the problems out of processes, and I even found myself teaching classes again. Boeing, of course, also had its politics, but nothing like the universities. New execs always want to make their mark. We routinely got "reorganized", to little apparent benefit in the long run, but the fast-trackers seldom stayed around long enough to experience the real effects of their changes. Caught in a layoff around 2002, with an offer to be retrained I decided to finish my working life teaching in K-12. I went back to school, this time at Western, to refresh my undergrad art ed degree and to pick up a second BA in History. I thought, at the minimum, the history degree could inform me about places I'd like to see while traveling, even if I didn't use it to teach. I found being a student these days is quite different from what we experienced, even when I was teaching. The quantity and quality of data and the easy access via the internet can make writing a paper a dream. The slog of wading through stacks at the library is almost gone, and even classrooms are disappearing. Spelling and grammar checkers means no more losing a grade for incomplete sentences or misspelled words. But sadly, or perhaps happily, the student's didn't seem any smarter than we were. And about this same time, I also found I was having real difficulty getting to and from my classes with a progressive back problem. Two surgeries later found me not much better, and since I was 62, I put in for retirement. There have been a couple of other surgeries as well, but on the whole, I find myself happy and grateful. I live on a cliff overlooking a beach with a great view of Puget Sound. Whales come by in the spring. I garden. I've traveled a bit. I'm the former president of the HHC, 269th Combat Aviation Battalion Association. There is a new woman in my life. And I'm making art again. Slowly.

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