Lakeside School

Chris Barney ’92 was a Lakeside student from 7th through 12th grade. After graduating, he attended Trinity College for one year, then transferred to the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the midst of his studies, he took some time off and earned his basic EMT certification, which led to a volunteer firefighting position with an agency just outside Boulder. In 1997, Chris received his Bachelor of Environmental Design, but decided to pursue his lifelong interest in helping people through a public service career in firefighting. His work has taken him from Boulder to Antarctica, and back to the Pacific Northwest. Chris is currently working for Portland Fire & Rescue. When he’s not busy responding to emergencies, he enjoys spending time trail running/racing and working on his house.

The following are excerpts from a conversation with Chris last spring.

Q. How did you first become a student at Lakeside? Did other members of your family attend the school?

A. In a way—my next-door neighbors growing up were like family, and both of their kids attended. One of them is now the Upper School Assistant Director, Elaine Christensen. She’s like my big sister. I grew up with Elaine and her brother Steve Schneider, rowing for Lakeside, going to regattas, etc.

Q. How would you describe your time at Lakeside?

A. Overwhelmingly positive. I would definitely not be the person I am today without that experience. It opened my eyes to many things beyond and including the academic classroom.

Q. What's your most vivid or important memory of the school?

A. One that comes to mind is a Middle School bicycle trip to Greece and Turkey. It was one of my first introductions to the world outside my hometown, state, and country.

Q. Which of your teachers had the greatest impact on your life?

A. Mike Brandon, Debbie Kraft, and Dale Bauer—they all had high expectations of me and believed in my ability to meet their expectations.

Q. What is the greatest impact that your time at Lakeside has made on your life, personally and/or professionally?

A. The wide range of experiences and ideas I was exposed to at Lakeside have really been helpful in my adult life, and in my profession. In my career, I am exposed to a wide spectrum of people from varied socioeconomic backgrounds—having received my education in an environment of diverse thought has definitely been helpful.

Q. What inspired you to pursue a degree in environmental and urban planning?

A. I liked the idea of creating livable communities that were enjoyable for people, and more pedestrian than vehicle centric. Those are concepts I grew up with in my neighborhood, and so really appealed to me. Studying Environmental Design also allowed me to use the creative part of my brain. But while I definitely enjoyed it as an academic pursuit, by the time I finished college, I was less interested in pursing it as a profession, in part because I had experiences with firefighting by then.

Q. Why did you choose firefighting as your profession?

A. I think I always had a subconscious interest in firefighting and emergency services because I wanted to work in a profession where I could help people. While I was at the University of Colorado, I decided to take a semester off to figure out what major to pursue, and on a whim, got my basic EMT certification. That led me to the opportunity to become a volunteer firefighter while I was still in college.

Q. What was it like when you first became involved?

A. I suddenly found myself studying a subject where I could sit in a class for four hours and not notice the time slowly tick by! I was completely involved in the information, which was one of the first indicators that I had found something that I was really interested in. I also strongly identified with the teamwork approach to problem solving, as well as getting a job done that ultimately helps people in need.

Q. How did you get started in your professional firefighting career?

A. While I was going through EMT basic training, one of my classmates told me about a company that hired medical personnel to work at a science research facility in Antarctica. I thought that would be fun, but still had years to go in school. Then, toward the end of school, I was working in an outdoor shop and a customer came in wearing a shirt with that company’s logo. We started talking, and he told me they also hired firefighters. So I jumped on the chance, applied, and was hired to work for their fire department during the 1997-98 winter/summer season.

After I completed that contract, I traveled around New Zealand for a month, and then moved back to Boulder where I had a summer job working for the Boulder Fire Department on their wildland firefighting team doing prescribed fire work, forest thinning projects, and various fire assignments around the country. When that position ended, I moved into another seasonal position doing wintertime operations.

Q. How did you end up back in the Northwest?

A. It was actually kind of funny—just when I was getting tired of Colorado and was close to leaving, South Metro Fire Rescue in the Denver-metro area hired me as a full-time firefighter. I worked there for nearly five years, and then decided to move back to the Northwest. In the spring of 2003, I began working with Portland Fire & Rescue. When I was hired in Portland, it kind of felt like I came full circle because I had the chance to get shipboard fire training at the state police training center near Snoqualmie Pass in Washington. I remember noticing the exit sign for that facility while I was growing up, so it was fun to actually receive training there.

Q. What does your work for Portland Fire & Rescue entail?

A. I’m currently assigned to Engine 24, and am in the process of testing for the lieutenant rank. My station responds to fires and medical emergencies, car accidents, hazardous materials, etc. We work every third day, and are on duty for 24 hours. Our station has also received additional specialized training because we are responsible for shipboard and high-rise firefighting, weapons of mass destruction-type events, and mass casualties.
I’m also part of a city project management team utilizing a $1 million FEMA grant to proactively reduce the threat of wildfire to the area. Specifically, I've been managing the operations of reintroducing prescribed fire into the city's parks for wildfire risk management & ecosystem revitalization.

Q. How do you deal with the stress of being a firefighter?

A. Definitely through physical exercise. A benefit of my schedule is having time off to enjoy the outdoors—one of my favorite off-duty pastimes is trail running/racing. There’s also a sense of humor unique to firefighters that we use to deal with stress.

Q. It sounds like you have found a career for which you are truly passionate.

A. I am fortunate in that respect but it does limit me. Having been introduced to world cultures at Lakeside so early on, I definitely have a desire to live abroad at some point. I’m hoping to figure out a way to accomplish that through my career.

Q. Is there anything else you would like to share with your fellow Lakesiders?

A. I appreciate being interviewed because it’s my hope that Lakeside students do not overlook public service professions. Whether it’s at the local, state, or federal level—from government agencies to law enforcement, FEMA to military service—these professions are important to every community throughout our country.

I’m also very excited about Lakeside’s emphasis on GSL because I think the broader global perspective it provides to students is one of the most beneficial views that a person can have as they grow up. One of my good friends, David Joneschild, a science teacher in the Upper School, keeps me up to date on these important projects.

Isaiah Wilner ’96 joined his sister, Claudia, at Lakeside at the beginning of his 6th grade year. After graduating, he attended Yale University, where he majored in history and worked as editor in chief of the Yale Daily News. At the ripe young age of 28, his book, The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine, was published by HarperCollins. According to the publisher, Isaiah’s book “…reveals for the first time a media scandal buried nearly eighty years. In this groundbreaking biography…Wilner shows that Briton Hadden, not Henry R. Luce, was the genius behind Time magazine.” Reviews by notable publications including The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews describe the book as “scintillating,” “a perceptive psychological study and cultural history,” and “an intriguing … tale, related with great skill and compassion.” The Wall Street Journal described it as “a riveting narrative … richly detailed … part This Side of Paradise, part Citizen Kane.” Isaiah is currently working on his second book and writing for Vanity Fair.

Q. What is the most significant experience you remember from your Lakeside years?

A. One of the things I really loved was being involved in student government. For Diversity Day, Abby Breckenridge and I put together a day of student-taught classes and activities. It was a remarkable day, unique to Lakeside. I think the most important thing I remember about the project was how great the teachers were in encouraging us to take responsibility for our own learning. I also think it helped to spark the diversity conversation at a time when it was needed. In the 1990s, as Lakeside was becoming more multicultural as well as more international in its outlook, that discussion was just beginning.

Q. Is there a teacher you feel had an especially positive impact on you?

A. Susan Saunders, faculty advisor for the Tatler, really influenced my thinking. She had a strong belief in, and knowledge of, the First Amendment, and as a teacher she was a truly a democrat with a small “d.” Susan encouraged us to think about all sides of an issue, rather than being satisfied with “both sides.”

She inspired us to take the time to dig deeply into our stories, to put things in context and provide the necessary balance. Before we ran a big story, the editors would discuss it as a group, ultimately reaching a much deeper level of understanding than would have been typical of almost any other high school newspaper. Susan demonstrated another great thing about Lakeside’s teachers—they recognized our potential more than we did, and as a result, we rose to meet their expectations.

Q. It sounds like you had many teachers that influenced you.

A. So many. A great number of teachers encouraged my writing, from Kathleen Mahler in the 7th and 8th grades, through a series of English and history teachers in the Upper School. I had one great history teacher after another at the Upper School, beginning with Dwight Gibb, who shattered a lot of my preconceptions about history. He taught the subject through ideas rather than time. It was eye-opening for me that history could be about debate, systems, and continuity vs. change, rather than just a series of events. I ended up majoring in history in college, and I think my interest began at Lakeside in classes with Bob Mazelow, Gray Pedersen and Hugh Tower.

Q. What is the greatest impact that Lakeside has had on your life, either personally, professionally, or both?

A. I became a journalist directly because of my Lakeside experience. Lakeside taught me that journalism could be a way to explore serious issues and contribute to public debates. The Tatler was more of a long-form newspaper; it wasn’t just a weekly summarizing the headlines. So the view of journalism I got from the beginning was atypical, and influenced me to pursue magazine and book writing rather than front-page newspaper reporting.

I think my book came out of my Tatler experience. It’s about two guys working on a student paper together, Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, the founders of Time. I was able to have a lot of insight into their friendship as well as their rivalry while they were at Hotchkiss working on a school paper similar to the Tatler. Ultimately, the book revolves around a moral question, which was, after Hadden died, after creating Time, what was Luce’s responsibility to tell his partner’s story, to carry on his legacy. The book explores the deeper question of what do you owe a friend. I think that did come out of the types of questions and explorations we were having at the Tatler.

Q. What was it like working at the Yale Daily News (YDN)?

A. I spent about 50 hours every week at the Yale Daily News. Some Yale graduates say they majored in the Yale Daily News!

There were approximately 20 people on the board and a core of about 80 students that produced the newspaper. It was a very supportive and close-knit group. We keep in touch, and many actually go into journalism after working on the YDN. That was inspiring because I had never really given much thought to my career path.

During the first year, you start by covering miscellaneous stories before you are assigned to a beat. My beat was the Provost’s office, which is basically covering the school administration. As part of that beat, I also covered some financial topics that I had never known much about, like the endowment, and that turned out to be a great experience. It broadened my knowledge base and helped me become a much better reporter.

Q. What type of work have you been doing since graduating from Yale in 2000?

A. I worked for ABC News for about 18 months while I was researching my book. I started as an assistant for investigative correspondent Brian Ross, and then wrote anchor copy for Good Morning America. At about that same time, my work on the book really took off. Fortunately, I was able to work on a part-time, freelance basis—the book took me the next 4½ years! After my book came out, I consulted for Time on their new redesign. And for the last year, I’ve been writing for New York magazine and Vanity Fair.

Q. What inspired you to write your book?

A. The book began because I was sitting underneath a painting of Briton Hadden [in the Briton Hadden Memorial Building at Yale, which houses the YDN] who had edited the YDN 80 years before I did. I was looking at the painting and wondering who this guy was. That got me interested in his story, and ultimately led me to discover there was a cache of papers that detailed the history of his friendship with his partner, Henry Luce, that had never been read by anyone outside the company. So it was more serendipitous than your typical career route.

One of my goals for the book was to not shy away from what I thought was the essential point—that Luce betrayed Hadden and buried his role in history. But at the same time, I wanted to show how they had a historic friendship that changed the course of magazines and transformed the way we think about news. Hadden loved and admired Luce and chose him as his partner because they were such opposite personalities. So I wanted the book to reflect the complexity of friendship. It would be too simple just to write a book saying Hadden was the hero behind Time and Luce took the credit. I think they inspired each other to do something greater than what either of them could have done alone. The originality came from Hadden, and Luce was the builder.

Q. Was it difficult to gain access to records at Time?

A. Everyone was really open, which is fairly rare. I’m not sure if that’s because it was an untold story—I think people were interested in finally having something written about Hadden. Part of it was also the timing. Luce had controlled the papers until he died in the mid-1960s, so people were unable to do the research during his lifetime. By the time I was interested in pursuing the story, there was a different generation running Time. It turned out the managing editor, Walter Isaacson, is himself a great biographer. I was fortunate because he thought it was wrong that Time would control access to the papers. He felt they should be open to the public, especially for someone who is doing a serious biography.

Q. How did the Luce family feel about you writing the book?

A. They were really inviting. I interviewed his son, Henry Luce III, before he passed away. Peter Luce, his surviving son, has another set of papers that belonged to his mother; he allowed me to visit him in Colorado and read the documents in his basement.

Q. Do you want to continue to pursue biographical writing?

A. Definitely. The great thing about biography is that it’s a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity, as well as seeing people three dimensionally. It’s a different kind of creativity because you are constantly guessing—the person is essentially a mystery unless they left comprehensive diaries or letters that expose their innermost feelings. Hadden did not, so I had to come up with a theory to connect the data points and make sense of them. With my study of Hadden, it was after about three years that his whole personality finally came into focus. It was probably around that point that I started to be influenced by him. I understood his idea that you have to entertain people in order to inform them through your writing.

Q. What is the story behind the book you are currently working on?

A. I’m researching a few stories, generally in 19th or 20th century American history. I’m also researching the history of Interview magazine, which was started by Andy Warhol. This story has given me the chance to delve into a segment of New York in the 1970s, and The Factory [Warhol’s New York studio]. Warhol was, in a strange way, a father figure to the group of people he assembled to work around him. Like my first book, this is about the human stories behind a publication—I was interested in the intense, close relationships with Time as well. My interested in biography comes from a web of relationships and ideas.

Q. Is there anything else you’d like to share?

A. I was really impressed when I visited Lakeside a little more than a year ago. I had a chance to talk with a few of the students at the Tatler; it seemed like the paper was as strong as ever. However, the students told me there is an increasing amount of censorship, and the administration now has a different view of the faculty advisor’s role. During my years at Lakeside, the advisor was heavily involved in our discussions and in teaching us, but wasn’t hands on to the extent of bluelining copy. We felt we had to be responsible student journalists because the newspaper was on our shoulders. My hope is that Lakeside will continue to appreciate the importance of having a student paper that is edited by the students. I learned so much by doing things at Lakeside because the teachers gave us room to experiment and make mistakes. Even if the students are critical of the school from time to time, the quality of their thinking and the trust the school places in them, can only be a compliment to Lakeside. If the discussion in the paper comes directly from the students, that is expressive of the strength of the school.

Susan Brandzel ’86 attended Lakeside throughout her middle and high school years. After graduating, she attended Wellesley College where she completed her B.A. in Psychology along with a minor in African Studies. Susan spent a semester of her junior year living in Jerusalem and studying the cultures and conflicts of the Middle east. After graduation from college and one year of working in the Psychology department at Harvard, Susan decided she could positively impact more lives by working in the field of public health, so returned to Seattle where she earned a master’s degree in Public Health from the University of Washington. She spent the next 12 years working at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In 2005, she and her husband packed up their two daughters and moved to South Africa where Susan spent the next two years helping build local capacity to conduct clinical and epidemiologic HIV and TB prevention and treatment research. Now back in the Northwest, Susan is happily balancing her time between her family and her international public health consulting business, Ndiza Consulting. She also founded the Two Hemispheres Writing Project, a progressive, fiction-writing endeavor involving women in the U.S. and South Africa.

The following are excerpts from a conversation with Susan earlier this year.

Q. How would you describe your time at Lakeside?

A. It’s funny because here I am almost 40 years old and it still plays a huge role in my life. I visit regularly with various classmates. Lakeside also provided me with an incredible foundation for life. I can remember arriving at college and my friends were really overwhelmed by the academic demands, and I wasn’t. Lakeside prepared me incredibly well for college and it was a great exposure to all that life has to offer.

Q. What is one of your more memorable experiences you had while you were a student?

A. During our 6th grade class camping trip, we were in the sand dunes in eastern Washington when we heard some really loud noises. Mr. Thiel thought it was dynamite for irrigation ditches being blown. But then these weird dark clouds started moving in so we decided to leave earlier than we had planned. Of course we drove straight into the cloud. When we got to a truck stop in Vantage, we asked a truck driver what was going on and he responded, “Didn’t you know Mount St. Helens has blown?” So all of a sudden, here are these poor Lakeside teachers with 11 students not knowing the protocol for how to deal with a volcanic eruption!

Q. Which of your teachers had a great impact on your life?

A. Bob Mazelow influenced me tremendously. He had an energy, enthusiasm and openness that were very attractive. And of course he taught me about Africa—he really flipped a switch in me in terms of my interest in its culture, politics and history, as well as its influence on the rest of the world. To this day, I have an incredible involvement with and passion for Africa, and I give Bob a lot of credit for that.

Q. What is the greatest impact the school has had on your life?

A. In 8th grade, my French teacher, Marie-Pierre Koban helped initiate the Seattle-Nantes Sister City Exchange. I was part of the first group do an exchange with families in Nantes. So in a way I credit her and Lakeside for my travel bug, and my excitement for seeing different parts of the world.

Q. What inspired your transition from psychology to public health?

A. During my senior year at Wellesley, I began working in a psychology lab at Harvard with Dr. Jerome Kagan, a well-known developmental psychologist. Dr. Kagan was conducting some very interesting longitudinal studies looking at whether temperament was biologically predictable. That was a fantastic experience and my real first foray into research. At the end of my second year when asked if I wanted to extend my position, I told Dr. Kagan I didn’t feel I could reach enough people through clinical psychology. He kindly suggested that if I wanted to “save the starving children of China,” then it was not the right field for me. That conversation helped trigger my foray into public health, which combines my studies and experience in the social and behavioral sciences.

Q. How did you become involved with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC)?

A. Through one of my graduate school professors, I was hired just after completing my master’s to be a recruitment and data coordinator for a very large clinical trial called the Women’s Health Initiative. I also helped start up one of the sites for this national, long-term study. That experience gave me my first taste of clinical trials, which demand a high level of regulatory rigor and exactingness in research, especially when the FDA is involved.

My next step involved working on various epidemiologic studies, and helping to run breast and prostate cancer studies, including a study funded by Michael Milken—he set up a foundation to fund prostate cancer research when he found out he had prostate cancer after being released from prison. Mr. Milken went on Larry King Live and advertised the telephone number to say we were looking for families to participate in our genetic studies, and I was on the other end managing the thousands of calls coming in response! As part of this project, I coordinated a familial prostate cancer study that found one particular susceptibility gene that was also linked to a certain kind of brain tumor. That was a great experience.

Q. How did you get started in international work?

A. I’ve always been attracted to the world outside of the U.S. When I was in graduate school, quite a few of my friends and colleagues were in the international health track and I always wanted to do that kind of work. But you can’t get the job without the experience, and you can’t get the experience without the job. In 1999, the Hutch was running a program to help initially with HIV vaccine trial work, and was later expanded to include HIV prevention as well as vaccine and treatment trials. When I was hired by that group, I became involved in international clinical trials and helped to launch quite a few different HIV prevention studies in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Thailand. When I was leaving for one of my trips to central Africa, I discovered I was newly pregnant. After I returned home, I decided I didn’t want to travel as much while we were raising young children, so I became manager of my group and advised a team orchestrating studies in Africa, Asia, South America, and the U.S.

Q. When did you decide to leave FHCRC?

I continued with my managerial position until April of 2005 when my husband and I began discussing how we might do something to help with HIV closer to the front lines. Becky Frink Sherman ’87, a friend since childhood, and her husband Joe, who were just headed off to be lay missioners for the Maryknoll program in Bolivia, helped inspire us to look at opportunities beyond the borders of the U.S. and apply our skills in countries that needed our help. I contacted a former colleague who had started a research program in South Africa and asked if he was interested in my help. His immediate response was, “Absolutely!” So approximately five months later, after figuring out how to move our lives across world, we landed sight unseen in Durban, South Africa, with a 2-year-old (Samantha) and a 5-year-old (Julia).

Q. How was the transition to living in South Africa?

A. It was incredibly shocking! Even though I had traveled quite a bit, with kids and the knowledge that you’re not just there for two weeks is a big deal. My very social older daughter felt isolated early on, so we realized she needed to be in school right away. We got very lucky and enrolled her in a school that had the same feeling as Lakeside—everyone got to know each other, the families were a community, and it provided an innovative way of learning.

I started work a few weeks later teaching South Africans how to do quality research. Since the country had been boycotted by the rest of the world because of Apartheid, their level of understanding of how to do good, basic research—let alone clinical trials—was pretty rudimentary. It was a fantastic opportunity for me, and really opened my eyes to what an incredible feat it is to do research in a setting where the infrastructure is so unreliable.

Q. Is there anything else you would like to share with your fellow alumni?

A. I’m excited that from the time I attended to Lakeside until now, the school has done a great job of opening up students’ learning about the world beyond the U.S. That was just starting to happen when I was there, but I think now there’s more attention paid to the globe as a whole.

I would love to see the Lakeside community, with its intellectual and economic capacity to contribute to the world, and public health in particular, take its wonderful potential and do something positive in the world. HIV, malaria, and TB as well as other major diseases are having a significant impact on the future infrastructure of the world, and we will see a critical degradation in the world economy and ultimately, the human condition, if we don’t address these issues directly.