The Senior Scene

The holidays are going to look a lot different this year due to the coronavirus. But people are doing their best to keep traditions alive.

United Methodist Church of Puyallup has been closed since March, “with no services in the building. Everything has been online,” said Rev. Cara Scriven, lead pastor.

On Dec. 24, online lessons and carols will be on Zoom at 5 p.m., and Christmas Eve communion service will air at 7. Church members can pick up a gift bag at the end of November containing candles and a devotional to celebrate the Advent season.

Family get-togethers will be very different this year, as well.

Tacoma resident Janet Bittner said Christmas was always her favorite holiday.

“As a little girl, we had a party for our extended family on Christmas Eve and mom made cookies, had drinks, and we laughed and played and had a fabulous time,’ she said.

In 1987, Bittner started hosting the holiday celebration in her home.

“Mom came with a ton of food and cookies and drinks and spent the night, so no matter how the Christmas Eve party changed, the one thing that didn’t was I was always with my mom on Christmas morning,” she said.

Bittner’s mom now lives in an assisted-living facility, and the only contact she has with her is the phone or visiting from the outside through her living-room window.

“This is the first time in 65 years I’m not with my mom for the holidays,” Bittner said.

The City of Puyallup is wrestling with how to help its residents safely celebrate the holiday season. City Manager Steve Kirkelie said there will be lights on the tree in Pioneer Park, along with candy-striped lights on poles and lights along Meridian. The annual tree-lighting ceremony won’t take place, but “we are going to do all the traditional events we can to brighten up downtown,” he said.

“Dealing with the pandemic is hard,” said Kirkelie, adding that it is particularly difficult for seniors.

“Many are isolated because their families can’t visit them or their spouses are in a long-term (care) facility. We really feel for the senior community,” he said.

Trudi Bocott, senior services assistant at the Puyallup Activity Center, said the center, despite still being closed during the pandemic, has whipped up an online Christmas event on Dec. 16 featuring the Fun Singers. More information on the performance will be available in December by logging in to the city’s web page at www.cityofpuyallup.org/387/Senior-services

There won’t be a Santa Parade in Puyallup this year, but Main Street Association president Kerry Yanasak is pleased that Sound Transit has donated $2,000 to paint 50 windows on downtown businesses.

“We want to make a big wow for people driving down Meridian,” said Yanasak.

 

Joan Cronk, who wrote this article, is a freelance writer from Puyallup.

POLICING THE HOLIDAYS

Like many law enforcement agencies this time each year, Puyallup Police chief Scott Engle said his department is gearing up for the holiday season. It’s focusing on the community doing online shopping due to the virus and the accompanying threat of packages being stolen off porches.

Since everyone, and particularly seniors, may be doing a lot of online shopping, the Puyallup PD’s community engagement coordinator, Kerianne Cockerel, who according to Engle is a great resource for seniors to stay safe, can be reached at 253-841-5415.

As always, the department will also be on the lookout for impaired drivers. “This is a priority,” he said.

As if the pandemic wasn’t enough, now there’s a flu season to worry about.

Like COVID-19, the flu is a serious respiratory illness. Last season, the flu killed 13 people in Pierce County, including two children. The year before, flu claimed 42 Pierce County lives.

Health officials warn that this new influenza season, which began in October and is expected to continue through next April, will be unlike any other because COVID-19 also will be circulating.

“A vaccine doesn’t exist yet for COVID-19, but we have one for the flu,” said Nigel Turner, director of the communicable disease division of the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department. “The flu shot is your best protection against the flu, and it will help keep ill people out of hospitals that are helping people affected by COVID-19.”

Anyone older than six months should get a flu shot every year to protect themselves and those around them, officials say. Even if you do get sick with the flu, your illness may be milder and shorter.

Along with getting a flu shot, people can take other precautions against the flu the same way they’ve been guarding against COVID-19—wash your hands, cover your coughs, stay home when you’re sick, exercise social distancing, and wear a mask.

“With COVID-19’s continued presence in our communities, something as basic as a flu shot is even more important this year to keep our communities healthy and prevent the spread of disease,” said David Carlson, chief physician officer of MultiCare Health System, which is helping offer  drive-through flu vaccination clinics. The shots are free for children 18 and younger and for uninsured adults. Insured adults with an insurance card will be billed to their health plan.

Additional information on getting vaccinations is available from the Health Department at www.tpchd.org/flu.

The national Centers for Disease Control recommends vaccinating as soon as vaccine is available and before influenza begins circulating in the communities.

People at high risk for complications from flu include children under 5 years old, adults age 65 or older, pregnant women, and people with diabetes, asthma, heart disease, morbid obesity or other chronic health conditions.

Governor Jay Inslee received a flu shot in front of reporters and photographers on Oct. 15 to promote the health benefits of flu vaccinations, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. He noted there is added emphasis this year on flu prevention to keep people healthy and to avoid putting additional stress on the state’s healthcare system.

“Flu shots are critical to the health of our families and neighbors,” Inslee said. “Getting vaccinated for the flu is just one very important way to keep yourself and those around you safe and healthy.”

Other “common-sense measures we need to take every day right now to avoid getting sick” include social distancing, washing hands, sanitizing surfaces, and wearing a mask, Inslee added.

“We need to keep people out of the hospital and out of the way of COVID-19. We owe it to our fellow Washingtonians to get vaccinated,” the governor said.

Because the vaccine takes roughly two weeks to build up immunity in a person’s body, it’s important to get a shot right away, said Dr. Richard Webby, a member of the infectious diseases department at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the World Health Organization’s Influenza Vaccine Composition Advisory Team. “It’s the most effective tool we have to stave off the influenza virus. We can all help save lives by getting the flu shot now in order for it to provide maximum immunity.”

Doing so can help avoid “a volatile dual influenza and COVID-19 season this fall and winter,” Webby said. “The absolute best way for the public to prepare against this unique and unpredictable scenario is to protect themselves now” with a flu shot. He added, “The more people who get one will result in less severe influenza in our communities, resulting in less of an impact on our medical facilities and greater protection for our most vulnerable family, friends and neighbors. Let’s not wait for a spike in flu cases to take action.”

Washington’s sturdy, tanklike ballot drop boxes are a source of pride for state and local election officials. So when President Donald Trump suggested in August that ballot boxes are less than secure, the response here was sharp.

“Some states use ‘drop boxes’ for the collection of Universal Mail-In Ballots,” Trump tweeted. “So who is going to ‘collect’ the Ballots, and what might be done to them prior to tabulation? A Rigged Election? So bad for our Country. Only Absentee Ballots acceptable!”

Washington has laws to prevent that. And the state, which has been all-vote-by-mail since 2011, has a decade of experience with ballot boxes that counters the president’s claims.

Washington’s top elections official, Secretary of State Kim Wyman, said she knows of no incidents where ballot drop boxes have been tampered with or the ballots inside altered.

“Washington’s experience is that they are very secure,” Wyman said. “We haven’t had any issues with lost ballots or fraud — and our voters love them. I don’t share the president’s concerns about ballot drop box fraud.”

Nationwide, the focus on ballot drop boxes has increased amid fears that cost-cutting measures at the U.S. Postal Service could hamper mail-in voting. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced a lawsuit challenging recent postal service operational changes that he said could undermine the November election. U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said he would pause some mail-system changes until after the election.

The issue has taken on greater importance this year, as more states shift to voting by mail during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Washington, more than half of voters in the Aug. 4 primary election used drop boxes to return their ballots, according to Wyman. There are about 450 boxes statewide.

State law requires two people to be present any time ballot boxes are emptied, to ensure there are witnesses to the process. They must log the date and time they remove ballots, along with their names, so there is a record of who handled the ballots should anything be amiss.

Five county election officials said they use only trained county election employees to transport ballots. Those people have to sign an oath that they will uphold the integrity of the election process.

“The people who are doing this are sworn election workers — they take an oath before every election to perform their duties and comply with the law,” said Mason County Auditor Paddy McGuire. “These aren’t just people we pick up off the street. Most  have been doing this for years and years in our office. They are people we trust.”

 

Multiple levels of security

 

Every time a ballot drop box is unlocked and emptied, a tamper-evident seal is placed on the access door. That means that when election workers return to the ballot box, they will be able to see if someone opened it and accessed the ballots without permission. All seals are numbered and the seals’ serial numbers are logged by election workers.

Ballots are then moved from the drop box to the counting facility in another secure container, which also is closed using a numeric seal.

Once the secure container of ballots reaches the tabulation center, the number on the seal is checked against the paperwork that was filled out when the box was emptied. State law requires that a second copy of the paperwork be kept inside the container, for added verification.

Some counties have gone to additional lengths to ensure they can track the process of emptying ballot boxes. Pierce County, the state’s second-most populous, issues county-owned phones to election workers and tracks them via a GPS system as they travel between ballot boxes. That way, the county knows if an election worker takes a detour or goes anywhere else with the ballots.

“They are given very clear driving directions, and they can’t deviate” from that route, said Julie Anderson, Pierce County auditor since 2009. She said that means even if someone made an unauthorized stop to use a restroom, county officials would know.

The same electronic system in Pierce County lets election workers upload information about dropoffs and pickups in real time, so that the auditor’s office can monitor the status of drop boxes remotely, Anderson said.

During ballot pickups, Pierce County election workers take photos of the empty ballot boxes and upload them as proof that all ballots were removed and none were left behind. King County election workers follow a similar procedure.

Julie Wise, King County’s elections director, said the state’s systems for tracking ballots also ensure that fraudulent ballots can’t be fabricated and stuffed in drop boxes to sway an election.

Each ballot envelope has a unique identifier associated with each voter, which ensures that elections officials only count one ballot per person — even if someone were to put multiple ballots in a drop box, or try to flood a drop box with fake ballots, Wise said. That’s even the case with the online ballots that King County voters can fill out and print at home, she added.

“You can’t have foreign interference, people printing off envelopes and sending them in,” Wise said. “That’s not how it works.”

Meddling with ballots to achieve a political end would also be difficult, since it’s impossible to tell how a person voted from the outside of a ballot envelope, said Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall.

Yakima County Auditor Charles Ross said citizens can learn election procedures and observe the process of opening ballot boxes to ensure everything is done properly.

“Any person can witness, go with us, meet us at a location,” Ross said. “We crave observation, we love when people come observe.”

Anderson said trained observers from the political parties are often present when drop boxes are emptied in Pierce County, “to make sure nothing is happening.”

Ballot boxes vary in size and weight, but many are several hundred pounds, even 1,000 pounds. They’re also typically bolted into the ground, so they can’t just be hauled away.

Even things that seem like they would compromise a ballot box often don’t. A Thurston County ballot box wasn’t significantly damaged last year when it was hit by an SUV. And in King County, a school bus failed to destroy a ballot box in a collision a few years back, Wise said.

“The box was fine,” Wise said. “The school bus, not so much.”

 

Source: Crosscut.com, a non-profit news site based in Seattle. Melissa Santos wrote this article.

 

ABOUT VOTING AND BALLOT BOXES

• County election departments will mail ballots to voters on Oct. 16.
• Ballots must be placed in a drop box no later than 8 p.m. on election night (Nov. 3). Mailed ballots must be postmarked no later than Nov. 3.
• Locations of ballot drop boxes In Pierce County and King County are listed on the counties’ respective websites and in county-issued voters’ guides. The same is true of other counties.
• State law requires county election officials to make sure ballot boxes aren’t overflowing. Most counties do regular pickups throughout the 18-day voting period leading up to the end of the election (Nov. 3 for this year’s general election). In King County, ballots a

  

  re retrieved from drop boxes daily, with additional pickups on Election Day and the day before. In Pierce County, pickups generally occur every 48 hours, then more often in the final two days of voting.

It was 1975, and a 19-year-old kid who had dreamed of just one thing in his short life—to play major league baseball—was, on this April day in southern California, a mess. A former draft pick of the California Angels, Casey Sander had been cut just 48 hours earlier by the club after his third professional season. Despondent, he cried in the locker room showers for hours. Clearly, baseball dreams die hard.

But then, in the equivalent of a madcap dash from first base to home, Sander drove all night from the Angels’ training site in El Centro, Calif. to Arizona, hoping for one last shot. He went to four cities in one day, offering his outfielder/first baseman services to four other teams as they were wrapping up spring training.

Nobody wanted him.

Out of options, he took to the long, lonely road leading home to Seattle. A California Highway Patrol officer stopped Sander going 95 miles per hour on Interstate 5 through Burbank. The driver’s eyes were puffy from crying. The officer glimpsed an Angels gear bag on the rear seat of the car.

“He said, ‘You play for the Angels?’” Sander recalls. “I said, ‘Not any more. I was cut.’” The officer couldn’t bring himself to write a ticket. “His exact words were, ‘You’ve got enough bad news for one day,’” Sander said.

Little did he know then, but Sander would be back in Burbank more than 15 years later, this time as a TV star.

His is a Hollywood tale, the story of spit-and-leather aspirations dashed by a series of injuries. It’s the story of unexpected second chances, with a beloved University of Puget Sound coach offering new beginnings. And, ultimately, it’s the story of transformation, of a man who found an acting career by happenstance, and who, as an artist, has been driven for four decades to put “skin on words” as he brings characters to life.

Viewers will know Sander, 63, best from his recurring TV roles on “Home Improvement” (in which he played Rock Lannigan, a classic American working man), “Grace Under Fire” (as Wade Swoboda, proud Vietnam veteran and doting husband), and “The Big Bang Theory” (ex-cop Mike Rostenkowski, loving father to Bernadette and ambivalent father-in-law to  Howard). Each show rose to No. 1 in the Nielsen ratings. (“How many people can say that?” Sander muses.) “Big Bang” and “Home Improvement” took Sander back to Burbank, where both sitcoms were filmed. In his career, he counts more than 300 television and movie credits.

The story starts more than 1,100 miles north of Tinseltown, in Seattle’s View Ridge neighborhood, where Sander played Little League catcher and gained a reputation as a spray hitter who also could punch a baseball into the gap. But it was his speed and dexterity on the high school football field, where he played running back, that brought offers of scholarships from Puget Sound and all four Washington and Oregon schools represented in the then-Pac-8 Conference. Sander turned them all down, banking on being drafted by a Major League Baseball club. Several teams had shown interest, and taking a college football scholarship would have lowered his draft status. “I gambled on myself to make my dream come true,” he says.

He was taken in the 10th round of the 1973 draft by the California Angels. But baseball quickly turned mean on Sander. In his first season in the minor leagues, for a farm team in Idaho Falls, Idaho, a ball skipped off the turf and struck him in the right eye, shattering his orbital bone. (Careful TV viewers will notice a slight droop of his eyelid.) During winter ball the following year, he suffered a fractured vertebra in his lower back. And the next year, at Quad Cities, Iowa, he tore cartilage in his right knee. It was shortly after that that the Angels cut him.

Back in Seattle, Sander wasn’t ready to give up baseball. He joined the Seattle Rainiers independent team (no relation to the Tacoma Rainiers, the current Triple-A team for the Seattle Mariners). Then came the most unexpected of phone calls: Puget Sound head football coach Paul Wallrof wanted to chat with him about enrolling at the school and playing Division II football.

Wallrof wasn’t able to land Sander three years earlier, but he was willing to give the erstwhile prospect another chance after attending a Rainiers game—unbeknownst to Sander—the night before. Say yes, Wallrof told him, and I’ll give you a full athletic scholarship.

“To this man, I owe everything,” a misty-eyed Sander says today. “During the game, I was, like, 0-for-4, with a couple of weak ground balls. He said, ‘I came to see if you could still run, because I need a running back.’ It was like someone threw me a lifeline.”

Wallrof died Aug. 28, 2018, at his home on Vashon Island, just weeks before a scheduled team reunion to celebrate the coach. He was 86. Sander was a pallbearer.

Sander enrolled at Puget Sound as a 20-year-old freshman and went on to play four years of football for the Loggers. He sat out most of his freshman year after twice wrecking his left knee, requiring surgery both times. But he regained his form and, during his senior year, he logged more than 200 carries without losing a yard.

Teammate Frank Washburn, now a retired Seattle school principal, also was a running back. Sander, he says, was all legs.

“Once he got going from behind the line of scrimmage, he was pretty quick,” Washburn said. “His style was to be elusive. He was a great athlete.”

A communications major at Puget Sound, Sander called basketball games for the campus radio station, an outlet for his natural gregariousness. One of his communications courses required students to audition for a play—to “find out what the nervous audition process is all about,” he says.

He auditioned and, to his surprise, landed the role of Lucky in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist comedy “Waiting for Godot.”

“I’m this 6-foot-3, 230-pound running back, and I call my mom to say that I just got cast in a play,” Sander says. “She told me that when a door opens, walk through it. You never know what’s on the other side.”

Theater felt much like athletics to Sander. Both require self-motivation, and opening-night jitters proved to be no different from pre-game jitters. The camaraderie of the cast had much the same feel as being a member of an athletic team. The successes proved equally exhilarating.

Sander went on to perform in a number of other campus productions. He loved it. But theater always was more of a hobby than a calling. He had plans to teach English, and he did just that, as a student teacher at Curtis High School in University Place.

He lasted half a year.

Sander was in the lunchroom listening to teachers talk about their plans for Thanksgiving, and he sensed an indifference in his colleagues. “At that moment, not one of them wanted to be there,” Sander recalls. “I’m the typical young teacher, fired up about doing it, and I’m having a great time. I’m looking at these guys and thinking, ‘I don’t want to be you. You’re not happy.’”

It was a crystallizing moment. Over dinner with his mother, Sander shared his plans to drive to Los Angeles and try his hand at acting. He wanted to give it a good two years. His mother paused to take a gulp of her drink, leveling a gaze at the youngest of her five children. Sander recalls her saying, “’I don’t know why that doesn’t surprise me. You’ve never done anything normal. Nobody goes and plays pro baseball–you went and did it.’”

Driving south, Sander diverted to Reno, Nev., where he played blackjack in hope of doubling the $3,000 he had brought to help himself get situated in California—but instead lost half of it. In Los Angeles, he found bartending work and a place to live. He joined a friend as a scene partner for one of her auditions, and an agency approached Sander, not his friend, saying they wanted to represent him in his acting pursuits.

Sander got his first break when he was cast as the Winston Rodeo Cowboy, plying cigarettes in magazine advertisements. With his push-broom mustache and ruggedly handsome looks, marketers needed only to adorn him with a flannel shirt and a cowboy hat. From there, he landed his first commercial spot—an ad for Burger Chef, playing a trucker eating a breakfast sandwich. His line: “Mmmm, ain’t no beatin’ that grease.” That job got him his Screen Actors Guild card, a turning point in his career.

His breakthrough came when, in 1983, he joined The Groundlings Theatre and School in LA, considered one of the nation’s leading improv training programs. There, he met comedians Phil Hartman and Jon Lovitz. Sander’s son and daughter refer to Lovitz as Uncle Jon, and Lovitz says Sander is “like a brother” to him. He praises Sander’s versatility and his dedication to the craft: “He never phones in a performance.” Lovitz says Sander, like all members of the Groundlings, would rehearse sketches hundreds of times to get them right.

“He can do drama, comedy, and character work, and he can use his own personality and just be himself,” Lovitz says. “He’s a big guy with a heart of mush.”

Actor Richard Karn, who played opposite Sander in “Home Improvement,” calls his friend “a large presence” in the room.

“Casey’s strength is his personality,” Karn says. “When a character actor shows up on the set, they have to, without necessarily taking over, create a presence instantly. Character actors have to put their noses to the grindstone.”

Karn and Sander both attended Eckstein Middle School in Seattle but didn’t know each other because Sander is a year older. On the set, they would rehash their younger years—Karn had also played Little League baseball—and they worked on philanthropic projects together. For five years, Karn ran a celebrity golf tournament and Sander a celebrity baseball game, resulting in more than $1 million donated to Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue.

In 1993, Sander got his biggest break–he was cast as Wade Swoboda on the ABC sitcom “Grace Under Fire,” starring Brett Butler. Swoboda played a Vieitnam War veteran who created pottery (as Sander does in real life) in a successful postwar life. Until then, most Vietnam vets had been portrayed on TV as damaged goods. The show lasted five seasons, and Sander says he received hundreds of letters from vets lauding his performance.

Now 64, Sander sits in his Newbury Park, Calif., back yard, which he’s planted with cactuses and succulents. He dips Copenhagen tobacco, a holdover from his playing days. His eyes are crystalline blue, his figure still ropy with muscle. He is frequently recognized in public, “which I look at as an acknowledgment of good work.” He does regular voiceover work in commercials—he’s been the voice of Goodyear tires for three years—and for video games.

Sander was married at 32 and divorced six years later. He has two grown children, ages 31 and 29. He has spent the last 25 years living in a two-story house in the suburbs. That is by design. “I am a dad first, 100 percent,” Sander says. “And I wanted to raise my kids outside of LA.”

He has a collage of photos from family vacations at his cabin in Port Townsend, where he likes to chop wood and put his kayak on the Sound, sometimes for as long as 10 hours.

On a cloudless October 2019 day, near where wildfires scorched portions of Newbury Park just days before, Sander reflected on his favorite dramatic role as a firefighter struggling to survive third-degree burns on a season 12 episode of “Grey’s Anatomy.” The fictional “Casey” lies on a hospital bed, his breath coming in fitful gasps as tiny, air-exchanging alveoli in his damaged lungs collapse under the weight of the burns.

The role is personal. Sander’s father, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who served in World War II, contracted non-smoking-related emphysema—likely from exposure to silica dust during his service in Africa—and was bedridden from the time Sander was 6. He died when Sander was 11. Sander’s tears on the show weren’t acting.

“This is my dad,” Sander says. “The dad who never saw me play sports, who never played catch with me. I got an understanding of how difficult it must have been for him to talk, because I did a lot of those scenes with no air in my lungs.”

Sander is his own worst critic of his performances. Still, he is sanguine, an actor who pursues his craft with the same passion with which he once pursued baseball. He cannot explain life’s twists and turns. Nor does he try. In Hollywood, there is always a second act.

Reprinted with permission from Arches magazine, University of Puget Sound.