BOMBER MEMORIAL

JOAN CATHARINE STEVENSON Ph.D ~ Class of 1969
January 22, 1951 - December 9, 2017



Joan Catharine Stevenson was born January 22, 1951 in Richland, WA to Viola Mable (Miller) Stevenson and Robert Louis Stevenson. The family moved to Bethesda, MD in 1964 where she graduated from George Washington High School in 1969. She attended the University of Washington in Seattle for her undergraduate degree (BA) and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee for her graduate degrees (MA & PhD).

She taught part-time at Marquette and Florida State Universities before she was hired for a 3-year non-tenure track position at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. A year later a colleague (James Bosch) passed, and she was moved into a tenure track position, gaining tenure in 1984 and becoming Full Professor in 1992.

Another colleague (Angelo Anastasio) introduced her to the "love of her life", Phillip Mark Everson, here in Bellingham and they married in 1982. She bore two sons, Robert Ward Everson (wife, Barbara Sue Jackson Everson) and John Harley Everson. She was very proud of her sons and valued immensely the time she spent with her husband and family.

She had a blessed life filled with music and travel, usually to see extended family, the national parks, archaeological/geological remains and museums. Her professional life involved a wide variety of research, from population genetics and European history (her PhD) to forensic immunology.

The highlight of her academic life was being included as a colleague by Dr. Michael Crawford, Dr. Moses Schanfield and Dr. Tibor Kortelevsky.

She especially enjoyed being a part of the Mennonite demography which occupied her for a few years, but she moved on to the evolution and human biology of ADHD, the use of two different statistical tools for sexing skulls for forensic identification, disease and ecological impacts on the peoples of the Seward Peninsula, and the community-building nature of pottery production in U.S. Southwestern pueblos.

But by far, her greatest gift was in working with her students, teaching them to write, to better use search engines and to produce papers that could be (and were in many cases) published in professional literature. Joan loved children, and students were her "other people's children", and as luck would have it she had a job she dearly loved that allowed her to work with them.

She found the many links between text-book theory and job needs that allowed her to better advise her students on finding their way in the healthcare field. She always talked about how many letters she wrote for students, and most people laughed thinking of them as the little things that took up "extra" time. She had 1597 letters on her computer written since 2009. Some were for the same people but for different needs, but most were for individual students.

Writing letters was never simple. She got their academic information, but also talked to them about their lives so that she felt she could write a "good" letter that was unique for each individual. She spent many weekends finishing her letters. The letters were important to her students' futures, so they were important to her.

One last letter remained incomplete on her computer, she was not able to finish it before they took her to the hospital.

Her only regret was waiting 30 years to return to playing music. As a child she played piano and violin, but her mother would never come to see her high school orchestra perform so she quit music until her mother passed away. She returned to the violin and piano, and also learned to play the ukulele, saxophone, and many other instruments. She enjoyed playing with groups at the Green Frog Cafe in Bellingham.

She is survived by her husband; both sons and a daughter-in-law; her siblings: Ann Stevenson (Michael Berres) of Bellingham, Helen Ciamacco (Sam) of San Diego and William Stevenson of Lake Stevens, as well as their families; and numerous nephews, nieces and cousins throughout the U.S. She also viewed her students as her "children" and would keep track of their successes after they left school and began their professional jobs and families. She saw these "children of other mothers" as providing the foundation for society in the future, for family and for education.

A memorial service is pending and will be announced at a later date.

View and sign the Online Guestbook.

Published by The Bellingham Herald on December 10, 2017.

Bomber Memorial put together by Shirley COLLINGS Haskins ('66).