Susana Schuarzberg had a momentous week recently. First she received the first-ever CFO of the Year Award from the Puget Sound Business Journal (PSBJ), and then she became an American citizen. In January, she won the PSBJ award, in the category of Small Nonprofit Organization. Since coming to America from Argentina in 2002, Susana has worked for New Futures, which serves 2,000 families annually, most of them immigrants. The organization’s stated mission is “to partner with families to create communities where children thrive.” They provide integrated, culturally relevant programs in low-income...

Sandcastles are transitory, and so is life. Building a sandcastle is like living your life: You build something out of millions of granules, you give it a large, intricate shape, and then it just washes away. The sands of time, and all that. No such metaphors for Jeff Benesi! Why does he build sandcastles? “Cuz it’s fun,” he says. “It’s an active, physical challenge, and it’s competitive. It’s also social – I do it with my friends – and it’s sustainable. It just goes back to where it was.” That’s merely a fact, not a metaphor. Born, raised, and educated in Michigan, Jeff moved...

“The best thing about growing old is the memories,” says Claire Raven. “I don’t just remember events, but how things looked. “Like the time I saw Princess Margaret in a London market,” she continues. “She was wearing a green taffeta dress, going from stall to stall. Women vendors curtsied as she passed, but they were supposed to wear white gloves, too. Someone found a pair, put them on, curtsied, snuck them behind her back to the next vendor, and so on down the line. It was very entertaining!” These days Claire has lots of memories. Next year she will move from her Queen Anne home of...

“Everyone who is sick has a part of them that’s not sick,” says Blake Thomson, “and I try to find it.” The Anacortes resident volunteers as a hospital caring clown, DR StumbleMore. On New Year’s Eve 1999, Blake and his wife Jeane attended a parade in Monterey, California, where they then lived. In the parade were several Shriner clowns, who visit burn victims in children’s hospitals. He chatted with them and woke up the next morning, the dawn of the new millennium, and said to Jeane, “I want to be a clown.” She replied, “So, what else is new?” But he was serious. In August of that...

Ruthe Williams lives alone in a tidy white house on Queen Anne with white lace curtains in the windows. Her front walk bisects her immaculate lawn and leads to four steps, a pot of pansies on each one. When she opens her door, she is wearing bright pink. The interior walls behind her are white, and the carpet and furnishings are a neutral color. A white cat scurries into another room. “I don’t allow myself to feel lonely,” says Ruthe, settling into her favorite chair. In her long life, she has had many opportunities to practice that discipline. Ruth James was born in 1919 in Douglas, Wyoming, the...

“I don’t know the veterinary equivalent of bedside manner,” says a Queen Anne pet owner, “but that guy has it in spades.” The pet owner is speaking of Dr. Stephen Jones of the Queen Anne Animal Clinic, a fixture in this neighborhood for more than a human generation, and for many generations of cats and dogs. Steve Jones was born in 1941 in Chicago, Illinois, the first of Nettie and Norman Jones’ two children. Steve’s sister Nancy was born a year later. Norman was a bookkeeper and accountant for a company in Chicago that owned the Ben Franklin stores spread across the Midwest. Until her...