Steven Zapinski:
CLASS OF 1975
O'Fallon Township High SchoolClass of 1975
O'fallon, IL
Pembroke High SchoolClass of 1975
Hampton, VA
Saint John Cathedral SchoolClass of 1972
Shreveport, LA
Greenacres Middle SchoolClass of 1969
Bossier city, LA
Ft. Crook Elementary SchoolClass of 1967
Omaha, NE
Steven's Story
I'd love to hear from all classmates: Connect with me at [LinkedIn.com/in/StevenSpenser].
COLLEGE SUMMARY:
Verbal ACT score in upper 3% of nation. Accepted to Stanford but took scholarship to Willam & Mary 1975-77. Moved across country to University of Wash. & coed dorms 1977-80. Dropped out for 3 yrs. and entered U.S. Navy. Received nuclear-engineering training at Naval Nuclear Power School, Orlando, 1983. Classes at sea from Univ. of Ariz. Medical School, and City College of Chicago, 1984-87. Brought new wife back to Seattle 1988. Re-entered UW, earned BA, Commun. (4.0 GPA in major courses; Dean's List). Professional Certificate in Public Relations, UW, 1991.
PERSONAL SUMMARY:
After 2 years at O'Fallon IL, we moved to Langley AFB in VA. I graduated with honors from Pembroke HS in Hampton VA, then went to a campus of William and Mary College on scholarship for my first 2 years.
My father retired as a full bird in 1977. I was SO miffed that he turned down promotion to Brigadier--I *really* wanted to flaunt being a general's son--and we moved to Tacoma, WA. On the way, I stopped in O'Fallon after a 4-year absence--the first time in 20 years I ever had been able to return to a former residence.
I toured the halls of OFTHS with considerably more confidence & enjoyment than my last time there, enjoyed renewing my acquaintance with some former classmates. One former crony, who since had found Jesus, was mortified by my presence and did not share my nostalgia for our wild & crazy escapades. I even looked up one of my favorite teachers, Mr. May.
In VA I had been active in college clubs & student government, and an editor of the campus newspaper. Moving to Seattle & joining the massive (43,000) student body of the Univ. of Wash., I experienced culture shock akin to a big fish in a small pond who becomes a minnow in an ocean. I lived in coed dorms, bowled and played a lot of tennis, & changed my major (Engl., pol.sci, drama, pre-law) with the seasons. Good grades had come in high school almost as an accepted fact of life, but in college I had to work for what had previously come easily. I didn't handle the challenge or the pressure well, and school & romantic (long-distance) relationships suffered drastically. I dropped out for 3 years, sold almost all I owned to pay rent during the recession of the early 1980s, then (with nothing left to sell) went into the Navy to become a nuclear engineer--which proved to be as disastrous a career choice as it was serendipitous for me personally.
After training at Great Lakes outside Chicago & attending Nuclear Power School in Orlando, the Navy, in its infinite wisdom, decided that it could best use me in...(wait for it)...Norfolk, just miles from my former haunts in Hampton. For only the 2nd time in my life I was able to revisit a place where I had lived, & I had a great time being with former classmates & a teacher who remained in the area. I continued to work on my degree while in the Navy, taking classes at sea.
I met my bride Tracey in Norfolk, after she answered my personals ad. Having to spend 6 months at sea apart from her each year was enough to keep me from staying in the Navy. We moved to Seattle, where I completed my degree at the UW (making the Dean's List with a 4.0 GPA in the School of Communications), found some work in journalism, then went into public affairs followed by hi-tech PR for start-ups. When my son was born I became a full-time, stay-at-home father, and in 2011 Tracey & I celebrated our 25th anniversary.
FOR THOSE CURIOUS ABOUT MY FAMILY:
My sister Mary completed high school in Tacoma, and joined the AF ROTC at the UW in Seattle. She met her husband while in the USAF, earned a Master's in hospital admin at Washington U. in St. Louis, served in Germany, and returned to live in O'Fallon when she was posted to Scott AFB. She settled in Tacoma to be close to my mom, whose health began to fail in the 1990s. Mary retired as a colonel in 2003, sold her house & possessions and now tours the Western U.S. with her husband in a huge, luxurious motor home.
Dad enrolled at the UW to earn a master's in speech therapy so he could help children with speech & hearing defects. (Sometimes we'd meet crossing campus to our classes.) Cancer interrupted his plans, and he battled it for 11 years until it claimed him in 1995. He's buried in San Francisco's Presidio National Cemetery, beside two brothers I never knew.
Mom became a successful Realtor in the military-housing market around McChord AFB & Ft. Lewis. She had to sell her practice when she developed multiple illnesses, and died of cancer in 2006. Her ashes were spread over my father's grave.
EXCERPT FROM SPENSER'S EXECUTIVE BIO
A widely traveled globetrotter able to curse in 9 languages during his naval career, Steven Spenser employs his own "Tourist Postcard Method" of sightseeing navigation, and asserts that successful travelers need only master five specific phrases in any language. He has climbed five volcanoes on two continents; trekked through the Amazon to the world's tallest waterfall; SCUBA-dived in shark-infested wrecks in the Caribbean; and successfully rafted some of the most dangerous whitewater rivers in North America.
In his travels, Spenser has explored ancient mysteries at Stonehenge, communed with the ghosts of Pompeii, and slipped through a moonlit, empty Parthenon at midnight. He has climbed the private stairwell to the top of St. Peter's in the Vatican, and knelt in the coolness of the immense Dome of the Rock in the Arab Quarter of Old Jerusalem. Once a next-door neighbor of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Madrid, Spenser also has gambled the night away at Monte Carlo's casino; been robbed by Gypsies in Rome; and eluded anti-American mobs in Athens.
A self-taught pianist, Spenser has composed several dozen copyrighted songs and instrumentals which are being compiled for a studio recording. His collection of autobiographical essays, which Spenser is finishing into a book, already has received inquiries for screenplay options. Spenser owns a collection of more than 2000 films, enjoys fencing, petanque and racket sports, and collects gargoyles, aboriginal masks and challenge coins.
To this day, Spenser maintains that the best writing he ever produced was the pithy personals ad that prompted a memorable and fateful response from the woman who--six months and one intervening hurricane later--became his wife of 28 years. He and his bride, Tracey, a former Seat...Expand for more
tle Times national-wire news editor, live in Seattle with their son, Jackson, along with 2 cats and a backyard menagerie of four peanut-trained Stellars blue jays; three peripatetic possums; two dive-bombing rufous hummingbirds; and an aggressive woodpecker intent on reducing the Spenser home to kindling.
CAREER SUMMARY:
In his 25 years of corporate, agency and independent public relations, Steven Spenser has managed communications for software companies in Redmond and Seattle, and consulted at the Northwest's largest public-relations agency, as well as for a division of the world's largest independent PR firm.
As principal of Praxis Communication, Spenser has consulted for a variety of agencies and corporations in the NW and Silicon Valley, and has provided online-marketing strategies and support for the launches of 11 Web sites, including two for pre-IPO, "Baby Bill" start-ups founded by Microsoft millionaires.
Spenser provided public-relations counsel to the Government of the Russian Federation for its first new diplomatic office in the U.S. in 40 years. He was the only public-relations professional in the nation to respond to the pleas of Seattle E. coli victims for help organizing against Jack-in-the-Box's parent, Foodmaker Inc.
A former editor and free-lance writer with The Associated Press, in 1992 Spenser was the first U.S. journalist to investigate Asian government support of Pacific Ocean pirates and their ties to American corporations. That same year, he was the first journalist in the nation to report about HIV-2, an unscreened, mutant strain of the AIDS virus infecting the U.S. blood supply.
After a stint as a copy editor on the news desk of The Seattle Times, Spenser became a restaurant critic and travel writer at The Times, and later was a regular columnist, critic and feature writer for another Seattle newspaper.
Spenser's news and public-relations writing has won awards from the Society for Professional Journalists, the Public Relations Society of America, and the Washington Press Association.
In 1993, the Arthritis Foundation acknowledged his success in securing most of the cast of CBS-TV's "Northern Exposure" for the foundation's annual telethon--as well as the state chapter's first successful publicity in four years--with the Arthritis Foundation Distinguished Public Service Award.
That same year, Spenser received the thanks of President Clinton, Washington Governor Mike Lowry and Seattle Mayor Norm Rice for his international media-relations assistance during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) ministerial meeting in Seattle.
The following year, Spenser was the architect of the greatest single, new-chapter launch publicity in the history of The Concord Coalition, a national, deficit-busting, grass-roots organization founded by U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas. Spenser's comprehensive public-relations plan for the new Washington chapter was adopted as a model by all 50 of the Coalition's state chapters.
Spenser has a BA in communication, as well as a Professional Certificate in Public Relations, from the University of Washington.
MILITARY SERVICE:
Steven Spenser received nuclear-engineering training in the U.S. Navy's Nuclear Power Program, the service's most demanding program. He was awarded a U.S. government "SECRET" security clearance so that he could study classified nuclear-power plant designs.
While in the Navy, Spenser managed $2 million in U.S. government (engineering-supply) budgets and was a television and radio newscaster for the U.S. Sixth Fleet (when deployed). As a member and occasional leader of shipboard, emergency-response teams, Spenser helped fight fires and participated in on-scene rescues in crises throughout the world's largest nuclear-aircraft carrier, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69). Spenser also served stints as a (duty) Safety Officer and as a Master-at-Arms aboard the "Ike."
His naval service aboard the Eisenhower included responding to the terrorist destruction of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983; deployments to the secure U.S. facility at Guantanamo, Cuba; and show-the-flag patrols off the coast of Syria, where the "Ike" was mentioned by name as a terrorist target in Hezbollah broadcasts.
His military memories include:
Scuba diving off St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands...The cable-car swaying high above Caracas...The roar of Angel Falls in the Amazon jungle...Jousting tournaments at castles in Palma de Mallorca... Revisiting his old homes, and the Prado, in Madrid...Trying not to ogle while at the nude beaches in Cannes, Antibes & Nice...Gambling at the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco--and walking away with chips still in his pocket...Roaming through Provence...The dark coolness inside Notre Dame in Paris...The windiness atop the Eiffel Tower...Strolling the Champs d'Elysees--and finding on it a Burger King filled with shipmates desperate for a taste of home...The famous (not-so-) nude show at the Crazy Horse...The bustle of the artists in Montmartre, and people-watching in Left Bank cafes...The Louvre (before the Da Vinci Code) and the palace at Versailles...The "hey-Joes" & careering taxis of Naples...The Blue Grotto at Capri...The impressive stillness of Pompeii...The amazing financial generosity of American tourists in Rome after his pocket was picked by Gypsies at the Spanish Steps...The beauty of Florence glistening in the sunlight...The multitude of pigeons in Venice's St. Mark's Square, and walking across it on tables during the floods...Driving an Alfa Romeo on the autostrada with no speed limit...The Parthenon in moonlight...Sailing the Greek isles...Ouzo and Greek dancing in tavernas... Discovering the joy of authentic falafel in Tel Aviv...The world's best chocolate-chip cookies at a hole-in-the-wall (literally) shop in the Old Quarter of Jerusalem...The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Garden of Gethsemane, Nazareth, and Bethlehem...Treating my best friend's English girlfriend to a dinner out (on his behalf) when the Ike visited Portsmouth, England...The solitude at Stonehenge--and the incongruous hot-dog vendors...Glorious London--and its lousy cuisine. Surviving hurricane-force gales--with waves crashing over the carrier's flight deck!--crossing the Atlantic...Chess and backgammon games in the ship's library...President Reagan's visit to us off Normandy...Watching Sally Ride rocket into space aboard the shuttle at Cape Canaveral...Going thru BEE & EMA with roommates & friends at Great Lakes.
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