By Rosa Jimenez
2004 Honored Alumni Embody Service
and Scholarship
William Loveless
If you are familiar with the name William Loveless, it isn’t too surprising. During his 55-year career, Loveless has served as pastor, counselor, professor, and college president at church institutions on both coasts.
And if you aren’t familiar with the
name, you may be familiar with one of the urban myths that have followed him
throughout his career.
No, it is not true that Loveless once rode a motorcycle down the center aisle
of a church service.
No, it is not true that Loveless once levitated during a church workers’ meeting.
Those close to Loveless know him as a servant-leader with a deep and abiding loyalty to the church and its mission, even if it meant at times breaking the rules.
One of his favorite sayings, “It’s far easier to ask forgiveness than get permission,” resonates with Loveless’s commitment to caring for people’s needs, even in the face of resistance.
One dramatic example of this commitment happened early in his career. As pastor in 1957 of the Sligo Church on the East Coast, Loveless challenged the church board on its stance forbidding people of color from becoming members, though they were allowed to attend church. He fought until the rule was changed.
And most recently, three years ago, as pastor of the Loma Linda University Church, he ordained a female pastor.
His unwillingness to shy away from controversy has often overshadowed many other significant accomplishments throughout his career, including pastoring the 3,000-member Sligo Church on the East Coast and the 7,000-member Loma Linda University Church, the largest Seventh-day Adventist church in the world.
He has also served as president of Columbia Union College and the Pennsylvania Conference.
In leading these institutions, he initiated groundbreaking programs, including a television network and a talk show.
Loveless’s interest in world missions led him to start the student missionary program at Columbia Union College more than 40 years ago. Though the General Conference forbade the sending of students as missionaries, citing students’ lack of maturity, Marlin Mathieson became the first student missionary, the first of thousands who have come after him.
As president of Columbia Union College, Loveless initiated an adult evening program, a cooperative education program, and an intercollegiate sports program.
Since retiring three years ago, Loveless continues to work as a professor at Loma Linda and La Sierra universities as well as University of California at Riverside.
Loveless, a 1949 Walla Walla College graduate, received a master’s degree from Andrews University in 1953 and in 1964 received a doctoral degree from the University of Maryland.
Loveless and his wife, Edna Maye (Alexander) have two daughters, Marti Olsen and Marilynn Loveless, assistant professor of communications at wwc.
Don Ammon 
For 37 years Don Ammon has served with distinction in the healthcare field. In a field challenged by continual and often swift change, Ammon has made his mark as a strong decision-maker and innovative leader.
Since 1999 he has led Adventist Health as president and chief executive officer. Adventist Health operates health care facilities throughout California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington. The system includes 20 hospitals, with more than 3,100 beds, 17,500 employees, and also clinics, outpatient facilities, and home care agencies.
Ammon views success as a willingness to try new things and grow in the industry. During his tenure, Ammon continually exercises his ability to respond to change. Currently, he is overseeing several significant initiatives, including Project IntelliCare, a cutting-edge program to incorporate technology into patient record management in all Adventist Health facilities.
Adventist Health is also undergoing major physical improvement projects at many of its facilities, driven by the increasing demand for services by the baby boomer generation and also state regulations requiring hospitals to comply with seismic building codes.
Although change is an ever-present factor in healthcare, Ammon is dedicated to the unchanging mission of Adventist Health: to share God’s love by providing physical, mental and spiritual healing.
Ammon brought to the role of president previous experience as executive vice president of Adventist Health, during which he was responsible for 13 hospitals located in the Northwest, and northern and central California.
His career has included leadership positions at Portland Adventist Medical Center, where in addition to heading the 302-bed hospital, he served as executive and regional vice president of Adventist Health System West.
Other institutions that have benefited from his leadership include Northwest Medical, Portland Adventist Convalescent Center, Tillamook County General Hospital, and Versitron Industries.
In short, Ammon has led in the success of Seventh-day Adventist healthcare in the western United States for many years.
Ammon is a 1964 business administration graduate. He also holds a master’s degree in business administration management from Andrews University.
Ammon and his wife, Sharon, live in Granite Bay, Calif., and have two adult children, Kathryn Stiles and Jonathan Ammon, and four grandchildren.
Ila Zbaraschuk
Ask Auburn Academy graduates if they know Ila Zbaraschuk, and chances are, their eyes will light up. Years after students have sat in Zbaraschuk’s classes, they still express their appreciation for her as a skilled teacher and also as a caring friend.
Zbaraschuk has taught English and journalism
at Auburn Adventist Academy since 1987, where she is known as an exceptional
teacher who passionately motivates and challenges her students.
On this campus she is known as a professional colleague and an ever-loyal
alumnae. Every year she teaches a college-level writing course at Auburn for
academic credit from Walla Walla College. She is also a strong supporter of
the college’s Young Writer’s Program.
Zbaraschuk says she loves teaching at Auburn where, among other things, she makes it clear to her students that wwc offers the kind of education that will greatly benefit thinking young people.
In the early 1960s, Zbaraschuk was one of those “thinking young people.” Her dedication to professional accomplishment was evident during her college years, for example, by the leadership she showed as Collegian editor during her senior year. Fellow alumni remember the Collegian that year as an exceptional publication.
Zbaraschuk is a 1964 English graduate. At the encouragement of her college journalism professor, Roberta Moore, Zbaraschuk went to the University of Missouri for a master’s degree in journalism. The university had, at the time, the largest program in newspaper journalism in the country.
For her graduate studies, Zbaraschuk spent
two years teaching and working on newspapers in England. Her endeavors culminated
in a thesis about the training and education of England’s journalists.
Her stay in England would initiate a lifelong interest in travel. During the
past 40 years, Zbaraschuk has either traveled or taught in North America,
England, Russia, Ukraine, and Japan.
Zbaraschuk’s professional awards and citations include a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar in Japanese Literature, a North American Division travel grant to Russia and Japan, and Teacher of the Year at Auburn.
Honored among the top teachers of the Washington Conference, Zbaraschuk also serves on several church boards and committees and is an elder at her church.
Zbaraschuk and her husband, Ivan, a 1963 wwc graduate, have two sons, Tony and Michael, who also graduated from wwc.
Philip Phillips
From a small Walla Walla College classroom to the halls of mit, the Young Alumnus of the Year has soared to the top of his profession in physics and chemistry.
Philip Phillips is a theoretical condensed
matter physicist whose research focuses on transport in low-dimensional materials.
For those outside the realm of physics, summarizing Phillips’s accomplishments
could mean looking up every word in the dictionary.
His research earned him the 2000 Edward A. Bouchet Award from the American Physical Society. Phillips is cited for “opening new vistas in the study of disordered and strongly correlated condensed matter physics, including the random dimer model and the size dependence of the Kondo effect.”
In 2000, he received the Bouchet Award, which is named after the first African American graduate of Yale College and the first to earn a doctoral degree. This award recognizes a distinguished minority physicist whose research is outstanding in its field.
Further professional recognition in Phillips’s
career includes election in 2003 as an American Physical Society fellow, a
status that only about one-half of one percent of society members achieve.
Phillips has conducted his groundbreaking research at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he has been a professor of physics in the department of physics since 1993. In recent work Phillips devotes his time to explanation of the origin of the new conducting phase found in dilute 2d electron gas.
Phillips is a 1979 graduate of Walla Walla College, where he completed studies in both chemistry and mathematics. He earned his doctoral degree in physical chemistry from the University of Washington in 1982.
A lesser-known side to the richness of Phillips’s scholastic abilities includes his fluency in Greek.
Phillips and his Grecian wife, Angeliki Tzanetou, speak the language at home and even held their wedding ceremony in her native tongue.
While under general anesthesia for hand surgery about a year ago, Phillips was waking slower than expected when he began speaking unintelligibly. It was later revealed that he was in fact speaking Greek, and he stated afterward that he couldn’t think of a word of English at the time.