Thaddeus and Lois Spratlen: Never give up

"Sometimes at home we just put on some music and have the best party you could ever have," said Lois Price Spratlen. "I love dancing with Thad."

And man, can they do a lively two step around the subject of retirement and when they might slow down the tempo of their lives.

Thaddeus, 76, officially retired in 2002 as a professor of marketing at the University of Washington Business School. But you'd never know it from hearing his schedule. The description of him as "retired" brought an outburst of laughter from Lois.

As an emeritus professor, Thaddeus has continued to teach classes and to work with the Business and Economic Development Center. He is the founding faculty director for the center, which links UW students and faculty with urban and ethnic businesses to help them grow and give students hands-on business experience.

Lois, 75, is the university's ombudsman on academic matters and sexual harassment.

She said she will retire "in a little bit" but artfully dodged the question of when that might be. All she would say was that she has to "finish a project" before she retires.

This could mean quite a few things, because Lois has an impressive list of projects on her plate, topped by a writing a job description for an academic ombudsman.

"I want to pass the baton to someone who fully understands what it is to be an academic ombudsman," she said, emphasizing the educational role of the position. "I have got to get across that every day I am here, I'm teaching."

Thaddeus was a little bit more definite about his second stage of retirement, saying that this time he was "really headed into retirement." He said he would not be teaching classes this coming academic year.

But he will be reviewing a textbook he wrote with two others and working to get it used at other schools. And he said he will continue his work with the center, which according to the university has assisted more than 250 small businesses and non-profit organizations in communities of color in its 11 years.

Then there is his goal of increasing scholarship opportunities, appealing for support from alumni who are people of color, especially African-Americans. He knows that can be a hard sell: "They may not have had a good experience in school," he said, "but we need to stop penalizing future students because of the alumni's bad experience at academic institutions."

The Spratlens learned about racism first-hand.

Thaddeus grew up in Tennessee, Lois in Virginia. He moved to Ohio and completed his last two years of high school in Cleveland. He spent one year at Kent State University, where he played football, before running out of money. In 1948, he joined the Army and went into Officers Candidate School in 1951.

In 1952, he was serving in Virginia at Camp Pickett, where he was supposed to attend an officers' ball. The dance had been advertised on a bulletin board at the Hampton University nursing school. "Twenty six girls needed to attend this event," the notice read.

Lois, a student at the school, saw the ad and told a friend: "I don't care what kind of test we're having, I'm going."

Lois and her friend rode the bus to the ball, but only 25 eligible officers showed up, leaving Lois the odd girl out. The young officer who had paired up with her friend recognized the cause of the shortage: The 26th man wasn't there "because he was always reading."

He promised to bring his delinquent colleague with him on a visit the following Sunday to the nursing home where Lois and her friend were work-study students.

"I never got weekends off," Lois said, "but for some unexplained reason my supervisor told me I had been doing good work and gave me that Sunday afternoon off. If you ever want to meet someone who believes in Providence, I'm it."

Thad and Lois met on that Sunday in April and married in September. The following month, he shipped out for Korea, an artillery officer.

By 1954, he was out of the service and Lois had her bachelor of science degree in nursing. He entered school at The Ohio State University and she started having children (five eventually).

"Racial segregation was unbelievable then," said Lois, noting that Thaddeus never received a paid teaching-assistant job that would have helped him through school.

"Thaddeus and I had made up our minds we weren't going to let people keep us from doing what we wanted to do," she said.

So he kept house and went to school while she worked three jobs, two in nursing and one running a "football nursery" so that others in the married-student housing at gridiron-crazy Ohio State could attend games.

Thaddeus finished his undergraduate degree in business in 1956, received a master's degree in international economics in 1957 and started work on a Ph.D in marketing. He finally won a research fellowship in the business school and a teaching-assistant job outside the department, in international studies.

But it wasn't enough, and Thaddeus needed to find something in academia that would support his family and allow him to finish his dissertation.

Ohio State, following the norm of the day, figured he would fit best at a historically black college, and that's where their recruiting efforts directed him.

Not happy with that, Thaddeus did his own search and ran head-first into blatant racial discrimination. The worst example came when he showed up for a scheduled interview at one Ohio campus. As soon as officials saw he was black, they told him he would not be able to finish the interview process.

While other Ph.D. candidates in the program were getting as many as 15 offers, he received one - from Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.

"Coming to the Northwest changed our lives," Lois said. "What we needed at that time was an economic opportunity - a paying job - and Western gave it to us," Thaddeus said.

For the next seven years, Thaddeus taught students at WWU - including one whose name was Paul Merriman. Despite a heavy teaching load, Thaddeus finished his dissertation and received his Ph.D from Ohio State in 1962.

In 1969, UCLA enticed him into giving up his tenure for a job in Southern California. Three years later, he had tenure at UCLA.

Lois, still seeking ways to support their family, found the door closed to what she thought might be a well-paying job as a bartender. She said a school of mixology told her "we've never had a colored person who asked to be a bartender, and we don't know if we can admit you."

She applied to be a "store nurse" at a department store but was turned down despite her years of experience as a nurse in Ohio and Bellingham.

Then she read in the Los Angeles Times that UCLA was having trouble attracting black students. The story mentioned a shortage of black applicants to the nursing school. Always wanting to be helpful, she promptly enrolled, earning a master's degree in nursing with a specialization in community mental health.

The degree helped her get a teaching job at the University of Washington School of Nursing when Thaddeus accepted an associate professorship with the UW Business School in 1972. He became a full professor in 1975, and Lois got her Ph.D - in urban planning - in 1976.

His emphasis at the business school has been on "applying marketing and having students go out in the community to develop projects on the basis of what they were learning," he said. His work has been recognized through several awards including the Dean's Citizenship Award in 2004, two Andrew V. Smith Faculty Development Awards and the Frederick Douglass Scholar Award from the National Council of Black Studies' Pacific Northwest Regional Conference.

An endowment fund has been set up in Thad's name to raise money for the Business & Economic Development Program, which now has more than $1 million that provides annual support for its mentoring program.

When the university advertised for an ombudsman for sexual harassment in 1982, Lois wasn't sure what an ombudsman was. She looked up the word (an official appointed to investigate individuals' complaints against an institution) and thought, "Heavens, I can do that!"

She got the job. Since 1988 she has also been overall academic ombudsman for the university. Her work has not gone unnoticed. She won the University of Washington Samuel E. Kelly Distinguished Alumni Award in 2005 for lifetime contributions to diversity, the Martin Luther King Jr. Award from the UW Health Sciences school in 2006 and induction into the Washington State Nurses Association Hall of Fame.

Lois has served on the King County Board of Ethics since 1994 and was elected chair in 1997. Her Ph.D in urban planning helped her implement a plan of "preventive" ethics - educating county personnel on a statement of principles to prevent problems before they begin. Before her retirement she wants to try to persuade all 39 Washington counties to adopt similar plans and to have "the state of Washington be the most well-known state in the nation in ethics."

Oh, and don't forget this project: She is completing a book for the African American Registered Nurses in Mississippi that will be similar to one she did in Seattle: "African American Registered Nurses in Seattle: the Struggle for Opportunity and Success." She gave the proceeds from the Seattle book to the Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses Organization, which she founded to provide scholarships in nursing to Washington state students.

The Spratlens have been Merriman clients since 1991. Even though they dance around the topic of just when they will "really" retire, they have a vision of what post-retirement life would be like at their home near Carkeek Park in North Seattle. This would include more time for exercise and for the things they like to do together: "read to each other, stupid games like Chinese checkers, listening to music and doing things for other people," Lois said.

Thaddeus, who was fitted with a pacemaker in 2005, says he's just getting back in shape enough to resume one of their favorite activities: roller skating. Getting in shape is important, he said, because if you roller-skate, "you have to accept falling down as part of it" and being stronger helps withstand those falls.

There also could be more time for their five children, eight grandchildren and two great grandchildren, mostly scattered about the country.

It doesn't sound as though the tempo slows down much, and the life philosophy and words to live by, Lois said, will certainly stay the same.

"In all of this we've had one of the richest experiences that anyone ever could have," Lois said, "and it's because of the fact that we've always had goals, always been committed to making sure that each of us is doing what it is we want to do and more than anything else we are living out something that my mother said: 'Be yourself and do good.' "