B. Ann Grafe, 92, died in Vancouver, Washington on September 14, 2022. She was born Beverley Ann Bacon in Portland, Oregon, on April 8, 1930, the only child of Velma Ella Henson Bacon and Theodore Roosevelt Bacon. By the time Ann was eight years old, her mother was a single parent whose mother and father owned restaurants in several small towns in the coastal range of Oregon and provided extra hands in raising their granddaughter. Adopted by her stepfather, Beverley Ann Scharf graduated in the class of 1947 from Thomas Jefferson High School in Portland and went to work at Shell Oil Company. She attended college at Oregon State University, where she met Willis Raymond Grafe. They married on April 26, 1952, at Piedmont United Methodist Church in Portland.  During the couple’s first years together, Willis worked year-round for Oregon’s Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), spending construction seasons in the…

School with students starts for me on Tuesday, but the faculty already had our two-day workshop. And our department had its all-morning meeting. At the latter, our department chair told us how wolves—reintroduced after decades of absence in Yellowstone National Park—transformed both the Park’s ecosystem and its geography (see video below). He reminded us that we don’t have to set out to change the world. Showing up and doing what God designed us to do, aiming at faithfulness rather than world-changing, can have enormous ramifications.