Tammy is the new User Education Coordinator at the Owen Library. Tammy was born in Goldendale, Washington and lived the early years of her life near Glenwood where her father was based as a mechanic working on diesel logging trucks. Her family later moved to Sunnyside, in the Yakima Valley, where she lived until coming to Pullman to attend WSU as an undergraduate. She remembers having fun while learning and meeting people. Her studies centered around Archeology and foreign languages, but after eight years of studying foreign languages she felt burned out, and returned to Sunnyside to attended Yakima Business College to train as an executive secretary. She then came back to Pullman for four years to work in various departments around campus.

She left eastern Washington for the bright lights and dreary skies west of the Cascades. She moved to Seattle, before venturing to Concepción, Chile, on a proselytizing mission in 1979-1980. While she was away Mount St. Helens erupted, and fortunately, it did not cause significant problems for her parents, who were still living in Sunnyside southeast of the volcano blast. On returning to the Seattle area she worked as a legal secretary and used an astounding array of ephemeral and nearly forgotten word processing technologies and data storage devices.

She was working as customer technical support for a word processor dealership when she decided to go back to school to study computer information studies at City University in Bellevue Washington. She continued to work full-time while taking her studies. The company went out of business as dedicated word processing machines declined and PCs with Word Processors increased in popularity and Tammy got a job with one of the companies' clients companies. Tammy was happiest when teaching people, but after many years, continuing as a legal secretary, she felt underappreciated and needed a change. She thought of a children's librarian that she had met years before while on jury duty. This chance meeting made a lasting impression on Tammy, and although she knew that children's librarianship wasn't for her, she examined the different facets of the profession and realized that she would enjoy working in academic libraries.

On moving back to Pullman, she says that she is quite happy to forgo the long commutes from Woodinville into downtown Seattle endured for the last twenty years. She misses her friends, the mountains and the greenery, yet she is very happy to return to the Palouse.

-Joel Cummings