HONORARY MEMBERS

The PSA-PBK Board of Trustees recently established a means of designating certain individuals as honorary members.  To guide the board in this process, the following policy was adopted:

To qualify for honorary membership, a person shall be elected by the board of trustees for sustained and outstanding contributions to the advancement of purposes for which the association stands.

Ernie Stiefel (B.A. University of Washington, 1949, elected to Phi Beta Kappa 1949) joined the PSA-PBK board in 1965 and for many years, faithfully and effectively, served as the association’s treasurer and, for the last few years, as assistant treasurer. He was also a member of the association’s finance committee. His tenure was noted for the careful administration of the association’s assets and the successful maintenance of the all-important scholarship fund, thus ensuring the continued support of undergraduate students at the University of Washington and the University of Puget Sound. Ernie, who passed away in 2010, had earlier been honored by having the association’s Graduate Study Award named after him.

Victor Scheffer (B.A. 1930, M.S. 1932, Ph.D. 1936, all at the University of Washington, elected to Phi Beta Kappa 1931), who passed away in 2011 just shy of his 105th birthday, was probably the person with the longest history in Phi Beta Kappa. And that includes membership in PSA-PBK, for which he served as president in 1978 and 1979. He maintained an active involvement in Phi Beta Kappa through all those years, though his work often took him far from the Puget Sound area. About his longevity he had a simple explanation, that “exercising my sense of wonder of the world has had an effect on my immune system.” That sense of wonder drew him into a life as zoologist and naturalist whose books have influenced all of our attitudes toward wildlife. These include Seals, Sea Lions and Walruses (1959); Year of the Whale (1969); Voice for Wildlife (1974); A Biologist Looks at Religion (2000) and nine other books. He has served in various federal agencies having to do with biology and the environment, and was chair of the Marine Mammals Commission from 1973 to 1976.

Stuart Prestrud lived in Seattle from his birth in 1919 until his death at the very end of 2011. He attended Queen Anne High School and the University of Washington, where he majored in history and was initiated into Phi Beta Kappa. He began his banking career in 1937, as a messenger boy in armored cars for Pacific National Bank. An unusually loyal and steadfast sort, he never changed banks, although, through mergers, Pacific National eventually became part of Wells Fargo. Prestrud still had a desk there in 2004. His career thus lasted two thirds of a century, during which he was vice president and senior trust officer. He also served as director of Pacific Coast Banking School.    

Prestrud devoted much of his life to the public good, serving on numerous boards of directors, including those of the Museum of Flight, Seattle Opera, the Museum of History and Industry, the Ryan Hill Medical Foundation, and PSA-PBK. He put in a quarter century on the board of managers of the Norman Archibald Charitable Foundation, where he played an important role in the making of over a thousand charitable grants to worthy causes in the Puget Sound region. 

He was president of the Puget Sound Association of Phi Beta Kappa from 1965 to 1966. He subsequently became treasurer, a position he held until 1972.  He was then elected assistant treasurer, a position he held for 27 years. His advice to PSA-PBK was invaluable.