Time, attachment make Boyans part of WSU community

The Boyan family knows what it means to have Cougar pride. While the family may be comprised of a husband, wife and two sons, they have become a part of another family—the close-knit WSU community. 

With Chris and Bonny Boyan being long-time WSU employees, and their two sons, Andy and Casey, attending college at WSU, the university has grown to mean more to the family than just a campus with students and buildings. It has become a home.

After starting out as self-professed Southern California “surfer-hippie types” to working as dairy farmers in Washington’s Whatcom County, the Boyans settled in Pullman in 1989, when Andy was 9 years old and Casey was 6. At the time, Chris had hopes of becoming a veterinarian, and enrolled in the veterinary medicine program at WSU. He soon found a new passion—business—and graduated with a business degree in 1993.

In the meantime, Bonny worked at Human Resource Services to help fund Chris’s education.
Pullman began as a temporary place for an education and turned into a permanent residence.

The family fell in love with the community, Chris said.

“Pullman brings the advantages of a small community with a big Pac-10 school,” he said. The community is familiar and close-knit, Bonny added.
Today, Chris works as administrative outreach manager for WSU Parking, Transportation, and Visitor Center. Bonny has worked as personnel coordinator for WSU Libraries’ administration for about 12 years. She said she hopes to work there for another 12 years.

“I really love it,” Bonny said. “Everyone in the department gets along very well. I have no desire to look elsewhere.”

Andy, who graduated from WSU with a bachelor’s degree in communication studies in 2003 and a master’s degree in communication in 2005, is now working toward his doctorate degree at Michigan State University. He is studying media effects, specifically focusing on video games.
“All those years we told him not to play too much Nintendo,” Chris said, “and now he’s studying video games for a living.”

While Andy was a graduate student at WSU, he taught various communication classes, including public speaking, language and human behavior and argumentation.

“It was weird to see our baby teaching college students,” Chris said.

Casey, who will be graduating in December with a degree in philosophy, has an interest in filmmaking and is in the process of filming a movie, Bonny said. He also works at Instructional Support Services.

“It’ll be hard when Casey’s gone,” Bonny said. “Everywhere I go on campus, I’m looking for him.”

Both sons are natural leaders, Chris said.
In fact, the two organized a martial arts club called Tian Wu Dao, which started off small but is now an official WSU club and has spread to Western Washington University and the University of Washington. Andy and Casey began teaching Chris the craft of martial arts in Tian Wu Dao, something Chris said was special to him.

“As a father, you teach kids stuff,” Chris said. “Coaching them, disciplining them, teaching them how to fish…Now they teach me, which is very cool.”

While they are in town, Andy and Casey reap the benefits of having parents just around the corner.
“We help them with laundry and finances,” Bonny said, “and buy them lunch on campus.”

Grocery bills have always been horrendous, Chris added.

“Thursday is grocery shopping day, so our kids and their friends stop by on Fridays,” he said.
Chris and Bonny open their home to more than just their children. They act as a bed and breakfast to Pullman visitors and even adopted 22 international students one Thanksgiving.

Andy was friends with many international students who couldn’t afford plane tickets home for the holidays, and wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving with them. The family applied for a grant to buy a large-scale Thanksgiving dinner and hosted it at the WSU Visitor Center.

“We had people from eight different countries come to eat,” Bonny said. “It was very memorable.”

In their prime, when both sons were attending school at WSU, the Boyans occasionally found themselves walking across campus together. Among the four of them, everybody knew somebody as they trekked from point A to point B.

Now, with Chris and Bonny soon to be encountering an empty nest, they spend their time traveling, attending church, visiting with friends and making music. After they retire, the couple hopes to go on a short-term church mission, possibly to Ukraine, where Chris’s family is from.

With Andy on his own, and Casey soon to be as well, Chris and Bonny are free to relocate. But the couple wants to stay.

“We’re really satisfied here,” Bonny said. “WSU is a really good employer.”

Their satisfaction comes from the strong extended family they have become a part of in the Pullman community.