By Gretchen Wing

A couple of contradictions stand out in Jan Sundquist’s life. The daughter of a woman born tenth of 13 children, Jan is an only child. Raised in Salina, Kansas, with the nearest water the little pool her dad used for fly-casting practice, she and (fellow Kansan) husband Bob somehow fell in love with ocean sailing. Yet these contradictions have helped shape Jan’s story.

Jan and Bob met at Kansas State University in the late 1950s. Upon receiving their degrees—Jan, home economics and journalism; Bob, electrical engineering—they both got job offers in Saint Louis. Jan signed on with Pet Milk Company, marketing their new evaporated milk, and Bob with Wagner Electric. At that point “Bob said the magic words, ‘I’ll help you move,’” says Jan. She accepted the offer, and their mutual commitment grew.

Jan loved her life in St. Louis. But knowing Wagner’s habit of transferring its employees, Jan and Bob decided to get married in order to stay together. In 1961, the Sundquists were sent to California. Two years in Los Angeles were followed by 13 in San Francisco; they have been Westerners since.

In San Francisco, Jan got a job with the California Wine Board. “It was my fun job to promote California wines,” she says. “In 1963 to 65, it was, ‘California wines? Isn’t that Gallo?’” Jan would pick up wine industry bigwigs in a company car and take them on delightful picnics at wineries, creating a market for both affordable and high-end wines. After a few years, now with a baby daughter, Jan used her contacts to join a friend in starting a consulting firm, Creative Communiques, promoting small wine and food businesses.

As a commodity, wine meant no more to Jan than Pet milk. But some people are genetically vulnerable to wine’s effects, and Jan slipped into alcoholism even as the family grew. “I tiptoed through both my pregnancies,” she says, emphasizing that the hereditary force of alcoholism would probably have exerted itself no matter her line of work. By the mid-70s Jan was confronting her condition. Sober since 1980, she describes herself still as a “recovering alcoholic,” because “it never leaves you.” But, ironically, alcohol led Jan to her life’s work.

In 1976, Bob’s career required a move to Redmond, WA, which in those days comprised “one blinking light at the corner of Redmond Way and Marymoor Drive.” With the girls in school, both parents pursued their Masters. Bob got his MBA, learning technology marketing, but Jan, awakened by her experience with alcohol, made a more dramatic career change. At Seattle University, she studied rehabilitation psychology and counseling. “I wanted to learn more about the physiology and psychology of addiction, and be helpful to people,” she says. “It’s what I felt called to do.”

For the first half of the 80s, Jan worked 32 hours a week at Eastside Alcohol and Drug Center while going to school and parenting. The family held meetings to divide up the workload, and “we got through it.” When she earned her degree in 1985, her daughters wrote her a card saying, “Does this mean we never have to have another fish stick?”

By then, Jan had started her own practice. “I LOVED my job,” she says. When asked why, she describes realizing how, as a precious only child, she had simply to practice the piano, or fly-casting, to be “the glue for my parents,” keeping everyone happy. “I loved being integral. I loved being asked what I thought.” Her solitary childhood, Jan implies, was as much a prompt toward her counseling career as was her struggle with alcohol.

The Sundquists’ transformation into Lopezians followed their surprising love affair with sailing. Harbored off Sucia one night, Jan says, Bob began musing about retirement in the islands. Though taken aback at first, Jan says, “the idea stuck.” In the late 80s the couple bought property in Hunter Bay. Originally planning a home to include Jan’s mother, they put those plans on hold when she developed cancer. When Jan’s mother died in 1989, the family took a while to work through their grief; they still set a place for her at holidays. But by the early 90s, Bob was living full-time on Lopez. After a couple of years commuting to Lopez on weekends, Jan re-directed her clients and closed her beloved practice.

Jan’s calling, however, defied retirement. For 18 months she managed grants for San Juan County, supporting alcohol and drug treatment and counseling and educational programming in Lopez and Orcas schools. And when that job ended, “I found my niche in Lopez Hospice,” Jan declares. Working with grief groups, helping people to adjust to the end of life, “this is home for me.” Along with Hospice, Jan remains active in Lions Club and the Lutheran Church. Like that little girl in Salina, she helps keep her Lopez “family” glued together.