Criteria
One or more scholarships will be awarded to WSU students meeting the following criteria:
- Female students in Communication
- Full-time students
- Undergraduate students
The donor did not wish to limit the Anita Busek Scholarship to students with a high grade point average. She felt that grades are not the only measurement of how successful one is or can be. A lot of women need financial help.
The recipient of the Anita Busek Scholarship may receive other scholarships as well.
History
Anita Busek graduated from Washington State College (1945-1949) with additional graduate work (1951-1952) in speech communication. Within the Speech department, she was a member of the three radio honorary and won the top woman’s award, the Judith Waller, during her Junior year.
Anita started as a part-time switchboard operator at KIRO Radio (1949-1951) and finished as Publicity Director. She returned to WSC and took a teaching (Speech, English & German) position (1952-1953) at North Idaho Junior College in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. In the summer of 1953, she attended the NBC Television Institute in Chicago. After that, her family called her home to support her mother, which she did for the next 35 years.
While in Seattle, she acted at local summer theaters such as the Mercer Island Summer Theatre, The Bellevue Playbarn, and the VFW Touring Group. She played in “Suds in Your Eye” with Jane Darwell at the Cirque Theatre. She also worked backstage doing makeup for one of the first live shows to originate in Seattle, “The Texas Jim Lewis Show,” on the only television station in Seattle which was owned by J. Elroy McCaw and later sold to become KING-TV.
In 1958, KOMO-TV bought and brought the first color camera to Seattle. Anita won the audition to become the “Weather GIRL” which was the only program broadcast in color in Seattle. The men reporting the evening news were Herb Robinson of the Seattle Times and Keith Jackson. The job lasted until KING-TV moved their cartooning weather MAN opposite the weather GIRL. Two gimmicks opposite each other were not good programming so Anita was replaced by the meteorologist, Bruce Caldwell.
Anita worked at KBLE AM/FM for many years; her last title was AM Operations/FM Station Manager. In 1975 she was a delegate to the 1975 Women’s Year Convention in East Berlin. To celebrate her 50th birthday, in 1977 she took Pan Am’s 50th Anniversary Flight around the world going over the north and south poles in record time to be part of the Guinness Book of Records.
When the FM station was sold in 1982, she was out of a job at age 55. She worked at Boeing through the “Manpower” agency and was hired by Boeing as a secretary at age 62. She retired in 1995. She also ran an antique business for 30 years in her spare time.