Mountain View Pool
Board Members
Diane McDade - President
Growing up in Western New York, Diane began swimming competitively at the age of 8 under the tutelage of university and Olympic swim coach Dick Heller, who (for fun) coached a local youth swim team each summer. Soaking up Coach Heller’s “tough love,” she learned the value of practice, teamwork, and how to “out-think” the competition. Thus inspired, Diane began swimming year-round, joining the local YMCA team. She basically grew up in pools.
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Diane’s first career was focused on political campaign management; her second on corporate governance related to internet privacy protection and cloud security management.
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As an adult, Diane swims for enjoyment, fitness, and relaxation. A Port Townsend resident since 2013, she recently relied on the Mountain View Pool to help her recover from a leg injury. Diane is acutely aware of the needs of Jefferson County’s citizens for a modern aquatic facility to provide a place for water exercise, swimming lessons, swim & dive team practice, and rehabilitation.
Janis Fisler - Vice President
Janis (Jan) and her husband moved to their home just outside Port Townsend in 1996, returning to the northwest where much of her family resides. They have 3 children, 8 grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren. Jan grew up on a farm outside of Oregon City, OR where she regularly found a way to get into town to swim in the large open-air pool.
Jan earned a BS from Portland State College, then worked for 16 years in a research lab at Wadsworth VA Hospital in Brentwood, CA studying fasting and metabolic derangements in obese humans. She obtained a PhD in Public Health Nutrition from UCLA in 1981 and began a post-doctoral fellowship that grew into faculty positions at USC and UCLA in the Departments of Medicine studying the genetics of obesity using both rat and mouse models, work that continued for many years in collaboration with a lab at UC Davis.
Jan has been a regular participant in aqua aerobics at MVP since 1997 and finds that to be vital for her health and well-being. In 2013 she represented MVP in an effort, led by the County, to establish a Metropolitan Parks District. At that time there was inadequate community support to go forward. She was a member of the Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) in 2017 focusing on ways to mitigate overweight and obesity in our community. She is committed to the goal of sustaining a thriving aquatic facility that will promote the health and safety of our population.
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Rena Murman - Treasurer
Rena and husband Earll moved to Port Townsend from Vermont in 2006. It marked a return to the Pacific NW after 26 years in New England. With one son in Redmond and another in Vermont, trips across the country are now common. In the Boston area, Rena worked in the world of high-tech start-up companies for a number of years and then returned to Lesley University for a MS in management focusing on arts organizations. She then became involved with theatre education at the Huntington Theatre in Boston and at the Weston Playhouse in VT. Rena considers the existence of a swimming pool in Port Townsend an essential amenity, regularly enjoys deep-water workouts and longs for a return to fitness classes. When not in the pool, she is a dedicated volunteer at Habitat for Humanity, a member of LION (Local Investing Opportunity Network), and on the board of the Olympic Music Festival. Her real passion is to see a state-of-the-art aquatics center in our community that will serve the needs of all.
Jane Armstrong - Secretary
Jane and her husband, Michael, moved to the Peninsula in 2014 and to Port Townsend in 2017. Her career moved her around the Northwest and Midwest in various capacities, primarily in the food industry. Settling here, they have found both a special community and a place to call home. Swimming has always been important. Her mom did not swim as a child and she was afraid of the water. She insisted that her young children learn to swim at the local Y. Jane became a lifeguard and swim instructor. As a high school junior, Title IX brought women’s competitive swim to her high school and she was the most improved swimmer her first year and a co-captain in her second year. These experiences impressed on her the lifelong benefits of swimming for physical and mental wellness, personal development, and social connection. In addition, in that we live on a peninsula where so much of what happens here involves the water, she views water safety and swim instruction as essential skills that should be available to all; Mountain View is our classroom and lab.
Katelyn Bosley - Website/Social Media Manager
Katelyn and her family moved to Port Townsend in August 2019 when she began working for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife as lead Puget Sound Crustacean biologist. After spending 15 years living on the Oregon coast, the Bosley family was happy to move to a warmer, drier location. Katelyn and her husband Keith (who is also a marine biologist), have spent their entire lives on, in, and around the water. As parents of two young daughters, Stella and Evie, they believe water safety to be a high priority. Entering the girls into swim lessons quickly evolved into joining the swim team and before long they became a dedicated swim team family, with Katelyn joining the club board and Keith becoming a certified Stroke & Turn Judge. Since moving to Port Townsend, both daughters have joined the Port Townsend RedFINs swim team, which they enjoy very much. Katelyn became a member of JAC in December 2019 to carry on her love and support of aquatics, especially swim programs for families and youth.
Rich Childers
Rich and his wife Karen moved from Newport Oregon to Port Townsend in 1995. Rich retired in 2020 after a 30 year career in marine police and fishery management. Rich’s interest in marine issues goes back to the early 1980’s when he launched a career as a commercial diver in Santa Barbara CA. Subsequently earning a bachelor’s degree in marine fisheries at Humboldt State University and a master’s degree in marine parasitology from Oregon State University. Rich lived on the coast of Ecuador for four years managing a research field station for the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission where he effected changes in commercial tuna fishing to reduce dolphin mortalities occurring in the fishery. From 1995 to 2020 Rich managed and guided policies for shellfish fisheries for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Rich has been an active swimmer his entire life and knows the value and service public swimming pools provide to communities. Rich joined the JAC board in 2022 and became board president in December of 2022. As president, Rich hopes to advance JAC’s mission and vision to establish an accessible, affordable, community-supported modern aquatic center in Jefferson County
Bill Mann
Bill and his wife, Jean, moved to P.T. 15 years ago from the San Francisco Bay Area, Sonoma County, where he'd been a newspaper columnist at the San Francisco Examiner and Oakland Tribune, as well as a newswriter at KTVU-TV. He had his own radio talk show. He also covered Canada, where he once lived, for CBS MarketWatch, and wrote for USA Today when he came to PT. He now writes a column for The Leader. Jean and Bill have two kids, both graduates of Reed College. One is currently off limits — he's a Canadian who lives up in Vancouver behind the closed-off border. Bill started swimming when he moved to PT, and it's had a decidedly salutary effect as his post-polio exercise.
Mary Janell Metzger
Mary Janell (aka Mary & MJ) and her husband, Steve VanderStaay, moved to Port Townsend in summer of 2022, transitioning from their work at Western Washington University as professors and administrators since 1995. MJ grew up on Capitol Hill in Seattle and spent family summer vacations in every state park from here to Los Angeles, where her nearest cousins lived.
A graduate of UW, she completed her doctorate at the University of Iowa and taught for three years at Millsaps College in Jackson, MS before returning to her home state and the deep comfort of living once again near public, state, and national parks. She has been delighted by the warm strength of Port Townsend’s community, which she long visited and to which she now hopes to contribute.
MJ has served on multiples boards including the Bellingham Rangers, a Whatcom County select soccer organization; she led the Western Reads Board as Director of the campus-wide reading program; and she was a founding member of the WWU Social Justice and Equity Committee, which reported to the Provost and oversaw the funding of curricular, scholarly, and public facing work by WWU faculty and staff, and which increased campus and community inclusion. She is the mother of two, Lily and Arie, who are both avid swimmers thanks to access to public swimming and diving lessons from the ages of 5 and 3. She is a regular lap swimmer and recognizes the community health and wellness that a modern public aquatic facility offers all of us, no matter our age, abilities or income.
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Kathryn Meyer
Kathryn (Kat) moved just outside of Port Townsend with her family in 2020, where they strive to be contributing members of this beautiful community. Kat has spent her whole life around water, growing up swimming and kayaking on the east coast, and later during her career as a marine scientist working both above and underwater in Alaska, California, and the Caribbean. In her free time, she and her family spend many weekends at the pool, both for fun and to ensure her young son has the opportunity to build the swimming skills that are so essential for water safety. She began supporting the JAC to ensure that families and kids continue to have access to swimming and swim lessons, and for the overall health and enjoyment of our community.
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