It has been said a journey of a thousand footsteps begins with one step. Starting out from CU-Boulder with a bachelor’s in political science, I have found myself halfway around the world after two master’s degrees, a brief United Nations mission and a nearly completed PhD in international commercial arbitration law in Australia. All this after considerable overseas sojourns to all of the world’s continents except Antarctica.  

My intercontinental travel began in Sweden through CU study abroad in Uppsala in the academic year 1997-1998. This first study abroad trip led to four more in Egypt, Malta, the United Kingdom and Australia, also including  a European study tour and a collection of overseas conferences. 

At the time, Sweden represented to me a hitherto unchartered frontier: long-term international travel in an entirely new culture. Fourteen years later, travel has become a way of life. The rigors and challenges of post-graduate studies in a foreign culture sharpened my intellect and refined my analytical skills. Through my many discussions and friendships I came to a better understanding of global affairs. The best part of my studies in Sweden was traveling to Aland Island for a human rights law conference. It was here that the seeds for my future career were planted. 

Growing up with an amazing father who was a CU professor of anthropology, Boulos Ayad, broadened my horizons. I listened to slide shows of his colleagues showing all the places in the world they had been – this broadened my view.

After completing coursework for my first master’s degree in international management (2003) specializing in intercultural relations, I decided that there was no better place for me to do my graduate practicum than in Cairo. I chose the Egyptian capital because my parents were born there, I speak the language (Arabic) fluently, have some familiarity with the culture and have relatives and family friends there.

Thinking I would only stay for six months, I stayed for three-and-a-half years, plus another six months. One of the best aspects of my trip to Egypt was that one of my uncles, Sam, is a very talented lawyer and in the course of our conversations he encouraged me to study law. Considering I was initially a pre-law-political science graduate but applied my degree to train for a career as a diplomat, I came to the conclusion that I much prefer law.

My long-term stay in Egypt and my cultural immersion (exponentially enriched by my background) gave me tremendous insights into the legal culture, which are now entirely relevant in my current PhD research. While in Cairo, I worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the Office of Refugee Resettlement. I accessed cases on the basis of criteria (legal and policy) for resettlement. Hearing firsthand accounts of war further solidified my commitment to human rights law and to the peaceful resolution of disputes. I then applied for a course in international human rights law in Malta for seven months of coursework. I was so inspired by this course that I began to consider going even further into legal studies.  My second semester component of the Malta law course was in Oxford and it was there that I decided that I would do a PhD in international business law, specializing in international arbitration, a form of alternative dispute resolution.

 Oxford is known as the city of dreaming spires for a reason. The air is imbued with inspiration.  One day while walking on the high street I went into Waterstone’s Bookstore and found my way to the second floor where the law books were. I took an introduction to business law textbook off the shelf and read a few cases of early oil concession arbitrations. It was then that I decided that would be the topic of my PhD dissertation.

I have been in Australia now for a little over three years. In the course of doing my PhD I’ve had some great experiences. In June I traveled to Madrid to receive an award for a paper regarding legislating trust between European investors and Arab states in a competition sponsored by the International Mercantile Court of Spain and several other organizations. I presented my paper before 40 Spanish King’s Counsel and the secretary general of the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

One of the best experiences I have had in Australia has been mentoring and coaching law students. The Macquarie team has competed against Ivy League and Big Eight Law schools  in the U.S. I learned more about the law and about courage and perseverance under pressure from the three students who were on the 2010 and 2011 teams through the course of watching them compete and in our preparations than from much of my reading. 

The most amazing thing about this experience was not so much winning over the other teams as it was a chance for me to share my mentoring and coaching skills which I learned first and foremost from my dad who  and from my uncle Sam in Egypt. It is experiences like this that create a valuable purpose for advanced legal knowledge, to mentor and nurture the next generation as my father and my Uncle Sam, as well as countless professors have done for me.

Overall, the value of all of my international experience is so priceless it really is beyond tangible expression. I can say that in terms of expertise in my area of international law, it gives me a highly specialized niche of skill and thus a significant edge in terms of insights and legal analysis as a result of the practicality of my experiences.

I have not been learning all of my legal knowledge in an ivory tower but rather through practical experience. I was able to give two radio interviews, an online news interview and  write an editorial opinion  with an Australian Senior Counsel regarding the constitutionality of the Egyptian revolution, for example, as a result not only of my legal knowledge of Egypt but of having lived there for several years. I attribute my career strengths, expertise, skills and knowledge to a considerable degree to my international travels which include Europe, Australia, Asia and the Middle East.

Mary Boulos Ayad (PolSci’94) is a PhD candidate in  international commercial arbitration law and international investment arbitration law at Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia. She has two master’s, one in human rights law and the other in intercultural relations international management.  She’s a member of the Australian Lawyers for Human Rights and the student affiliate of the chartered institute of arbitrators.

It started with a phone call from an old friend.  Not even an old Forever Buff friend.  An old work friend who had moved to Oregon a decade ago, but we still keep in touch.  “My son,” he said (who, gulp, was not even born when we first met) “is looking at colleges and I was wondering if you’d show us around CU.” 

Of course I was happy to.  I didn’t give it a second thought until the day before they were to arrive.  By then I started to stew a bit about what campus information I could possibly convey well to an insightful tour.  We started on Pearl Street (at what used to be Tom’s Tavern, which closed in early 2009 and is now SALT the bistro – no greasy burgers anymore), drove by my various old apartments (if walls could talk), and parked on the Hill (Espresso Roma is still there!) before walking down to campus.

It was early August and the campus was quiet — resting and anticipating the imminent arrival of the students the following week.

They had brought along another dad and son who also wanted a tour.  Both young men were likely to be Forever Buffs in a short 12 months.  While they lagged behind, football, fitness center and food in the dorms being their guy talk, I lost myself in a sense of place so overwhelming I could almost see and hear the CU of my time.

I was day dreaming about friends and classmates of the late ‘80s.  Big haired girls, faux-hippie haired boys.  L.L. Bean backpacks and Blucher shoes.  High school prep meets Boulder bohemian.  Kids set loose for the first time to test the waters of life away from family and home.

As we meandered around the campus, so different yet so much the same, I tried to put into words this feeling, this sense of place, for these young men – so full of bluster and promise.  I couldn’t.  It all came out sounding like anything anybody would say fondly about their college town.

But those long- remembered moments were there.  Looking around – the fountain, the UMC – brought them to me.

In Boulder, so many of those moments were packed into such a short span of time.  Maybe it’s meant to work that way.  You cram them in while you’re still young enough to keep them pure and untainted.

Freshman year, I lived in Farrand Hall.  I don’t remember many of the days but the moments, they are with me permanently.   Those lived not just on the campus, but in the Boulder outdoors.  Farrand Field, Chautauqua , the Flatirons and Flagstaff Mountain.

My first and last ride on the back of a motorcycle, racing up Flagstaff.  Freezing cold and exhilarated.   

The north tower room in Farrand was where we had many freshman-style parties.  Several of us piled on an old couch.  The huge French doors flung open to the bright, crystalline air.  The Flatirons as our whole view and our whole world.  We spent afternoons on that couch, talking, the group Boston blaring from huge speakers around us.

I remember also the early spring day we burst from our overheated dorm for Frisbee and frolic on Farrand Field (see photo just below). The ground cold and soggy.  The sun just a whisper of what it would become when spring arrived for real.  White winter skin, finally free of the snow though, ready for a change of seasons.

I believe there are times we recognize that a life-changing moment is taking place.  The world shifts and you sit up and take notice.  But most of the time, I think, we don’t know it.  How could we?  When the soul-shifting is happening we are in it, not wondering if we’ll think about it again in the near, or far flung, future.  These impressions – permanent chunks of our being – can take time, maybe a lifetime, to realize.

Since graduating from CU in 1991, I have proudly — if cautiously — made my way in the world armed with my English degree.  I knew a specialty in creative writing wouldn’t get me far in the work world so, with no real plan, my senior year I applied and was accepted for an internship at Fiction Collective Two , a small, author-run publishing house with an office at CU.  There I learned about editor’s red marks and printer bluelines.  I ran errands.  I read disturbing manuscripts from the slush pile. And later, I became one of four editors of the creative writing undergraduate magazine Walkabout.

With this barely sufficient resume, I set out and landed my first job as a marketing assistant.  My dad breathed a huge sigh of relief.  He never thought I’d find a decent job.

My work and life journey, so far, has included moves to interesting places – but always I have come back to Colorado.  I was born in Germany, and my parents journeyed to Colorado for the first time when I was just 1 year old – and my dad freshly wounded in the Vietnam War.  They had to choose a town that had a certain level of military hospital after his intense recuperation at Walter Reed.  In 1969, Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Aurora, just east of Denver, was one of the best in the country for his kinds of injuries.  And so our love affair with Colorado began.

While still in college, my family moved to France—a job-related move for my folks that my brother and I thought we’d capitalize upon by going along—then we returned to Colorado.  After I graduated from CU, I moved to the East Coast, back to Colorado, my company’s Sydney, Australia, office and, eventually, back to Colorado. 

RFC Corporate Finance is an investment banking firm headquartered in Sydney and was the foundation of my Australian journey and where I met my husband.  I quickly learned that this amazing country is far more than Vegemite, crocodiles and kangaroos. 

The first time I flew into Sydney, in the early dawn, the pink sunlight sun was shining on The Heads – two massive cliffs that protect the entrance to Sydney Harbor.  I had that fleeting sense of a memory etching itself.  As I looked out the airplane window, I knew that soul-shifting was taking place.  Right that minute.  I was right.  My life’s course abruptly changed direction.

When I returned to Colorado, Aussie husband in tow, I had to find a job.  The thought of starting from scratch was a little daunting.  Armed with my English degree, I found one!

For its first two decades, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory was still “that little lab in the hills.”  We were the smallest of the national laboratory complex. You know the big ones:  Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore.  Twelve years later I am still here.  While corporate communications is not really what I dreamed of on those clear, mountain days in Boulder, I have realized it’s the best job in the world for me.  To tell the story of an organization that’s changing the world in terms of renewable and efficient energy is not just a job.  It’s my calling.

At the end of our tour with the future, frisky Buffs – like big, playful puppies they loped around campus – my friend promised me a CU t-shirt.  I felt like one of the soon-to-be students, full of promise and ready to reap the generosity of a visiting parent.  We perused the now high-end offerings at the CU Bookstore in the UMC. 

At the checkout, a lovely undergrad rang up our purchases.  My friend called me over to show me the cashier’s name tag.  She, too, was an English major!  I thought she’d be happy to hear that I parlayed my major into a satisfying career.  And had proved my dad wrong.  English majors could end up in great careers (and not just as a prelude to law school).

The undergrad looked at me kind of funny and said, kindly, “I plan to do something creative with my degree.”  It was a knife to my heart.  Me?  A corporate sellout?

A little abashed, and a lot tired from the long day walking in the hot sun, we gathered our t-shirts and other gear, and headed back to The Hill.  We strolled past Hellems, and again those ghost students of 1986 were around me, chattering and laughing.   

As they say:  you don’t remember days, you remember moments. 

The moments.  Permanent.

Kimberly Bristol Adams (Engl’91) lives in Lakewood, Colo., with her husband, 8-year-old twins, two chocolate labs and a variety of cats.  She is the managing editor of Continuum Magazine and has done corporate communications at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., for the past 12 years.  See her guest blog about her work at NREL and a bit about the nature of the scientific search. 

I work every day in downtown Denver. To get there from my home in the suburbs, I take the train, which lets me off on 16th Street, a grand pedestrian mall of red and gray granite lined with planted trees, shops and eateries, all against the backdrop of skyscrapers and renovated historic buildings. It’s a mile-long, and while it would be convenient to just hop on the free shuttle and ride it down to my final destination, I find something exhilarating about wandering down on my own two feet.

When the weather’s warm, in particular, I enjoy watching the revelers on any number of patio dining areas chatting in the sun that sometimes peaks between buildings. I marvel at the eclectic crew of Starbucks coffee drinkers (there’s a shop just about every block), some clad in business suits, others in skinny jeans and Ray Bans, still more in bohemian florals. I cherish the pleasant surprise when a baggy panted kid with noise canceling headphones covering his ears passes me on the street, humming a tune I recognize as one on my own iPod. Down here on the mall, it’s a vibrant world in the city at the foot of the Rockies and it thrills me to know I am a part of it.

I notice other things too. The smell. It’s kind of sweet, but not in a pleasant way. Like when fresh baked cookies are overpowered by a sewage problem. I glimpse little moments of destruction—a broken window, an obscene artistic rendering on the side of the building. And, of course, I see the homeless people. A shirtless man sleeps under the shelter of the portico of a building. A group of street kids with worn back packs and matted hair congregate on the sidewalk, smoking and laughing. Sometimes, they bring a dog. A woman with watery eyes and cut-off jeans asks for spare change at the train station.

Sometimes they keep to themselves. Sometimes they beg for money to buy food or maybe a bus pass. Sometimes they are alone. Sometimes they are in groups. But they are always there and often in the same spot. Like the woman who spends her morning around the Starbucks where I stop. She has long, gray braids and wears black sandals on dirty feet. If the weather’s nice, she’s out on a bench, communing with voices no one else hears. When it’s cold, the rain pooling on the uneven sidewalk, she comes inside, sits and turns her head occasionally, whispering.

I tell this story and others because I’ve come to realize that despite being homeless, Denver is home for these people I see. They live and eat and sleep and breathe just like the rest of us. So, when I buy an Egg McMuffin for a hungry woman one chilly morning, the next time we pass on the street, she remembers and waves. When a man stops me outside the coffee shop and asks for a drink, we chat and wait for our frothy beverages, only to discover we both have family in Westminster. He tells me next time I visit my cousin, I should look up his brother. His name is Joe.

It’s important to recognize these patterns. It’s important to remember the faces of the homeless you pass on the street because you’ll see the same ones over and over again. We often treat the homeless like they’re foreigners in our city. But, this is their neighborhood, their home. They sleep in the same spot, sit on a particular bench, because they create space for themselves. They are not an affront to the city. They are a part of it. And, to love Denver, to love any city, you have to look at the whole, industrial, life-brimming place that it is and not just accept but truly appreciate all of it, and every person in it.

Stephanie Ann Harper (Engl’09) is pursuing her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in fiction through Fairfield University’s low residency program, where she is also a co-editor of Mason’s Road, an online literary journal. Her work has been featured in Poetry Quarterly, Haiku Journal and the Midwest Literary Review. She loves having the opportunity to work and spend time in Denver every day.

“Stutterbox,” my classmates at Hyattsville Elementary School, Maryland, called me. This hurt me then, but, in hindsight, it probably jump-started my career. By age 11, I was selling stories for a dollar each to the Washington (D.C.) Star, and I worked for the Hyattsville weekly newspaper, The Prince Georgean, until I was 16.

It seemed natural that I study journalism in college. In the 1940s the CU journalism program , ranked in the top 10 in the country. My father liked CU and thought I should apply. I was accepted as a non-resident student, but my father died in December 1943, when I was a sophomore in high school. I wrote his obituary for the local paper.

As I boarded the train at Washington’s Union Station in September 1947 I was excited at going west for the first time. My black trunk held all my possessions: clothes, ice skates, a portable typewriter, a used Rolleiflex camera and a scrapbook of writing clips.

Before my 17th birthday in July, my mother remarried and moved to San Diego. I was an only child, so I was used to being alone. But this time, I felt abandoned, homeless.

In one of CU’s freshman dormitory, Bigelow Hall (the southwestern wing of Sewall), my three roommates and I had a breathtaking view of the Flatirons. Soon, I felt at home with my CU “family.” I kept busy with classes, dances, dates and ball games. I was the “official” photographer for Bigelow Hall, and I played the piano for song-and-dance shows we coeds put on for veterans at Fitzsimmons Hospital in Denver.

Journalism classes met in the dank basement of Old Main. Frosh were required to take “History of Journalism,” taught by the professor who had written a textbook of the same name. Sophomore courses consisted of writing leads and news stories.

The money my father saved for my education was depleted during his three-year bout with leukemia. I cut my expenses by moving into the Campus Club, on the corner of 13th and Pennsylvania Avenue, where we coeds cooked, cleaned and managed the house. Also, between classes I worked as a waitress, typist, bookstore clerk and babysitter.

In 1949 I learned to ski in physical education class and joined the Buff Ski Club. CU leased a cabin at the foot of Winter Park’s slopes and a house in Georgetown, close to Arapahoe Basin. To reduce expenses on ski weekends, I kept gates for club races and helped at the cabins by cooking meals and cleaning. After my sophomore year I went to live with my mother and stepfather in San Diego, where I worked for the Naval Reserve Records Office for a year.

When I returned for my junior year at CU, I changed my major to geography. I had survived speech therapy classes, but it was still agony talking in front of classmates. I took English composition classes and wrote for the humor magazine, Colorado Dodo, but I thought a stuttering reporter would seem incompetent to people in the “real” world.

In the summers of 1950 and ’51 I worked for the U.S. Geological Survey and the Board on Geographic Names in Washington, D.C. I didn’t return to CU that fall; I worked until December to save money to sail to Norway with my college roommate, Bonnie Berge Smith (Art’51). After we attended the 1952 Winter Olympic Games in Oslo, we cycled and hitchhiked around Europe for four months.

In spring 1953 I returned to Boulder for my senior year. At the graduation ceremony in Folsom Field, my geography professor, Dr. Hoffmeister, gave me the diploma. “I’m glad you made it, Janet.” My mother attended the ceremony, but I held back tears, thinking how my father would have liked to be there.

After graduation, I worked in the technical publications section of The Martin Company in Denver, where I opted for the swing shift so I could ski mornings at Winter Park. Two years later, marriage and jobs with newspapers, magazines and Civil Service took me to Hawaii and Saipan and Guam, in the Mariana Islands.

For 10 years I was a reporter for Guam’s daily newspapers, and in 1969, I wrote the first tourist guide to Guam and Micronesia. I learned to hide my stuttering and to enjoy interviewing and taking pictures of island visitors, including John Warner, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, Pope John Paul II, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bob Hope, Tiny Tim, various Hollywood stars and Guam’s last Japanese straggler from World War II.

In 1991, I retired while working as a technical writer/editor for the Navy in San Diego. I moved to Fraser, Colo., where I skied, hiked, sold travel articles to the Rocky Mountain News, and wrote my first book about living on Guam. Ten years later, I moved to Grand Junction, Colorado, where I wrote three novels and published a book about my world cruise on the Queen Elizabeth 2. In 2010, I moved to Maui, Hawaii.

I’m proud to be a CU alum, and I wouldn’t trade my years in Boulder for the world. My father was right.

Descriptions of two books by Janet Go (text from amazon.com)

Don’t Miss the Boat, Cruising Through the Leisure Years by Janet Go and Perry McGinnis (Lifetime Chronicle Press)  Read Janet’s tale of adventure, wining and dining, dancing and sightseeing. Her descriptions of shipboard life and of ports of call as varied as Pago Pago, Taipei, Sri Lanka, Mumbai, Athens, Valencia and Northampton will hold your interest from the time the ship sails out by the Statue of Liberty until it docks in Southampton. And it doesn’t end there – she sails back to the U.S. on the newer Queen Mary 2.

Dance of Desire Hardcover (Xlibris)   Based on a true story of tangled passions in New Orleans, America’s most intriguing and sensuous city. When Remy Rawley’s husband dies suddenly at age 60, this lonely widow throws herself on the mercies of New Orleans, renowned for sin, seduction and sex.

Besides the amazing education I received from CU, if someone asked me to name the most important lesson I took away from college, it would be this: people can tell me I won’t succeed in certain aspects of life, and they can tell me to play it safe because I wouldn’t want to screw up. But that’s exactly where they’re wrong. I came to CU declaring a major German, as well as a major in astrophysics, mainly because I love astronomy. I realize that the astrophysics major was a mistake. The astronomy aspect of the major was great, but calculus was not my strong suit. I felt that if I continued on that track my college career would not have been very successful.

So after my freshman year of college I decided to change my astrophysics major to international affairs, and I’m very glad I did. I’ve made mistakes and I’ve failed at several things throughout my college career, but that hasn’t stopped me from continuing to make mistakes. It’s the best way to not only learn about myself, and how to be successful. The best part about life is taking risks, and I might just be a professional at it.

Growing up I had a typical suburban childhood life, but that all changed when I moved to Vienna, Austria, for five years during my middle school years. I returned to attend high school in the United States but found that the cookie-cutter lifestyle no longer satisfied me. In Vienna, I attended the American International School and my classmates came from almost every country around the world. The diversity was comforting. I felt at home and I finally felt like I fit in; I found my missing puzzle piece.

High school was completely the opposite I attended Shipley School, a small, upscale, private school in Byrn Mawr, Pa., in the Philadelphia suburbs. Most of the students had gone to school there since kindergarten. There was no diversity, or at least compared to what I was used to. I had to fit myself into something that did not come natural to me. I’m not cookie-cutter. There was no inspiration and I couldn’t be creative. I was prevented from taking risks, until, that is, I came to CU.

I started out at CU, I like to think, like few of the freshman at CU. I stuck to my dorm room and only exited for classes, eating and laundry. It was almost as if my high school years caused to forget how to make challenging and risky decisions.

At the beginning of my freshman year, I joined The Herd Leadership Council, a group of 20 student volunteers who plan events on campus and encourage students to celebrate- their school spirit. The Herd [www.cuherd.org] is the largest student group on campus, and one of the few groups that provides students with free gear, discounts all around Boulder and networking between alumni and students ― all for an unbelievably low-cost membership.

During my first two years of being a Herd Leader, I was extremely introverted. I hardly talked to anyone and I never went out to dinner with the group after the meetings. I did my work and then went back to my dorm room. That was probably my first mistake, but I learned from it. I eventually gathered the courage to speak my mind, show my creativity and turn that creativity into improvements in Herd events. My fellow Herd leaders encouraged me and supported me.

I went on to coordinate and plan The Herd’s two largest events, The Nearly Naked Mile. Planning these events entails scheduling space, filling out approval forms, talking with police and campus staff, lots of marketing and advertising to get the word out about the event, and creating a benefit, like themed t-shirts, for Herd members. The leadership aspect comes in as the head of the event who has to work efficiently to delegate tasks and stay organized and on schedule. It also means that I had to work at making the event more successful than the previous years. I realized that I had found my new niche; I had found a new puzzle piece that I fit into. I found the diversity and creativity that I had been missing for so long.

I am now going into my second year as the president of The Herd. My childhood experiences showed me that I was meant to lead, and not to follow. That’s probably why I take risks and make mistakes! The Herd allowed me to shape those skills. Before I joined The Herd I never saw myself in a leadership position and I never saw myself as a valuable team member. I only saw myself as introverted and reserved, and I tended to think that ideas I had weren’t important enough to say out loud. The Herd helped me see through that, and more specifically, The Herd director Dawn Barone (Hist,Psych’09), pushed me through that barrier to show me the true extrovert that I really am. I can honestly say that I don’t think I would be president of The Herd if it hadn’t been for her encouragement, inspiration and support. She showed me the qualities of a true leader.

So this may not have been the risk you were expecting me to elaborate on, and many may not even see it as a risk, but I consider a risk to be a decision (or an action) one person makes knowing that there is the chance of failure but taking the chance anyway. I could have continued as a Herd leader sitting in the background as a shadow failing to learn anything about leadership or about myself, but instead, Dawn saw potential in me to be a leader before I even knew, and that is important. I had someone who believed in me, and still does believe in me, before I really believed in myself and I think that is how I gathered the courage to risk the failures and successes as a leader.

College is supposed to be about new experiences, challenges, failures and successes and I can say with confidence that my college career has offered me just that. What I take away from this chapter of my life is that no matter how many people discourage you from pursuing your dreams, pursue your dreams with even more enthusiasm and gumption; no matter how many times you fail at doing just that, know that trying again will get you one step closer to success; and really, no matter who you believe you are when you enter college, you will most likely leave college changed forever (and hopefully for the better).

My biggest passion in life is helping people and I’ve dreamed of starting my own non-governmental organization to help grassroots movements in South Africa gain momentum. With that being said, on to the next chapter!

The following quote from Theodore Roosevelt sums up for me what is significant in my life.

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid who know neither victory nor defeat.”

Marni grew up in both Philadelphia, Pa., and Vienna, Austria. She is pursuing her master’s degree in Germanic studies. In 2012 she will be awarded two bachelors (in German and International Studies) and one master’s (in German). Talk about ambitious! This past spring, Marni was given the Forever Buffs Student Award by the CU-Boulder Alumni Association [cualum.org] for her engagement, commitment and contributions to the university. Marni will be traveling to Germany in late July, but she will return just in time for this to be published!

Matthew (Art’92) of Glendale, Calif., sent us this photo of their three-month-old twins, saying they had “just received their first CU Buff gear as gifts!” Their girl, Emerson, is on the left and their boy, Atticus, is on the right. Ironically, they’ve become a Pac-12 family, as dad is a CU alum and mom Kerri Walsh graduated from the University of Southern California in 1998.  When CU moved to the Pac-12, it made them very excited as they’ll get to see CU play the Trojans every other year where they live in Southern California.

Pounding rain and stinging hail pummeled my bare legs. Lightning bolts struck fast and close. I hugged the wet grass on the side of a ditch. My steel bicycle lay nearby, temporarily abandoned. I had not planned on this on my solo bicycle ride to the middle of Colorado.

This was South Park, and I was trapped on the high, desolate grassland between the towns of Jefferson and Fairplay.

Shivering in my only extra clothing — a wispy, wet windbreaker — I began to question the wisdom of this trek. Of course, no such doubt arose 90 miles earlier, before I rode out of Boulder, over-confident, ill-prepared and — quite stupidly — alone.

That was half a lifetime ago, when I was enthralled by the solitude of the open road. There, half-formed thoughts and half-processed feelings streamed by like fence posts. Fatigue and exhilaration came in waves. Nirvana, surely, could not be far off.

At the time, I didn’t want to ride with small groups, much less join large, organized rides, which I saw as chaos on wheels. I was quite wrong.

By 2008, when I began working for CU-Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences, I’d ridden a mountain race (the Bob Cook Memorial/Mount Evans Hill Climb) and one large, organized ride (the Copper Triangle). Though still not enamored of group rides, I signed up for the Elevations Credit Union Buffalo Bicycle Classic ride that year.

I didn’t expect to enjoy it. I rode because I supported the cause — scholarships for great students who have financial need. Yet I signed up the next two years. I returned not just because the cause was good but also because the ride had turned out to be great fun.

Though strong riders on feather-light bikes can rocket over the 100-mile course like Lance Armstrong, this is no race. The Buffalo Bicycle Classic, a multi-distance ride for all abilities, is a celebration of cycling, the university and, one might even say, life.

This feeling appears as I depart campus, where the ride starts and finishes, rolling down Folsom Avenue with the cool, September air waking me up. Ryan Van Duzer (Jour’03) appears, a Boulder filmmaker and journalist who is known for not owning or ever having driven a car, and interviews riders with a camcorder from the seat of his own bike, his boundless enthusiasm billowing in his wake.

“Ready to ride?” Van Duzer bellows.

“Somebody’s had enough coffee,” I say.

I stop by the aid stations, where volunteers, many of them university employees, spend the day cheerfully dispensing peanut butter, pizza and praise. I wonder why they’re so chipper. But my spirit is nonetheless buoyed.

The mood never seems to dim. The aid station just inside Larimer County is staffed by CU’s integrative physiology department, which seems appropriate. A beaming police officer directing traffic urges me to “pour it on” as I cross Colorado 66. Waving hands emerge from the windows of passing cars, which often display CU insignia.

Meanwhile, a flotilla of riders and I roll past great scenery — Carter Lake, pastoral fields, shady country homes and, formerly, the turnaround point at Horsetooth Reservoir. (The new “century” route ascends Buckhorn Road to the 50-mile turnaround point, where riders’ bibs get the marking that will prove they’ve completed the century ride and entitles them to Buff Bike Classic caps emblazoned with the word “century.”)

The century has cachet, but this event is not snooty. It fits all ages and abilities. A 14-mile “Little Buff” accommodates families and easy riders, and there are 35-, 50- and 70-mile options as well. These choices encourage new riders to head out for short rides or to take longer rides. The event is a Johnny Appleseed of biking; it sows passionate pedaling.

Most participants are glad to ride and happy to support scholarships.

This commitment was never clearer than last year, when the Fourmile Fire required the cancellation of the 2010 Buffalo Bicycle Classic. That wildfire, which destroyed more homes than any in Colorado history, erupted less than a week before the ride. The ride’s course intersected with emergency routes to the fire.

Given the exceptional circumstances, the volunteer committee of Arts and Sciences that organizes the ride waived the no-refund policy. Because I write for the college, I penned the news release explaining that the ride was off and refunds were available upon request. But we hoped riders would still support the event’s charitable purpose. As the ride’s de facto social-media manager, I also posted the news to our Facebook page and Twitter feed.

Three-fourths of our riders and nearly all of our sponsors did not seek refunds. As many emphasized, the ride was enjoyable but served a public good —  scholarships.

Such deep support neither appears overnight nor happens by accident. Todd Gleeson, dean of the college (and my boss), conceived of this event with Woody Eaton (DistSt’62), an investor and philanthropist. As Gleeson and Eaton rode another charity ride (a fund-raiser for the Children’s Hospital in Denver), they wondered if a similar event could be staged for CU scholarships. Gleeson and Eaton enlisted the help of Frank Banta (EPOB’72) and Gail Mock, longtime university supporters.

Since the ride’s founding in 2003, the founders and a band of committed volunteers have created and nurtured an event that is more than just fun, scenic and inspiring. It is also greatly beneficial.

About 2,500 riders participate each year, and the event has generated more than $1.4 million in scholarships. Those who “Ride the Buff” support the single largest source of scholarship — for 641 students — within the College of Arts and Sciences, CU-Boulder’s largest college.

Because I interview the ride’s beneficiaries for the Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, I see the benefits first-hand. Recently, for instance, I interviewed Punam Chatterjee, who won a full-ride scholarship from the Buffalo Bicycle Classic. Chatterjee hopes to become a physician and work with Doctors Without Borders, probably in West Bengal, India, where her family is from.

“If I didn’t get that scholarship, I knew I’d have to be a waitress or something,” she says. With it, she could expand her horizons a great deal further. In addition to being a top student, Chatterjee served as chair of the CU Distinguished Speakers Board.

Her passion for learning and life is infectious, and when I think about the ride, I think about students like her, who deserve a helping hand.

That’s why when people Ride the Buff this September, I’ll again join them, enjoying the buoyant crowd, good food and great scenery. I also will again appreciate the many benefits of a group effort—one of which is being able to commiserate with compatriots if the weather really goes south.

The 2011Buffalo Bicycle Classic is Sunday, Sept. 11 from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. The ride begins and ends on the CU-Boulder campus beside the Benson Building near Folsom Field. The Classic ‘s website is here. The phone number is 303-735-1569.

Clint Talbott (Jour’85) is publications coordinator for the College of Arts and Sciences and produces the Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine online.

Look at past CU Voices.

A forty-five year resident of Port Washington, Long Island, NY until he moved to Virginia eight years ago, Doc was most recently  Vice President and the assistant to the President of  Value Line,  Inc. While his undergraduate career was interrupted by service as a Lieutenant in the US Naval Reserves, during and after World War II, Doc subsequently received a B.S. in both mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado, followed by a Master’s in Business Administration and a Doctorate in Law, both from the Ohio State University.

Doc also was a Certified Public Accountant, and accepted to the Bar in both Ohio and New York. Doc had a long and distinguished career as a consultant and advisor to numerous companies both in the U.S. and internationally.   He was also a long-time civic and community leader in Port Washington, holding positions on the PTA, School Board and the local council of the Boy Scouts of America, among other organizations.

Doc and his late wife, Jan, whom he met at Ohio State, were the proud parents of three sons, Stephen Patrick, of Port Washington, New York, John Edward, of McLean, Virginia, and Thomas Robert, of Knoxville, Tennessee.  Doc is survived by his sons, their partners, and his seven grandchildren, all of whom will miss his advice, counsel, appetite for life, and fierce pride in his Hungarian heritage.

Services will be in Xenia, Ohio, on June 25, 2011, with interment in the family plot beside his beloved Jan.

I was hired as chairperson of the voice area and founder/director of the opera program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. I was there for three years and really enjoyed my work. Then my husband was offered a job in Boulder. The day we moved I was offered an adjunct faculty position at CU.

Several things drew us back to Boulder: the university, the students, the faculty and Niwot’s curse.* On a personal note, my grandparents both attended CU-Boulder in the 1920s. William Bradley (A&S ex’27) and Gwendolyn Bone (A&S’30) met at CU, fell in love and eloped in Central City. They were married a year later while still at CU, before they told anyone about the relationship. The fact that my grandmother graduated was quite a remarkable  accomplishment for a woman in the 1920s!  Needless to say, the university holds a special place in my heart, and moreover the talent, excitement and possibilities here are endless.

I stayed in the adjunct position for a year before going to work as director of the Young Artists/Education Department at Opera Colorado in Denver. I worked with aspiring young opera singers in a training and outreach capacity, and had the opportunity to assist well known opera directors such as James Robinson and Ron Daniels.  Then, in 2009, the CU-Boulder opera director position opened up at CU. I just had to apply.  I joined the faculty as an assistant professor in the fall of 2009.

I loved my work at Opera Colorado. I had the opportunity to train young artists, stage direct their touring shows, assistant direct for the mainstage productions and develop wonderful relationships with all types of people. I’m directing a show in Italy this August (see below) and the connection I made with an Italian conductor at Opera Colorado led to this opportunity. It was a wonderful experience.

My musical career had started many years earlier. I grew up in a small town in Tennessee, Trenton, population 4,000. I applied to three universities out of state, and let me tell you, it was very uncommon to do so. Deciding to go away to a big music school was pretty controversial around town. I was offered scholarships at Carnegie Mellon, NYU and the University of Southern California.  I chose USC because it had an outstanding voice department andI couldn’t wait to live at the beach! Ah, the foolishness of an up-and-coming mezzo-soprano. But I got a great education there, experienced a very different culture and learned to love USC  football. Now that we’re in the Pac-12, I’m going to have to run back and forth to cheer on each side of the field!

But back to the present. I can summarize it all by saying that during the past many years it’s been a great pleasure to direct or assistant direct many operatic and musical theater scenes spanning from the Baroque period to contemporary American works.

I’m surrounded by visionaries, and that spirit comes from the top. Daniel Sher, dean of the college of music, is a visionary. He likes to take risks, grow and keep students first in all we do. That paradigm resonates with me and of course, I was more than thrilled to be offered the opportunity to build a career in directing, research and teaching at Cu.

Among other visionaries at the college of music is Patrick Mason, baritone and voice faculty member. He believes in developing new work but more importantly he understands that introducing our students to the process of working with living composers is invaluable.

The students are the true visionaries though. They bring their talents to the table, have the energy, youth and wide-eyed optimism to see what is possible. But in talking about visionaries, I’m afraid we’ve opened a can of worms. I could go on for pages about all of the people, including the entire voice and opera faculty, that work together to make CU Opera exciting. We’ve even pulled former CU Opera director Robert Spillman out of retirement to join our team!

We’ve recently started a program in the summer celebrating and performing brand-new American operatic works, called CU NOW. We’ll be performing in the Black Box Theater in the basement of the ATLAS building using all kinds of cool technical gadgets in an intimate setting.  Our summer audiences have the chance to participate in talk backs with the composers and performers after every performance, and their questions and feedback really influence the shape of these works in progress.

CU New Opera Works grew from a project I worked on at Opera Colorado and brought to CU when I came back two years ago. It’s my baby and I’m VERY excited about it. It’s something I can give back to help develop the art form further in this country. We know it is valuable to composers to have the opportunity to workshop their new operas, but more importantly, it’s invaluable to our students to work with living composers. I often refer to CU NOW as a mini Conference on World Affairs for opera. The process is exciting as well as the feedback the composers, artists and design/production team get from the audience following every show. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be a part of this in the summer at CU.

This month, opera composers Kirke Mechem (Pride and Prejudice) and Herschel Garfein (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: The Opera) will arrive on campus to work with our students to help make these two new works come to life on stage. Our students will have the chance to inhabit some of literature’s most famous characters within new operas this summer, from Elizabeth and Darcy to Hamlet and the Player King.

In August, we will begin a year-long collaboration with the Piccolo Festival in the Friuli region of Italy. I’ll be directing Rossini’s Il cambiale di matrimonio, and four of our students will sing there as well. We decided to make the upcoming opera season at CU a celebration of Italian opera and will present Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Suor Angelica (a double bill), then close our season with a remount of Il cambiale di matrimonio after this production’s summer premiere in Italy. It’s sure to be an exciting and busy year!

For more information or tickets to any CU Opera or CU NOW events, call 303-492-8008 or go here .

*Chief Niwot, or Lefthand (c. 1825-1864) was a tribal leader of the Southern  Arapaho people who lived where Boulder is today. He is purported to have said, “People seeing the beauty of this valley will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of the beauty.”

Robin Melinda Rasmussen (A&S'03)

Robin Melinda Rasmussen (A&S ’03), 30, of Napa, California, lead pastry cook with Solbar Restaurant at the Solage resort in Calistoga, California, died suddenly in an automobile accident near St. Helena, California, on April 27, 2011. She is survived by her parents, Karen and Chris Rasmussen, of Mare Island, Vallejo, California; her family and many friends miss her terribly.

A 1999 graduate of Lewis-Palmer High School in Monument, Colorado, her junior year was spent as an AFS exchange student in Belgium (1997-98). She attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (Film Studies) in 2003.

She moved to San Francisco where she worked at MX Entertainment as executive assistant and later at AMB Property Corporation as management administrator. She found her passion in the kitchen and completed the pastry program at Tante Marie’s Cooking School in San Francisco. She moved to Charlottesville, Virginia and Charleston, South Carolina, where she began baking and developing a specialty for wedding cakes. Returning to California’s Napa valley, she worked in the pastry kitchens at Brix in Yountville, then at Ubuntu in Napa.

Her wide circle of friends defined much of her life, a life that touched so many people in so many ways.

A celebration of Robin’s life will be held in California later this summer.

Jim Palmer, director:
We have just completed our 63rd Conference on World Affairs.  What a privilege for our staff, students, and community volunteers to serve this tradition, but not be tradition-bound.  Each year we create a time capsule, a snapshot of our world and our concerns.  Our responsibility to our thousands of conference-goers is to inform and delight, to remain committed to a free-thinking onference that remains “free and open to the public.”

The conference must be both timely and timeless, addressing both WikiLeaks and William Shakespeare.  We know our audience is a participatory community of people of all ages and interests – people whose open-minded curiosity will resonate with the Irish writer who proclaimed that  ”Curiosity will conquer fear more than bravery will.”

If you love music, want to have your assumptions challenged, enjoy listening to thoughtful dialogue between conservative and progressive thinkers, are enchanted by storytellers and appreciate multiple perspectives on hot-button issue, we have a conference for you.

Jane Butcher (IntlAf’66), co-chair:

The Conference on World Affairs brings the world to Boulder to interact with our students and community.  We ask our 100 participants from many disciplines to have intelligent conversations in front of an audience.   It’s not so much an academic conference as it is a conference of the real world of today – a chance to hear and interact with the movers and shakers of now and the future.

We provide a unique opportunity for students to hear, meet and make friendships with our many guests.  The entire conference is produced by volunteers – many of them students who have many types of engagement.  It is a unique opportunity for students to have face-to-face interactions with our guests.

The lasting appeal of our conference is the value we give our students by introducing them to the real world. I think we change lives in the process.

Collin Goddard, participant on the panel “When Psychotherapy Goes Wrong”

On April 16, 2007, Goddard survived the shootings at Virginia Tech University. Today he works for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence; he spoke about the killer, Cho Seung-Hui . He spoke to the Boulder Camera prior to the panel:

“What happened to me is an example of a lack of psychotherapy.  It didn’t go wrong. It didn’t start at all. People throw their hands up in the air when it comes to mental health. We need to have a serious discussion about that.”

Juli Steinhauer (Mus ex’60), co-chair:
Jazz was born in America and is our music. It molds the CWA into a community in one evening because of shared joy. The Jazz Concert emulates the CWA because the music statements are always innovative and progressive. Old songs become new and new songs become vocabulary. The music is ever evolving because of improvisation. The quality and diversity of the musicians give the concert a depth of feel from a world-wide perspective.

Joe Cirincione, participant, president, Ploughshares Fund, San Francisco:

The coolest part of the Conference on World Affairs by far is the Tuesday jazz concert. World-class music.

Adrean Ferrugia, participant on the panel “Music, Our Refuge From Misery”

Ferrugia teamed up in 2008 with the ensemble Ricochet and their album has received widespread critical acclaim. He’s a jazz pianist and composer on the faculties of two Canadian universities:

Speaking to the Boulder Camera, Ferrugia recalled one event when he was 11 and succumbed to the sounds of  Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King. “There was this real sense of being uplifted out of the sort of mundane existence I felt I was living in at the time.”

Sanho Tree was a participant on the panel “Gay Culture: Acceptance and Assimilation.”

Tree  is a fellow and director of the Institute for Policy Studies, working to end the war on drugs and replace it with policies that promote public health and safety:

“Twenty years ago I was fighting for basic survival,” he told the Boulder Camera, “and now we’re talking about rights and privileges that were thought to be so far removed back then.” But as a caveat, he noted, “If you’re spending the night [as a gay couple] in places like Oklahoma, you may not want to tell people you are fine with one bed… assimilation and acceptance are regionally specific states of being.”

Clare Murphy, participant, storyteller, Galway, Ireland:

It’s hard to sum up what CWA is like. Imagine being trapped in a beautiful villa for six days with a bunch of people, from scraggly haired optimists to hard-line realists, all with a wild bright look in their eyes. As soon as you break bread together the verbal tennis begins, no one is certain of the outcome but you have a wonderful time getting there.

Gigi Ibrahim, political activist and citizen journalist, Cairo:
Boulder is the most beautiful farm-empty-clean land with mountains, snow and sun all at the same time.

We know we owe the crown jewel of the Boulder campus – Macky Auditorium – to the generosity of Andrew J. Macky (1834-1907) who arrived in Boulder in 1859 during the Colorado gold rush. An early supporter of establishing the University of Colorado in Boulder, Macky became president of the First National Bank and Boulder’s richest citizen. His 1903 bequest of a substantial sum to construct the auditorium transformed the campus geography, but—more importantly—has been a primary focus of the University’s intellectual and cultural life for nearly a century. For me, Macky has many personal connections.

A family connection

The same year Macky did, another “Pike’s Peaker” made the trek to the Front Range, my great-grandfather William Guy Fairhurst. Born in New Jersey, he worked as an iron molder in Brooklyn, New York, and moved to Illinois in 1855 with his new bride to take up farming. His wife died in childbirth in 1858 and Guy headed West to what was then Kansas Territory.

In 1876 he struck pay dirt in Magnolia, half way up Boulder Canyon. Promising strikes of tellurium in 1895 presaged big profits and Guy’s company took out loans from Macky’s First National Bank. My family’s Macky connection began in 1903 when Guy sought a loan extension at the First National Bank and was refused. Andrew Macky was out of town at the time and on returning to Boulder was upset that his employees had refused to help out another Boulder pioneer whom he knew. Macky reversed his subordinates and Guy kept his Magnolia property until his death.

High school graduation

On Thursday, June 9, 1960, I joined 408 other graduating seniors from Boulder High School in Macky for graduation. I don’t remember much about the ceremony or the commencement address by CU education professor Homer Rainey. I probably should have paid more attention, given that he had been fired by the CU Regents in the 1940’s because of his staunch advocacy of academic freedom and undoubtedly offered some valuable insights.

Three years later I shared the podium with CU President Joseph Smiley and other university administration and faculty members for the President’s Convocation – the first event in New Student Orientation Week. I was president of the Associated Students (ASUC).

A transfer student from Auburn University in Alabama was sitting in the auditorium with her mother. Susanne Alexander (later Stoiber) (A&S’65, MPubAd’75) was a cute blonde with a deep Southern accent. As I later learned, her mother Suzy was a charming “steel magnolia” from Eufaula, Ala., who kept a close watch on her two girls. Only after being married to Susanne for 30 years did I find out that during my remarks in Macky, Suzy turned to her daughter and said, “Susanne, honey! That looks like a nice boy. Why don’t you get to know him?” And I thought I was in control of my life!

JFK connections

Those of us who came of age in the early 1960s can’t escape the label “the Kennedy Generation.” As one who campaigned for JFK during my first weeks at CU, I have cheerfully accepted the label. His inaugural injunction to “Ask not what the country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!” resonated with me. It was certainly one of the influences that turned me toward a life of public service.

My first Kennedy connection with Macky was on, Oct. 23, 1962 when the new president revealed that offensive missiles had been stationed in Cuba by the Soviet Union and that the U.S. was instituting a naval blockade to halt this development. The next day I sat on the steps of Macky with a couple of classmates from my sophomore philosophy class, debating the question of “determinism versus free will.”

Then, on Nov. 22, 1963 President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I was sitting in the ASUC office in the UMC when the student body vice-president Neal Johnson (PolSci’64) (later the best man in my wedding) rushed in to exclaim “the president has been shot!” We rushed down to the UMC Indian Grill to join crowds of students listening to radio and TV broadcasts. Classes were canceled. Three days later a requiem was held in Macky where I joined university officials on the podium in mourning the fallen president.

A significant first date

In March 1964 the 29th season of the Artist Series included a performance in Macky of Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville. I had two tickets and needed a date. Susanne Alexander, the Auburn transfer student, had applied for a position in student government. I was impressed by her and appointed her ASUC public affairs commissioner. She led a lobbying effort at the Colorado legislature in Denver to attempt to prevent a major tuition increase. Although we failed, I felt I shared some important interests and perspectives.

So, I invited her to join me for “Barber.” I confess that I don’t remember much about the performance, except that everything seemed to turn out all right for the lovers.  At any rate and Macky turned out to be the perfect venue for a first date since Susanne and I celebrated our own “Marriage of Carlo” three and a half years later in Boulder.

World Affairs Conference inspires

Another Macky-related connection which shaped my life was the annual Conference on World Affairs. The CWA was conceived by my cousin, Professor Howard Higman (Art’31, MSoc’42) in 1937, and it helped to turn my career interests toward international affairs

I remember in 1959 – my senior year at Boulder High School, just down the hill – attending a presentation in Macky by the eloquent young Kenyan leader Tom Mboya. He had launched an airlift program for African students to come to the U.S., which brought his fellow Kenyan Barack Obama Sr. to this country.

I got my own turn at the CWA for nine years (1990-1994 and 1999-2002) participating in 63 panels and giving two plenary addresses. As a director at the State Department, I pontificated on nuclear proliferation and terrorism. I also had some of CWA’s eccentric assignments on panels addressing such topics as “Goulash Capitalism” and “Adventurism.”

As an editorial cartoonist, I also joined panels on humor in politics – often projecting some of my work to illustrate my viewpoint. My favorite panel was one in 2001, just after George Bush’s election. The panel included the terrifically acute and funny Texas journalist Molly Ivins, entitled “Why Dubya Could Make a Great President.” I led off with a series of cartoons showing Bush tackling various issues – usually rather ineptly. Was this prophetic or only biased? Molly guffawed heartily since she was even more critical of “the Shrub,” as she called Bush. After my presentation she took the podium to say, “I learned one lesson today. And that is never follow a cartoonist on one of these panels!” I took it as a great compliment.

Macky in joy and sorrow

Macky Auditorium looms in my mind not only as a beautiful architectural edifice but as a symbol of artistic and intellectual enrichment, of doubt and hope, of joy and sorrow. I know that many others have similar memories of Macky. I am also sure that future generations of students, faculty and others who experience Macky’s special character will be grateful that a generous Colorado pioneer bequeathed this magnificent structure to us.

Here’s Macky Auditorium information.

Here’s an article and video about Macky’s 100-year history.

Carlton Stoiber (A&S’64, Law’69) is currently trekking in far southern Patagonia. He is a senior consultant with Talisman International, LLC, in Washington, D.C., where he lives.

Interested in writing a CU Voices article and sharing your CU connections with over 100,000 alumni? E-mail Marc here.

When I graduated from CU last spring, I enjoyed the idea of being free from the academic world, at least for a while. During my junior and senior year much of my inspiration and encouragement had come outside the classroom in volunteer contexts and I was eager for more. After studying abroad in Israel my junior year I dreamed of spending six months backpacking around Southeast Asia after graduation – taking, in other words, the “big trip” somewhere in the world that many young Israelis do after their army service. For the first time in my life, there was no academic calendar to schedule my adventures around.

My life as an alum began as I intended it to – I spent two weeks in the Dominican Republic doing service work to address issues in rural education, followed by six weeks in Israel volunteering with environmental groups. I was delighted by the open-ended future (and had a reoccurring mental picture of myself trekking around India with a rucksack) but while in Israel I realized I wanted to stay longer. My next step had many similarities to the first two months of freedom, but also integrated me back into an academic community.

In February I will be six months into a yearlong commitment as an intern at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies located on kibbutz Ketura in southern Israel. The institute is a nonprofit organization with an academic program for Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and internationals bringing together environmental and peace studies aimed at improving the political and environmental reality in the Middle East.

“I live a life without frills, work closely with others and am learning to work in a field that I care strongly about.”

I work in the alumni department, serving a network of more than 500 people who shared this experience and want to stay connected to each other and to their goals. I traverse the barriers between several existing communities here. I’m not a student but am integrated into the campus community as if I am. At the same time I’m a staff member at the institute, a teacher’s assistant for a course each semester and I participate in peace building seminars and field trips.

In addition, AIES is located on a kibbutz in the Arava Desert – picture a remote village of about 300 people in a strikingly quiet, natural desert. I transition between overlapping communities constantly. And all of them require intention, consciousness and an appreciation for community needs. I live a life without frills, work closely with others and am learning to work in a field that I care strongly about. Daily I try to connect my goals being here to my experiences of the past few years.

I am near a beautiful place I was at two years ago. I lovingly recall that semester abroad in Jerusalem my junior year during which I spent several weeks volunteering at a wildlife preserve, Hai-Bar Yotvata, that protects and preserves rare desert animals and which is part of the Israel Parks and Nature Authority. It was close to the kibbutz I’m at now. With me were 10 international volunteers and we became a close-knit group, working each day to beautify the visitor’s area by layering hand-mixed mud on the walls to cover the uninviting concrete and create a more natural desert look.

Some volunteers preferred other roles such as “group chef” and others tossed the tools aside and used their hands to crumble the clay as we prepared large batches of mud. I was one who felt that the more mud on my face, the better, and I was in heaven doing physical, hands-on work.

No matter what role an individual preferred in making the group function and finish the work, each person was strong and motivated to be spending their summer volunteering. However, there was a certain conversation sparked early on: how much were we really helping rare desert species survive by putting mud on the walls? It was difficult to see a connection between our efforts and the issue of species preservation.

Furthermore, as individuals we didn’t necessarily feel personally connected to this little section of Israel’s nature and the species that depend on its unique ecology to survive, though I was having the time of my life playing with mud while also having conversations with well-intentioned individuals. When the summer ended, I left Israel cleansed after many mud baths, but feeling I had just skimmed the surface of something important.

Upon returning to Boulder for my senior year at CU, I channeled this feeling by getting involved with campus student groups. Most significant, I became site leader for the CU chapter of Alternative Breaks, a national movement empowering college students to volunteer. My co-leader and I selected a team of 11 CU students and planned and organized a week-long spring break service trip to Catalina Island, Calif., off the coast of Los Angeles, where we would work with the Catalina Island Conservancy addressing environmental restoration and conservation.

“The communities that impacted me so much have provided a framework allowing me deeper access to the communities in which I now belong.”

Like at the wildlife reserve in Israel, I stepped outside my personal community to volunteer. However, this time we spent a semester preparing ourselves to function as a strong group, cultivating leadership skills and educating ourselves about our host organization and environmentalism in general. In addition to preparedness, we also engaged in intentional reflection while on the trip and reorientation to the issues after the trip.

Upon our arrival, our cohesive group had a great time painting the local airport on the high hills of Catalina. Despite the lighthearted atmosphere I felt my wheels turning in response to the work we were asked to do, just as had happened in Israel. I understood why both groups questioned our usefulness in each situation, yet a part of me always felt that my efforts, no matter how small, were making a positive impact.

With this group I felt better equipped to understand our effect on the community that hosted us. Each day of work I could see the individuals in my group going through a process, myself included. There was disillusionment and questioning at first, but a strong desire to connect. At the end of the week we spent two days building a fence that would prevent bison and deer from eating endemic plants that were struggling to re-grow after a devastating wildfire. By the time the week ended we could name many native species on the island, recite the history of the island and felt it was crucial for the California Conservancy to continue its work in protecting this unique eco-system.

We returned to campus clinging to the feeling of connecting to a new place and to each other and at first I felt a deep sense of loss. Yet somehow my feeling of connecting transferred to my feelings about campus. The thousands of people who walked by me felt less anonymous – they felt like potential. My group members, who I felt so close to after being with them for just nine days, had been anonymous just months before.

Suddenly, as a senior who had transferred to CU after two years at California State University at Monterey Bay, a very small school where I knew everyone, I was hanging out in the dorms, meeting my group members in the dining halls for breakfast, attending sorority dance performances and rallying my new friends to meet at a Conference on World Affairs session. I felt that a group of former strangers had somehow become inextricably accountable to one another, and I felt a greater level of access to the entire campus community because of it. I recognized the difference made by our volunteering efforts wasn’t just that we helped a conservation organization for one week (good, but not enough) – the difference was in us, as individuals.

“The strength in the experience and in the group pushed each of us forward on our own paths, and found a new direction.”

Voluntarism has truly shaped me ―I have reassessed the value of community, the importance of getting to know individuals in the communities I involve myself in, the value of hard work, of passion and believing in something and making commitments.

In an ironic twist today I live 10 minutes away from that same animal preserve of my junior year, and I’m at home in a community that has become my own. I admit I’m not overjoyed that part of my job is to be a teacher’s assistant (the classroom, remember, doesn’t have enough mud for me), but there are a million opportunities to engage in the type of community building and hands-on work that I like so much.

My dream of traveling abroad and moving freely from place to place shifted into a dream of traveling abroad and staying in one place for a long period. So I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing. The communities that impacted me so much have provided a framework allowing me deeper access to the communities in which I now belong.

Lindsey Zemler (Engl’10) lives in southern Israel and works at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. She grew up in Boulder and lived and studied in Monterey, Calif. , and Jerusalem before graduating from CU last May. While at CU she worked closely with the Volunteer Resource Center. Looking for a wildlife or social service volunteer opportunity? Lindsey recommends GoEco.

I grew up in Boulder in the shadow of the Flatirons. My free time was spent hiking, backpacking, skiing and rock climbing. One of my earliest memories is of being carried in a backpack on my mother’s back during a mountain hike, and the bottom seam split and spilled me in a startled heap onto the trail. (This was before there were toddler carriers. My mother literally cut two slits for my legs in the bottom of a regular knapsack and put me in it when I grew tired of hiking).

Some of my favorite childhood memories are of Saturday hikes with my father up Green Mountain or near Brainard Lake, the two of us exploring new trails or revisiting familiar ones, and ending the day back in Boulder with the ultimate treat – a chocolate-covered, cream-filled Long John at Roger’s Donuts on Pearl Street. A different kind of “treat” took the form of rainy days, a rare occurrence that enabled me to stay indoors and read to my heart’s content.

The Boulder campus was an everyday part of my life, since we lived less than a mile away and my father, Irving Weiss, was a math professor here. My elementary school, University Hill, was (and still is) across the street from the UMC and my high school, Boulder High, was a short hike or bike ride through campus and down the steep 17^th street hill. The campus was a never-ending source of adventure, from viewing old movies in the Cristol Chemistry building to attending music and theater performances to name a few.

I’ve been back in Boulder for six months now after taking off for college in the east when I was 18. And Boulder’s even better than I remembered. Much and yet nothing essential has changed since those earlier years. The emphasis on a healthy, active lifestyle is still here, strengthened by the addition of Open Space trails, city bike lanes and numerous fitness centers.

The campus is still a treasure-trove for me. Becoming executive director of the Alumni Association last year has made me realize more than ever what an amazing institution CU-Boulder is. The Heritage Center, a vibrant part of the Alumni Association, welcomes people to discover a wonderful array of CU history in an elegant, historical space. At the Museum of Natural History the dioramas of my childhood are gone, but in their place are the Discovery Corner and fascinating Southwestern textile exhibits.

Opera, orchestra and choral concerts, Shakespearean performances and the Conference on World Affairs are just a few of the other delights that CU holds for me. Treasures in the form of new buildings appear as I walk across campus each day to attend meetings in places such as the Visual Arts Center, with its wonderful jewel of an art museum, and the energy-filled, eclectically furnished Center for Community.

I’m very glad to be back in Boulder and to be part of the Forever Buffs family. I’ve had the opportunity to meet many alumni, both here in Boulder and around the country, and what always strikes me is the depth of pride and strong sense of loyalty that our Buffs have towards their alma mater. I hear fascinating stories of how they met their future spouse on campus, or how their lives were redirected by a particular course, or how the opportunity to take a leadership role in a student group shaped their character.

Many now want to give back to CU, returning to campus to talk with students about their careers, becoming involved in local alumni chapters, spreading the word about CU at local high school college fairs or raising money for scholarships. I’m also impressed with the number of alumni who have gone into the nonprofit sector, including over 3,000 Buffs who are Peace Corps alumni, one of the highest from any school in the U.S. I feel privileged to be part of such a vibrant, caring community.

As part of showing our new family pride, my husband Stephen and I just picked up our new customized license plates, which read, “4VRBUFS,” which is the closest we could come in seven letters to our Forever Buffs slogan. Our Old English Sheepdog, Manfred, is an official part of the CU-Boulder Alumni Association, appearing in our office’s annual holiday greeting card along with the rest of the staff (and their dogs). Our grandchildren received some sort of CU paraphernalia among their Christmas presents: a CU sleeper for our infant grandson and stuffed Ralphies for the older four.

As we begin this new year, I hope one of your New Year’s resolutions will be to stay closely connected to CU and to encourage other Buffs to do the same. I look forward to meeting many of you in the coming months. Go Buffs!

Deborah W. Fowlkes is executive director of the Alumni Association and a CU-Boulder assistant vice chancellor. She returned (permanently) to Boulder in July 2010 after growing up here. Prior to her current work she served as executive director of the Temple University Alumni Association and assistant vice president of Temple’s Alumni Relations office and before that in several positions at Duke University, from which she received her undergraduate and master’s degrees, in Comparative Literature/French Literature and Liberal Studies, respectively. Her father, Irving Weiss, is still enjoying the Boulder lifestyle at 91 years of age.

Eileen Brown had this comment after receiving our Buffalum Notes holiday greeting:

Thanks for the memories and the beauty of our campus and life there at one time and still.

I enjoyed climbing the back hill to my dorm (Sewell) after working at Fred’s Café for the day or evening.
Sure felt alive and assured that there were friends waiting for me there, a warm room and books to be studied before the end of the day.

Awesome how we measured our way through all of that: study, work, play and the harmony of living the life of a student of music.

Merry Christmas, Forever Buffs of all beliefs.
Eileen Rose Haffey Brown of 1956

It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. “It” refers to finding a sailor who had served on the USS Colorado during World War II, who was also a student or alum of the University of Colorado. In the mid-1990s, while serving on the CU alumni board, occasionally writing stories for the Alumnus (now Coloradan) magazine and being a CU-NROTC graduate and Naval officer, I wondered if such a person existed. After a two-year search I located Don Bloomquist (MechEngr’44) of Littleton, Colo., who fit the description of the man I was looking for. He has since died.

My goal was to make sure the third warship named after the state of Colorado was adequately recognized and artifacts from it preserved. The lack of recognition by the State of Colorado, which gave its name to the battleship, had left a bitterness with the sailors who served aboard the ship.

One of the interesting facts about Bloomquist was he worked at the Federal Center in Lakewood for a number of years, and he discovered one of the ship’s bells in storage at the Federal Center which eventually led to the bell being transferred to the University Memorial Center on the CU-Boulder campus.

In the course of my search for Bloomquist, I came in contact with the USS Colorado Alumni Association, a group of former sailors who, along with their wives and families, meet in annual reunions. One of the Association’s goals is to foster remembrance of the ship and the men who served on board.

There had been some other recognition. One of the former shipmates, Marine Chris Baker, author of Teakwood Decks (Susquehanna Publishers), a history of the USS Colorado, had collected a variety of photos and artifacts to donate to the Colorado Historical Society. There was an understanding on the part of the USS Colorado Alumni Association that the society would maintain a permanent display of ship artifacts in its collection, but the society maintains that such a promise was never made and that its responsibility was to preserve the items donated for posterity. Those photos and relics are available to view by appointment only.

The battleship USS Colorado was commissioned in 1923 and decommissioned in 1947. Its history is that of distinguished service, particularly in World War II. It was not in Pearl Harbor at the outbreak of the war in 1941 because it was being overhauled for modern warfare in the state of Washington. It saw service throughout World War II, however, particularly in the Pacific where it was active in 10 significant battles. It was struck by a “kamikaze” aircraft in November 1944 during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It was the first battleship in Tokyo Bay at the end of the war, but because the peace treaty was signed on the USS Missouri, it wasn’t recognized for the actual peace signing.

Prior to the war, the USS Colorado was the lead ship in the search for explorer Amelia Earhart in July 1937. Apparently CU President George Norlin (1919-1939) was aboard the ship during the search as part of a familiarization tour.

There are a number of items from the USS Colorado at the Veteran’s Lounge in the UMC at CU-Boulder. Particularly notable are the stern pilot’s wheel and the ship’s bell. The bell was made from copper pennies donated by Colorado school children. Later the bell was removed from the ship to prevent it from being damaged during warfare and mysteriously disappeared for several years.

The bell was found in 1947 inside a chapel in the jungles of the Philippines and was returned to the ship prior to its 1947 decommissioning. The bell was removed again before the ship was stripped and sold for scrap in 1959. Shortly thereafter, in 1960, the bell was presented to the State of Colorado by the U.S. Department of the Navy. In 1961 the state turned it over to CU and it has been in the UMC ever since.

Because the UMC is dedicated to those who served in the “great wars” the Veterans Lounge in the UMC became the host to various artifacts from the ship. With the backing of the USS Colorado Alumni Association and through the sponsorship by UMC director Carlos Garcia, several additions to the UMC were made. A waterline one-meter scale model of the U.S.S. Colorado was constructed by Dave Runkle in 1988 and donated to the Veteran’s Lounge by the U.S.S. Colorado Alumni Association in 2002. Each year on Veterans Day (Nov. 11), Garcia honors USS Colorado servicemen in a speech and calls out the items on display in the Veteran’s Lounge.

In 2003 a model of the ship was added to the Veterans Lounge. In 2004 what is known as the “Sunday Flag,” measuring 9 feet by 17 feet, as well as some other items, were donated to the university. In 2007, the UMC hosted a reunion for those who had served on the USS Colorado, one of the last reunions for these sailors, as the remaining men who served aboard the ship are in their late 80’s and early 90’s.

In addition, in order to develop an awareness of the role of the USS Colorado statewide, I undertook a project to develop a memorial for the ship at the State Capitol. This search resulted in a freestanding bench on the northeast corner of the State Capitol grounds. It was dedicated in March 1997 by Gov. Roy Romer (Law’52, HonDocHum’06) and was the last freestanding memorial to be allowed on State Capitol grounds

I have also helped to assemble additional photos of the USS Colorado in action along with other artifacts and have donated them to both the Broomfield and Fort Morgan Military History museums along with the Colorado Historical Society for preservation.

Finally, along with several veterans from the ship I assembled photos and artifacts that have become the focal point for the Naval Reserve quarterdeck at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colo., which was dedicated in May of 2010. Almost the entire display focuses on the service the USS Colorado provided. This is intentional, as many recruits from Colorado get their first visual experience of being in the Navy when they walk into the Buckley Navy Reserve Center and see the historical record of the ship.

Norris Hermsmeyer (Acct’67) has called Boulder his home for 50 years, although he has spent considerable time overseas with the Navy in Vietnam and as a church volunteer in India, Papua New Guinea, Madagascar and Kenya. As a community volunteer, he has been active with the CU-Boulder, Sister Cities and Rotary. He is still active as a Boulder Realtor. Norris and his wife have three wonderful college-age children.

Our sleek, sporty metal beast speeds on a deserted stretch of Hwy. 191, the asphalt a scar in the flat green valley, sculpted on one side by a rushing, metallic-gray river and on the other by jagged white mountains, heavy with late spring snow. It’s dusk-near-dark, and we’ve been driving nonstop for eight hours. A long haul from Colorado. We’re tired, and drooling of an earthy meal, a boxcar of cold-brewed Coors and soft beds.

Suddenly, a collection of lights — no, reflecting eyes! — appears from the side of the road. I barely see them in time to instinctively hit the brake, swerve to the center lane and . . . exhale a huge sigh of relief. Missed! Way too close. I glimpse in the rear-view mirror just in time to see a barreling 18-wheeler smash through the crossing herd. Carcasses and parts are airborne, randomly landing on both sides of the highway.

The Mack-battering ram doesn’t miss a piston stroke—and apparently a deer—and plows through, barely scathed. Life and death on the way up to the great Yellowstone National Park. My buddy sarcastically pleads, “You might wanna slow down.” I set the cruise at 75, still shaking at our near slaughter. This is not the way we will go down. We have to ski Yellowstone first.

It’s mud season in Jackson Hole and it seems half the town is AWOL for some well-deserved rest — somewhere exotic, we hope—after a long winter season. The few that remain are still partying hearty. Beers at the Silver Dollar Saloon are never dull. It’s open mic night and the locals compete for the worst voice of the West. Not even alcohol soothes the ear ache and it’s time to go. Wake-up call is set for 4 a.m. While the ghost town sleeps we sneak out to Grand Teton National Park, a brief warm-up before Yellowstone.

We decide to get our mountain legs under us with a predawn hike to get up close and personal with Grand Teton’s abundant fauna. Huge herds of elk, pronghorn antelope and bison are on the move, relentlessly making their way north. Africa is famous for its wild migrations, and so often we forget that we have our own such miracle here in our own backyard, one that rivals that continent’s TV-hyped wildebeest exodus.

We’re transfixed by the sight and sound and are literally moved by the experience, feeling the ground trembling under our feet like a small earthquake. The Grand Teton — jutting skyward without distracting foothills — paints a spectacular background, shining in the morning light, with its impossible verticality and grandeur.

The moraine lakes surrounding the 13er are still mostly frozen, but one gigantic moose wasn’t. She comes out for a morning drink, struggling to find an opening in the ice. What a glorious animal. So big, tall and majestic. She gets her ice-cold, hard-earned drink, then disappears into a break in the steep mountainside. Gone in an instant, surviving, like the heavy snow hiding in the forest. I wonder where she goes. Life is tough in the Tetons. The long winters, the scarce food, predators and then us — humans — maybe the biggest threat of all.

Our ski date with the mountain beckons, so it’s back in the car for a short, scenic drive to Yellowstone. Skis shouldered, we soldier in from the parking lot. The park is open, but not many tourists have ventured this far this early. Old Faithful doesn’t care and explodes on time. My mate and I take pictures of the people on the benches, those waiting for the brief eruption. They’re so focused on the postcard moment that they don’t even bother looking around. To us it seems they’re looking in the wrong direction. The attraction shouldn’t be that attraction; it should be the surrounding beauty.

Onward and upward. Our mountain destination is on the remote east side of Yellowstone. where even less people step outside their cars. No pretty geysers or colorful hot pools. The perfect spot to strap on boots and sticks and ski into the wild.

A solitary bison grazes by a large river. A pocket of elk defends a nearby hill, nervously eyeing two strangers in curious gear encroaching on their land. The spring snow is soft and heavy. Jackets and helmets way too warm for the steep climb. And it finally hit us, we’re out of the protection of an enclosed car, walking on dangerous ground. Lions and tigers and bears — okay, bears and wolves — could be anywhere and wouldn’t be easily scared by a flying pole or a dull ski edge. But we’re not here to fight the beasts. We’re here to ski among them in their pristine environment where hopefully wild animals and our wild idea can coexist. It’s about respect, not harm.

And respect is what we get when we cut through a bison herd grazing on an unexpected patch of grass in the sea of snow and ice. They look at us warily, alert to our presence but don’t react . . . meaning charge. Our hearts beat faster, but apparently theirs don’t. We gratefully hike through.

We’re finally on top. The view is indescribable, with the Teton Range in the distance covering most of the rim that encloses us. Where the hot geysers erupt, the green, flush grass offers a welcome oasis for the Yellowstone menagerie ―a peaceful contrast to other areas of the park that are still engulfed in heavy snow, and rivers and streams roar with powerful spring snow melt.

We descend swiftly — and respectfully — through our newly met friends. Again, the indigenous Yellowstone residents pay little heed but their eyes follow our “s” shaped turns in natural curiosity. What in the hell are these creatures doing on our land? Why are they going so fast? And where are they going? We, in turn, grin all the way to the bottom, feeling as one with the nature around us.

By the time we regretfully return to civilization, the sun is setting and darkness is filling the space around us. We seriously debate a second run, but it’s impossible. Headlamp-hiking is too insane. Not worth the risk. We’ve had our unbelievable wild encounter, and it’s a long way home. We bid adieu to the lone bison that has guarded our car the whole time, and we climb back into the comfort — and safety — of our vehicle. Heated seats, dry clothes, cold drinks and plenty of snacks.

Life is easy for us. Life is tough for the animals of Yellowstone. Or is it the other way around? We’ve skied among them and briefly witnessed their struggles and serenity, which are not unlike our own travails and moments of peace. We like their chances as much as ours. So, we assume, do the bald eagle we see perched on a parking lot post and the coyote dancing in the distance as we leave the park. We salute our new friends of Yellowstone. Predators and prey.

In 2001 Pietro Simonetti (Bus’98) reached the top of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere (23,000 ft.). In 2002, Pietro and four friends set a Guinness World Record by skiing all Colorado’s 28 resorts in 80 hours, 41 minutes to raise funds for the National Sports Center for the Disabled. He traveled to Makalu Base Camp in Nepal to undergo a series of tests to study the effects of high altitude on his own body, research sponsored by CU-Boulder, which led to improvements to the high-altitude Gamow bag used to reduce effective altitude in cases of sicknesses. Pietro was one of two skiers on the Kilimanjaro expedition of Across the Atlas, the nonprofit with which he works. The organization supports groups with substantial monetary donations raised through adventure expeditions that span the globe.

At the age of 2, I was living in Mississippi with my family. Nineteen years later I was graduating from CU-Boulder. Some important things and historic events happened in between. These are worth talking about.

My background includes an amazing family. At a time when few Southern women actually worked outside the home, my mom did, and like my dad, for at least six days each week. Bumps along the way included a bout with polio and a December tornado that passed through the middle of downtown destroying our family’s livelihood, a small retail store.

Yet what really set my parents apart was their reaction to these adverse events and their deep community involvement. I believe they saw this as giving back to a town that had embraced them and provided them with opportunities. And, they made certain that seeds of these same values were implanted in me.

This all happened in Vicksburg, Miss., where life was generally sweet and secure, unless, of course, one happened to be black. In the South then, segregation was the norm. These were the days of “colored” and “white” signs on water fountains and on restroom doors, of housing areas racially delineated by railroad tracks and proximity to anything structurally undesirable or hazardous, of limiting access to city pools, libraries, YMCAs, restaurants and churches by race. Out-of-date textbooks were deemed good enough to be passed on to the minority schools. Buses had understood seating arrangements and job “openings” really weren’t. It didn’t seem fair. I noticed.

After high school I ventured out, but not too far, just across state line to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where my brother was enrolled. These were the early ’60s. Socially, college life at Alabama was one big party, and academically, it was a breeze, so why my discomfort? While there I was confronted with Gov. George Wallace standing on campus steps insisting that THIS university would never be integrated. The state embraced this mentality. It was time for me to go.

After working for the National Park Service in Yellowstone for the summer, I enrolled at CU in 1962.  Mary Mothershed (Soc’64), a beautiful, accomplished African American woman, was named homecoming queen. Equal opportunity. What a concept. I had selected well. CU and I were a fit.

After graduating I was off again, this time to a teaching job in Coronado, Calif., with new scenery, new friends and little time to reflect back on my time at CU. I had moved on, or so I thought, before meeting and marrying a Colorado native.

Next, work took us to the Dallas area, and in 1989 our only child, Heidi, bypassed offers from a couple of “top” schools and shocked us by asking to attend CU. We agreed. She enrolled and shortly afterward we received an invitation to a Dallas reception hosted by then CU President Gordon Gee. If you’ve ever met President Gee, you’ll understand. That did it. I was back.

Soon I received a postcard invitation to a football watch party. I don’t remember who the Buffs were playing, but with a husband out of town and a daughter in Boulder, why not? There were maybe a dozen people there; I knew none of them, and they were not particularly welcoming. My southern roots kicked in as I thought to myself, “They’re not getting rid of me this easily and it doesn’t have to be this way.” I’ve been involved ever since, striving to help create that welcoming atmosphere and to reach out to CU alumni and friends throughout the Dallas Fort Worth area.

We’ve organized crowds and events to support our student athletes (and fans) practically every time their feet have touched down in Texas, Oklahoma or Shreveport, La. We’ve orchestrated local Big 8/Big12 events and helped host visiting Buff fans for the Cotton Bowl. Our alumni turn out in large numbers to take part in high school student recruitment nights.

This Dallas-Fort Worth chapter awards a small scholarship annually to local area student(s) attending CU. That money is raised, literally one Buffalo tattoo at a time or by having raffles and occasional yard sales. These funds are matched by the Alumni Association and Parent Association. We’re mindful of our local/CU image, that of contributing to our community by volunteerism as a chapter. This has a dual benefit – good for CU and for us as individuals.

Today my husband Gary, a retired pilot who still works occasionally, and I remain in Dallas. I took “a break” from teaching to try my hand at real estate. Three decades later, I remain an active broker. We’re fortunate as our Buff daughter, Heidi Restivo (EnvCon’93) and her family live close by in Austin, Texas, the best weird city in America, so we always have four legitimate excuses to visit the beautiful Hill Country. I would say that we rescue dogs, and we do regularly, but in truth, they rescue us. This and other causes keep us here, in spite of the wretched summer heat. We caught a break recently by taking our young grandsons to CU Family Camp, high in the Rocky Mountains. What an experience. We highly recommend it to everyone.

CU obviously continues to play a big role in our lives. We’re Lifetime members of the Alumni Association and the Directors Club. I’m proud to have served a term as a member of the board of directors at the Association. We’re enthusiastic backers of CU sports and even bigger fans of our student athletes. I believe those “seeds” that my parents implanted by example have kicked in, and have had much to do with my efforts in behalf of CU. To be honest, and I’m convinced that this is the case in most volunteerism, I have gotten far more return in terms of the wonderful friends we’ve made than I’ve ever given. These include our Dallas-Fort Worth Buffs and also some terrific people who work for the university.

If anybody asks, my best advice is that regardless of where you live, if at all possible get involved or involved again with CU. Our lives are richer for it.

So, thank you, CU. I’m happy to be back, and I’m always proud to be a Buff!

Author Patricia Bianco (MThtr’65) has some great memories from the '60s.

I was a residence adviser for students living on the side of Sewall Hall in 1962-63. My little “apartment” was just off the huge living room. Sewall was an upper-class women’s residence hall. We called it Menopause Manor. The women and I obeyed most of the rules and had wonderful times together.

Sewall had beautiful furniture. One of the stellar furnishings was a grand piano. It was regularly tuned but few used it. I’d taken piano — classical — as a child. Hated it. The grand drew me in though. I began to play bits of old, memorized pieces. Finally I bought a couple of jazz books and went off in a new musical direction. I remember studying in my room, playing to relax, studying, playing. . . sometimes I play now for Semester at Sea voyages — in the piano lounge — an avocation that began in Sewall.

Women had curfew hours. Another rule was, we had to wear skirts to dinner every night. The winter of 1962 was “wicked” cold. Revolt was in the air. I made a deal with the residents that they could wear long pants (not jeans) to dinner every day it was below freezing. No one wore skirts for a long time.

The 1962-63 school year was one of transition, with unrest, hi-jinx and panty raids. Students used to trash the dorms during the panty raids. If anything seemed to be brewing we had a “lock-down.” One evening the head of housing called me. Students were throwing rocks at the president’s house, where Quigg Newton lived (now Koenig Alumni Center). Would I walk over to see how much trouble was brewing?

When I arrived, folks were tossing small stones at the president’s windows, but it was mostly a party. As I stood there watching, patrol vans rolled in, police jumped out and formed a ring around students — and I was in it. No one was impressed that I was an RA. My one phone call to the head of housing saved me, but the next day, on the front page of the student newspaper (or possibly it was the Boulder Camera) was a picture of the students being arrested, including me. I sent the picture home to Mom and Dad.

The corrugated outer texture of Sewall gave finger and toe holds to ardent swains who became human flies after hours. I dug them out of closets and from under beds when folks reported them on the floors. But I just threw them out and didn’t bring charges. C’est la vie. I did report a mountain climber who scaled the fountain side of Sewall and broke one of the sandstone blocks as he rappelled down from his love or lust’s second-floor window.

Many of us were broke and far from home the winter of ’62. Thanksgiving approached and it was depressing — no family — eating in the dorm. Sewall had a large, magnificent dining room with elegant furniture. I called a dorm meeting with the women who would be staying with me for Thanksgiving. We decided to “dress” for dinner. The staff pitched in and there were candles and, really, a banquet. I remember the fabulous food, sugared grapes, “jeweled” fruit and music, to this day. Eyes sparkling, we read, recited, or shared a memory around our banquet table. With the joy of frank astonishment, we became a family for that evening, which continued into a pajama-filled night of talk, songs and games in the living room.

I hope these words are poignant. My life’s journey led from Sewall to marriage and Spain. Later I became a University of Pittsburgh professor of theater for nearly 30 years. I’ve never returned to little Boulder. Tulagi, The Sink, The Terrace and Sewall remain forever unchanged in my eclectic memory.

Patricia Bianco (MThtr’65) earned her doctorate in theater at Florida State and taught theater and was the department chair at the University of Pittsburgh for many years. Now she lives in Quincy, Mass., where she’s a full time artist. Check out her website. She travels with Semester at Sea teaching world theater and performance, and has circumnavigated the globe with the program three and a half times. She has one daughter and two grandchildren who she adores.

A bottle rocket launched in my mind the night I first thought of going to learn Arapaho by living with an elder on the Wind River Reservation in central western Wyoming. I lay there thinking about how it would be to visit the old heart of our continent, experiencing a different side of the culture I saw splashed around the gift shops in Manitou Springs, Colo., where I grew up wandering the same mountains the Arapaho once inhabited. It struck me suddenly that I could actually go live on the reservation with support from my doctoral work at CU’s Center for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the West (CSILW).

It made such sense: in order to sufficiently document the language I must learn to be respectful in Native America just as much as I need to learn the language. Arapaho, which flows with sounds of wind and water, is teetering at the brink of the forgotten, deemed “critically endangered” by the United Nation’s Atlas of Endangered Languages. Fewer than 200 speakers remain and not one child speaks it fluently.

With this mellifluous and critically endangered language right in our backyards, some homestay program must place learners with the few fluent elders, right? Wrong. Shockingly, no organization facilitates homestays to learn Native American languages, so I pioneered my own. I asked representatives of the Northern Arapaho Council of Elders if I could live with an elder in exchange for basic eldercare (I have no medical training).

Learning Arapaho for the reservation

Four months later in August of 2008, my adventure on Wind River Reservation began. For several weeks that August I spent every waking moment learning Arapaho and experiencing the amazing world of Native America. Since then I have returned many times to stay with my family and continue CSILW’s documentation research for the archives at the University of London’s School for Oriental and Asian Studies.

The elder who accepted me rewrote my understanding of the world, particularly of my role in it, beginning with the month-long homestay and continuing today. When I met Crawford White (Eagle), one of the Four Old Men who share the highest tier of ceremonial leadership for Northern and Southern Arapaho Nations, he was lying on scraps of carpet outside his sweat lodge, which looked like an igloo covered with old blankets and tarps.

He was smoking in the cool dusk, taking a break amid moist heat and prayer. He told me to speak, reminded me the language is sacred, looked me straight in the eye ― his way, in a sense, of asserting dominance over me ― and decided with a smile that he would help me. He was busy with matters of the tribe, but I could come listen to the Council of Elders and was welcome in his home with his children.

Time on Wind River flies like the heeyei, the hawk – distant, a thought that comes and passes in the blink of an eye. My expectations were entirely unlike the experience that followed. The openheartedness with which I was invited into Crawford’s family upended the first of my misconceptions – that an outsider remains an outsider. I soon learned that the truest, oldest American values may have been born in Native America ― the twin virtues of spirituality and familial cohesion.

Mother Theresa once said America was the most impoverished nation she had visited, despite its affluence, because of our familial division and spiritual isolation. But I feel Native America defies that description entirely. The love there convinced me beyond doubt that there is no real poverty when we fight for each other more passionately than we fight for ourselves.

The force of that love held me up when my mother died, five years after she contracted West Nile Virus during Boulder’s 2003 epidemic. Her passing unseamed my mind with a searing unlike anything I could have imagined, but the support I felt from the reservation imparted an unwavering strength, an active concern and kindness that allowed me to survive that darkest of times. My Arapaho family even threw a healing ceremony for me the way they do for each other, showing the depth of their caring by cooking and spending hours in preparation and prayer to help me shoulder the stress of sadness.

Partly because healing ceremonies are led in Arapaho, language revitalization is critical for the traditional methods of keeping depression and ill-health at bay. Elders have told me that the loss of the language will result in the loss of the Arapaho spirit from the face of the earth.

Linguistically, English and Arapaho also highlight very different aspects of a concept, so spirituality doesn’t translate clearly at all. For instance, both nii’oo’ and hii3eti’ translate as “it is good,” but nii’oo’ might describe a good car while hii3eti’ describes something morally uplifting, as in “it is good that we are together.”

Identity as language

Because identity is embedded in language, elders say learning to speak strengthens the self-respect of children and adults alike, and encourages them to value and adhere to traditionally healthy ways of living. People make vows to live respectfully because ceremonies require it; I heard a young man describe holding his anger in check when another man provoked him because he had vowed to behave kindly as a member of a ceremonial group. People break addictions and fast to honor the Creator, so empowering young people to understand Arapaho is one way Elders strive to protect children. I watched grandparents’ eyes shine when little ones at the new Arapaho Immersion School repeated their words ― language revitalization stimulates loving intergenerational interaction, contributing to familial cohesion. When we value our ancestors, we value ourselves, and self-respect is the strongest protection against depression and the resulting drug abuse and suicide that can devastate reservation life.

In addition to early morning Arapaho lessons at Crawford’s bedside, I was included in many fascinating activities. I discovered that sweat lodge ceremonies are really prayer meetings in pitch blackness. The total effect is one of vulnerability, of opening. When I took a break between rounds, the prairie breeze and the soft whispering of grasses lulled me into a deep peace, very like strong meditation. I learned to cut corn husks into “papers” for tobacco-filled prayer cigarettes. I picked chokecherries from bushes on the roadside for use in traditional gravy. And I was taught to identify the smooth grandfather stones suitable for ceremonial use. Crawford’s youngest children, young teenagers and twins Bailey and Marcus, took me to a rock water slide that ends in a waterfall hidden up a canyon where the tribe has played for generations.

I learned and am continuing to learn cultural norms but this problem is amplified by the deceiving surface-level similarity between mainstream culture and reservation life. Families watch television together, teenagers wear baggy pants with boxers showing, Crawford even texts the many young people who love him – but underlying differences are very powerful, and the pulse of life on the reservation has a distinctly exotic feel that reminds me of my undergraduate student exchange to Ghana.

Women are extremely modest, often covering their bodies from the neck to the toes in the steaming heat of a sweat lodge. Behaviors that typically hold no sexual connotation in mainstream American culture, such as sprawling on a couch or lying on the floor watching television, are interpreted as being directly suggestive; my ignorance of those subtleties compounded the misunderstandings I had with other women.

The importance of nonverbal communication

Other offenses are equally hard to avoid, since they involve unconscious behaviors. Eye contact is seen as a sign of respect in popular American culture (as shown by the phrase “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”) but it is understood by the Arapaho as it is understood in nature: a sign of conflict, a threat, a stab at dominance. Conversations are much slower because interrupting is so disrespectful that the listener withholds their response an extra few seconds to be sure the speaker is really finished.

Nonverbal communication always means more than words, and as a linguist I should have anticipated that behavior and body language could send very different messages than I intended. Despite the breathtaking complexity of the Arapaho language, unspoken Arapaho proved the hardest to learn, and I am deeply grateful to those who had the patience to teach me and forgive my missteps.

Crawford also taught me powerful lessons of forgiveness and hope, primarily by example. Despite the way his people have been treated by the United States government, he is a VietNam veteran with three purple hearts who has a quilt of American flags hanging in his bedroom. He often told me wonooyoo’uusi’, wonooyoo’uunetiit – it is a new day; it is a new life.

That “life is new” belief inspired me to try for another lifelong dream, so I interned with Rosetta Stone’s Endangered Language Program. From September to December 2009 I worked at their headquarters where I helped design Navajo language software, which was exhilarating. My coworkers taught me their fields of expertise with startling eagerness; a high-ranking journalist gave me one-on-one writing lessons, the lead photographer spent lunch hours explaining aperture and shutter speed and media developers showed me how to edit video and sound recordings. The momentum of the experience led to an even bigger success – I secured an internship with the United Nations in its Endangered Language Programme. I have had to postpone acceptance for financial reasons, but I hope to work with the Brazilian office doing Amazonian fieldwork before completing my doctorate.

If you would like to participate in linguistic philanthropy, CU’s Center for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the West can help point you in the right direction. It certainly led me there. Go here for an article in Indian Country News about the work of the center.

Finn Thye (Psych’01, MLing’09) is pursuing a joint doctorate in linguistics and cognitive science at CU-Boulder. This summer she is searching for speakers of indigenous Latin American languages in the Denver area so CU’s new crop of field linguists can gain practical experience in documentation. She hopes to enrich the public esteem of indigenous heritage as a means of promoting the self-valuation of disenfranchised communities.

What’s unforgettable about your CU-Boulder experience?  Check out Chris Dea’s (Jour’09) entertaining music video, “Boulder the talented, creative and bold.” It will bring you back to your good ol’ CU days.

Assistants were Nicole Dietz (Jour‘09) and Michael McCarthy, a Leeds School of Business graduate. The project was his thesis for a Technology Arts and Media capstone class.

Watch the video at YouTube.

CU-Boulder announced that Deborah W. Fowlkes (pronounced “folks”) has been named executive director of the University of Colorado Alumni Association. Fowlkes, who will assume the post on July 26, currently serves as assistant vice president for alumni relations and executive director of the Temple University Alumni Association in Philadelphia.

“We are delighted to welcome Deborah Fowlkes to CU-Boulder,” says Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Julie Wong, to whom Fowlkes will report. “We are excited to have a leader of her breadth of experience with two great institutions – and strong ties to CU-Boulder – ready to take our dynamic alumni association to the next level of success.”

Boulder Daily Camera story

CU-Boulder official press release:

Deborah Fowlkes named executive director of alumni association

The University of Colorado at Boulder today announced that Deborah W. Fowlkes (pronounced “folks”) has been named executive director of the University of Colorado Alumni Association. Fowlkes, who will assume the post on July 26, currently serves as assistant vice president for alumni relations and executive director of the Temple University Alumni Association in Philadelphia.

“We are delighted to welcome Deborah Fowlkes to CU-Boulder,” said Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Julie Wong, to whom Fowlkes will report. “We are excited to have a leader of her breadth of experience with two great institutions – and strong ties to CU-Boulder – ready to take our dynamic alumni association to the next level of success.”

Fowlkes grew up in Boulder. She is a graduate of Boulder High School and the daughter of retired CU mathematics Professor Irving Weiss.  Since July 2005, she has served in the top alumni relations position at Temple University, where she is responsible for university-wide alumni relations and heads outreach efforts to the school’s 265,000 alumni.

Prior to her position at Temple University, Fowlkes worked for almost two decades at Duke University, where she served as director of alumni education and travel (1999-2005), director of alumni continuing education (1991-99), assistant director for alumni admissions (1989-91) and first reader in the admissions office (1986-90).

She holds a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and French literature and a master’s degree in liberal studies from Duke.

“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” said Fowlkes. “I grew up on CU-Boulder’s lively and stimulating campus, so I look forward to working with our alumni and the CU-Boulder administration to ensure that same vibrancy continues to define the CU alumni experience at every level.”

The executive director of the CU-Boulder Alumni Association is responsible for building and maintaining a leading alumni association, expanding CU-Boulder’s relationship with its 240,000 alumni and 30,000 students through the “Forever Buffs” initiative, serving as publisher of the Coloradan alumni magazine, and supporting an alumni communications and engagement strategy as part of CU-Boulder’s Flagship 2030 Strategic Plan.

The post is currently held on an interim basis by Ron Stump, who formerly served as CU-Boulder’s vice chancellor for student affairs, and who has overseen the organizational transition of the Alumni Association from the independent CU Foundation to the university administration over the past two years.

“Where to next?” my family and friends asked me after I returned home in April 2008 from a four-month stay among the cloud forests of Monteverde , Costa Rica. “I don’t know, maybe Antarctica is next on the list?” I would sarcastically answer. I knew a few people who had made the epic journey south but I never thought I would actually get there, certainly not while I was a CU student.

But after a while I started to daydream about the cold and dry southern tip of our planet. I talked to friends who had been there. They told me if I really wanted to go, I certainly could. That was all the encouragement I needed. In a matter of, well, quite a few months I was shivering on the enormous continent of Antarctica.

Getting hired and physically qualifying for the United States Antarctic Program is a long process. It took over six months. There were stacks of paperwork and tons of doctor appointments to attend.

When I was finally hired, I hopped on an airplane bound for Christchurch, New Zealand on Oct. 13, 2009. From Christchurch I took a military plane down to McMurdo Station in eastern Antarctica. This would be my new home for the following five months.

McMurdo Station, on the Ross Ice Shelf where it meets the Ross Sea, is essentially a work camp where up to 1,000 people live during the summer.  It’s the largest station in Antarctica. (Eight countries claim territory in Antarctica and researchers from 27 countries spend time there.) Everyone at McMurdo works 10-hour days six days a week as a support team for the scientists. As you can imagine, most of the work is labor intensive and your one day off is a good time to relax and recreate. I spent most of my days off playing basketball and recovering from the Saturday night party.

My job on the ice was as a general assistant for operations. Every day was different. Some days I worked with the fuels team and other days with engineers working to solve problems on the roads made of ice and compacted snow. I also worked a lot on the general town infrastructure. Twice I got the chance to leave McMurdo and go to research camps in various parts of the continent.

The first time I left town, I went to a research camp in the middle of Eastern Antarctica. The camp was named AGAP (Antarctica’s Gamburtsev Province Project), where researchers use ground-penetrating radar on a mountain range located two miles beneath the ice sheet. It’s located at roughly 14,000 feet above sea level in one of the most remote places on the planet, and about 20 people are there at any one time.

Since AGAP is so high, I had to acclimatize my body at the South Pole, which is 9,000 feet above sea level. This took three days. During these days, I had to take it easy and take a prescription drug called Diamox. While at the South Pole, I prepared mentally to be in arguably the most remote place on the planet during the Thanksgiving holiday. I knew I was going to be at a place that is unbelievably flat and white. I also knew that I would be staying in a tent for 12 days in a place that doesn’t get much warmer than minus 35 degrees.

Once at AGAP, the carpenter team and I took on the challenge of uncovering 12 tent-like structures that had been buried by snow drifts over a long winter. It took us 11 very long and strenuous days. Thankfully we got Thanksgiving Day off. On turkey day we ate a full feast made on three Coleman camping stoves. Truly astonishing! That day, I also got the chance to call my family from a satellite phone. As you would think, my mother was pretty surprised to answer the phone and hear me on the other line.

After dinner and my phone call, I decided to take a walk a mile outside of camp. This was honestly the most remote and alone I have ever felt. I kneeled down and listened to the wind howling at my back. I took a moment to reflect on this incredible journey I was on. As I thought, I began to tear up. I was growing as a person every day I spent on the ice. I felt I was learning more and more and that the only boundaries in this life are the ones you impose upon yourself.  As each day passed, my work ethic and attitude in general were becoming stronger and more solidified.

Upon my return back to McMurdo, my boss explained to me that in a couple of weeks I would be embarking once again to another research camp. This time I would be going to WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet) Divide. There I would be helping sustain a comfortable style of living for the scientists who were doing research using ice cores.

When I arrived at WAIS, I was very surprised at the size of the camp. About 50 people worked and lived there. My job was to assist in any way I could. Some days I worked with the fuel technician or helped in the oil drilling process. Most days though, I worked with the heavy equipment mechanic. This was very different work than I had ever done.

Before WAIS Divide, I was extremely ignorant on the subject of mechanics. While there though, I quickly learned heaps about the subject. It was pretty neat to do my first oil change on a large bulldozer. I would have never thought that changing oil was as simple as unscrewing a filter. Man did I learn the hard way though that you need to keep a good grip if you don’t want all the oil to end up covering the engine compartment.

I spent Christmas, New Years and the following three weeks out at WAIS Divide. What a wonderful time. Christmas dinner consisted of duck and prime rib followed by an array of desserts. Antarctica was special, you know? Some nights I sat and ate with an award-winning scientist and other nights with a town janitor. Never a dull moment.

When I got back to McMurdo Station, the penguins were out and there was open water in front of the town. I saw almost all of the Antarctic wildlife in my last three weeks in town. Emperor penguins molted by the ice runway. Whales breached in the open water. Skuas (Antarctic sea gulls) dive bombed people walking outside with food. What a magical time those last few weeks were. And what a great send off.

On my way home, I stopped off in New Zealand for five weeks and Australia for four. In New Zealand I bought a car with a great friend from the Antarctic ice and snow times. We toured around, hiking and taking in the sights. In Australia, I spent most of my time in Sydney visiting my girlfriend — who was studying there — and surfing nearly every day. I got the chance to get to Darwin (northeastern tip of Australia) long enough to see a few crocodiles and nearly melt in the 95 degree heat with 95 percent humidity. After enjoying my travels in the southern hemisphere, I came back to the U.S. long enough to see my friends in beautiful Boulder, my parents in windy Chicago and my brother in the rainy Pacific Northwest. I truly made it around the world.

While visiting with my parents, my father asked me what I got out of the whole trip. I didn’t really know how to answer at the time. After reflecting for a while, I realized that I learned that anything is possible so long as you put in a good solid effort. I also learned that this world is a wonderful place full of excitement around every corner. Sometimes you just need a little flat and a little white to realize it.

Jack Vertovec grew up in Littleton, Colo. His parents were the ones who inspired him to travel as much as possible. He will be a junior anthropology and Spanish double major at CU in the fall. In the future he plans on continuing his travels and hopes to combine his two majors and work in Central or South America.

From Michael Charles “Chuck” Hursch (CompSci’88) Larkspur, Calif.

Regarding the open space article in the December 2009 Coloradan, I was an undergraduate physics student of professor Al Bartlett in 1982-83. I see he still wears his trademark bolo tie. I don’t recall being aware of his involvement with open space, but on a related issue, exponential population growth, his remarks on the topic carry with me to this day. It is something I think of frequently, and the images of professor Bartlett down at the lectern discussing this powerful fascinating topic are in my thoughts.

The doubling time of a population undergoing exponential growth can be approximated by the simple formula of 70 divided by the growth rate. The Coloradan article says that Boulder’s growth rate in 1956 was 6 percent yearly, implying a doubling time of roughly 11 to 12 years. Such a powerful small number would take the Boulder population from 32,000 in 1957 to 64,000 in 1968 and 128,000 around 1980, assuming the growth rate remained constant. I believe the Boulder population was actually around 80,000 around 1980, so the growth obviously slowed.

As a teenager growing up in Denver in the early 1970s, I remember riding in my mother’s car in the vicinity of the interchange of I-25 and Hwy. 6 and telling her that I had decided that there were really getting to be a lot more cars on the road. Colorado’s population at that time was roughly two million, mostly along the Front Range corridor. A few years ago I read on the internet that Colorado’s projected population for 2020 was about six million, presumably with most from Fort Collins to Pueblo. I nearly fell out of my chair! If this were to mean something like 8 million by 2030 (a not unlikely prospect), it would mean two doublings had occurred in the 60 years from 1970-2030, or one doubling in 30 years, implying a growth rate of a bit more than 2% per year. Such a small number…

In 1989, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to take a software job. I found myself in a major metropolitan area with about, you guessed it, six million people, depending on how one defines the Bay Area. I was overwhelmed with the number of people. San Jose (900,000 to 1 million), San Francisco (800,000), Oakland (300,000-400,000) and innumerable smaller cities of 25,000-100,000, one after the other, carpet the landscape. Eight to 10-lane wide freeways running between endless sound walls, dense suburban subdivisions and office parks and shopping centers and car-sale lots on the other side of those walls, mile after mile, tens of miles to the next California-style triple-decker freeway interchange. When I was first out here, traveling one of those freeways, especially at night, down in South Bay (Silicon Valley) or over in East Bay, refrains of “all alone in the … Big City” would ring in my head as I felt like I was in a tube with a mass of other cars moving down the road.

The Bay Area is roughly the size of the Colorado Front Range corridor, maybe within a factor of two, depending on how you slice it. The typography is quite different, however, from the flat high plains and piedmont of the Front Range. For one, there is the large bay and estuary in the middle. Flat areas rim the Bay and valleys extend away from it – these are where most of the population lives.

Mountainous typography upwards of 4,000 feet is outside of that. It is a very hilly area. It is amazing what gets built out here. But once one gets beyond the maze of freeways and shopping malls, and lets their eyes rest upon the vast acres of open space in the oak-studded hills, with the fog rolling in like a river from the coast over the hills and through the Golden Gate, the Bay Area and Babylon by the Bay, the world takes on a beauty all its own. Part of what makes this area what it is and livable are these visions.

For the last 18 years I have been fortunate to live near open space lands. From my apartment door, all I have to do is cross one parking lot and then I can hike in open space with no cars, their noise and fumes, for seven miles over mountain ridges and valleys to the Pacific coast, or take a different turn to explore thousands of acres of chaparral-covered hillsides or redwood-filled valleys. For several years, part of my commute to work consisted of walking through the edge of this open space. This is one of the main reasons I have lived here this long.

Since I moved out here to the Bay Area, I have been between Denver and Boulder, along the turnpike, only two or three times, notably 1999 and 2008. What were once open fields back in the ’60s and ’70s are now extensive housing developments and office parks, particularly near Broomfield and to the south and east, as I remember it. It really made me sit up and take notice. The character of the area is changing. The Denver area is turning into a big city, on track to those epitomes of sprawl, Houston and Los Angeles.

Exponential population growth, open space, quality of life…

Thanks, Professor Bartlett. Memories of many of your lectures remain with me some 30 years later, and will be with me the rest of my life.

Michael Charles “Chuck” Hursch (CompSci’88)

Larkspur, Calif.

Letter from Maxwell D. Epstein (Soc’54)

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of “HH” is that there is hardly a day when I do not think about him—something he said or something he did. The reason he had such a profound effect on my young life is that he put into words what I thought and lacked words to say. Here I was, a young Jewish boy from Denver with a businessman father and a Southern Belle mother, suddenly exposed to a powerful, iconic radical, who spoke fearlessly in golden tones, and let the arrows fall where they may.

When I met Howard by attending one of his classes, I was a business major who thought he might go into his father’s cap-manufacturing business. The first time I made an excuse to visit Howard in his office, hoping to get acquainted, he greeted me by leaning back in his chair and putting his feet on the desk, almost in my face. I assumed this was some sort of test of my mettle, and so ignored the intended insult and carried on as if nothing had happened. If it was a test, I apparently passed, because we did become acquainted.

Howard was a professor of sociology at CU-Boulder, where he was generally regarded as the greatest lecturer on campus. He was also the founder, in 1948, and dictator, of the greatest conference of its kind (if there was any other of its kind) in the world. This is a claim I hope to demonstrate.

He was also a world-class drinker, who put away a bottle of vodka per evening, and remembered everything the next morning, which gave to such a competitive man an advantage over his sparing partners. He live to be 80 years old, which might seem to be a miracle unless you knew his mother who lived to be 98, and so might he have, if it weren’t for the quart of booze he consumed nightly.

For years my late sister Ruth told me she blamed Howard for my then-heavy drinking. I did not understand how she came to that conclusion until I pressed her to explain, and she told me that Howard “made it seem fashionable to drink a lot.” That now seems possible.

If my goal was to get a doctorate in sociology, and apparently I chose the wrong adviser when I chose Howard. In the first place, his highest degree was a master’s in fine art. Second, he was not especially interested in doctoral degrees, for himself or his students. I cannot blame Howard entirely for never getting my degree (in fact, after my bachelor’s I spent two years as a graduate student, and never got my masters degree, though I passed every requirement except for the dissertation). For years, after I accepted my first professional job, as foreign student adviser at Iowa State University, I tortured myself with the thought that I should not be going to a movie or a party—I should be doing my research. Finally, one day I woke up and told myself, “Max, you are not ever going to do that degree, so get on with your life, your wife and your three children.” With that burden out of the way, I did go on, and retired as dean emeritus of international students and scholars at UCLA. In a peculiar way, this is an honor, because no one else at the University of California, as far as I can ascertain, has ever retired as “dean” with a bachelor’s degree. But this is supposed to be about Howard, so enough about me.

As a physical specimen, Howard was a slender young man in his thirties when I met him, and he gradually became obese as he aged. He also began to look and sound like Orson Welles. As a personality, he ranged from a sensitive, considerate person to a raging bull who insulted everyone, depending on the time of day. At his funeral, in 1995, one of his daughters said of him, “He was like the sun — a blazing mind, but if you got too close, you got burned.”

Howard liked to distinguish between a “drunk” and an “alcoholic.” Alcoholics were those who sneaked a drink before giving a lecture, and drank at any time of the day. Drunks, by contrast, were those who never drank during the day and never drank before a lecture, but allowed themselves to drink all they wanted at the end of the day when their work was done.

One night when Howard had consumed his usual load of hard liquor, he was stopped in his car by a Boulder police officer. When he presented his license, the officer became apologetic and wanted to forget the whole thing. Howard was, by that time, a well-known professor. On the other hand, he wanted no special treatment. He informed the officer that he was drunk, and that he wanted the usual ticket, which the officer then had no choice but to write.  At least one night per week, or more, Howard invited the members of the “Birthday Society” for drinks, scuffles and more drinks. The name was derived form the fact that by coincidence, there was a group of colleagues and their wives who happened to have been born in the same month—April, I believe. There were faculty members who resented being excluded from these soirees, thinking, probably correctly, that being excluded meant missing out on some of the conversations which result in promotions. Marion often absented herself from these parties, and she complained to Howard that his entertainment schedule would lead them to the poor house. These were not “cheese and crackers” evenings. Howard was a superb chef, and he enjoyed entertaining his friends royally.

The Conference on World Affairs

And now, having told of Howard and his society, I can turn to what I regard as his greatest accomplishment: The Conference on World Affairs, held for one full week every April. I call it the greatest conference in the world based on these factors: The quality of the speakers, the size of the audience, the audacity of the topics, the accessibility of the speakers to the local community and the length of the run, beginning in 1946 and continuing to this day, though without Howard, I suspect it is no longer comparable to what it was.

Taking each of these factors in turn, I begin with the quality of the speakers. For example, during my tenure, in the early 1950’s, I met at parties at Howard’s house Buckminster Fuller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead and many others. Fuller, by the way, was Howard’s mentor, as recognized by both men.

Howard expanded the audience by opening it up, not only to the entire campus, but to the community of Boulder and even some from Denver. In the early years, Howard was told by the engineering college that stimulating as the conference appeared, engineering students would not be able to attend the conference sessions because their course load was too heavy to allow for any missed classes. This required a “Higmanian” solution, which Howard was only too happy to provide. He worked with the office that scheduled classes and managed, miraculously, to put his sessions in spaces where classed normally met, leaving the engineering students with cancelled classes and therefore the opportunity to attend conference sessions, some in their very classrooms.

When it came to topics, there were two exceptional factors at work: Nothing was considered too controversial. There were sessions given by Communist government officials (recall this was during the McCarthy days) and speakers who, by normal standards, would be considered “anti-American,” and there were others, equally provocative. Howard and his committee used a unique method of selecting topics in which they would first become familiar with what each speaker knew best, and then assign him or her a totally different topic, on which, on very short notice, they had to put together a talk.

In my case, one of the years I was invited as a speaker. Despite the fact that I was well acquainted with international education, I was assigned to speak on the difference between Japanese and American art. It seems I had told Howard I had been to Japan. To prepare, I ran to Norlin Library, where I read How to Wrap Five Eggs. I also used my observation that in Japan they speak of a 500-year-old bridge, meaning that the form is that old, while individual boards are replaced as needed. In America, we treasure the individual pieces, not the form, so we claim that we have the “London Bridge” in Lake Havasu, Calif. because we took it apart in England, shipped it to California where it was re-assembled. This technique of Howard’s assured that no one could get away with delivering a canned speech from a previous lecture.

In addition to the appearance I made as described above, I attended one other conference as a speaker. That year, Howard scheduled me to open the main plenary session with a celebration of the fact that as a student I brought student participation to the conference for the first time. I was honored both times to appear as a speaker at my favorite conference.

Another contribution to the extraordinary spontaneity of the conference was the fact, unbeknownst to the audience, what they were hearing was a slice of week-long arguments which were carried on in the homes of the faculty hosts who provided housing for the speakers. All of the speakers were required to live in the home assigned, and none could stay in a hotel. It is also significant that all of the speakers paid their own way to the conference and none were paid to participate. When the university recognized that this conference it was a way of putting Boulder on the intellectual map of the world. At the time the President offered Howard $50,000 to help offset expenses. Howard politely refused on the grounds that money form the outside would damage the spirit of the event.

To add to their accessibility to the students, speakers were encouraged to attend fraternity and sorority meetings and to drink beer with the students at Tulagi, the main local beer bar.

A key to conference success

One key to the success of the conference was the way it was organized. The day after one conference closed, the planning committee began work on the next year. This committee, over which Howard ruled with an iron hand, was composed of five or six faculty members from a variety of fields, not all in the social sciences, and as of my year, one student representing all students. Their task was to follow a process in which speakers names were nominated and topics were thrown in and somehow, matches were made. It took the whole year, meeting every week!

Along with the conference, we students organized our United Nations Week, for which we lined the main campus walkway with flags of the nations, scheduled newsreels on world events and for our crowning glory mounted our Model United Nations. Model UNs were not unique, but my year I not only persuaded Howard to make it a part of the Conference on World Affairs week, but I designed it so that the foreign students were representing their own countries. This added a strong note of authenticity to the proceedings.

Years later, when I worked first at Iowa State University, then at UCLA, I produced mini conferences on world affairs, with Howard’s permission to use the name, and invited him as a speaker. Unfortunately, he was beginning to fade, certainly by the time he came to UCLA, and the man upon whom I had heaped such praise turned out to be somewhat of an embarrassment. Still, if I thought being part of my conference pleased him, I would do it again.

As mentioned, Howard was generally considered the best lecturer on campus, partly because of his topics and partly because of his take on those topics. For example, he would draw two sets of concentric circles on the blackboard and label one “Communism” the other “Catholicism.” He then challenged us students to find any difference between the two. He was, I might add, equally at home in political science, psychology and biology. It was from him I first heard the theory that life on Earth emerged from a sea of riboflavin. Surprisingly, Howard never published, and, as mentioned, his highest degree was a masters in fine art, but those facts did not prevent his serving terms as chairman of his department.

At this time, Howard had a student whose name was Marilyn Van Derbur (Engl’60) who was reporting to the FBI on whatever Howard was saying (she was the recent Miss America). This plan lasted until the Denver Post exposed it. For this and other reasons, Howard expected to be denied a passport when was planning to visit Europe, and he told us he was disappointed when he received it with no problems. That trip to Europe, by the way, was an example of Howard’s grand extravagance. He took his wife and their three daughters for a three-month tour of the continent.

With this introduction of Howard as professor and founder of a world-famous conference, we have time for a quick look at some of his other skills.

Renovating a home

For three years, I, along with my three roommates, lived in an apartment below Howard’s house. This was a sexy, dark green and black two bedroom, den, living room, bathroom and kitchen apartment, with delayed-action switches used to control the hidden lights. Before our time, when Howard lived there, he could open the front door from one of several switches around the living room.

According to Howard the house was built by his carpenter father before Howard was born, and he was raised there. At about the age of 18 he began excavating and bracing the space which was to become his home under his parent’s home, and he lived there until his father died, at which time he moved upstairs and rented the apartment to favorite students. Until she died, his mother had her own small apartment in the main house, and Howard used to amuse us by telling his mother that he knew where she hid her key, and he was going to sneak in and take all of her things. The game also amused mother.

As the years went by, Howard systematically made the house and grounds into a villa. This included a walkway between the house and the garage, a distance of some 50 feet. The floor was paved with old bricks. The ceiling was entirely composed of skylights, and the walls were entirely glass in the form of windows which could be opened. This was important because the walkway was also a hot house, where Howard cultivated ferns, a variety of gorgeous orchids and other tropical plants, including gardenias. I recall those gardenias blooming even in winter in their Higman-made environment, and I recall the wonderful fragrance all along the walkway. Along the way there was an antique wall fountain of brass, which served as a convenient source of water.

Arriving at the end, the garage was a different experience. Here the floor was polished black concrete, the walls were used for paintings and books, and the furniture included several overstuffed chairs in outrageous colors. Over all of this was a gigantic chandelier with some 50 small bulbs. As with all of his rooms, this one had a telephone, and it also had a stereo with advanced speakers. This so-called “garage” offered a wonderful place to escape, to think and to relax.

Between the house and the garage there was a gently sloping lawn surrounded by greenery. On one wall there was a large fountain imported from Italy, and over all, there were those small white bulbs one sees at Christmas time.

For the most part, Howard, who was strong as an ox to the end, did his own work, save an occasional assist by a grateful student helper. The design was all Howard, and in fact he was called upon by friends to design their homes and interiors. The electrical work and plumbing was also done by Howard, who was somehow expert in all these fields.

I have already made a brief reference to Howard’ cooking. Let me add that dinner at his house was always memorable. He had a library of cookbooks, a penchant for experiment and the patience of Job when it came to cooking. Whether it was an intimate dinner for four or a feast for 100 conference speakers scattered throughout the house, the result was a gastronomical masterpiece. His style was many courses, each very small so as to tease the palette and each enhanced with just the right wine. Looking at Howard, one would not suspect such subtlety, but it was always there.

There is much more I could write about Howard Higman, who lived from 1915 to 1995, but I hope what I have provided will serve to introduce a great man, the memory of whom will live as long as those who knew him and longer for those who read about him.

Maxwell D. Epstein (Soc’54)

Santa Monica, Calif.

Read more at the CU News Center.

“Hey Tom, you’re an engineer. Come over and talk to this lady. She wants to bring clean water to a village in Madagascar,” my friend Steph Cohen Stoddard (EnvCon’96) said as I ambled down the Pearl Street Mall. She was speaking with Fanja Rakotonirina, a Malagasy woman selling gorgeous raffia hats out of a white tent. I stopped to speak with Fanja and within a couple of months, had started, with the help of a Boulder group called Hope for Madagascar, an Engineers without Borders (EWB) project to bring clean water to the village of Ambalona, Madagascar.

Almost two years later, I found myself bumping along a Malagasy highway on the way to Ambalona. My travel partner, Ryan Tolene (Geol’04), and I had been traveling for four days and were exhausted. Throw in some jet lag, a very foreign culture, police checkpoints in the dark and a seemingly endless, windy, pothole-ridden drive to the village and I wasn’t quite certain we would ever make it to our project. Fear, anxiety and excitement were riding shotgun with us.

I struck up a conversation with Fidi, our translator, who learned English while spending a couple of months in the Midwest learning to cultivate orchids. “The U.S. was nice,” he said, “but this place is paradise!” Paradise…hmm…that’s not the word I would have chosen to describe what I had seen so far, but who was I to judge?

Our week in the village turned out to involve the most satisfying and challenging work I have ever done. Interacting with locals, managing drillers and doing basic engineering in a tiny village halfway around the world was intense and fulfilling. By the last day, I was totally exhausted and the school teacher gathered his class around one of the wells and all the students sang a tribute song to EWB. I cried.

Everything about EWB has CU connections

The organization was founded by Bernard Amadei, a CU engineering professor, in 2001. When I was an environmental engineering graduate student, finding a seat at student EWB meetings was hard.

I worked on a CU-EWB water supply project in Peru and then spent a semester studying waste water irrigation in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal with the help of a Benjamin Brown grant. During those four months, I found myself interviewing farmers, getting lost on ancient paths through countless rice paddies and taking water quality samples next to smoking funeral pyres. My EWB and Nepal experiences were highlights of my graduate studies at CU. Upon graduation, I was determined to stay involved with international projects.

Many of my CU classmates were involved with projects all over the world. Since the organization was founded, EWB has spawned student and professional chapters around the globe and some universities, including CU, have introduced developing-world engineering classes and programs.

Taking a close look at local groundwater

The primary goal of our December 2009 trip in Madagascar was to conduct an investigation of the quantity and quality of local groundwater. We also wanted to survey potential surface water resources and finalize a memorandum of understanding with the village. The groundwater investigation included drilling two test wells, conducting hydraulic testing and collecting water quality samples. The goals for our trip were based on data collected during a 2008 assessment trip conducted by two of my colleagues at Golder Associates, Adam Hobson (MCivEngr’04) and Eric Blumenstein.

Our entourage was quite large and included nine drillers, one translator, one community development specialist, two drivers and three cooks. The drillers arrived in the village by taxi, with all their equipment and supplies tied to the roof.

Six hundred people live in Ambalona. The village has no electricity and subsistence agriculture is the primary economy. One of the first things I noticed was that village life revolves around rice. Lush green rice paddies surround the village, crammed into every corner of the landscape. Women are busy transplanting rice, drying rice on mats in the middle of the village and pounding rice for rice meal. Villagers eat rice three times a day and a favorite drink is water cooked in the big rice pot after the rice is done. I slowly got used to the drink, which tasted like burnt rice. The villagers promised me that it aided digestion. Ryan was surprised to find out that rice production is done completely by hand when he found a pebble in his plate of rice.

Most villagers have little money and some suffer from starvation. Our translator was visibly disturbed when he pointed out mothers harvesting a large tree whose fruit is barely edible and only eaten by those who can’t afford food. It was depressing to see children with distended bellies, another indicator of poor nutrition. I had never spent this much time in a village where people were starving and it was different than I expected.

It was a far cry from the dramatic portrayal of starvation in Africa I was used to seeing on the cover of Time or Newsweek, where you assume that a village is thrown into chaos from starvation. No, this was different. Some villagers had enough to eat and some villagers did not and this just appeared to be a fact of life. It was almost like comparing yourself to the Jones’ down the street who might just happen to live in a smaller house, which is also just a fact of life. It was also different because the villagers were generally quick to smile, always curious as to what we were doing and always a laughing heartily at our Malagasy phrases.

Water contamination but water needed

Villagers collect water from a nearby river, which is contaminated with fecal bacteria due to human and animal contamination. Women and girls are responsible for collecting water and they were instrumental to our project, even though I didn’t realize it when we arrived. At least three times a day they spend up to an hour walking down to the river and hauling water back to the village for cooking. All the time spent collecting water prevents girls from attending school. Even simple contact with the river water can be hazardous as the local snails carry the disease schistosiamiasis.

One big issue when we arrived was there was no water to help the drillers begin to drill the well. And we needed at least 250 gallons to drill each well. We said this to the village chief, but the next morning there was no water. Things were looking grim. We called another meeting with the chief and explained once again why the drillers needed water to begin drilling.

Although I felt frustrated the next morning, I spied three women coming through woods carrying water jugs on their heads. Chatting and laughing, they dumped the water at the drill site and headed back to the river for more. An old man from the water committee showed up and began taking attendance. Unknown to us, the villagers had met the night before and the women had agreed to bring water.

A steady stream of women and girls kept coming that morning, lugging water to our site so that one day, their walk to water would be as easy as walking over to the village well. It was a beautiful sight to behold.

On or around our third day in the village, I caught glimpses of Fidi’s paradise. My morning commute consisted of a five minute stroll to a drill site. For our midmorning snack, the village boys would arrive with a bundle of delicious leche fruit. During lunch, we would get a sneak preview of dinner, usually a scrawny chicken or duck strutting around the kitchen tent. No matter what time of day, there was always a boisterous crowd of children following us around, trying out a handful of English phrases.

Hard work in the village

Why was EWB founded at CU? How did I meet up with Fanja on the Pearl Street Mall? The CU community, faculty and staff are constantly looking for new opportunities and are willing to dream big. Bernard Amadei started the first EWB project by chatting up his Guatemalan gardener who described a village in need. When I met Fanja on the Pearl Street Mall, I knew what EWB could accomplish and I jumped at the opportunity to start a project halfway around the world. And CU grads like Ryan Tolene and Adam Hobson are helping to make the project a success.

In the village, Ryan logged 14-hour days, often completing field logs and running pump tests in the dark. He said he was taking the EWB work more seriously than his professional career because of the impact he was having and the epic journey we had taken to get to it.

We completed installation of two wells during our week in the village. The water quality and quantity of one well was promising and we hoped to have a hand pump installed soon. The other well was contaminated with fecal bacteria and we are currently considering possible remediation alternatives.

In a dramatic ceremony with the entire village, most of who were crowded in a single classroom, we signed a memorandum of understanding which outlines a five-year partnership between the village, Hope for Madagascar and EWB. We are currently planning our next trip and can use all the support we can get.

Tom is a senior project engineer at Golder Associates in Lakewood, Colo. He lives in Boulder with his wife, Tori Peglar (MJour’00), director of CU-Boulder alumni communications, and their two very lively girls, Skylar and Jordan.

More about Engineers without Borders

Many CU students and alumni are involved in professional EWB chapters. The national EWB-USA headquarters is in Boulder. Dubbed the “Blueprint Brigade” by Time magazine, EWB-USA grew from a handful of members in 2002 to over 12,000 today. EWB-USA has over 350 projects in about 45 developing countries around the world including water, renewable energy, sanitation and other projects.

Interested in writing a CU Voices personal essay like this one? Contact Marc Killinger at 303-492-2280 or 800-492-7743.

Mark Arnoldy, a University of Colorado at Boulder senior set to graduate on Friday, doesn’t like peanuts. As a matter of fact he avoids them like the plague because he is highly allergic to them.

Ironically, a project he has been working on for more than two years relies specifically on peanut butter to combat childhood malnutrition in Nepal.

After finishing his junior year at CU-Boulder in 2007, Arnoldy took a year off from school to travel to Nepal where he taught in a school and piloted an education program. One day, he mistakenly ate some food that had peanut sauce in it and started to go into anaphylactic shock. He turned out OK, but the episode had a lasting affect on him.

“It was a very short time after that that I came across some research describing how peanut butter was literally solving the problem of malnutrition around the world,” Arnoldy said.

“I came to find out that half-a-million children in Nepal are malnourished. While it seems irrational that someone who is allergic to peanut butter wants to build a project around peanut butter, I just couldn’t turn away because it seems like it happened for a reason that is beyond me.”

Since that summer he has now been to Nepal five times to lay the groundwork to produce and distribute the peanut butter product called NepalNUTrition. He also traveled to Haiti to study an organization there that uses peanut butter to combat malnutrition. President Bill Clinton featured his project during the Clinton Global Initiative University Conference in 2009.

Arnoldy spent six months in Nepal last year finding a factory location, evaluating distribution chains and working with local partners and government officials to get his program underway.

Then, just a week ago, Arnoldy learned that he had been awarded a Fulbright grant to continue his work in Nepal. He plans to spend the next two years there building the program.

Read the rest at the CU News Center