By Risto Marttinen (Hist’62) I step out of the hotel. The trip is over. Boulder’s mountains are still there. 50 years have passed. It is the class reunion for 1962. That was a good Kennedy year and things looked bright. Some 60 members came. This was out of an Arts & Sciences attendance totaling 790. Fluff floats in the air.
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Mother was Tri Delt sorority member at what was then called Colorado University and her brother was a Delt. She wanted me to be a fraternity man. What did I know? Dad had been at CU for two years before being called into service in WWI, and was not a fraternity man.
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Sometimes advice arrives from unexpected places and is seared into the brain, forever.
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By Irene I. Blea (PhDSoc’80) The only thing I was good at in the late 1970s was watching people and going to school. But high school was over five years past and now I found myself with a four-year-old daughter, divorced, on welfare and food stamps. I lived near a steel mill in Pueblo, Colorado and a friend suggested I
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It’s dawn on New Year’s Day and I’m crossing the border just west of Juárez, Mexico. In the semi-darkness I can see the silhouettes of five soldiers at the checkpoint. Fortunately, they don’t stop me and inspect my car.
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By Mary Ayad (PolSci’94) 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
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By Kim Bristol Adams (Engl’91) 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
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By Stephanie Ann Harper (Engl’09) 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
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By Janet G. Go ( Geog’53) “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
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By Marni Spott 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
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By Clint Talbott (Jour’85) 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
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I’m Leigh Holman (DMAMus’03), director of the CU-Boulder opera program, and I remember the career path that eventually led me back to CU. It’s always difficult to leave a magical place like Boulder, but I was excited to find a very good academic job even before I received my degree. I was hired as chairperson of the voice area and
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Here are comments from organizers and participants in the April 4-8, 2011 Conference on World Affairs. 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
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By Carlton Stoiber (A&S’64, Law’69) 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
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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.
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By Deborah Fowlkes 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.
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By Norris Hermsmeyer (Acct’67) 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
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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.
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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.
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By Finn Thye (Psych’01, MLing’09) 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
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“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.
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The year was 2006. I had just finished my marketing degree at the Leeds School of Business and was getting ready to set out into the “real world.” Like many of my friends, I was eager to live the dream and go somewhere completely new.
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Most students probably select institutions of higher learning based on majors, research or scholarships available. Perhaps my method was not the most analytical , but it did get me to Boulder in the fall of 1976: Ralphie the buffalo.
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The University of Colorado at Boulder has become one of the most gay-friendly campuses in the nation, ranked in the top 100 by the nationwide observer, “The Advocate College Guide.”
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First thing this morning I took a brief jaunt to Pearl Street, and people were wearing shorts and biking happily down the block. A few seconds later I watched folks in the Sierra Nevada Mountains stop for coffee at Schat’s Bakery in June Lake, Calif. My nimble footwork and enabled nostalgia came courtesy of a webcam of course.
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By Jackie Garcia (Span’08) and Marc Killinger

In October Alumni Association staffer Jackie Garcia (Span’08) made her first trip to New York, and it wasn’t just to catch a Broadway show. As an undecided woman voter she was invited by NBC to watch and comment on the vice presidential debate between Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Delaware Sen. Joe Biden.

Several days earlier, NBC had called the CU-Boulder communications office in search of an undecided likely woman voter. The office contacted CU staffer Peter Simmons (Psych’73, MPubAd’76). As it turned out, someone in his office had attended the Michelle Obama rally on campus with Jackie, who had confessed her indecision regarding the election.

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by Rebecca Ernst Lange Remember the students walking around in a military uniform on Thursdays? They marched on Balch Courtyard regardless of the weather; they sat beside you in calculus, ate lunch with you in the UMC and lived in your freshman dorm. Ever wonder what happened to them? In this edition of “CU Voices,” I am honored to highlight
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… to draw a smiley face on your burger. Of course the big icy Pepsi or better yet, the mug of beer was just waiting there on the side half empty by now because it was always delivered first thing. The juke box was never intrusive and had music you hadn’t heard in awhile, Otis Redding, James Taylor, even John
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…the entire Thanksgiving week off! Officially it’s the combining of Thanksgiving and fall break. The latter began a few years ago in October as a way to let students take a two-day time out and catch up — despite what we say about students “getting soft,” classes really are much more intense now. But it’s always been hard to keep
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