2011 Spring: University of Denver Magazine

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The University of Denver Magazine is published quarterly for alumni, employees, parents, donors and friends of the University of Denver.

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Spring 2011

U N I V E R S I T Y

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MAGAZINE

N I V E R S I T Y A G A Z I N E

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UN I V ER S I T Y O F MAGAZINE

UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE

Climbing Back

Office of the Chancellor

Contents
Features

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Dear Readers: It is one of the most vivid and lasting memories of my college years. The time was the spring of my freshman year and I was just 18, a young transplant from Colorado to Williams College in the Northeast. I was assigned a semester-long research paper in my European history class, and I decided to focus on the Schlieffen Plan, the grand strategy developed by the German General Staff in the years leading up to World War I. I spent months rumbling through the stacks of the old library on campus, following research leads, writing notes, learning as much as I could. I had not done such a thing before, and I absolutely loved it. That old library became my second home, a place where I could literally feel my mind growing. It was a place where thoughts and ideas popped out of me spontaneously, like new plants on fertile ground. That spring was 44 years ago, and I can still remember the feel of the stacks all around me, the cold winter light filtered through small windows, the smell of the books, my mind in overdrive. It was magical. Today, college libraries function in an altogether different way. Virtually all of the serials collections in DU’s Penrose Library have been digitized and are available online. It’s been many years since I’ve had to go to the library to read the most recent research articles in chemistry; I now simply call them up on my laptop in my office or at home. A significant portion of the book collection in Penrose has also been digitized and is available whenever and wherever one wants. With Web access available in every building on campus, in every room in the residence halls, and everywhere outdoors via our wireless network, one might easily wonder what has become of the library and what its future may be. You might be surprised to know that the number of students using Penrose Library has gone up substantially every year during the past decade, precisely the era of mass digitization. It cannot be that they are drawn there for access to information, since so much of the library’s collections (and some would say that the collections are the library) are available everywhere, anytime. No, the truth is that our students go to the library for precisely the same reasons that I did 44 years ago. Individually or in groups, they go there to work, to think, to create, to feel their minds grow. The students are drawn to its intellectual intensity. Even in this digital age, the library is still a magical place. Of course, the students find Penrose Library’s old ’70s construction, brilliant orange colors and “egg” chairs amusing. While its guts are technology-rich, little of the outward appearance of the library has changed since it was opened in 1972. This has become a significant problem—far too much space is taken up by bound volumes and infrastructure, as was appropriate decades ago when Penrose opened. Today we need that space for our students and faculty, and a major renovation project is set to begin soon. The renovation will open up the interior of the building to create a light and airy atmosphere and a raft of new spaces for people to gather for work or conversation. There will be spaces for critical support for our students and faculty, such as the Writing Center, the Math Center and the Center for Teaching and Learning. Aesthetically, technologically and intellectually, the new “Academic Commons” will be the focal point of the DU campus. The outside of the building will change as well to include a new entrance, a colonnade, and our trademark stone and copper finishes. (Read more about the Academic Commons project on page 45.) All of this will cost $33 million. The good news is that we’ve raised and saved $27 million of that amount, and we recently began a campaign to complete funding for the project. If the library was a magical place for you as well and you would like to help, please let us know.

Climbing Back
By Chelsey Baker-Hauck

When double amputee Neil Duncan summited Mount Kilimanjaro, he did more than conquer Africa’s highest peak. The climb marked the end of his recovery and the beginning of the rest of his life.

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Beyond the Veil
By Tamara Chapman

Palestinian women are fighting for independence and equality. PhD candidate Rebecca Otis is documenting their struggle.

Powder Days
By Richard Chapman

Alum David Lucy reflects on his time as the country’s first black collegiate skier.

The Phipps Legacy
By Richard Chapman

The family that had a hand in everything from the U.S. Senate to the Central City Opera to the Denver Broncos also had a lasting impact on DU.

Departments

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Editor’s Note Letters Views DU Update 8 News $3 million gift 11 Research Poker strategy 15 Sports Lacrosse coach 17 Arts After-school activities 19 Academics CourseMedia 21 People Dana Cain 22 Q&A Cox media’s Jim Kennedy 25 Essay In season Alumni Connections History Winter Carnival

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Online only at www.du.edu/magazine:

Office of the Chancellor Mary Reed Building | 2199 S. University Blvd. | Denver, CO 80208 | 303.871.2111 | Fax 303.871.4101 | www.du.edu/chancellor

On the cover: Double amputee Neil Duncan climbs Mount Kilimanjaro in August 2010; read the story on page 26. Photo by Reed Hoffmann. This page: Neil Duncan loads his pack for the next stage of his climb up Mount Kilimanjaro. Photo by Reed Hoffmann.

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University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

University of Denver Magazine Update

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U N I V E R S I T Y

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Editor’s Note
Last spring I started researching the story of my great uncle Paul Clum, a paratrooper killed in the Philippines during World War II. His death was a great source of sorrow for my grandfather, and I wanted Uncle Paul to be remembered even after those who knew him were gone. With help from the 503rd Heritage Battalion, I was able to reconstruct much of the last two years of Paul’s life serving with the Army 503rd Parachute Regimental Combat Team. I put out a call to others who may have served with him. One morning last summer, I got an e-mail from the daughter of Uncle Paul’s service buddy Virgil. He had passed away a few years earlier but left a written memoir of his best friend, my Uncle Paul. They had fought together in the Battle of Corregidor in February 1945. Virgil was injured and spent the next few months in the hospital; Paul went on to other campaigns, including the island of Negros, where he died in May of that year. Sixty-five years later, I sat on my kitchen floor and cried as I read about my uncle and his friend and all the other brave men they served with. I started to understand the magnitude of their sacrifice. Just weeks later, I met another veteran of the 503rd, current DU student Neil Duncan, who lost both of his legs in Afghanistan in 2005. I felt an instant connection—here was a young man who had joined the paratroopers at 18, just like my uncle. A young man who answered his country’s call when the rest of us stayed home. A young man who paid a price for that service. (Read more about Neil on page 26.) And in December, I heard from former University of Denver Magazine intern P Glavey (BSBA ’07), who joined the Marines after graduation. In .J. October, he lost both of his legs in Afghanistan; he took his first steps on prosthetics in January. I protested the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But now I have a different message for P Neil, and all the men and women serving, .J., or who served in wars past: Thank you.

MAGAZINE

w w w. d u . e d u / m a g a z i n e
U N I V E R S I T Y Number 3 Volume 11, O F M A G A Z I N E

U N I V E R S I T Y

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Letters
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UN I V ER S I T Y O F MAGAZINE UNIV Publisher E R S I T Y O F
MAGAZINE

MAGAZINE

Jim Berscheidt

U N I V E R S I T Y M A G A Z I N E

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UN I V ER S I T Y O F MAGAZINE

Managing Editor

Chelsey Baker-Hauck (BA ’96)
Assistant Managing Editor

Cover to cover

Greg Glasgow
Associate Editor

Tamara Chapman
Editor

Kathryn Mayer (BA ’07, MA ’10)
Editorial Assistants

Deidre Helton (Class of 2012) • Katelyn Feldhaus • Amber D’Angelo Na (BA ’06)
Staff Writer

Richard Chapman
Art Director

Craig Korn, VeggieGraphics
Contributors

Jordan Ames • Wayne Armstrong • Julene Bair • Janalee Card Chmel (MLS ’97) • Carl Dalio • Kim DeVigil • Justin Edmonds (BSBA ’08) • Jeff Francis • Brenda Gillen (MLS ’06) • Laurie Younggren Goodman (BA ’84) • Kristal Griffith (MBA ’10) • Jeffrey Haessler • Judy Maillis • Doug McPherson • Allan Roth • Nathan Solheim • Chase Squires (MPS ’10)
Editorial Board

The winter 2010 alumni magazine was outstanding, and to be honest, the first one I’ve ever read cover to cover. “China on the Rise” fascinated me because I am planning to go on a tour to China in March, and I had gone to [Professor Suisheng Zhao’s] class during the Alumni Symposium the first weekend in October. The Holocaust memorial article was of interest to me because I have a family on my street who are Jewish and who have teenagers nearing college age, so I shared the magazine with them after I was through with it. “Greetings From the Sanatorium” was extremely interesting, and I was impressed by the professor who was using the names and stories to involve students in some real research. I also enjoyed “States of Change,” “Jersey girl” and “Boo-who?” Altogether the format, writing, and the paper of the magazine itself was truly a pleasurable experience. Thank you for grabbing my attention through the whole issue.
Barbara Nelson (MA ’69) Englewood, Colo.

The dark side of microlending

UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE

We received the latest edition of the magazine in December. One story [Academics, winter 2010] was about how the granting of microcredit is being taught at the DU business school. Surprisingly, at least to me, all the economic “externalities” involved in microlending were ignored by the writer. For instance, no mention was made about how microlending has become an easy source of large revenues, and even a form of usury, mostly because of the involvement by corporate players such as Deutsche Bank. Recently the prime minister of Bangladesh was cited as follows in an opinion piece in the Financial Times: “Microlenders make the people of this country their guinea pig. … They are sucking blood from the poor in the name of poverty alleviation.” Several pieces in the Financial Times have echoed sentiments felt every day in many other poor countries besides Bangladesh and India, where microcredit interest rates top 30

percent, and where the smallfont contracts have caused lenders to commit suicide on a massive scale. Another important fact ignored in the story is that microcredit has a rich history, and that the original providers of microloans are not doing so well anymore because the private banking industry is taking over their shares in the market. One original provider, Oikocredit in the Netherlands, was founded by the [World Council of Churches]; now it is giving in to the Deutsche Banks of global capitalism. I had hoped DU’s business students could have stood for the plight of the poor rather than to help redefine the DU mission into making money off the poor.
Paul Timmermans Tigard, Ore.

Wayne Armstrong

Send letters to the editor to: Chelsey BakerHauck, University of Denver Magazine, 2199 S. University Blvd., Denver, CO 80208-4816. Or e-mail [email protected]. Include your full name and mailing address with all submissions. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Chelsey Baker-Hauck, editorial director • Jim Berscheidt, interim vice chancellor for university communications • Thomas Douglis (BA ’86) • Jeffrey Howard, executive director of alumni relations • Sarah Satterwhite, senior director of development for research and writing • Amber Scott (MA ’02) • Laura Stevens (BA ’69), director of parent relations

Ski team scrapbook

Printed on 10% PCW recycled paper

Chelsey Baker-Hauck Managing Editor

The University of Denver Magazine (USPS 022-177) is published quarterly—fall, winter, spring and summer—by the University of Denver, University Communications, 2199 S. University Blvd., Denver, CO 80208-4816. The University of Denver (Colorado Seminary) is an Equal Opportunity Institution. Periodicals postage paid at Denver, CO. Postmaster: Send address changes to University of Denver Magazine, University of Denver, University Advancement, 2190 E. Asbury Ave., Denver, CO 80208-4816.

I read with great interest the last issue of the University of Denver Magazine [winter 2010] that included the picture of the 1946 ski team on page 53. Enclosed are pictures of the 1962 ski team around our 1962 Buick team car, with what I believe is the NCAA championship trophy we won that year. Pictured, standing, left to right: Coach Willy Schaeffler, Aarne Valkama (BS ’64), Phil Shama, Oyvind Floystad (BA ’63), Jan Blom, Mike Baar (BSBA ’64), Chris Rounds. Kneeling, left to right: Alan Miller (BS ’62), Chris Selbeck (BS ’62).
Phil Shama (BSBA ’64) Mount Vernon, Wash.
Editor’s response: Readers, if you have old photos to share, please e-mail us at [email protected] or mail them to University of Denver Magazine, 2199 S. University Blvd., Denver, CO 80208-4816.

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University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

University of Denver Magazine Letters

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Views

Splash of color
9 10 14 18 20 24 Murray Armstrong Civil War Student volunteers Poetry grants Advice for parents TEDxDU

Denver-

Wayne Armstrong

and Arizona-based artist Carl Dalio painted this pastel of the Harper Humanities Gardens in summer 2010. A member of the American Watercolor Society, the National Watercolor Society and the Rocky Mountain National Watermedia Society, Dalio also creates many of the architectural illustrations for new buildings on the DU campus. Dalio’s paintings, cover art and articles have appeared in books and publications including American Artist, The Artist’s Magazine, Watercolor Magic and The Pastel Journal. >>www.carldalio.com

The Idiosingcrasies, a DU student a cappella group, opened for Yale University’s Whiffenpoofs at a Jan. 29 concert at the Newman Center for the Performing Arts. Founded in 2005 by a group of singers who have since graduated, the Idiosingcrasies are DU’s longest-lasting—in recent memory, anyway—entry into the growing field of college a cappella. Making music with nothing but their voices, the group’s 15 members arrange their own versions of songs by hitmakers such as Guns N’ Roses, Miley Cyrus and Michael Jackson. >>www.idiosingcrasies.com
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University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011 University of Denver Magazine Update

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Top News

Gift expands international programs in Sturm College of Law
By Chase Squires

Hockey icon Murray Armstrong dies
Legendary DU hockey coach Murray Armstrong died Dec. 8, 2010, of complications following a series of strokes. He was 94, just 24 days shy of his 95th birthday. Armstrong coached the DU Pioneers from 1956–77, amassing one of the most impressive records in college hockey history. His teams won five NCAA championships and finished as runnersup four times. After playing junior hockey, Armstrong played nine years in the National Hockey League in the 1930s and 1940s, finishing his career with the Detroit Red Wings. After World War II, Armstrong coached the Regina Pats until he was hired by the University of Denver. When he arrived, he promised to give DU a national championship in three years or he’d quit. He delivered on the promise in two years. Armstrong often said his proudest accomplishment was “all of the fine young men” whose lives he touched. He was in contact with many of his former players. In 2009, some of those former players created a book of “Murray-isms”—some of his sayings that live on. They called it Don’t Think, It Weakens the Club. Among his favorite sayings: “Excuses are for losers.” In 1977 Armstrong retired to Venice, Fla., where he pursued his other sporting passion—golf. He played the game regularly until 2010. In 2000, Armstrong and his wife, Freda, moved to St. Augustine, Fla., to be closer to their son and his wife. Armstrong is survived by Freda, his wife of 68 years, and his son, Rob. >>Read more about Armstrong and share your memories of him at www.du.edu/today.
—Media Relations Staff

Pioneers Top 10

College of Law. The new program will increase the school’s capacity to provide comprehensive, internationally relevant business transaction skills training for master’s of law and JD students. The flexible nature of the gift allows the school to provide financial aid to top students, to hire faculty and to underwrite international business law programming such as national conferences and colloquia. “I feel very lucky and honored to be able to help students at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law prepare for careers in a field I have found to be challenging and rewarding,” says Roche (JD ’88). “I have spent my professional life involved in international business transactions. Helping the college of law create a program in that very area is indeed fulfilling. After all, this is where I received all my training for my professional career. “The Roche family has been associated with the University of Denver for nearly 30 years,” he continues. “My wife, Ritsuko Hattori-Roche, spent a year studying at the University, so this new association is even more meaningful as the University has become like family.” The gift is among the largest of its kind in the law school’s history and includes outright and future cash commitments. This is the second donation Roche (pictured) has made to further an academic institution’s mission. He also donated $1 million to establish the Roche Chair at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan. Roche studied Japanese language and culture as an undergraduate at Nanzan and returned for a year of legal studies there while studying law at DU. “The Roche Family Foundation and Robert Roche’s generosity to the DU Sturm College of Law is unprecedented,” says Sturm College Dean Martin Katz. “Their support has enabled the Sturm College of Law to leverage two areas critical to our strategic vision—international law and business law—and to build degree sequences and programming that will set the standard for international business law in the 21st century. We are honored by their vision and humbled by their generosity.” Roche is an entrepreneur and investor working in China, Japan and the U.S. He is co-founder and chair of Acorn International, one of China’s largest TV shopping companies, and co-founder and chair of Oak Lawn Marketing Inc., the largest infomercial company in Japan, which is now part of NTT Docomo Group. Roche also founded URBN Hotels, China’s first carbon-neutral hotel. He currently serves as vice chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce/Shanghai. Recently, Roche was named by President Obama to serve on the United States Trade Representative’s advisory committee for trade policy and negotiations. “This is an extraordinarily important and pleasing gift for both the Sturm College of Law and the University,” says Chancellor Robert Coombe. “It’s important because it will support one of our major strategic directions: an interdisciplinary approach to internationalization of our programs and curriculum. It’s pleasing because it is given by a true DU family and it sets a fine example for many others.” >>www.law.du.edu

A $3 million

gift from the Roche Family Foundation and Robert Roche will establish the Roche Family International Business Transactions Program at the University of Denver Sturm

Countries of origin for DU international students
1. China 2. Saudi Arabia 3. India 4. Kuwait 5. Libya 6. Taiwan 7. Canada 8. South Korea 9. Norway 10. Iran and Japan (tied)
Compiled by Mary Boevers, director of international students and scholars. The ranking is based on fall 2010 enrollment.

DU Archives/Athletics Department

Shutterstock

DU says ‘willkommen’ to new language center
DU students have a significant new campus resource: the Center for World Languages and Cultures. The center’s goal is to promote intercultural communication through a University-wide resource center that supports languages and literatures education and builds bridges between disciplines across campus. Professor Kathy Mahnke, director of the center, says it will enhance students’ preparation when studying abroad and in their mandatory language studies. It also will “leave DU graduates better prepared for the global citizenship that is their inheritance as adults of the 21st century,” Mahnke says. The center—located on the second floor of Sturm Hall—is designed to be a welcoming and comfortable place for undergraduate and graduate students to spend time in groups or individually. Mahnke says one of the goals of the center is to reach out to the large international community on campus. “Their potential for contributing to and gaining from the vitality of this campus is limitless,” she says. Additionally, the center will examine DU’s current language placement and proficiency assessments with an eye toward making them more efficient and effective for students. The center also will be an important resource for faculty by offering guidance on how to integrate technology into languages and culture education, finding tutors for students and assessing language proficiency.
—Kristal Griffith

Photo courtesy of Acorn International

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University of Denver Magazine Update

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Research

History professor writes for New York Times series on the Civil War
On Oct. 31, The New York Times began an unusual news series to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. The “Disunion” series follows the secession crisis of 1860–61 and the ensuing war on a day-by-day basis. Susan Schulten, associate professor of history at DU, was asked to contribute to the series by examining the crisis from a geographic and cartographic perspective. Schulten is writing a book about the rise of thematic mapping in American history, and from 2008–09 she was a member of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission in Colorado. “I’ve been interested in Lincoln and the Civil War as both a researcher and a teacher for years, and I’ve thought about the meaning of maps for nearly two decades,” Schulten says. Her first piece ran Nov. 11 and focused on President Lincoln’s election victory on Nov. 6, 1860. Her second story ran Dec. 9 and focused on a map of slavery favored by Lincoln. It was among the 10 most viewed and most e-mailed stories that day. Because of her expertise in mapping, Schulten plans to write about the geographical dimension of the crisis, both through old maps from the period and also new maps. “It never ceases to amaze me that the Civil War continues to be a source of tremendous interest for Americans,” Schulten says. “I was also fairly surprised at the intensity of the comments on the pieces we run, which recalls [William] Faulkner’s observation that ‘the past is never dead; it’s not even past.’” Schulten’s articles are slated to run about once a month through April 2015.
—Kristal Griffith
Wayne Armstrong

No chance
By Jeff Francis

Ask DU statistics

DU named a best value in private education
The University of Denver has been named one of America’s best values in private higher education by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine. DU ranks No. 65 on Kiplinger’s 2010–11 “Best Values in Private Colleges” rankings. DU is the only Colorado school included on the list of 100 private institutions. The magazine ranked schools by academic quality and the net price students pay to attend, with quality accounting for two-thirds of the total. Working with data on more than 600 private institutions provided by Peterson’s, the magazine sorted the schools first based on quality measures including admission rates, test scores of incoming freshmen and four- and five-year graduation rates. The institutions then were re-ranked to account for cost data including tuition, fees, room and board and financial aid. Princeton University took the top spot on the list of private college rankings, while Swarthmore topped the list of liberal arts colleges. >>www.kiplinger.com/links/college
—Jordan Ames

Campus earns good grades for going green
The University of Denver goes to the head of the class when it comes to sustainability, a national survey finds. The Sustainable Endowments Institute of Cambridge, Mass., surveyed the 322 institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada with endowments of more than $160 million and graded them on its annual College Sustainability Report Card. With a grade of A -, DU was among the top 52 schools in the country to receive an A-level grade. The institute, founded in 2005, is a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the United Nations Foundation and other groups. DU Sustainability Council Chair Rebecca Powell says the report is a valuable overview of DU’s efforts provided by a third party. DU raised its grade from a B+ last year and a B two years ago with improvements coinciding with the rise of the Sustainability Council and concerted, campuswide efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle. Over the past two years, the University has initiated a robust single-stream recycling program, added food composting in dining halls, reduced the use of air conditioning in the summer and replaced lighting with more efficient systems, among other programs. In this year’s survey, DU scored A grades for dining services and the purchase of locally grown foods, environmentally friendly building policies and greenhouse gas reduction efforts. Of the five schools surveyed in Colorado, DU was the highest scoring research institution, sharing the top grade of A - only with Colorado College. Colorado State University and the University of Colorado both received grades of B+, and the Colorado School of Mines received a C. The DU Sustainability Council meets monthly, bringing together faculty, staff and students interested in finding sustainable solutions to everyday energy needs. >>www.du.edu/green
—Chase Squires

Professor Robert Hannum how invigorating he finds the study of probability, data collection and quantitative analysis, and he can’t bluff. “I freely admit there are many areas of statistics that I find dry and boring,” he says. “That’s part of the reason I ended up doing statistics of gambling and game theory.” Hannum has applied his top-shelf knowledge of statistics and probability to the study of poker. While some professors toil away at microscopes and dusty volumes, Hannum studies the math behind flops, value bets, pot odds, full boats, pocket rockets and the nuts. And his conclusions have led to him playing a pivotal role in criminal trials around the country. In 2008, law enforcement stormed a Greeley, Colo., poker game and arrested organizers. The ensuing charges contended that the organizers—in running weekly games with a $20 buy-in at a local bar—were running an illegal gambling operation. Enter Hannum, who testified as an expert witness. Calling upon his extensive research on the subject, Hannum argued—as he did in subsequent trials in other states— that poker is a game of skill, not chance, and therefore doesn’t meet the legal definition of gambling. “It’s not like we’re saying chance isn’t involved, but we’re saying it’s predominantly skill that determines the outcome,” Hannum says. “Players determine what other players’ cards are, who’s bluffing, how much they’ll bet, whether they’ll bet at all. Most hands don’t even go to showdown.” In the Colorado case, Hannum’s testimony resulted in a jury acquittal. But the prosecution appealed, claiming Hannum should not have been allowed to testify because a 20-year-old state Supreme Court case already had established poker as a game of chance. The appeal was accepted, although the defendant, Kevin Raley, cannot be retried. Anthony Cabot, a Las Vegas-based gaming attorney, collaborated with Hannum on Practical Casino Math, a reference book on gambling law. Cabot praises Hannum’s contributions to the gaming law field and says lofty math concepts are the casino industry’s backbone. “The gaming industry is based on statistics, which results in a positive financial benefit for the casino industry,” Cabot says. “Robert has effectively provided the courts and the regulatory bodies the proper framework for understanding the statistical nature of the industry.” One might assume such knowledge would have Hannum frequenting casinos and poker nights. Not so. He says deeper knowledge of gambling has made the pursuit less appealing to him, not more. “I might sit down at table games, but I’m doing it for background research,” he says with a chuckle. Hannum adds that the dream of going to a Colorado casino or spending a weekend in Las Vegas and coming back with more money is, for the most part, a delusion. Though it is possible to win in the short term, it usually doesn’t happen that way and, except for a few rare situations (such as a highly skilled poker player), it certainly doesn’t happen in the long run. He says it’s best to view gambling as an endeavor in which losing money is inevitable, and that the money lost (hopefully a small amount) is nothing more than entertainment dollars. “It should be viewed the same as going to the movies: a certain amount of money spent for a certain time period of entertainment,” he says. “In the long run, you’ll lose money gambling. There just aren’t that many situations in which the player has the advantage over the house.”
University of Denver Magazine Update

Wayne Armstrong

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One to Watch

Injured Pioneers hockey player returns to campus
Jesse Martin, the DU hockey standout who suffered a life-threatening injury during a game Oct. 30, has returned to Denver to continue his studies. Martin, 22, was looking to get the puck out of his own zone in the second period of a game at rival North Dakota when the puck started to come off his stick. He tried to corral it, looked down, and was slammed by onrushing North Dakota forward Brad Malone. An MRI showed that Martin had broken his C2 vertebra in three places. His doctors were shocked he was still alive. Of those who break a vertebra as Martin did, 98 percent die instantly. Of the 2 percent who survive, 98–99 percent are left quadriplegic. Martin survived because a small bone chip got stuck between two vertebrae, which kept his spinal cord from severing. After the hit, Martin was airlifted from Grand Forks, N.D., to a hospital in Minneapolis, where doctors recommended fusing his neck as the safest way to treat his injury. His father intervened at the last second and asked for a second opinion. Martin and his family were encouraged to consider other procedures, and, 10 days after the accident, Martin underwent surgery at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minn. Two days after surgery, Martin was able to take two steps. Today, he’s wearing a neck brace, attending class and just two quarters away from graduating. Speaking at a TEDxDU Xpress luncheon on Jan. 20, Martin said that playing hockey again hasn’t been completely ruled out.
—Media Relations Staff

Ahmad Najim Dost, international studies
As a PhD student at DU’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, Ahmad Najim Dost is not studying unfamiliar territory. He lived most of his life in Pakistan as an Afghan refugee. “I grew up in developing countries, and I wanted to study about where I come from,” Dost says. Dost and his family were at the center of the 1992 civil war in Kabul, Afghanistan. They fled to Pakistan and started a new life in a refugee camp. Dost later got a job at the International Rescue Committee. He went to Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, for his undergraduate studies and earned a master’s degree at the Harvard Kennedy School. Brad Miller, director of graduate admissions at the Korbel School, recruited Dost to the University’s PhD program. “His application rose to the top of our pile very quickly because of the quality of his previous academic work and his fit for our program,” Miller says. Dost also helped found Jobs for Afghans, a research and advocacy group for non-military solutions in Afghanistan. The group’s mission is to call attention to the troubles of ordinary Afghans, for whom life is a daily struggle for survival. “It is disheartening that things in Afghanistan are getting worse. I want to do what I can for the Afghan people in need,” says Dost, who also teaches in the economics department at DU. After he gets his PhD, he says, he hopes to teach in Afghanistan. But he wonders whether the country will be in a condition that enables him and his family to live there. “When it comes down to it, we all need to feed our family. It is what drives us all, in the U.S. and in Afghanistan, but the means of achieving this goal is different,” Dost says. “The countries may be different, but I like to focus on the similarities. We are all humans. We all smile, laugh and eat. Why shouldn’t we all have the same opportunities?” >>www.jobsforafghans.org
—Katelyn Feldhaus

DU expands summer session offerings
Summer at DU will never be the same. The University is dramatically increasing the number of summer courses available for undergraduate students. Beginning in June, more choices will be available online and on campus in each of the academic divisions that offer undergraduate education. “A survey in April of last year showed that undergraduate students are interested in expanded summer term offerings at the University,” says DU Provost Gregg Kvistad. “Our goal is to make it easier for students remaining in the Denver area to take classes on campus and to increase the number of online courses so those who go home can earn DU credits no matter where they’re located.” The higher number of summer courses also will make it easier for students to accelerate their degree program, Kvistad says. And just as important, students studying abroad will have access to classes during the summer they might miss during the academic quarter they’re away. In addition to more courses, DU also will offer more need-based financial aid for the summer term. Summer quarter registration begins April 11. >>www.du.edu/summer
—Jim Berscheidt

Jeffrey Haessler

Wayne Armstrong

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The University of Denver Presents

Award-winning American journalist and poet

Eliza Griswold

Tuesday, March 22, 2011 at 7 p.m. Newman Center for the Performing Arts 2344 E. Iliff Ave.
Like other notable dates in history, Sept. 11 is one that will always remind us of a day that changed our lives. During the 2010–11 academic year, the University of Denver will explore why it happened and how society is being challenged to rethink our values. Join the discussion as DU’s Bridges to the Future series hosts 9/11: Ten Years After.

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University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

University of Denver Magazine Update

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Donor Spotlight

Sports

Dennis Erik Markusson
There are people in this world who, simply by living their lives, teach those around them how to more fully live their own. Dennis Erik Markusson (BS ’92), known as Erik to his friends, was one of those people. “His attitude was, ‘I’m here. I’m going to do this,’” says his father, Dennis Markusson. “That was kind of infectious to the people around him. You learn more from someone like Erik than he learned from us.” Erik died in December 2009 at age 44 due to complications caused by Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare genetic degenerative muscular disease that often takes boys (girls rarely get the disease) by the time they are in their teens. According to his parents, Dennis and Nanci (MA ’92), from diagnosis at age 4 until his death, Erik never expected special treatment. Thanks to an unbridled curiosity, he frequently coaxed people around him into mind-boggling, exhilarating adventures. Like the time Dennis and a guide carried Erik in his wheelchair to the top of the Acropolis in Greece. Or the time Erik’s entire Boy Scout troop carried his wheelchair into the woods for a campout. Or the eight years Erik and Nanci spent together at the University of Denver earning degrees. “I had to go with him to all of his classes, so I told him that he would also have to take a few with me,” Nanci says. “That’s how he ended up with a major in biology and a minor in history, because I got my master’s in history.” When Erik died, he left $1,000 to special needs programs at DU. “Erik did not have much wealth,” his father says, “but one of his wishes was that DU share in what he had.” In his memoir, Erik admitted that biology was a tricky major for him because of the lab work, but with the help of aides, his mom and other students, he had a complete experience, conducting experiments, using microscopes and participating in group studies. “Going to college and graduating was a great example of how I didn’t let Duchenne prevent me from doing something I wanted to do,” Erik wrote. “To me, it’s better to try and fail than to not do something and wonder if you could have.” He also shared how the disease shaped his approach to life: “After living with Duchenne for 40 years, I have formed a definite philosophy for coping with the disease. The most important traits to have are perseverance, patience and a positive attitude. Self-pity and using the disease as an excuse will get you nowhere. With the uncertainties of the disease, don’t worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow, deal with it when it comes.” His memoir is more remarkable when one considers the fact that he wrote it using a joystick that he operated with his tongue. The Markussons say Erik’s disease was never something they viewed as unpleasant—just sometimes inconvenient. “When you have a child like Erik, when you never know what the next day is going to bring, you don’t say, ‘We’ll do this tomorrow.’ You do it today,” Nanci says. Dennis agrees and says that’s what Erik’s memoir is all about. “It’s about how to live,” he says. “I think that’s what he’d like to communicate: The boundaries of how you want to live your life are in many respects the boundaries that you create yourself.” >>Read Erik Markusson’s memoir at www.du.edu/magazine.
—Janalee Card Chmel

Student-athletes give nonprofits an assist
DU’s student-athletes are showing that they’re not only good athletes—they’re good sports, too. Throughout the year, Pioneers are taking off their gear and taking part in service projects that support a number of service organizations around Denver and the state of Colorado through the University’s Citizen-Athlete Community Outreach Program. The program was created to increase efforts and strengthen DU’s connection to the community, says Cindi Nagai, DU’s director of studentathlete support services, diversity and community relations. The other goals of the program are to encourage student-athletes to deepen their selfunderstanding as citizens and role models for their peers; to create a learning laboratory that provides student-athletes opportunities to acquire skills for civic engagement by learning alongside community partners; and to empower studentathletes to become agents of positive social change. Each athletic team is required to do a community service project. On past projects, Pioneers have worked with Habitat for Humanity, the Children’s Hospital, the 9Health Fair, the Make-A-Wish Foundation and Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The council works in conjunction with Nagai and the Citizen-Athlete Community Outreach Program to coordinate community outreach activities. The council consists of two representatives from each team. Student-athletes undertake one large community service project each quarter. The fall quarter project was the 9News Food Drive; the winter project supported Soles4Souls, an organization that collects new and gently worn shoes and donates them to people in need.
—Katelyn Feldhaus

Lacrosse’s new roar
By Janalee Card Chmel

decided to leave the Princeton Tigers men’s lacrosse team after 22 years and six national titles to take the helm of the Pioneers men’s lacrosse team, the media went bananas. The New Yorker’s John McPhee wrote a feature on Tierney, Lacrosse Magazine named him “person of the year” and The Denver Post called him a “legend.” The buzz at DU matched the media frenzy. “We expected that he would increase the visibility of our great university, not only because of who he was but because we expected him to win,” says Peg Bradley-Doppes, vice chancellor for athletics and recreation. “And in his first year here, he won the conference championship and went on to the NCAA championships, so I’d say he’s well on his way to achieving our goals.” Tierney admits it would have been easy to look toward retirement at Princeton. “I’m 58 years old, and it would have been easy enough to stay at Princeton and walk off into the sunset. But that wasn’t me. I was excited for a new challenge.” Tierney, who led the U.S. national men’s lacrosse team to the 1998 world championship and was inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 2002, became DU’s head lacrosse coach in 2009. (His son Trevor is the team’s first assistant coach.) In addition to the new challenge, Bill Tierney says he was excited to use the move as a way to grow the sport of lacrosse nationally. In his first year, he set up lacrosse camps and began reaching out to local players. “One of the things I love about lacrosse is that it’s still got an innocence to it,” he says. “There’s nobody coming to college saying, ‘If I just have a couple of good years of college lacrosse, I’ll go be a millionaire in the NLL or MLL.’ And the best part is that for young men and women to play at the pinnacle of this sport, they’ve got to get a college education.” The combination of proven coaching and academic expectations paid off for Tierney and his team on the field and in the classroom during his first year. The Pioneers closed out their season with a 12–5 overall record, tying the program’s best season since turning Division I in 1999. Additionally, the student-athletes’ overall grade point average rose from 2.7 to 3.1. Senior Captain Andrew Lay says he has known who “Coach Tierney” was since he started playing lacrosse in the second grade. “I went to all of the Princeton lacrosse camps when I was young with hopes that Coach T. would approach me with a letter of intent regardless of how old I was,” Lay recalls. “Obviously, I did not end up attending Princeton, but my dream of playing for Coach T. came true.” Tierney says he has found a new home at DU. “This place is special,” he says. “I came from arguably the finest academic institution in the world and I wasn’t sure if I’d find that again. But very quickly I have found it here. I’ve discovered such an honest, family atmosphere at DU. I’m thrilled to be here.” >>www.denverpioneers.com

When Bill Tierney

Photo courtesy of Dennis and Nanci Markusson

Wayne Armstrong

Cindi Nagai

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University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

University of Denver Magazine Update

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Arts

Myhren selected for Colorado Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame
DU has a new hall of famer roaming its halls. Trygve Myhren, who chairs DU’s Board of Trustees, was inducted into the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame at the 34th annual induction gala Nov. 6. Each year, roughly 25 individuals are nominated, and five or six of those nominees are voted into the hall by a panel of hall of fame members, leaders of Colorado ski areas and resorts, and members of the board of the Colorado Ski and Snowboard Museum in Vail. The list of nominees and those who are selected make up a “who’s who” of individuals who have excelled and contributed to Colorado’s world-class status as a place to ski, says Dean Ericson, a former president of the International Skiing History Association who nominated Myhren for the honor. Nominees fall into three categories—athlete, sport builder and inspirational leader. Myhren is being recognized as a sport builder. Myhren was selected for induction because of his work with disabled skiers and the U.S. Paralympic program. Myhren started working with what was then called the U.S. Disabled Ski Team—now called the U.S. Adaptive Ski Team—16 years ago. He also helped create SkiTAM, an annual cable television industry fundraiser that has raised more than $5 million for disabled athlete training expenses. He also helped form an arrangement between the U.S. Olympic Committee and the United States Ski & Snowboard Association that provided training to the U.S. Paralympic ski team. For his efforts, Myhren was selected to serve as Chef de Mission for the U.S. delegation to the 2006 Paralympic Games in Torino, Italy. Last year, Otto Tschudi (BSBA ’75)—also a Board of Trustees member—was inducted into the hall of fame.
—Katelyn Feldhaus
Courtesy of the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame

Painting a better future
By Greg Glasgow

THANK YOU LOYAL DU DONORS!
Throughout its 147 years, the University has depended on loyal donors to help talented students from all walks of life attend DU. We’re especially grateful for the many donors who have extended their generosity by including a bequest to DU in their estate plans. Make your mark on the future! Contact us to discuss current and deferred giving options that best suit your circumstances and will accomplish your desired impact at DU.

Office of Gift Planning 1.800.448.3238 or 303.871.2739 E-mail: [email protected]

www.giftplanning.du.edu

CELEBRATING 147 YEARS OF ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE

got her MA in art at DU in 1998, she thought she was off to a career as a college instructor, teaching undergrads the finer points of Picasso, postmodernism and perspective. But that all went out the window when she set foot in Downtown Aurora Visual Arts (DAVA), a 17-year-old nonprofit that provides free after-school arts programs for kids ages 3–17 in the city just east of Denver. “The first time I walked into a classroom with middle school kids they just captivated me,” Jenson says from behind her desk at DAVA. “I thought they were so incredibly interesting and complex and they had such good ideas, and so that was it. I started working here, and I’ve been here for the past 12 years.” Under Jenson’s watch—she became executive director in 2002—DAVA has more than doubled its offerings, adding a computer arts lab, a multigenerational family arts program, a portable arts school and a student-run public gallery to a list of programs that also includes a drop-in studio and a “job training” program where middle-schoolers learn about punctuality, accountability and performance while they create. “We were not just interested in their coming here and learning art skills,” Jenson says. “It wasn’t an art academy where you would put up an easel and give kids a paintbrush and tell them to follow your instructions. Instead we were much more interested in what kids had to say—what their issues were and how to develop art programs around those things.” So rather than going to the mall after school, or going home to play video games, kids can head to DAVA to sculpt, paint, film and draw. A staff of two full-time and three part-time instructors trained in art education— including Viviane Le Courtois (MA art history ’00)—keeps an eye on their progress. And while some DAVA students go on to careers in the arts, just as many go on to work in science or medicine. A study begun in 2007 shows that kids who participate in DAVA have significantly higher grade point averages than their peers. That link to academic performance underscores DAVA’s role in supporting local schools and points to new models for learning. “Creativity gives you this sense that you can solve every problem,” Jenson says. “The operating mode around here is that there’s a solution to everything. If you can imagine it, you can usually figure it out.” Serving 900 kids a year—many from low-income or first-generation families—DAVA has proven success in keeping kids off the streets, away from drugs and on the road to higher education. “At the point at which I came here, there was this recognition that having kids learn within the arts was far more important than anything else I could be doing,” Jenson says. “And doing this in a community setting, where this gallery and this facility would be open to everybody, I think it also spoke to areas of social justice that were incredibly important to me. “Not all kids have access to a safe creative space,” she continues. “This is a safe haven for kids to be creative and let their imaginations take them wherever they can go.” >>Watch a video about DAVA at www.du.edu/magazine. >>www.davarts.org
University of Denver Magazine Update

When Susan Jenson

Wayne Armstrong

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University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

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Academics

Sustainability statistics
Percent of employees using alternative transportation (bicycling, walking, public transport, carpooling)

DU by the Numbers

DU ranks fourth in nation for study abroad
DU ranks fourth in the nation among doctoral and research institutions in its percentage of undergraduate students who study abroad, according to the 2010 Open Doors report released Nov. 15 by the Institute of International Education (IIE). The report, which reflects data from the 2009–10 academic year, shows DU sent 61.4 percent of its undergraduates abroad. Pepperdine University, the University of San Diego and Wake Forest University finished ahead of DU. The percentage of DU students studying abroad has held steady, but that number across all U.S. colleges and universities dropped slightly by 0.8 percent this year after nearly two decades of growth. According to the report, 260,327 U.S. college students studied abroad in 2009–10. According to the IIE, the global financial crisis, rising fuel costs and the H1N1 outbreak in Mexico contributed to the decrease. The top study destination for students was the United Kingdom. At DU, the most popular destination was Spain, followed by Italy and the United Kingdom. Additionally, the report found that new international student enrollment in the U.S. increased 1.3 percent from the previous year. Students from China, India, South Korea, Canada and Taiwan accounted for 52 percent of all international students at U.S. higher education institutions. At DU, the number of international students increased from 6 percent to 7 percent. International students hail from 89 different countries and make up approximately 9.5 percent of the total student population at DU. DU offers more than 150 study-abroad programs in 58 nations. Through DU’s Cherrington Global Scholars program, eligible students have the opportunity to study abroad while paying the same tuition and fees they would while on the DU campus. The University helps students pay some additional costs, such as transportation, fees for visa applications and insurance mandated by the host country or university. >>www.opendoors.iienetwork.org
—Kim DeVigil

So long, slide projector
By Doug McPherson

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Percent of students using alternative transportation

51 19 8

Percent of food in dining halls that is locally grown/produced Food waste (in tons) composted each month from Centennial Halls dining room Percent of campus landscaping waste that is composted or mulched

Two DU poets win NEA grants
Two poets with DU ties were among 42 poets from across the nation awarded literature fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in November 2010. Sandra Meek (PhD poetry ’95) and current PhD student Jennifer Denrow each were awarded $25,000, as were the 40 other grant recipients. According to the NEA website, the grants “encourage the production of new works of literature by allowing writers the time and means to write.” Meek (pictured), an English professor at Berry College in Georgia, plans to use the money to return to South Africa— where she served in the Peace Corps 20 years ago—to work on her fifth book of poetry, An Ecology of Elsewhere. Denrow—whose first full-length book of poetry, California, comes out in April from Four Way Books—plans to use her grant to travel and write as well. A native of Kansas City, Mo., she is in her third year in DU’s PhD creative writing program. The NEA’s annual creative writing fellowships alternate between poetry and prose. The agency received 1,063 eligible applications for the 2010 grants. >>Read poems from Meek and Denrow online at www.du.edu/today.
—Greg Glasgow
Courtesy of Sandra Meek

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Students with a declared minor in sustainability

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DU Archives

Compiled by Rebecca Powell, assistant professor in the geography department

would feel right at home teaching at the University of Denver these days. He wouldn’t expect to conduct his class with chalk, chalkboards, dry erase boards (and the smelly markers that go with them), overhead projectors and those clunky slide carousels. And at DU he wouldn’t have to, because those relics are landing on the endangered species list. Taking their place is something much more modern—some might even say futuristic: CourseMedia. A product of DU’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), CourseMedia makes lesson-planning a snap (or a click). Now instructors simply go online and browse a huge digital collection of more than 56,000 photos, historical images, videos (including full-length movies and YouTube content) and even music clips to sleep-proof their lectures. The idea sprouted in 2003, when art history faculty collaborated with the CTL to digitize slides of artwork used in old carousels that were beginning to break down. (Kodak stopped making slide projectors in 2004.) The school ended up with thousands of digitized slides, but no easy way to project them in classrooms. That’s when Joseph Labrecque, DU’s senior multimedia application developer, and senior education web developer Alex Martinez began tinkering with what would become CourseMedia—an easy way to search, gather, organize and deliver digital content on laptops and desktops and in classrooms. Professors can enlarge photos to see specific elements, add notes that appear beside images and even record their own personal narration. And it’s only at DU. “Other schools have image or video collections, but they don’t have anything like this that I’m aware of; this was built specifically for DU,” says Labrecque, adding that DU does allow a few other schools to use the software via license agreement. At first, the system was used mostly by art history professors, but today it’s used in several disciplines and in more than 300 courses. Susan Sterett, associate dean of arts, humanities and social sciences at DU, uses CourseMedia regularly and believes it improves learning. “It’s important to offer multiple ways of learning because some teaching methods stick with Kim Axline, assistant theater professor, is one of many DU faculty members using the CourseMedia students better than others,” Sterett says. “Some system in their classrooms. students might remember and relate better to a film clip over just reading.” One example: Sterett was able to find and load a film within seconds via CourseMedia to show her sociolegal studies class a documentary called Rain in a Dry Land, which depicted life for Somalians living in a refugee camp before they came to the United States. “A lot of our students work with refugees when they come here, but I wanted them to see how they lived in camps before they arrived so they can better connect with each other,” Sterett says. Sterett says she wants to dispel the thought that professors are “pulling out 20-year-old lecture notes” for their classes today. “That isn’t reality anymore,” she says. And the CTL isn’t resting on its laurels; it’s now working on a way to let students pull up content on their phones and other mobile devices. “That way they can study on the bus, or even while they’re [out],” Labrecque says. And that’s something George Jetson’s boy, Elroy, would surely appreciate.
University of Denver Magazine Update

George Jetson

Knud Nielsen/Shutterstock

Wayne Armstrong

University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

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Parent to Parent

People

Supporting your ‘emerging adult’
If only I had read Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s book Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties (Oxford University Press, 2006) when my daughter was a freshman, I would have had a better understanding of how and why her college experience and her view of life after college differ so much from mine. Arnett describes the years from 18 to somewhere around 25 as the period of “emerging adulthood”—a time of identity exploration, instability, self-focus, transition and seemingly unlimited possibilities. No longer do our children expect to finish school, get a job that leads to a career path, marry and start a family in their early 20s. Rather, current American society encourages young people to explore, try out new experiences, dabble in romantic relationships, and to wait before getting married and having kids. No wonder my daughter and her friends seem unsure of their plans for after graduation. They have no specific plans—and, according to Arnett, they probably don’t even think they should. Initially, this seeming lack of clear focus baffled and frustrated me. However, in Chapter 6, “The Road Through College,” Arnett explains that college today is a place where students discover what they want to do—a place to experience personal growth rather than vocational training. I now have a better understanding of the college experience for my daughter and her friends. College represents a safe place, a place for trying out different ideas and different directions for one’s work future while many of the decisions and responsibilities of adult life are temporarily postponed. Arnett also suggests that emerging adulthood is a time when young people may be simultaneously moving away from and becoming closer to their parents. For our part, we parents need to learn not to ask so many questions and to expect our emerging adults to tell us less; we need to let them lead their own lives with as little interference as possible. The reward is that we will begin to see each other as individuals and establish new relationships as friends and near-equals.
Judy Maillis is a retired English and theater teacher and a member of the University of Denver Parents Council. Her daughter, Caitlin Holleron, is a senior majoring in international studies with minors in Spanish and anthropology.

Queen of cool
By Kathryn Mayer
Justin Edmonds

One of DU’s Highest Fundraising Priorities: The Academic Commons at Penrose Library
Every gift will help make the critical difference in this project. Support the Academic Commons at Penrose Library. Make your gift today at giving.du.edu. “The Academic Commons at Penrose Library will create the ideal place for students and faculty to build our community of 21st century scholars and further our mission as a place of inquiry, a place of dialogue, and a place of academic rigor and engagement.” —Nancy Allen, Dean and Director of Penrose Library

our COMMON GOAL
giving.du.edu 20
University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

800.448.3238

comes to mind when you think about modernism, or art shows, or anything cool or hip, then you probably have Dana Cain (BA mass communications ’81) to thank. Founder of the Denver Modernism Show, the Colorado Chocolate Festival and the Vintage Voltage Expo, among others, Cain has hosted more than 150 events in the Denver area since 1983. The modernism show, her biggest claim to fame, grew from a small event in a 4,000-square-foot space in 2006 to one of the biggest modernism events in the world. The 2010 show was held in the National Western Complex with some 140 vendors from across the nation showcasing retro fashion, cars, furniture and art. Cain also hosts the Vintage Voltage Expo (classic stereo and musical equipment), the Collectors Supershow (toys) and the Rocky Mountain Book and Paper Fair. In years past she’s penned collectors’ guides, run a fulltime collectibles business on eBay and worked at local stores dedicated to midcentury style. “I was born in ’57, in the same month that they launched Sputnik,” Cain says. “I grew up with ‘The Jetsons’ and ‘Star Trek.’” She also was influenced by her mother, a trendy furniture store employee who would collect vinyl chairs and pole lamps—some of the items that can be seen in the modernism show. “I’ve always loved it,” Cain says of retro and popular culture. Cain’s next project is a summer 2011 relaunch of the Denver County Fair, which hasn’t been held for at least a century. Cain says it’s “not just Grandma’s county fair,” promising “cutting edge” crafts (think clothes and funky jewelry by Colorado fashion designers) and rodeos featuring skateboards and bicycles instead of saddle horses and bucking broncos. For Cain, the events are all about “promoting Denver as the creative city of the West,” proving to all the naysayers out there that Colorado can hold its own with other cultural meccas. “We can’t drive an hour to Chicago or California or Seattle to find art,” Cain says. “We have to create our own culture.” Which Denver has, she adds, thanks in large part to burgeoning music, art and fashion scenes and a healthy stream of funding to the arts. And thanks to people like Cain. “Dana’s enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit have done so much for the art scene in Denver,” says Gwen Chanzit (MA art history ’74), curator at the Denver Art Museum and a lecturer in DU’s School of Art and Art History. “When she organizes an event, everyone knows it will be high-energy and well-attended. She’s highlighted the work of local artists, made modernism cool and brought a variety of people together. Denver now hosts events formerly exclusive to places like Los Angeles.” In the past five years, Cain has taken on a new role in the scene: art collector. Among her collection of about 150 original pieces by Colorado artists are a painting of angelic ramen noodles and a Mary Mother of God paper towel dispenser called “The New Holy Water.” “I was never an actual cheerleader in high school. I didn’t have the bod,” Cain says with a laugh, “but I’ve always had the personality. And I like thinking of myself as a cheerleader for Denver. I like cheering for the arts, galleries and all the things I think are cool. That’s me doing my part to support the local culture.” >>www.danacain.com
University of Denver Magazine Update

If Denver

FOR OUR COMMUNITY

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Q&A

A conversation with Cox Enterprises Chair Jim Kennedy
Interview by Nathan Solheim

opportunities for all kinds of folks, and higher education is so crucial in our society. As things become more complex and we need to solve an ever-increasing number of problems, highly educated people can do that, and I’m excited to have a small role in helping DU do that.

Q A

What’s your current involvement with Cox Enterprises now that you’ve retired from the CEO position?

Q A Q A

I read that you were a cyclist and then quit at age 50. Has anything filled the void?

I’m still the chairman of the company. I’m still there a good bit of the time. The newspaper portion of the business is under real pressure and struggling. Newspapers need to figure out how to live in an electronically delivered news world. And they need to be able to monetize all the content they produce that is now delivered free. One of my sons reads five papers a day and none are in print and all are free. So we have to figure that out. Our biggest business is Cox Communications, the cable business. We’re getting into wireless, which—combined with the powerful pipe we now have in homes— makes our business even stronger. We need to find more things we can do to deliver information into people’s homes and find more ways to get added value out of that pipe. Our other businesses—radio and TV—those are mature businesses but they’re still good businesses. Manheim is the largest automobile auction company in the world, and it’ll continue to do well. AutoTrader.com is our fastest-growing business. The automotive industry has been really hit in the last two years, but we do well online—that helps.

You have quite an interest in conservation. I notice you serve on the board of DU—and by DU, I mean Ducks Unlimited—and other conservation organizations. Why?

Q A

All outdoor activities. I took up golf at age 53, and I’m whacking away at that stupid thing and my competitive nature has calmed down a bit. I retired a year ago and I started surfing again like I did when I was a kid and traveled to Fiji. I have a place in Montana where we spend more time. I’ve got plenty of things that fill in the holes.

My mother had a great love of the outdoors, and she instilled that in me. When I came to Colorado, I really enjoyed—I hate to sound too corny—the majesty of the West, whether we were hunting, fishing, hiking or skiing, and I thought, “This is just so wonderful.” Frankly, going back to Hawaii, where I grew up, and seeing what happened there with the overdevelopment, I’m reminded of Joni Mitchell’s old lyric, “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot” … she wrote it about Hawaii. I hate for that to happen. I want my grandchildren to see the great open spaces, so I’ve been very active in conservation my entire life.

Are you a hunter and fisherman as well?

You go back to Teddy Roosevelt, whose love of the outdoors came as a result of being a hunter. I think consumptive users tend to care about [the environment] the most. So it makes good sense, but I don’t know that everybody appreciates that, and the more urban dwellers you have, they don’t understand that either. I’m fortunate that all three of my children hunt, to one degree or another. I’m a bow hunter for big game purely, and I only hunt with traditional equipment so I’ve spent a lot of time hunting and not much getting.

Photo courtesy of Jim Kennedy

Q A
dizzying forward progress of technology, the media and communications industries have undergone big changes in recent years. And DU alum Jim Kennedy (BSBA ’70) has played a major role in all of it. As CEO of Cox Enterprises from 1998–2010, Kennedy guided his private, family owned company through the fastest-changing business landscape in human history. What started as a small newspaper company in 1898 has grown to almost $15 billion in revenue. Today, Cox also owns television and radio stations, cable television systems, website AutoTrader. com and vehicle remarketing service Manheim. In 2010 Kennedy took a step back from day-to-day involvement with his businesses, though he is no less committed to causes he’s passionate about. He recently endowed three professorships in DU’s Morgridge College of Education and plans to become more involved in conservation.

You’ve said newspapers need to learn how to make money on the Internet. What’s been the effect on radio and TV?

You don’t have to visit Denver to reconnect with your alma mater, DU is coming to you in 2011. Please join us for an evening of light hors d’oeuvres, drinks and the opportunity to mingle with fellow alumni, university leadership and staff. For more information, please visit

Thanks to the

Not as big an effect on television and radio. If you look at the numbers radio and television deliver, they’re still darn good, but the more ways people have to get news, entertainment or information, it segments the market. If someone’s on the Internet they may not be watching television or listening to radio. [Radio and television are] still able to deliver good audiences for their advertisers—not as good as they used to be, but I don’t know what is.

Q A

How did you decide to help out the Morgridge College of Education?

www.alumni.du.edu/DUOnTheRoad or call 800-448-3238, ext. 0.

Obviously, I’m a graduate of DU, and for a short time I was on the board and I got to witness what [Chancellor Emeritus] Dan Ritchie did for the University. Dan and I had developed a little bit of a rapport, and I told him when I could, I would make a financial contribution to the University. He directed me toward the [Morgridge College of Education] and said that’s where we needed the help. I have a great deal of gratitude for the University and what they did for me at a time in my life, and so I made my gift and I wanted it to go to where the University of Denver felt like they needed it the most. I think education can be a key that unlocks
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Look for us in 2011 as we travel to the following cities:
Fort Worth March 14 San Diego April 7 Dallas March 15 Minneapolis May 10 Houston March 16 Chicago May 12 Los Angeles April 5 & 6

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University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

University of Denver Magazine Update
2/10/11 8:54:15 PM

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Essay

University to host second TEDxDU event
With the success of the TEDxDU celebration of “DUing” in May 2010, the University has decided to “DU” it again. The University of Denver will host the second TEDxDU on May 13, 2011, at the Newman Center for the Performing Arts. The event will be simulcast at other campus locations and streamed live online. TED—which stands for technology, entertainment and design—is a nonprofit devoted to “ideas worth spreading.” At TED conferences, leading scientists, philosophers, entrepreneurs and artists present their ideas in 18 minutes or less. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At TEDxDU last May, photojournalist Aaron Huey (BFA ’99) called for the U.S. to honor its treaties with American Indians. Kim Gorgens, a clinical professor in the Graduate School of Professional Psychology, shared her research on the cumulative effects of multiple brain injuries. Their talks were featured on TED.com, whose TEDTalks videos have been viewed more than 300 million times since 2006. The 2011 TEDxDU event will bring together an equally compelling roster of scientists, performers, philosophers, innovators and thought leaders to inspire, entertain, and share their ideas for changing the world, organizers say. TEDxDU aims to connect attendees to the power of ideas and optimism and to celebrate action. “We live in an exciting time in history as the sciences, technology, and a general understanding of the world are advancing at an ever-increasing pace,” says DU student John Ketelsen, who plans to volunteer at TEDxDU 2011. “TED, to me, embodies this idea by taking speakers from the forefront of their respective fields and making their ideas available to the world.” Seating will be limited, and registration will be by invitation and online application. Volunteer and sponsorship opportunities are available. >>www.tedxdu.com
—Media Relations Staff

In season
By Julene Bair

In Sanskrit,

Congratulations to our 2011 Honorees
Evans Award Community Service Award

Patrick A. Grant (MBA ’73)
Distinguished Service to the University

Brad Busse (BSBA ’80)
Randolph P. McDonough Award for Service to Alumni

Victor Quinn
Professional Achievement Award

John Ritter (BA ’72)
Ammi Hyde Award for Young Alumni Achievement

Carol Tome (MBA ’81)

March 3, 2011

Nicholas Sauer (BA ’05)

the word for spring comes from sphayati, “desires eagerly.” In Old English, “springan” meant “to leap, burst forth, fly up.” I’m doing it all. Through the winter, I kindled desire, ogling seed-catalog pictures of voluptuous tomatoes and curvaceous squash. Were they airbrushed? What vegetable could look that perfect? When March came, I leapt, burst and flew, digging and double-digging. I built my compost pile and a fence around it all. Someday life will depend on this, I theorized. What with all the cataclysms we’re bringing down around our ears, people will have to grow their own food again. But I wasn’t really thinking about the end of the world as we know it. I was thinking about the end of my world. Last year, my family did the unthinkable. We sold our Kansas farm, the one that my mother and father spent their entire lives building. Even though I hadn’t lived on the farm in decades, it lived in me. By the time we sold, the original farmstead—where my mother had tended flowers and vegetables near a tree-shaded lawn—had been erased. The house had been torn down and the windbreak burned to make way for one of the sprinkler irrigation systems that have turned the Western plains into an alien landscape. Out of an airplane window—which is about the only way I see Kansas anymore—the fields look like giant clocks with sprinklers for dials, none of them agreeing on the time. I have no need of a clock now. The angle of the sun tells me it’s Morning Glories & Windmill by Gordon Vanus spring. Time to dig! It has been a long journey back to these simple pleasures—hands in dirt, nostrils filled with the scent of it, worms writhing as I turn a spadeful. Lettuce seeds are chocolate sprinkles. Scallions tiny chunks of charcoal. Spinach gray pebbles. Chard desiccated thorns. Gardening is my attempt to make myself whole again in this vacuum of identity-less-ness the sale left in its wake. I was shocked by the wave of seller’s remorse that hit me as soon as we’d sealed the deal. Seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke believed we gain rights to land when we mix our labor with it, but I think that when we mix our labor with the soil, we become it. Or it becomes us. So this is a homecoming. We must long for this union in our genes, but few people experience it anymore. How did we forget? Are we that repressed? It would be like forgetting sex. My hands know. They will slip their seed into the ground just as lips will find each other in the dark. The mingling of self and soil, seed and soul must and will occur. But gardens take a little more know-how than procreation. Before I’ve even dusted off the knees of my jeans and looped the wire over the gatepost—which I plan to make bloom with blue morning glories like those that climbed the farm windmill—I suspect that I should have mixed the compost on top with the dirt underneath. Even though I carefully screened it, it is too loose to hold moisture. And I shouldn’t have mulched the lettuce with straw. Lettuce needs light to sprout. That’s why you plant it only an eighth-inch deep. Within hours, days, weeks, I discover a host of other mistakes I wouldn’t be making if I’d stayed home and married a farmer. I couldn’t have done that and become me. But if I now had to choose between growing things and being me, I couldn’t do it. Growing things, I grow myself.

Wayne Armstrong

For more information or to purchase tickets please visit du.edu/foundersday or contact the Office of Alumni Relations at 303.871.2701 24
University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

A 2004 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow, Julene Bair has published essays and fiction in periodicals ranging from the Chicago Tribune to the Iowa Review. Her book, One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter, won Mid-List Press’s First Series Award and Women Writing the West’s Willa Award.

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When double amputee Neil Duncan summited Mount Kilimanjaro, he did more than conquer Africa’s highest peak. The climb marked the end of his recovery and the beginning of the rest of his life.
By Chelsey Baker-Hauck Photographs by Reed Hoffmann

W
“I’m here.”

When Neil Duncan reached the summit of

Mount Kilimanjaro on Aug. 7, 2010, he called his sister from the top. He told her simply, Those two little words said a lot. Just a few years earlier, Duncan—now a University of Denver undergraduate—had nearly died on a battlefield in Afghanistan. He had to learn to walk again and to start life over without legs. And then climb a mountain. Sponsored by Disabled Sports USA, the Challenged Athletes Foundation and Health Net Federal Services, Duncan made the Kilimanjaro trek with Kirk Bauer and Dan Nevins. Their Missing Parts in Action team —three wounded veterans with just one leg between them—made international headlines. Conquering Kilimanjaro’s 19,340-foot summit was something he needed to do,

Climbing
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Duncan says—a test of the limits of his new prosthetic limbs, and a test of his will. Will is something he has plenty of. It’s what kept him alive in Afghanistan. It’s what powered his recovery. It’s what fueled his training for the trek—climbing 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado and logging 25 miles a week on elliptical machines. And will is what drove him up Kilimanjaro for up to 12 hours a day with a 30-pound pack on his back, sometimes walking, sometimes crawling over boulders and scree on the mountain’s upper reaches. Standing on the top of Africa’s highest peak, Duncan proved to himself, and the rest of the world, that he’d left the limitations of his disability far behind.

Back

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Although the climb up Kilimanjaro had started just a week earlier, the journey began in 2002, when Duncan joined the U.S. Army. He was 18 and had been taking classes at a community college in his hometown of Maple Grove, Minn. “I was bored,” Duncan recalls. “I was re-evaluating my priorities and what I wanted to do. Military service was always on my radar. “College would always be there [later],” he adds. “I wanted to train and see the world. I got every bit of that and more.” Duncan spent his 19th birthday at Fort Benning, Ga., where he went through infantry training and paratrooper school. March 2003 found him stationed in Italy. A few months later, he was in Iraq. In March 2005, Duncan—by then a 21-year-old sergeant in the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry (Airborne)—was leading a team at Forward Operating Base Wolverine in the remote and sparsely populated Zabul province of Afghanistan. Zabul’s 40-mile border with Pakistan is a conduit for Taliban fighters. “We were rolling all over our little province rooting out insurgent activity,” says Duncan, who spent the night of Dec. 4, 2005, parked in the cold on a mountaintop, watching for Taliban movement. His team rose with the sun the morning of Dec. 5 and headed back to Wolverine along a dry riverbed. That’s when the Taliban struck. Their attack came in the form of an improvised explosive device buried in the dirt track. The homemade bomb—with a makeshift pressure plate of tire tubing, pieces of chicken crate and
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old hacksaw blades—detonated directly under Duncan, who was sitting in the passenger seat of a Humvee. The blast sheared off the truck’s front end. “The explosion was so fierce it launched a 100-pound Humvee wheel about 100 yards. It blew the radiator right out of the truck another 75 yards,” Duncan says. The vehicle’s gunner was ejected and the driver’s head slammed into the steering wheel hard enough to leave a dent; both escaped with minor injuries. But the explosion drove the engine through the Humvee’s firewall, crushing Duncan’s legs. His right arm and hand were shattered, and he had thirddegree burns on his left arm. His bottom lip was nearly severed,

his jaw was shattered and 10 of his teeth were blown out, taking bone and skin with them. “My legs were mangled, wrapped in metal,” he says quietly. “I just sat there, bleeding out. “It’s not what you would know as pain—it’s beyond pain. It’s the worst nightmare you’ve ever had, and you can’t wake up.” Twenty minutes ticked by. Duncan stopped moving. By the time medics arrived, most of his blood had pumped out into the dust of that gulley.

Medics left the chopper running as they gave Duncan all the blood they had at Forward Operating Base Lagman in Zabul. From there, he flew to a field hospital in Kandahar, where doctors amputated his mangled legs. Three days later he was at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Still in critical condition, he was placed in a medically induced coma. A ventilator breathed for him. Vacuums inside his open amputation wounds kept them from festering; the wounds were scrubbed out at least once a day. On Dec. 11, 2005, he arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Duncan doesn’t remember those early days, but his family can’t forget. The Army informed them within hours of his injury. “That day is very vivid. I’ll never forget that day,” says his only sibling, older sister Katy Davenport. “The pain, the sadness, the hurt—nothing has come close to that day.” The family met Duncan at Walter Reed, where Davenport stayed with her brother for the next three months. “He was unconscious when we saw him. He was swollen. His legs were always covered—we could only see where they ended. “At that point, we knew he would live, but we didn’t know his brain function, or if he had PTSD.” Duncan’s teammates e-mailed a picture of his Humvee. “It was a shock,” Davenport says. “I thought, ‘How are you still alive?’”

Duncan finally woke to find his legs gone—the right was amputated above the knee, the left below. He was in a neck brace and his right arm—held together with plates and screws—was in a cast to the armpit. He breathed through a tracheotomy tube, his jaw was wired shut, and an external frame was screwed into his face to hold the fragments of his jaw in place. “He was as bad as you can be and still be alive,” recalls climbing partner Bauer, executive director of Disabled Sports USA and the Wounded Warrior Disabled Sports Project. He met Duncan while visiting with severely injured soldiers at Walter Reed and “trying to give them a little hope.” Duncan had surgery every day, sometimes twice a day, for weeks, lapsing in and out of consciousness. Still, he says, he got lucky. He didn’t have internal injuries or a brain injury. He didn’t have post-traumatic stress disorder. He survived. Duncan’s most vivid memory from that time is a nightmare— one he still can’t quite shake. “I dreamed that my plane into Kandahar had crashed and ground my legs off,” he says, looking away. “I couldn’t wake up.” It was the worst night of his life. As he fought to escape the nightmare, he says, “They had to chain me to the bed.” “It was a couple of weeks in before I really started to deal with [the injury],” Duncan recalls. “I couldn’t move, couldn’t bathe. All of the hair on the back of my head fell out. It was just disgusting.” He couldn’t focus on the future. “It was one hour at a time, there was so much pain.” But he started to see progress. His legs were stitched up. He was able to drink through a straw. The stabilizer was cut off his face. He could speak again. He started physical therapy. He began to eat solid food. Eventually, he was fitted for prosthetics. That’s when Duncan’s battle back really began. He had blast marks on his face—black tattooing that had to be removed by laser. He required extensive dental work, including skin grafts and tooth implants. He also had to learn to walk with prosthetics—the biggest challenge yet. “Initially, it’s like trying to walk on stilts, but there’s no sensation,” he explains. “You don’t know where things are. It’s like trying to walk on stilts and in a tremendous amount of pain. “My first time standing was the most painful thing I’ve ever felt in my life,” he adds. “And it was the most disappointed I’ve ever been in my life. I foolishly thought I would muscle through it, but I could only stand for a few seconds.” He practiced using his new legs for hours every day and set a goal of running again.
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“He would put on his legs and run down the dorm hallways, and he would fall on the hard floor until he got it,” his sister recalls. Duncan’s new mission was to end his dependency on others, and by May of 2006 he was living independently at a Walter Reed facility for severely injured soldiers. “There was no one around, and I liked it that way,” he says. “It made me deal with things, made me get up in the morning. It made me learn to do things and become independent.” Eight months after his injury, Duncan took his first running steps on a track. “It was 20 months before the legs became part of my life and I reached my full potential,” he says. He retired from the Army, and in September 2007, not quite two years after he was injured, Duncan had the last of some 40 surgeries.

The Kilimanjaro climb “changed people’s perception of what disabled people can do,” says Bauer, 62, a retired Army sergeant who lost his left leg to a hand grenade in Vietnam. As Duncan, Bauer and Nevins worked their way up the mountain, other climbers greeted the group of amputees with disbelief. Local children made robot noises as they passed. “There are a lot of assumptions about what [disabled] people can do,” Duncan says. “I’d love to be the first person to break any of those.” But breaking assumptions isn’t easy, especially on Africa’s highest mountain. Duncan had attempted Kilimanjaro a year earlier but had to turn back. “[The guides] put me on a route that would require an acclimated climber to go for seven hours a day for seven days,” Duncan explains. “I was doing 14-hour days, shimmying across rock faces by headlamp. I turned around at 16,000 feet—I wasn’t sure I could get down.” From that experience, Duncan told The Washington Post, “I learned that if you take a bunch of amputees and you want to put them on top of a mountain, there are a lot of things you need to think about.” Things like allowing extra time for the trek up Kilimanjaro’s Rongai route and securing permits that would allow them to camp anywhere on the mountain—critical accommodations for disabled climbers. Duncan packed solar panels to power the microprocessor in his above-knee prosthetic and brought along extra legs as well. “[The descent] was a huge, controlled fall,” Duncan says. “We’d go 100 yards and then tumble.”
University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

On the way down, the microprocessor that controls resistance in Duncan’s artificial knee overheated and shorted out. Bauer’s prosthetic leg locked up and then fell off entirely. Nevins, 39, a retired Army staff sergeant who lost both his legs in Iraq, developed a pressure wound and high fever and had to be evacuated from the mountain after summiting. On Aug. 8, 2010, Nevins greeted an exhausted Duncan and Bauer at the trail’s end. Duncan doesn’t crow about the accomplishment, and he doesn’t dwell on his injury. “I really have a hard time remembering myself before,” he says. “You just get used to it—there’s no going back.” “I’ve heard him tell people that it’s ‘better that it happened to me,’ Davenport says. “I never heard him do the whole whiny ‘Why did this happen?’ deal. “His true core characteristics are the same. If he hadn’t had the determination and motivation, he wouldn’t have the same results,” Davenport says emphatically. “The injury enhanced them. It gave him a new appreciation for life.” The injury certainly hasn’t slowed Duncan down. He skis, he bikes, he runs. He even jogged around the White House grounds with President George W. Bush in 2007. In September 2010, Duncan enrolled as a full-time student in DU’s Burns School of Real Estate and Construction Management with scholarships from the Veterans Administration and the Daniels College of Business. He’s one of 289 veterans currently enrolled at DU. In October he completed the Army Ten-Miler—his farthest run yet on prosthetics. In November, he completed the New York City Marathon on a hand bike. In December, he headed off to New Zealand for an interterm course. And though he spends about 12 hours on the DU campus most days, he still makes time for at least an hour in the gym every day and jogs 4–6 miles at least twice a week. Today, his only medical issues are sports injuries. Duncan’s goals are to finish college and establish a career. And he intends to remain involved in raising awareness about wounded veterans and supporting all people with disabilities. “He really has been one of the warriors who has changed the paradigm for what disabled people can do,” Bauer says. “He’s really been a leader—a shining example of someone who has confronted their disability and moved beyond it.” The road to recovery hasn’t been easy, Duncan admits. “I’ve done a lot of falling, that’s for sure,” he says with a laugh. And getting back up.
See more photos from Neil Duncan’s Kilimanjaro climb, and watch a video of the ascent, at www.du.edu/magazine.

RESOURCES FOR WOUNDED VETERANS AND DISABLED ATHLETES
Wounded Warrior Project
www.woundedwarriorproject.org Raises awareness and enlists the public’s aid for the needs of injured service members; helps injured service members aid and assist each other; and provides direct programs and services to meet the needs of injured service members.

Association for Service Disabled Veterans
www.asdv.org Creates opportunities for service-disabled veterans to achieve and maintain their rehabilitation through enterprise development and managed employment.

Homes For Our Troops
www.homesforourtroops.org Assists severely injured servicemen and servicewomen by raising donations of money, building materials and professional labor and coordinating the process of building a home that provides maximum freedom of movement and the ability to live more independently.

Disabled Sports USA
www.dsusa.org With more than 100 chapters in 37 states, provides adaptive sports programs for youths and adults with disabilities, helping them develop independence, confidence and fitness through participation in community sports, recreation and educational programs.

U.S. Olympic Committee Paralympic Military Program
http://usparalympics.org/usoc-paralympicmilitary-program Provides post-rehabilitation support and mentoring to veterans who have sustained physical injuries; introduces them to adaptive sport techniques and opportunities through clinics and camps; connects veterans with ongoing Paralympic sports programs in their hometowns.

Disabled American Veterans
www.dav.org Assists veterans with claims for benefits; provides grassroots advocacy and services in communities nationwide; operates a comprehensive network of volunteers who provide veterans free rides to and from VA medical facilities and who improve care and morale for sick and disabled veterans.
Find links to additional resources and ways to get involved at www.du.edu/magazine.

Challenged Athletes Foundation
www.challengedathletes.org Provides opportunities and support to people with physical disabilities so they can pursue active lifestyles through physical fitness and competitive athletics.

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Tara Todras-Whitehill/Associated Press

Palestinian

As

women are

fighting for

independence

and equality.

Veil
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University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

PhD candidate

Beyond the

Rebecca Otis is

documenting

their struggle.
By Tamara Chapman

a second-grader, Rebecca Otis first encountered the slender volume that would ultimately inspire her dissertation. The book was The Diary of Anne Frank. Otis’ dissertation is Palestinian Women: Mothers, Martyrs and Agents of Political Change. The former, one of the most widely read books in the world, chronicles the day-to-day life of a Jewish teenager hiding, along with her family, from the Nazis. She met her destiny in BergenBelsen, a concentration camp that claimed the lives of an estimated 50,000 inmates. The latter—born out of Otis’ time spent living in a Palestinian refugee camp—examines the resourcefulness of modern-day Palestinian women contending with the Israeli occupation and with the realities of an increasingly fundamentalist society. In the face of these challenges, Otis contends, Palestinian women are claiming authorship over their own destinies. “I have always been drawn to the human side of what it means to be socially and politically dispossessed,” says Otis, a PhD candidate at DU’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. She grew up in Richmond, Va., the capital of the Confederacy. In a city that keeps memories of the Civil War fresh, Otis—who is of Christian and Jewish ancestry—learned about Europe’s troubled history around the family hearth. “I grew up knowing the story of Jewish oppression and dispossession,” she explains, noting that Frank’s diary, given to her by a Holocaust survivor, loomed large in her grade-school imagination and became a fixture on her bedside table. “I empathized with Anne Frank so much that my mother threatened to take me to therapy,” she says. If Frank’s fate stoked Otis’ sense of injustice, the day-to-day existence of Palestinian women gives her much to cheer. Despite fighting what she calls two systems of oppression—“the political oppression that comes with being born Palestinian and that is aggravated by the Israeli occupation, and the social oppression associated with being born female in a patriarchal society under siege”— Palestinian women are way ahead of their Muslim sisters in much of the Middle East. Not only are they at the forefront of the struggle for nationhood, Otis says, they are fully engaged in a battle for gender equality. And that, says Nader Hashemi, assistant professor at the Josef Korbel School and one of Otis’ dissertation advisers, may surprise many observers of the Middle East. In her research, he explains, Otis challenges conventional assumptions by showing that the women of a fundamentalist Islamic movement are not sitting quietly behind the veil. “This seems counterintuitive to a lot of people,” he says, noting that Otis ventures where few other Western scholars have cared to go. Most typically examine these questions from the top down, rather than from the bottom up: inside Palestinian homes and refugee camps. In addition, many Western scholars gravitate away from religious groups and “tend to instinctually and philosophically identify with secular political groups in the Middle East,” Hashemi says. “Anyone who enters this subject area enters with a lot of ideological baggage.” Otis left her baggage at the entrance to Azzeh, a Palestinian refugee camp in Bethlehem. That’s where her field research began.

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Otis is struck by the fact that Palestinian women are determined to remain central to the

O

tis enrolled at what was then DU’s Graduate School of International Studies in 2001. “My first day of graduate school was Sept. 11,” she recalls. “I was in Jack Donnelly’s class Introduction to International Politics.” She had intended to focus on human rights issues and international security, with a geographic emphasis on Greece and Turkey. A research trip to Cyprus made her rethink her plans. “I felt as though I needed to go even further east,” she recalls. With that in mind, she enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to study Arabic. There, she became increasingly aware of the full weight and political ramifications of her Jewish identity. Studying alongside Israeli Arabs, she also became curious about their views. “I never let my Jewishness interfere with my ability to connect with people of other faiths,” she says. “I made friends and I made contacts, and I was invited to tea.” The following year, she journeyed to Bethlehem in the West Bank, volunteering with a Christian group and living with a Muslim family in the Azzeh refugee camp. Her hosts assumed she was Christian, and she didn’t reveal her Jewish heritage. She soon was regarded as an honored guest and a member of the family. “I pretty much spent my time with women. We danced, we cooked,” she remembers, noting that she learned the ins and outs of how women raise and educate their children with minimal resources. “I really left my identity and became absorbed.” Part of that absorption involved impassioned exchanges about politics and gender—exchanges that became the genesis for years of subsequent fieldwork. “I had many interesting conversations about what it means to be a Palestinian woman and a Palestinian mother,” she says. Her new friends assumed her American life was characterized by wealth and privilege, but they didn’t resent her circumstances. Nor did they ask her for anything. Rather, she says, “They just wanted me to tell their story.” When she began her research, Otis says, “I had an idea of studying women’s political behavior. I abruptly learned that everything is political. That was the story. Everything is political, including where you buy your eggplant.” Do you buy from a Hamas vendor or from one with a cousin affiliated with Fatah? Do you do business with Muslims or Christians? The choice to have children is no less political. From the very beginning, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has been characterized by a demographic race, with each side attempting to ensure existence through population growth. That makes the
University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

womb ground zero in the battle for statehood. It makes bearing children an act of defiance. Otis illustrates this point with an anecdote culled from her time in Azzeh, where Palestinians still rankle about a 1969 statement from Golda Meir, then prime minister of Israel. “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people … they did not exist,” Meir said. To which one of Otis’ friends retorts: “That Meir woman, I tell her, ‘I have 10 children. I exist.’” Because women raise, as well as conceive and carry children, Otis says, they are “symbolic vessels of Palestinian identity.” In other words, nurturing and raising children is “a way of assuring the future and continuity of their own people.” That’s not to suggest that the decision to have children is purely political. “A large family is a sign of prestige,” Otis explains, “and children are adored. They are the center of society.” Like mothers in many other stressed societies, Palestinian women devote much of their energy to addressing logistical questions: How do we eat? How do we survive? How do we make sure our children are educated as well as possible? Motherhood also offers women a way to achieve heroine status and parity with men within the struggle for nationhood. While men bear arms, women bear the children who will continue the struggle. In the last decade, Otis says, many women have sought to contribute to the nationalist struggle by embracing a form of militancy typically reserved for men. Spurred by the failure of the Camp David peace summit in 2000, a number of Palestinian women opted to become suicide bombers. “It is commonly thought that the women who undertake these missions are political pawns, victims of the machinations of their male handlers, emotionally unstable or religious zealots of some sort,” Otis explains. “But my research found that this is simply not true. For many years Palestinian women demanded that the male leadership of the Palestinian nationalist movement give them a more significant role in the more violent aspects of the struggle.” For this, they had a role model from the world stage: Leila Khaled, renowned for her part in the 1969 hijacking of a TWA flight. “I saw her image spray-painted on concrete walls almost everywhere I went in the West Bank,” Otis recalls. “Khaled really is the poster girl of secular female Palestinian militancy from a time long before the rise of the Palestinian Islamist movement.” With Khaled as their inspiration, some Palestinian women

public discourse while improving their own futures. And by doing so, they’re breaking down societal fears about empowered women.

have clamored to participate in the highly skilled and dangerous aspects of resistance. In addition, Otis says, “the small handful of Palestinian women who have volunteered for and committed the suicide bombing acts have done so under a wide range of personal reasons, but there also seems to be a compulsion for them to demonstrate to the male leadership that women are politically active and committed citizens of their nationalist struggle, however violent and destructive it can be to themselves and their victims.”

I

n addition to their roles within the nationalist struggle, Palestinian women also are working for gender equality. By that, Otis explains, they mean the right to go out into the street, to choose their own husbands and professions, to divorce and acquire custody of children. They pursue equality through a number of personal acts—by driving, by taking university classes, and by organizing through a number of women’s and political groups. During her several stays

in the Azzeh camp, Otis saw how these groups operate firsthand, attending their meetings and sometimes volunteering at their offices. As Hashemi notes, such in-the-trenches experience gave her insight other scholars simply don’t get. He credits Otis with having the emotional maturity to conduct this kind of immersive research while maintaining objectivity. Reviewing her time in the West Bank, Otis is struck by the fact that Palestinian women are determined to remain central to the public discourse while improving their own futures. Women are leading political groups, they’re attending classes at Islamic universities, they’re reporting the news. And by doing so, they’re breaking down societal fears about empowered women. “Granted, they are dressed in veils and head coverings, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a brain,” Otis says. To illustrate their world in all its complexity, Otis recounts a story about catching a ride with a friend. Veiled and robed, with high heels peeking out from underneath her hem, she zipped through traffic with confidence and verve. Otis asked her if she shared the car with her spouse. “My husband doesn’t know how to drive a stick shift,” she told Otis. That anecdote may not lend itself to statistical analysis, but it does symbolize the modern Palestinian women who populate Otis’ dissertation. “I have found that Palestinian women are successfully ahead of their sisters in Arab and Muslim countries,” Otis says. “They are more literate, educated and aware of their democratic rights as women and citizens.” And as Otis sees it, that’s a story that needs to be told.
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Wayne Armstrong

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By Richard Chapman Photography by Justin Edmonds

Alum David Lucy reflects on his time as the country’s first black collegiate skier.

Ask DU alumnus David Lucy (BS ’61) what it was like being the only black varsity skier in America and you get a stare as if he didn’t understand the question. Weren’t you a trailblazer of the 1950s? you ask. A high-altitude Jackie Robinson fighting uphill for a place in the downhill? Same stare. You trot out data from the National Ski Areas Association showing that as recently as 2009–10 only 1.4 percent of skiers and snowboarders were black and 89 percent were white. 1959 was ages ago, you say, before the March on Washington and the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Weren’t you a role model, a groundbreaker, a pioneer among Pioneers? Lucy looks you straight in the eyes. “I’m not significant,” he says firmly. “I’m just a fact.” A kid from New Hampshire who loved to ski, competed for DU, earned a business degree, married his sweetheart, raised two kids, worked hard, played harder and retired in 2001. That’s it, Lucy emphasizes. “Just a fact.” At that he breaks into a wide smile and redirects the conversation to skiing. “I had two speeds: stopped, and as fast as I could go.” Light dances from his 73-year-old eyes like sunshine on spring snow. “It was a competitive thing,” he gushes. “I just wanted to go fast. Others were right behind me.” Lucy grins, kicking up wrinkles where hair used to be, stretching his 6-foot-1-inch athletic frame still lean from trips to the gym. “I did downhill and slalom and specialty events like the 55-meter ski jump. Set a record at 103 feet. But I was never mistreated. Name-calling in grade school but not after that.” No mistreatment in high school in North Conway, N.H., and not when he was practicing and competing for DU on the ski slopes of Aspen, Steamboat and Winter Park. He pauses to think. Only one bad experience, Lucy says. When he and his Hawaiian/Filipino wife, Sylvia—married 50 years now—were looking for an apartment near DU. The landlord’s explanation of why she wouldn’t rent them an apartment on Race Street was pretty much about race. But that was decades ago. Lucy doesn’t dwell on the unfairness any more than he does his singularity on the ski slopes. He was just a fact, he repeats; silent scenery on the train ride from where America was to where it is today. If he was a trailblazer, it’s for others to say.

One of those “others” is Associate Professor Tom Romero II (BA history and public affairs ’95), a lawyer with a doctorate in history who teaches at DU’s Sturm College of Law. Romero is researching law and race relations in Denver after World War II. Ask him for a racial profile of Denver in the late 1950s and he can tick off a list of tensions: segregated swimming at Washington Park; real estate agents and mortgage lenders who denied loans and steered minorities away from tony neighborhoods like University Park, Crestmoor and Bonnie Brae, where race-restricted covenants continued despite being outlawed by the courts; and public school attendance boundaries so jiggered to disadvantage minorities that twice in the late ’50s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. showed up in Denver to help fight the unfairness. Racial tension in Denver wasn’t as tinder-dry as it was in Detroit and Los Angeles, Romero says, but it was absolutely present. “There weren’t signs or laws that said ‘No Blacks Allowed’ or ‘No Mexicans Allowed.’ What was going on was a lot more implicit.”

At the University of Denver, Romero points out, attitudes were “pretty progressive.” In part this was because DU’s research mission focused on the community, where faculty was very active, particularly through the school of social work. It wasn’t unusual for firebrand leaders in the city’s Chicano and African-American movements to take courses at DU or enter as full-time students. The result, Romero believes, was a remarkably tolerant campus. “I think it would be very easy to come to a university, focus on your studies and your athletics, and move pretty seamlessly without having racial restrictions thrown in your face.” The Department of Education didn’t require universities to count minority enrollments until 1980, so the number of black students on campus in 1959–60 is not clear. Photos of graduates in the 1960 Kynewisbok yearbook show six black graduates among 411 pictured. Sports team photos in the same yearbook show seven black athletes on the football team, three in track, one in skiing, one in basketball and none in hockey, baseball, tennis, wrestling, gymnastics or swimming.
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The black skier in the team photo is Lucy, and the basketball player is Jim Peay (BS transportation ’60), a first-team all-Skyline Conference standout from 1958–60 who ranks sixth at DU all-time in rebounding and 22nd in scoring with 1,086 points. Today, minorities at DU are 16 percent of the student body, not counting international students. Black students are about 3.7 percent of DU’s 11,842 total enrollment. With that growth in numbers has come growth in racial consciousness. Situations are addressed swiftly. “I was on the elevator and someone said a racial slur to me,” recalls DU senior Brianna Culberson, a star women’s basketball player from Jefferson City, Mo. “I brought it to my floor person, and she helped get it brought to attention. He had to come to me and give me an apology and talk about the situation. It made me feel good that there were people around me who were on my side.” Culberson says that was her only negative experience in four years at DU, a situation she believes is consistent with what other DU student-athletes tell her. She would prefer there were more black students in her classes, she notes, but she loves being a DU student and the demanding tasks of studying and playing sports.

In David Lucy’s day, demands on athletes were also intense, though quite different. There was no state-of-the-art strength and conditioning complex nor guiding advice from exercise professionals. In the late ’50s, skiers got in shape by running up and down the steps of DU’s football stadium, carrying other team members on their backs. Back then, skis were like boards, bindings were primitive by today’s standards, garments weren’t as aerodynamic and boots were laced so tight you had to feel with your hand every so often to make sure your feet weren’t getting frostbitten. Then, too, skiing was not the leisure activity it is today, with high-tech, weather-protected lifts and warming areas. In Lucy’s day there were J-bars and T-bars and rope tows, and if you couldn’t hang on and keep your balance, you might take a tumble. “It took strength in those days just to get up the mountain,” he recalls. And it took athletic talent to get down again, especially if you wanted to post times faster than the next guy and make the DU ski team, which won national titles from 1954–57 and has 21 NCAA skiing championships in its history. In 1960, one of the years Lucy skied for the Pioneers, the University of Colorado edged DU for the national title 571.4 to 568.6. “The judges looked at the point totals about four times,” Lucy recalls. “The guy who made the difference was someone I had competed against in high school.” The following year, DU’s ski stars returned from their 1960 Olympics commitments and that ratcheted up the level of team

competition. The result was the first of seven straight national championships for DU. But they were earned without Lucy, who was unable to dislodge the Olympians and make the team. “It was a long ride back from Aspen,” he says, the memory still stinging five decades later. Rather than dwell on it, he focused on graduating, getting a job, raising two children, building a career at Johns Manville and other companies, running youth ski programs at Winter Park in the ’70s and working for the organizing committee that tried to bring the 1976 Winter Olympics to Denver. Lucy was in charge of facilities, hammering out deals to accommodate visitors, reporters and the Olympians, whom DU had agreed to house. The arrangements fell apart in 1972 when Colorado voters rejected a bond issue to pay for the games, forcing Denver to officially withdraw as host. “That was very disappointing,” Lucy says. He’s still bitter at what he views as the state’s shortsightedness. But he accepted the decision and moved on, quenching his disappointment on the ski slope and in the cockpits of Lolas, Ferraris and Indy-style cars, which he raced until injuries from a crash persuaded him to stop. Today, Lucy enjoys retirement, tools about in his supercharged Mini Cooper, continues to ski and marvels at how few African-Americans are involved in the sport. According to 2009–10 NCAA data, the only intercollegiate sports with a lower percentage of black male participants are archery, badminton, bowling, equestrian, rugby, sailing, squash and team handball. Every other sport exceeds skiing, including water polo and riflery. Results for black women athletes are similar, although the percentage of participants in skiing is equivalent to ice hockey and equestrian. Lucy blames the low totals on lack of proximity to ski areas and high cost. He believes secondary schools could correct that by connecting kids to skiing the way European schools do. If they don’t, ball sports will continue to dominate. Historian Annie Gilbert Coleman, in her 1996 paper “The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing,” adds an additional factor— persistent advertising images that make skiing appear as “a potentially alienating experience” for minorities. That hasn’t deterred the National Brotherhood of Skiers (NBS), an advocacy group of black skiers with 84 clubs nationwide, including the Slippers-N-Sliders in Denver. The Denver club was a founding member of NBS in 1973, says club historian Charles Smith, 69. Smith has been skiing in Colorado since the early 1960s and teaches intermediate and advanced skiers at Loveland Ski Area. He says he’s heard stories of discrimination from others but never experienced any himself. “Skiing is different,” Smith says. “When you deal with the

elements and Mother Nature it calms everybody down.” Ski students who give “objectionable looks and reactions” when they find out Smith is the instructor “get over it right away” when they realize he’s in charge of their safety and is working hard to ensure it. He agrees with Lucy that cost is the killer. “It’s not because we’ve been denied access,” Smith says. Ski industry representatives say ethnic and racial minority groups are an important potential growth segment and point to Spanish-language ads that have increased the number of skiers who come to Colorado from Mexico and South America, says Caragh McLaughlin, director of marketing at Vail Resorts. But skiing’s bigger problem, she says, is raising skier numbers regardless of race or ethnicity. Baby boomers are starting to “age out” of the sport, she says, and the impact is huge. “We’re trying to make the

sport attractive to all forms of minority groups.” Smith says he sees little evidence, and Lucy just enjoys the mountains, speeding down the slopes on skis he bought on sale for four bucks. He’s determined to enjoy every run he has left, the competitive spirit that took him to the mountaintop in the 1950s taking him to the top still. “I’m going to ski until I can’t,” he says firmly. “That’s a fact.”
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The Phipps Legacy
By Richard Chapman

The family that had a hand in everything from the U.S. Senate to the Central City Opera to the Denver Broncos also had a lasting impact on DU.

enver society gasped back in 1911 when multimillionaire steel magnate, philanthropist and Colorado business tycoon Lawrence Phipps announced his third marriage. Phipps’ intended bride was Margaret Rogers, the daughter of wealthy attorney and former Denver Mayor Platt Rogers. She was smart, attractive and eligible, but 26 years younger. Local wags wondered. They needn’t have, says grandson Graham Phipps. The couple was close and loving, and the marriage proved a successful union of two of the era’s most important Denver families. One way or another, each family has been aiding the state as far back as 1876, when Rogers’ grandfather Amos Widner helped found the University of Colorado. “The Phipps clan have made innumerable contributions to the betterment of Colorado,” says historian Tom Noel (BA ’67, MA ’69). Of particular benefit to DU was the donation of the sprawling family mansion in Denver’s Belcaro neighborhood to the University in the early 1960s. DU’s stewardship continued for nearly five decades, perpetuating the family’s legacy and preserving the landmark estate. The mission ended in late 2010, when the University sold the property to private buyers. Lawrence Phipps “One of the tenets of the family was always to give back to society and be as much of a philanthropist and supporter of the city as you possibly can,” Graham Phipps says. That legacy was well under way by the time Lawrence Phipps and Margaret Rogers wed, the industrialist having by then given nearly a million dollars—more than $23 million in today’s money—to charitable causes in Colorado. About half of that went to build the Agnes Memorial Sanatorium, a medical campus for low-income, early-onset tuberculosis victims who could be treated and returned to work. The complex—built in 1902—was on what is now Sixth Avenue in Denver’s Lowry neighborhood and was a memorial to Phipps’ mother, who had died of TB. Other projects included raising funds for the newly founded Children’s Hospital and for what is today the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

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Photos on this page courtesy of Denver Public Library, Western History Collection

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at Invesco Field at Mile High. The Phipps’ impact didn’t stop there. family’s GH Phipps Construction built Charismatic and determined, he the complex in 2001 to replace Mile High ran for the U.S. Senate in 1918 as Stadium—which it also built. a Republican and won, focusing on “I know quite a few ex-Broncos,” important bills to improve business, Dennehy says, “and what they say about agriculture and road building in my father [Gerald Phipps] is that if he the West. Six years later he won gave you a handshake, it was the law. He re-election. didn’t need to sign a piece of paper if he “[Phipps] was a generous man, said it was a deal. That’s the kind of man a kind man, a fair man, but he had he was.” a huge temper if you crossed him,” Gerald’s older brother, Allan, guided Graham Phipps says. “He was an development of the Winter Park ski aristocrat without an education.” area, where a run is named for him, and Lawrence Phipps’ spirit was honed served the University of Denver for 45 in a Pittsburgh steel mill, where he years as a trustee and donor. A Rhodes went to work at age 16 to help support Scholar, Allan earned a law degree from his family after his father died. He was DU in 1937 and received the University’s talented and tenacious and he rose in prestigious Evans Award in 1980 for his the company, riding a wave of Eastern numerous civic contributions. These industrial development from wage Margaret Rogers Phipps include heading the Presbyterian/St. clerk to vice president and treasurer Luke’s Medical Center board of managers with stock holdings worth millions. He and being active in the Denver Symphony Society and the Colorado retired to Colorado in his 30s to enjoy his fortune and the outdoors. chapter of the American Red Cross. He fished with Dwight Eisenhower and Gen. John “Black Jack” “Allan saw himself as being part of a prominent family with a Pershing, among others, read avidly, raised dogs and enjoyed boxing, huge responsibility to the community,” Graham Phipps says. “This horses, automobiles, bowling and his family. was a duty.” “Mom used to call him austere,” recalls Phipps’ granddaughter, Good deeds notwithstanding, the family name today is far less Sandra Phipps Dennehy. “But my father used to say if he knew he distinct in the public’s mind than in decades past, Phipps says. Some scared you, it would break his heart.” ex-Broncos he’s spoken to think the Phipps in the Ring of Fame was a long-ago kicker for the team. argaret Phipps was as driven as her husband, but toward All the public remembers, Graham Phipps laments, is the music, art and sports. She played the piano and organ, construction company and the Phipps mansion, which DU sold co-founded the Denver Symphony Orchestra and was an active for $9.2 million in December 2010. The University operated the supporter of the Central City Opera and the St. John’s Cathedral 6.2-acre estate as the Lawrence C. Phipps Memorial Conference choir. Piano virtuoso Van Cliburn was a regular in her home. Center, and due to periodic operating deficits and the University’s She helped numerous artists and young people obtain college ample on-campus meeting space, an off-campus facility became educations, and she collected important 19th-century French unnecessary. paintings and American landscapes. Proceeds from the sale are being used for scholarships and She brought some of the world’s best tennis players to the professorships at the Lamont School of Music and the School of Art state to compete, give exhibitions and teach young people the game, and Art History, and as matching funds for a campaign to support the providing Colorado a national stature in tennis it would not have Newman Center for the Performing Arts, the theater department and otherwise enjoyed. For that patronage, and for winning three state Lamont. doubles titles, she was enshrined in the Colorado Tennis Hall of The property was a gift based on Margaret Phipps’ friendship Fame in 2000. with then-Chancellor Chester Alter. The chancellor was living The couple’s sons, Allan and Gerald Phipps, were luminaries in a house on High Street that the Phippses previously owned. best known for buying the struggling Denver Broncos football “Grandmother decided to go over there and knock on the door,” franchise to keep it from being moved to Atlanta and then building Dennehy says. “She wasn’t shy. They became very, very good friends. the club into a Super Bowl contender. Gerald Phipps is today the They had great visions for what could be done with the house.” only non-player among 21 Broncos enshrined in the Ring of Fame

Jeffrey Haessler

he Phipps estate sits on a sweeping, tree-lined curve just south of Exposition Avenue and has witnessed everything from weddings, reading groups, yoga classes and varsity basketball practices to a gathering of world leaders. President Clinton and members of the G8 met and dined there in 1997, scholars gathered for academic confabs, and trustees charted the University’s future. City officials hammered out public policy, DU stored and displayed important art holdings by painters Albert Bierstadt and JeanBaptiste-Camille Corot—among others—and thousands of people entered the travertine marble entrance for holiday soirees, nuptials or a chance to marvel at how wealthy business aristocrats once lived. “The craftsmanship is amazing,” says Allan Wilson, DU’s director of building services. The 33,123-square-foot mansion has 14 rooms on the first floor and seven bedroom suites upstairs. The dining room is colonial pine hewn in America, shipped to England in the 1750s and used in an English manor house—then returned to the United States for the mansion. The house required a staff of seven, plus another seven to maintain the grounds.

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“The main house is very conventional Georgian Revival layout, but amazing construction,” says DU art curator Dan Jacobs. “It looks like a brick house, but it’s actually a modern cast-in-place reinforced concrete structure with brick and stone facing.” In other words, a high-end industrial-grade structure with modern conveniences, including an early form of swamp cooler. Even more striking is the tennis house, which Graham Phipps
Photos on this page courtesy of Denver Public Library, Western History Collection

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calls “one of the finer architectural buildings in Denver.” Sporting a glass-domed ceiling over a cork court, the tennis house is notable for combining athletics with social functions in a warm, manor-house style. Jacobs describes the building as rustic English with an interior of exposed steel reminiscent of a 19th-century train station. “It’s beautiful,” he says. “You could put the window hinges and latches in a museum.” hen the two buildings were constructed in the early 1930s, they were Lawrence Phipps’ way of marrying business interests, family wishes and community betterment. From a business perspective, the estate was the centerpiece of his plan to develop then-vacant land between Colorado and University boulevards into what today is the prestigious Belcaro neighborhood. The Belcaro Shopping Center at Exposition and Colorado was his key to pushing commercial development south. From a community perspective, the estate was a “works project” that employed scores of Denver tradesmen idled by the Great Depression. The project’s impact, Graham Phipps speculates, may have been as important to Denver’s economy then as Coors Field was to LoDo some six decades later. Plus, the project aided the construction company owned by Lawrence Phipps’ brother-in-law Platt Rogers Jr., which went on to become GH Phipps Inc. The company built a slew of high-profile buildings including the Cherry Creek Mall, Children’s Hospital, the Wellington Webb building and Olin and Nagel halls on the DU campus. From a personal perspective, the mansion project was intended to overcome Lawrence Phipps’ wife’s resistance to giving up Capitol Hill social life for the boonies of south Denver. “Grandfather said, ‘If I build a tennis house for you, will you move?’” Graham Phipps says with a laugh. “That’s how he got her to go south.”

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A lifelong player, Margaret Rogers Phipps made sure the tennis house got heavy use, not only from neighborhood kids and family members but also from friends, promising local players and future Wimbledon and U.S. champions. Players would commemorate their visits by autographing the walls of the soda fountain room off the main gallery. “Every Sunday, we’d play a round robin,” recalls Jack Cella, now 88 and a Colorado Tennis Hall of Fame member. “When you got through, you’d get an ice cream soda. When Mrs. Phipps wasn’t present, you went to the main house and got the key and returned it when you were through. “They were down-to-earth people, but the senator commanded respect,” Cella continues. “He was no-nonsense. Mrs. Phipps was a wonderful, unassuming lady. One year I was selling Christmas wreaths and I asked Mrs. Phipps if she needed any. She bought one for every window in the house.” Friendly, ladylike and gracious are words that people who remember Margaret Phipps use to speak of her personality. They describe the senator as quiet, stern and regal—but with a heart of gold. Together, Lawrence and Margaret Phipps were a pioneering Colorado couple who were “one of the leading social, financial and political families in Denver,” according to the Denver Landmark Preservation Commission. “Lawrence Phipps didn’t come here to make money. He came here to spread health and happiness and to have fun with his kids and grandkids,” says Lorin Fleisher, who managed the Phipps estate for DU prior to its sale. “You read the history of the Phipps family and it’s truly interesting. They were really wonderful people.”

See a Phipps mansion photo gallery and read more about the tennis house and the art collection online at www.du.edu/magazine.

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University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

The Campaign for the University of Denver

Jeffrey Haessler

IntroduCIng the ACAdemIC CommonS

building—students and faculty will find plenty of books and journals. They’ll also find a light-filled space designed according to a new learning model, one where students can work in groups, develop team projects, use the latest technology in innovative ways, and collaborate with professors and each other. Just as important, there will be continuity of service. As always, students can tap into services offered by the Writing Center, the Research Center, the Math Center and the Technology Help Desk—housed together in one location. Faculty will be able to draw on a vast array of resources, including the expertise of the Center for Teaching and Learning. There, they will benefit from many new opportunities related to pedagogy, from applying the latest technology in the classroom to learning the art of blogging. Penrose Library has long offered DU students and faculty a robust learning center. But the truth is that the building—for all its midcentury modern charm— belongs to another era. When Penrose was built in the early 1970s, library spaces were designed to support individual study and a teaching style largely dependent on lecturing. Information had an address in the stacks or within a roll of microfilm. A research project started with the card catalog. Today, a new adventure in learning lies ahead. Penrose will continue to be the place where history comes to life, thanks to Ascend: The Campaign for the University of Denver. We are incredibly fortunate that the Academic Commons at Penrose Library will allow us access to extraordinary materials located around the world, as well as our own, right here, on site. Is there any higher or nobler cause than the promotion of wisdom and knowledge? As the inscription over the door of the ancient library at Thebes read, the new Academic Commons at Penrose Library will continue to provide “medicine for the soul.” — Nancy Allen, Penrose Library Dean

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ibraries have always held a special place in the public’s imagination. They are centers of exploration and inquiry, of mystery and romance. They’re conservators of knowledge and intellectual heritage. The late Lady Bird Johnson once said of libraries, “Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.” To adapt to changing times and demands, university libraries across the nation are rethinking everything from how they care for collections to how they assist patrons. That’s especially true at the University of Denver, where Penrose Library is embarking on a remarkable transformation into a new people-focused enterprise: the Academic Commons. The Academic Commons at Penrose Library will be a dynamic center that will support social learning, interactive technologies, student-centered programs, and, of course, individual study and reflection. In the new Academic Commons—housed in a reconstructed, state-of-the-art, LEED-certified

A Library for the 21st-Century Scholar
When Penrose Library was completed in 1972, learning was largely a matter of lectures, books and labs. Today’s learning model involves experience, collaboration and access to information in forms barely imagined 40 years ago. That model demands a one-stop resource where the activities of scholarship are assisted. That resource is on the way. When the Academic Commons at Penrose Library opens for business, it will provide integrated workspace for a full array of academic support services, including the Writing Program and Center, the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Math Center, the Research Center and the Technology Help Desk. In addition, a Media Help Center will assist students and faculty in the emerging art of marrying different media into single presentations. “We’re all about empowering people and providing access to information,” says Julanna Gilbert, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, which works with faculty to improve teaching and learning and to acquire high-tech

pedagogical expertise. “I see the new building as responding to that. Now the books are almost a barrier to services, especially on our floor.” Once the renovation is complete, the Center for Teaching and Learning, which is currently obscured by stacks of books in the southeast corner of Penrose’s upper level, will have a much stronger visual presence. An increased visual presence, adds Peggy Keeran, professor and arts and humanities reference librarian, will help patrons “see the connections” among services. It will allow students and faculty to get research assistance at one stop, advice on persuasive rhetoric at another and a consultation on embedding media in a PowerPoint presentation at still another—all without leaving the building. Doug Hesse, director of the Writing Program, expects the new design, with its open floor plans and emphasis on transparency, to increase demand for services. “I think the Academic Commons is going to be much more purposeful and inviting,” he says. “It’s going to convey to students that this is central to the academic mission of the campus and not ancillary. As a result I can imagine students using the services more.”

A new FACe For A CAmpuS FIxture

ACAdemIC CommonS, South eLevAtIon renderIng

Inside the Academic Commons
When it opens its doors in late 2012, the Academic Commons at Penrose Library will offer an inviting environment focused on 21st-century learning styles. As Penrose Dean Nancy Allen notes, academic libraries today must complement the way learning occurs on campus. Higher education is no longer about students receiving knowledge from “the sage on the stage.” Rather, students are learning from peers and experience, as well as their professors. The commons will provide ample opportunities for quiet study, but it also will expand space for collaborative work— comfy areas where armchairs can be pulled into a circle so that students can explore digital resources together. Project teams will be able to meet in group study rooms where they can put the finishing touches on class presentations. Think of the commons, suggests University Architect Mark Rodgers, as a “place where different ideas collide, interact and intermingle.” And think of it as a place where students prepare for careers increasingly reliant on collaboration: “Very few people are hired to go sit in a corner and do their own thing.” The commons’ main level will focus on matching people and services. It will house a café with an inviting fireplace, browsable collections of in-demand books and periodicals and the many centers that help students create, access and share

From the outside, Penrose Library has always been discreet about its mission. Nothing about the building tells passersby that it is a center for learning and inquiry. And apart from its location on campus, little about the building communicates that it belongs to the University of Denver. That will change once renovations to the structure are completed, says University Architect Mark Rodgers. Plans for the update call for a 10,000-square-foot expansion to the southern side of the building, a relocated entrance and a materials upgrade that will unify the exterior with other campus buildings. The two-story expansion will run the length of Penrose’s southern side. The entrance will shift from the southwest corner of the building to the center of the southern face, where it will open to the pedestrian traffic along Carnegie Green. “The south side is where the people are, and we want to make it enticing,” Rodgers says. With that in mind, southern walls will feature large windows on both stories. These will give the building

a transparency it does not enjoy now. That will be particularly true at night, Rodgers says, when lights will glow from study areas populated by students preparing for exams and class presentations. The exterior of the Academic Commons at Penrose Library will be made even more inviting by a patio that will face the green and the Rocky Mountains. The patio also will offer seating to patrons of a new café. Rodgers expects the patio will enjoy year-round use, as students take their beverages, books and laptops outdoors for continued study. The east and north sides of the building will remain largely untouched, Rodgers says, though windows will be updated and signature materials will be integrated into the design. The west side of the commons will benefit from the addition of windows along the lower floor. To ensure the building complements other campus fixtures, the southern side will incorporate DU’s signature materials: limestone, sandstone and copper. It will, says Nancy Allen, dean of Penrose Library, “sing the DU song.”

knowledge: the Writing Center, the Math Center, the Media Help Center (where students can learn how to incorporate new and old media into presentations and projects), the Research Center and the Technology Help Desk. The main level also will host an events arena, a glass-walled space—“a fish bowl,” Rodgers explains—suitable for poetry slams and author readings. The upper level, which currently houses most of the stacks, will include a legacy reading room with a stone fireplace. It also will house the Center for Teaching and Learning and offices for the faculty of DU’s acclaimed Writing Program. Students will be able to study in a “deep quiet” area and work with peers in sections devoted to open seating. In addition to numerous spaces for quiet and group study, the lower level will accommodate Special Collections and Archives and the bulk of the book and journal collections. Thanks to compact shelving, the commons will afford access to about 75 percent of the Penrose book collection. Although final selections for furnishings and materials have not been made, Rodgers expects the commons will incorporate DU’s Southwestern-inspired color palette and a handful of heirloom furnishings, including a selection of the midcentury modern pieces that made Penrose Library a mecca for design enthusiasts.

“A new adventure in learning lies ahead. Penrose will continue to be the place where history comes to life. ... Is there any higher or nobler cause than the promotion of wisdom and knowledge?”
—Nancy Allen, Penrose Library Dean

A Safe and Secure Shelter for the Collections
The numbers boggle the mind: more than 1.1 million books, 250,000-plus bound journals and 851,000 government documents. Add to that well over 1.1 million microfiche, DVDs and CD-ROMs. It totals almost 3.4 million items. Before the first hammer falls, the materials housed at Penrose will need to be moved to the Hampden Center, the University’s new 51,500-square-foot storage facility in southwest Denver. The center, which will have a climate-controlled section to accommodate the University’s rare books and fragile materials, will store DU’s collections during construction. Once the renovation is complete, the Hampden Center will provide permanent storage for the library’s “low-use” materials. The collections that will remain at the Hampden Center include seldom-accessed print journals and those with digital replacements, government documents—many of which are available electronically—and low-use books. All the materials will still be accessible to the DU community, but they’ll also be stored safely and securely in an environment designed with conservation in mind. “Browsing” materials, such as new and popular books, magazines and DVDs, will return to campus, as will special collections and about 75 percent of DU’s books. These will be shelved on the library’s lower level in high-density compact shelving. During construction, patrons can access Penrose’s robust digital collections online and “page” physical materials through an online request form. Two vans will circulate between the Hampden Center and Penrose’s temporary pop-up library in the Driscoll Center Ballroom, where users can collect held items. “It’s not like moving the books in your apartment,” observes Michael Levine-Clark, collections librarian at Penrose, anticipating the logistics challenge associated with vacating Penrose Library so that the transformation to the Academic Commons can begin.
Visit ascend.du.edu for more about the Academic Commons project.

FundrAISIng FASt FACtS: the ACAdemIC CommonS
• The total cost of the project is $33 million. • The University has commitments in hand of $27 million. • The remaining fundraising goal for the next two years is $6 million.

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Founders Day awards Book bin Reunion recap Pioneer pics Announcements

MAKE YOUR GIFT TO the ASCend CAmpAIgn TODAY!

Office of University Advancement 2190 East Asbury Avenue Denver, Colorado 80208 800.448.3238 giving.du.edu

DU Archives

In the early 1970s, contestants competed in an Engineer Day tricycle race in front of the Mary Reed Building. Pictured are contestants Terry Toy (PhD ’73) (No. 82), an assistant geography professor; engineering Dean John Weese (No. 85); electrical engineering professors John Smiley (No. 84) and Mike “Maynard” Moe (No. 87); and Richard Fay (No. 74), president of Fay Engineering. Contestant No. 89 is unknown. If you can tell us anything more about Engineer Day or have any experiences or photos you would like to share, please let us know.

University of Denver Magazine Connections

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The classes
Stanley Wonderley (BA ’50) of Lakeview, Ore., was a third-grade teacher in California for 15 years. He was hired as curriculum coordinator for Lake County Schools in 1965 and developed the program “Music Helps You Read.” Stanley retired from teaching in 1986. He has written various parenting and children’s books, including Preschool Learning Activities (Kenneth E. Clouse, 1983). He also wrote a column from 1974–2004 called “Kids Are My Business.” He currently is writing a manuscript titled How A Nation Can Become A Nation of Readers.

1950

Elmer O’Brien (MA ’61) of Boulder, Colo., and his wife, Betty, were honored when United Theological Seminary of Dayton, Ohio, named its library the O’Brien Library. Elmer formerly was the director of library and information services and professor of theological bibliography and research at the seminary.

1961

1963

Marlow Ediger (EdD ’63) of North Newton, Kan., was appointed as an external examiner of PhD theses for Mother Teresa Women’s University in Kodaikanal, India. He has had several articles accepted for publication and was reappointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Education.

1965

Comic artist Ed Stein
Ed Stein’s Mile High City-themed comic strip Denver Square ran for 12 years in the Rocky Mountain News. When the News folded in 2009, Stein reinvented the strip as Freshly Squeezed, a nationally syndicated daily comic about a multigeneration family forced to live together because of the economic downturn. “I wanted to do a family comic strip, but I didn’t just want to do a gag-a-day strip,” says Stein (BFA ’69), who brought the characters from Denver Square to his new comic. “This is about a family that is being forced to live together because of the economy. And there are pluses and minuses to it. They’re a family of people who love each other, but

John David Lutz (MA ’65) of Evansville, Ind., is the director of the University of Evansville Theatre. The opening of the theater’s production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in November 2010 marked a double celebration for John—his 70th mainstage production at the university in his 70th year. In 1965 he joined the faculty of what was then known as Evansville College, and 10 years later he became the theater department chairman, a post he’s held since.

He received outstanding-professor-of-theyear awards from regional and national professional associations, as well as from San Jose State. He also is past president of the Western Psychological Association. His latest book, Identities for Life and Death: Can We Save Us From Our Toxically-Storied Selves? (AuthorHouse), came out in September 2010. Bob qualified for the national bodybuilding championships as a second place finalist in the master’s division at the San Francisco bodybuilding championships in October 2010. Dennis Powers (JD ’66) of Ashland, Ore., released his fifth book, Tales of the Seven Seas (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2010). After getting his law degree from DU and an MBA from Harvard, Dennis went on to work in various

investment companies while writing books on legal issues. He eventually opened his own law firm in Santa Barbara, Calif. He has penned four other books about the sea.

1966

Bob Pellegrini (MA ’66, PhD ’68) of San Jose, Calif., is a professor emeritus of psychology at San Jose State University.

Larry Weirather (MA ’68) of Vancouver, Wash., was selected as a Honeywell Aerospace Series Lecturer at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. To celebrate the 75th anniversary of transpacific flight, his illustrated presentation—based on his book The China Clipper, Pan American

1968

1951

John Harris (MSW ’51) of Blackfoot, Idaho, is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Golden Promise (BookSurge Publishing, 2009). He is semiretired after spending more than 50 years as a marriage therapist. He also retired from the U.S. Army Reserve as a lieutenant colonel.

Founders Day Awards
The University of Denver will celebrate the accomplishments of its alumni, faculty and staff with the 2011 Founders Day Awards, which will be presented at a gala reception March 3 at the Seawell Grand Ballroom in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. John Ritter (BA ’72) will receive the Randolph P McDonough Award for Service to Alumni. . The award is named for Randolph McDonough, DU alumni director from 1934–63; it was first presented in 1986. Ritter is president of the New York chapter of the DU alumni association; he also has served on several DU boards, committees and focus groups and has conducted Ammi Hyde interviews of prospective students. The Distinguished Service to the University Award will be presented to Victor Quinn, DU’s outside legal counsel for more than 50 years. Also employed by Waggener & Foster LLP , Patrick Grant will receive the Evans Award at the 2011 Quinn was a partner with Denver law firm Cockrell Quinn & Creighton from 1961–2007. He has Founders Day ceremony on March 3. practiced in the areas of nonprofit corporation law, real estate, probate and trust, elementary, secondary and higher education and public pensions. Brad Busse (BS ’80) is the recipient of the Community Service Award, first presented in 1973. President and co-chair of RBC Daniels—which provides financial services to the cable, telecommunications, media and technology industries worldwide—Busse also serves on Colorado’s Early Childhood Leadership Commission. Busse also has been involved with the PCIA Foundation (the education and charitable arm of the Personal Communications Industry Association), the Governor’s Commission on Science and Technology and Mile High United Way. The Ammi Hyde Award for Recent Graduate Achievement will go to Nicholas Sauer (BA ’05). Recipients of this award, first presented in 1993, must have earned a DU undergraduate degree in the previous 10 years and demonstrated professional achievement. Sauer, who currently serves as the youngest member of the School District 220 Board of Education in his hometown of Barrington, Ill., worked on the gubernatorial campaign of former DU President Marc Holtzman and served as a political appointee under President George W. Bush. While at DU, Sauer served as president of the Theta Chi fraternity, senior senator for the All Undergraduate Student Association and president of the Interfraternal Council. Carol Tomé (MBA ’81), chief financial officer and executive vice president of corporate services for Home Depot, will receive the Professional Achievement Award, first given in 1973. Tomé began her career as a commercial lender with United Bank of Denver (now Wells Fargo). She also serves on the United Parcel Service board of directors. In January 2008 she joined the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. She also is an active volunteer, serving as a member of the Committee of 200 and a member of the Atlanta Botanical Garden board of directors. The Evans Award—the University’s highest alumni honor—will be presented to Patrick Grant (MBA ’73), who recently stepped down as president and CEO of the National Western Stock Show, a role he held since 1991. Under Grant’s leadership, the stock show increased ticketed events by 20 percent. Grant oversaw the funding and construction of the Events Center, the Expo Hall and the Hall of Education, and he helped create the National Western’s trademark Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale. Grant is now director of long-range planning at the National Western. First awarded in 1951, the Evans Award, named for University Founder John Evans, recognizes alumni who have demonstrated professional achievement, humanitarian service to the community and continuing interest in the University.
—Media Relations Staff

Marc Piscotty

1955

Benjamin Steele (MA ’55) of Billings, Mont., was honored on his 93rd birthday for his life contributions to his home state of Montana. He survived the Bataan Death March in World War II and spent four years as a prisoner of war. He returned to Montana after graduating from DU and started a career as a professional artist and professor of art at Montana State University Billings. In September 2010, Steele gave 11 original oil paintings and 78 drawings to the Montana Museum of Art and Culture, located on the campus of the University of Montana in Missoula. The museum is preparing the collection for an exhibition in fall 2011.

1958

Julie (Procopio) Plekan (MSW ’58) works part time as a clinical social worker in the behavioral health unit at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Ore.

they also have issues with each other and there’s a certain amount of pain and difficulty involved, as well as joy. I wanted to capture all of that; I wanted it to be emotionally honest.” Stein studied graphic design at DU, but at the same time he was drawing cartoons— later for the Clarion but first for a short-lived radical 1960s student paper called the Student Free Press. “I was the only art major they knew, so they asked if I would draw some cartoons for it,” he says. “So I did, and the next day in the student union kids are going, ‘Did you see that cartoon?’ Wow, that was great—instant gratification. It’s not like hanging a painting on a gallery wall and waiting for somebody to buy it. People were commenting about it the next day.” So Stein stuck with comics, eventually landing a gig at the Rocky, where he drew editorial cartoons for 31 years in addition to Denver Square. He launched Freshly Squeezed on the web and in papers around the country (including the Denver Post) in fall 2010. “It’s like writing a novel; you really have to know who the characters are,” he says of drawing comics. “Years ago when [Bloom County cartoonist] Berke Breathed used to live in Evergreen [Colo.], he and I became friends and we would talk a lot about comics. At one point he said, ‘Do you know what the secret to a good comic strip is?’ and I said, ‘great characters.’ And he said, ‘No, great relationships between characters.’ That always stuck in my mind.” >>www.edsteinink.com
—Greg Glasgow

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Airways and Popular Culture (McFarland & Co., 2006)—played to a packed house at the William M. Allen Theater at Boeing Field, where transpacific clipper flying boats were built in the late 1930s.

1970

Doug Hirsh (BA ’70) of Warm Springs, Va., won a bronze medal as part of the Australian team at the 2010 world lacrosse championships held in Manchester, England, in July.

Lake and Park counties. Tom established the Carbonate Real Estate Co. in 1974. He is a past president of the Summit Association of Realtors and past chairman of the Ten Mile Planning Commission and is the current chairman of the Copper Mountain Consolidated Metropolitan District. Tom was inducted into the Leadville Lake County Sports Hall of Fame in 2008. Mary Alice Murphy (MSW ’71) of Fort Collins, Colo., works to fight homelessness in Fort Collins through Catholic Charities, CARE Housing for low-income families, St. Joseph’s Peace and Justice Ministry and the Homelessness Prevention Initiative. The Sister Mary Alice Murphy Center for Hope is being built in her honor. She opened the first soup kitchen, the first homeless shelter and the first nonprofit affordable housing agency in the area. She also sits on the board for Homeward 2020, an initiative focused on ending homelessness in Fort Collins within the next 10 years.

Thomas Watson (BA ’71) of Littleton, Colo., is an affiliate faculty member of Regis University. He served as the Episcopal chaplain for the Auraria Campus in Denver and taught English at the University of Colorado-Denver. He has trained as a psychotherapist, has done postdoctoral work at Cambridge University and was named a research fellow at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University. Thomas is the author of many scholarly writings, including a book on Milton, Perversions, Originals, and Redemptions in Paradise Lost (University Press of America, 2007).

Dale Davidson (BA ’72) of Las Vegas, general manager of KEEN-TV and president and COO of Christian Media Associates, was inducted into the Nevada Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame. He began his broadcasting career as a broadcast editor in the Associated Press’ Denver bureau. He moved into commercial television in 1980 as creative services director for an ABC-TV affiliate in Ohio. Ugo Ginatta (BSBA ’72, MBA ’72) of Dallas is the president and CEO of Paciugo Management. He founded Paciugo Gelato & Caffè in 2000 with his wife, Cristiana, and son, Vincenzo. Since Ugo and his family came to the U.S. from Turin, Italy, to open their first gelateria, they have created more than 200 gelato recipes and the company has grown to 45 franchised locations across the United States and Mexico. They celebrated 10 years in business in September 2010. Dilip Kapur (MA ’72, PhD ’77) of Pipestone, Minn., is the founder and president of Hidesign, a luxury leather goods manufacturer based out of India. Hidesign started in 1978 as a one-man brand and has since become a well-known business in India and abroad. From its first exclusive boutique in 1998, Hidesign has grown to 62 stores and a distribution network in 23 countries that has placed Dilip’s products in more than 2,000 stores.

Book bin
Candace Toft (MA ’74) wrote Off the Ropes: The Ron Lyle Story (Scratching Shed Publishing, 2010) to shed light on Lyle’s extraordinary life. The major heavyweight contender from Denver is portrayed as a man defined not by his failures but by his triumphs in and out of the boxing ring. Known as “the toughest heavyweight who never won the title,” a convicted murderer before his boxing career and later a humanitarian, Lyle was an icon during the era of the greatest heavyweights in boxing history. Lyle was one of 19 children in his family growing up in the Denver projects. In his teens he was convicted of second-degree murder in a gang killing. He served seven-and-a-half years in the Colorado State Penitentiary, where he learned to box. He fought on the prison’s boxing team and started his amateur boxing career after being paroled in 1969. He turned professional in 1971 and established an impressive record as a pro boxer. Lyle was accused of murder for a second time in 1978 and was acquitted of the charges. Toft details the years after his boxing career as a time of struggle, love and redemption. Today, Lyle runs the Cox/Lyle Community Youth Center in Denver. Off the Ropes is a compassionate story of his trials and triumphs. Toft, a writer and former educator, lives in Susanville, Calif., with her husband. In 2000, her novel A Mingled Yarn won first runner-up in the San Diego Book Awards’ unpublished novel category. In 2004, Toft and co-author Gordon Ooley won first place in the same category for Emergence. In 2009 she was awarded a grant from the California Council for the Humanities to collect and publish local stories, which became Small Moments in Time: Memories of Lassen County. Off the Ropes was launched at the International Boxing Hall of Fame Induction in Canastota, N.Y., in June 2010.
—Katelyn Feldhaus

1971

1972

Tom Malmgren (BSBA ’71) of Copper Mountain, Colo., has been named the 2010 Realtor of the Year by the Summit Association of Realtors for Summit,

Larry Antony (BA ’72) of Copper Harbor, Mich., is retired after 30 years of daily newspaper management. He most recently worked for the Milwaukee Journal Co. He lives near Lake Superior and is involved in several community projects.

Writer David Rosenberg
David Rosenberg thinks soccer can connect the world. “It’s a universal language in a way,” he says. “You can bring a ball to a field anywhere in the world and you can connect.” That’s the message Rosenberg (BA mass communications and psychology ’78) and co-author Ethan Zohn relay in their Soccer World books, a series aimed at 7- to 10-year-olds that explores soccer in different countries. Soccer World: South Africa—Explore the World Through Soccer and Soccer World: Mexico were published in April 2010; Spain will be released this April. Three more titles are on tap. Each book explores different aspects of its corresponding country, Rosenberg says. South Africa is described as the “rainbow country”; the Mexico edition spotlights environmental issues; and the book on Spain celebrates the area’s “enjoy life” mantra. “The books mean a lot to me because the process of writing them with [Zohn] meant a lot,” he says. Rosenberg was a staff writer for the children’s TV series “Rugrats” when he met Zohn, a former professional soccer player and reality TV star who won the third season of “Survivor.” Zohn used his million-dollar prize to start Grassroot Soccer, a program that uses soccer to educate, inspire and mobilize communities to stop the spread of HIV. After hearing about a literacy project through the organization, Rosenberg contacted Zohn about donating “Rugrats” scripts to the cause. Shortly thereafter, a book idea was born. For Rosenberg, publishing his first book at age 55 is just more proof that he’s a self-described “poster child for perseverance.” After graduating from DU in 1978, Rosenberg moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. He held a series of odd jobs before selling his first TV script to a Nickelodeon show called “On the Television” when he was 39. Around that same time, he also sold a freelance script to the NBC series “Empty Nest.” “I wrote a spec script to show that I could write for a show and really nail it,” he says. “I had a really slow climb up the mountain.” Three years after selling his first script, Rosenberg jokes that he became “the oldest living staffer” for another Nickelodeon series, “Rugrats.” He since has written for “The Wild Thornberrys,” “Rocket Power” and most recently, “90210.” “It was really about staying the course,” Rosenberg says of living out his dreams. “I’ve been all over the place, and it makes me happy.”
—Kathryn Mayer

1973

Dan Lathrope (BSBA ’73) of Moraga, Calif., has accepted a chair in the law school at the University of San Francisco. He taught graduate tax programs at New York University and the University of Florida. He was a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law; the University of California, Berkeley; Pacific McGeorge School of Law; and Leiden University in the Netherlands. He co-authored casebooks on individual, partnership and corporate taxation and wrote a treatise on the alternative minimum tax and a book on comparative income tax.

for programs at Foundation for Excellent Schools, where he worked with 130 public schools in the U.S. to help youth in lowincome communities. He was headmaster at Suffield Academy in Connecticut for 13 years. He also was executive director at the Lee Pesky Learning Center and served on the board at the Community School.

School of Medicine recognizing her for more than 25 years of excellence teaching medical students and pediatric residents.

1976

1975

1974

David Holmes (PhD ’74) of Hailey, Idaho, was appointed to head the Community School in Sun Valley, Idaho, effective July 1, 2011. David previously was the vice president

Laurent Fisher (BA ’75) of New York was named executive director of the nonprofit Cape Cod Community College Educational Foundation. Laurent served as director of major gifts, donor relations and the alumni campaign at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. She also played a major role in establishing and managing the fundraising plan to meet the college’s $250 million capital campaign goal. Jody Ann Maes (BA ’75) of Lakewood, Colo., received the Career Teaching Scholar award from the University of Colorado

Winnie Barrett (MSW ’76) of Asheville, N.C., chairs the Asheville Puppetry Alliance board of directors and is a longtime member of the 75-voice Womansong community chorus. Retired since 1996, Winnie enjoys creative writing and working in her art studio. Lisa Leeman (attd. 1976–78) of Los Angeles directed the award-winning feature documentary One Lucky Elephant, which screened three times at the 2010 Starz Denver Film Festival in November 2010.

1977

William Evans (MSW ’77) of Helena, Mont., has owned a private mental health office focusing on adult and child counseling for more than 25 years.
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University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

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Edward “Ned” Froehlich (MSW ’77) of Osseo, Minn., continues his private practice of psychotherapy as a clinical social worker. He is a fellow of the Minnesota Society for Clinical Social Work, is past president of that group and was certified in 2009 as a relational life therapist.

1980

Marieta Johnson (MSJA ’80) of Virginia, Minn., was named St. Louis County court administrator. She worked as a program assistant for Duluth’s Northland Foundation from 1988–93 and currently is a member of its board of trustees. She also chairs the Virginia Mural Committee.

a certified management accountant. He specializes in small business tax planning, value assessment and creation, and financial counseling to business owners. Lucinda Roff (PhD ’82) of Tuscaloosa, Ala., was named interim dean of the University of Alabama School of Social Work. Lucinda previously served as the school’s dean from 1987–2000. Since, she has taught full time and served as co-director of the university’s Center for Mental Health and Aging.

Carol Fenster (PhD ’79) of Centennial, Colo., is the president and founder of Savory Palate Inc. She also is an author and wrote her ninth cookbook, 100 Best Gluten-Free Recipes (John Wiley & Sons, 2010), to meet the needs of the glutenfree community. Larry Wright (BSA ’79) of Glenview, Ill., launched the Green Pet Shop in April 2010. The shop offers self-cooling pet pads, natural anti-itch solutions, biodegradable poop bags, recyclable kitty litter boxes and eco-friendly towel and mitt sets.

1979

1982

Scott Levin (JD ’82) of Englewood, Colo., was named mountain states regional director by the Anti-Defamation League. Scott is a Denver attorney who has served on the league’s regional board for many years. He was chairman of the board of the Rose Community Foundation, president of Congregation Emanuel and a trustee of the Denver Campus for Jewish Education. He also is a member of the Community Leadership Board of Mile High Montessori Early Learning Centers. John Moran (MSF ’82) of Littleton, Colo., is a CPA and managing member of Moran & Long LLC. He is an accredited business valuator, a certified valuation analyst and

Mark Wilson (BSBA ’83) of New Orleans joined the Bourbon Orleans Hotel as general manager. He most recently was director of marketing and sales at the Roosevelt New Orleans, where he spearheaded marketing and branding efforts in the $170 million historic preservation and reopening of the landmark hotel. He began his career with the San Francisco Hilton and has since held director-level positions at such hotels as the Sheraton New Orleans, Fairmont and Royal Sonesta.

Comforter Jan Bezuidenhout
Going from running a hospice to running a restaurant may sound like an odd transition, but to Jan Bezuidenhout it makes perfect sense. Bezuidenhout (MSW ’85), founder of the Denver-based Namaste Hospice, says that no matter how connected they were with the hospice during their loved ones’ illnesses, very few survivors were willing to accept bereavement services. “They would throw out letters; they wouldn’t come to groups or memorial services,” she says. So Bezuidenhout took another approach, connecting with grieving family members through the universal language of food. “I started just socially visiting and saying, ‘Tell me what you remember about your mom. When you were a little boy and you fell off your bike and you skinned your knee, what did your mom make you?’” she says. “I started collecting recipes and stories.” That’s when Bezuidenhout got the idea for a restaurant that would specialize in recipes donated in memory of loved ones. Inspired by restaurants like Denver’s SAME Café, which lets patrons pay what they can for a meal, she transformed the hospice’s event center in northwest Denver into the Comfort Café, a cozy neighborhood restaurant offering breakfast and dinner five days a week. “The thought of combining the comforting of the bereaved with feeding the hungry and everybody else and really creating a community, I thought that was exciting,” she says. Cooking on equipment donated by a local restaurant owner, Bezuidenhout and her partners Sandy Corlett and Barb McGhee turn out a menu of fresh food daily, much of it vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free. Often utilizing produce from farmers’ markets and community gardens, they craft dishes such as Mediterranean beef and orzo soup, braised Brazilian-style pork loin with black beans and steamed carrots with fresh dill. “We only serve local whenever possible—organic, really fresh,” Bezuidenhout says. “Our basic food philosophy is we usually don’t put more than six ingredients in anything, and if a third-grader can’t pronounce it we don’t put it in.” As for letting patrons name their own price for a meal, she says, it’s worked even better than she expected. For everyone who can only pay a dollar, someone else will pay 20. Call it karma. “It’s just the right thing to do,” she says. “Maybe people are starting to understand that richness doesn’t come from hoarding and having money—richness comes from giving and sharing.” >>www.thecomfortcafe.net
—Greg Glasgow

1983

1985

1986

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Cheryl Huff (BSBA ’86) of Bakersfield, Calif., joined the Bakersfield Association of Realtors as its director of communications. Cheryl helps the organization with communications, marketing and advertising, publications and public relations. She worked with the Boy Scouts of America Denver Area Council as a development executive involved with special event fundraising, marketing, communications and graphic design.

1988
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John Herrlin Jr. (MBA ’88) of Mendham, N.J., was hired to head oil and gas equity research in the U.S. for Societe Generale Corporate & Investment Banking. John joins the bank from AlphaOne Capital Partners. Prior to that he spent 14 years at Merrill Lynch as an oil and gas analyst. He was Institutional Investor Magazine’s top-ranked oil and gas analyst for six years while at Merrill Lynch. He also has covered the oil and gas industry at Lehman Brothers and Smith Barney.

1990

Ingrid Seftar Bakke (JD ’90) of Lafayette, Colo., was appointed to a Boulder district judgeship by Gov. Bill Ritter. Ingrid is a partner at Boulder law firm McCormick &

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Wayne Armstrong

Dianne Briscoe (BA ’83) of Denver was named a Denver County court justice after being nominated by the city’s judicial nomination commission. From 1986–88 she owned her own law practice, then worked as counsel in the Colorado governor’s job training office until 1996. She was an assistant Denver city attorney before being appointed a Denver County court judge by Mayor John Hickenlooper.

Michael Carson (BA ’85) of Silver Spring, Md., was named executive director of American Friends of Guinea, a nonprofit targeting medical relief and disease prevention in the Republic of Guinea, West Africa. Michael joined the American nongovernmental organization (NGO) Axios Foundation in April 2010 as the organization’s first director of business development. He was a country director for a major NGO in East and West Africa for nine years.

University of Denver Magazine Spring 2011

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Kennedy P and works part time as a .C. Lakewood municipal judge. She spent 11 years as a deputy district attorney in Jefferson County. She then moved to the Boulder district attorney’s office, where she was chief deputy DA. She entered private practice in 2007.

Everest’s Death Zone (New Leaf Publishing, 2010), which recounts his experiences guiding people with disabilities to the most perilous places in the world. Eric guided blind climber Erik Weihenmayer on his 2001 ascent of Mount Everest. Roger Smith (BA ’92, PhD ’98) of Englewood, Colo., has joined the Colorado Center for Nursing Excellence as the newest addition to the board of directors. He is vice president of human resources for Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) Continental Division and HealthONE. Prior to joining HCA and HealthONE, Roger led a global training organization for a major software company. He is a member of the American College of Healthcare Executives, the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration and the Society for Human Resource Management.

his first year as learning and development director for E*Trade Financial, Bill increased quality monitoring scores by 25 percent and customer satisfaction with employee knowledge by 31 percent. Ken Sardoni (MCIS ’93) of Alpine, Utah, was appointed vice president of the Steton Technology Group’s new business intelligence and analytics division. Ken was the regional vice president and held technical and management positions at Oracle Corp. for 13 years, focusing on business intelligences, data visualization, database design and implementation, and data warehousing technologies.

1995

Catharine MacLaren (MSW ’95) of Long Beach, Calif., is the chief operating officer of Workforce Performance Solutions, which provides employee assistance programs and development and training services to organizations throughout the Northeast. Brian Pinkowski (JD ’95) and Michelle (Brown) Pinkowski (BSBA ’87, JD ’94) have returned from East Africa, where Brian was the anticorruption adviser to the government of Southern Sudan and Michelle founded an international nongovernmental organization to work with Kenyan youth on ethics, drug abuse prevention and human rights. In the U.S. they have founded Global Transitions & Development LLC, an international consulting firm specializing in anticorruption, community conflict mitigation and democracy and governance. Brian is now in Iraq assisting in the development of local government.

1996

1991

Lori Canova (MSW ’91) of Superior, Colo., is CEO of the “I Have a Dream” Foundation of Boulder County. She was awarded the Woman of the Year Award from the Boulder Professional Women’s Association in March 2010. Herman Elger (BSBA ’91) of Denver was appointed general manager of the Montage Beverly Hills for Montage Hotels & Resorts. He previously was general manager of the Ritz-Carlton Cancun. Herman is a secondgeneration hotelier. He worked for RitzCarlton for 18 years in Aspen, Colo.; Bali; Washington, D.C.; and Miami.

L. Heath Sampson (BSAC ’96, MAcc ’96) of Englewood, Colo., is the chief financial officer for SquareTwo Financial. He was named one of ColoradoBIZ Magazine’s top 25 most influential young professionals. He joined SquareTwo in 2009 and led the company’s successful development and completion of a $475 million financial package.

2010. His dissertation was about colleges that use social networking sites to recruit undergraduate students. Chris is director of admissions and an assistant professor at Wilmington University in Delaware. (A class note in the fall 2010 issue gave an incorrect graduation year for Chris.)

1999

1994

1998

1993

1992

Eric Alexander (BA ’92) of Vail, Colo., is an author, speaker, father and guide who recently published The Summit: Faith Beyond

Bill Cushard (BSBA ’93) of Mountain View, Calif., was hired as chief learning officer for the Knowland Group, a hospitality marketing company. Bill has spent more than 10 years developing learning strategies for customer-company relations. During

Laurel (Zolot) Field (MSW ’94) moved to Broomfield, Colo., to be close to her children and grandchildren. She is a licensed clinical social worker who worked for more than five years at SolAmor Hospice in Colorado Springs, Colo., where she supervised various interns. She is now seeking another position near her new home.

Denis “D.R.” Dwyer (BA ’98) of Southampton, N.Y., is the vice president for strategy at Blue Moon Works, a Denver digital marketing company. He works in New York with fashion and luxury goods companies in making the transition from print to Internet marketing. He married Priscilla Alexandre in September 2010. Chris Ferguson (MSW ’98) of Avondale, Pa., successfully defended his dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania in March 2010. He received a doctorate of education in higher education management on May 15,

Karim Bouris (BA ’99, MBA ’02) is the director of community and workforce development at the Maximizing Access to Advance Our Communities Project, a San Diego-based nonprofit aimed at promoting self-sufficiency among low-income families. Current initiatives include a federally funded green jobs training program, a construction job-training program for youth and an initiative designed to support the Latino population in pursuing careers in health care.

2000

Brenda Brown (MSW ’00) of Dalton, Mass., welcomed daughter Grace Gabriella in July 2010. Grace’s big brother, Michael, is 1. Brenda is an outpatient therapist working with children and families in central Massachusetts.

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Julia (Rymer) Brucker (BFA ’00) of Brooklyn, N.Y., is an abstract artist and art educator. Her work bridges drawing and painting and often integrates mixed media including acrylic, watercolor, graphite, charcoal, crayon and paper collage. She worked as a visiting assistant professor of foundation art at Metropolitan State College of Denver from 2007 to 2009, and her work has been widely exhibited in the Denver metropolitan area, New York and New Mexico. Andrew Frey (PhD ’00) of Louisville, Ky., received the Gary Lee Shaffer Award for Academic Contributions to the Field of School Social Work at the School Social Work Association of America’s annual conference in St. Louis in April 2010. The award acknowledges Andrew’s leadership in the field of school social work through service and research. Dennis Goodyear (MLIS ’00) of Kansas City, Mo., completed a master of humanities degree from Tiffin University in Ohio. Dennis is the technical services librarian at the Avila University Library in Kansas City.

David McEntire (PhD ’00) of Denton, Texas, received the Dr. B. Wayne Blanchard Award for Academic Excellence in Emergency Management Higher Education at the 13th annual Emergency Management Higher Education Conference in June 2010. Beth Roalstad (MSW ’00) of Colorado Springs, Colo., was a finalist for the 2010 Athena International Award from the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce. Beth has been the executive director of the city’s Women’s Resource Agency Inc. since 2008. She served for six years as director of advocacy and community leadership for Denver’s Project WISE, the site of her GSSW internship.

2002

Elizabeth Kelchner (PhD ’02) of Denver was appointed to the faculty at Binghamton University in New York after graduation, but returned to Denver once her contract expired. She serves as executive director of Washington Park Cares, a nonprofit organization established in 2008 to help south central Denver residents continue to experience the comfort and familiarity of their own homes as they age.

Advocate Mary Overington

Reunion recap
More than 200 DU graduates from the classes of 1980–86 gathered in Denver for a reunion Nov. 4–7, 2010. The alumni were brought together through the power of online social networking. On Nov. 5, alumni from around the world greeted one another at a reception hosted by DU in the Driscoll University Center, attended the DU vs. Colorado College hockey game and then headed for the Border, just like “back then.” The weekend also featured lunches, sightseeing, and dinner and drinks downtown. “I started this out of curiosity and it took off right away, with friends reaching out to other friends,” says organizer Ann Sedgwick Kloppenburg (BSBA ’83). “It was unbelievable.” Kloppenburg says Facebook, e-mail and online directories made it easy to locate and find past friends. “We had one common link—DU,” she says. “What a very special place, one that is truly a part of all of us. It was amazing to see the connections being formed once again 27 years later.”
—Laurie Younggren Goodman (BA ’84)

2003

2001

Julia Gillette (MEPM ’01) of West Point, Calif., self-published her musical cookbook 7 Suppers for Sassy Soulful Cooks in 2010. It contains recipes for seven suppers, packaged with a CD of seven original songs inspired by her family. Julia also runs a program called Music in the Schools with her husband, Mic, to keep music alive in schools nationwide.

Vilem Kolin (MGS ’03) defended his dissertation at the Charles University in Prague in March 2010 and received a doctorate in international relations in May 2010. Vilem moved from Prague to Brussels, Belgium, with his family to work as a senior defense industry data officer for the Industry and Market Directorate of the European Defense Agency. He is primarily responsible for the design of a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base.

Wayne Armstrong

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Mary Overington (MSW ’98) is eager to talk about why her work for Denver-based Clothes To Kids means so much to her. “When I hear stories about kids who come in [to our store] and their eyes say, ‘Wow—I get to shop and pick out what I like,’ that’s the greatest part of this,” says Overington (pictured at right). It’s a story Overington and the other founding members of Clothes To Kids of Denver Inc. hear often. Kids who can’t afford new school clothes visit the Clothes To Kids store, browse the racks, try on outfits and leave with a week’s worth of clothes—for free. That’s the mission of the nonprofit: providing low-income school-aged children clothing to encourage school attendance and self-esteem. “The kids have said when they are in school they see other people that bully the kids who don’t come well-dressed,” says Overington, a social worker with Denver Human Services. “They are isolated and ostracized, and they don’t tend to join school activities. “These clothes make them feel good about themselves, make them feel accepted, and I know that in these particular struggles—like grandparents raising their grandkids—and in this time of economic disparity, how do you choose between feeding your children and clothing them?” The clothing—donated by retailers and individuals and often collected via clothing drives—goes to the organization’s store on Colorado Boulevard. Those who qualify (families must live in Denver County and be on a need-based financial assistance program such as a free or reduced school lunch plan) can visit the shop twice a year. They come home with new underwear, socks, five tops, four bottoms, shoes, a jacket and other accessories on each visit. In the years since its 2008 founding, the nonprofit has served more than 4,000 children. “I’ve been a social worker for my whole career, but this has been the most rewarding thing I’ve done,” Overington says. >>www.clothestokidsdenver.org
—Kathryn Mayer

Three friends met in Vail, Colo., in August 2010 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of their graduation from the executive MBA program at DU. They celebrated by dining out, hiking and reminiscing about their time at DU. After meeting more than 25 years ago, the women have remained close friends. The photo on their shirts was taken 25 years ago after they ran the Cherry Creek Sneak. From left: Karen (Wilkinson) Wilhelm (MBA ’85), Erika Schafer (MBA ’85) and Cherryl (Kelly) Leone (MBA ’85).
—Deidre Helton

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2004

Brian Ellis (BS ’04) of Dallas received a PhD in cell regulation from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Brian’s dissertation was titled Improving Viral Vectors for Gene Targeting in Gene Therapy. Brian and Kelley Briant were married Jan. 1, 2011. Ian Ivarson (BSBA ’04) of San Francisco founded Ivar Packs, which designs and sells backpacks with an internal shelving system. Ian began making prototypes while attending DU. Lands’ End redesigned its entire line of backpacks based on Ian’s initial design, which includes laptop sections, storage for electronics and other customizable features.

courses. Her book Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary (Ahsahta Press, 2006) was selected for the 2005 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. She recently wrote a full-length collection of poems called Iteration Nets. Elizabeth (Anderson) Taylor (BA ’05, MA ’09) and Charles Taylor (BA ’05, MPS ’10) welcomed their first child, Helen Amelia Taylor, on May 7, 2010. Charles graduated from DU in August 2010 and was awarded high honors on his master’s capstone project. The family resides in Colorado Springs, Colo. Mike Treinen (BS ’05, MBA ’05) and Annie Dalton Treinen (BA ’04), of Boise, Idaho, welcomed son Caleb Michael Treinen on June 10, 2010. He weighed 9 pounds, 6 ounces and is already looking forward to his freshman year in J-Mac.

2006

Pamela Hancock (MSW ’06) of Denver has begun the PhD program in social work at the University of Texas at Arlington. Tierney Shaffer (MSW ’06) of Aurora, Colo., married Carl Larson on Aug. 28, 2010, at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church in Denver. Tierney and Carl both work in Denver.

Organizer Espen Haugen
A 25-year-old ski instructor from Anchorage, Alaska, seems an unlikely champion for schools in Nicaragua. But Espen Haugen (BA international studies and geography ’08) is unusually determined. He first went to Nicaragua in 2007 as part of a geography course taught by Associate Professor Matthew Taylor. Haugen knew that although the Sandinistas valued education, the Contra War (1979–90) had hampered the country’s social efforts. Schools were dilapidated, textbooks were outdated, and economic pressures prevented many students from attending secondary school. “I realized this was an actual place where I could implement what I had been learning in international studies and geography,” Haugen says. “It’s like a frontier country. There are huge rural areas where people are living a subsistence lifestyle and the education system is suffering.” He returned to the Tola municipality near Nicaragua’s west coast five times as Taylor’s teaching assistant. Each time, he became more convinced he could make a difference. So he founded a nonprofit, Proyecto Remedios Educativos (PRE), with a mission to provide a remedy for community and educational needs in Central America. In fall 2008 he returned to Nicaragua, where he investigated the community’s needs and willingness to participate. In 2009 PRE donated materials and the community provided labor to bring 13 schools up to working standard. PRE recently has begun construction of an additional two-classroom school and is taking on more schools in Tola for reconstruction. When Haugen learned that schools were equipped with 1980s-era textbooks, he spent a year tracking down current book lists. PRE purchased books for each subject—one for every four students and guidebooks for teachers. More than 2,000 schoolchildren have benefited from his efforts. “It’s something they never had before, and it’s a huge benefit. I am really excited about that because I think that is really benefiting the quality of the education,” Haugen says. Taylor credits Haugen’s success with PRE to his knack for translating book knowledge into real-world knowledge, and for listening deeply to locals rather than coming in as an outsider with all the answers. “Espen has proven himself. He went from not speaking Spanish to speaking Spanish pretty fluently. The people of Nicaragua, the people that I know in that region, they want him to be there. He’s been invited to official government events as an honored guest. So the government is recognizing his work as well,” Taylor says. >> www.prehelps.org
—Brenda Gillen
Photo courtesy of Espen Haugen

2007

2005

Karla Kelsey (PhD ’05) of Selinsgrove, Pa., has been an assistant professor at Susquehanna University since 2005, teaching poetry, literature and culture, editing and publishing, perspectives and honors program

Ray Blanch (PhD ’07) of Monument, Colo., resigned from the superintendent position of the School District 38 Board of Education. He most recently worked as superintendent of the Lewis-Palmer School District in Monument. He worked in the district for nine years as an elementary school principal and as director of technology, assessment and research. Alison Burns (BSBA ’07, BA ’07) and Sergej Henning (BSBA ’07) were married on Aug. 21, 2010, at their home in Chicago. Sergej is an associate for a financial consulting firm, and Alison is a supply chain management consultant. Bryan Comer (BA ’07) of Birmingham, Ala., is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Robert Deline (BA ’07) of Denver and Shane Carrick (BA ’08) of Ouray, Colo., made a documentary while attending DU called The Black Birdman. The film about Tuskegee Airman James Harvey III was accepted by the International Black Film Festival in Nashville, where it premiered in October 2010 and won the award for best historical short. Andrew Mark Weinberg (BSBA ’07) of New York married Jenna Louise Goldschmidt in October 2010 at New York’s Plaza Hotel. Andrew is the vice president of real estate developer Weinberg Properties, where he is in charge of acquisitions and development.

Money matters
Allan Roth thinks investing is so simple a child can do it. But that’s not to say adults feel the same way. “Investing is so simple any 8-year-old can do it but so emotional it’s hard for adults to do it,” Roth explains. The financial planner and DU adjunct professor’s book, How a Second Grader Beats Wall Street: Golden Rules Any Investor Can Learn (Wiley, 2011), outlines a simple approach to creating an investment portfolio that can be used by any new investor. Roth urges investors to keep their approaches simple and offers the following tips: • Don’t overcomplicate. If you can’t explain your investment strategy, you might be in trouble. • Dare to be dull. If you are a small investor, consider CDs, bonds and money markets. • Don’t lend money to people you know can’t pay it back. The same goes for lending it to people when you don’t know what they will be doing with it (i.e. Bernie Madoff). • Avoid buying just what’s hot and trendy. You can save a little room for fun with volatile and trendy stocks (think BP or Apple), but your family’s future shouldn’t depend on it. • Buy low and sell high—not the other way around. Don’t panic when the market falls and sell everything. • Don’t put too much stock into what the experts say. If there really was an expert who knew how to beat Wall Street, he wouldn’t be dishing out free advice. Instead, he’d be a billionaire. • Diversify and simplify. Remember the saying “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” • Keep in mind that something can always go wrong.
Allan Roth teaches investment and behavioral finance courses at DU and has been working in the investment world for 25 years. He writes a column for CBS MoneyWatch.com and is the founder of Wealth Logic LLC, an investment advisory and financial planning firm.

2008

litigator who focuses on complex adversary proceedings, receiverships, foreclosures and corporate disputes. Luke Johnson (BS ’08, MBA ’08) and Holly Benson (BSBA ’10, MBA ’10) were married on Aug. 14, 2010, in Colorado Springs, Colo. Holly was a 4-year letter winner on the DU women’s volleyball team from 2005–08 and currently is an assistant volleyball coach at the

University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. Luke is a third-year medical student at the University of Colorado-Denver. Carmen (Dudley) Sample (MSW ’08) of Longmont, Colo., founded a private therapy practice specializing in trauma, addiction and attachment issues. She also started Sample Supports, through which individuals with developmental disabilities receive residential services, mentorship support and supported employment services. She teaches at Front Range Community College.

2009

Hillary Baker (MSW ’08) of Denver has worked at Synergy Healthcare Group as a multisystemic family therapist since November 2008 with Stephen Carleton (MSW ’08) and another colleague. Hillary recently started a private practice. David Hyams (JD ’08) of Boise, Idaho, a former Holland and Hart associate, joined the Denver office of Rothgerber Johnson and Lyons. David is a bankruptcy and commercial

Leland Becenti (MSW ’09) of Chinle, Ariz., is the housing director for the Tohatchi Management Office under the Navajo Housing Authority in Tohatchi, N.M. The program provides housing assistance to lowincome families in the form of either public rental or home ownership. Stefanie Bednar (BA ’09) of Denver was inducted into the National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC), an AmeriCorps program. She arrived at NCCC’s southwest regional campus in Denver in October 2010 to begin training
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for 10 months of full-time service and began work on her first of four long-term service projects in November 2010. As a corps member, she will complete a series of service projects as part of a team. Michael Briggs (BA ’09) of Tucson, Ariz., married Taylor Wisniewski on April 10, 2010. The wedding and reception took place at St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church in Tucson. Emmanuelle Martin (MSW ’09) of Denver is the director of social services at a longterm care facility that specializes in adults with major mental illness and in treating adults with multiple sclerosis. Leah Martin (MA ’09) of Loranger, La., has taken on an assignment with the U.S. Foreign Service as a political officer in the U.S. embassy at Athens, Greece. Leah was awarded the Rangel International Service Scholarship from the Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Program and earned her master’s degree from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies.

Toni Panetta (MA ’09) of Littleton, Colo., was selected to participate in a bilateral development program through the American Council of Young Political Leaders. Toni will serve as one of a handful of U.S. delegates to El Salvador and Guatemala. Steve Schweitzer (MBA ’09) of Berthoud, Colo., released his new book, A Fly Fisher’s Guide to Rocky Mountain National Park (Pixachrome Publishing), on Jan. 31, 2011. Steve has spent more than 10 years hiking and fishing in Rocky Mountain National Park collecting notes and photographs for the book. He is a contributor to several flyfishing periodicals and a contributing author and illustrator to the book Drag-Free Drift: Leader Design and Presentation Techniques for Fly Fishing. He is the co-founder of the popular fly-fishing website www.globalflyfisher.com.

Allie Pohl (MFA ’10) of Winter Park, Fla., was featured in the November/December 2010 issue of Orlando Arts Magazine. The article details her artwork, which explores body image issues and the media creation of the “ideal woman.” Allie’s work is part of the “XX - XY: Gender Representation in Art” exhibition running through June at the Orlando Museum of Art. Jake Spratt (JD ’10) of Denver joined the Sherman and Howard law firm’s public finance practice. While at DU he served as editor in chief of the Denver University Law Review. Katherine Wandtke (MA ’10) of Washington, D.C., traveled to Sikkim, India, in summer 2010 as a program consultant for the Taktse International School.
Post your class note online at www.du.edu/alumni, e-mail [email protected] or mail in the form on page 59.

?
Deaths
1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s

Which alumna was mentioned by name in President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address? The answer can be found in the People section of DU Today, www.du.edu/today. Send your answer to du-magazine@ du.edu or University of Denver Magazine, 2199 S. University Blvd., Denver, CO 80208-4816. Be sure to include your full name and mailing address. We’ll select a winner from the correct entries; the winning entry will win a prize courtesy of the DU Bookstore. Congratulations to Ariana McKnire (BA ’07, MA ’07) for winning the winter issue’s pop quiz.

Pioneer pics
Christopher “Hugh” Ilenda (JD ’95) is pictured on Mackinnon Pass, the highest point on the Milford Track between Lake Te Anau and the Arthur Valley in Fiordland National Park on the South Island of New Zealand. “I visited this memorial during my recent hike of the famous Milford Track,” Ilenda writes. “The memorial is at mile 16 of the track. I am proudly wearing my DU hockey cap.” As you pioneer lands far and wide, be sure to pack your DU gear and strike a pose in front of a national monument, the fourth wonder of the world or your hometown hot spot. If we print your submission, you’ll receive some new DU paraphernalia courtesy of the DU Bookstore. Send your print or high-resolution digital image and a description of the location to: Pioneer Pics, University of Denver Magazine, 2199 S. University Blvd., Denver, CO 80208-4816, or e-mail [email protected]. Be sure to include your full name, address, degree(s) and year(s) of graduation.

2010

Kari Baars (MSW ’10) of Superior, Colo., has joined Clinica Family Health Systems at a clinic in Thornton, Colo., where she’s working with a bilingual staff and members of the Latino community.

Staff update
Scott Lumpkin (BS ’79, MBA ’88) became DU’s new vice chancellor of University Advancement in January 2011, when thenVice Chancellor Ed Harris moved into the newly created position of chief development officer and special assistant to the chancellor. The change was made to strengthen DU’s fundraising efforts through the Ascend campaign. Lumpkin began his career at DU in 1979 as assistant dean of admissions. He moved to University Advancement in 1983 and became associate vice chancellor in 1992. Two of his children attended DU and another is currently enrolled. As vice chancellor, Lumpkin will lead University Advancement and shepherd its many relationships with people and organizations both internal and external to the University.
—Media Relations Staff

David Beck (BA ’65), St. Petersburg, Fla., 5-17-10 Helen Diltz (MA ’65), San Diego, 9-2-10 Gayle Wish (BA ’67), Petaluma, Calif., 10-9-10

Joe Berenbaum (BA ’38, JD ’40), Denver, 11-3-10 Maxine Hyland (BA ’39), Denver, 7-29-10

1970s 1980s 1990s

Rose (Minutolo) Kelly (BFA ’74, MA ’78), Denver, 7-31-10 James Tolhuizen (PhD ’77), Merrillville, Ind., 10-1-10 Paul Frye (PhD ’79), Bethlehem, Pa., 11-15-10

Ralph Ginn Jr. (BS ’41), Glendora, Calif., 1-27-10 Arthur Holch Jr. (BA ’44), Greenwich, Conn., 9-23-10 Edwin Olson (MA ’49, PhD ’53), Sturgeon Bay, Wis., 10-19-10 Richard Yates (BA ’49, MA ’53), Lakewood, Colo., 9-11-10

June Kathleen (Helm) Steinmark (MBA ’80), Fort Collins, Colo., 10-26-10

Harold Hamilton (BS ’50), Omaha, Neb., 8-3-09 Robert Mauney (MBA ’50), Hendersonville, N.C., 9-1-10 Louis Burkhardt (BS ’52), Los Alamos, N.M., 8-19-10 Joan Wiley Seielstad (BS ’53), Pagosa Springs, Calif., 10-22-10 Conrad Peterson (BSBA ’54, MBA ’58), Denver, 11-11-10 George Paxinos (BS ’55), Chicago, 8-4-10 Francois (Pat) Martel (BSBA ’57), Akron, Ohio, 10-23-10 Norma Williams (BA ’57), Denver, 10-3-10 William Schneider (BS ’58), Windsor, Colo., 9-1-10 Robert Sterling (MBA ’58), Houston, 6-29-10 Sam Eccher (attd. ’59), Durango, Colo., 3-6-10

Christian Pruchnic (MA ’95, CERT ’05), Denver, 11-20-10

Faculty and staff

Anne Mathews (MA ’65, PhD ’77), former Graduate School of Librarianship and Information Management professor, Naples, Fla., 10-21-10 Laverne Pritchett, Graduate School of Social Work professor emerita, Denver, 10-13-10 Don Smith (BA ’50), former sports information director, Tucson, Ariz., 9-12-10 The death notices in the winter 2010 issue of the University of Denver Magazine contained two inaccuracies. Kenneth Jastrow (BA ’48) died on July 3, 2010, and Doris Finnie-Shade, whom we listed as deceased, is in fact alive and well and living in Denver. The magazine regrets the errors.
University of Denver Magazine Connections

Corrections:

Frank Ruble Jr. (BS ’61, MBA ’64), Geneva, Fla., 7-4-10 Larry Arpan (BS ’63), Portland, Ore., 9-13-10

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ANNOUNCEMENTS
Get Involved Mentoring Join the Professional Network and share your career
experience and advice with current DU students and alumni. >>www.alumni.du.edu

Lifelong Learning OLLI DU’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute is a membership

DU Photography Department

Local Chapters Just moved to a new city and don’t know any-

one? Need to expand your professional network? Want to attend fun events and make new friends, or reconnect with old ones? Join a local alumni chapter: Atlanta; Boston; Northern California; Southern California; Chicago; Dallas; Minneapolis/St. Paul; New York; Phoenix; and Washington, D.C. New chapters are under way in Houston and the Pacific Northwest. To find out how you can get involved, call the Office of Alumni Relations at 800-871-3822 or visit http://alumni.du.edu/chapters.

program designed for men and women age 55 and “better” who wish to pursue lifelong learning in the company of like-minded peers. Members select the topics to be explored and share their expertise and interests while serving as facilitators and learners. >>http://universitycollege.du.edu/olli

nars and weekend intensives explore a wide range of subjects without exams, grades or admission requirements. >>http://universitycollege.du.edu/learning/ep

Enrichment Program Noncredit short courses, lectures, semi-

2010 Eva Håkansson: Power vs. Pollution

2010 Aaron Huey: In the Shadow of Wounded Knee–A Case for Indigenous Reparations

AHSS Faculty Lecture Series DU’s Humanities Institute

Women’s Library Association A group of DU alumni and

friends regularly come together to raise funds for Penrose Library and participate in continuing education initiatives. Programs include lectures, teas, special events and book sales. >>http://library.du.edu/site/about/wla/wla.php launching in summer 2011 is designed exclusively for non-business majors who are interested in supplementing their education with critical topics in business and leadership. For more information, contact Becca Mahoney: 303-871-4833 or [email protected].

offers a free monthly lecture series to showcase the current research, creative endeavors or recently published works of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences faculty. >>www.du.edu/salons

Calling All Experts
We’re trying to get to know our alumni better while developing possibilities for future articles. Please send us your ideas. We would especially like to hear about readers who: • work in the renewable energy industry • work in the health care industry • are working/serving in Iraq or Afghanistan • were DU Centennial scholars • served in the Peace Corps • served in AmeriCorps • live abroad
2010 Karambu Ringera: Emancipating Marginalized People from Dependency 2010 Stephen Brackett and Jamie Laurie: An Experiment in Holistic Media

Summer Business Institute New three-week intensive program

On the Web Annual Report DU’s 2009–10 Annual Report is online at
www.du.edu/annualreport.

Media Find photographs of campus, events, sports, students and
more at www.flickr.com/photos/uofdenver. DU videos are at www.youtube.com/uofdenver.

Alumni Connections Pioneer Alumni Network Join other Denverarea alumni for networking events each month. >>http://alumni.du.edu/PAN

Nostalgia Needed
Please share your ideas for nostalgic topics we could cover in the magazine. We’d love to see your old DU photos as well.

Pioneer Generations
How many generations of your family have attended DU? If you have stories and photos to share about your family’s history with DU, please send them our way!

DU on the Road Find out what your alma mater has been doing since you left. See if DU is coming to a city near you. >>http://alumni.du.edu/DUontheRoad Alumni News Biweekly e-newsletter contains information on alumni events and news happening on campus and around the country. E-mail [email protected] to sign up. Stay in Touch Community News DU’s

2010 Philip Tedeschi: Exploring Man and Woman’s Best Therapy

TEDxDU The second annual conference of ideas—featuring speakers on technology, entertainment and design—is May 13, 2011, at the Newman Center for the Performing Arts. >>www.tedxdu.com Newman Center Presents The 2010–11 Newman Center
Presents series continues this spring with the tribute “Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell” on March 11–12, a performance by father and son Jeffrey Kahane and Gabriel Kahane on March 25 and Alarm Will Sound’s “1969” on April 23. >>www.newmancenterpresents.com distinguished alumni and faculty of the Sturm College of Law is Sept. 21 at the Hyatt Regency Denver at the Colorado Convention Center. Proceeds benefit the Student Law Office, the DU Law Scholarship Fund and the Judicial Fellowship Program. For more information, contact Laura Dean at [email protected] or 303-871-6122.

Mark Your Calendar

Experience

2010 William Espey: Standard Deviation of the Creative Mind

In person or online. | 13 May 2011 | 1:00 pm - 5:30 pm MDT
Join us for a celebration of DUing at TEDxDU2. This year, we’ll explore radical collaboration with intriguing speakers, exceptional musicians and a few surprises. If you can’t make it to the event on campus, we hope you’ll join in from wherever you are in the world by streaming it live at TEDxDU.com. Visit TEDxDU.com for ticket information, to learn more about TEDxDU and to check out videos from TEDxDU 2010.

monthly online newsletter features campus news, profiles, an events calendar and more. >>www.scribd.com/uofdenver

ePioneer Online Community

DU Law Stars Dinner The annual awards dinner honoring

Connect with other DU alumni and friends. Update your contact information, connect to your Facebook page, search the directory and post class notes. Online class note submissions will automatically be included in the University of Denver Magazine. >>http://alumni.du.edu

Contact us

University of Denver Magazine 2199 S. University Blvd. Denver, CO 80208-4816 303-871-2776 [email protected] www.du.edu/magazine Twitter: DUMagazine

TEDxDU.com
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Miscellanea

Novel approach

Stoner was John Williams’ third novel, but it’s the one that has earned the former head of DU’s creative writing program the most attention. The tale of a farm boy-turned-college professor has grown from a poor-selling title upon its release in 1965 to a cult classic that was reprinted by New York Review Books in 2006. While at DU, Williams (BA English ’49, MA ’50) wrote his fourth and final novel, Augustus, a fictional exploration of the life of Julius Caesar that won the National Book Award for fiction in 1973.

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