Billy Lewis (PE’60)

Billy Lewis (PE’60), the school’s first African-American varsity basketball player, passed away in his Sarasota, Fla., home on June 14. He was 72.

In October 2008, just a few weeks before Americans elected the country’s first black president, Lewis was inducted into CU’s Athletic Hall of Fame. He recalled how far the country had come since he was a student-athlete and often forced to eat and sleep away from his teammates on road trips because some hotels didn’t allow blacks on their premises.

“My grandmother told me to never let anyone break my spirit,” he said during the ceremony. “It’s a blessing for me to be successful and because of what I learned and what I was exposed to at CU, I was never afraid of anything.”

His best season was his junior year, when he averaged 5.9 points per game with a career-high 21 against Nebraska. The 6-3 forward played in 67 career games, scoring 244 points and grabbing 197 rebounds in lettering three times.

Off the court, he was the first African-American elected by the student body as commissioner of the Associated Students of the University of Colorado.He led a delegation of students to tackle discrimination in housing and employment practices and headed the Students For Human Dignity. These were two of many causes he championed that helped change CU in a positive way.

Upon graduation, he clerked for a Denver judge, married JoKatherine Holliman Page (A&S’60), and worked for Colorado Sen. Peter Dominic while earning his law degree from Howard University. In 1964 he became the first African-American corporate attorney at IBM’s headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., before working at the Boulder office.

After running for state representative in 1968, he opened a private law practice in Denver with partner Morris Cole, one of — if not the first — black law firms in Colorado. He served as general counsel at Howard University and vice president of government relations for the Putney Hospital Group in Albany, Ga.

“I hope in some small way I have contributed to the success of the university, as it has benefitted me in a myriad of ways,” he said.

Dave Plati (Jour’82) is associate athletic director. Read the longer story online at www.coloradanmagazine.org.

While at CU, Pete became one of the all-time greats in Colorado baseball and was known as the “Paonia Peach” and “Pistol Pete.”  He helped the Buffs win the Big 7 Baseball Championship and lettered in 1941 and 1942.  He also played semi-pro baseball.  In 1994, he was named one of CU’s Living Legends, meeting the criteria of earning his varsity letter 50 or more years earlier and joining the likes of such outstanding CU athletes as Byron “Whizzer” White.

In 1943, Dale married Ilene Davidson, who predeceased him in 1997. They had four children: Loretta, Linda, Peter, and John.

After serving as a medical resident at CU’s University Hospital, he started his own practice in Denver specializing in urology in 1953 and quickly established himself as an outstanding physician. He demonstrated his commitment to medicine and Colorado’s residents by serving rural communities and establishing a monthly clinic in Del Norte, Colo.

Over the years, Pete was a tireless participant in CU and state-wide activities.  He taught at  CU’s medical school, served as a member of the Board of Regents for 12 years, was a lifelong member of the CU Directors Club and served as a National Western Stock Show Association director for 34 years.

Dale passed on September 6, 2010. Private services for family only were held. He will be missed.

Kenneth Caughey (Law’55) - photo by Peter Caughey

When Kenneth Caughey (Law’55) was born on the University of Colorado at Boulder campus, it started a relationship that lasted 85 years.

He was born April 8, 1925, in CU’s hospital, then located in Boulder. He spent his first year sleeping in a dresser drawer at the Sigma Chi house where his father was manager while working as a CU engineering instructor.

But his most enduring connection began years later when he returned from the Marine Corps to attend CU’s law school. It was then he was invited on a blind date with a CU undergraduate described only as “the president’s daughter.”

For awhile he thought he was going out with Margaret Truman.

But at that memorable picnic on Flagstaff Mountain, his date turned out to be Judith Stearns (DistSt’50), the third of CU President Robert L. Stearns’ four daughters. She was living in the President’s House, now known as Koenig Alumni Center.

When he went inside to pick her up for a date early on in their relationship, he was surprised to be introduced to Columbia University President Dwight Eisenhower and General Lauris Norstad. They were meeting with Stearns to establish the curriculum for the new U.S. Air Force Academy.

Ken and Judy married in Denver in 1953. By all accounts, he was lucky to have made it to his wedding day.

After growing up in Aurora, Ill., he joined the Marine Corps right after high school.  In 1945, in the days just after World War II, he was stationed in China where he contracted tuberculosis. He wasn’t expected to survive and spent the next three years in hospitals.

By the time he came back to Boulder to attend law school he had use of only one lung and took mandatory naps every afternoon. But he continued to improve and fathered the first of his three sons before earning his law degree.

After graduating he joined the Colorado National Bank (now U.S. Bank) in Denver where he headed the trust department for 17 years and later served on the board of directors. He was long active in Denver civic life, including service as president of the Denver Rotary Club and as an early board member of Craig Hospital and the Webb-Waring Institute. In 1998 he received the law school’s Executive in Industry Alumni Award. He died in Denver on July 26.

He loved connecting with other people and enjoyed telling humorous stories to his many friends, old and new, young and old, throughout his long life. And he was pleased that when the Alumni Association held icebreaker contests at gatherings to see who had the most connections to CU, he often won.

Peter Caughey is the son of Kenneth Caughey (Law’55) and the senior editor in the CU-Boulder office of media relations and news services.

Clyde Martz - CU Foundation

A tireless attorney, CU professor, carpenter and water gardener, Clyde Martz passed away on May 18 at home in Albuquerque, N.M., after a long illness. He was 88. Martz taught at the CU law school from 1947 to 1962, writing the first natural resource law casebook. He saw the big picture, pioneering a new area that creatively combined water law, mining law and oil and gas law.

Born on Aug. 14, 1921, in Lincoln, Neb., he received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska where he was president of his fraternity. His time at Harvard Law School was interrupted by service on the submarine USS Tilefish during World War II. He married Ann Spieker in 1947, the same year he received his law degree from Harvard. He and Ann were inseparable until her death in 2004.

During his 15 years as a professor at the CU law school, he published the first natural resources law casebook, Cases and Materials on the Law of Natural Resources. Martz also helped found the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation and was a guest professor at several other law schools.

He departed CU in 1962 to join the Denver-based Davis Graham & Stubbs law firm. Clyde was also a dedicated public servant who served in what arguably are the two most eminent positions for any natural resources lawyer, assistant attorney general of the lands and resources division of the U.S. Department of Justice (1967-69) and U.S. Department of the Interior solicitor.

During this time he was involved in a dispute involving the treaty fishing rights of the Yakima Indians as well as one involving condemnation of lands needed for the NASA facility in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and numerous mining claim cases. In 1987, Colorado Gov. Roy Romer (Law’52, HonDocHum’06) appointed Martz his natural resources director, calling him one of the nation’s top lawyers.

In 1982 Martz helped found CU’s Natural Resources Law Center to promote intellectual discourse over crucial natural resources law and policy issues and foster practical and effective solutions to problems. The center is best known for its ground-breaking work on management and conservation of the West’s water resources.

Part of being a giant in the field of natural resources law was his mentoring of so many students and young lawyers.

“Those of us who had the honor of working with Clyde,” says Natural Resources Law Center director Mark Squillace, “will long remember him for his dedication and passion for the practice of law, and for the support that he gave us as we began our careers.”

Martz had a son and a daughter with whom he spent a great deal of time. He climbed the Third Flatiron and Grand Teton with Robert Martz and rode horses with Nancy Martz. All through his life but especially when he retired he built innumerable gardens and ponds. A creative and prolific carpenter, he built several additions to the family home by himself. A carpenter indeed.

Go here to contribute to the Clyde Martz Endowment Fund.

Marc Killinger is assistant editor of the Coloradan.

Jimmie Heuga (PolSci’73)

Former CU-Boulder skier and Olympic bronze medalist Jimmie Heuga (PolSci’73) passed away Feb. 8, 46 years to the day he won one of the first two medals in United States men’s Olympic ski team history. He was 66.

Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1970, he courageously fought the disease for almost four decades.

During the1964 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck, Austria, he won the bronze medal in slalom. The U.S. team coach was Bob Beattie, also head coach of the CU ski team, and Heuga was one of four CU skiers on the U.S. squad, along with Billy Kidd (Econ’69) who won the silver in the slalom, Buddy Werner (A&S’64) and Bill Marolt (Bus’67). This group is largely credited with elevating U.S. skiing in the international community.

Kidd notes that Heuga passed away in Boulder shortly after 1 p.m., which was ironic because the slalom on Feb. 8, 1964, commenced at 1 p.m. At the start, Heuga was in the 24th position.

“I’ll always remember that day, the excitement when we found out we finished 2-3 behind [Josef] Stiegler [of Austria],” Kidd recalls. “Only our parents and Bob Beattie thought we had a chance to win a medal.”

Born Sept. 22, 1943, in Tahoe City, Calif., Heuga took to skis right away. He appeared in a Warren Miller ski film when he was nine. In 1958, at 15, he was named to the U.S. Ski Team. He remains the youngest man ever on its roster.

At age 17 he performed well at the 1959 U.S. Olympic Trials but was not selected for lack of experience. Undeterred, he traveled with the team to Europe for pre-Olympic training and gained valuable experience racing against Europe’s best.

A three-time CU letterman, Heuga was the 1963 NCAA champion in slalom. He also was on two championship U.S. Ski Teams (1962, 1966).

Heuga skied in the 1968 Winter Olympics at Grenoble, France, before retiring to coach. He was inducted into the U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame in 1976, the Colorado Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 1987, the CU Athletic Hall of Fame in 2000 and the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame in 2008.

In 1983 he founded the Jimmie Heuga Center for Multiple Sclerosis in Edwards, Colo., offering physical conditioning and consulting services for people with disabilities and personal challenges. Today it is called Can Do Multiple Sclerosis and has had a profound effect on many people’s lives.

Later in Heuga’s life, CU ski coach Richard Rokos became his personal coach and Heuga did laps around CU’s track on a specially crafted three-wheeler that cyclist and friend Tyler Hamilton (Econ ex’95) helped acquire.

Despite his MS affliction, Heuga said he “skied aggressively” until he was 63 and attended two or three CU football games every season.

Marolt, who met Heuga when they were 13, remembers him as a tough guy who impacted everyone around him.

“He was this little guy who was full of energy and buzzing around all the time,” he says, “whether it was the slalom, dancing the twist at the Tul [Tulagi, a famous Boulder student hangout] or simply life in general.”

Dave Plati (Jour’82) is the associate athletic director and head of sports information.

William H. Baughn (photo by Jerry Stowall)

After William H. Baughn died, his family continued to discover hidden achievements of the man who acquired armfuls of accolades, then quietly tucked them out of sight.

“He had a lot of awards that came out of the woodwork that I never knew existed until we started going through boxes and finding them,” says Bill Baughn (Fin’79) of Boulder, one of his two sons. “He didn’t have any plaques on the wall of his home office. All he had on the wall was a calendar.”

A man who started life “dirt poor,” according to his family, Baughn played a crucial role in pouring a new foundation for the university’s business school, then placed the girders that would hold long past his two decades as dean. He later took the university’s reins as interim chancellor and twice as the university’s interim president.

In the end, the soft-spoken southerner said he was happy to keep past accomplishments in the box and look forward to what came next.

William Hubert Baughn died Nov.1, 2009, in Boulder of complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was 91.

He was born in rural Alabama and his father died of pneumonia when Bill was 4. He worked his way through the Great Depression and never stopped.

During World War II, he served stateside as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Force, then earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Virginia. In 1964 he became dean of the CU business school, which at the time “had no classroom space,” he told the Boulder Camera. “We held classes in everyone’s basement and attic.”

During the next two decades he found funding for a new building, helped add a graduate school, co-authored a highly regarded book on banking and helped establish the Colorado Business Economic Outlook Forum.

For five months in 1985 he stepped in as president and helped navigate CU through prickly budget negotiations with the state legislature. He served as president for eight months during 1990-91.

“He was eminently fair,” says accounting professor emeritus John Tracy. “He was not a flamboyant guy, not a backslapper or grandstander. He just put his nose down and plugged ahead.”

Despite his hectic schedule, he regularly found time to take his family camping. Married to his college sweetheart, Mary Morris Baughn, for 60 years, he left campus to eat lunch with her nearly every day. In the late 1960s, the family was one of the last in the neighborhood to buy a color television. Although he could have afforded a Mercedes, he drove a Subaru.

While he didn’t participate in sports, Baughn spent 18 years as a faculty representative to the Big Eight Conference where, among other accomplishments, he pushed to strengthen academic requirements for college athletes. A highlight included watching the CU football team beat Notre Dame in the Orange Bowl in 1991 during his presidency.

After the big game, he was presented with the coveted NCAA Championship ring, but few people ever saw it.

“Like everything else,” his son says, “he squirreled it away.”

Jim Sheeler (MJour’07) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who teaches at the journalism school.

Stephen Romine (MEdu’40, PhD’47)

As far as Stephen Romine (MEdu’40, PhD’47) was concerned, the legend at the bottom of the trail map was never to scale.

“He would always say, ‘Save your breath — come on, let’s go!’ ” remembers his daughter, Pat Romine Peterson (Soc’60, MFren’69). “He would continue, ‘Oh, come on, it’s only a mile or two further,’ but his miles were always two or three.”

In the backcountry, Romine could name each flower and recite the geological history of nearly every rock. Back in Boulder, he infused the CU campus and community with the same wide-eyed wonder he found in the wilderness, stretching each year of life as he did each mile on the trail — just a little bit further.

He died on July 28 in Seattle. He was 96.

His educational career began as a high school teacher and administrator in Oklahoma and Colorado. After serving as a U.S. Army captain in North Africa during World War II, Romine earned a CU doctorate in education, which at the time was a department in the College of Arts and Sciences. Later, as dean of the department, Romine led the effort that created the separate education school.

In his 29-year CU career, Romine reached out to his graduate students, inviting them to his family home for informal class sessions and made faculty feel welcome by hosting summer parties. In 1970 he received CU’s Robert L. Stearns Award for extraordinary service.

Still, education professor emeritus Jack Cousins also remembers Romine for his explorations out of the office — where, at times, the dean was called to treacherous peaks to provide aid as a member of the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group.

“Steve was noted as an outdoor snow camper,” Cousins says. “He would dig a snow camp in four feet of snow on a mountaintop and just think that was an ordinary thing.”

After retirement, Romine moved to Steamboat Springs, Colo., to continue teaching — this time in the snow as a cross-country skiing instructor. Even after the death of Marguerite Romine, his wife of 68 years, he continued prowling the mountain passes, leaving not only footprints but lessons.

“When we were camping as a family, we might come to a campsite where someone had left some trash and he would say, ‘You clean it up,’ ” his daughter remembers. “And I remember saying, ‘That stuff was here when we came’ and he would say, ‘No, you leave the campsite better than you found it.’ And I think that was his philosophy about life — leave it better than you found it.”

Jim Sheeler (MJour’07) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who teaches at the journalism school.

Carol Eileen Ryan (Psych'65)

A listener for life

As her sister lay in bed with lung cancer, Mary Ryan took a minute to look out the window at the rolling fields, horses and sky. Then she heard the whisper of her sister’s voice.

“What are you thinking about?” Carol Eileen Ryan (Psych’65), a doctor, asked from her bed.

At that point, the doctor-turned-patient was so weak that her younger sister thought she would only use her strength to ask for something crucial — a drink of water, adjustment of a pillow.

“Instead, it was always something about you,” Mary Ryan says. “She always wanted to know about you.”

Two weeks before Carol died, she still wanted to listen.

“I told her, ‘I’m thinking how beautiful it all is,’ ” Mary Ryan recalls. “I said, ‘I’m so glad you have this to look out at.’ She smiled.”

After nearly 30 years of treating students as a psychiatrist at the Wardenburg Student Health Center, Ryan died at home in Longmont on May 28. She was 65.

As a girl, she wanted to be a veterinarian and carried that love of animals with her even as she focused on helping people. After earning her M.D., she worked briefly as a pediatrician before switching to psychiatry. She completed her residency at Wardenburg where she was hired in 1980.

During the next 29 years, she navigated emotional and bureaucratic minefields as director of the psychiatry clinic. She was known for fighting for students and keeping up with medical advances, simultaneously battling budget cuts and insurance issues — all while maintaining her own private practice.

“She was a very youthful person — youthful in that she still had curiosity,” says Jane Bliss Stoyva, a former social worker at Wardenburg and one of Ryan’s good friends.

“She didn’t judge kids — she was primarily interested in getting to know them,” Stoyva says. “She could hear them. She was not an um-hummer.”

Away from the clinic, she focused on life’s details with equal intensity — skiing, horseback riding or reading all night. “She would swim forever,” recalls her husband, Clive Jones.

After being diagnosed with terminal cancer in August 2008, she maintained a similar steadiness. Before her death, she wrote a note to her family — her husband, two sons and five siblings — not asking how they were, but, for once, telling them how she felt after listening all her life.

“There was never enough time for all the things I hoped to do, now or ‘someday,’ and some always waited for ‘someday’ because the days were so full of all the others . . . When asked about future changes, I’d say, ‘Not yet . . . I’m still enjoying it all too much . . . Right now being ‘present’ as much as I can be with those I love is what is most important. It feels to me more like making a choice than throwing in the towel. I can enjoy the east sky lightening, the pastoral scene, the light fading as the day goes on.’”

Jim Sheeler (MJour’07) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who teaches at the journalism school.

Near the end of World War II, a young Polish soldier, temporarily blinded by an anti-tank mine, began his new life in the dark.

By 1945, Edward Rozek had fled his homeland and spent time in a Nazi slave labor camp. He had fought his former captors in France and Germany, earning numerous medals. Then, as he spent nearly a year recovering from surgery on his eyes, he made a decision.

“Because he couldn’t see, he had plenty of time to think,” says Rozek’s wife, Elizabeth Rozek. “He began thinking, ‘Why is it that every generation or so the old men of one country send their young men to fight against the young men of another country?’ He decided that there had to be a better solution, and that started with teaching young people.”

Rozek died Feb. 19 in Boulder. He was 90.

When Rozek arrived in the United States, he carried $50 and a drive to find the best education in the country, his wife said. He worked on a dairy farm and in an auto shop to save enough money for tuition to Harvard, where he soon earned scholarships that carried him through advanced degrees.

For the next several decades, Rozek concentrated on studying his way into the top tiers of academia, earning a place as an international relations expert and vehement anti-communist. On campus, in the classroom and even in retirement, he consistently set sparks of debate and reveled each time they caught fire.

Rozek joined the CU political science in 1956. Soon afterward, one of his students was an accounting major named Hank Brown (Acct’61, Law’69).

“I remember in the first class I had from him I missed the third lecture,” says Brown, who served as CU president from 2005-2008. “And in a class of more than 250 he noticed I’d missed one lecture and he announced to the class that whoever knew me should tell me that I was to come to his office immediately…he made it clear to me that it was inexcusable that I miss a single class.”

During his 43 years at CU, Rozek chaired the Institute for the Study of Comparative Politics and Ideologies and directed the Central East European Studies Program, among others. He was known to spend days preparing for a single lecture, and quickly earned a reputation for classes as riveting as they were demanding.

“He took great delight in engaging with people who would debate with him – especially those who disagreed with him,” said Brown, who now teaches in the same department where Rozek taught. “People who did that would often get the best grades in the class.”

Throughout the years, Rozek never wavered in his staunch warnings about what he saw as the constantly lingering threat of communism and in 1980 was tapped as an advisor to Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign.
Following his retirement in 1999, Rozek focused his ire at university bureaucracy and what he saw as a lack of intellectual diversity, barraging local newspapers with editorials. He even trained his poison pen on a former student.

“Administrators were not his favorite group of people,” Brown says, in a not-so-subtle understatement. “I suspect that I was a bit of a disappointment to him in that regard.”

In 2008, Rozek bought a full-page advertisement in the Boulder Camera alleging a disparity between registered Democratic and Republican professors, claiming the university suffered from “ideological incest.”

“Ed’s view was that the purpose of an education is to get people to think, and if they don’t think they just accept,” says Elizabeth Rozek, to whom he dictated most of his op-ed articles. “He maintained that the purpose of education is not just ingestion of information.  It’s learning to think for yourself.”

Despite his intimidating reputation, Rozek’s wife says he also remained guided by a compassion ingrained as he recovered from the injury that nearly blinded him in the war that shaped so much of his life. On his first visit back to Poland after the fall of communism, he spent hours at a Polish orphanage for blind and deaf children. After his death, his family directed all donations to the orphanage in his name.

“He was always mindful,” his wife says, “that there but for the grace of God, he could have gone.”

Jim Sheeler (MJour’07) is a Pulitizer Prize-winning writer who teaches at the journalism school.

BY JIM SHEELER

Ruth Helm (Art’78, MA’86, PhD’91) 1934-2008

Dorothy Stoneham dreaded the first day of class.

“I thought it was a bust. I’m not going to lie,” the freshman says, thinking back to her introduction to “U.S. History to 1865.” “I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to have so much studying to do and this tiny little lady is going to come in and speak softly and I’m going to have a hard time staying awake.’ ”

Within minutes of the first class, Ruth Helm (Art’78, MA’86, PhD’91) shattered Stoneham’s assumption. The petite woman with the soft voice soon captivated her and the rest of the class with tales more than two centuries old — not lectures, but stories — not speeches, but narratives. Often, the classes would end on a cliffhanger, ensuring the students would return, awaiting conclusions written long ago.

“Not paying attention wasn’t an option,” Stoneham says. “She brought history to life.”
Helm died at home in Boulder on Nov. 20. She was 74.

Born in Philadelphia, Helm grew up surrounded by the historic landmarks she would later bring to life. She interrupted a college degree to marry and raise three children but eventually yearned to return to the classroom.

She arrived in Boulder in 1976, following a divorce, and enrolled at CU along with her daughter (her older son was already attending CU, and her younger son would enroll while she completed her doctoral thesis). After earning her doctorate she began teaching and found a home in the Sewall Academic Program, where students take classes inside the residence hall. As associate director of the program, she earned prestigious teaching awards and wowed students and instructors who praised her ability to present a syllabus as an adventure.

“She was like a responsible — not autocratic — leader of an expeditionary team,” says history professor Patty Limerick. “She was interested in the questions of history, the search, the exploration — but she made clear that we’re all on this exploration together.”

According to women and gender studies senior instructor emerita Anne Marie Pois (PhDHist’88), Helm lived by two adages: “Life is not for sissies” and “The most important job of a human being is being human.”
She embraced both philosophies while battling breast cancer for almost three years while continuing to teach. Then, in the middle of the fall 2008 semester, the class was left with the ultimate cliffhanger: Helm was too ill to teach, and another professor would take over the class. They all hoped it was temporary.

During Helm’s final weeks of life, history professor William Wei visited her often. The conversations always drifted to the same subject.

“Her last thoughts,” he says, “were of her students.”

At her memorial service, students lined the back of an overflowing room in Sewall Hall, sniffling and smiling at the announcement that future students would be taught inside the place their professor felt most comfortable — a classroom dedicated in her name: The Ruth Helm Classroom.

After the memorial service, the freshmen remembered all they had learned, then choked back tears.

“She said that history was our story,” freshman Morgan Presson said. “I remember that she told us in class that it was our duty to know our story, our history.

“And now she’s part of ours.”

Jim Sheeler (MJour’07) is a Pulitzer  Prize-winning writer who teaches at the journalism school.