Features

The world by road

When Toyota and Stevinson Toyota, a Denver dealership, and other businesses decided to underwrite Steve Bouey’s (PolSci’99, MPubAd’01) and Steve Shoppman’s (Fin’00) ambitious plan to literally drive around the world, they were probably looking for a little positive public relations.

A return to Buff country

As a child, Deborah Fowlkes splashed in the CU engineering school fountain on hot summer nights to cool down while her father, applied math professor Irving Weiss, worked in his office. The night watchman flicked the lights to tell her it was time to go home.

Jumping for joy

For years Bloom has been turning his own dreams into reality, juggling football games with World Cup races and business interests. Today he’s doing the same for low-income seniors through his Wish of a Lifetime Foundation, which he started in 2008 to honor his 84-year-old grandmother, Donna Wheeler, who still works and volunteers 20 hours a week.

A change is gonna come

In many ways, according to research conducted by CU archivist David M. Hays, CU was ahead of its time in terms of race in its early years.

Do immigrants reduce crime?

Scrolling through The New York Times on his computer, the assistant professor of sociology came upon an op-ed by Harvard professor Robert Sampson, a leading sociologist, who proposed an intriguing if extreme hypothesis: the drop in crime rates in the 1990s could be related to the rise in immigration.

Sleuthing for Jane Doe

From the day in 1996 when Pettem discovered the humble grave marker etched with the words “Jane Doe: April 1954: Age About 20 Years,” she has spent nearly 14 years investigating the crime.

Where the Oscars roam

Sarah Siegel-Magness (Bus’95) never doubted the decision to turn the controversial young-adult book Push: A Novel (Vintage) into the Oscar-winning film Precious, despite widespread skepticism that the story’s gut-punching realism would find an audience.

Bringing down the house

Since the turn of the century, earthquakes — including tsunamis — have directly or indirectly claimed the lives of more than 640,000 people, four times more than in the preceding two decades, and proportionately more than the global increase in population would anticipate.

Knocking history out of the park

Every semester Tom Zeiler explores how baseball and American society have intersected from the 1830s to the present, drawing both fantasy league junkies and baseball neophytes to his popular Boulder classroom. What Zeiler doesn’t do is focus on batting averages, pitching statistics and the fate of the Boston Red Sox.

The man who shaped Pinocchio

While walking to art class at Boulder in 1937, Willis Pyle (A&S’37) saw a poster from the Walt Disney studio seeking animators for his fledgling operation in Hollywood. Pyle, a senior who was art editor of the university’s satirical Colorado Dodo, and an advertising illustrator for Gano-Downs clothing store in Denver, decided to mail his best work to Southern California. “A few weeks later, Walt offered me the job,” Pyle recalls. “So I headed to Hollywood, found a room within walking distance of the studio and got to work.”

Cambodia: A photojournalist returns to a forgotten country

In 1979 I traveled with journalist Joel Brinkley to the Thailand/Cambodia border region where Cambodian refugees were fleeing to safety as the invading Vietnamese army was in the final stages of defeating the Khmer Rouge regime. Listening to the personal stories of survivors in the camps, we heard about the horrors of “The Killing Fields,” the systematic genocide of almost two million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979 by the ruthless Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot.

A film mogul in action

The hard part for the extreme skier, who has been featured in the past 20 Warren Miller films, is getting to the cliffs. To film the spectacular segments in Miller’s movies, Anthony has taken some long, strange trips around the world — white-knuckle flights in rattletrap Russian Army helicopters over Iran and three-day slogs behind horses through belly-deep snow in the remote reaches of northwestern China.

Invisible manuscript appears

Ralph Ellison published his groundbreaking Invisible Man in 1952 but died before finishing his long-awaited second novel. Against all odds, CU’s Adam Bradley and a colleague pieced together Ellison’s manuscripts, publishing the opus in January.

Brushing wih destiny

Mathews is no dentist, but she has figured out how to convince those in the profession to pay their own way, donate their vacation time and work back-breaking eight-hour days to give children their smiles back. Meanwhile, she handles the tricky details, such as how to transport an air compressor via yak to an ice-covered Himalayan village or how to deal with Maoist rebels trying to shake her down for a bribe.

Dialing for dignitaries

What would Howard Higman (Art’31, MSoc’42) have done with a cell phone? The late CU sociology professor, best known as founding maestro of the annual Conference on World Affairs, never had anything but a land line at his home on 11th Street in Boulder, but he surely would have loved an iPhone or Blackberry.

Giving peace a chance

On Oct.14, 1960, on the steps of the University of Michigan student union, a young senator named John F. Kennedy made history when he challenged students to spend two years of their lives working for peace in developing countries. In the 50 years since Kennedy’s speech, the Peace Corps has sent hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the globe in its mission to fulfill his grassroots quest for world peace. Serving for two-year stints, volunteers work on everything from AIDS education to information technology and environmental preservation. In the process, they gain the intangible yet invaluable life experience and cultural understanding that come with living and learning from people different from themselves.

Fullbacking an aria

It was one of those crossroads moments that defines a life. Former University of Colorado fullback Keith Miller (Art ex’96) faced two divergent paths in 2001. He had been offered a spot as a bass/baritone in Michigan’s Pine Mountain Music Festival, but he had just finished a good workout with the Denver Broncos.

Healing gets a leg up

As a former point guard who pounded her knees on high school and college hardwoods, Kristi Anseth (PhDChemEngr’94) feels your pain.

As a CU-Boulder researcher in tissue engineering, she’s doing something about it.

Cyclist seizes the world

During the past year, I’ve biked 9,300 miles while intermittently camping, shivering, sweating, getting visas, following directions and struggling to comprehend various languages. So far, I have pedaled through the eastern United States, Europe, the Middle East and India during which people have offered me coffee, tea and places to stay. I even got a cavity filled in India for $7.25.

Tribal cultures leave mark on anthropologist

Lars Krutak (Anth, Art’93) knows about ritual pain. The 38-year-old anthropologist has dozens of tattoos and decorative scars given to him by the tribal people he studies in such far-flung places as Hawaii, the Philippines and Indonesia. Native artists have used a variety of objects to pierce his flesh — hippo teeth, tree thorns and nails.

CU’s hoozat helps you figure out who’s that

You’ve just wandered into a party and there, through the haze, you see him — movie-star gorgeous, hip, laid-back, just your type. But who knows? So instead of approaching him, you take out your iPhone and in seconds you’re scanning Mr. Right’s — or Ms. Right’s, as the case may be — Facebook profile. Freshly armed with that information, you can now decide if you want to cross the room and introduce yourself.

Billups helps make Nuggets golden

Denver Nuggets basketball player Chauncey Billups (Soc ex’99) stands very tall in Denver and at CU — now more than ever. Nowhere is this better illustrated than at the Coors Events Center where, in the arena’s southeast corner, a 68-foot-by-26-foot mural features Billups and CU’s buffalo mascot, Ralphie.

Open space

Open space looks at how CU professors helped establish Boulder’s legendary open space.

Serving up summer

During the summer when you were 20, anything was possible. You held your first job, maybe went to war, fell in love, lived with good friends and an overflowing sink of dirty dishes and volunteered to make the world a better place. Without fail, September called you back to campus with its cool nights, engaging classes and spirited football games. And life marched on.

Zen and mountaineering madness

Trudging through waist-deep snow on the 24,688-foot Annapurna IV mountain, Tonya George Riggs (Bus’86) couldn’t get one thought out of her mind: they were alone. It was just her and husband Brad Clement, two little specks climbing up the enormous peak in Nepal with the thundering sound of avalanches crashing down the slopes around them. Fear and exhaustion overwhelmed her.

Science with a twist(er)

It’s doubtful even a tornado could have pulled 9-year-old Brian Argrow away from flickering black-and-white images of a man walking on the moon.

The interminable job search

I hit a milestone in June — I’ve been out of work for more than a year. When people ask me how it’s going, I try to emphasize the positives: the consulting work I’ve recently started, a better-looking lawn and a more practical wardrobe. Strange how outdated and pointless some of those corporate clothes look now. Oh, and I’ve enhanced my computer skills by building an elaborate, five-tab Excel spreadsheet to track my job contacts and satisfy the unemployment office. Everyone smiles and says I seem to be holding up pretty well.

Walking the line between life and death

It’s been 25 years since sociology professor Michael Radelet decided to publicly denounce the death penalty, but he can still recall the children’s cries that made him do it.

Solving a mysterious disappearance

In November 1934 Everett Ruess, a 20-year-old artist who explored the Southwest in the early 1930s, stepped into the Escalante post office in Utah. He was mailing a letter to his brother in California, explaining he would be hiking the Colorado River area and would be out of touch for a month or two. Several days and 50 miles later, two sheepherders shared a campfire with Ruess amid the desert’s lonely sagebrush country.

Here’s something to squawk about

The good-natured camaraderie between Kernen and Quintanilla is, in part, what the hundreds of thousands of viewers who watch Squawk Box each weekday morning (6-9 a.m. Eastern time) tune in to watch. Three hours of live TV, turning on the proverbial dime to a CEO here, a government official there and sometimes even a celebrity investor, can be both exhausting and exhilarating, and a brotherly sense of humor can be the WD-40 that makes it all work.

Hot reads for the summer

Forget Oprah’s Book Club or The New York Times bestseller list. If you’re looking for diversity — both in subject matter and artistic form — when compiling your summer reading list, read on.

Singer soars to new heights

During the last time Cynthia Lawrence (MMus’87) sang with world-renowned operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti, he gave her a one-eyed glance to see where she was going to land before she plunged backward off a wall in Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca.

Alum heads Gates fund to help students

When Bill Gates put up $125 million to fund his own philanthropic foundation in 2000, one of the first employees in the fledgling Seattle organization was Allan Golston (Acct’88), a health care executive working in nearby Olympia, Wash.

Making gas from grass

Weimer, 55, says his technique could make a gallon of green gasoline for less than $3. And he and his team of 10 doctorate and three postdoctoral students recently won a three-year, $1 million federal grant to continue refining the process.

Desperately seeking Tom Cruise

The 1980s was a tough decade at CU-Boulder. The ’60s and ’70s had stamped their respective imprimaturs on everything from campus politics to postgraduate expectations. When we met alums from other eras, they seemed smug and self-satisfied — or maybe we were just envious of their big times in Boulder.
“You should have seen the war moratorium protest on the quad. . .” those from the counterculture said. “You know, since AIDS wasn’t a part of our lives, sex was everywhere. . .”

Run, Kara, run

When Kara Grgas-Wheeler Goucher (Psych’01) crossed the finish line of the New York City Marathon last fall, she wept.

Shopping with Donnie

Donnie Lichtenstein, a CU marketing professor, remembers looking in the newspaper as a young child and regularly seeing an ad for barbecue grills from Sears. “They were always, always on sale. I thought, ‘How can that be? They can’t always be on sale.’ I guess my curiosity just grew from there.”

From soldier to student

Interviews with five military veterans who are now CU-Boulder students highlight the contrast between military life and student life.

When Sputnik and the Beatniks ruled

During the late 1950s, Bob Harvey (Edu’59) and his friends at the University of Colorado listened to folk artists like the Kingston Trio, played guitar and ruminated on the deeper meaning of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 anti-establishment treatise, On the Road (Viking).

You’re not in Colorado anymore

The other day someone asked where I was from, and I automatically replied, “Colorado.”
“No, no,” he said. “What part of Philly are you from?”

Kidding around on the slopes

Kidd says it’s all a dream come true – and his genuine passion for skiing has driven him to spread his love and inspiration with everyone from Special Olympians to Ute Indian schoolkids.

Center for Community leads Building Boom

Young students of the class of 2014 will arrive to see a campus transformed from the one students experience today. CU-Boulder is in the throes of the largest building boom since the 1950s and early ’60s, when enrollment approximately doubled. Eight buildings and major renovation projects are already under way or will break ground between March and the end of 2009.