Photo by Neal Beidleman

Mountaineer Neal Beidleman (MechEngr’81) survived the 1996 Mount Everest tragedy that left eight climbers dead. Upon his return this year he found some peace.

As he plodded across Mount Everest’s knife-edge Summit Ridge on May 20, 2011, Neal Beidleman (MechEngr’81) realized something was not right.

His summit push had begun perfectly the night before, with a starry, moonlit sky overhead as he and his partner, Chris Davenport (Hist’93) hiked upward at an impressive clip. But as dawn broke and the icy crown of the world’s highest mountain grew nearer, the effort become much more difficult and eventually Beidleman’s pace slowed to a crawl. An eerie tunnel vision consumed him and his oxygen-starved mind turned to the events of a darker day, 15 years earlier.

Anatoli Boukreev, a guide for Scott Fischer’s team, is belayed by Neal Beidleman (MechEngr’81) while approaching the Hillary Step in 1996.

“I started having all these wild thoughts,” recalls Beidleman, who later discovered his oxygen mask had malfunctioned, leaving him climbing without oxygen for hours. “On the way up, I felt like I was somehow reliving what Scott [Fischer], myself and some of the others had gone through … like fate made this happen to me, so I could better understand what happened in ’96.”

Beidleman had been a guide during one of the most tragic days in the mountain’s history. His tearful arrival at the summit last spring marked one of the most “emotionally intense” moments in a two-month trip that was full of catharsis, revelation and coming to terms. It was the first time the 52-year-old Aspen-based engineer had returned to Everest since his close friend Scott Fischer perished along with seven other climbers.

For Beidleman, whose life was forever changed by the events of that day, returning was all about moving forward.

“I wanted to go back and leave Everest on better terms,” he says. “Chris and I had a great trip. But there were several times when I was taken off guard by how intense it was. There were some very powerful moments up there.”

Beidleman is shown shortly after surviving the fatal storm that killed eight climbers on Everest in 1996.

Fifteen years after the disastrous expedition, made famous in Jon Krakauer’s bestselling book Into Thin Air, the events of May 10, 1996, remain a haunting memory in the minds of many involved. In all, eight died after a fierce fast-moving storm engulfed the mountain. Among them was Beidleman’s expedition boss Fischer, one of the first mountaineers to offer guided treks up many of the world’s highest peaks. Veteran Everest guide Rob Hall and a diminutive 47-year-old Japanese client named Yasuko Namba also died. Namba proudly became the oldest woman to summit Everest before dying on its flanks despite Beidleman’s efforts to save her. Three members of an Indian expedition also perished.

Afterward, the tragedy became fodder for countless media accounts, with at least five survivors publishing dueling perspectives on who was to blame. The nagging question that Krakauer asks in his controversial account is, “Why did veteran Himalayan guides keep moving upward, ushering a gaggle of relatively inexperienced amateurs — each of whom paid as much as $65,000 to be taken safely up Everest — into an apparent death trap?”

The question has yet to be answered fully, as the two men in charge died on the mountain that day. By all accounts, the weather deteriorated quickly. And many have speculated that a friendly, unspoken rivalry between Hall and Fischer may have led the two guides to resist turning their clients around earlier.

But for Beidleman, widely credited for acting heroically that day, returning to Everest was not about stirring up old controversies. Rather, it was about making peace with an iconic mountain he’d dreamed of climbing since he was a child but could only look upon with grim memories.

Climbers cross a treacherous crevasse in the Khumbu Icefall on Everest in 2011 ahead of Chris Davenport (Hist’93) and Beidleman.

“To leave Everest on such a horrible note like that and have it be the last word that the mountain speaks to you is not the way I wanted it to be,” he says.

It was just after 1:25 p.m. on May 10, 1996, when Beidleman crested the 29,035-foot Everest summit the first time. But his climb to Everest began in grade school when his outdoors-loving parents turned him on to the sport in his hometown of Aspen. He became a world-class climber, getting engaged to his wife Amy Beidleman in 1994 while on an expedition to Makalu, the world’s fifth highest mountain, located 14 miles from Everest. When Fischer asked him to join his upstart guiding business and serve as third-in-command leading eight clients up Everest, Beidleman jumped at the chance.

The summit push was fraught with mishaps and delays. But when the then 36-year-old finally arrived at the summit with two clients and Fischer’s second guide Anatoli Boukreev, the clear cobalt sky and sweeping panorama didn’t disappoint.

“It was beautiful. For about five minutes, I took it all in,” he recalls. “But then I got very nervous.”

It was late in the day. He was burning through oxygen even though he turned the flow down. A solid blanket of clouds was building on the jungle plains below. And Fischer and the team’s remaining clients had yet to arrive.

Without a radio to communicate with his boss and reluctant to head down and begin turning paying clients around (that was pre-determined to be Fischer’s job), Beidleman waited a grueling two hours on top until every last client stumbled up.

“My role was to do what Scott had asked me to do and I did those jobs well,” he says. “Had I known Scott was in trouble I might have acted differently, but I assumed he was still making decisions and guiding people to the top.”

Climbers enjoy a sunset from Camp 3 at 24,000 feet during the summit push in 2011.

Around 3:30 p.m., Beidleman headed down, accompanying five clients into the brewing storm. They passed Fischer, looking tired but still pushing upward near the summit and assumed they’d ultimately see him shortly in the descent. What Beidleman didn’t know was Scott may have been suffering from severe high-altitude sickness that many believe later debilitated him, leaving him unable to continue below 27,500 feet after the others began their descent.

As they climbed down, the lightning and thunder worsened. By nightfall, Beidleman’s group had swelled to 11, including two sherpas and several members of Hall’s team.

Blinded by a furious ground blizzard with winds blowing at 75 miles per hour and unable to find their camp, they huddled in the dark on the South Col, not far from the 7,000-foot drop-off of the Kangshung Face. Beidleman feared if they kept wandering they might step off into the abyss, so he made the call to huddle on the ice and rocks and wait for an opening in the weather.

“The wind was so ferocious it just kept knocking us down,” Beidleman recalls. “We put our backs to the wind, and I kept yelling at people and hitting them on the back just to make sure they stayed awake. You just wanted to close your eyes and drift off.”

When the sky cleared after midnight, only four, including Beidleman, had the strength to set out for the tents, which ended up being roughly 400 yards away. Three others would be rescued later that night. Namba, a member of Hall’s team whom Beidleman had virtually dragged off the mountain to the huddle, succumbed to the frigid temperatures, lying down on the Col and never waking.

Hall’s client Beck Weathers, left for dead by other rescuers the next day, miraculously made his way to the tents in late afternoon but lost his right arm, the fingers on his left hand and part of his nose to frostbite. Hall, his third guide Andy Harris and his client Doug Hansen, a postal worker who saved for years for the trip, reached the summit but never made it down. Neither did Fischer.

“Nobody had ever imagined that something so extraordinarily bad like this could happen,” Beidleman says.

After leaving Everest in 1996, Beidleman began to contemplate going back. But it wasn’t until recently that the pieces began to fall together.

Davenport, a fun-loving, professional big-mountain skier and guide famous for skiing all of Colorado’s 14ers in one year, had a client who wanted to climb Everest. He called long-time friend Beidleman and asked if he’d be interested in co-guiding. Beidleman now had a wife and two kids and a thriving engineering business.

But the prospect of climbing with a small team and being in control of the decision-making appealed to him. For Davenport, 40, it was not only an opportunity for another first but also for a rare learning experience.

“It was really powerful to have a firsthand perspective as to what went wrong in ’96 and to learn from the mistakes that were made,” Davenport says. “I learned far more having been there with Neal than had I gone on my own.”

Things went so smoothly on the early acclimatization ascents that they took a detour one day, making a glorious ski descent of a large portion of the Lhotse face, a 45-degree slab of black ice barely covered in powder snow at 24,000 feet.

But the mood intensified as the duo and their client moved higher. On May 18, they made a summit push but turned back without hesitation when the weather turned bad.That bit of “serendipity,” as Beidleman puts it, allowed Davenport and him the full next day to wander around the South Col and visit the rock pile where he and the others had huddled in the blizzard 15 years prior.

“It’s very easy to look back and say to yourself, ‘You should have done this or that,’ but I took one look at the topography, remembered the fierce storm, the dark night, the lack of oxygen and could really see how easy it was to get there instead of where we were supposed to be,” he says.

Neal Beidleman (MechEngr’81) captures climbers making their way toward the summit of Everest in May 2011.

The next morning, as they pushed toward the summit in their second bid for the top, Beidleman passed the snow-covered area where Fischer’s body still lays and was heading toward the South Summit where Hall, Harris and Hansen perished. Beidleman felt his body weaken, and his oxygen-starved brain began to play tricks on him.

Davenport took the lead, arriving at the crystal clear summit a few minutes ahead.Not long afterwards, Beidleman leaned into his friend’s arms, emotionally cooked by what he described to Davenport as “an epiphany.”

“A lot of people have burdened Scott and Rob and others up there after the fact with all these things they should have done. But the reality is, once you are out of oxygen, your world becomes very small and what you are capable of becomes very limited,” he says. “I was reminded of that.”

After another climber discovered the malfunctioning of Beidleman’s mask and repaired it, Beidleman regained his faculties within minutes and walked away with the epiphany that what occurred in ’96 couldn’t have been easily solved with a few quick fixes. He realized, having climbed inadvertently without oxygen, that not all things are possible on a mountain that has been ascended about 3,000 times but where more than 220 have lost their lives.

“Little things can go wrong, and it is still the highest place on Earth,” he says.

At home in Aspen now, he looks back on the trip as a gift, which helped him close one chapter and start another.

“I will always be sad about what happened in ’96,” he says. “People died up there and that’s a bad thing. You cannot ever change that outcome.

But you can come to terms with accepting what your limitations were. Just allowing yourself to appreciate that you maybe did everything you could under the circumstances is really powerful.”

Lisa Marshall (Jour, PolSci’94) is a freelance writer near Estes Park, Colo.

Since 1957, 87-year-old twins Betty Fitzgerald Hoover (A&S’46) and Peggy Fitzgerald Coppom (A&S’46) have attended CU-Boulder football games.

Cheering on players amid sun, rain, snow and bitter cold, 87-year-old twins Betty Fitzgerald Hoover (A&S’46) and Peggy Fitzgerald Coppom (A&S’46) may hold the record for attending the most CU sports games ever. They’ve only missed one home football game since 1957 because one of them was ill.

“That’s what it takes for us to miss,” says Betty defiantly, to which Peggy adds, “All weddings have been planned around CU football.”

Wearing matching gold Buff sweatshirts and waving pom-poms, the sisters have been season football ticket holders since 1957 and men’s and women’s basketball season ticket holders since 1979. As a result, they cannot tell you what their seat numbers are. They just know their seats when they see them.

After attending Boulder High School — where they were cheerleaders — they came to CU and fell in love with the university. Their passion for the campus has never left. To them, the CU community is family. They also are members of the Buffalo Belles booster group.

For home football and basketball games, an entourage of no less than a dozen family members follows them to after parties at Peggy’s house to savor the excitement of each game. Peggy says that they also try to become personally acquainted with everyone involved with the teams. They traveled to Miami for the Orange Bowl national championship in 1991 where they say they bonded with the grandmother of Eric Bieniemy (Soc’01), the current offensive coordinator and running back coach for the Buffs.

Despite being miniature in size — both stand just under five feet tall — Betty and Peggy are giants in the CU sports realm, says athletic director Mike Bohn.

“The twins represent the pinnacle of our class, pride and enthusiasm that is so vital to any university,” he says. “They inspire us all and provide a wonderful guide to the ideal fan.”

Their most memorable games? The football team win over Nebraska in 2007 and when the men’s basketball team beat Kansas in 2003.

Regardless of any disheartening losing streaks, they always have faith in their Buffs.

“We’ve been through some pretty low times [at games] with not much to cheer about,” Betty says. “But we’ve always thought, ‘If the team has to stay, then someone should stay with them.’ ”

Christie Sounart is a student writer for the Coloradan.

Wonderful to see our friends, 87-year-old twins Betty Fitzgerald Hoover & Peggy Fitzgerald Coppom, at the ASU-CU game.

Lighthearted Entertainment

One of Hollywood’s pioneers in reality TV, Howard Schultz (Comm’75) bares all about his hits like Extreme Makeover and Moment of Truth.

The idea came to Howard Schultz (Comm’75) at the end of a long weekend as he crawled into bed in his Los Angeles home and glanced at his TV.

Flickering on the screen was a promotion for an upcoming segment of the daytime tabloid talk show Jenny Jones Show about ugly ducks-turned-swans. Schultz, a TV producer, froze for a moment.

“I grabbed a receipt because it was the only piece of paper I could find on my night stand,’’ he said. “On the back, I wrote down two words: Ultimate Makeover.’’

With a sense of urgency, Schultz immersed himself in what became Extreme Makeover, the groundbreaking show that gave ordinary people new lives — and new faces — after winning an opportunity to undergo plastic surgery. Debuting in 2002, the ABC series altered the course of reality TV, helped trigger a boom in cosmetic surgeries and blew the roof off the ratings to boot.

It was vintage Schultz — original, risky, highly controversial — a formula that made MTV’s Next! and Fox’s The Moment of Truth comparable hits for Lighthearted Entertainment, the company he started in 1992 following the success of Studs, his breakthrough reality show. In its sixth season, Next! is a speed dating show that has become MTV’s highest-rated show in the late afternoon time period. Launched on Jan. 23, 2008, The Moment of Truth was a game show hosted by Mark Walberg in which contestants answered a series of 21 increasingly personal questions to receive cash prizes. It ended in August 2009.

Howard Schultz (Comm’75) of Lighthearted Entertainment has produced a series of reality TV shows.

Schultz sits in his Burbank office down the street from NBC Studios where staff members are busy cranking out The Tonight Show. It’s a gloomy rainy day, but the 57-year-old is his usual irrepressible self, chatting about his current project, a reality show with another intriguing premise: in a world dominated by Facebook, do your friends have your back?

“This is a brutal business,” he says. “It will tear your heart apart if you don’t absolutely adore it. You’re living on the edge, trying to achieve the impossible nearly all the time in this very risky endeavor. But it’s been an incredible profession for me.’’

Although critics usually rip his shows, The Hollywood Reporter picked Schultz as one of the top 50 forces in reality TV in 2008, and Los Angeles Magazine named him one of the city’s most influential people in 2003. Not bad for a Chicago boy who arrived at CU in 1974 with little interest in TV beyond watching Star Trek reruns.

“I had this plan of taking all my prerequisites in my freshman year — biology, anthropology, psychology,’’ he says. “Needless to say, I got in too deep. I needed a class that was an easy A.’’

So Schultz took “Introduction to Communications,” followed by “Introduction to Broadcasting,” which ended his plans of running the family printing business.

“It was almost like I was made for television,’’ he says. “It was like a hand fitting into a glove. That’s the only way I can describe it.’’

It seemed Schultz was everywhere in those days — producing shows for the campus TV station, working as a disc jockey for Boulder station KADE, contending for Trivia Bowl titles and returning day after day to a studio/classroom at Folsom Field.

“Nobody walked in and knew what they were doing in those days,’’ says Bud Leonard (ConservEdu’72), one of Schultz’s CU instructors. “Howard was very sharp, especially on the producing side. He had the passion and the talent.

For example, he got [legendary Hollywood director] Frank Capra into the studio to do an interview. I always wondered how he did it. In this business, courage and belief in yourself are huge factors.’’

Schultz’s obsession became his profession when he returned to Chicago for his first TV job. A year later he picked up his first Emmy for a show called Friday Night.

Before long, Schultz packed his car and headed to Hollywood, a move that temporarily soured him on the business.

But he began working on a series of game shows, news documentaries, dating shows and as a segment producer of the John Davidson Show.

“Howard is a thinker,” says Ron de Moraes, former director of the Davidson show, who works for Schultz.  “He’s always thinking about what he’s pulling the trigger on. But there was no way of recognizing that he’d be running his own production company 20 years later.”

In 1992 the Real World introduced MTV viewers to living in public, the beginning of the modern reality TV era. When the new genre began mutating into an array of concepts, Schultz was ready for his big, strategic move.

Asked by Fox to come up with a new show, Schultz came back with Studs, a raunchier version of Love Connection. It quickly became must-see TV on college campuses.

“It became a cultural phenomenon,” Schultz says. “Johnny Carson and David Letterman were doing jokes about it. Studs changed my life because it allowed me to start my own production company.’’

Sensing a shift in the cultural landscape, Schultz began to look at plastic surgery as a reality premise in the early 2000s. The thought of surgically altering bodies on prime time freaked out one of his assistants. “You could kill someone,’’ she told him. But Schultz took care to minimize his risk.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared,” he says. “I did realize people could die. That’s why I spent hours and hours in surgery and handpicked every surgeon. We took out a lot of insurance.’’

An immediate ratings success, Extreme Makeover eventually aired in 100 countries — in different variations — as the reality genre went global. It stopped airing in 2005.

“The show was a game-changer for me,’’ he says. “I think it established me for the long haul. Once you’ve had hits, you’re forever associated with those hits.’’

Schultz went farther out on the limb in 2008 with The Moment of Truth, a controversial, scathingly reviewed Fox hit. During the show contestants were hooked up to a lie detector during which they faced personal questions backstage. Then they answered the questions again in front of cameras. The Moment of Truth ended up being seen in more than 100 countries.

“The show really established our presence globally,’’ he says. “I’ve been blessed not only with the ability to create ideas out of thin air but also to observe things going on in the world. I saw globalization coming long before other producers, and I said, ‘I’ve got to get into this game.’ ’’

Even at age 57 — old by Hollywood standards — Schultz is looking around the cultural bend, searching for another big idea.

“Reality shows will be part of TV forever,’’ he says. “Nothing’s more entertaining than reality.”

Clay Latimer is a freelance journalist and children’s book author who lives in Centennial, Colo.

U.S. Navy

How did World War II fuel a surge in opportunities for women?

When Tom Brokaw wrote his paean to the Greatest Generation, he left them out. Filmmaker Ken Burns skipped them when he documented The War.

They are the estimated 100,000 women who joined the military during World War II. The Navy Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES), their Coast Guard counterparts, the SPARS, and the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) provided critical support to the American war effort.

“It’s really a shame,” says Margaret Thorngate, 88, who served as a WAVES yeoman, or secretary, in San Francisco. “Nobody under the age of 60 has even heard of the WAVES.”

But CU journalism associate professor Kathleen Ryan hopes to ensure the women’s contributions are never forgotten with her documentary and multi-platform media project, Homefront Heroines.

“Part of the appeal of the story is that it’s a largely untold history,” says Ryan, who joined the CU-Boulder faculty in 2010. “They really have not received the recognition they deserve.”

Ryan, whose mother served in the WAVES, spent 20 years working in television before going to graduate school at the University of Oregon. There, she decided that the Navy women would make the perfect subject for her dissertation.

The documentary is based on interviews with 52 WAVES and SPARS she did for her doctoral project, focusing on three women, including Thorngate. The film also makes use of five rolls of 16-millimeter film of female vets that have “never seen the light of day.”

Last summer Thorngate, who helped paint the USS Missouri during the war, visited the venerable battleship in Hawaii with Ryan for the documentary.

“When people aboard the Missouri heard I was a World War II vet, they were all very interested,” Thorngate says. “They start realizing that this is a generation that is passing by.”

The film is currently in post production. Ryan plans on pitching it to public television, cable channels and film festivals when it’s completed.

But she’s also pushing the story out on newer media platforms with the help of intern Laura Hampton, a 22-year-old CU journalism student. Besides leveraging such “old school” media as Facebook and Twitter, Hampton is using a “geotagging” smart phone application to “tag” physical locations with stories, photos and videos related to WAVES history.

“Kathleen is sharing a part of history that a lot of people don’t know,” Hampton says. “It’s really cool being a girl and seeing these women take that role, which was really unheard of at the time.”

The WAVES program began in 1942. The strictly male hierarchy imagined the “gals” could handle a few basic but crucial tasks — secretarial work, storekeeping, decoding messages.

But it didn’t take long, Ryan says, for women to move into other, more critical roles. They got into weather forecasting and helped repair planes. They trained pilots and served as gunners’ mates teaching seamen how to shoot moving targets from moving vehicles.

Many of the WAVES, especially those in instructional positions, had been teachers before the war.

“Early on, men were skeptical, but very quickly it became evident that women were more successful in training competent pilots than men,” Ryan says. “And so [men] pushed to be trained by women.”

Virtually all male trainers, by contrast, had come up through the Navy without previous teaching experience. Simply put, many of the women were better teachers.

Becoming a WAVE was no easy task. While the Navy accepted most able-bodied men, women had to be at least 20 years old, have finished high school and spent time on the job or pursuing higher education. To become an officer, women had to have completed at least two years of college.

“Initially, a lot of the women who came through had gone to teachers’ colleges,” Ryan says. “They had taught, they were a little older, they were good at this . . . This was their skill.”

The pioneer WAVES also had to fight ugly prejudice. World War II marked the first time women were allowed in the military.

Ryan says men often resented their presence, as women entering the military were initially pitched as freeing men to fight overseas, but there was a perception that women were taking men’s jobs.

“Therefore, there were lots of derogatory rumors out there saying that the only women who joined were either prostitutes or lesbians,” Thorngate says. “But after a year or two the women proved themselves to be able to do the job without any ‘immoral conduct.’ ”

Ryan says the women she interviewed said they wanted to serve the country during a time of need, but that was far from their only motivation. Many joined because it was a steady job and an avenue for more education, although the G.I. Bill did not pass until 1944.

And then there were the uniforms. Designed by the famous French-American fashion designer Main Bocher, the Navy’s female togs were much coveted following the privation of the Depression years. With blue serge jackets and skirts in a classic cut, white or light blue blouses and a silky tie, the uniforms stood in stark contrast to the dowdy khaki outfits worn by women in the Women’s Army Corps, also known as WAC.

Ryan initially suspected the notion that women joined for the uniforms was a case of gross stereotyping. But she found all of her interview subjects “mentioned it — unsolicited — how gorgeous the uniforms were and how important that was.”

Thorngate is pleased that Ryan’s work will preserve an important part of American history, especially as her generation dies.

“Kathleen has been very instrumental and helpful in really bringing us back to life,” says Thorngate, who lives in Florence, Ore. “We are not dead! There is something to be appreciated in what we did.”

A snapshot of CU-Boulder student soldiers today

• Total student veterans and ROTC participants on the campus: 1,239
• Veterans on campus: 797
  Women: 92
  Men: 705
• Enrollment in an ROTC program on campus: 442
  Women: 94
  Men: 348
• Students on active duty: 92

Clay Evans is writing a book about his grandfather, Alexander Bonnyman Jr., who was awarded the Medal of Honor after he was killed in the Battle of Tarawa in the Pacific on Nov. 22, 1943.

Engineering freshman Brandon Lin, left, enjoys a burger with his father, Michael, outside of Andrews Hall during a welcome BBQ in fall 2010.

What you need to know to talk to your college-age student and why you still matter.

Making friends, staying healthy, drugs, drinking and sex are topics Donald Misch tackles every day as assistant vice chancellor for health and wellness and Wardenburg Health Center director. Misch shares advice with parents on how to assist their children in navigating the sometimes choppy waters of college.

Why do parents still matter to their college-aged students?

It’s developmentally appropriate and healthy that college-aged students should pay more attention to their peers. But that doesn’t mean parents aren’t important.

You’re still no less than number two. Surveys show parents are the number one source for important information for their kids. Second, a new study of college freshmen shows that those who spent more than 30 minutes talking with their parents on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday consumed 20 percent fewer drinks on those days and were 32 percent less likely to engage in heavy drinking.

And with all the things we [administrators] can do to students — put them on probation, give them community service — the worst thing we can do in their eyes is call their parents.

What are the most important things parents can do to help their students while they’re attending college?

As kids get older, you have to treat them differently. Be flexible and adjust your tactics. Know when you need to step in and help and when not to.

Support your son or daughter to be who he or she wants to be and not who others want them to be. Parents should tell their kids not to panic if they don’t find friends early on at college.

Encourage them to take risks, but not inappropriate risks, or risks I call seriously future-foreclosing risks. Failure is a crucial learning experience.

Promote academic and pro-social involvement and engagement that are good for the community and for your child like community service and sports — they’ve been shown to be protective factors against alcohol and drug use.

Talk specifically about alcohol, drugs, sex and sexual assault. Share your expectations and values as a family and re-emphasize long-term goals versus short-term gratification. Not that they shouldn’t have fun, but they should remember what’s important to them and where they want to go.

How can parents know if they’re being too overprotective versus supportive and helpful?

Attend to your child’s responses. If he or she is giving you a “what?” response or refusing to talk to you, your child may be expressing appropriate autonomy.

Check it out with your spouse or friends who have kids in college. Tell your son or daughter you care and you’re just trying to do the right thing. It shows you’re trying to respect their autonomy and growth, but it also reinforces you’re the parent.

What advice do you have for parents who are having trouble letting go of their child?

Get a life. But seriously, I know it sounds bad, but you need to move on with your life. It’s a new phase of life for you, too. Have faith in your child and demonstrate that faith.

If you never have faith in your children’s ability to do things and always micromanage them, then by-golly they won’t be able to handle things and you’ll continue to have to micromanage. Give them room to fail but not fail miserably. You might say to them, “You know, that worked out badly, but it was a very interesting learning experience.”

Anything else you care to add in regards to parental involvement?

One of the last parts of the brain to mature is the prefrontal cortex. What this means is that — please don’t take this the wrong way — the odds are that your 18-year-old isn’t playing with a full deck.

The prefrontal cortex is responsible for thinking, judgment, decision making and impulse control. When they do something that leaves you breathless and you ask them what they were thinking, they may say they weren’t thinking. It turns out they may be literally correct.

Doug McPherson is a Colorado-based freelance writer with two kids who’ll be attending college sooner than he (or his bank account) is ready to admit.

Anakary Valenzuela is one of the thousands of Latino youth who serves as an information leader in her family, promoting civic engagement. Associate professor of journalism Mike McDevitt and Mary Butler (MComm’11) co-authored a study on Latino youth and their civic influence within their families.

At election time, 17-year-old Anakary Valenzuela of Lafayette, Colo., sits with her grandfather — a man in his mid-60s who emigrated from Mexico decades ago — and pores over a mail-in ballot, providing Spanish translation and discussing the candidates and issues.

“It can take a while if I’m not familiar with an item,” Valenzuela says. “When I get stuck, my grandpa tells me, ‘It’s okay, miha,’ ” which is a Spanish term of endearment meaning little girl.

She Googles anything she’s not immediately able to explain, an act that comes naturally to Valenzuela through her propensity for media and information technology.

It also is a role that should have great meaning for political campaigns, according to a University of Colorado Boulder study showing that Latino adolescents serve as “civic information leaders” among immigrant families through their tendency to share knowledge from the classroom, media and information technology.

“If you really want to make a difference in promoting civic engagement among immigrant Latino families, don’t try to reach parents directly,” says Mike McDevitt, the study’s lead author and an associate journalism professor. “Instead, reach out to teens. This can trigger a trickle-up influence to their parents.”

The study recommends figuring out ways to preserve family cohesion, cultural identity and parental leadership while taking advantage of young Latinos’ leadership.

“For decades, political scientists and strategists have often ignored the family in tactics for promoting political participation or have viewed the family as a barrier, as a private domain that must be overcome,” McDevitt says. “The family is not something to overcome. It’s not a deficit; it’s a resource for political engagement.”

Yet most political candidates struggle to see the value of investing in young people who aren’t yet of voting age, according to Steve Fenberg (EnvSt’06), founder of New Era Colorado, a civic engagement organization. It’s a strategy they should rethink, he says.

“When it comes to Latino youth and issues that hit close to home, such as immigration and education, they’re extremely passionate and have some serious opinions,” says Fenberg. “These findings are one more indicator that reaching out to Latino teens is one of the most cost-effective things candidates can do. They may earn the loyalty of future voters who’ll also bring their family members along.”

The study was conducted primarily with Latino participants from the I Have a Dream Foundation of Boulder County who attend Centaurus High School in Lafayette, Colo. Surveys completed by 74 students served as the basis of four focus group discussions involving 53 students and parents. In addition, 12 students completed diaries tracking their media and information technology use over 48 hours.

The student participants, including Valenzuela, were surveyed on their use of media and information technology, measuring their consumption of traditional resources — radio, newspapers, magazines and television — and newer tools — the Internet, MP3 players, cell phones and texting.

They also were surveyed on their political views, activities and willingness to discuss civic issues in school and in family settings. Participants rated their willingness to listen to opponents, initiate discussions and to disagree, among other questions.

“Young Latinos have a steady pulse on news, government and politics, and it doesn’t stop at being in the know,” McDevitt says. “They involve themselves in matters they care about.

They deliberate with parents on how their life choices and career aspirations fit into their cultural identities, and this has a modeling effect among family members.”

This rings true for Valenzuela who has modeled civic participation as she has grown older. At age 12 she participated in a national walkout to support immigrant workers. In more re­­­­­cent years, she’s discussed her views on abortion and gay marriage with her grandfather. In the future, amid a culture that often emphasizes family unity over academics, she plans to be a pediatrician.

“It’s a lot of weight on your shoulders,” she says tearfully. “I feel I have a responsibility because I’m the oldest among my siblings. I’m the one who tells my parents what’s going on, like at school or if there’s news on immigration legislation, a war or a new president.”

She is regularly in touch with the world around her through school, the numerous student groups she follows on Facebook, her cell phone, bilingual news radio and television, online newspapers and music and film from the Internet.

Her level of connectedness sets her apart from the grandfather whom she helps to vote, as well as her immigrant parents, who tune into limited amounts of Spanish-language news in the scant time they have between the four jobs they hold, Valenzuela says.

In the construct of Latino teens as information leaders, however, a pitfall emerges when parental authority is perceived as undermined, according to the study.

“Family communication can be thwarted when Latino youth act as information leaders, changing the usual structure of authority,” McDevitt says. “But the upside is that these provocations can promote reciprocal influence in the family because parents want to keep up with their kids and retain a leadership role, particularly about controversial political issues.”

Meanwhile, young, media-savvy Latinos like Valenzuela are leading the way among their communities by helping immigrant family members assimilate culturally and engage civically.

“I love my grandpa,” Valenzuela says. “When I help him vote, I do it for him and my family. I think it’s really cool because it gives them a voice.”

iStock

For those looking for another reason to get out and exercise, a CU-Boulder study reveals that just a little physical exercise can help protect us from long-term memory loss in old age.

In the study, CU research associate Ruth Barrientos and her colleagues in the psychology and neuroscience department showed aging rats that ran just over half a kilometer each week were protected against infection-induced memory loss.

“Strikingly, this small amount of running was sufficient to confer robust benefits for those that ran over those that did not run,” Barrientos says. “This is an important finding because people of an advanced age are more vulnerable to memory impairments following immune challenges, such as bacterial infections or surgery.”

The news is especially significant because the nation’s baby boomers are aging and the risk of diminished memory function in this population is of great concern, says Barrientos, who emphasizes the importance of developing effective noninvasive therapies.

Past research has shown that exercise in humans protects against dementia and declines in cognitive function associated with aging. Researchers also have shown that dementia is often preceded by bacterial infections, such as pneumonia or other immune challenges.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show that voluntary exercise in rats reduces aging-induced susceptibility to the cognitive impairments that follow a bacterial infection and the processes thought to underlie these impairments,” Barrientos says.

In the study, researchers found rats infected with E. coli bacteria experienced detrimental effects on the hippocampus, an area of the brain that mediates learning and memory.

When the older rats in the study encountered a bacterial infection, the immune cells of the brain, called microglia, released inflammatory molecules called cytokines in an exaggerated and prolonged manner. This supports earlier research that has shown these immune cells become more reactive with age.

“In the current study we found that small amounts of voluntary exercise prevented the priming of microglia, the exaggerated inflammation in the brain and the decrease of growth factors,” Barrientos says.

What’s next? She plans to examine the role stress hormones may play in sensitizing microglia and whether physical exercise slows these hormones in older rats.

Greg Swenson (MJour’98) is editor of student news in CU-Boulder’s Media Relations office. He lives in Denver with his wife and daughter.

Chipotle Mexican Grill

Steve Ells (Art’88) vividly recalls the day in 2000 when his eyes were opened about factory farming.

1993 First Chipotle opens at a former Denver Dolly Madison ice cream shop.

1999 McDonalds invests, allowing company to grow from 16 locations in 1998 to 500 in 2005.

2000 Starts serving naturally raised pork.

2002 Starts serving naturally raised chicken

2006 Goes public on New York Stock Exchange. McDonalds divests.

2007 Stops using cheese or sour cream with rBGH (bovine growth hormone).

2009 Ells testifies before Congress to eliminate use of antibiotics in ranching.

2010 85 percent of Chipotle’s beef and all of its pork and chicken are naturally raised. First London restaurant opens.

He was visiting a hog farm in Thornton, Iowa, with Paul Willis, co-founder of San Francisco-based Niman Ranch, which farms, processes and distributes natural meat from humanely raised animals. Ells saw free-range hogs foraging, grunting and socializing, acting, in other words, like hogs.

“I was thinking this was typical,” says Ells, founder of Chipotle Mexican Grill, the phenomenally successful chain of restaurants that focuses on a la carte burritos and other casual Mexican fare. “Paul told me the scene was rare, that 99 percent of all pork is raised in factory farms.”

After researching factory farms, he discovered hideous exploitation of animals and abuse of the environment.

“I didn’t want my success or Chipotle’s to be based on that,” he says.

So in 2001, eight years after it was founded, Chipotle began serving exclusively Niman Ranch pork, followed by commitments to provide natural and humanely raised beef, chicken and dairy products. The company also has launched efforts to be friendly to the environment and supportive of
farm workers.

His efforts have paid off. Last year the company had a net income of $178 million with 1,100 restaurants and more than 26,000 employees.

But Ells’ commitment to creating simple, tasty food made with fresh ingredients and integrity goes back even further than that first farm visit. Ells, who turns 46 on Sept. 12, says his mother always had gardens and served fresh vegetables and salads in their Boulder home.

Dinner was “an event,” he says. “It was often simple and straightforward, but . . . there was a sense of community.”

In junior high school he pored over cookbooks and cooking articles. By the time he reached Boulder High School, he was practicing his burgeoning cooking and hosting skills on a few lucky friends.

“Those were the first really grown-up meals I had,” recalls Gina Yarusso Skene (Dance’89), who met Ells in junior high. “He actually read Bon Appétit.”

In 1993 Steve Ells (Art’88) founded Chipotle Mexican Grill, which now boasts 1,100 restaurants and more than 26,000 employees. The company aims to be friendly to the environment and supportive of food producers and farm workers. Shown at right is the Chelsea London location.

Ells attended CU-Boulder to study art history. His first apartment on University Hill was a “real dump,” but he was still able to lure friends with food and drink. He says he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do after graduating until his friend, Cindy Gueswel ( Engl’88, MEdu’93), suggested he attend the famous Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.

“I went because it was something to do besides going to graduate school or starting a real job,” Ells says, laughing. “But really, I was pursuing my passion for learning more about food and wine and restaurants.”

His apprenticeship under culinary superstar Jeremiah Tower at Star’s restaurant in San Francisco cemented his commitment to simple, fresh food. Tower, the original chef at the famous Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., was one of the pioneers of French-influenced California cuisine and an early promoter of sustainable, locally grown ingredients.

After studying under Tower, Ells returned to Boulder eager to start his own French-style restaurant. Lacking the funds, he remembered the California taquerías where he’d eaten burritos with everything on the inside — the ultimate fast food — and sketched out plans for Chipotle, the humble Mexican-style restaurant that was going to pay for the fancy French restaurant.

Chipotle, which is Mexican Spanish for smoked, dried jalapeño chili pepper, opened with little fanfare in Denver in 1993. But the concept took off, and within three years Ells had opened five more Denver locations. In 1999 the first Chipotle restaurants opened outside Colorado in Minneapolis and Columbus, Ohio. The “everything on the inside” model, with an emphasis on grilled meats and a choice of salsas, made Chipotle not just popular but a forerunner of copycat chains.

But Ells says the company’s ethical stance sets it apart from those that
came later. In addition to working to serve natural meat from humanely
raised animals, Chipotle led the industry in 2004 by using zero-trans-fats frying oil. It also works to preserve the environment.

For example, since 2010 Chipotle has set a goal of using at least 50 percent locally grown products in season and is exploring buying beans that are grown with “no till” anti-erosion methods.

More recently the company has added fair treatment of farm workers to its menu. It helped negotiate a penny-per-pound pay increase for tomato harvesters in Immokalee, Fla.

Despite all those efforts, almost unheard of for a fast-food restaurant chain, Chipotle has received some criticism for its refusal to sign a “Campaign for Fair Foods” agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization of Latino, Mayan Indian and Haitian workers in Florida. A small group of CU students protested Ells’ commencement speech in Boulder last spring over the issue.

Ells says it’s not a fair critique.

“Chipotle has always supported the CIW,” he says. “But the CIW wants us to sign a contract that would let them control Chipotle’s decisions regarding food in the future. It would be like you giving to a charity, and then the charity protesting you for not signing a contract forcing you to do what the charity tells you to do in the future.

“The bottom line is that Chipotle . . . does the right thing because that is the kind of company we are.”

Ells credits CU for giving him the ability to “look at the world in a broader way,” which has underpinned his entire career. And at a time when college is increasingly seen as mere vocational preparation for a high-paying job in finance or technology, Ells stoutly defends the importance of the liberal arts education.

“It’s really a luxury to be able to spend four years at an institution like CU where you can sort of be indulgent, go to lectures, read and study and think,” he says. “That’s really something. People in school should savor those years.”

Clay Evans is a freelance writer for the Coloradan.

Jon Embree (Comm’88) was named head football coach on Dec. 6, 2010. Embree, 45, signed a five-year contract through the 2015 season.

When he received the offer in December to become the University of Colorado Boulder’s 24th head football coach, Jon Embree (Comm’88) was prepared. Oh, was he ever prepared.

Embree, whose CU roots run deep as a former standout player and three-term assistant coach, spent some spare time during his most recent NFL off-season plotting, formulating and researching the Xs and Os of becoming a head coach. His first choice, of course, was to be hired by the Buffaloes.

“It’s the only job I’ve ever wanted,” he said at the time.

His master plan was all-encompassing.

Embree compiled a ready list of preferred assistants, projecting the staff he would assemble when given the chance. He knew how he would conduct practices and what he wanted on game day. He reviewed the head coaches he had worked under — most recently the Redskins’ Mike Shanahan as well as ex-CU coaches Bill McCartney, Rick Neuheisel and Gary Barnett — and envisioned blending their best into a leadership style of his own.

Good pupils recognize whom they should emulate, but Embree also targeted the importance of autonomy. He is, after all, the starting and stopping points for accountability within a win-starved Buffs program — a massive responsibility for a first-time head coach.

But Embree, 45, is eager to assume it.

“The only question to me is, ‘Are you the right guy at the right time?’ I believe I am,” he says. “Yeah, I’ll make some mistakes. There’ll be calls on the sidelines, timeouts that some people will dispute, that kind of stuff . . . I’m not worried about that. I can lead, motivate, recruit and evaluate talent. That’s what makes you a successful head coach.”

McCartney, who recruited Embree to CU out of Cherry Creek High School in 1983, is fond of recounting Embree’s willingness to accept a new but not necessarily starring role in a revamped offense. A highly recruited tight end, Embree made an immediate impact in his first two CU seasons, setting school records for receptions (51) and receiving yards (680) as a sophomore.

But prior to Embree’s junior year, McCartney saw the wishbone formation as CU’s best route to success. It was the right move at the right time for Buff football, he thought, but if a tight end wanted to flourish as a receiver the run-oriented wishbone wasn’t the right vehicle.

Good hands and running good routes — both Embree trademarks — gave way to good blocking fundamentals. Embree was good with that, too. It was the way of the wishbone, and McCartney was deeply appreciative.

“I knew what he was sacrificing, as did Jon,” McCartney recalls. “But he never complained; he knew what we needed as a team and he went out and did his job, humbly and efficiently.”

Embree shrugs off that personal sacrifice of two-and-a-half decades ago, but it clearly impacted him and what he will expect from his CU players. He believes many of the ills that recently have surfaced in college football stem from a sense of entitlement among some high-profile student-athletes.

As Embree’s rosters take shape, count on them being stocked with talented players but also with players who put team above self.

A stalwart tight end for the Buffaloes in the mid-1980s, Jon Embree (Comm’86) returned to his alma mater from the National Football League’s Washington Redskins. He was in the process of completing his first season as tight ends coach under former Denver Broncos coach Mike Shanahan.

It was among the things Embree learned under McCartney and others, and he believes it will be paramount to an eventual turnaround as the Buffs compete in the Pac-12 Conference. Embree’s mantra as that historic shift looms: “Raise the standard . . . all of us are going into the Pac-12, not just the football team. When we get there, we’re all going to be sending the same message. I want us to be the flagship university for the Pac-12.”

Embree isn’t entering foreign territory. He has coached and recruited in the Pac-10, spending three seasons (2003-05) at UCLA. Enough is on the agenda to make 2011 a special year for him, but the next-to-last regular season game will be memorable within the entire Embree family.

On Nov. 19, CU plays UCLA, coached by Embree’s ex-boss, Neuheisel. Embree’s oldest son, Taylor, is among the Bruins’ top returning receivers entering his final season of eligibility.

Youngest son Connor is a walk-on redshirt freshman receiver at Kansas, and their father jokes (or maybe not) that his two sons “knew the CU fight song before they knew The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The school is that special to Embree, as are its former athletes. In 2005 he collaborated with a pair of ex-football players to found Buffs4Life, a nonprofit organization designed to reach out to former CU student-athletes in their times of need. The organization conducts one annual fundraiser and hopes to maintain the family-style commitment that Buffs before and after Embree have experienced.

For instance,  Buffs4Life helped out with the Buffs’ all-time leading tackler Barry Remington’s (Mktg’87) medical bills for his 18-year-old daughter’s heart transplant last year. Samantha Remington received her lifesaving heart from a family who had lost their son.

“I think if you have gone through one of those kinds of things, you enjoy the simple things in life,” a grateful Remington told the Boulder Camera. “It gives you a reality check about how to look at things.”

Remington works at KOA News Radio 85 and lives with his family in Superior, Colo., near Boulder.

Embree is CU’s first African-American head football coach and will be only the fourth in Pac-10 football history. He will be the Pac-12’s only minority head football coach in the expanded league’s debut season this fall.

“From that aspect,” Embree says, “this opportunity means a lot to me. But it also means that there’s a responsibility for me to succeed. My success could create more opportunities for African-American coaches . . . But I think my career speaks for itself. Players — whether they’re white, black, Hispanic, whatever — will tell you what kind of coach I am.”

Embree recognizes opportunities and takes none of them lightly. CU fans can be assured that nothing has been done overnight as he prepares for his biggest opportunity yet.

B.G. Brooks was a long-time Rocky Mountain News staff writer who was hired as contributing editor for CUBuffs.com in 2009.

Founded by Jennie Dorris (MMus’05), Telling Stories is a concert series that draws on a cast of 100 classically trained freelance musicians and writers who want to make chamber music and literature “a little more fun and a lot less stuffy.”

The hiss of coffee steamers, clinking cutlery and murmur of conversation are an unlikely backdrop for a concert of Mozart, Dvořák and Takemitsu. But for Jennie Dorris (MMus’05), a coffee shop is the perfect place to perform live classical chamber music.

Dorris and her Telling Stories troupe perform chamber music and read original essays at casual Colorado venues, including cafés and art galleries. They’ve even performed amid kegs of beer in a brewery warehouse.

Founded by Dorris in 2006, Telling Stories is a concert series that draws on a cast of 100 classically trained freelance musicians and writers who want to make chamber music and literature “a little more fun and a lot less stuffy.” It has its own radio show on Colorado Public Radio.

Her goal is to attract a younger audience to classical music, and what better way to do that than by performing where the show can be enjoyed over coffee or a brew?

“I want to make classical music more approachable,” Dorris says. “Most 20-somethings are not invested in classical music and have zero patron knowledge. That meant plopping music down in the middle of their lives.”

And in the process, Dorris, 31, is carving out an unconventional niche by combining her two passions — writing and music — into one creative career.

“Classical music has such complexity and passionate intensity,” she says. “I can hear a sad pop song and enjoy it, but when I listen to a Chopin prelude, I can feel the sorrow.”

Dorris plays percussion instruments, including drums, vibraphone, glockenspiel and a six-foot-long, five-octave marimba. She graduated from CU-Boulder with a master’s degree in percussion performance during a tight economic climate in which young musicians were jockeying for scarce positions in traditional orchestras. Rather than get a job while waiting for a position to open, Dorris decided to take music to the people.

Telling Stories’ inaugural hour-long concert was at the Laughing Goat Coffeehouse on Pearl Street in Boulder. The theme was Getting Ahead of Ourselves, a tongue-in-cheek nod to her concern she was launching Telling Stories prematurely.

“The idea of that first concert was to push the concept down the mountain and see if it would roll,” she says. “It’s hard when you’re making your own career path because you don’t even know what the milestones look like.”

Her concerts typically consist of three to five musicians playing classical chamber music or a commissioned new chamber piece interspersed with two to four writers reading short original essays based on a theme. Topics have included Rush Hour, Expecting and Guilty Pleasures. Although these novel concerts are performed outside the traditional symphony or recital hall, the classical repertoire is never compromised.

“We don’t ever dumb down our music,” Dorris says. “We play hard and sometimes avant-garde repertoire and people come along with us because they’re comfortable. They’re not trapped in their seats scared they’ll cough. They love to stay after concerts and talk with the performers. We’re attracting people who are new to classical music.”

Music and writing have been part of her life since Dorris was growing up in Oklahoma.

“If you saw me in high school, you’d see a younger version of me doing what I do now,” she says. “I was running the school newspaper and playing in the band.”

She double-majored in music and magazine writing at Drake University. After graduating Dorris wanted more training and mentorship for her music, which led her to the College of Music at CU-Boulder. With writing, however, she just wanted more work. She has written for publications as diverse as Field & Stream and Entrepreneur and wrote a blog for 5280 Magazine about living an affordable sustainable life.

Since it launched, Telling Stories has transformed into a burgeoning business. In 2010 Dorris received a MasterMind Award from Denver’s Westword magazine for being a cultural visionary, and she has been featured in Symphony Magazine.

Dorris stays busy with music, writing and extending her interdisciplinary reach. She teaches journalism at Community College of Denver and music at Red Rocks Community College in Lakewood, Colo. She is a sabbatical replacement instructor at the CU College of Music and plays with the Colorado Ballet and Colorado Springs Philharmonic.

In addition, she created a program at the Denver School of the Arts in which she works with high school students to produce 10-minute performance pieces showcasing the kids’ music, art and writing.

Jeffrey Nytch, director of CU’s Entrepreneurship Center for Music, emphasizes the untapped opportunities for the entrepreneurial musician.

“The most effective entrepreneurs are those who create opportunities that didn’t exist before,” Nytch says. “Musicians who succeed at this connect with the audience because they have something authentic to communicate while staying true to their art.”

Dorris has learned that finding her niche means developing a career that is a satisfying amalgam of two arts.

“I love interdisciplinary work because I’m wearing all my hats,” she says. “I’m not just a writer or a musician. I’m the type of person who can see how many different things can work together.”

Kenna Bruner, a writer and editor with the CU-Boulder office of university communications, interviews and writes about CU’s many interesting and inspiring faculty, students and alumni.