Xiaomei Chen (MAnth’06) captures a slice of Americana as Bill Smith, left, and Ryan Hysell watch the Albany Independent Fair’s derby on Friday, Sept. 7, 2007. She says a demolition derby usually consists of five or more drivers competing by deliberately ramming their vehicles into one another. The last driver whose vehicle is still operational wins. Both observers said it was the best derby in Athens County, Ohio.

Photos by Steve Bouey and Steve Shoppman.

“The Steves” are invited to a wedding in the countryside of Mongolia outside of Ulan Bator, the capital, and this “biker gang,” as they call it, is also in attendance.

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.

So just imagine what the sponsors thought when they received photos of the pair sitting cheerily with Congolese rebels in central Africa — territory on the U.S. State Department’s “do not travel” list.

“We camped with them and we sent Toyota these photos of guys sitting next to us with AK-47s,” says Bouey, 32, with a chuckle. “I guess they were probably surprised.”

But then, “the Steves” themselves were constantly, pleasantly surprised on their epic two-year, 147-day journey that took them 77,000 miles across six of the world’s seven continents. The journey began in New Zealand after two Toyota trucks had been shipped by boat from California. It included treks across the vast, empty outback of Australia, plunges into the jungles of Laos and Cambodia, as well as China, Eastern Europe, Norway, where they reached the Arctic Circle, descended into Africa and then motored north from South to North America. And since their trusty Toyotas could not swim, the adventure included three boat trips — from New Zealand to Australia, Australia to Indonesia and South Africa to Argentina.

Not long after embarking in 2007, they realized the trip to 67 countries was more than just the adventure they had initially conceived.

“The trip started out as something completely selfish, just to satisfy my curiosity about the world,” says Bouey, who worked in the Denver state auditor’s office for six years before taking the trip.

“The only thing most people know about the rest of the world is what they see in the news, and it always seems to be the worst thing ever,” says Shoppman, 31, a Denver-based graphic designer. “But 99.99 percent of the people in the world are pretty good human beings.”

Take, for instance, the nomads they met while roaming the high steppes of Mongolia. Traveling outside the country’s main city, Ulan Bator, they discovered people living a life “not much changed from the days of Genghis Khan,” Bouey says.

Arriving in a 2007 Toyota Tundra and a 2004 Sequoia — worth more money than the nomads make in two or three generations, Bouey says — and hobbled by an insurmountable language barrier, the Steves were welcomed as fellow travelers.

“There is an unwritten nomadic code that you take care of people because you might need help yourself some day,” Shoppman says. “They invited us to stay inside and fed us. We couldn’t communicate very well, but with handshakes and smiles we made do.”

“I don’t know if you were backpacking in the U.S. how many people would willfully open their door to a complete stranger, invite them to eat with the family and pitch a tent in their backyard,” Bouey says.

After they explain the concept of “tourist,” “the Steves” get along well with these central African rebels toting AK-47s. They are in a part of the Republic of the Congo that is on the U.S. State Department’s “do not travel” list.

Even Congolese rebels welcomed the pair — once they explained the concept of “tourist” in halting French, a task that took 20 minutes.

Hospitality was the rule almost everywhere they went, although the Steves agree that people who live in the countryside are friendlier than those in the cities. After giving a group of Buddhist monks in Thailand a lift, Bouey and Shoppman were invited to stay in their temple.

Along the way the two received the help of some 30 crew volunteers from many nations, typically six at a time, who learned of the trip from Craigslist and YouTube. Bios for 22 crew members — including a monkey doll named Swinger that was photographed at exotic locales around the globe — can be found at www.theworldbyroad.com. Crew and volunteers helped drive, set up camp and essentially became part of the journey for a few days, weeks or months at a time.

“People submitted information to sign up,” Bouey says. “Ultimately the people we picked were the people we felt we could get along with.”

When asked, both Bouey and Shoppmann say they would be willing to visit any place on their itinerary again. But when pressed, they grudgingly acknowledge two countries that left them a little cold. The former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan was an unfriendly, crime-ridden society where “you either have millions in the bank or you don’t know what a bank account is,” Shoppman says. Someone smashed a truck window and stole their cameras and other equipment. They also didn’t appreciate being “shaken down” for money every 30 or 40 miles while traversing Honduras.

But most of the people and cultures were so welcoming that the Steves say they wish more Americans experienced the world as something other than “us vs. them.” They note that just 20 percent of Americans have a passport and only a puny 5 percent have crossed an international border.

Steve Shoppman (Fin’00), left, and Steve Bouey (PolSci’99, MPubAd’01) navigate a minefield in the western Sahara Desert during their trip around the world.

“The world is completely different from what average people think,” Bouey says. “Most people get a skewed media view.”

The pair returned home with a deeper appreciation for the opportunities afforded them, shadowed by concerns that Americans don’t always appreciate what they have, and not just materially.

For example, they visited a Swedish aid project where Laotians were learning how to be journalists. Journalism, as historically practiced in the communist Southeast Asian nation, was a sham — government-written propaganda read word-for-word over the radio and published in newspapers, say the Steves.

“These people were so excited to learn,” Shoppman says. “They wanted to build their country, make it a great place.”

But Americans, he says, are moving in the other direction, listening only to views with which they agree instead of questioning.

“We have had a free press for hundreds of years,” he notes. “We have this freedom of speech — take advantage of it.”

They realized their privilege of even pondering such an adventure in a world where billions live on the equivalent of $2 a day. Driving 4x4s around the globe might seem extravagant, and indeed, some criticized them for burning fuel and adding carbon to the atmosphere.

But one of their sponsors provided “carbon offsets,” they say, and in the end, their net resource use was less than what it would have been staying home.

“We were driving the trucks, but we were living in tents, sharing resources and food,” Shoppman says. “Per person, we were emitting half as much carbon a year as the average person [in the U.S.].”

Shoppman and Bouey say the trip has changed them forever. Although returning broke in the middle of the worst economy in 70 years forced them to take “regular” jobs, they hope to use the expedition as a launching pad to educate more Americans about the world. Each is writing a book about the experience and they are working on a joint video and speaking to schools, service clubs and elsewhere. They hope that The World by Road will become a true vocation — they want to take people on trips to unexpected places.

“We can help change the perception that the world is a horrid place,” Shoppman says, “or that we need to be sending troops everywhere.”

Travel is often thought of in the U.S. as “escape, screwing around, avoiding reality,” Bouey says. But both men say there is a growing hunger for engaging with the world on a deeper and more genuine level. Bouey often refers to “walkabout,” the ancient Australian aborigine rite of passage in which young men leave home to live in the wild, returning with new knowledge to help the community.

Monks impart an elaborate blessing to the travelers’ Toyota Tundra in Thailand.

After their own “driveabout,” the two men seem almost at a loss for words when asked about the wisdom they bring back. The lessons are too broad, too deep to be easily summed up but include: don’t be afraid of what you don’t know, people really are the same everywhere and appreciate what you’ve got, whether it’s clean water or a free press because billions of people in the world don’t have it.

“The U.S. is great — don’t get me wrong,” Bouey says. “It gave us the means and resources to take a trip like this. But people here take for granted a lot of the opportunities they have. If Americans visited other countries where the opportunities are few and far between, they might think differently.”

Clay Evans grew up in Boulder. He has worked as a journalist for almost a quarter of a century and hopes to continue.

Deborah Fowlkes is the first female to lead the CU-Boulder Alumni Association since the organization’s founding in 1882.

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.

Thirty-six years later, Fowlkes, 53, is executive director of the CU-Boulder Alumni Association. She came on board in late July from Temple University, replacing Ron Stump who retired after two and a half years as executive director and 12 years in student affairs, mostly as vice chancellor.

“Deborah is a manager, leader and motivator who will provide benchmarks and strategic planning,” says Julie Wong, vice chancellor for student affairs since July 2008. “Her breadth of experience in working with different partners serves us well. We are very, very pleased.”

For the past three decades Fowlkes worked at Duke University and Temple, but she regularly returned to Boulder to visit her father, run the Bolder Boulder and cross country ski with her dad and two sisters — Wendy Weiss (Ital’78) and Ellie Weiss Krajewski. Many of her Boulder memories are shaped by the university. She still has six-foot Amazon spears, a giraffe-skin drum and other souvenirs she bought at various Conference on World Affairs events.

As a Boulder High School student, she rock climbed, skied, jogged and hiked with her father. Her first job was at the Orange Julius on the Hill. It was a time when transients were all over the Hill, carrying sun-burnt babies, trailing bedraggled dogs and sometimes proposing to the 15-year-old Fowlkes.

Her father, 91, raced in the first Bolder Boulder and was a charter member of the Boulder Road Runners. He’s “delighted and thrilled” that Fowlkes has returned home after leaving in 1974 for Duke University where she majored in comparative literature and French literature and later earned a master’s degree in liberal studies.

Fowlkes met her husband, Stephen Fowlkes, on Valentine’s Day during her freshman year at Duke. A child and adolescent psychologist, Stephen has been in the clinical field most of his career, working with juvenile delinquents. He taught at the Community College of Philadelphia for five years. The couple has two sons: Gabriel Fowlkes who works in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles and Daniel Fowlkes who is in the computer field in Virginia where he lives with his wife and five children. The new alumni executive director and her husband also have a puppy, Manfred, a 75-pound (and growing) Old English sheepdog that is eight months old.

Fowlkes’ work in alumni relations began with a volunteer stint. Living in a small town three hours from Duke, she discovered none of the local kids were applying to Duke, so she called the admissions office to volunteer to recruit students. She received admissions materials, attended leadership training sessions and volunteered at college fairs. She was motivated by the strong sense of community she felt where everyone seemed drawn together by love for and pride in their school. Her desire to give back was the starting point, as it turned out, of her career.

When the couple moved back to Durham, Fowlkes was hired by Duke undergraduate admissions to read and evaluate applications and conduct information sessions.

Fowlkes then took on the Alumni Admissions Program, working with about 3,000 alumni volunteers who interview prospective students. Two years later she became the founding director for alumni continuing education. Realizing more intellectual substance could and should be offered to former students, she worked with faculty to create programs that provided lifelong learning. She later took over the alumni travel program.

A call from a search firm about an opening at Temple University in Philadelphia brought a “no thank you” from Fowlkes. But three months later they called again, telling her the university was ready to revamp its alumni program. She recognized the challenge and chance to build a program and this time she said yes.

Deborah Fowlkes, executive director of the Alumni Association, grew up near the Boulder campus as the daughter of applied math professor Irving Weiss.

“After 19 years I was ready for a new challenge,” she says.

Fowlkes likes creating and building and says she had done as much as she could at Duke. She served as assistant vice president of alumni relations and executive director of the Temple University Alumni Association for
five years.

She sees her greatest accomplishments there as revamping the board of directors from 120 people to 50, establishing term limits and starting shared interest/affinity groups and reunions as well as alumni clubs around the country.

David Unruh, Temple’s senior vice president for institutional advancement, says he’s “incredibly grateful” to have worked with Fowlkes.

“Her approach and personality strike a balance, encouraging a conversation and building consensus to achieve priorities,” he says. “She has transformed our alumni relations program in every way from staffing to event quality to engaging alumni.”

Propelled by a desire to give back to the community, Fowlkes and her husband sought unique volunteer opportunities in Philadelphia. Asking themselves how they could make homeless people feel important, they served food at the Grace Street Café. Through Hosts for Hospitals, they opened their home to patients and families needing a place to stay when they came to the city for treatment. One man stayed with them five weeks to be with his wife who had been hit by a car.

Fowlkes also served on the boards of two inner-city Christian schools that provided high-quality education to youth aspiring to attend college. She adds, “Faith is central to my life and who I am.”

An opera fan who is particularly fond of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Fowlkes also enjoys reading and took up motorcycle riding with her husband after their sons went to college. She thinks the activity must appeal to the part of her that likes adventure and relishes mastering a new skill. However, she reports she’s “very cautious, which is almost an oxymoron, watching everyone, every second.”

Fowlkes welcomes their return to Colorado’s healthy outdoor lifestyle, although she says she will miss Philly’s “wealth of culture,” the diversity of the urban environment and ease of subway transportation. Having given up their cars four years ago, Fowlkes and her husband enjoyed walking, taking buses, and for Fowlkes, hopping on the subway for a three-minute ride to work.

To her new position Fowlkes brings the perspective of an alumni relations professional who has been closely associated with CU, understands the university and feels strong ties to it. She’s the first woman to lead the CU-Boulder Alumni Association since its inception in 1882.

“I bring an outsider’s perspective and an insider’s love,” she says. “I’m so excited to be back at the school I grew up in and around that meant so much to me.”

Nancy Rasmussen (A&S’68), who left Boulder for Philly six years ago, is sad to see Fowlkes leave. Boulder transplants are few and far between, she says. As associate director of alumni relations at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Rasmussen has found just one law alumnus whose undergrad degree was from CU, and they talked about the Buffs most of an alumni networking night.

Jeremy Bloom (A&S ex’06), left, and 72-year-old Lucy Gallegos, right, prepare to depart from the Boulder Municipal Airport to do tandem sky diving, a wish of Lucy’s that was made possible through Bloom’s Wish of a Lifetime Foundation. Wish of a Life Foundation

Standing at the edge of an open plane door at 10,000 feet, ready to jump, Jeremy Bloom (A&S ex’06) could see everything clearly.

The Flatirons. Boulder, the town where he became a national sports figure. And the wide-open eyes of 72-year-old Lucy Gallegos, who hovered a few feet away, a parachute strapped to her back.

It’s one thing for a marquee athlete to fling himself out of a plane — it’s quite another to do it with a grandmother of six. Yet there was Bloom, the former CU football star, NFL player and Olympic freestyle skier, caught up in a typically electric moment.

“Any fear I might have had faded when I saw her,’’ Bloom says. “She said, ‘I’m ready, I’m ready.’ I mean, this was her dream.’’

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.

Bloom put up $25,000 of his own money and initiated the paperwork during his final season with the Pittsburgh Steelers, but his passion for the project had been years in the making.

“I started thinking about it when I was 15,” says Bloom who works as a broadcaster for ESPN covering college football and skiing/winter sports events. “We spent a lot of time in Asia for the World Cup, and I was impressed by the way they treated seniors in that culture — the respect, the sense of honor for them.”

“I knew one day if I was ever privileged enough to be able to start my own foundation, I’d want to do something for seniors,” he says. “My grandmother has been a huge inspiration all my life. I mean, she took me to and picked me up from karate for 12 years. She lived with us. My grandfather lived in the mountains and would drive down and pick us up to take us skiing every weekend. My grandparents were always in my life.’’

As soon as Bloom unveiled his unusual organization, requests started coming in, ranging from the prosaic to the extreme.

“We’ve had a lot of requests from out of state that we had to turn down,” says Char Bloom, Jeremy’s mother and the foundation’s coordinator. “The goal is to go national eventually.’’

A cancer patient requested a reclining chair to help her sleep, which the foundation purchased and delivered to her. Two Russian immigrants who’d lost everything during the collapse of the Soviet Union dreamed of going on a fishing trip. Wish of a Lifetime arranged for them to spend a day on a private lake in the Rockies.

Driving a souped-up car at Bandimere Speedway was the lifetime wish of a Denver-area resident, which he did last August.

But Gallegos’ request to sky dive upped the ante a bit.

“We almost fell out of our chairs,’’ Bloom says.

Gallegos has spent her life imagining jumping from a plane.

“I’ve wanted to sky dive since I was 8 after I saw it in a movie,” Gallegos says. “I want to inspire other seniors to get off the couch and do something. We’re still alive.’’

Bloom understood Gallegos’ drive.

As a world-class freestyle skier, he won 11 World Cup events, two overall World Cup titles, finished ninth in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and sixth in the 2006 Turin Olympics. As a punt returner and wide receiver at CU, Bloom scored five touchdowns of at least 75 yards, including two the first two times he touched the ball.

In one remarkable three-week stretch Bloom scored against Oklahoma on an 80-yard punt return in the Big 12 championship game, took final exams, traveled to Finland for a World Cup event, then played for the Buffaloes in the Alamo Bowl.

Bloom also generated headlines for an unsuccessful court battle with the NCAA to allow him to play college football and ski on the World Cup circuit.

Abandoning his comeback attempt for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics in November, he immersed himself in the dreams of seniors such as Gallegos, who endured cancer, hip-replacement surgery and a gallbladder operation in 2009 — yet still insisted on jumping out of a plane on a breezy August afternoon.

Gallegos was hardly alone on her big day. Gathered at the Boulder Reservoir were her children, grandchildren and other family members, some of whom appeared markedly scared.  But it was a smooth ride. At first Gallegos was little more than a speck in the bright blue sky, but as the plane grew smaller above her and the ground stretched out below her, the chute deployed and she drifted in for a soft landing.

“It was so beautiful up there,’’ she says, brushing away a tear.

As they boarded a bus to return to the reservoir, Bloom and Gallegos were like a pair of veteran teammates, reliving the big game.

“How come your landing was so much better?’’ Bloom asks.

Without a pause, Gallegos responded, “I got my dream.’’

Clay Latimer (Jour ex’76) is a Denver-based freelance writer who wrote for the Rocky Mountain News for 27 years.

The 1969 Coloradan yearbook captures the crowd that gathered and later rioted on March 3, 1969, when conservative San Francisco State College president S.I. Hayakawa spoke on campus and made racist remarks.

When JoKatherine Holliman Page (A&S’60) began her freshman year at CU-Boulder in 1956, the country was still reeling from the murder of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Mississippi boy whose brutal beating (reportedly for whistling at a white woman) served as a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

In Montgomery, Ala., the bus boycott was in full force. In Little Rock, Ark., nine black students were suing for the right to attend a traditionally white school. And at universities across the South, students would soon be staging sit-ins at lunch counters, organizing freedom rides on public buses and marching in protests against Jim Crow segregation.

But on the notoriously liberal, mostly white CU campus that began its fight against discrimination in the 1890s, racism — and the movement to defeat it — took a more subtle form.

“The sentiments and gestures on the surface were very kind, but on the deeper level, it was clear we were not accepted,” recalls Holliman Page, 71, one of 35 blacks out of nearly 11,000 students on campus in 1959.

More than 50 years later, Holliman Page and other black alumni look back on the civil rights era at CU with mixed feelings, thankful for the friends made, opportunities offered and strength gained. They recall with pride the progress made by CU. But in light of reports showing that minority enrollment has stalled since 2006 (16 percent minorities of whom 2 percent were black on the Boulder campus in fall 2009), they vow to stick around to assure that things keep improving.

“Things have changed but not enough,” says W. Harold “Sonny” Flowers (Engl’67, Law’71), 64, a Boulder attorney and former member of the Black Panther Party whose mother, educator Ruth Cave Flowers (A&S’24), was the second black female to graduate from CU. He has remained active with the university. “We were all just part of a continuum. It’s not done.”

Leaders in desegregation

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.

“If you look at the records of the university, its leaders have always been interested in equality on campus and put their reputations on the line over and over to support it,” Hays says.

CU-Boulder enrolled one of its earliest black students, Franklin Laveale Anderson (A&S’ ex’1899), in 1897 and had accepted 486 blacks by 1939, a time when many universities were still segregated.

During the 1920s, at the apex of Ku Klux Klan activity in Colorado, President George Norlin resisted calls for a purging of Catholic and Jewish faculty and was a member of the multirace campus group, the Cosmopolitan Club, which still exists today. During the 1930s, faculty and students worked together to end Jim Crow policies on the Hill.

In 1947, the Associated Students of the University of Colorado, with the support of the regents, passed a resolution calling for all fraternities and sororities to remove discrimination clauses from their charters within five years. When Alpha Chi Sigma failed to do so, it had its charter revoked. The student body also elected Anthony Ray (Mus’48) as canebearer in 1948, a prestigious honor that began in 1900 and recognized the most outstanding male student on campus by peer vote.

CU football coach Dal Ward began recruiting black players in 1955, signing a tight end named Frank Clarke ( A&S ex’57) from Beloit, Wis., and offensive guard John Wooten (PE’59) from Carlsbad, N.M., at a time when many Southern colleges still banned blacks from playing. When Colorado was matched against the Clemson Tigers in the Orange Bowl in Miami in 1957, Clemson officials said they wouldn’t play Colorado if Wooten and Clarke were on the team.

John Wooten (PE’59), pictured second from right, was one of two black players on the 1957 football team that won the Orange Bowl against Clemson, which was reluctant to compete against black players. Frank Clarke (A&S ex’57), not pictured, was the other black player.

“Clemson was totally opposed to playing against black players, but our whole team stood together, including the coaches, and said we will go as a team,” recalled Wooten in an interview with Buffalo Sports News magazine. “I have such great feelings for the stand my white teammates took.”

Clemson played the game and was defeated by CU 27-21.

Two years later, when Holliman Page arrived on campus, CU reached another milestone, hiring its first black faculty member, English professor Charles Nilon.

“It was really a big deal for me,” Holliman Page recalls. “I’d never had a black teacher. The fact that he looked like me and he had such an outstanding intellect was really inspiring.”

By the time Milt Branch (Psych ex’66) arrived on a basketball scholarship in the fall of ’62, “CU was considered the most progressive campus in the Big 8 as far as race relations,” he says.

An undercurrent of racism

But despite its glowing image, the university community was not immune to racism. When Holliman Page went to look for an apartment off-campus, one potential landlady listed in the university housing database politely explained, “I would love to rent this apartment to you, but your people leave a ring in the bathtub that never comes out.”

Holliman Page never forgot it.

While sororities were ostensibly open to black members, that seldom played out when rush week rolled around.

“We knew before we went we would never be asked to join a white sorority,” recalls Holliman Page, who joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, a black sorority in Denver.

Against many odds, Mary Mothershed (Soc’64) was crowned Homecoming queen and named best-dressed female in 1962.

Even so, in 1962 Mary Mothershed (Soc’64), who was black, was crowned Homecoming queen and named best-dressed female. She also served as resident adviser and freshman camp counselor.

Branch recalls the occasional racist remark by a faculty member or coach but says that what people didn’t say stung the most.

“People weren’t hostile,” he says. “They didn’t call you names or keep you from going certain places. But you felt so excluded. You were never invited, so you had to create your own institutions.”

While the degree of activism on campus paled in comparison to that on some campuses, black CU students undoubtedly made their voices heard.

Holliman Page helped form a local chapter of the ACLU and in 1960 joined dozens in picketing the local Woolworth in solidarity with Southern students who had been arrested at sit-ins.

In 1968, after years of black players quietly complaining about racist treatment at the hands of CU football coaches, fullback Wilmer Cooks (Mktg’69) brought his grievances to the administration, alleging among other things that coaches prohibited black players from dating white women. The players gathered for protest marches and refused to play until their complaints were addressed.

CU President Joseph Smiley responded by forming a faculty-student committee, which ultimately concluded discrimination existed and made nine recommendations for the athletic department. These included creating an integrated staff and making it clear that interracial dating was accepted. One year later, Bill Harris (Edu ex’64) was named special assistant coach, becoming the first black to hold a formal coaching position on the university’s football team.

One year later, when conservative San Francisco State College president S.I. Hayakawa visited Macky for a lecture and stated blacks “had a primitive sense of manhood,” he was greeted by hundreds of jeering students, Black Panther members and other civil rights groups in what escalated into a riot.

“There were marches and rallies and speeches. But some of us were more radical,” recalls Flowers, who still wears a tattoo of a black panther on his leg. “We were not willing to sit down and be dragged away.”

A pivotal moment came in spring 1968 when Flowers accompanied Boulder’s black mayor-to-be Penfield Tate II (Law’68) and a group of student activists to a meeting with President Smiley. They requested more emphasis and funding on recruiting black students.

CU’s first black professor Charles Nilon was hired to teach English in 1961 and received the Alumni Association’s Robert L. Stearns Award recognizing extraordinary achievement in 1986.

As Flowers tells it, he quietly set his gun on the table as the group laid out their requests.

“I think there was a concern on the part of the administration that things were escalating, and sooner or later, if something wasn’t done, there would have been a fire or a bomb on campus,” Flowers recalls.

That spring Smiley announced $180,000 would be dedicated to launch an education opportunity program to better prepare students of color for college life. Soon the number of blacks at CU began to rise.

Visualizing the future

Fast forward to 2010 and Branch, Flowers, Harris and Holliman Page have gravitated back to the university in one form or another.

After decades in the airline industry, Branch returned to Boulder and served as president of the Black Alumni Association and as an Alumni Association board member, working to bring alumni together and developing programs to make incoming students feel more comfortable.

Flowers continues to press the university to do more to boost minority enrollment and recruit black faculty. Black enrollment was 488 out of 30,196 students in 2009. Harris served as athletics’ Alumni C Club director for nine years before retiring last year.

And Holliman Page, an accomplished social worker, academic and activist, has finally made peace with a university with which she has long had a “love-hate relationship.”

“Because of my experiences at CU I became acutely aware of my ethnicity and have carried it proudly ever since,” she says.

On May 6, at the Koenig Alumni Center, she stood before a crowd of roughly 100 graduating students at the annual Black Alumni Association graduation ceremony to deliver a commencement speech she describes as “cathartic.”

“It was my own graduation too,”
she says.

Her message to them and to herself: Look forward and make a change.

“There is a real need to have people around who remember what it was like and visualize what it can be in the future,” she says. “I’m no longer angry with CU. I want to be part of the solution.”

Lisa Marshall (Jour, PolSci’94) is a freelance journalist and mother of four who lives in the hills west of Lyons, Colo.

Josefina Mata, 68, left, traveled by bus from California with daughter Maria Mata, 37, and granddaughter Danielle Quezada, 2, to Phoenix for the May 29 march in opposition to the state’s new immigration law. © The Arizona Republic, May 30, 2010, Cheryl Evans. Used with permission. Permission does not imply endorsement.

Tim Wadsworth remembers the moment vividly, as if it happened a few hours ago instead of on a March day in 2006.

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.

The gears instantly started rotating in Wadsworth’s head.

“It was one of those moments where you feel like a kid in a candy store,’’ says the CU-Boulder assistant sociology professor, 41, who was teaching at the University of New Mexico at the time.

“My first response was, ‘Why has nobody tested this before?’ I thought I’d better get on it before somebody else did. I thought naively at the time this would be a pretty quick and clear-cut project.’’

That was a major miscalculation. Not until June 2010 did Social Science Quarterly publish his findings, which showed that during the 1990s the incidence of serious crime dropped in major cities in the U.S. — but fastest in the cities with the largest increase in immigration.

The timing was crucial because in late April Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the nation’s toughest bill on illegal immigration into law, which intends to identify, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants. The bill triggered immediate protests and reignited the divisive battle over immigration reform nationally. It also pulled Wadsworth into the thick of the debate.

From his office in Ketchum Arts and Sciences, he fielded calls from both local and national reporters. He came under hostile attack in the blogosphere, and politicians on the right attacked his findings.

“It was certainly a new experience [in my career] in terms of media attention,’’ Wadsworth says. “When people are trying to draw on information to respond to current events, they want what’s sort of the newest. I just had the good fortune of bad timing.’’

Murder rates decline

The presumed link between crime and immigration is ingrained in American culture, so Wadsworth wasn’t sure what to expect when he started his research. In 1994 the murder rate began to decline and has been decreasing ever since. Sociologists credited innovative policing policies, tougher sentencing, an aging population and the end of the crack epidemic. The authors of Freakonomics (Harper Perennial) attribute the big drop to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973, which they say reduced by millions the pool of unwanted children who might have grown up to be criminals a generation later.

To test Sampson’s controversial hypothesis, Wadsworth turned to FBI and census data from 459 cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, focusing on statistics for homicides and robberies — the two most accurately reported crimes. He measured the growth of the immigrant community over the 1990s in the selected cities, the scene of 80 percent of the country’s worst crimes.

Contrary to popular perception, Wadsworth found that the growth in the new immigrant population was responsible, on average, for 9.3 percent of the decline in homicide rates, and that growth in total immigration led, on average, to a 22.2 percent decrease in robbery rates. He controlled for other variables in the study, such as changes in employment, poverty, divorce, age distribution and other factors that often influence crime patterns.

Perhaps one explanation stems from what Wadsworth calls the “self-selection” factor.

“They [the immigrants] might be the ones chosen [to go to the U.S.] by families and communities as the most likely to succeed in a new community, the ones most likely to get jobs and send money home and support other family members coming to the U.S,’’ he says.

Wadsworth says immigrants have strong incentives not to step out of line in ways that might lead to incarceration or deportation.

“And many are migrating into communities with other immigrants,” he says. “They could be extended families or people from the same village. It tends to create a sense of solidarity in the community that we know tends to reduce criminal behavior,’’ he says.

Just one piece of the pie

Another possible reason is that many immigrants come from conservative rural areas in their home countries.

“They come from villages where crime is virtually nonexistent,’’ Wadsworth says. “If you haven’t committed a crime by the time you’re 20, 21, there’s a pretty good chance you’re never going to.”

Still Wadsworth says the findings hardly represent a “big bang theory.”

“This is just one piece of the pie,” he says. “This certainly isn’t necessarily a huge piece. (But) everyone is really finding the same thing. There is no support for the argument that immigrants are committing more crime and that immigrants are driving up the crime rate.’’

Sociology assistant professor Tim Wadsworth found a link between increased immigration and lower crime rates, a study that has received a lot of attention in local and national media. Photo by Doug Wray.

Some critics accuse Wadsworth of approaching the study with a liberal bias, intent on finding a way to support Sampson’s hypothesis, an accusation Wadsworth shrugs off.

In fact, he says finding a serious flaw in Sampson’s reasoning would have been a significant finding in its own right.

“Sampson is probably one of the most well-known criminologists and sociologists out there to be able to say, ‘Well, this is an interesting idea, but the data do not support it’ — that would have been interesting as well,” he says. “And if there was no relationship, in many ways that still questions public perceptions.

“If you’re being honest with your data you try to think, ‘Well, what am I leaving out? Is there something else that could be included in this model that would help explain or get rid of this finding?’ ”

But Wadsworth says the more he tried to do that, the more persistent the findings became, and the clearer it was that this was a significant and robust relationship.

Other critics dismiss Wadsworth’s findings out of hand, including former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, who is known for his anti-immigration views.

“Any report, any kind of investigation of this particular issue and study of it is like trying to shovel smoke,’’ Tancredo told Denver’s 7News. “The statistics are incredibly varied and skewed.’’

Wadsworth notes a couple of critics have rejected the research because he didn’t distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. The professor thinks it’s a valid concern. However, he notes communities that have the highest number of documented immigrants also are the ones with the highest levels of undocumented ones.

“I couldn’t separate the two because the census doesn’t separate the two,” Wadsworth says.

The San Diego effect

Wadsworth’s findings aren’t likely to cool the passions on either side of the issue, even though they back up other findings. For example, Ramiro Martinez, a sociologist at Florida International University, has come to similar conclusions by studying homicide rates among Latino and immigrant communities in Miami, El Paso, San Diego, Chicago and other cities.

“San Diego, for example, is a place that captures the public imagination with all this concern about closing the borders of Mexico,” he wrote in 2006. “[But] it has one of the lowest homicide rates for any major urban area in the United States.’’

But the link between immigration and crime is largely taken for granted among the media and policymakers. Polls continue to show that the vast majority of Americans think immigrants cause crime.

And the dry facts of an FBI report are no match for the emotional impact of a sensational crime story, as Arizonans discovered in March following the murder of a popular rancher by a suspected illegal.

“Any homicide is horrendous and tragic,’’ Wadsworth says, “but in our country we have somewhere around 12,000 homicides a year. So to point to one and sort of make that the focal point of a debate about immigration is, I think, really putting up a smoke screen that eliminates a broader examination of trends and patterns.

“If you turn to Channel 4 and they start talking about FBI statistics, most people would change the channel. But if [newscasters] talk about a gruesome homicide or fugitive murderers and they put up pictures of scary people, that’s when they’re going to get people watching. And that’s what tends to sway public opinion.’’

Wadsworth grew up in Boston where his father was headmaster at a prep school. He discovered a passion for sociology as an undergraduate at University of California, Santa Cruz.

“It sort of knocked my socks off,’’ he says. “It offered a new way of understanding the world. I got very enthused about viewing the world through a sociological lens. It just made a lot of sense to me.’’

During graduate study at the University of Washington, he concentrated on economics and crime. While still actively studying crime patterns, his newest side project — a study of happiness — is a dramatic departure from his other work.

“What is it about the communities that people live in and the peer groups they spend time with that make people happy, that makes people content with their lives?” he asks.

This is the study his family members actually thought was going to end up hitting the media. And then the immigration study took off.

“Who knows where it will lead?”
he says.

Clay Latimer, a Denver-based freelance writer, is author of a series of children’s books that will be published in 2011.

SEPTEMBER 2010

Coloradan aims to connect, inform and engage readers in the life of the University of Colorado at Boulder through regular communication with alumni, faculty and staff members and friends of the University. It is published four times per year in March, June, September and December by the CU-Boulder Alumni Association. Permission to reprint articles and illustrations may be obtained from the editor.

EDITORIAL OFFICES

Koenig Alumni Center, University of Colorado, Boulder CO 80309-0459; phone 303-492-3712 or 800-492-7743; fax 303-492-6799; e-mail tori.peglar@colorado.edu

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ON THE WEB

Visit www.coloradanmagazine.org to read the magazine and latest web exclusives.

PUBLISHER

Ron Stump

EDITOR

Tori Peglar (MJour’00)

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Marc Killinger

STUDENT ASSISTANTS

Emery Cowan (Jour, Span’10), Alex Bak (A&S ex’13), Christie Sounart (Jour ex’12)

CONTRIBUTORS

Glenn Asakawa (Jour’86), Michelle Starika Asakawa (Jour, Mktg’87), Gary Baines (Jour’83), Casey A. Cass, Peter Caughey, Dave Curtin (Jour’78), Paul Danish (Hist’65), Clay Evans, Marty Coffin Evans (Engl’64), Andi Fabri (Art, Comm’00), Bronson Hilliard (Hist’86), Clay Latimer, Jennie Lay (MJour’05), Lisa Marshall (Jour, PolSci’94), Kathy McClurg, Ken McConnellogue (Jour’90), Malinda Miller-Huey (Engl’92, MJour’98), David Plati (Jour’82), Linda Poncin, Jim Scott (EPOBio’73), Greg Swenson (MJour’98), Doug Wray

DESIGNERS

Art director Elizabeth C. Johnston and assistant art director Marissa Price of Lizzardbrand Inc.

www.lizzardbrand.com

WEB PRODUCTION

M. Douglas Wray

Please recycle with magazines.

iStockphoto.com

by Nancy Averett (IntAf’89), which was beautifully written and poignant, expressed a theme consistent to many as we age [page 36, June Coloradan]. Since we can’t put old heads on our own young shoulders, all we can do is pass along to our kids what our parents did for us. I hope Averett’s piece and similar ones by her get more exposure.

Bonnie F. McCune (Psych’66)
Denver

Coloradan kudos

The Coloradan is one of the best-written, best-looking magazines I get. You’re doing a terrific job. I congratulate you. I majored in English literature and seriously loved every minute I was at Boulder. I had wonderful professors and worked in the summer for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.

Linda Urbach (Engl’62)
Bridgeport, Conn.

Kennedy assassination

As with countless other alumni I was struck by the beauty and serenity of the photograph of Old Main, with the snow-covered campus and Flatirons in the background, that appeared on pages 34 and 35 of the March 2010 Coloradan. In viewing it I was immediately drawn back to my days at CU, and most specifically the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963. Along with my roommate “Rebel,” I stood on the roof of Old Main and we lowered the flag to half mast. This was an event I will always remember, and the exceptional photograph by Casey A. Cass brought me back to campus and that horrific day when we lost a president.

Michael H. Logan (Anth’67)
Knoxville, Tenn.

From baseball to immigration

Many of us here at Sewall loved reading the wonderful article in the June 2010 edition of the Coloradan that featured faculty member Tom Zeiler and his “American History through Baseball” course. The course is offered at Sewall every spring and it is a huge hit with the undergraduates.

The Sewall Residential Academic Program offers residents wonderful programmatic opportunities, including the Dialogues on Immigrant Integration program. It facilitates conversations between immigrant housing and dining staff and students to promote an honest and respectful conversation about immigration and immigrant integration. Since it began three years ago, Dialogues has fostered new respect and understanding among participants.

Martha Dunne Shernick
Sewall Residential Academic Program assistant

Most every kid in 1940s and 1950s America knew that, in the majors, Robinson played only for the team that called Ebbets Field home in Flatbush, N.Y., a bit east of Los Angeles. Some may even recall the bums moved to Los Angeles in 1958, two years after Robinson retired.

Word in the dugout is that you’ve received a near-record number of letters on this one. Right?

Franklin Bell (Jour’70)
Bluemont, Va.

After playing for Montreal, Jackie Robinson enjoyed a successful career as a Los Angeles Dodger, breaking baseball’s color barrier at age 28 in 1947. Major League Baseball retired his number, 42, in 1997 on the 50th anniversary of Robinson joining the major leagues but allowed players who already had it to wear the number until they finished their career.

Jack Roosevelt Robinson never played for the Los Angeles Dodgers (whoever they are). He played only for the Brooklyn Dodgers and retired before the team moved West. The photo of Jackie on page 26 of the June Coloradan shows him in front of the Brooklyn clubhouse.

Marshall Brodsky (Law’78)
Denver

[Editor’s Note: We goofed! We heard from several of you who caught this error in the photo cutline regarding Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers. We are deeply embarrassed but glad our alums are reading the Coloradan very mindfully. Thanks for taking the time to write and set the record straight.]

Higman memories

Your March 2010 issue of the Coloradan featuring Howard Higman (Art’37, MSoc’42) revived a long-cherished memory for me and I thank you [“Dialing for dignitaries,” pages 28-32].

While working on one of his committees I met R. Buckminster Fuller and Mrs. Fuller standing alone in the deserted hallway in front of the room where he was to speak. Following proper courtesies between us, he reached down and picked up two programs, carefully handing one to his wife. Whereupon she looked at him and softly said, “We should get some more of those for the grandchildren.” And they did.

I was immediately moved by the common thread of humanity that weaves among the celebrated and the ordinary alike.

Sonia S. Smith (Engl’59)
La Jolla, Calif.

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.