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.

©2007 David Litschel

David Litschel (Art’74) photographed this traditionally dressed Maasai youth watching a herd of cattle in Sinya Private Wildlife Conservancy outside of Arusha in northern Tanzania.

The area borders Kenya and is rich in wildlife, hosting a diverse bird population and one of Africa’s healthiest elephant populations. Because there are no roads, visitors travel in four-wheel drive vehicles with Maasai guides who know the lay of the land.

Litschel, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa, is a travel photographer. His work can be seen at www.davidlitschel.com.

In every issue we feature professional-quality photography by alumni or students on these two pages. To submit your images for consideration, please e-mail marc.killinger@colorado.edu.

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.

Casey A. Cass captures the beauty of a fall morning in Chautauqua Park south of campus.

Tori Peglar (MJour’00)

I will never have the desire nor technical expertise to climb Mount Everest, but our story, “When Everest speaks” on page 6 in this issue is particularly close to my heart. It follows Neal Beidleman (MechEngr’81) as he climbed the world’s highest mountain 15 years after he survived the tragedy that left eight people dead in the wake of a fierce storm.

I arrived at CU-Boulder for graduate school the year Jon Krakauer published his book Into Thin Air, which provided a sobering, firsthand account of the 1996 Everest disaster. I couldn’t put the book down.  I had spent the 1990s, learning how to rock climb and self-arrest down snow fields with an ice axe. I had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with Mountain Madness, a company owned by the legendary Scott Fischer who died that fateful day.

But I don’t think I fully understood the dangers of high-altitude mountaineering until I read Krakauer’s book, in which Neal really shined as a hero.  We learn lessons from other peoples’ tragedies and that one, more than anything else, made me aware of the risks inherent in outdoor sports.  In short, I became more of a wimp. But I did climb 13,223-foot Mount Audubon west of Boulder earlier this fall. Winds were howling at 50 miles per hour, the temperatures were below freezing and being above tree line never felt so invigorating after a week in the office.

Wishing you safe and exciting adventures in the new year.

DECEMBER 2011

Coloradan aims to connect, inform and engage readers in the life of the University of Colorado 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

ADDRESS CHANGES

To change your address or remove your name from our mailing list, write or call the Alumni Association at the address and numbers above or e-mail processing@cufund.org.

Please include your alumni ID number, which is on your mailing label.

ON THE WEB

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

PUBLISHER

Deborah Fowlkes

EDITOR

Tori Peglar (MJour’00)

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Marc Killinger

STUDENT ASSISTANT

Christie Sounart (Jour ex’12)

CONTRIBUTORS

Glenn Asakawa (Jour’86), Michelle Starika Asakawa (Jour, Mktg’87), Gary Baines (Jour’83), Patrick Campbell (EnvDes’11), 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),
Doug McPherson, Malinda Miller-Huey (Engl’92, MJour’98), David Plati (Jour’82), Linda Poncin, Jim Scott (EPOBio’73), Greg Swenson (MJour’98), Doug Wray

DESIGNERS

Elizabeth C. Johnston and Marissa Price of Lizzardbrand Inc., www.lizzardbrand.com

Please recycle with magazines.

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.

Law dean David Getches and his wife, Ann Getches

Losing David

Congratulations on your fine remembrance of David Getches [page 23, September Coloradan]. We worked together in the cabinet of Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, had offices in the same building and spent hours and hours trying to figure out how to get the legislature to see things our way. He was the brains, and I was more of the political operative.

I had been planning to go up and see him when I heard of his illness, but it just happened so fast and suddenly he was gone.

Morgan Smith (Law’66)
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Coloradan highlights

Your great pub just came to the top of my stack — terrific! Just some highlights [from the September Coloradan]:

• Profiles of Coach Embree (Comm’88) [pages 10-13] and David Getches — very informative.
• “Concrete Results” [pages 60-61] on the new Hoover dam bridge — very timely; it’s the cover article for the American Society of Civil Engineers Civil Engineering magazine — near and dear to my heart.
• “Power to the People” [page 19] by Paul Danish (Hist’65) — helpful briefing on the Boulder municipal issue.
• The award for excellence — well deserved.

Thanks to you and staff for an outstanding issue.

John Clark (CivEngr, Mgmt’64)
Boulder

Congratulations on recent changes in the Coloradan. It is colorful, readable, even thought-provoking, and a great asset to the university.

Minor Judd Coon (Chem’43)

Ann Arbor, MI

What exciting news about the [first place] Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) magazine award. That is truly tremendous and richly deserved! The Coloradan magazines are so bright and entertaining, plus edifying in a totally easy-to-enjoy way — the numbers, the colors, the quick bites, the layout. No wonder it’s an award winner! And I read every story this time [September issue]. They all had such human interest while spanning a variety of subjects.

Nancy Rasmussen (Engl’67)

Philadelphia

And yet another great job on the recent Coloradan.

I especially like the photos of the campus in every edition. I like the layout/format of the publication — easy to read and keeps my interest moving. The breadth of topics covered in the array of articles keeps me informed.

And I like the international dimension in at least one article per issue. If CU is to be an international university, it must have an international focus, i.e., Peace Corps, the personal international experiences of former and current students and faculty, etc.

I loved your piece on Old Main [pages 40-41, June Coloradan]. I had Spanish class in that building. I passed.

Bill Kieffer (PolSci’63)
Rock Hill, SC

Providing sustainable food

I am so impressed with Chipotle [pages 4-9] after reading the September Coloradan that I am going to start eating there. I had no idea what a progressive and green effort they are making . . .

Great job!

Gaffney Peglar Barnett (Hum’99)

Manhattan, NY

Remembering Rozek

As political science students at CU in the 1960s, we were introduced to Dr. Edward Rozek [June 2009 Coloradan] and were very impressed with his life story. As a young Polish tank commander he fought in Europe and was wounded and imprisoned during World War II.

Dr. Rozek’s lectures taught us about the greatness of the American system of government and its fight against tyranny throughout the world, especially communism. He was a man of great integrity and listened to both sides of an argument.

When Dr. Rozek passed away in 2009 we thought it fitting to honor him with a plaque on the Boulder campus. Thanks to donations from many of his former students, friends and colleagues, the plaque was dedicated in June 2011 at Hellems.

The plaque is inscribed with his favorite saying, “If I were a rich man I would pay for the privilege of teaching.”

Christina (Vicki) Dickson Godbey (PolSci’61) and H. Gail Godbey (Econ, PolSci’65)
Denver

Embree’s not alone

There is an error in the article “Forever Buff Jon Embree takes charge” [pages 10-13 in the September Coloradan] that states coach Embree (Comm’88) is the only minority head football coach in the Pac-12.

David Shaw is the first-year head football coach at Stanford and also a minority. I can think of five minority coaches that have worked in the Pac-10 or Pac-12. They are Ty Willingham (Stanford), David Shaw (Stanford), Embree (Colorado), Dennis Green (Stanford) and UCLA had Karl Dorrell just before Rick Neuheisel. I am up to five black coaches. There may be more? Should be!

Dick Porter (Econ’51)
Palo Alto, Calif.

Editor’s Note: Thanks, Dick, and my former journalism school classmate John Borstelmann (MJour’99) who took the time to point this error out to us.

Associate athletic director Dave Plati (Jour’82) responds:

Embree became just the fourth African-American head coach in Pac-12 Conference football history (with Stanford’s David Shaw the fifth a month later). Dennis Green was the first when he coached Stanford (1989-91), followed by Ty Willingham, also at Stanford (1995-2001) and then former Colorado assistant Karl Dorrell at UCLA (2003-07); Willingham also was head coach at Washington (2004-08). Nationally, Embree is one of seven African-American head coaches among the 66 BCS schools and one of the 16 at the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision programs.

So many buildings and so few maps

I’m sure I’m not the only alumna who would love to see a map of the current campus printed in the magazine. Whenever we read of a new building being constructed, it’s very difficult to figure out exactly where it is located. Is the quadrangle filling up or has it been left for greenery?

Margaret McCutcheon Lauterbach (Jour’56)

Boise, Idaho

[Editor’s Note: Rest assured, Margaret, the Quad still is full of greenery. Thanks for the feedback. We will work on including a map in an upcoming issue.]