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.

Forbes found that the Boulder metropolitan area, aka Boulder County, had the highest proportion of college graduates — 53 percent — of any metropolitan area in the U.S.

The Gallup organization surveyed 187 metropolitan areas and found Boulder had the second lowest proportion of obese people in the country at 16.6 percent. First place went to neighboring Fort Collins/Loveland, aka Larimer County, at 16 percent. Montgomery, Ala., and Stockton, Calif., tied for last at 34.6 percent. By way of comparison, the national obesity rate is 26.5 percent.

How does Gallup figure who’s lean and hungry and who’s fat and sassy? It asked people how much they weighed and how tall they were, which allows you to calculate a person’s Body Mass Index by dividing your weight by the square of your height. Normal is 18.5 to 24.9. Anything over 30 is obese.

So how did Boulder get so svelte?

Runners line up at the start of the Bolder Boulder, an annual Memorial Day 10k that celebrated its 32nd year in May.

Item: In America, rich folks tend to be thinner than poor folks, and surveys regularly find Boulder County’s median family income is around a third higher than the national average. That means you can afford to dine on, say, organic, fat-free, hummingbird tongues and other delicacies whose calorie count vary inversely to the price.

Item: Younger tends to be thinner than older, and with 30,000 CU students and a disproportionate number of 20-somethings in residence there’s proportionately less middle-age spread in Boulder County.

Item: Boulder eats its veggies and works out. It turns out Gallup tracks the proportion of people who eat fruits and vegetables “frequently” and exercise for at least 30 minutes a day three times a week or more.

Gallup found that 61.2 percent of Boulderites eat their veggies often, a bit above the national average of 56.8 percent. And 61.2 percent also exercise frequently, well above the national average of 49.9 percent.

Boulder gets stellar marks on all sorts of well-being metrics — so stellar that it finished No. 1 on Gallup’s Well-Being Composite Index, which averages the responses to questions about healthy behaviors, physical and emotional health, work environment, access to food, shelter, medical care, etc. Boulder got a 72.5 rating, the best among medium and small cities and higher than any city on the large cities list to boot.

And which community scored lowest? The lowest overall rating went to metro Fort Smith, Ark., with a 59.5 score.

Among large cities, (over 1 million population), Las Vegas finished last with a 63.5 rating.

Which just goes to show what happens in Boulder stays in Boulder.

Paul Danish (Hist’65) was once detained at the Boulder County line while returning from Johnson Corner truck stop in Loveland, Colo., with a sweet roll as big as his head.

Hosea Rosenberg (EngrPhys’97)

Boulder chef Hosea Rosenberg (EngrPhys’97) became a “Top Chef” in February when he won Bravo TV’s reality competition, completing a 12-month season and beating out 16 others from around the country to win $100,000.

Rosenberg, executive chef at Jax Fish House on Pearl Street, had to keep quiet about his win since the show finished taping late last year. When the final episode aired, he told the Boulder Camera, “I’ve played poker, so it was kind of like holding aces.” He says the competition was the hardest thing he has done in his career.

The nation’s top chef says he has plans for a new restaurant with his newfound fame and prize money, as well as a new food line to be released by Whole Foods.

To learn more about CU’s history, visit the Heritage Center on the third floor of Old Main or go to www.cuheritage.org.

The Old Main bell joined a cacophony of bells tolling 150 times on Feb. 10, 2009, in celebration of  Boulder’s sesquicentennial anniversary.

For decades the Old Main bell rang between class periods and for home football victories. After a wild night of celebratory ringing following a win over the Colorado School of Mines in 1926, the bell cracked. As a result it was moved to the men’s gymnasium. In 1948, brawny Mines students stole the 1,000-pound bell. Its whereabouts remained a mystery for two years until Mines staff unearthed the bell with a giant “M” carved into its side.

After sitting in Macky Auditorium (see photo), it found a permanent home in the newly opened CU Heritage
Center in 1985.