Notes from the Class of 1981

Michelle R. Houser (Jour) was named the chief operating officer of the Tesla Foundation, a think tank focused on workforce development and education related to autonomy and autonomous technology. She previously managed advanced transportation, aerospace, cybersecurity and clean tech economic development efforts at the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation and worked as a political communications consultant in Southern California.

Kathleen MacDonald (Comm) is the senior vice president of marketing at Spectrum Retirement Communities, LLC. She is part of a three-generation CMCI family. Her mother, Helen Kiley Masterson (Jour’56), is a public relations and communications specialist and an active member and former president of the Denver Woman’s Press Club. Kathleen’s son, John Sauer (Jour’14), is a personal vacation advisor at Inspirato.

Eugene Rosenquest (Jour) is an account representative for ADT Corporation in Volusia and Lake counties, Florida. He will be visiting Boulder this year for the first time since 1981.

Rick Mullen (Jour) has lived in Malibu, California, since 1990 and was elected to the Malibu City Council in 2016. During the 2018 wildfires, he worked with media outlets and elected officials—including President Donald Trump—as the city’s mayor. Rick is a retired Marine Corps colonel with 30 years of active and reserve service and was a captain in the Los Angeles County Fire Department. He and his wife, Jenny Ball, have two children, Marshall and Tatiana.

Linda Villarosa (Jour) runs the journalism program at The City College of New York in Harlem and is working on a book about race, health and inequity. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and her cover story, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life or Death Crisis,” was nominated for a 2019 National Magazine Award.

Thom Kuhn (Jour) is president and CEO of Millstone Weber, a heavy civil construction company focused on the transportation industry, and PHL Inc., a charitable organization that provides free athletic facilities, equipment and long-term maintenance services to inner-city and underserved public school districts and community organizations. He and his wife, Dianne, have three sons and a daughter. Two of their sons work in sports radio. The Kuhns live in Wildwood, Missouri.

After graduation, Patti Sanford (Advert) worked in public relations for Petroleum Information in Denver and then for Cartier in New York. She later lived in Istanbul, Paris, Brussels and Toronto working as a freelance writer. For the past 15 years she has been a fine arts photographer and Broadway producer, including for Hadestown, which won eight Tony awards in 2019. She lives in Larchmont, New York, with her husband, Michael Roberts. They have two daughters.

In 2021, Jim Gray (Advert) received CU Boulder’s George Norlin Award, recognizing outstanding alumni who have demonstrated a commitment to excellence in their chosen field of endeavor and a devotion to the betterment of society and their community. It is the highest award bestowed by the university on CU Boulder alumni. In 2020, he released his book, Talking to GOATs: The Moments You Remember and the Stories You Never Heard, in which he reflects on four decades of sports reporting from the perspective of one of the world’s most respected and skilled interviewers. It includes interviews with Tom Brady, Muhammad Ali, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Michael Jordan and more. Always a loyal Buff, he followed the book’s release with a virtual reading and discussion for students in CMCI’s sports media minor. He was recently featured in the documentary series Mike Tyson: The Knockout and contributed to Fox Sports’ coverage of the Tokyo Olympics.

Cindy (Cossid) Stern (Jour) recently celebrated 10 years with the Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema, where she serves as executive director. She spent the previous three decades at advertising and marketing agencies in Los Angeles and Chicago, including Frankel & Co./Arc Worldwide, J. Walter Thompson, Euro RSCG and Leo Burnett. During her career, she helped pair Starbucks and United Airlines and develop the USPS ReadyPost boxes. She lives in Lincolnshire, Illinois.

Well-known sports journalist Rick Reilly (Jour) recently released his 15th book, So Help Me Golf: Why We Love the Game. It includes 80 new stories, some of them about his own life growing up with an alcoholic golfing dad in Boulder. It comes on the heels of his New York Times bestseller, Commander In Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, which the New Yorker called "amusing and alarming." Reilly, whom USA Today called "the closest thing sportswriting ever had to a rock star," lives in Sedona, Arizona, and Hermosa Beach, California.