Letters: Fall 2026
Dear Old CU
My, how the times have changed and are so excitingly different. I am so thrilled to see how the Leeds School of Business continues to think and act out of the box for the betterment of our society. It makes me so proud to say I’m a CU graduate, and I wish I were young and starting all over. I would be back in the same classrooms making good trouble. I am also glad to know that instead of only two women in a class, it is now 50/50, and that CU has continued to support and promote thinkers and doers, like [CMDI’s] amazing Sandra Ristovska.
Here’s to the next 150 years of CU’s contributions to the country, society and the world. Dear Old CU!
Cathy Burnley Hartrich (Mgmt’70)
Medford, Oregon
A Story of Opportunity
“Silver Tsunami” [Summer 2026] is an important and hopeful story about succession, stewardship and preserving the businesses that anchor our communities. That is why the title feels so misaligned.
“Silver Tsunami” may be a familiar shorthand, but a tsunami is a catastrophe — and older business owners are not the disaster. The real risk is our failure to plan for the transfer of their knowledge, ownership and economic value.
The article tells a story of opportunity. I would love to see the language rise to meet it.
Cambria Jacobs (Comm’96)
Lafayette, Colorado
Ed Goldberg with a scale model of the Orbiting Solar Observatory.
CU’s First Startup
Thanks so much to Heather Hanson for recognizing Merc Mercure (A&S’51; MPhys’55; PhD’57) in the Coloradan as a co-founder in the 1950s of Ball Brothers Research Corp., which soon became Ball Aerospace. Decades before “entrepreneurship” and “ecosystem” were used to describe Boulder’s startup community, Merc set high standards for innovation, invention and collaboration.
Clif Harald (DistSt’75)
Boulder
My father, Dr. Leo Goldberg, led the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) team at Harvard during his tenure as Higgins Professor of Astronomy and director of the Harvard College Observatory. His scale model of OSO has been in our family for over 60 years. I first saw CU while in high school when I tagged along with him on a visit to Ball Brothers in the summer of 1968. That’s when I decided that I wanted to attend CU.
Ed Goldberg (ArtHist’73)
Tucson, Arizona
Kokushobi
I cannot say how many times I’ve awakened in the middle of the night with a yucky feeling deep in my stomach followed by overwhelming sorrow for Mother Earth. I lie there thinking of plants and animals who no longer exist and how many more will become extinct as we continue to poison and bulldoze the last wild places — even as the deadly effects of climate change unfold before us.
It’s terrifying and sickening, but in his column “What Do We Call This Feeling?” [Summer 2026], Dr. Pedro DiNezi gave me a word for that feeling: kokushobi. It’s good to have a word for my fears and to know that enough people feel the same that there’s a word for us. Surely that’s enough to do something about it.
Robyn Parker (Soc, WomSt’89)
Grand Junction, Colorado
In the summer of 1962, I spent several weeks working and skiing at the top of the Stelvio Pass in Italy. Now, snow there disappears completely from May through September. That fall, I tried out for the CU ski team. We trained some near Idaho Springs at Saint Mary’s Glacier, which fully melted this September. From 1965–68, with the Grenoble University Club, we trained each June through October on the back side of the Alpe d’Huez ski resort. That snowfield no longer exists in summer and fall.
Simeon Thomas (Fren’79)
Salida, Colorado
Memories from Fiske
“Fiske You Were Here” in the Summer 2026 issue brought back happy memories. From about 1976–78, I wrote for the student-produced Colorado Engineer magazine. Among the articles I wrote were reviews of the “Eye See the Light” and “The Voice of the Martian Wind” shows. I’ve gone on to publish three novels and six nonfiction books, but these were among my first publications.
Ross Lampert (Phys’77)
Hereford, Arizona
One Phone Call
Page 4 of the summer issue mentions Steve Hatchell (Advert’70). Once in high school, I walked off the football field with our opponent’s equipment manager. He told me big-time college football teams had up to eight equipment managers. I asked my high school coach about this. A few weeks later, he handed me a piece of paper with a number on it for me to call.
It was Steve Hatchell at CU. He had just been the head football team equipment manager. He said if I had the SAT scores to get in, I had a job on the equipment staff.
Five years later, all through the CU football program, we had traveled to play other teams in all four corners of the U.S. We had been to the Orange Bowl vs. Ohio State and the Astro Bluebonnet Bowl against Texas. We saw Hatchell again as he became the head of the Orange Bowl.
My brother and sister also became CU football managers. Our bricks are right in front of the Ralphie statue.
Douglas Adams (Mktg’78)
Skaneateles, New York
California Protectors
Just got my copy of the Coloradan and read the article on Mike McCoy and his wife, Patricia. What was not mentioned was that Mike was a member of the CU track and cross-country team and he was a teammate of mine for those four years in Boulder. Also important to us Californians was that Patricia was a member of the California Coastal Commission that today protects an enormous amount of open space along the entire Pacific coast of the state.
Richard Burns (Fin’64)
Corona del Mar, California
Intersection of AI, Evidence and the Courts
I’m on the communications and engagement team at WITNESS. We were really glad to see us mentioned in Lisa Marshall’s piece on Sandra Ristovska’s work at the Visual Evidence Lab. It’s a thoughtful, well-reported piece and the through-line on courts lacking guidelines for video evidence in the age of AI is exactly the terrain we work in every day.
A few things came to mind reading it that might be useful as background or for a future story:
- The Alameda County case and the “deepfake defense” Ristovska describes are exactly why we run a Deepfake Rapid Response Force, a network that helps journalists, courts and investigators authenticate suspect video quickly when a case like that breaks.
- On the authentication side, we just published a report on C2PA content credentials which looks at how “proof of authenticity” systems can actually work and where they can be misused for surveillance relevant to the guidelines gap the piece names.
- Our colleagues shirin anlen and Sam Gregory wrote for Tech Policy Press about Google Earth’s brief AI image-generation feature and what it means when generative capability gets added to tools that journalists, courts and investigators treat as trusted infrastructure — a very close cousin to the video evidence questions Ristovska is raising.
Mwara Gichanga
Online
A House on 13th Street
I was thinking about the years (1950–57) I grew up in the rooming and boarding three-story house at 1080 13th Street with a curious feature. My mother bought it for $19,000 and fed up to 45 students three meals a day, six days a week from 1950–1964.
My bedroom was in the basement with my brother, Ralph, in a room which could not be rented because it was not up to code. Our beds were mattresses on concrete ledges built into the wall. But originally built into this house was a staircase going from the basement up through the first floor, opening into a closet on the second floor! The basement was accessed through a back door going into the basement. So, a person could enter the back door and access any of the rooms on the second and third floors without detection.
Of course, the question is what was it built for? My guess is that the house was built in the 1920s–30s.
Ray McKinnis (Phil’61)
Wendell, North Carolina
Photos courtesy Ed Goldberg (OSO); University of Colorado (top)