Class Notes

For Richard “Dick” Knowlton (Econ, Geog) and Nancy Knowlton (A&S’57), Alzheimer’s hits close to home. Dick is in the late stage of the disease, writes Nancy. To help bolster the search for a cure, the couple donated $500,000 to the Colorado Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. Before retiring, Dick was the CEO of Hormel Foods Corporation, where he had worked for nearly 40 years.

Graydon "Dee" Hubbard's (Acct) novel At the Altars of Money was the No. 1 best seller on Amazon related to wealth management. The book captures the American ethos about money, and scripts the financial meltdown of 2008. “That’s gotta be a first for an expat 30-year Colorado CPA gone rogue and turned novelist,” he writes. Dee and wife Bonnie live in St. George, Utah.

On June 16, Herb Davis (PhDPhys) and wife Donne celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in a not-so-ideal place: The emergency room. “ER or no ER, it’s still a joy to be together and in love after all these years,” writes Herb, who was admitted for a flare up of his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. 

For more than 45 years, Douglas Kimmel (Psych) has been a champion for the LGBTQ community. He received a lifetime achievement award from political advocacy non-profit EqualityMaine for his distinguished service as a psychologist working with the LGBTQ community. Doug lives with his husband in Hancock, Maine, where they were legally married in 2013, on their 44th anniversary. In 1969, the couple had a wedding ceremony in Boulder at the United Protestant Center. 

Fran Yardley (Thtr) published the book, Finding True North: A History of One Small Corner of the Adirondacks. It outlines Fran’s journey with her late husband, Jay Yardley, as they revived the historic and long-abandoned Bartlett Carry Club in the Adirondacks. In 1999, Fran co-founded Creative Healing Connections, a nonprofit organization offering retreats for women veterans and women with cancer and chronic illness. Originally from Buffalo, she now lives in upstate New York
on Middle Saranac Lake with her husband, Burdette Parks, and their dog, Merlin. 

Some might say that Steve Frenzl (Mktg) worked an “odd” job while attending CU. In the late 1960s, he worked as an apprentice at Boulder’s Howe Mortuary. A retired marketing manager, Steve recently published a two-volume fictionalized memoir of his days (and nights) working at the mortuary, Coffee & Donuts with the Dearly Departed. In addition to his book, he published the Life-Alone Planner, a free, digital workbook to help survivors prepare for life without their loved ones. Visit his blog at https://coffeeanddonuts.biz.

N. Stephen Kane (PhDHist) published his new book, Selling Reagan’s Foreign Policy: Going Public vs. Executive Bargaining in May 2018. Stephen is a former U.S. State Department officer and American University professor. He holds a B.A. and a M.A. from Temple University in Philadelphia and currently lives in Silver Spring, Md.

Since leaving Boulder, Cathy Crosby (MPhil) writes that her professional career has included working at the Los Angeles Crime Lab as a senior criminalist and as a chemistry teacher at Santa Monica College. In 2015, she published the book A Good Catholic Girl: Pro-choice IS Pro-life. She teaches science to her granddaughters and other little ones at Hidden Gems, her daughter’s pre-K school in L.A.

When eight CU alums met up in Siena, Italy, this summer, they had a lot of catching up to do. It had been 45 years since they'd studied abroad together in 1973. Frank Cefali (Ger'75) described the trip as “a rejuvenation of mind and soul.” The group revisited the Villa diGeggiano, a small estate outside of Siena where their Italian professor, Bianchi Bandinelli, had hosted a farewell pranzo (lunch) in 1973. “We were grateful and awed that we could repeat that experience in his honor 45 years later,” said Mary Bellotti (Jour’74). “This reunion was a gift of a lifetime. My only regret is that we did not do it sooner,” said Susan Levitt Given (Bio’75). Other attendees included Elaine Catalano (Ital’74), Jim Hagerty (Geol’75), Joanne Hindlemann Berger (Ital’74; MDes’82), Elise Magistro (Ital ex'75), Teri Walker Lebow (Ital ex'75) and Annette Bowman Amendola (PE’73) in memory of husband Gary Amendola (Hist’73), who died Dec. 11, 2017.

Carolyn Stefanco (Hist), president of the College of Saint Rose in New York, won a Helen Gurley Brown Genius Grant, and Saint Rose was invited to join the BOLD Women’s Leadership Network by the Pussycat Foundation. The foundation provides a $100,000 grant to Saint Rose’s President’s Fund and $1 million to fund a program to benefit women student leaders at the college.

Boulder-based author Phyllis J. Perry (PhDEdu) has written more than 90 books and she’s still going strong. In 2017, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Colorado Authors’ League. She has four books that she plans to publish this year: Missing Bones in June; Buddies, Bullies and Baseball and All About Julia Morgan in August; and It Happened in Rocky Mountain National Park in November. 

“I’ve traded the Rockies for the Cascades, of which I have a beautiful view during the few weeks per year when the weather clears!” writes Noel Ludwig (Geol), forest watershed program manager for the Mount Baker- Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington.

Chett Rubenstein (Acct) left Hewlett Packard Enterprise to join Cisco as director of Cloud Services Incubation. In this role, Chett is utilizing his decades of experience in web-based software and enterprise cloud services to help Cisco expand its enterprise. “I’ve come a long way since I wrote software on punch cards at CU in the early ’80s!” said Chet, who wrote the first portfolio management system ever used to manage the CU Endowment Fund back in 1983.

Tracy Lehr (Jour) received the California State Capitol “Woman of the Year” award for her coverage of California’s devastating Thomas Fire and Montecito mudslides on Santa Barbara’s ABC-affiliated TV station KEYT and social media. Tracy, who started her journalism career in Vail, has won two Murrow Awards and received three regional Emmy nominations.

Cyndi Boman Thompson (Mktg) writes that she is now vice president at Cinder, a business journal in Portland, Ore. Cyndi, who is a licensed financial planner, joined Cinder in 2015. She currently serves on the board of directors for the Financial Planning Association of Oregon and Washington.

Rob Stites (MBaSci) presented a workshop titled “The Power of Peer Review” at the Capability Counts 2018 International Conference in Reston, Va., May 1. He published a book, which he started as a CU graduate student, titled Organized Proverbs: Contrasts in Wisdom from the Holy Bible. Rob works for CACI, a multinational professional services and information technology company, where he is a project manager for quality assurance.