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Call Number OH3085Date 2021Contents Single recording; 1 hour, 3 minutes, 10 secondsDescription This interview is focused on the narrator’s involvement (co-founder) with the Indian Peaks Wilderness Alliance, but it encompasses many important aspects of the narrator’s life and experiences, studies and understandings, and reflections. Anne Forrest Ketchin, who goes by Forrest, had a rural upbringing in Georgia, but her way of being—outdoorsy—didn’t fit expectations for a Southern female. She talks about a dramatic departure from Georgia at age 20: running away/escaping with a soldier from Colorado who helped her get re-situated and who introduced her to mountain activities and recreation. Her introduction to Boulder was through grad school; she was involved in Outward Bound and the Masters in Experiential Education at the University of Colorado; she was enrolled in the PhD program for anthropology, and she developed Outward Bound courses for women over the age of 30 (dissertation, “Women Out of Bounds”). She transitioned to involvement with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and mapping the impact of recreation in the Indian Peaks, which got her connected to Anne Vickery and Jan Robertson; they formed a working group that produced a document to share with Senator Tim Worth, to get a wilderness designation for the Indian Peaks, and then they formed a nonprofit organization and began recruiting volunteers. Forrest estimates that her most important contribution was helping/training volunteers to have positive encounters with people, to offer wilderness education without shaming anyone and showing respect during every interaction. Other topics include: her time at Naropa as chair of the Environmental Studies Department, which had an American Indian Studies component; the US government’s manifest policy of extermination for American Indians; “cut rose esotericism,” which describes white people connecting to indigenous wisdom but undermining cultural variety and integrity; managing controversial situations; and her research on culturally modified trees. Throughout the interviewer, the narrator talks about her name: the origin, her feelings about it, what she describes as valences, and how it might indicate an amount of coherence to her life and in her soul.
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Call Number OH3086Date 2022Contents Single recording; 51 minutes, 58 secondsDescription John Howell describes growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, as part of a large extended family. He discusses his education in St. Louis schools, including getting to take part in the Upward Bound program, which allowed him to spend two summers at Yale when he was in high school. He details his professional life, including working for IBM and later for Storage Technology Corporation (STC). He worked for STC, starting in 1979, for 26 years, after moving to Boulder in 1977 and earning an MBA degree at the University of Colorado. He was hired at STC as a financial analyst, one of few Black professional employees there at the time and was one of the founders of the Black Career Forum, which sought to increase the number of minority professional workers at STC and support their professional development. He also talks about his marriage to Velveta Golightly-Howell, who was a law student at the CU Law School when he met her in 1978. Other topics include his participation in Partners, a mentoring program for teenagers; the importance of working in community; and his family.
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Call Number OH3087Date 2022Contents Single recording; 1 hour, 7 minutes, 25 secondsDescription Velveta Golightly-Howell talks about her upbringing in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, including her supportive family and community, the positive values she learned from her family, some early experiences that shaped her understanding of race relations, and her education up through college. Eventually, she went to law school at the University of Colorado, and she discusses being one of the very few Black students at the law school at that time. She describes her life as an attorney, including working as the first Black woman attorney prosecutor in the District Attorney’s office in Denver, working in the field of labor law, and being a civil rights attorney in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and for the Environmental Protection Agency. She also talks about mentoring people of color to help them develop their abilities, including mentoring students at the University of Colorado Law School, and women worldwide through an organization she founded called Sister to Sister International Network of Professional African American Women, Incorporated. Throughout the interview, she talks about the religious and moral underpinnings of everything she has done and the way she values giving back to the community.
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Call Number OH3088Date 2022Contents Single recording; 48 minutes, 57 secondsDescription Larry Dorsey, chair of the Superior Historical Commission, discusses how he and the town of Superior were affected by the Marshall Fire of December 2021. He gives an overview of Superior as a community, including its history and how it developed over the years. He details his experiences on the day of the Marshall Fire, including evacuation and a period of uncertainty about whether his house had burned down. He describes the extent of the destruction, including the profound destruction of Original Town. He talks about the Superior Historical Museum, what it was like before the fire, it’s destruction by the fire, and plans to rebuild. He reflects on the ways the community has worked together after the fire, house rebuilding efforts as of a year after the fire, and silver linings and lessons learned from the fire.
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Call Number OH3089Date 2022Contents Single recording; 51 minutes, 31 secondsDescription Reginald Lingham grew up in Boulder, then lived in California as an adult. He describes his family history and the lives of various members of his family. He recalls his childhood years in Boulder as mainly pleasant and full of family activities, although he does detail one experience of discrimination against him as a Black child involving being turned away by a particular Boy Scout troop leader. After high school, he joined the Navy and served in California and Japan. Settling in California after his military service was complete, he worked for the Post Office for most of his career, mainly working on electronic equipment. Throughout his military service and Post Office career, he continued to receive technical training in electronics. He describes his life in California—in Berkeley and Sacramento—and he talks about his daughter’s life there.
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Call Number OH3090Date 2022Contents Single recording; 1 hour, 4 minutes, 7 secondsDescription Carole Jones relates her family’s history, reaching back as far as the 1700s, and including those who were “free coloreds” in Baltimore and Freedmen of Oklahoma. She describes her upbringing in Washington, DC, her college education at Oberlin, and becoming a social worker in her post-graduate years. After marrying George Jones in 1959, they moved to Colorado and eventually to Boulder. She explains where they have lived over the years in Boulder, including where they live now. A large portion of the interview details the work that she and her husband did in the Boulder/Denver area and then for 25 years in various African countries (alongside her husband) mainly through USAID, ranging from social work to developing post-apartheid policies for equitable salary levels among all workers, to developing programs for victims of torture and trauma. She also reflects on the challenges of blending work with child-rearing and coordinating her career with that of her husband. Other topics include the Black community in Boulder, the shortcoming of education for children of color in Boulder during the 1960s, and her current volunteer work in Boulder.
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Call Number OH3091Date 2022Contents Single recording; 44 minutes, 7 secondsDescription George Jones, born in the mid-1930s, grew up in Yonkers, New York, the last of ten children. He starts by relating experiences relevant to being a Black young adult, such as being told by his high school guidance counselor that he should stick with woodworking rather than pursing academics (he eventually received a PhD in medical sociology), being the first Black person accepted by his college fraternity, and racial discrimination that he experienced as he tried to get hired after earning a master’s degree at Columbia University. He relates work he did in Colorado, beginning in 1962, with the developmentally disabled population, including as Director of Mental Retardation for the state; working for the White House in the 1960s; and the extensive public-health-related work he did for many decades with USAID in many African countries. Other topics include raising children in an international environment, and experiences of both racial discrimination and a sense of inclusive community in Boulder in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Call Number OH3092Date 2022Contents Single recording; 1 hour, 20 minutes, 17 secondsDescription Gaylon Ferguson talks about growing up as a Black child in the segregated society of east Texas during the 1950s; his experience of being part of integrating a public school in the mid-1960s when he was in eighth grade; and the values, including respect for education and community service, that he absorbed from his mother and grandmother. He details his educational journey from his last year of high school on, which included attending Exeter as a scholarship student; his mother’s death in a car accident when he was 18, on the cusp of his starting to attend Yale University; dropping out of Yale after two years in the wake of his grief at the loss of his mother; learning about meditation and Buddhism; and his subsequent involvement in Buddhist teaching, earning a PhD in anthropology, and ultimately melding the two—academics and Buddhism. Other topics include studying under and teaching for Chögyam Trungpa in various location, including at Naropa Institute (later Naropa University); studying and teaching African studies and anthropology; using a Fulbright Scholarship to live and do field work in Nigeria; returning to teach at Naropa from 2006 to 2021; teaching meditation to African American divinity students; teaching mindfulness in Chicago to community members working for social justice and on counteracting violence; Black Americans and Buddhism; the significance of Shambhala to him and to Boulder; and the problem of reconciling religious teachings with the reality of abuse by religious individuals.
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Call Number OH3093Date 2022Contents Single recording; 1 hour, 32 minutes, 8 secondsDescription Glenda Strong Robinson describes her family’s history in the American South, including the enslavement of her ancestors, experiences of segregation and discrimination, and the strong involvement of many family members with religion and education. She discusses her college years during the 1960s, including the contrast between attending a historically Black college versus Memphis State where she was racially in the minority, and the larger events that were happening at that time—the civil rights movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the civil rights march in support of the striking sanitation workers in Memphis in which she marched, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. She draws parallels between voting inequalities and civil rights struggles of the 1960s, on the one hand, and those happening at the time of the interview in 2022. She goes on to describe her move to California; the work she did there; meeting her husband, who worked for IBM; and moving with him when IBM transferred him to IBM-Boulder in 1980. She describes settling in Longmont, where she has lived for 42 years. Topics include her children’s schooling, working for Ball Aerospace, race relations in Boulder County, the high quality of life in Boulder County, the family-oriented culture of IBM, storytelling to “bring history to life,” conducting Black history programs and other social justice and religious programs, and work with the NAACP of Boulder County.
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Call Number OH3094Date 2023Contents Single recording; 45 minutes, 27 secondsDescription Stuart Dodd talks about his work with the Indian Peaks Wilderness Alliance (IPWA), an organization that works in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service to preserve and protect the Indian Peaks and James Peak Wilderness Areas. He began as a volunteer with the organization in the mid-1990s—patrolling trails, educating the public, collecting data on usage, and helping to ensure safety—and eventually moved into a leadership role. He discusses the history of the IPWA and his work as board chair for four years. While board chair, the organization defined its mission, increased trail restoration work, established a sawyer certification program, started a winter patrol program, created a scholarship program to fund alpine research by college students, created a student intern program, and created a trailhead host program. Other topics discussed are divergent views of how to manage public lands, the boundaries for usage of wilderness areas set by the Wilderness Act, IPWA as a 100-percent volunteer organization, working with the U.S. Forest Service, the challenges of managing a wilderness area that receives so much usage, working with other wilderness friends’ groups and the National Wilderness Stewardship Alliance as a source of ideas and funding resources, and the challenges inherent in continuing to protect wilderness areas.
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Call Number OH3095Date 2023Contents Single recording; 1 hour, 40 minutes, 11 secondsDescription Jeannette Smith grew up in Denver, spending summers in Nederland, Colorado, where her mother ran the Junior Catholic Daughters Camp for girls. Jeannette rode horses and bicycles with the girls. She met her husband, Mike, when she was twelve and he was fourteen, just before a ten-year drought in Nederland, and she has lived the rest of her life in Nederland. Many Nederland residents worked in the Conger Tungsten Mine until it closed. Nederland lost much of its population after the mines closed. Mike’s father owned a tungsten mill. The mill burned down in 1956 when the few men not in the mine that day were unable to douse the flames. In another incident, Mike was working in the garage of their house when the roof blew off from a gas leak, and he crawled out of the dust like Lazarus. Jeannette talks about racism in Denver during her childhood, in the Jim Crow era. Also discussed is limited medical care in Nederland and its one-man police force. Jimmy Griffin was the only town marshal until an influx of hundreds of hippies living in tents and using drugs required drafting additional marshals to patrol the town. Jeannette tells the story of the Hells Angels being bested by a lone cowboy. Other topics include doing laundry before modern washing machines, severe weather events in Nederland, recreational activities during her and her children’s childhoods, hiking in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, working for the Title 1 program, and the financial difficulties of mining.
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Call Number OH3096Date 2023Contents Single recording; 38 minutes, 27 secondsDescription Marc Sobel and his wife moved to Boulder in 1998, some years after they had retired from careers at IBM. He describes volunteer work he did after moving to Boulder. He and his wife moved into the Frasier Retirement Community at the beginning of 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit Boulder. He describes the pandemic lockdown at Frasier, the protocols that were followed, the relative success of these protocols at keeping people healthy, and his role in developing a Zoom-meeting program to help counteract isolation among residents. He reflects on the ways things changed as more became known about the disease and how different people handled the challenges of the pandemic in different ways. Other topics include social aspects of living at Frasier, Resident Council committees, the national response to managing the pandemic, and the way residents used the Touchtown social media program within Frasier to keep in touch and keep informed.