1125 Pine Street
Boulder, CO 80302
303-441-3110
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Call Number OH3059Date 2020Contents Single recording; 68 minutes, 07 secondsDescription Katherine Millersdaughter talks about living in the Ostara Cooperative housing complex, with her two teenage children, during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. As a woman in her 50s with an auto-immune disorder, living in cooperative housing during this time presented special challenges, in terms of protecting her health while living in close proximity to approximately eighteen other people. She discusses how the co-op members approached coming up with pandemic protocols, and the challenges that group living presented. She also discusses the Boulder co-op housing movement in general, including its history, other co-operative houses in Boulder, and the experiences she and her children have had over the years while living in the Ostara Co-op.
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Call Number OH3060Date 2020Contents Single recording; 65 minutes, 52 secondsDescription Crista de la Garza is a 42-year-old massage therapist and yoga instructor who lives in Lafayette, CO. This interview focuses on her new home—which includes her 13-year-old son, a dog, a cat, a conure, and a canary—and changes that have come from the COVID-19 pandemic: changes to her work/profession, changes of pace, and other adaptations. Crista talks about the comfort she feels now, compared to her prior living situation in Boulder, in affordable housing, where she observed increasingly volatile behavior from individuals camping, sleeping, and moving about in areas around her building. From her experience as a board member of Thistle (though not representing Thistle) and her own research, Crista reflects on the issue of homelessness and the complexity of addressing the underlying causes. While still feeling shut out of home ownership in the Boulder area, Crista ultimately is extremely grateful for what she has and the level of stability she and her son enjoy together.
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Call Number OH3061Date 2020Contents Single recording; 68 minutes, 38 secondsDescription Sam Endor, a twenty-one-year-old dishwasher at Trident Café in Boulder, is interviewed about the experience of “home” during the COVID-19 pandemic. In February of 2020, Sam left their parents’ home and moved in with their partner and her family in Longmont. After losing a job due to the pandemic, Sam collected unemployment for a while before starting work at the Trident. Despite a language barrier with their partner’s Spanish-speaking family, Sam describes their new home as a comfortable place where Sam has felt able to grow into their identity as non-binary in a way that they couldn’t at their parents’ home. Sam discusses the challenges of being quarantined with their partner and her school-age sister, who suddenly had to do online school. Generally, Sam feels lucky compared to others who lost relationships, weren’t able to get unemployment, or are missing social interactions. Sam talks about the ways they have been able to find space in a full house by doing artwork, taking online classes, and drinking a lot of tea, which is a particularly comforting ritual. Sam also stresses a love for their work, particularly the customer service aspect. They close out the interview by talking about a deeply impactful experience volunteering with Boulder SAFE [Safe Access For Everyone] and advocating for Boulder’s homeless community who were being evicted from camps by the police.
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Call Number OH3062Date 2020Contents Single recording; 51 minutes, 34 secondsDescription Yolanda Lopez had been homeless in Boulder for two-plus years and had just obtained an apartment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Boulder County in the spring of 2020. As a formerly homeless person with many ties to people in that community, Yolanda speaks about the experience of being homeless and being on the financial edge during the pandemic. She talks about how the pandemic has negatively affected her—as the house-cleaning jobs she had before the pandemic dried up—and about the isolation of being far from her family in Durango during a time when travel by public transportation is risky. She also speaks positively about assistance she has received through a mentoring program, a peer-to-peer counseling program, and a housing voucher program that helped her get back on her feet and fulfill her goals of helping others. She reflects on the good aspects of services in Boulder County for people who are homeless, and she notes the places in which those services fall short, especially during the pandemic.
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Call Number OH3063Date 2021Contents Single recording; 58 minutes, 13 secondsDescription Anne Dyni talks about moving to Boulder County after buying farmland at Valmont and 95th Street in 1978. She recalls the beginning and development of the Maria Rogers Oral History Program and her friendship with Maria Rogers. She talks about the interviews she did for MROHP and for the Boulder County Parks and Open Space department, some of her most interesting interviews, and how the stories she heard while recording these oral histories inspired her to write numerous books about pioneer schools in Boulder County, Boulder County agriculture, and the history of the county. She discusses the preservation of open space, the history and historic preservation of Niwot, and her volunteer service on the Boulder County Parks and Open Space Advisory Committee and the Boulder County Historic Preservation Advisory Board.
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Call Number OH3064Date 2021Contents Single recording; 59 minutes, 20 secondsDescription Helen Davis talks about how her career was jump-started by the absence of men on the home front during WWII. She describes her job as Coordinator of Art for Boulder Valley Schools in the 1970s. She speaks about how she dealt with feminism, sexual harassment and male domination. She was one of the original organizers of the Handweavers’ Guild of Boulder, and she talks about how that organization worked with Boulder’s schools. Helen also talks about the gallery at the Boulder Library and the building of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. In addition, she recalls aspects of her childhood in the 1920s and 1930s, including having had smallpox and other diseases of the time, and compares that time to the COVID pandemic that was happening at the time of this interview.
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Call Number OH3066Date 2021Contents Single audio file; 2 hours, 02 minutes, 05 secondsDescription Diana Sherry talks about the founding, development, and accomplishments of the BoulderReads adult literacy program, which she ran for twenty-six years. She details some of the specific subprograms and events that she and her staff developed over the years, which contributed to the program’s success: GED classes, literacy tutoring for jail inmates, the Picturing Writing program for adult-literacy students at the library and at the jail, Reading Progress Celebrations, Discoveries publications, Reading Buddies, Read to the Dog, the Outstanding Adult Learner Award, and the Janet Driscoll Turner Award. She tells many inspiring, illuminating stories about BoulderReads students. She praises the institutional support the BoulderReads program received from the Boulder Public Library, the Boulder Library Foundation, the Boulder County Commissioners, and a variety of foundations. She also calls attention to the tremendous support of BoulderReads staff members, volunteers (including some she mentions by name), former library director Marcelee Gralapp, former Library Foundation president Doris Hass, and others. She discusses both the pedagogical approaches that BoulderReads has used as well as the fundraising challenges and techniques that contributed to keeping the program going and growing. She also talks about the impact of the Boulder Rotary Club, which sponsored the Outstanding Adult Learner award and worked with Diana Sherry to bring Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library program to Boulder.
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Call Number OH3067Date 2021Contents Single recording; 40 minutes, 15 secondsDescription Micaela Lozano De Ortiz was born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and an American father. She has lived in the United States since 1980 and is 72 years old at the time of this interview. She talks about the decision to immigrate from Mexico to the United States, how it changed her life, and about the education of her six children. She discusses the challenges for her family of making the transition from Mexican culture to American culture and some of the reasons that learning English has been important for her. Through the BoulderReads program, she worked for many years with a tutor to improve her English and earn a GED. She describes some of her favorite BoulderReads/library programs, such as book discussion groups and a group that included painting and writing poetry, and talks about the importance of the tutors that work with BoulderReads students. She talks about working as a janitor for the University of Colorado for 25 years, and volunteer work that she does for Sacred Heart of Jesus Church, coordinating Hispanic catechism classes and helping with English to Spanish translation.
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Call Number OH3068Date 2021Contents Single recording; 45 minutes, 32 secondsDescription Lisa Klein talks about volunteering with the BoulderReads program, a Boulder Public Library adult literacy program that has been in existence since 1986. She had previously volunteered with Literacy Volunteers of America (LVA) in the northeast part of the country before moving to Boulder County and starting to work with BoulderReads in 1992. She talks about students she tutored and the long-term friendships that they developed. She describes teaching techniques, challenges, and satisfactions of tutoring for BoulderReads, which involved a combination of literacy and English as a Second Language tutoring because her students were immigrants. She also describes working through the BoulderReads program as a math tutor with women prisoners at the Boulder County jail who were pursuing a GED.
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Call Number OH3069Date 2021Contents Single recording; 1 hour, 15 minutes, 38 secondsDescription Laurie Watkins talks about her work with the BoulderReads program, where she first worked as a volunteer tutor and then as a paid administrator from 1996 until 2016. She describes her role as administrator, discusses the economic structure of the program and how it evolved, and details the many sub-programs that BoulderReads offered in addition to one-on-one tutoring, such as GED programs, tutoring in the Boulder County jail, the Reading Buddies program, the Read to the Dog program, the Picturing Writing program and others. She stresses the individualization of the program, which is oriented toward meeting student-defined goals. She talks about change in the program over time from mostly serving native-English speakers to serving many ESL students. She ends by describing the Boulder Library Home Delivery program for which she has volunteered since retiring.
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Call Number OH3070Date 2021Contents Single recording; 50 minutes, 54 secondsDescription Eleanor Kalejs talks about working from 1999 to 2014 as the tutor/student coordinator for the BoulderReads literacy program. She discusses training tutors in literacy education methods, matching tutors and students, what motivated students to want to improve their literacy skills, how BoulderReads met their needs, and the transition to working extensively with second language learners. Other topics include reading, writing, and ESL proficiency assessments; specific programs that BoulderReads implemented, and her reflections about the importance of the program and the ways in which working for it was satisfying for her.
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Call Number OH3071Date 2021Contents Single recording; 42 minutes, 47 secondsDescription Oradan Barlow grew up in a Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints family, living in Utah, Colorado, Texas, and North Dakota, before he left the church in 2015 at the age of 19 and moved to Boulder County. As a child he was largely homeschooled, and as a young adult, he realized that he wanted to have better reading skills. He briefly became a BoulderReads student in 2015. After leaving the program for a while, he recommitted to studying through BoulderReads and the Boulder Valley Family Literacy Program in 2019, not only to improve his reading skills but also to complete his GED. Having started at about a third-grade reading level, at the time of this interview he was close to obtaining his GED. He talks about challenges and accomplishments in his life; strategies he used in life before he became more skilled at reading; his experiences with BoulderReads and the Family Literacy programs, including the many services and supports that the organizations provided for him; adapting to online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic; his work experience and future goals; what his hobbies of skydiving and snowboarding have taught him about life in general; and his appreciation of what it means to him to be able to read better.