1125 Pine Street
Boulder, CO 80302
303-441-3110
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Call Number OH3077Date 2022Contents Single recording; 1 hour, 21 minutes, 55 secondsDescription Finn began a career in amateur pool competition as a CU student representing the university and continued to compete regionally after college. She describes the culture of the competitive pool community. She went on to work for the University of Colorado in a variety of administrative roles, starting with the Alumni Association, then working in the Registrar’s Office, and finally for the Athletic Department. She details her work in the Athletic Department business office, which centered around arranging transportation and lodging for the football team’s away games. Other topics include discussion of people who were football coaches and athletic directors over the years, descriptions of student-dominated residential areas in Boulder, and the business and cultural life of Boulder in the late 1970s and 1980s.
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Call Number OH3076Date 2022Contents Single recording; 49 minutes, 46 secondsDescription After working in human capital management for various corporations for 35 years, Carey Mason moved to Boulder four years prior to this interview, worked as a business coach, and this year (2022) became CEO of the Boulder business DEI4BIZ, which helps businesses work on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues. He talks about how he helps businesses move beyond training seminars to incorporate a comprehensive DEI strategy that also strengthens their business objectives as a whole. Other topics include the attitudes of millennial-generation workers, the current labor shortage, the role of the Boulder Chamber of Commerce in encouraging diverse workforces, taking advantage of opportunities to continue to grow in awareness of biases, reasons for employing a professional consultant when undertaking DEI work, and his own motivations for working in this field.
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Call Number OH3075Date 2021Contents Single recording; 29 minutes, 29 secondsDescription Anne Vickery grew up in Colorado where she developed a love for the wilderness, including hiking and camping. She worked with the Colorado Mountain Club; co-founded the Indian Peaks Working Group, later renamed the Indian Peaks Wilderness Alliance; and worked with the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative. She reflects on these involvements, and her daughter Helen adds details about her mother’s work and achievements, including describing some of her mother’s environmental advocacy work through the Colorado Mountain Club, such as opposition to the Two Forks Dam and support of the Clean Air Act.
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Call Number OH3074Date 2021Contents Single recording; 68 minutes, 48 secondsDescription Laura Roettiger had been a volunteer tutor with BoulderReads, an adult literacy program, for three years at the time of this interview. With a background in teaching and previous training as a reading specialist, she brought many relevant skills to her work with BoulderReads. She discusses the differences between teaching reading to children (which she had done previously) versus adults. She illustrates different approaches to teaching literacy through discussion of her work with her current student, who started at a second-grade reading level and now is working on obtaining his GED. She talks about some of the nuts and bolts of how the BoulderReads program works. She also talks about teaching writing skills (in addition to reading), about using accommodations for students with learning disabilities, and she offers tips for other tutors who want to help students succeed. She is a picture-book author and a strong proponent of using picture books in adult literacy programs. She describes a training she provided for BoulderReads about how to use picture books as a tool for teaching adult readers.
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Call Number OH3073Date 2021Contents Single recording; 29 minutes, 48 secondsDescription Angela Maria Ortiz Roa talks about living in the Mapleton Mobile Home Park, where Isabel Sanchez, who works with the non-profit organization The GrowHaus, has established permaculture gardens. She details the difficulties involved in qualifying for a mobile home unit, the high interest rates charged for mobile home loans, and other challenges for those who are seeking affordable housing, such as maintenance and energy costs. She also talks about her work with FLOWS (Foundations for Leaders Organizing for Water and Sustainability), and Boulder Food Rescue, and how that work has dovetailed with accessing resources for the mobile home park’s gardens. She talks about being an immigrant and the importance of building community. She talks about the misconceptions people have about low-income communities and the need for those who design programs for affordable and low-income housing to involve members of the targeted communities in the planning.
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Call Number OH3072Date 2021Contents Single recording; 20 minutes, 51 secondsDescription This oral history was organized and recorded as part of the “Affordable Housing Residents of Boulder Project,” carried out by Cynthia Torres. Seemanta Seemanta describes how she came to be in Boulder and living at her space in the Mapleton Mobile Home Park after having lived in a number of places in pursuit of affordable housing. Seemanta describes what she likes about Boulder—the outdoor activities, being able to get around easily—and what she enjoys about her home, which is comfortable, provides a good quality of life, and has a diverse, friendly community. She also appreciated her job driving a school bus.
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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.
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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 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 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 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 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.