He will see drama, all right—compelling acting, plaintive expressions and emotional outbursts from an ensemble cast that might include the likes of Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Kevin Durant.

Indeed, the plays Wishmier will watch have occurred in recent NBA games and are awaiting his judgment of disputed referees’ calls.

Wishmier (BSBA ’72), who was a 6-4 shooting guard for the Pioneers, is integral to what the NBA calls its team inquiry website, or TIW.

“Teams are allowed to ask questions about plays,” Wishmier says, “whether a call is made or whether a call is not made. I have access to the video on every game that’s played. It shows the regular television angle and usually two or three alternate angles, such as baseline angles, overhead angles. I interpret the play and give the team an agree or disagree ruling.”

The NBA began playing a shortened 66-game schedule on Christmas, the result of a lockout that ran from July 1–Dec. 8. In mid-July the league laid off 114 employees, including Wishmier, who was one of three group supervisors responsible for the oversight of the NBA’s 60 referees. Wishmier been in that post for eight years.

“They basically eliminated the position,” Wishmier says. “Fortunately, I was the only group supervisor to be rehired. So I’m hoping it leads to something bigger and better next year. I actually really enjoy [the TIW job], but I like the interpersonal relationships of dealing with referees on a daily basis better.”

While laid off last summer, Wishmier started exploring avenues within college basketball. Ed T. Rush, the NBA director who hired Wishmier, does frequent consulting work with the Pac-12 Conference. He enlisted Wishmier to evaluate every play in assigned games and chart the calls made by the refs.

Wishmier, formerly a referee in the NBA and in two defunct minor leagues, the Continental Basketball Association and the World Basketball League, works out of his home in Aurora, Colo. His office is equipped with a 42-inch high-definition television, and five DVRs enable Wishmier to record all the NBA games on any given day. With remote control in hand, Wishmier will look at a play, stop the action, hit rewind and repeat the process until he has arrived at clarity.

Was that a charging foul on the offensive player going toward the basket or a blocking foul by the defender trying to stop him and theatrically flopping to the floor? Three-second violation by the offensive player? Defensive three-second violation? Did the defender impede the offensive player without the ball, bumping him off course?

“It’s all across the board,” Wishmier says of the plays that reach him. “I’m probably spending eight to 10 hours a day reviewing plays in my office at home. I have no time restrictions other than my self-imposed ones. I don’t want anything to sit for more than 24 hours on my desk.”

Already this season, Wishmier has detected a pattern. Six teams are sending in about 90 percent of the plays for TIW review. Understandably, Wishmier prefers not to publicly name those teams.

Wishmier submits his decisions to Joe Borgia, the NBA’s vice president of referee operations. If Borgia agrees with Wishmier’s judgment and his written analysis of the play, Borgia marks it as approved. An email response goes directly to the team filing the complaint, although upon completion of this process, any team in the league can examine all plays that were reviewed.

Wishmier says Borgia disagreed with just two of Wishmier’s first 195 rulings. In those cases, Wishmier says, members from the referee operations and basketball operations departments in the league office in New York examine the play and reach a conclusion by vote.

Regardless of Wishmier’s success rate, with the game over and the result final, what satisfaction does the TIW process bring a team whose complaint is upheld, particularly a team that lost?

“That’s a good question,” Wishmier says. “I don’t know what satisfaction they get out of that. First of all, you have to understand that teams are paranoid with referees and umpires. So for the NBA to admit that an official missed a play, it must give the teams some sort of satisfaction. I don’t know.”

Jay Kemmerer. Photo courtesy Jackson Hole Mountain Resort

Though they both earned BSBA degrees from DU in 1970, the top executives at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, Jerry Blann and Jay Kemmerer, never met on campus during their undergraduate years.

Blann was an All-American on the ski team that won three national championships during his four years at DU. Kemmerer, meanwhile, transferred to DU to study finance and hung out with friends on the hockey team.

Their collaboration at Jackson Hole began in 1995, when Kemmerer hired Blann to run the mountain resort his family had purchased in 1993. Sixteen years later, Blann and Kemmerer are still at it.

“Jerry is a leader and a great speaker,” says Kemmerer, 64. “I’m more behind the scenes, involved in strategic planning. Jerry’s out front, while I lie in the weeds.”

That arrangement has worked well for the pair, who have built Jackson Hole into one of North America’s top resorts — serving skiers and snowboard riders in the fall, winter and spring and providing a welcome destination for those who like to spend their summers high in the Tetons near Yellowstone National Park.

Kemmerer’s family, which had been involved in mining since the late 19th century, decided to invest in Jackson Hole after selling its Wyoming coal operation. At the time, the resort was enmeshed in litigation, and the sale to the Kemmerers helped resolve the dispute.

“We were quite fortunate to sell the coal business at that time,” Kemmerer says. “We had become involved in the state, and we wanted to try to give back. And we’ve continued to build the resort.”

That includes installing a new $31 million Doppelmeyer tram in 2008; it takes skiers and riders from its base to the summit — at 10,450 feet — in under 10 minutes. Kemmerer has invested an additional $11 million since 2008 in additional resort improvements.

“The framework was there when we bought the resort; we just needed to spiff it up,” says Kemmerer, who transferred to DU during his junior year from Clarkson College in upstate New York. “It was old and broken down. Then Jerry came in, and we’ve nurtured it along.”

Blann, 63, arrived in Jackson Hole to continue a career in skiing that began during his childhood at Mount Bachelor in Bend, Ore., where his father managed the ski area. At age 10, he was painting lift towers. By 14 he was cutting down trees along the trails, and before long, his summers were filled with blasting tree stumps, digging footings for ski-lift towers or painting chairlifts.

His love for ski racing brought him to DU, where he skied on the team that won the NCAA national championship in 1967, 1969 and 1970. He placed second in downhill and third in slalom in the NCAA championship at Steamboat in 1969.

“Skiing in college is a team sport, and it’s important you finish the race,” Blann recalls. “I seldom got knocked down.”

He majored in business, which helped launch him into the ski industry. He was accepted for a management-training slot at Aspen. He stayed there for 18 years, rising up through the hierarchy to become the resort’s president from 1984–88.

Blann spent the next five years as president of Bear Mountain in California before returning to Colorado to help launch Lake Catamount, a new resort slated for construction near Steamboat. But the plan fell apart, and Kemmerer recruited Blann to Jackson Hole in 1995.

2010 was Jackson Hole’s second busiest year, with about 480,000 skier days. That season’s snowfall of 558 inches, coupled with the resort’s dedication to improved guest services, also made it the resort’s most profitable year, Blann says.

Jerry Blann. Photo courtesy Jackson Hole Mountain Resort

“We found ways to be more efficient,” Blann says. “And good snow helps.”

Both Blann and Kemmerer say they find time for skiing, especially on those powder days when the light, white stuff sets up knee-deep on a crisp morning. Kemmerer, who calls himself a “C-plus skier,” will take the tram to the summit and make his way down to the Grand, which runs under the Thunder lift.

“It’s a very sweet run,” says Kemmerer. “Everybody has his own little stash.”

Blann, meanwhile, still has his carving chops from his racing days and likes the challenge of what he calls Jackson Hole’s “high-testosterone terrain.” From atop the gondola, he’ll take a run down Sundance, get on Casper and seek out his favorite powder stashes in the Moran Woods. Later, he may dip into Tower Tree Chutes or try his legs on the Alta Chutes.

Jackson Hole already has welcomed more than 16 feet of snow this season, with more to come before spring. Blann is gearing up for the fun.

“I ski three times a week, for an hour or two, to see what’s going on,” Blann says. “I still really like the powder.”

Courtney Mitchell, left, and her partner, Sarah Welton, made history in June when they became the first lesbian couple to publicly wed in Nepal. Photo courtesy of Courtney Mitchell

It’s not so unusual that Courtney Mitchell, who served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, would want to return to the country for her wedding. But Mitchell and her partner, Sarah Welton, made history in June when they became the first lesbian couple to publicly wed in Nepal.

“What I had hoped was that this would be a good opportunity to have our wedding be a meaningful experience politically … and at the same time get to show Sarah Nepal,” says Mitchell, an instructor in DU’s Graduate School of Professional Psychology. “I lived there for six years and it was very important to me, so I knew I would take her back at some point and I also knew we wanted to get married at some point, so it seemed like a perfect combination in terms of the opportunity.”

The wedding was organized and publicized by the Blue Diamond Society, a Nepal-based gay-rights organization run by Sunil Babu Pant, a gay Nepalese lawmaker Mitchell met during her Peace Corps service. Through his Pink Mountain Travels, Pant hopes to encourage the adoption of same-sex marriage laws in Nepal by packaging the issue as a tourism initiative.

“He basically said, ‘Look, we can capitalize on all this tourism money Bangkok and other big hubs in the region receive because they are known as being gay-friendly and really make Nepal this regional model for being welcoming to same sex couples and more specifically being supportive of same sex marriage,’” Mitchell says, noting that Nepal has made significant progress in sexual-minority rights in recent years.

Held at Dakshinkali Temple, a popular Hindu shrine on the outskirts of Kathmandu, and performed by a Hindu priest, the ceremony hewed to Nepalese customs, with traditional music, clothing and food. Mitchell says it was important to the couple to show their respect for the Nepali culture. She hopes her wedding will inspire same-sex couples and lawmakers in Nepal and elsewhere to keep pushing for same-sex marriage rights.

“The important thing is the implications for Nepal,” she says. “I hope that people in the States would understand and appreciate why we chose to do what we did, but what matters more to me and will always matter more is the perception of Nepalis in terms of what we did and the implications for local sexual minority rights.”

Mitchell and Welton have considered making their union official in Iowa, where gay marriage is legal, but for now they’re waiting to see how things shake out in Colorado. They have an adopted daughter — all the more reason, Mitchell says, to be considered a legitimate married couple. They hired a private attorney to help with domestic beneficiary forms, joint property agreements and the like, but it isn’t the same, she says, as being officially married.

“It’s deeply disturbing to me that we couldn’t be perceived as a legitimate married couple in the state of Colorado,” she says. “I do believe that marriage is meaningful in terms of the spiritual and religious connotations and people having that choice to participate in a spiritual ceremony, as opposed to just having a beneficiary form or something comparable.”

Roger Salters

Longtime DU engineering Professor Roger Salters died at his home on Jan. 13, 2012. He was 72. Salters had been under treatment for prostate cancer since October.

Salters was born in Switzer, S.C., on Aug. 5, 1939. He was born into a military family and spent his early years in Virginia, Philadelphia and other locales where his father was stationed. At age 17 he joined the United States Air Force, completing high school while in the service. He received a BS in electrical engineering from Colorado State University in 1968. He earned a master of science in electrical engineering (MSEE) from Northeastern University in Boston in 1971, focusing on communications theory and information theory, and a PhD from the University of New Mexico in 1985 with a concentration in control systems. Before coming to DU in 1987, Salters served as a senior staff engineer with the National Systems and Research Co., which provided support to the Air Force Space Command and NORAD. He also worked for Martin Marietta and the Aerospace Defense Command and taught at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. While at DU he was director of the MSEE program. He also supervised students in the robotics laboratory and served on the faculty senate.

Over the years Salters enthusiastically taught many courses related to his areas of expertise. He never retired, teaching right up until the final days of his illness.

“Roger was a vibrant instructor,” says Al Rosa, professor emeritus and former chair of the engineering department. “I could assign him just about any course and he would never complain. He loved to teach and he was quite good at it. He had a special love for helping students — a quality very much respected at the Air Force Academy that he took with him to DU. He would very often agree to teach a course for just one or two students without pay because he strongly believed that every student needed all the help possible for them to succeed.”

DU alumnus Elliott Martin was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in New York on Jan. 30.

Famed Broadway producer and Tony Award winner Elliot Martin, who attended the University of Denver from 1943–46, was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in New York on Jan. 30.

Martin studied theater under one of DU’s most noted professors, Camden Bell. Instead of completing his bachelor’s degree, Martin followed Bell’s advice to get to New York — and fast.

“He called me into his office one day and told me to leave for New York immediately because there’d be 45,000 GIs all heading to there to go into theater,” Martin says. “And he was absolutely right.”

Martin says four weeks after he landed in the Big Apple he had to compete against 3,000 other men — many of them soldiers who had returned to the states at the end of World War II — for a part in the renowned musical Oklahoma!

“There was a line around the block; I looked like a real hayseed and all the GIs looked great with their slicked-back hair,” Martin says.

But Martin won a part. The pay? Just $55 a week.

What followed was a prodigious career as an actor, stage manager and producer. Martin has been involved in some 50 Broadway productions since 1949. He won a special Tony Award for Moon for the Misbegotten in 1973.

He’s also a Tony award nominee as producer for A Touch of the Poet, Angels Fall, American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Circle, Shadowlands and She Loves Me.

Martin says he learned a lot from Bell: “He was a wonderful professor, and he gave us a great basic grounding of theater in body language, presence and the whole thing.”

He also has praise for DU’s theater department. “It has wonderful equipment,” he says. “I walked through it a couple of years ago and it’s got a lot going for it.”

His advice for students looking to choose a career: “If they want to go into theater, by all means, go. If they have to ask me if they should go, I’d say no, don’t go. They have to have a passion. Wild horses couldn’t keep them from going if that’s their passion. If there are any questions, they should be when to go or how do you go.”

Martin joins extraordinary company in the hall of fame, including Fred Astaire, Samuel Beckett, W.C. Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, Helen Hayes, James Earl Jones, Eugene O’Neill and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

His name joined those and others when it was etched into the Gershwin Theatre in New York as part of his hall of fame induction. Terry Hodge Taylor, executive producer of the American Theater Hall of Fame, says Martin’s induction was long overdue.

“He was selected due to his enormous 60-plus years of producing on Broadway,” Taylor says. “He’s the last of the great gentlemen producers.”

The Theater Hall of Fame was founded in 1971 to honor those who’ve made outstanding contributions to American theater. Nominees must have a minimum of five major credits and 25 years in the Broadway theater. Inductees are voted on by the American Theater Critics Association and theater hall of fame members.

Benjamin Funk

Retired U.S. Air Force Major Gen. Ben Funk, a commanding officer in World War II and a key figure in developing America’s ballistic missile program and launching the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft, died Jan. 21—three months before his 99th birthday—at his home in Long Beach, Calif.

Born Ben Ivan Funk in Wray, Colo., on April 21, 1913, he entered the University of Denver in 1932. After experiencing the thrill of flying in a Fokker Trimotor during a fraternity event, Ben decided to leave college to become a pilot, entering the Army Air Corps flight school in 1935 and earning his wings in 1936 at Randolph-Kelly Field in Texas.

In 1939, on a tour of Paramount Studios in Hollywood, Ben met Judy King, a young actress who became his wife and lifelong love until her death in 1994. They are survived by their two children, Judith Funk Albert and John Christian Funk.

At the beginning of World War II, Ben flew numerous missions in his B-24 bomber, nicknamed “Bag of Bolts,” to evacuate American and British citizens from the Philippines and Java. Returning to the U.S. during the war, Ben played a pivotal role in improving the B-17 and B-24 and developing the B-29 Superfortress. In 1945, then-Col. Funk led a group of 2,000 men in 45 B-29s to Okinawa for the bombing of Japan.

In 1948, Ben earned a bachelor of science degree from the Air Force Institute of Technology. He graduated from the advanced management program at Harvard Business School in 1949. From 1951-54, having earned his first star, Ben commanded Erding Air Depot in southern Germany. It was there that Ben and Judy conceived “Operation Christmas,” a U.S. military program that provided gifts and meals to thousands of war orphans throughout Bavaria.

As commander of the Ballistic Missile Center in Los Angeles from 1956 to 1960, Ben supported the development of America’s first generation of ballistic missiles, the intermediate-range Thor and the long-range Atlas. He was the recipient of the first Missile Badge in 1958 and was promoted to major general in 1959.

Ben completed his career as commander of the Space Systems Division in Los Angeles from 1962 to 1966. His teams at Vandenberg Air Force Base and Cape Canaveral carried out missile launches at a rate that remains unsurpassed. Gen. Funk oversaw the development of the Titan III, which launched not only communications and military satellites, but also the Mercury and Gemini manned spacecraft. For these accomplishments, he received NASA’s Space Achievement Award from President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

After retiring from the Air Force in 1966, Ben went on to 10 years as an executive at Lockheed Missiles and Space Corporation. After fully retiring, Ben and Judy enjoyed time traveling with their grandchildren throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico by Airstream trailer and on Princess Line cruises.

In the last 10 years of his life, Ben shared a home in Long Beach with his daughter Judy and her husband, Charlie Albert. During most of those years, Ben was able to travel and visit with his family, including his grandchildren, Cathy Schufreider, Christopher Cale, Matthew Funk, Allison Funk Fleischman, Jeff Albert and Karen Albert Radford. His other grandchild, Jennifer Funk Volpe, died in 2001. He is also survived by his great-grandchildren, Daniel, Emily, Madeleine, Natalie, Sarah and Jackson.

Ben Funk will be remembered as an honorable gentleman who lived up to his own advice: “Find something in life that you love to do.” His passion was flying, and he was able to be a pilot one last time in 2005, when, at the age of 92, he flew a PBY Catalina over the hills of southern England.

Memorial services are pending. In lieu of flowers, donations can be sent to the Alzheimer’s Association at www.alz.org or P.O. Box 96011, Washington, D.C. 20090-6011, or the University of Denver, Chancellor’s Innovation Fund at P.O. Box 910585, Denver, CO 80291-0585.

MP Mueller is the founder of Austin-based advertising firm Door Number 3. Photo courtesy of MP Mueller

Growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, DU alumna Mary Pat Mueller (BA ’83) learned how to upholster a simple story at a young age.

It’s a hazard of small-town life. When your setting lacks hustle and bustle, Mueller says, “you have to channel a part of yourself that knows how to make life more interesting.”

Start with the name. She’s known as MP to her friends, which is short, they’ll tell you, for “mostly punctual.” Only her parents invoke the first and middle names, and then, she says, “you know you’re in trouble.” Either way, there’s a story there.

In the two and a half decades since she claimed her DU degree, Mueller has plotted her personal story with a dose of determination and an eye for serendipity. She has peddled jokes as a stand-up comedian, taken up hay farming, blogged about business and marketing for The New York Times and launched her own company, an Austin-based boutique advertising firm known as Door Number 3.

In addition, she has tussled with breast cancer, survived a divorce and raised two children. If she knew way back when what she knows now — well, she probably wouldn’t have done much differently.

Her career kicked off with a soothsayer’s prognostication. After studying communications and public policy at DU, she landed a job in Corpus Christi, working as “a glorified administrative assistant.” Casting about for something more challenging, she sought advice from outside her family circle.

“I actually went to see a Mexican card reader, called a curandera, because I had no rudder,” she recalls. The curandera recommended that Mueller move to Austin, where she would — so the cards foretold — meet her husband and find fulfilling work.

For Mueller, the next step was obvious. “In the absence of any other direction, I said, ‘why not?’”

Once in Austin, she landed work handling advertising for an international contract research organization. That gave her the confidence to open her agency, named for the famous prize-concealing closed door on television’s “Let’s Make A Deal.”

With a host of awards to its credit and a client list that includes the Alamo, Habitat for Humanity and the Texas Rangers baseball team, Door No. 3 prides itself on “insight-driven storytelling.” As Mueller puts it, “One of our pillars is to give clients things they don’t think to ask for.”

Consider the case of Texas-based Cow Wow, purveyor of a liquid compost made from bovine excrement. Among other things, Cow Wow promises a green way to green grass. When the company approached Door No. 3 about developing a “different” campaign, the agency’s brain trust skedaddled all over the creative map.

“We could do giant chias,” Mueller says, reconstructing the Cow Wow brainstorming session. “What kind of chias? Well, there’s an election coming up.”

And so they arrived at a hare-brained scheme to produce 6-foot terra cotta heads of the two gubernatorial contenders. Each would sprout its own luxuriant crop, treated with Cow Wow and groomed to resemble the candidate’s do. One of the candidates happened to be the carefully coifed Rick Perry, nicknamed Governor Goodhair by the same Texas wag who once dubbed George W. Bush “Shrub.”

The chia “heads of state” were ferried from one event to another, earning notice from such faraway observers as The Village Voice. The promotion culminated with a vote to determine which chia pate could lay claim to the better head of hair. The Perry locks went down to defeat, though the terra cotta planter was later listed on eBay for $4,500.

Leslie Hearne, founder of Cow Wow and its self-proclaimed grand poo-bah, credits Mueller with delivering a campaign that reinforced her company’s essence — “which is not normal, and that’s the way I like it.”

Sure, Hearne says, the market is home to thousands of fertilizers, but only one Cow Wow. A conventional marketing campaign simply would not have expressed the product’s singularity. At one point, Hearne adds, she succumbed to second thoughts and canceled the campaign, fearing it lacked long-term branding appeal. But a conversation with Mueller restored her courage.

And she’s never regretted the green light she gave the effort. To date, the campaign hasn’t translated into revenue growth, but the product’s name recognition has increased significantly. “We got the notoriety,” Hearne says. “A lot of people now know about Cow Wow.”

In its 17 years of existence, Door No. 3 has parlayed its make of strategic goofiness into annual sales of $8 million and into campaigns that “reinvigorate brands.” For example, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, a project for the Austin Humane Society transformed the nonprofit’s storytelling from grim to chipper. Where once the society trafficked in downbeat tales of animal abuse and neglect, a new campaign emphasizes the joys of pet ownership. The shift paid off for the society, with donations on the increase, adoptions on the rise and new volunteers clamoring to lend a hand.

Mueller attributes such success to her firm’s creative culture and its disciplined approach to storytelling. Designers and copywriters are allowed to pursue the wildest ideas they can conjure, but they’re held in check by rigorous adherence to a “creative brief,” a document outlining marketing objectives.

Mueller believes so fervently in the power of creative storytelling that she surrenders to it even in her personal life. Take the acquisition of her ranch. Seven years ago, she participated in a cancer therapy and recovery program that asked her to write her own obituary. When she reviewed her postmortem, she was amazed to stumble upon the following sentence: “MP enjoyed spending time at her ranch and riding her horse named Buck.”

What ranch? What horse? Not a word of that was true, she says, “but it just flowed out of me.” And so, a few years later, convinced that her preliminary obituary was really prophecy, she purchased a spread in the Texas hill country.

“We farm hay,” she explains, launching into yet another story. Well, if the truth be told, not we exactly. A hired farmer plants and sows. As for Mueller: “I make him cookies,” she says.

Former DU gymnast Lauren Garan returns to campus Sunday to raise money for the Take Steps for Crohn's and Colitis Walk. Photo: Rich Clarkson

Lauren Garan says she was “a stocky little gymnast” when she was last in Denver. That was during a brief visit in July, shortly after she received her MS in advertising management at DU and a few months before the ulcerative colitis she had dealt with for 12 years suddenly raged, necessitating two major surgeries. A third — and if she is fortunate, the last — is still to come.

“At one point I was emaciated, sick-looking, 107 pounds,” says Garan, who is 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 152 pounds when she competed on the balance beam and vault for the Pioneers. “I’ve gone back to looking like a healthy girl. But people don’t look at me and say, ‘Oh, she must have been that high-caliber gymnast.’ I kind of just blend in the crowd now.”

Maybe in the Boston area, where Garan moved in August, eager to begin life after DU before getting swept up in a medical maelstrom. But not in Denver and never at DU, where she returns this weekend to host a fundraising brunch from 10:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Jan. 15 at the Crimson and Gold Tavern, 2017 S. University Blvd., for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America.

“I’m really worried about giving hugs, because of what’s on my stomach,” Garan says, referring to an ileostomy bag, the result of an Oct. 28 surgery when 90 percent of her colon was removed. “I give awkward hugs. But I feel I’m going to spend the majority of the brunch running around and just hugging everyone and saying so many thank-yous.”

Garan, who also received a BA in communications from DU in 2009, was 12 when she was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. She says she never researched her disease or talked openly about it. At DU, Garan told gymnastics coach Melissa Kutcher-Rinehart, as well as Julie Campbell, DU’s director of sports medicine, and medical adviser Girish Paranjape. Some of Garan’s former teammates were aware she had ulcerative colitis; most weren’t.

“Everyone just knew I had a stomach condition,” Garan says. “We never really went into details. There were definitely days I walked into practice and just didn’t ever think I was going to be able to do anything. I was so competitive in nature that even when I wasn’t feeling well, I don’t think I ever missed a practice.”

Garan had every reason to think her health would not hold her back when she left DU last summer. A colonoscopy in August 2010 showed 6 percent of her colon was infected, which had been the case for 12 years.

“I never once had a discussion with my gastroenterologist that I would one day be removing my entire colon,” she says.

Garan moved to the Boston area on Aug. 1. While searching for a job in marketing, she began working in retail for Lululemon Athletica, which sells yoga wear. Garan began doing yoga often and developed a “really intense pain under my left ribs.” She assumed she had pulled a muscle, nothing more.

When the pain continued during a trip home to Greenwich, Conn., in September, Garan decided to visit Neda Khagan, her long-time gastroenterologist. Khagan’s initial concern was that the disease had not just spread in Garan’s large intestine but might now be in her small intestine, meaning Garan would be suffering not just from ulcerative colitis but also from Crohn’s disease.

“My small intestine was clean and perfectly fine,” Garan says. “So we were all relieved and thought everything was great. But unfortunately (Khagan) did find that in my large intestine, the disease had spread from 6 percent to at that point 89 percent of my colon.”

Garan, in so much pain she was forced to go to an emergency room, soon learned her colon had become 98 percent infected. She underwent two surgeries in a 53-day period, opting for a prosthetic rectum because she went from a 6- to 98-percent infection so quickly, putting her on track to develop colorectal cancer.

“A hospital is the most humbling place you could ever spend time,” Garan says. “As much pain as I was in and what I was going through, I would walk around the halls and look around me, and it made me feel so fortunate even in the worst of circumstances because I’m getting the chance to get better, I’m getting the chance to have surgeries.”

This week should be joyful for Garan. She will arrive in Denver late Friday night after vacationing for five days in the Bahamas. Garan will participate in the Take Steps for Crohn’s and Colitis Walk May 19 in Las Vegas. She has raised about $3,500 for the event, which aims to find cures for these digestive diseases, and she anticipates adding to that total at her brunch on Sunday.

“I’m not hooked up to IVs anymore,” Garan says. “I’m going to walk there on two feet, going to be tan from my trip. So I just can’t wait.”

Terence Tarr retired from DU in 1991. Photo: File

Terence Tarr was generous to his friends and displayed his gourmet cooking skills at dinner parties he co-hosted. He loved the opera, enjoyed gardening, rooted avidly for the Denver Broncos and helped breed five generations of Norwegian elk hounds.

While certainly no penny pincher, Tarr was nonetheless rather frugal when it came to himself. And that’s understandable, since Tarr — a former DU history professor who died on Dec. 10 in Santa Fe, N.M., at the age of 76 — was born in 1935. He was a child of the Depression and grew up on a dairy farm in Everson, Wash. — a dot on the map in the northwestern portion of the state, less than 10 miles from the Canadian border.

Tarr’s thrifty ways held sway right up until his death from a recurrence of lung cancer, 12 years after he underwent surgery for the disease. When Michael Pulman, another former DU history professor and Tarr’s partner since 1972, called the hospital to check on Tarr, a nurse told Pulman, “He’s just had a CAT scan, but he didn’t want to do it.”

“And I said, ‘Why not?’”

“And she said, ‘Well, he didn’t want to have to pay for it.’”

“And I said, ‘Well, just remind him he’s not going to have to pay for it. He’s covered by insurance.’”

At DU, Tarr taught the history of Latin America, Spain and Portugal. He received his bachelor’s degree from Washington State University in 1957 and then went to the University of Florida for his master’s degree (1958) and his PhD (1960). After two years as an assistant professor at the University of Mississippi, Tarr began a 28-year teaching career at DU in 1963.

When he decided to take early retirement in 1991, Tarr received a letter from Roscoe Hill, former dean of DU’s Divisions of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Hill gently voiced his displeasure about Tarr’s departure.

“I wish to repeat that I have very mixed feelings about this proposed early retirement: while I am wholly committed to helping you achieve what you wish, I will miss you here at the University,” Hill wrote. “It seems that we have worked together forever on various Phi Beta Kappa activities, and I have oftentimes gratefully relied on your wise counsel in that and other arenas. This place will not be the same without you.”

Tarr and Pulman built a house at 2620 S. Fillmore St. in 1972–73 and lived there until they moved to Santa Fe in 1991. They entertained at the residence, which Pulman says came to be “regarded as the history department’s party house.” The home had a large dining room that seated 14. Dinner parties were frequent, Pulman says, and Tarr always did the cooking.

“Terry was never happier than when he had fed a lot of people and he could retire to the kitchen and just putter around in his kitchen,” says Cathy Gronquist, a Santa Fe resident who received her BA and MBA from DU in the late 1970s and along with her husband, Guy, was very close to Tarr. They remained so, visiting back and forth, during the 30 years she and Guy lived in London.

“He wasn’t a big crowd person, but yet he loved to feed people,” she says.

Mary Kime, who taught at DU’s Lamont School of Music from 1969–90 and lives in Santa Fe, says she got to know Tarr well during their involvement in a now-defunct DU program that operated under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“I don’t know that he ever got terribly indignant,” Kime says. “I think he had a broad perspective about people and giving people (their) just due and recognition. He was a tolerant kind of guy. It was very much a pleasure to be around him. Thoughtful and kind. I never heard him make a mean comment about somebody. He was very forgiving of people’s idiosyncrasies.”

Pulman says, “I think anybody will tell you that he was one of the most lovable people that they’ve ever known. The very idea of confrontation was anathema to him. He bent over backwards to see the best in people, and that made him many, many friends.”

One of those friends was Tom Lohman, who in an e-mail to Pulman after Tarr’s death described himself as an “unfocused youth” seeking “some purpose” when he encountered Tarr at DU in the mid-1980s. Lohman wrote of Tarr, “I remember him as a man blessed with intelligence, enthusiasm and wit. He was one of the finest and kindest men I met in my life.”

Tarr and Pulman made annual visits to hear the Santa Fe Opera, which influenced their decision to retire there. At DU, Tarr had the opportunity to take any course as a student, and he earned a master’s degree in library science in 1967. Tarr put the degree to use in Santa Fe, where he became the first librarian and archivist of the local botanical garden.

In Santa Fe, Tarr and Pulman became reunited with the Gronquists. Guy Gronquist took a course from Tarr while studying for his master’s degree under Pulman. When Guy went to England to do research for that degree, Cathy spent Sundays with Tarr in his basement, where they watched the Broncos while refurbishing antique dressers that had been in Guy’s family for several generations.

“Because he was a farm boy, Terry could do anything,” Cathy Gronquist says. “He could put up preserves. He could cook a meal for 20. He could refinish furniture. When you live on a farm, I think you’re used to doing anything.”

That resolve became an asset for Tarr after he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1999. He had surgery to remove two-thirds of his left lung but didn’t require radiation or chemotherapy. And then he plowed onward.

“He had a very optimistic nature,” Cathy Gronquist says. “He was very determined that he was going to live life and not let anything stop him. And I think that stood him in good stead. He was made of very strong stuff. And I think that comes back to the kind of roots that he had.”

A celebration of Tarr’s life will be held in late spring in Santa Fe. Donations in his memory may be made to the Raymond Calhoun and Michael Pulman Scholarship in History at DU, Office of Gift Processing, Dept. 585, Denver, CO 80291.

Alum Herman Motz won two state championships while head coach of the Thomas Jefferson High School football team. Motz also taught English and Latin. The football field at Thomas Jefferson was renamed in his honor last year. Photo: Wayne Armstrong

Early on the morning of Sept. 8, which happened to be his 82nd birthday, Herman Motz collapsed in the bathroom of his Denver home.

He was unconscious when the paramedics arrived. They detected no pulse or blood pressure and thought he had suffered a heart attack.

Motz was taken to Swedish Medical Center and admitted when his blood pressure registered 70/40 in the emergency room. Upon being transferred to a regular room, Motz began expelling blood. Motz would spend a week in intensive care. The diagnosis was a bleeding ulcer, and Motz ended up receiving 14 pints of blood.

Patricia Motz, his wife of 56 years was at Motz’s bedside, along with their four children. Their vigil, naturally, was hour-to-hour, day-to-day, but with a football field soon to be named after him at Thomas Jefferson High School, the family couldn’t help but gaze a few weeks ahead. They offered Motz encouragement — dialogue that was one-sided for several days until Motz became more responsive.

“We kept saying, ‘You’ve got to hang in there, because you’ve got to be at that field on Oct. 15,’” Patricia says. “‘You must survive. Don’t you dare check out on us.’ And we told the nurses, too. ‘He is a legend, and he has to be in attendance at his ceremony on Oct. 15. So do what you must. But he must survive.’”

Motz spent a week in the hospital but recovered. “So he’s a survivor as well as a legend,” Patricia says. To which Motz, who received his teaching certificate from DU in 1956 as well as his master’s degree in 1958 and his PhD in education in 1965, says, “Sorta.”

Motz can talk for hours on a variety of subjects but is given to brevity when talking about himself and his accomplishments.

Michael Gellner, a volunteer for 12 years at the herbarium in the Denver Botanic Gardens, where Motz, a master gardener, has been a herbarium volunteer for about 20 years, calls Motz, “a very unassuming person. One never knows, unless you find it from somebody else, what he’s done.”

What Motz accomplished as the football coach at Thomas Jefferson led to the renaming of Spartan Field in his honor. A redstone slab announces the entrance to the Coach Herman Motz Athletic Facility.

Motz was the head football coach at Thomas Jefferson from 1976–89. During those 14 seasons — all of them winning — the Spartans compiled a record of 135-30-1. They won the Denver Public League nine times, reached the state semifinals six times and won state championships in 1980 and 1989. No DPL school has won a state football championship since Motz’s 1989 team.

In addition to having the field named after him, Motz was one of the inaugural inductees in the Thomas Jefferson Spartan Hall of Fame. It’s the fifth hall of fame that has inducted Motz, who is called “Coach” for obvious reasons.

And because Motz has his doctorate, some call him Dr. Motz. This melding of Motz’s higher education and his gridiron experience has resulted in stories about Dr. “Coach” Herman Motz — nomenclature that is somewhat cumbersome but entirely appropriate.

Motz never taught a physical education class. He taught Latin and English at Thomas Jefferson from 1967–92, adding science to his teaching duties in his final few years.

“For me, it was a holiday; I loved teaching,” Motz says. “You’re molding. You only have a little part of the statue to mold, but you get to do that. It’s really worthwhile. And the better you do it, the better it is for the kids.”

Re-naming the Thomas Jefferson football field after Motz was the culmination of a grassroots letter-writing campaign. One of those letters came from Bob Lackner, a member of the Thomas Jefferson class of 1977. Lackner never played for Motz but had him as a Latin teacher for three years. And in his letter of support, Lackner wrote, “He could diagram a passage from the Aeneid or a poem from Horace with as much skill and mental dexterity as he could diagram a modification of the I-Tight Slot Fake 42 Dive 456X.”

Motz, who grew up near Newtown, Ohio, was a halfback at Xavier University in Cincinnati. A photograph from 1952 shows Herman “Buck” Motz   in one of those wonderful publicity poses from that time. Leather helmet, the top marked by an ‘X.’ No face mask. Straight-arming with his right arm and the football cradled in the left arm. Right leg lifted off the ground and crossed over the left. A try-and-stop-me grin on his face.

Eric Black was the quarterback on Motz’s 1980 state title team and graduated from Thomas Jefferson in 1982. Black said Motz had all the necessary football attributes, namely a playing past and knowledge of the game, but his intellectual side made for an intriguing and memorable mix.

“I’m 16 then, and my world is just expanding,” says Black, who did not have Motz as a teacher. “To see somebody be that smart and also be a big, stud athlete and a big, stud football coach and to command respect not just because of his physical presence but by his mental capacity and with humor mixed in — he had all sorts of assets that were woven into one exemplary person. Looking back in my life, I think that’s the first time I saw somebody like that.

“When I think of ‘Coach Motz,’ I don’t think of the football coach. I think of Coach Motz as ‘Dr. Motz’ the teacher and the family guy.”

Motz began his teaching career at Cole Junior High School in 1957 and taught Latin and English there until 1967 when he moved to Thomas Jefferson. At Cole from 1963–66, one of Motz’s English students was Alex Martinez, who became Manager of Safety for the City of Denver on Nov. 1, stepping down after 15 years as a justice on the Colorado Supreme Court to take that position.

Martinez recalls how happy Motz seemed about whatever he taught and his ability to make it fun.

“His enthusiasm was contagious,” Martinez says. “More than anything, it’s that sense of joy at the mere opportunity to learn something that you didn’t know before without regard necessarily to whether it had some application. If it had some application, then maybe there was even more joy. But it was that sense of learning, the excitement of learning that influenced me the most.”

Years later, Motz had a similar effect on a student teacher named Matt Spampinato. In the spring of 1989, Spampinato, then 27, completed his student teaching under Motz in his American literature class at Thomas Jefferson.

“The first lesson I saw him teach was about Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire,” says Spampinato, the journalism teacher at Thomas Jefferson and director of the school’s center for communication technology magnet. “He stood in front of that class and in 45 minutes, I watched him turn kids on to American literature just with the quality of his voice and his storytelling ability. And his obvious love of literature was infectious.

“He was the perfect role model. When I watched him the first couple days, I thought, ‘Oh boy, if I ever end up like this guy, I will have reached the pinnacle, because he was the most comfortable, knowledgeable guy I’d ever seen deliver a lesson.’”

In 35 years of teaching, Motz, an imposing figure who stands 6-3 and has a distinctive handlebar moustache, never sent a student to the office for disciplinary reasons.

“I dealt with it,” he says. “We had some kids that put up their backs, but we worked on it. And sending them to the office doesn’t do any good, doesn’t help anybody. They’re never better when they come back.”

Martinez crossed paths with Motz in his early teaching days but wasn’t surprised to learn Motz never banished a student to the office during his career. A frown or a shake of the head, Martinez says was usually enough to cause any inappropriate behavior to cease.

“Disapproval from him had a very powerful impact,” Martinez says. “You saw the effect on him. You saw yourself taking that fun and taking that spirit away, and his disapproval was just completely undesirable. It was like you disrupted a flow of joy and that was wrong.”