Making it through the semester can be easier with...

1. Guided Meditations are held Fridays at 12:15 at the Art Museum.

2. CU NightRide (303)492-SAFE gives free rides within Boulder City Limits.

3. The Career Services office in the C4C provides mock interviews, resume reviews, and career fairs.

4. Party Registration at the Off-Campus Housing office allows students to receive a phone-call warning before being given a noise complaint ticket.

5. Free Flu Shots are given at the Rec Center during cold and flu season.

6. Also at the Rec Center are free fitness classes on Fridays from 5 to 6 pm, including Zumba, cycling, yoga, and more.

7. Nutrition consultations are available on Wednesdays from 1 to 5 pm in the FitWell Office.

8. Group Therapy sessions, including skills for depression, therapy for insomnia and animal-assisted anxiety reduction, are available through Counseling and Psychiatric Services.

9. Also through CAPS, "Let's Talk" consultations provide all students an opportunity to meet with a counselor to discuss potential mental-health treatment and care.

10. The CU Writing Center provides meetings with professionally-trained writing consultants for everything from writers block to proper citation. 

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As the CU students take the week off for Spring Break, campus is in full bloom. Tulips, daffodils, hyacinths and vinca are just a few of the flowers adding bright spots to campus, as well as the pink blossoms of the magnolia and redbud trees. Here, tulips abound in the plaza of the University Memorial Center on campus.  

Photo by Glenn Asakawa. 

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How the Grill got its Name 

A 1960s CU alum who was in the UMC’s Alferd Packer Grill recently asked a student if she knew who Packer was.

“An early CU president?” she replied hopefully. 

How soon they forget. 

OK, gather round ye who never heard the tale, and I’ll sing of Alferd Packer, and how the UMC grill came to bear his name. 

But first, confession time: I had something to do with it. OK, a lot to do with it. The naming, that is. I never met Packer. Fortunately. 

First off, Packer was not an early CU president. He was a cannibal. Like Hannibal Lecter, only with worse manners. And a better excuse — he was hungry. 

Packer was part of a six-man prospecting party that got marooned in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains in the winter of 1873. Come spring, he emerged alone and surprisingly un-emaciated. He was eventually caught, tried and sentenced to hang for murder. 

His claim to fame  comes from the sentence of doom pronounced upon him — as magnificently interpreted and imparted to a credulous media by a drunken bar-keep thusly: 

“Stand up, yah man-eatin’ son of a bitch, and receive your sintince!... They was siven Dimmycrats in Hinsdale County, but you, yah voracious, man-eatin’ son of a bitch, yah eat five of thim!” 

Fast forward to the spring of 1968. I’m sitting in the grill with my BFF, student body president Paul Talmey (A&S’67; MBA’78) (I’m his veep), and a couple of others. Someone at the table is grousing about the food. 

“We otta’ name this place after Alferd Packer,” I said brightly. (It was then called the Roaring Fork.) 

“We could get the Student Assembly to do it,” Talmey said. 

The Student Assembly was new. Talmey and I had started it. 

Five or six hundred students showed up for the next meeting, when I introduced a resolution renaming the grill for Packer and read the hanging speech. It passed unanimously. 

I had a day job at the time — at United Press International’s Denver Bureau, as did another former Colorado Daily editor, Bob Ewegen (Jour’68; MS’72). 

As soon as the vote happened I called Ewegen, who sent a story about it to UPI’s main bureau in New York. 

Within 20 minutes it came blasting back on the “A” wire, UPI’s premier breaking news wire with subscribers all over the world. 

The year 1968 was tumultuous. The world needed a laugh. 

And so did the CU Regents. They were so glad to see the students doing some campus high jinks instead of occupying Regent Hall that they immediately renamed the grill for Packer. 

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1. Cast in 1856
2. Weighs 800 lbs. 
3. Found again 2015 
4. Arrived CU-Boulder November 2015 
5. New home: The UMC 

Home Port 

A long-lost warship bell has reached its new home port — one with a view of the Flatirons.

The 800-pound brass bell, cast in 1856 for the USS Colorado, the first in a series of Navy ships to bear the name, settled in its new home at CU-Boulder’s University Memorial Center just before Veterans Day.

After a 1,700-mile journey from a naval warehouse in Virginia, the bell joined various other military artifacts in the UMC’s Veterans Lounge, including later USS Colorado bells. The UMC is Colorado’s official veterans memorial.

Dick Cooper, a Colorado Springs-based officer of the Navy League, learned in early 2015 that the original bell had been found in the warehouse. He and Norris Hermsmeyer (Acct’67), a CU Naval ROTC alumnus and Vietnam War veteran, helped bring it to CU on permanent loan from the Navy.

“I wanted to perpetuate the memory of the ships that have worn the name USS Colorado — to share with the residents of the state of Colorado,” says Hermsmeyer, a Boulder resident who paid for the bell’s transportation to campus.

The original USS Colorado bell was cast in Philadelphia for a three-masted Civil War-era frigate named after the Colorado River. (Colorado was not granted statehood until 1876.)

The bell was later moved to a Navy cruiser, also called the USS Colorado, commissioned in 1905. For a time it was on display in Chicago, then wound up in storage in Virginia.

Someday, perhaps there will be yet another USS Colorado bell for the UMC: The fourth ship to carry the name, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, is under construction in Connecticut.

Photo by Jeremy Papasso/Boulder Daily Camera

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Vets honored in campus hub

Sixty years ago, the UMC opened as a living memorial to honor the service and sacrifice of all Colorado veterans. In the years that followed, students came to eat, shop and meet with friends, but it was not until 1976 when the student veterans association, along with the UMC Board, established a Veterans Lounge.

Yet, many do not realize CU’s first Memorial Student Union building, now Economics, was completed in 1931 as a tribute to 55 CU veterans who fought and died in World War I. Their names are engraved in the northwest entrance foyer. Outside, the word “Memoria” is etched in stone.

After World War II, a growing student population quickly outgrew the first memorial building. While plans were under way for the UMC, Colorado Gov. Lee Knous (Law’11) expanded the university’s original focus to include all Colorado veterans who gave their lives in both world wars. 

Today, UMC director Carlos Garcia keeps updated memorial plaques on the Veterans Lounge walls with the names of nearly 1,000 Colorado veterans who have died since World War I. This includes 83 in World War II, 151 in Korea, 595 in Vietnam, four in the Persian Gulf, 34 in Afghanistan and 75 in Iraq.

“We owe it to all citizens of Colorado to help us remember that freedom does not always come free,” Garcia says. 

Photo from Coloradan yearbook 1954 

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