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How did you decide on your profession? You could go first, since yours is a straight line.

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Sort of a straight line. I always liked science. I liked biology. I suffered through chemistry.

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I wasn't great at calculus. But I liked science and I liked problem solving.

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And my parents, my dad especially, since he bounced around from his geology to fundraising, they always urged me to get a career that was portable and a career.

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And so I was kind of pre-med, but wasn't too keen. I worked at Penrose Hospital summer of my freshman year in college, and that was pretty interesting.

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I liked that. I wasn't sure I could get into med school. I wasn't sure I really wanted to be a physician.

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So then I started looking at veterinary school and decided that was a good option for me and was able to get in with a little help from one of my dad's friends.

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Hershberger was one of the early veterinarians in town. He was quite a colorful man, colorful, colorful character in Colorado Springs.

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Well-known, had a pretty nasty awful toupee, but was a swell guy. He was a nice guy.

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Yeah, he was a swell guy and he was really funny. He was on city council and they built the new jail downtown.

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A couple of guys that hung themselves were sheets and he was a hard-nosed right-side guy. And one time in the paper he said, "I think they ought to just give all of them a set of clean sheets when they put them in the cell." You can't imagine that now.

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Anyway, it turns out Hershberger had gone to vet school with the dean of the veterinary college. So it didn't hurt me a bit that Art had called Dr. Gorman.

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And I forget his first name, but I did meet him a couple of times and he said, "Here, Art's friend, son, dad's friend, something." But he got to know me so I'd see him around and he sort of kept track of how I was doing because I think he was reporting back to Hershberger so I always humped pretty hard.

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Yeah. So I worked in the summer and mom worked year-round and that's how we did it.

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So I wouldn't say I picked a straight profession at all. In college I was really wanting to major in English as a second language and they didn't have that, but they allowed you to do what you called distributed education major.

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So I put together my own major with the classes. I had an advisor, but I picked the classes and felt like these were things I needed to take.

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So I was doing great in that, loved it. Decided to go to Spain first semester of my junior year.

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Actually, that was through New York University because I wanted to go to Madrid and see you didn't have a program in Madrid.

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So I went there, came back. Actually, kind of had a hard time getting in to see you the second semester because they didn't take any transfer kids because now I'm a transfer student.

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Yeah, the old major was kind of flung. Well, and that didn't have anything, but it was Jeff's dad knew they, because they grew up in Boulder, were in Boulder.

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He knew the, the admissions director. What was their name?

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Dwight Grohwald. It wasn't that guy.

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It was the friends, the young, it was the desk upstairs that we, the dressing table anyway. So he called them and that they got me in back in and I show up on campus and they go, well, we decided while you were gone, not because of me, but they said that underclass people can't have their own distributed education major.

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So I'm a second semester junior with literally no major and I'm having to go, okay, what's my transcript look like?

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You know, I knew I needed to get out of there in four years. You know, my parents were having three kids in college at this, basically the same time.

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And I didn't want to stay there. Yeah, really at the same time.

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And I didn't want to be any, they're long-term, not that I didn't like it, but you know, I wanted to move on in life.

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So I thought, okay, I can do linguistics. That'll be good.

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That's kind of, you know, similar. So I, now because I'm, and now I'm a junior.

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So I'm really an upper division classes. And I remember walking into this first class and I felt like they were speaking Egyptian.

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I had no idea what they were talking about. I thought, I'm never going to figure this out.

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I am so far behind all these people. I can't do this.

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I can't do this. So I go and talk to my counselor again.

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And at that same time, they were just starting just that semester, a new major called speaking business, a Spanish business doing business speaking Spanish.

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And I went, well, I speak Spanish and I like business. So that looks like that's a great major for me.

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And so I went and that was what my major was, was doing business speaking Spanish.

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It was a combination of taking every key subject in the business school. You so, you know, I had, you know, all the accounting, finance, marketing, organizational behavior, business law, business law with one of the hardest professors and Boulder.

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Whoa. And you had it after Frederick, didn't you?

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Yeah. And so, and then my other classes were in the Spanish department and they were all in Spanish, but about commercial business.

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So that became my major graduated and I did pretty well on that because I graduated with distinction at CU and was Phi Beta Kappa.

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And then I was like, okay, now what am I going to do with this? And this is 1975 and Spanish industry was not really hadn't really developed in at least in Colorado in this country.

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If you had a Spanish major, a language major, you were pretty much relegated to teaching English or being an interpreter.

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Well, neither of those were attractive to me. So I'd graduated.

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I needed to make a living, support myself. I wasn't going to move back home and I got a job at this electric motor repair shop and they hired me because I was kind of a go-getter and because I had that business on my, you know, resume from school that I was a business major.

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And so I was there only office person did inventory control, you name it, all of that was great.

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And they were a really good company, really sweet new owners. The father and son just bought it from the original founders, Oran, Oran and I forget really long time rock of the earth people, salt of the earth people.

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And we became friends in fact, they came to our wedding and we'd gone back and seen him a few times too.

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So I worked there for a year. We got married.

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Then because of that business on my resume, I could get a job at HP. And so I kind of, you know, my role was hooked to a mothership, get insurance, you know, get a good salary, you know, do a good living while benefits while Jeff was in that school.

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And then really good benefits. Yeah.

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And then when he gets out of that school, you know, help support. So HP was also in Colorado Springs.

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So I could come down to Colorado Springs and transfer down here. And there were some rocky jobs at HP.

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I mean, I had some, I had some turbulence, but then rose above some turbulence and here, there, oh, down here, down here, down here.

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And then I was kind of right before Aaron was born. I was pregnant.

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I was just kind of done with HP. I just felt like it was time for me to say goodbye.

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Some of my friends there were going to Craig Computer Corporation, Seymour Cray was moving out from Wichita or Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, starting to branch.

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And I thought, okay, I'll stay in this tech industry. It's not my favorite thing, but I'll stay because I make good money, good benefits.

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Well, that was a disaster. Craig Computer was an awful place to work.

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All my friends got fired. I ultimately got fired in a way, but they gave me a year's payout and a nice severance.

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And then I went, I'm tired of working in high tech. And that's when I went and worked for Cystic Fibrosis.

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And then I went, oh, I kind of like this kind of field, but I need something that's pays a little more, does a little more.

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And that's why I got to Colorado College and stayed there for 15 years. So really, I didn't totally choose my path.

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I did it based on what would benefit our family. And mostly you liked it.

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And I wish that life were, if I could go back, I wish that the Spanish, the business industry was here that I could have used my Spanish for that.

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But you know, you don't use it a lot and you lose it. Remember when I came back from Spain that junior year, that spring break, my dad took us all to Mexico because he wanted me to use my Spanish.

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Remember, you might recall, I said one of his key pillars for us all was to learn a foreign language. And so I had to sit there with the tour guide and translate and do all that.

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It was a lot of fun. So that's the story.

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You were kind of ahead of the curve in terms of Spanish business. Oh yeah, it was the first graduate.

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But you did, you forgot to say you taught teaching English as a foreign language. Oh, I did do.

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I did. Some summer.

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I did two summers. I think it was still on Boulder.

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No, two summers and it was when a lot of Vietnam refugees were here. Yeah, because the war ended.

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And so my dad would take me down to, it was downtown at the Aroria campus. And I would go in there in the morning.

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And I had, my class was made up of Vietnamese. I had Israelis.

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I, I was just an eclectic group, mostly adults. But there was one young girl, the Vietnamese, and she kind of latched on to me.

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And she wanted me to adopt her. Now my job in college.

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And, but, you know, really sweet girl. What was her name?

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Leon. Leon.

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Leon. Leon.

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And I thought she coached me at Perce. I mean, it was a really touching story.

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It was really kind of hard. She came to our wedding.

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Yeah. Didn't want you to forget that.

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No, thank you. I appreciate that.

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Yeah. I love that.

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I enjoyed that. I had no experience, but I was a volunteer.

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I did that for a volunteer because I, that was the only summer I lived at home, actually. Because your major, your first major was kind of headed towards teaching English as a foreign language, wasn't it?

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That was the distributed ed major. Yeah.

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Yeah. Yeah.

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So that's my. My was sort of much more direct.

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Yeah. Because then I ended up working for the Weisman's, who are my parents, veterinarians here and the rest is Pikes Peak vet clinic history.

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Mine was an opportunistic career. That's what I could say.

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Yep. Okay.

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High tech to fundraising. To high touch is what I like to say.

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That'll take up some video time. [BLANK_AUDIO]