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How did your parents meet? Well, it's funny. Our parents met both the same way.

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My dad went to school at Seabolder after the war, and my mom, who was from Minnesota, during the war, her first year of college, she went to Carlton College, the same place her parents went, and then in Northfield, Minnesota.

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And it was a small school, and it was during the war, there were no men, and she really didn't like it at all.

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So then they had her transferred to Mankato State, which was in Mankato, and she didn't like that either.

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So then she decided, I don't know how she convinced her parents, I don't even know how she knew it, other than they vacationed here.

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She wanted to come to the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her parents let her do it.

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But they said to her, "Once we let you go, we know we'll never get you back.

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You'll find a young man there, marry him, and you'll be in Colorado forever." And no tour words were spoken.

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She came out to Colorado, she joined a sorority house. She was an Alpha Chi Omega, and my dad was a Beta, and they were a year apart in school, and somehow he was a hasher at her sorority, and they met, and that was it.

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And they got married in 1948. So very easy, sweet, simple story.

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And I think yours are the same, because they had parallel paths, they were similar ages.

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Yeah, my dad grew up in Boulder, and after the war, he didn't get back to the States for like five or six months.

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He was in the United States, and he was in the United States, and he was in the United States, and he stayed in Germany, and was doing construction, rebuilding whatever part of Germany they were in.

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But they got back, and he started back. He'd done a little bit of work at CU already, and then he joined the Army.

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So he came back, and was working on his degree in geology. And he, like Ralph, was a Beta.

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I think your dad lived in the house, and my dad lived at home.

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But anyway, they, I don't know exactly how he met my mom. She was a Theta.

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She'd come from Winette, Illinois, very, you know, Fridt Stanley White was quite the entrepreneur.

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If you look at the pictures of his pharmacy in 1929, it was like, he never suffered.

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And they moved to Colorado eventually, and they knew pretty much they were going to stay.

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I don't know exactly how they got introduced, but they did a lot of skiing together, and hung around, got married.

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She taught school. He got his master's in geology, and petroleum exploration, exploration, not exploitation, exploration, and so we moved around a lot as kids.

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[silence] This is Lauren, the youngest daughter of Debbie and Jeff.

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Here are my questions. What were your parents like?

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What were their personalities? What were our parents like?

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Well, my dad inherited a lot of the crazy, fun-spirited traits from his mom.

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And maybe some of them were from his dad, I don't know. But he was, in many ways, he was like a child on some things.

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If he saw something that he wanted, or thought he wanted it, he'd buy it.

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I mean, he bought a lot of different cars. You know, we had a snow cone machine.

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We had a button-making machine. He had the calliope. He had golf carts.

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He had luggage carts. And he was not an easy person to be with always.

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He was very much like his mom, I would have imagined. If you think deeply about it, that he had strong opinions.

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He wasn't afraid to say them. He was well-liked, though.

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You may recall that he was a Shrinor, and he went through the ranks and became the head of the shrine, which you called the potentate of El-Jabal Shrine.

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So, you know, that took a lot. He worked very hard.

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You have to think about him that his dad died in 1947. He was 22 years old.

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His mom had two other children that they had to raise. And so he went and took over his dad's insurance business, the Douglas Hill Agency.

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And he helped support his mom and raise our family. So, he was smart.

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I remember fondly that he was a great writer. I have to pull out the letters sometimes that he wrote.

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And I was just in awe of his ability to turn a phrase, to just say things that really touched me that meant a lot.

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He was big in education. We'd have French verbs taped to the cupboards of our house, and at dinner time we had to learn how to conjugate those verbs.

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So, he was about education, foreign language, typing. He wanted you to learn how to type, a foreign language.

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And I'm forgetting the third thing, but there were three things. But he was also a man of great integrity.

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Just a fun guy. My mom, when she married my dad, she worked at Gates Rubber for a little bit, but then had a child in 1950, another one in '52 and another one in '53.

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So, she was a housewife all of her life. And we all have great memories, I think, of my mom being so sweet.

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Never a mean word, never a tear. She endured a lot of physical pain in her body, and yet you never heard her talk negatively about that or complain.

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And she taught us a lot about grace, about humility, about loving people, about having a smile, and just being a good human being.

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Just being really sweet. She never met anybody that she didn't remember, and she had macular degeneration for the last 15-plus years of her life, so she might not remember your face, but she could remember your voice and put a name to it.

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And she had an amazing gift for that. In fact, recently, my brother and his wife celebrated an anniversary, and it was, I think, their 40-something wedding anniversary, and one of the guests commented about Marge Hill, my mom, and she came to that wedding and met people and then could tell you again who they all were.

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She just had that neck to meet people and to make you feel good about having known her. So she was a great mom.

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She was the one that was home when we came home from school every day. Yes, she did have this amazing ability to remember people's names.

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When Ralph was the potentate of the shrine, and that was the year we got married, which was probably a burden on both of them.

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It's a huge burden. She knew every shrine in the state of Colorado knew their wives' names, something about their family.

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It was, like, somewhat scary, actually. What was the question again?

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What was it about? About our parents.

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I should say one thing. You know, you were right, Jeff.

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We got married in 1976. That was the year that my dad was going to become potentate right after that.

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But the year before your potentate, you do the circus, which is a very big deal. And I remember-- It was fundraising for the whole shrine.

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Yeah, it was how you made your money. And I remember my parents saying, "Well, if you're going to get married, please don't get married around the circus." Well, guess what?

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I must have been-- I was, not must have been. I was a very selfish daughter.

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And we got married the week of the circus. And we planned it with only three months lead time.

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And my mom didn't complain. They planned-- that was back in the day where they planned everything.

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And once again, she demonstrated grace and style and just put it all together. You kind of-- And my dad was the wallet.

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Yeah, he was. He was the wallet.

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Which he called himself. Yeah, but it was pretty funny.

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Yeah. That you're the one that drove the bus.

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I know. Wasn't me.

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I know. I know.

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Well, we'll get into that. You talk to the parents.

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So my parents-- so my dad grew up with two younger, one older brother in Boulder, in the depression. Dad was dead.

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He was off at war. Two of them were-- he and older brother were off at war.

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So Louise was home with Sam, little Sam, they called him, and Knox, Chris and Drew's dad, Chris. You guys know who he is.

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You don't know cousin Drew much. Anyway, they had a rather rough time.

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And so when your granddad Will came home, he had been through the war. I think Ralph had PTSD.

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My dad had PTSD. Ralph got home way sooner after the bulge.

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Granddad obviously stayed through more and was wounded and all that. So he had a bit of a fight-or-flight response.

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Not knowing him as a kid, but knowing him as your father. You couldn't push Will very far.

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There'd be hell to pay. And you learned that pretty quick, but he was fair and he was very kind and he was very helpful to both my brother and I along the way.

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He was really good at math and like Debbie's folks, my folks were-- my mom was a teacher. They were behind you every step of the way all the way to college and through.

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So there were expectations of performance and we moved a lot. So I was the new kid a lot of times and they provided a really stable, friendly family environment, but there was no bullshit.

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When I was like in seventh grade, I was playing hockey and basketball and Houghton and my grades weren't that great. And guess what?

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No more basketball. We're paying for hockey.

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And you're playing hockey, so there's nothing until you get your grades up. But then basketball was over.

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So that was sort of an introduction to the Will Fowler School of Success. You better have your nose down and grinding along.

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What's kind of served me well until I got to college and then first semester, I'd gone to a high school that was not really a college prep school. Some of us, you know, probably 15% of my high school class went to college.

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And so I had pretty easy time. I get to boulder.

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No more easy time. I got to see an all Bs.

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Granddad Will said, "Okay, here's the thing. Next semester it's all Bs and As, or you're going to Pikes Peak Community College.

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Yo." So I managed to pull it out.

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You know, I want to come back and say something about my dad too, because he, I liked to ski a little bit. And we joined their Rappahoe Basin Ski Club.

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And I hated it because I didn't like a basin at all. But he would frequently come home.

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He didn't like to be cold. He didn't like to go fast.

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Well, besides that. But that's another story.

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He had a truck. This has had to been past 19.

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This has had to been my end of my high school because the truck was a 1969, 1970 truck. And he'd say, "Two-wheel drive." Yeah, two-wheel drive.

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And he'd say, "I'm taking you skiing tomorrow." And he would take off from work.

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And remember, he worked by himself. And we'd load my skis into the back of the car.

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And he'd drive up to the ski area. And he'd let me ski by a pass, you know, the day pass, a lesson.

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And he'd sit there the whole day and he'd let me go skiing. And he just, he cared about us.

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You know, I got drug around a lot because of two brothers close in age right in front of me. And he'd put me in his little decorated circus golf cart.

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And we'd put down the streets to go watch their baseball game. But, you know, he was really there for his kids.

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He was a scout leader. He still did scout stuff later in his life.

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And he was about, you know, just caring for all kids. Not just us, but all kids.

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And my mom was right there encouraging him and being a great support too. So, couldn't have asked for a better childhood.

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Really a great childhood. I think we both were blessed.

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Yeah. My dad was very supportive of us.

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We did a lot of YMCA Indian guide things in Boulder. He was very helpful with the scout troop in Houghton.

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He was a big time skier because after the war, he and Scott Carpenter were the Mercury astronauts.

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They were best pals all through childhood in Boulder up on the hill. And he was instrumental in Houghton at getting Mount Ripley modernized from a rope tow to a T-bar and adding some terrain.

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And this was kind of an offshoot of when Eldora was getting started in Boulder. He was involved somehow as the director of development at CU getting Eldora going.

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And now, you know, that's where CU skiing is training. And he knew Bobby Otte, Billy Kid, Jimmy Hugo, all these CU Olympians back in the day.

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My mom, she was more of a disciplinarian, even more than my dad, really. And she was, I would have to say, talking to my brother and my cousin Craig, whose mom was her sister, they were kind of stern taskmasters.

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And the girls, you all know, Grammy was that way. No surprise to any of us.

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And she was kind of fickle. You know, for a while, your mom was the chosen one until the next chosen one came on.

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And then after Granddad Will died, she was always after these, you know, always wished that she had been a social light like she'd grown up.

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And so that became kind of a social climbing thing with her, which Tim's and I think resent to this day.

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So anyway, that's kind of it. Although we did get to ski a lot because of my dad.

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And he skied with us when we were in college, and that was a lot of fun. You even got to ski with your mom.