Member Profiles

If you see Academy board member Donna Barrow wearing an even bigger smile than usual, there’s a good reason: she recently helped snag a grand piano for The Academy’s music courses and concerts.

Donna happened to be online at the exact moment that Opera Colorado director Greg Carpenter emailed several nonprofits about The Westin Denver Downtown Hotel’s offer to donate a piano bought to celebrate the hotel’s opening 30 years ago. Donna’s instant e-reply led to the piano finding a new home at The Academy, just in time for the Opera Colorado Young Artists’ already-planned performance at The Academy on Feb 27^th. (Click here for information on that event!)

Of course, it wasn’t quite as easy or lucky as that news bite sounds. In The Academy’s search for a piano for its new Greenwood Village campus, Donna and Jim Kneser had both asked Greg Carpenter, Opera Colorado’s director and a longtime Academy programming partner, if he could help. And the rest, as they say, is history . . . with a dash of serendipity.

But it isn’t the piano coup that Donna ranks as her most significant contribution to The Academy. “What I’m most proud of,” she says, “is the fan base we’ve got here now [for the CU Science series and other science courses] that wasn’t here before.”

As many Academy science fans know, Donna initiated The Academy’s courses on innovative scientific research at CU and continues to create variations on this theme, such as this spring’s Colorado Science Researchers: At the Cutting Edge class, running for four weeks starting March 26.

Like the piano episode, Donna’s first foray into the CU series was marked by a fortuitous coincidence. After she told the Knesers that she’d like to pursue such a series but questioned how The Academy could find an entrée to scientific experts, she happened to attend a “terrific” science lecture at CU–with lamentably poor attendance. Afterward, she cornered the CU development officer introduced at the lecture, realizing that the officer’s presence signaled CU’s twin needs to reach out to the community and foster public support for research. Donna quickly capitalized on this “wonderful opportunity” for The Academy: “What we can give them is an eager, engaged and sizable audience.”

Her success with CU led her to make similar overtures to Opera Colorado, one of her and her husband Ken’s favorite cultural organizations. Numerous exciting Academy courses featuring Opera Colorado performers and educational staff (and sometimes their Colorado Ballet counterparts) have since attracted The Academy’s many opera aficionados.

Donna notes that, as a course coordinator and board member, “I’ve really enjoyed these relationships with our institutional partners: it’s win-win.” And The Academy’s wins just keep coming, thanks to its good fortune in having Donna herself as one of its most creative and energetic partners.

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How does a Realtor leap from writing leases and selling properties to writing music and selling songs? For Jenny James, the catalyst was taking The Academy’s two Writing Music workshops with composer Conrad Kehn—“a genius who’s extraordinary at inspiring people to discover their talents,” she says. Of course, to sell a song, it didn’t hurt that Jenny already had mega-promotional skills that helped open doors in the entertainment world.

In the lead-up to the NFL playoffs, Jenny’s song “Denver Broncos: The Sheriff’s Back in Town” aired on several local TV stations, after she posted it on YouTube. One station prefaced her song with an interview, lengthening the entire segment to about five minutes. You can listen to the song by searching online. It’s also available on iTunes.

“I couldn’t have done the Broncos song if I hadn’t composed my ‘Austria Switzerland’ song in Conrad’s second workshop,” she claims, “and I couldn’t have composed that song if I hadn’t composed my first song in his first workshop.”

Though not required for either workshop, Jenny learned how to use a music-compostion software program, thanks to Conrad’s help and patience. With the Broncos’ playoff win inspiring her, she is now determined to enhance her newest song with both a professional musical notation program and a complementary video, so she can promote this more sophisticated version to local stations that haven’t yet aired it, as well as national early-morning talk shows such as “Good Morning America.”

Mirroring Peyton Manning’s “phenomenally inspiring, unstoppable spirit in facing challenges,” she is also determined to master many more skills than song-writing. During The Academy’s spring term, Jenny is taking her first bridge course ever, plus Drawing (an extension, for her, of an earlier Denver Art Museum class) and Writing Your Life Stories. In Life Stories, she hopes to greatly improve a self-published story written for her grandson and mother-in-law, “Secrets of a Super Hero.”

As a song writer, a storyteller and simply a joyous lifelong learner, Jenny is adamant that “The Academy has changed my life!”

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As a 22-year old paratrooper in Vietnam 44 years ago, Academy member James Speed Hensinger captured his unit’s blinding blitz of a Viet Cong sniper nest in mesmerizing photographs.

But his professional-quality pictures captured world-wide attention last year, after he posted his photos online. They went viral and were published in several media outlets, including the Daily Mail (London)’s lead story on June 20. James faults a few sections of the Daily Mail story for slight inaccuracies, but discounts the errors as nothing of real import.

You won’t want to miss his astounding photos and their riveting back-story at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2345454/Incredible-Vietnam-War-photos-moment-American-troops-unleash-hell-Viet-Kong-sniper-hills-Army-camp.html.

Here are a few of the photos, which we think you’ll enjoy, but larger versions are on the Daily Mail website.

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Karen Fox loved stories—writing them, reading them, performing them:  they were at the center of her life. After majoring in English and theater in college, she worked as an English teacher and professional actor. Later she moved to Colorado and held down what she called a “horribly boring” day-job as a technical writer and editor, but it was then that she discovered the magic of storytelling for adults.

At a storytelling festival sponsored by the University of Colorado at Denver, she found her niche: “it [storytelling] incorporates everything I love—writing, drama and teaching,” she once said. She went on to earn a master’s in Creative Arts in Learning and assemble a repertoire of more than eighty stories (the  majority of them original), which she performed solo for audiences ranging from mega-corporations to small nonprofits and intimate family celebrations. Her stories combined humor with serious messages about racism and other issues. “My hope is that I’ll make people laugh, cry and think,” she said this past fall. And that’s exactly what happened without fail at her performances, according to a host of testimonials on her website, www.crazysanewoman.com.

At The Academy, Karen found yet more ways to indulge her love of stories. Her first course was Kathy Boyer’s Writing Your Life Stories. “So wonderful! So exciting! It’s not really about writing as much as evoking memories,” she said. “You remember the dog you had as a little girl, your elementary school friends . . .” For Karen, those revived memories—and three years in a spin-off writing group–prompted her to complete her memoirs for her family.

Meanwhile, she twice performed stories for The Academy’s Experts & Entertainers series, began regularly volunteering as a greeter and an E&E class assistant, and registered in more Academy courses. One of her most memorable classes was Dr. Fred Abrams’ Doctors on the Edge course on medical ethics. Rating it as “really fabulous,” she gave it the ultimate storyteller’s compliment: “What a page-turner is to a book, his course is to an ordinary class.” High praise from someone who herself excelled at simultaneously engaging and enlightening audiences.

Karen died unexpectedly in early January. Her stories—those she wrote, those she performed and her own life story—are a legacy that will continue to enrich her family, her friends and all kindred spirits who love stories as much as she did.

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Like many Academy participants, Chuck Shannon was no newcomer to lifelong learning when he discovered The Academy. Among other things, he and his wife Jo have always searched for travel options with a strong educational emphasis. “One of my more dynamic experiences,” he notes, “was a tour that [encompassed] an in-depth assessment of the effects of Nazism and Soviet occupation on Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.”

So Chuck’s expectations were high when Jo urged him to follow in her footsteps and take one of Jim Kneser’s economics classes, while Chuck was still working. When his expectations were more than exceeded, the well-known “Academy Addiction” kicked in: he was hooked on The Academy. After retiring, he plunged into classes led by Dr. Bennie Bub, Dr. Abe Flexer and Dr. Lew House. “Academy courses,” he says appreciatively, “have expanded my horizons and exposed me to quality instruction in the hard sciences for which I have no background.”

However, Chuck has his own impressive expertise in a range of other disciplines. His “two careers” began with twelve years as a division director for the Denver Regional Council of Governments and concluded with twenty-plus years in the United Way system. In his last ten years with United Way, he split his time between serving as a Mile High United Way vice-president and as a senior fellow with the United Way of America. In the latter role, he focused on developing national initiatives for the organization, fostered by his serving part-time as a fellow at Harvard. He envisions his most significant contribution to the United Way system as helping the nonprofit “define low-income communities in terms of their assets, not their liabilities,” thus “avoiding the stigma and labeling [that comes with a focus on] their deficits and problems.”

Chuck’s post-retirement volunteerism embodies the same positive, community-building approach that he initiated at United Way. As an Arapahoe Library District volunteer, he has engaged immigrants from 62 countries in English conversational circles for the past four years. In addition, he has volunteered with Denver Kids, Inc., which partners with the Denver Public Schools to match students with mentors. Though his Denver Kids commitment was a formal one for the first three years, Chuck is now informally mentoring one student from the program (currently enrolled at CU) “as a friend.”

Clearly Chuck is among many at The Academy who are making an invaluable contribution (to borrow his own language) as “community assets.”

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