Football may have left DU in 1961, but Pioneers hockey more than filled the gap, going from an athletic also-ran in the late 1940s to one of the country’s most talked-about college programs in the 1960s. The DU hockey program, which began in 1949, celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. […]
On May 4, 1970, a group of DU students gathered in the student union to discuss the invasion of Cambodia, a regional expansion of the Vietnam War, announced by President Richard Nixon four days earlier on April 30. The students formed the Ad Hoc Committee to End the War and […]
In 1919, a series of bombings turned a football rivalry between DU and the School of Mines into all-out intercollegiate war.
“Radio should supply an outlet for emotion and be a vehicle for expression,” declared sophomore John “Nile” Wendorf (BA ’72) in 1970. It was the height of the Vietnam protest era and Wendorf, general manager of student-run campus radio station KVDU, had recently secured the last noncommercial FM radio frequency […]
Clark Secrest, writing in Colorado Heritage magazine in 1992, pointed out that the short-lived town of South Denver had its own railway and its own university, but almost no saloons. The original boundaries of South Denver extended from Colorado Boulevard to the east, Pecos Street to the west, Yale Avenue […]
The only thing most people know about Mary Reed is that her ghost is said to haunt the DU building that bears her name. But there is more to her story. Born in Bucyrus, Ohio, on Oct. 8, 1875, Mary Dean Johnson traveled to Colorado in the late 1800s, met […]
Exiled diplomat Josef Korbel, founder and namesake of DU’s international studies school, reinvented himself as a devoted teacher and scholar.
It looked like a spaceship moving down University Boulevard, students said. The floating contraption — carried five blocks by 17 students — was a geodesic dome 30 feet in diameter and 17 feet high made in celebration of the first Earth Day at DU. April 22, 1970, was a snowy […]
Vance Kirkland didn’t have patience for fumbling. The former director of the University of Denver School of Art, whose paintings hang in more than 15 museums throughout the world, once sent a student unable to properly stretch canvas out to find a “stretcher-stretcher.” Another time, he dispatched a student in […]
When the football program filed out of DU in 1961, the Pioneers marching band — a 45-year institution that launched scores of alumni into musical careers — followed suit. On Jan. 9, 1961, Chancellor Chester Alter announced that football would be discontinued because it was “prohibitively expensive.” The program operated […]
“Hey Spike! Whazzup Spiker?” As I walked into my 25-year baseball reunion on a warm Friday night last summer, I was instantly transported back to a simpler time — a time free of the pressures and responsibilities that would mount in the ensuing two-plus decades. Spike was my baseball nickname and […]
Unlike nouveau sports bars that morph into sushi bars, the Stadium Inn at 1701 E. Evans Ave. faces the future by embracing the past. Parked in a section of the DU neighborhood where a fast-food crowd comes to slurp noodles or create zeppelin-sized burritos, it is a relic from a […]
Many visitors to the DU campus are drawn to the elegant little stone chapel nestled amongst fountains and flower beds in the Harper Humanities Garden. Thousands of students, faculty and staff have gathered at Evans Chapel over the years to worship, to be wed or to mourn those who have […]
For more than 50 years, Chancellor Emeritus Chester Alter has cast a light on the University that is still shining bright.