Developments

Once outfitted with such equipment as a terrain conductivity meter, portable gas chromatograph and infrared spectrophotometer, students will be able to analyze air, water and soil samples far away from Barnes Science Center.

Val Veirs, physics professor and director of the environmental sciences program, says the new lab will save time and effort. "Last year, students studying methane emissions from desert soils discovered only after gathering hundreds of gas samples that their field protocol wasted time and resources because methane emissions dropped to undetectable levels on the winter nights of the field trip. An on-site laboratory would have helped students to detect this problem immediately."

Chemistry professor Sally Meyer looks forward to using a well-equipped mobile laboratory for outreach and community service. "For example," she writes, "we might be able to use our long-standing relationship with the San Luis Valley to help answer the environmental questions of the valley's residents. This would not only assist them in their farming and ranching, but may also help residents experience the value of a college education for farming, ranching and living in a rural community."

The George Alden Trust, based in Worcester, Mass., makes grants to secondary and higher education, education-related projects and the YMCA. It is named for its founder, an educator, inventor and entrepreneur who died in 1926.

KN Energy, Inc., a progressive utility with customers in nine western and mid-continent states, is an integrated energy services company.

No, it's not the invasion of corporate America. The blurs speeding by you are the Colorado College academic technology specialists who, by all accounts, defy Newtonian physics by being in two places at once.

"When Martin comes over to help me out and his cell phone rings I always say, 'By all means answer it. That could be me on the line,'" says music Professor Michael Grace of humanities technical specialist Martin Ingram. "I can't remember what we used to do without him."

Those sentiments are echoed by faculty across the divisions, from mathematics to political science, economics to art history.

And now the importance of the technology specialists has been recognized by Charles E. Culpeper Foundation. The Connecticut-based group has awarded Colorado College $144,000 over two years for partial support of their positions.

Established under the will of the late Charles E. Culpeper, one of the early pioneers in the bottling and marketing of Coca-Cola, the foundation has dispursed approximately $7 million a year to activities in health, education, arts and culture and the administration of justice.

Natatorium or "indoor swimming pool" comes from the Latin natare, meaning "to swim." Swimming was important in Greek and Roman life. Plato considered an individual who could not swim uneducated, and Gaius Maecenas, a wealthy Roman diplomat, is said to have built the first heated swimming pool in the 1st century BC.

Plato and Maecenas would have approved of CC's new Schlessman Natatorium. Dedicated on a sunny Homecoming morning, the pool is one of the finest and fastest competitive aquatic facilities in the Rocky Mountain Region.

Speaking at the dedication, swimming and diving coach Andy Aspengren explained the impact the new pool has had on her athletes. "Our swimmers and divers went from feeling like a Division 5 team to feeling like Division 1. It has been an amazing boast to their self-esteem."

Some 250 friends and alumni, many former CC swimmers and divers, filled the stands to celebrate and show appreciation to the folks responsible for this dazzling new facility. Susan Schlessman Duncan and Lee Schlessman, major donors for the $1.25 renovation, have been connected to Tiger swimming since the first on-campus facility was dedicated in 1963.

Schlessman family members have served on the Board of Trustee and the National Alumni Council. The family has also established the Schlessman Executive-in-Residence Program and the Gerald and Florence Endowed Scholarship Fund.

Over twenty other alumni, parents, and friends stepped forward with additional gifts to make the renovation project a reality. Their gifts to the locker room were made in recognition of long-time and dedicated coach, Jerry Lear.

After the plaque was unveiled, Lee Schlessman along with Coach Lear conducted the ritual cutting of the ribbon. Determined to carry on tradition in the new facility, Coach Aspengren presented a jar of water from the old pool to former Tigers who poured it into the new.

The Schlessman Natatorium features nine lanes with a modified pool floor for faster conditions, new gutters, lane lines, and starting blocks. For the first time since early 80's when revised regulations dictated its removal, a three meter board is in place, made possible through the 14 foot deep diving well. Plato and Gaius Maecenas would have been proud.