Classification Talks

I am Jerry Kennell and my classification is Foundation - Fundraising. President Jan, members of the club and, especially, Jean Griswold, who extended the invitation, thank you for this opportunity to be part of the Rotary Club of Fort Collins. There are many paths to service. Let me tell you a little about mine.

I was raised on a farm in Illinois I am married, since 1972, to Leonor Constantin. The child of immigrants from Puerto Rico and Cuba, she grew up in the South Bronx. Leonor is a bilingual special educator at Irish Elementary. We have an adoptive family of five and three grandchildren.

I have spent the last 33 years working for nonprofit organizations. I have served on many boards, including chairing the founding board of Ten Thousand Villages Fort Collins and current service as board chair of Village Earth In January, I opened the Western Regional Office for MMA affiliated with the Mennonite Church. We help people – anyone – connect their faith and values with their financial decisions.

The connecting thread of my career has been a passion to build and improve organizations dedicated to service. Needless to say, I am pleased to sit at table with hundreds of people who demonstrate that same passion by their participation in the Rotary Club of Fort Collins. Thank you for the privilege of your company.

Carrie Baumgart’s classification is Automobile - Management. Carrie is a fourth generation member of the Markley family to be working at Markley Motors and very proud to be following her grandfather, Gene Markley, in the business. She has worked for Markley Motors for around 20 years. She started doing filing and answering the phones while in high school to make spending money. Then she worked for 5+ years in the service department followed by 10 years in marketing. Last year she completed the National Automobile Dealer Academy year long course and is not working as a General Manager Trainee.

Cary is married to Eric and has two children, Ashley 16 and Hunter 6. She loves being in Rotary and is anxious to meet all of the members and get involved in our activities.

I am Lee Jeffrey and my classification is Physician – OB/GYN. I was born and grew up in Southeastern Oklahoma. Undergraduate studies were at Oklahoma State University. In 19661 graduated from University of Oklahoma Medical School. I completed a rotating internship at Highland Alameda County Hospital in Oakland, California in 1967. I returned to Oklahoma for long enough to marry my wife, Carla before entering the Air Force as a general medical officer which led me to pursue a residency in obstetrics and gynecology.

The residency brought me to Denver from 1970 to 1973. It was there that I met Kelly Kesler who invited me to join him in practice in Fort Collins which led to the development of Women’s Clinic of Northern Colorado. The practice grew to a group of 11 doctors plus 8 midwives and nurse practioners supported by 75 additional employees and my family also grew with the addition of 2 sons, Craig and Scott. I am a great lover of nature and being outdoors.

During my years of practicing medicine, my service to others was primarily rendered to individual patients. In 2005, however, I spent 2 weeks doing gynecological surgery with a local physician in Democratic Republic of Congo as part of a medical team sponsored by the Methodist Church. I became interested in learning how to help the unfortunate citizens of developing countries that lack the infrastructure and resources that we take for granted. I am enjoying Rotary's Service Above Self approach to local needs. I am also hoping that Rotary will lead me to opportunities to use my skills to serve others in under developed parts of the world as well.

Kris Boesch was born in Boulder, CO and has also lived in Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Atlanta and Mexico. She graduated from Fairview High School in Boulder, CO and then went on to the University of Colorado in Boulder and received bachelor degrees in Anthropology and Spanish. She received the honor of summa cum laude for her work in Spanish. She then went to Washington University in St. Louis, MO where she received her Masters in Spanish.

Kris worked for Hitachi Power Tools as a PR and Web Specialist and as a Consultant for Conocer, a public leadership consulting firm, before she became CEO of Exodus Moving & Storage in 2003. Kris is very proud of Exodus which "Provides Peace of Mind, All in One Piece" to residential and commercial clients moving locally, nationally and internationally. Exodus has been locally owned and operated in Ft. Collins for over 10 years and was voted the #1 mover by the Ft. Collins Chamber of Commerce members.

She met her husband, Ilan Levy, in 2002 and moved to Ft. Collins, CO where they live together in Greyrock Cohousing. They have four children, Aidan, Brielle, Madison and Anika. Kris says that Greyrock has offered her and her family a wonderfully close community experience.

Kris Boesch is a Bahai and is very active in the Bahai community. Kris says that she is dedicated to the main tenant of the Bahai Faith, unity of humankind, and has found its guidance and teachings to be invaluable. She has been impressed with how much Rotary's values and her Bahai beliefs are similar.

In her free time, Kris enjoys reading Latin American Literature, hiking in Lory State Park, dancing, Bikram yoga and walking her dog Lola."

Jim Harper grew up in Yuma, Colorado, on a dairy in his family since 1933. The dairy was supplemented by both dryland and irrigated farming to raise livestock food. He graduated from CSU in 1960. His in-laws are the Herveys, well-known at CSU, and known to us as Art Wilcox’s second wife. Jim was a Lion until John Roberts persuaded to become a Rotarian. He and his wife have 3 daughters. The eldest contracted leukemia at age 11. The middle daughter is an ophthalmologist in Cheyenne and the youngest is involved in the film industry. They also have 5 foster kids and 2 foster grandchildren. They are enjoying their life in Fort Collins.

Doug Hutchinson was born in Billings, MT. His family moved to Ft. Collins when he was 4. He completed his public schooling in Poudre School District. He joined the military, specializing in intelligence and spent 23 years in the Air Force and retired as a Lt. Colonel in 1999. His education after Ft. Collins High School included a bachelor's from CSU, a Master's from USC , and some work at Colorado Technical University. He and his wife Cathy have three children, all living in Fort Collins, and six grandchildren plus one on the way.

Doug said, "I thought I had enough hobbies to keep me busy when I retired. I have been an amateur radio operator since 1956 and that has been a great hobby my entire life. I like woodworking, especially cabinet making and precision kinds of woodworking. I also enjoy reading and the mountains, but a funny thing happened on my way to retirement. I spent three and a half years writing a column in the Coloradoan and going to council meetings and then in 2005 I ran for Mayor. So now here I stand delighted to have the chance to give back to the city that I love. I am delighted to be a Rotarian."

Myra Monfort said she wanted to express her sincere appreciation for enthusiastically welcoming me into this Club. I am so pleased to be a part of this Rotary group.

I have to say that (1) there will be no power point presentation; I am technologically challenged. And, (2) I’ve been told that I don’t know how to be funny so I won’t. This will all be straight forward and dry.

However, when I was preparing these remarks, it struck me as interesting if not unusual, that this girl who grew up in Brooklyn, where, as you know, only one tree grows, should end up with the classification “agriculture”; it gets worse, as I tell people I was actually born in Newark, New Jersey and my family upgraded to Brooklyn. Then I reflected that I have had three careers, three husbands and this is the third Rotary Club in which I have been an active member. I’m not sure that there is any connection. Nevertheless, I am prepared to give you the short version of how I came from Brooklyn to the classification “agriculture”.

I attended Erasmus Hall High School, the oldest High School in New York City. I graduated with 1500 other students. Among those distinguished graduates were names you might recognize: Lainie Kazan (who played the mother in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and Doug Moe who served a stint as head coach of the Denver nuggets. I continued my education at Barnard College, part of Columbia University, where I majored in philosophy, with a minor in political science (all in preparation for my later immersion in “agriculture”). I commuted on the subway from my home in Brooklyn to 116th Street and Broadway because all the scholarships and monetary awards that I received still would not enable me to live on campus. All through high school and then while at Barnard I worked in my aunt and uncle’s furniture business in Long Island (career # 1). I married my first husband, the father of my two children and I continued to work in the furniture business to support him through his last two years of Law School at Columbia.

Thirteen years later, my then lawyer husband determined to move the family to Colorado, after attending a seminar in Colorado Springs. This prompted the sale of the family business and, in 1972 we arrived in Lafayette, Colorado and I started Law School at Boulder. The summer of my second year in law school I had been offered a summer internship with Monfort. That summer I became enthralled with the company. When I graduated, there was no room for me at Monfort. Finally, the company reorganized and I was asked to come back to Monfort as Staff Attorney (Career # 2). I advanced over the years from Staff Attorney to Associate General Counsel and finally, to Group Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of Monfort of Colorado and held them until retirement in 1990.

In 1979 Monfort experienced many serious problems. A side effect of working extraordinary hours and being under enormous stress, my marriage fell apart and Ken Monfort’s marriage did likewise. Suffice to say we were married in 1982 after our divorces were finalized. (thus, Husband # 2). We were married for 18 ½ years until his death, February 2, 2001.

When Kenny’s health deteriorated, we started a Foundation in Florida because Kenny believed that wherever you lived you had to give back to the community. When Kenny died he left the bulk of his estate, after providing for his and my children, to the Monfort Family Foundation and the Kenneth and Myra Monfort Charitable Foundation and today, I am still a Trustee of the Monfort Family Foundation and the President of the Kenneth and Myra Monfort charitable Foundation.

I sometimes think that my real vocation is Rotary. I joined the Rotary Club of Sarasota in 1996. My classification then was “prior service”, as Rotary was then opened to retired persons. I have held many positions in Rotary, both in the clubs and district wide.

I have always tried to do something somewhat reckless on my birthdays which got me into riding horses, buying horses and building a horse ranch near Windsor reservoir. We now have six mountain horses—registered Rocky Mountain and Kentucky Saddle bred. Our horses can be seen on our website—Highland Horses.com. This new career has provided new learning experiences and challenges. It is definitely a business and not a hobby. I breed fine horses and expect to sell them.

Amelia Streigel gave us her classification talk using a Power Point presentation, a unique way. Born in Grand Junction, raised in Rangely before moving to Wyoming all the moving because her father was a pipeliner and moved to where there was work. Amelia said she had a unique background for our club because she was probably the only female who could operate a backhoe and drive a bulldozer. She then had the opportunity to spend a year in Germany as an exchange student and told us how much that experience meant to her. She graduated from CSU with a degree in Chemistry, worked for Honeywell as a software tester, moved to Munich, Germany to work for Wacher-Chemie as a translator. She moved back to the U.S. to be nearer her close nit family and to go back to CSU to get a Masters degree in Biomedical Sciences. She now works with the Molecular and Cellular Integrated Neuroscience Program at CSU. Her research involves studying fruit flies. She said she has been dating her boyfriend for four years and would appreciate any help she could get for him to take the plunge, because she is not getting any younger.

Alan Bennett gave a unique classification talk. He said that he was born some time ago on an island off the coast of France, an island colonized by the Italians in 46 ad. He was born in what the Italians called Londinium, London. The two themes that run through his life are airplanes and international connections. His grandfather, an american, flew for the RAF in the First World War. He returned to England and maried a Spaniard whose parents were German and English. Alan's father managed a small airline so Alan grew up among pilots.

He has degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics, paid for by the Dutch company Philips. After working as a true Engineer he changed course and worked in Argentina in an applied area for English Electric. He returned to England to work for RCA and then moved to the US with the same firm. Later he owned a scientific and medical instruments manufacturing company until he retired.