Under the Big Tent, Aims Community College, 5401 W. 20th Street
10:00 am – 4:00 pm
ALL AGES

High Plains Chautauqua is proud to present our Young Chautauqua scholars. These students have spent months reading, researching, and presenting their characters to different audiences. Young Chautauqua is a Colorado Humanities program that has been developed and supported by Greeley-Evans School District Six. Since the program began ten years ago, approximately five thousand students have participated as audience members or by researching and presenting a character.

9:30 – 10:30 am
Abe, the Storyteller                   
Dennis Boggs as Abraham Lincoln

Abe Lincoln once told a friend about a dream in which he found himself in some great assembly where the people drew back to let him approach the stage. In the dream, he overheard a man whisper, “He's a common-looking fellow,” to which Lincoln replied: “Friend, the Lord prefers common-looking people; that is the reason why He made so many of them.” This is just one story among dozens told by America's greatest story-telling president. In this session, Dennis Boggs will relate many more stories as told by Abe, “the storyteller.”

10:45 – 11:45 am
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Her Woman’s Bible
Laurie James as Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Fifty years after Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century was published, Elizabeth Cady Stanton published her The Woman’s Bible. Both visionary works shared the common goal of making women aware of the roots of gender inequity and inspiring women to work for their rights. For Stanton that meant women’s right to vote. At the age of 80, after 50 years of failing to win the vote, Stanton organized a committee of women scholars to examine the Bible and write commentaries on the portions that viewed women negatively or excluded them. A storm of controversy broke loose. She was labeled an infidel. Organizations, libraries, schools, ministers, and Christians denounced and threw out The Woman’s Bible as heresy. In this workshop, Laurie James will reveal the what, the why, the how, and ask participants to read and discuss parts of The Woman’s Bible. She’ll also perform excerpts of “Winter Wheat,” her original solo drama which brings Stanton alive as the first woman to publish a woman’s perspective of the Bible.

1:00 – 2:00 pm
The Visionary Voice of Henry David Thoreau
Kevin Radaker as Henry David Thoreau

Through dramatic recitation of passages from Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” “Walking,” and other writings, Henry David Thoreau will offer trenchant criticism of an overly materialistic and mechanized life, argue that principled non-violent resistance against injustice can lead to profound change, and celebrate the spiritual value of nature and the wild. Thoreau was a visionary whose eloquent prose has inspired countless persons to live lives of simplicity, integrity, and higher purpose. His “Civil Disobedience” inspired such great reformers of the past century as Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his thoughts on nature provided the ideological underpinnings of the wilderness preservation movement and contemporary environmentalism.

2:15 – 3:15 pm
Walt Whitman’s Lincoln
Brian Ellis as Walt Whitman

Lincoln was a fan of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, reading excerpts to clients in his Springfield law office. The one time he took the poetry home Mary Todd threatened to burn it! Whitman’s most famous poems, “Oh Captain, My Captain” and “When Lilacs Last Bloomed,” were written as eulogies for this martyred hero. After Lincoln’s assassination, Whitman gave regular lectures on Lincoln to rave reviews. Ellis recreates a program Whitman delivered on the Life of Lincoln woven with his Civil War poems and recollections of their misty morning encounter during the war.

This program follows Abraham Lincoln from birth to his twenty-first year. President Lincoln talks about his life through these years – growing up in the hills of Kentucky, the forest of Indiana and the prairies of Illinois, reminiscing about his playmates, his teachers, his sweethearts and his pets. He shares stories of happy times and sad times, and situations that inspired him to exceed expectations.

Dickinson described death as “the Deep Stranger,” and her visionary poems question what lies beyond this life. This workshop will begin with a 15- to 20-minute portrayal of Dickinson at the end of her life, as she contemplates her own mortality. Then Conner will break character to explain how this unknown poet’s work came to be published after her death. Dickinson’s posthumous path to publication is one of the most fascinating stories in all of literature.

1:00 – 2:00 pm
Nikola Tesla, Eccentric Genius
Richard Marold as Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was the brilliant scientist whose work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries set the stage for the technological breakthroughs that shape our world today. He devised the system of alternating current and created the modern radio system. Among his discoveries are the florescent light, laser beam, wireless communications, wireless transmission of electrical energy, remote control and robotics. He registered over 700 patents worldwide. He foresaw interplanetary communications and satellites. Tesla spent seven months in Colorado in 1899 conducting experiments in wireless telegraphy and investigating the higher strata of the atmosphere. Enjoy a visit with this brilliant, eccentric genius whose humanity motivated the exceptional research he conducted. In this program Mr. Tesla will focus on the experiments and studies he conducted in Colorado.

Richard Marold, a resident and native of Colorado, has worked as a Chautauquan for a number of years. In addition to Tesla he also portrays Winfield Scott Stratton and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Marold holds a master’s degree in humanities from Penn State University, has edited a journal on Colorado history and is the author of Winfield Scott Stratton – Reluctant Millionaire.

Suggested Reading
Cheney, Margaret. Tesla, Man Out of Time. Touchstone, 2001.

Draper, Wanetta and Hunt, Inez. Lightning in His Hand, The Life Story of Nikola Tesla. Tesla Book Co., 1991.

O'Neill, John J. Prodigal Genius, The Life of Nikola Tesla. Brotherhood of Life, 2002.

One of the most influential men in the pioneering era of Colorado was a Russian immigrant named Otto Mears (1840-1931). Orphaned at age three, and living on his own from the age of eleven, he came to the Colorado Territory in 1865. He built toll roads and railroads where none existed in the steepest parts of the Rocky Mountains, opening the vast riches of Colorado’s high country to exploration and development. He was a witness at the trial of Alfred Packer, he helped design the Colorado State Capitol building, and he was a power to contend with in Colorado politics for fifty years. His place in Colorado’s history is immortalized in stained glass in the state senate chambers.

Steve Lee taught sixth grade for thirty-two years, often through the use of stories. Now, he is able to devote more time to the art of telling stories that teach. Steve works at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden, Colorado, where he provides educational programs.

Suggested Reading
Tucker, E.F. Otto Mears and the San Juans. Western Reflections Pub. Co., 2003.

Kaplan, M. Otto Mears: Paradoxical Pathfinder. San Juan County Book Co., 1982.

Strong, W.K. The Remarkable Railroad Passes of Otto Mears. San Juan Book Co., 1988.

Normal parking restrictions in the Senior Activities Center parking lot will be waived during HPC programs on Friday, August 7. Entry to the lot is on 6th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues.

Write Like Emily Dickinson
(Ages 8 and older)
Debra Conner

Dickinson described ordinary things in unusual ways. The moon, she said, is like a chin of gold. She described a snake as being like a whip.  In this workshop, we’ll play a metaphor game and try our hand at writing some poems that use metaphors and similes in creative and imaginative ways.

10:00 am – noon
Kids Are Visionaries, Too! (Ages 6 – 12)
Hands-on art for children

Let’s be visionaries, and let’s imagine: Envision an animal, bird, or insect from another planet – a creative drawing experience taught by Deanna Rohnke. See like you have never seen before! Make yourself a pair of magic glasses with Judith Meyers and Karen Inglis, and see like a visionary.

We often compare the lens of a movie camera to the human eye, because it selects what we see on the screen. Sometimes the camera looks away or momentarily blinks for us. Sometimes it fixes our gaze.

Part of the fun of going to a movie is allowing our eyes to be manipulated by what the camera and projector are showing us. However, opening our eyes to the visionary world that lies behind the movie magic not only gives us better peripheral vision and keen depth perception – we may find ourselves with x-ray vision as well. 

C. S. Lewis recalls some of his worst and best memories of attending four boarding schools from the age of nine to fifteen. He then recalls fond memories of studying under a very demanding tutor (William T. Kirkpatrick) for three years until he enrolled at University College, Oxford, at the age of 18. We learn that before Lewis could complete his first term, he enlisted for military service and found himself fighting in the front-line trenches of France on his nineteenth birthday, November 29, 1917. Finally, Lewis shares very difficult memories of combat through his poetry, in which he expresses anger and disgust with God for allowing such horrible carnage. 

Henry Adams was a unique sort of visionary.  As a historian his vision was primarily of the past, though he did briefly look into the future once he had clearly seen the past. This workshop will briefly reference Adams’ nine volume history of the United States and then turn almost immediately to his one volume work on medieval history: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. The workshop will take participants to the same medieval cathedrals that Adams and his niece toured in the book. A power-point slide show of the cathedrals, and especially their windows, accompanied by Uncle Henry’s descriptions and observations, will make participants visionaries of a time when “woman (in the person of the Virgin) was supreme.” They will see why Henry Adams said: “All the steam (power) in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.” 

Lise’s contemporary, Marie Curie, received two Nobel Prizes, whereas Lise received none.  Yet Meitner’s vision and heroism match the more famous scientist’s. Meitner discovered the “Auger effect” two years before Auger, for whom it is named. Working with Otto Hahn, Meitner discovered the longest-lived isotope of the element protactinium. Also in collaboration with Hahn, Meitner figured out the basis for nuclear fission. Hahn received the Nobel Prize for discovering nuclear fission in 1944; Meitner was not recognized. During World War II  Meitner clearly explained nuclear fission in a report that convinced Einstein to write to then president Roosevelt, resulting in the Manhattan project and the nuclear bomb. Meitner refused to work on nuclear weapons, but conducted research for Sweden’s first nuclear reactor. Why does this visionary remain largely invisible? Find out about the combination of politics, religion, and assumptions about women working in science that kept Lise Meitner’s name in obscurity. Hear of her hair-raising escape from Berlin during the war. And learn of the long overdue honors bestowed upon Lise Meitner both later in her life and posthumously. 

The academic study of organized Black Religion in America began with Du Bois’s Atlanta University Series publication of The Negro Church in 1903, the same year he published his classic The Souls of Black Folks. In this seminar Pace will draw upon both books to explain how and why, beginning in the late 18th century, the Black church has emerged as the primary institution in black America, even predating, according to Du Bois, the negro family. The Negro church is black America’s “creative crucible” – one that has produced leaders in the fields of religion, politics, show business, and academia. It is the where “I first learned,” according to Pace, “as assistant superintendent of Sunday School at Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church in Texarkana, TX, to speak persuasively before a public audience.”

Note from the presenter: My use of negro, Negro, black, Black is intentional, whose semiotic purpose will be explained in the workshop, as part of the process of understanding the complexity of being colored in America.