Members' 25-Year Reminiscences

Mike McAnelly, FAICP

Dallas, Texas

As a second year graduate student, I attended my first national planning conference in Chicago (I believe it was in 1973). Encouraged by the Fort Collins City Planning Director Bill Kane and our CSU professors Ross Whaley, Al Dyer, and Perry Brown, a group of six students decided to take a week off from classes and make the big trip. Associate Dean Ross Whaley arranged for us to take a station wagon from the university motor pool. We rotated driving and sleeping, completing the road trip non-stop from Colorado to Chicago. We were all pumped with adrenalin over learning more about our newly chosen profession.

We took advantage of the inexpensive student housing offered by the conference committee and reserved a double room at the YMCA on the south side of Chicago (yes, the lyric from Jim Croce's song should have clued us in, but we were poor, determined country boys.) Arriving in Chicago, we registered in the lobby, paid for the first night's lodging, and went upstairs to a dingy, trashed-out room, intending to shower, change clothes, and head for the conference — a good hike north along State Street. Discovering there was no bath in our room, we headed to the gang showers down the hall. After surprising a junky shooting up in a toilet stall, the five of us counseled together in the room, recounted our available bankroll, and collectively decided it was time to plead with the desk clerk for our money back and to find alternative accommodations at a cheap motel further down the street. From that low profile beginning, we enjoyed a spectacular week at the conference and spent evenings exploring the city that never sleeps.

30 years later, all of that group of six students are still working in planning or a planning-related field. Three went on to complete their PhDs, one is a Municipal Planning Director in Canada, one recently sold his environmental planning firm and retired, one recently retired as a Resource Manager for the Forest Service, one is a planner and attorney in Seattle, and one is a planning consultant in Texas.

Over the years, I have enjoyed other opportunities to return to Chicago and attended numerous national planning conferences. But none of my subsequent experiences come up to the thrill and adventure of that first conference in Chicago. Thanks to Bill Lautenbach, Dennis Pendelton, Tom Shepherd, Terry Trembly, and Bruce McGurk for the company, and to Dean Ross Whaley for trusting us to take care of that station wagon, and to Bill Kane, FAICP, for encouraging us to find out more about planning.

As a result of my reminiscence being on the Internet, I have heard from several of my old friends. I was pretty awestruck to see the range of activities. Of the five students who made the road trip to Chicago with me:

• Terry Trembly, called from Seattle after finding the APA reminiscence via a Google search. Terry was a regional planner in the Loveland-Fort Collins area, then went to law school at CU in Boulder, spent many years as a corporate attorney for Boeing, and is now practicing law in Seattle.

• Bill Lautenbach is currently the Planning Director for the City of Greater Sudbury, Ontario, where he has worked for 30 years except for a brief stint as a planner for Victoria, B.C. As an environmental planner, he managed the Sudbury's strip mine reclamation program and worked his way up the ranks to be the big kahuna for planning in Greater Sudbury.

• Dennis Pendleton, is currently the Dean of University Extension at UC Davis, where he also is a Principal in Common Ground: the Center for Cooperative Solutions, a joint endeavor of the UC Davis School of Law and University Extension, providing problem assessment, mediation, and facilitation services.

• Tom Shepherd, also received his doctorate from CSU and was recognized as a 2004 Distinguished Alumnus of the CSU College of Natural Resources. He founded his own environmental consulting firm, Shepherd-Miller Inc., which later was acquired by MFG, Inc., part of Tetra Tech Companies. In 1990, he established the Tom and Ann Shepherd Diversity scholarship, the largest endowment for the Department of Forest Sciences at Colorado State.

• Bruce McGurk spent 30 years as a Research Hydrologist for the U.S. Forest Service Central Sierra Snow Lab, and is currently a Water Resource Hydrologist for Pacific Gas & Electric Company.

Of our professors in the Regional Resources Planning graduate program at CSU:

• Ross Whaley recently moved from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, where he served 16 years as its President and subsequently as University Professor. In 2003, the New York State Senate approved the Governor's nomination of Dr. Whaley to become the Chairman of the Adirondacks Parks Agency for the State of New York.

• Perry Brown is currently Dean of the Montana State University College of Forestry and Conservation and Director of the Montana Forest and Conservation Experiment Station.

• Al Dyer retired in 2004 as Dean of the College of Natural Resources at CSU, where he created the Environment and Natural Resources Policy Institute, the Integrated Resources Management Program, and established the interdisciplinary environmental studies open-option for students interested in environmental programs.

• Bill Kane, FAICP, was inducted as an AICP Fellow in 2004. Currently, he is a principal of Snow Engineering in Aspen, CO. As planning director for the City of Aspen and Pitkin County, he created and implemented the Growth Management Plan for Aspen and Pitkin County.