Sally Kurtzman, who has helped the Lowry community get to know two dozen neighbors in this forum over the past few years, is stepping back from “Meet Your Lowry Neighbors.” She’s not stepping away from much else, including the Lowry United Neighborhoods board, where she’s been a longtime, vital member.

If you’ve actually met Sally, this will come to no surprise. She’s 81 now, sure, but her energy and acuity bely that. Add in her tall stature and her bias toward action and you have someone as formidable today as when she moved to Colorado back in 1962.

Nuns as nudge

Sally grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii. Denver landed her thanks to aquatic nuns.

Her father, Philip Corboy, was an ophthalmologist. He mother Cassie, a homemaker originally from New Zealand, where she had been a newspaper reporter. They were active in the Catholic Church. They had a backyard swimming pool. Nuns who happened to be in town from Colorado were allowed to swim at private pools such as this.

Apropos nothing in particular, Sally’s mom mentioned to the swimming nuns, “Sally may want to go to school in Colorado.” Sally hadn’t really considered Colorado, though the mental images of skiing and mountains and horses were enticing enough. She looked into the University of Colorado, but settled on Loretto Heights College.

“I applied just to get my mother off my back,” Sally says.

A transition to teaching

She graduated with an English degree in 1966 and went on to earn a master’s in English at John Carroll University near Cleveland. She returned to Denver in 1968 to a job in the Denver Post library. Back when the capabilities of Google and ChatGPT were still science fiction, newspaper librarians received search queries from reporters verbally or on paper slips.

She might have stayed at the Post until newspaper librarians became extinct, but a Xerox copier salesman she met at a party mentioned a young and expanding educational institution out in Littleton. Sally, who had instructed John Carroll undergrads during her master’s studies, decided to apply for a teaching gig.

She would teach composition, literature, grammar, and creative writing at Arapahoe Community College for 32 years until retiring in 2000. Along the way, she spent two semesters teaching in England and a full year on a teaching exchange in Fukuoka, Japan.

‘Make due, wear it out, use it up, go without.’

Beyond spurring Sally’s move to Colorado, her mother also influenced how she channeled her energies once here. Her mom Cassie’s formative years passed during the Great Depression and wartime New Zealand. Money was tight and imports rare. Her mother had cut collars and buttons, pockets, and collars off shirts for reuse.

That ethos, which Sally sums up as, “Make due, wear it out, use it up, go without,” persisted despite the means to afford an in-ground swimming pool in Honolulu. As a child in Hawaii, Sally ironed paper towels for reuse if they had merely gotten wet.

Sally’s initial foray into organized reuse and recycling happened while still at Loretto Heights College. Observing how many perfectly usable items ended up in trash bins when school wrapped up in late spring, she organized a collection and channeled much of it to the surrounding community.

Later, in the early 1980s, Sally observed the enormous amounts of recyclables going to waste, convinced the King Soopers at Ninth Avenue and Corona St. to let her and a cadre of volunteers use part of the supermarket’s parking lot for a few hours on Saturdays and Sundays one weekend a month. Founded what became the Capitol Hill Recycling Network, she soon learned that collecting it all was the easy part.

“I had to get Coors to take the glass and get the different recycling places to pick up the newspapers,” she says.

Community organizations (and “Jeopardy!”)

The Capitol Hill Recycling Network became surplus as King Soopers and, later, the city and county of Denver instituted recycling programs. But recycling led to more community involvement for Sally, and that ultimately led to her longtime service on the Lowry United Neighborhoods Board – and, by extension, her dedication to this “Meet Your Lowry Neighbors” feature. In addition, Sally has also been an active freelancer for various publications and is a member of the Denver Woman’s Press Club.

Her intellectual curiosity manifest nationally in 1986, when she appeared on the TV show “Jeopardy!” She came in second, she says, the consolation prize being a trip to New York, which she used as impetus for a girls’ weekend.

Sally and husband Jim, who owned and ran hardware stores, moved to Lowry near First Avenue and Quebec St. shortly before her retirement, which was for years much more a semiretirement. She taught English as an adjunct at the University of Denver, and then, together with DU English professor Margaret Whitt, consulted to businesses on writing (“The Write Approach,” they called their firm.) Sally is now contemplating a series of essays around the general topic of living longer and dealing with the inevitable health issues that accompany aging.

Delivering reused items to shelters

Since 2004, she and Jim have lived near the Montclair Recreation Center in Lowry’s north neighborhood. Montclair Rec Center regulars will be familiar with the big cardboard collection box to the left of the lobby doors when you walk in. That’s another Sally thing.

The type of donations requested varies by month. She does toiletries and cosmetics twice a year. November was canned goods; October = Socktober. Eyeglasses, T-shirts, sweatshirts, and towels are also in rotation. She picks donations up at the end of the month and delivers it to six shelters in Denver and Aurora.

“Someone asked me, ‘Why don’t you just take them all to one shelter?’,” Sally recalls. The answer, she says, is “Because I’m a good little communist, I want everybody to get this stuff.”

The ideas keep coming

She and Lowry friends are now planning a program in the community room around the corner from her donation box. The topic: dying and death – or, more specifically, what you should do to prepare for the inevitable.

“One of the girls in our coffee group said, ‘There should be a class on this,’” Sally says. “And I like a short-term project.”

She and Jim had no children, but did have a succession of black labrador retrievers, several of them depicted in artwork adorning a home library that’s testament to the couple’s shared love of reading – and Sally’s having reviewed some 400 books for the Rocky Mountain News over the years. Lulu, a calico rescue cat that succeeded Jim’s many canine duck-hunting companions, prowls the premises. That’s short for “Honolulu,” Sally notes.

Sally is a long way from Honolulu. Has been for a good while. We in Lowry are sure thankful for that.

If you’re an aspiring – or retired – writer and would like to pick up “Meet Your Lowry Neighbors” where Sally left off, give us a shout at connect@lowryunitedneighborhoods.org.

This special edition of Meet Your Lowry Neighbors was penned by our very own Lowry resident Todd Neff, who often facilitates our LUN Town Halls. Thank you, Todd. We sure would like to see more of your writing in this very column!