Amy Parsons: Hi, I’m Amy Parsons, president of Colorado State University and host of The Next 150 podcast. We have so many remarkable people in our community, and this is where we’re going to hear their stories, we’re going to get their perspective on CSU’s next 150 years, and gather their very best advice for today’s CSU students. Let’s get started, Rams.

Hi everyone. I’m Amy Parsons, president of Colorado State University. I’m really honored to be here today with former Colorado Governor, Roy Romer, a 1950 graduate of Colorado State University. It’s an honor to be here with you today.

Roy Romer: Thank you.

Amy Parsons: Governor Romer and I just flew out to Eastern Colorado today. We are at 21st Century Equipment, celebrating 100 years of being in business here. And Roy, this is a business that your family helped to build.

Roy Romer: It is.

Amy Parsons: It’s really special to be here to celebrate. I’m just going to give a quick note about who you are for our listeners, just in case people don’t know your full story. But you grew up here in Holly, Colorado during the Dust Bowl, during the Great Depression. 97 years old today.

Roy Romer: Yeah.

Amy Parsons: You’re a wealth of knowledge about Colorado and agriculture. You earned your bachelor’s degree in agricultural economics from CSU in 1950, law school at CU; we have that in common, you and I on the same path. And then ethics and divinity, I learned on our flight today in Yale. Service in the U.S. Air Force as a military prosecutor in Germany. Went on to serve in the Colorado House, Colorado Senate, eight years as treasurer, 12 years as governor of Colorado. And after that, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, amazing position. And here you are still working in agriculture, working in Colorado, and we’re so happy that you’re a Ram. We’re so proud of you as a CSU alum. So we’re going to be going on a tour of the store after this. Really excited to see everything that’s been built here. And we just want to start and get some of your perspectives on what it was like being here during the Great Depression.

Roy Romer: One, it’s drier than it is right now. As I came down the highway, I recognize there’s a much more green than in the 1930s. There just wasn’t any green around. Secondly, I lived through the Dust Bowl and the Depression, but I did a lot of things in life, but it was all shaped by the values you represent around this table. It’s working together, living together, worshiping together in small groups. This was a very, very key thing. Behind me is the picture of my mother and father, who were working at that time. They were very instrumental. And I want to share with you just a bit about my mother, because my people would think that my father was a driving thing. She did everything in Holly that was going on. She sang at every funeral; she was a good singer. She worked in the store. She was doing the parch counter. She was doing the scales, weighing in the grain. But she was a tremendous individual. I remember particularly, there was no place to swim in Holly. So on a Sunday afternoon, we’d get in a car and go to the lakes up near Eads or somewhere to find a place to swim. Every time we did that, we had to take somebody with us. My mother would say, we had a station wagon, we got to add two people. So we would go to a family that didn’t have a car, didn’t have access to swimming, and say, “Let me take you with us.” That was a spirit that I got from my mother. I want to tell one more story about values. As I look around the room, you’re all rural or related to rural. I picked up most of my values in life out of this town, and I’ll illustrate it by one man named Orville Sellard. Orville worked with me in the elevator, and our job was to carry Purina feed sacks off the boxcar and put it in a warehouse. I was a strong 16-year-old guy in high school. He was 65, but had a peg leg, wooden stick sticking out. He carried those 100-pound bags every damn day, the same as I did. So during life, when it really got tough for me, I would think of Orville and say, “Hey, Orville could do it with one leg. I ought to be able to do it with two.” And those values come at you from working, living, being close together in rural communities. So I highly value the culture. And I appreciate you, Ms. President, being here because there is a gap between urban ethic and rural life that needs to be closed. Urban people have an elitism about rural people, and that needs to be overcome. And that’s why I love Holly, and I love John Deere and love being here. Thank You.

Amy Parsons: Well, that’s one of the things we’re trying to do at Colorado State University is really bring people together. You’re part of that history of CSU.

Roy Romer: Yes.

Amy Parsons: Talk about how you ended up at CSU. And I also learned from you when we were here earlier today that you were both student body president of CSU and you were on probation, the whole time you were at Colorado State University, which is pretty awesome.

Roy Romer: I went to CSU because I didn’t social dance, but I square danced. I felt comfortable being in a… My last memory of a football score was 56 to nothing, and I was nothing. You follow? Down the valley as you get smaller. And so when I went to CSU, I thought it was a place I deserved, and it was not as sophisticated as others. But when I was a freshman at CSU, I and a group of guys went down to CU before the football game and painted the cannon in front of the CU green and gold. And because I was driving, they got my license number and put me on disciplinary probation for four years. I later became student body president, and a new president to the campus had a group of 40 students together saying, “Hey, it’s you leaders here who need to set an example of how you behave in college.” Everybody’s starting to laugh. The president said, “What’d I do wrong?” He said, “Well, hey, you got to know your student body president’s still on disciplinary probation.” So there’s a short story.

Amy Parsons: I love that story. Talk to us about how you’ve seen agriculture in Colorado change over the years because you’re such a wealth of perspective for the state.

Roy Romer: I farmed a lot. I drove the Model D tractor, Model A, B. I did a lot of that personally. And I got to tell you one more story. I was in a Model G tractor in a field cultivating, and a dust storm came in to where I couldn’t see the rows. So I had to stop in the middle of the field and walk to the fence. It’s on Section 31 down south of Holly. And I had a partner with me in the area. He was coming to pick me up. So I saw this pair of lights coming down the road, how roads have ruts in them. And he was going slow, so I ran around the front of the car and got in the rider’s seat, the passenger seat, looked over, and there was nobody driving the car. What had happened, he’d gone down to start his car, having it idle, went back to his tractor to pick up something, and the wind was blowing that car. And just the experience of the Dust Bowl was very, very severe. But the final conclusion about that is you got to solve that problem. You’re going to die or go to California if you don’t solve that problem. And the people who stayed here in this country have a lot of grit and a lot of smart, and they make a culture that I like to identify with.

Amy Parsons: Yeah. What do you see ahead for Colorado in agriculture?

Roy Romer: In the short run, you really got a tough couple of years ahead in water and weather. I’m not an expert on weather, but I follow it. And the dryness and the heat and the cycles that we read, I believe that global warming is having an effect on our current weather. And so in the short run, you’ve got a tough row to hoe. In the long run, agriculture has a tremendous future because we’re going to be doing some much better things. We’ve got to find a way to use our water better. We’ve got to find a substitute for the alfalfa cattle feeding way of producing food for the world. And there are other foods and other plants that will do better for us. We need to be smart enough to get… And many of you are in this area; you need to be smart enough to help the private economy work into those new areas. So long-term, good future for agriculture. A couple of years ahead, tough times.

Amy Parsons: Governor, you’ve had such an amazing career, such a diverse career over time. Seems like it’s always been driven by your intellectual curiosity and search for truth. How have you cultivated that over time? And thinking about advice for our young people in college today.

Roy Romer: Well, the search for truth has always been with me. During the war, you remember Camp Amache, you saw it on the road coming down, just 10 miles from here. I went up to Camp Amache and played football with them. I knew at the time what a great injustice this was, but the experience I’ve had living in the country has given me perspective on how to sort truth from falsehood. And you really live by truth, by the way, you can’t lie when you have no crop. When your crop grows, there’s reasons why it grows, and you need to know why and make it good. I just love the culture of rural life. And when I was governor, knew there was a division. People in the city have an elitism about country people. They’re slower, they’re dumber. There’s an elitism about city folks regarding country folks. And I think we need to close that gap. This is a part of that effort.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, yeah. Well, we want to thank you for your ongoing leadership in Colorado, and you’re an inspiration to all of us, especially at 97 years old. I asked you earlier, any tips for those of us who want to be as productive, healthy, and happy as you are at almost a hundred years old?

Roy Romer: Hold yourself accountable and the people you work with accountable. Let me tell you a quick story about accountability. We had the store down south of the railroad tracks, and there was a filling station, two pumps. And you know how to do, you put all the cans up in a V shape, four high in front of a pump. I was riding a bicycle. Hell, I was only seven years old, and I ran into those oil cans, and I damaged them. What did my father do? He made me pay for every damn oil can I damaged. But he was smart enough to say, “Now, hey, they haven’t been broken. They’re just damaged. They’re bent. You can go over here at a spot I’ll let you have, and you can sell those at a discount and get some of your money back.” So he was disciplining me, but at the same time saying, “Hey, there’s a lesson to be learned here, let me help you learn that lesson.” That’s what rural people do. They tackle a problem directly and say, “Hey, you got to find a solution. You just can’t sit here and die. Let’s find a solution together and do it.”

Amy Parsons: Mm-hmm. So that stick-to-itiveness you’ve had since the very beginning has driven your life to where you are now, and that intellectual curiosity is-

Roy Romer: Well, yeah. Intellectually curious is right. I’ve been known to go to a convention in which I was supposed to speak and then get caught on a sidewalk by a building they’re tearing down and I’m so fascinated by how they’re tearing the building down that I missed the speech.;

Amy Parsons: Well, thank you for doing this with me and for sharing some of your wisdom with the folks here at 21st Century and with John Deere and with Colorado State University as well.

Roy Romer: And I want to say thank you to coming down here. Hey, I didn’t know CSU knew where the hell Holly was.

Amy Parsons: You’ve got some Ram alums in here. You’ve got quite a few Ram alums in this room. Yeah. It’s been an honor spending time with you here today, and thanks for sharing your wisdom. We’re so proud of you as a Ram and your leadership in Colorado. You’re really an inspiration to us.

Roy Romer: Thank you.

Amy Parsons: Thank you.

Roy Romer: All right.

Amy Parsons: All right. Thanks. Go Rams.

Thank you for listening. I’m Amy Parsons, president of Colorado State University, and you’re listening to CSU’s The Next 150, where we explore what comes next for CSU by chatting with changemakers who are already leading the charge and shaping our next 150 years. I’m gathering their very best advice for today’s CSU students. Stay tuned to wherever you get podcasts for our next outstanding conversation. Go Rams.