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Today's Featured Biography
Chris Moulding
When I first came to East High School in the fall of my junior year, it was the 9th school I’d attended. Most of the times I was forced to enter school mid-year, the result of my father’s career wanderlust. I was perennially “the new kid”. So, entering East at the normal time in September might have been a blessing, but I had a terrible secret. I had repeated 9th grade and I had maintained this secret for two years. The classmates and friends I had made at Smiley Jr. High, who I had not seen for two years were by then seniors, and I was a junior (oh, the shame!). In my best (15-year-old boy) thinking, the only reasonable strategy was to avoid every one of them, pretending we had never known one other. I would have been in the class of ’72, but instead I was now in ’73. As it turns out, thank goodness! But unfortunately, I didn’t get to know many of you because I was keeping my head down so much and, in retrospect, so foolishly hiding.
In our second semester junior year, two wonderful things happened. First, I joined the gymnastics team, a group of highly talented, relatively small athletes who would win the Denver city championship a year later and ultimately produce NCAA champions (Rich Healey and Kirk Stephens), and who warmly accepted me despite my own modest talents in the disciplines. I finally belonged to a tribe, and that was good. Second, and even more importantly, I met Cathy Lucas. More precisely, she met me, introducing herself in study hall. I think this was her opening line: “Kirk says you’re really good at math.” Well, yes, I was! I did not know at the time that my tutoring skills were so magnificent, since Cathy seemed to grasp every concept almost immediately. Pretty soon we were no longer working on math problems; we had moved on to chemistry. Yes, we were bonding, primarily ionic but very nearly covalently.
We attended colleges 100 miles apart, Cathy in Boulder and me in Colorado Springs. With each of us growing separately for four years, those bonds eroded and finally broke. But fortunately, the memories remained. In the emotional words of Forrest Gump, “I thought about Jenny”.
I moved to east to Boston after college and began work as a lab technician in a biochemistry lab, then joined a molecular genetics lab. For seven years in the early 1980s, I had a front row seat at the emerging frontier of recombinant DNA technology. I moved west to California to attend business school, got married to Nancy, and we had two beautiful daughters, Laura and Natalie. I worked in the biotech industry in the SF Bay area for a few years, then found my niche in University technology transfer. I have been involved in patenting and licensing of inventions made in medical research institutions (at UCLA, Caltech, USC, City of Hope, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute) for more than 30 years. I have largely enjoyed my career, but … back to the main story.
Cathy married a few years before I did, moved north to Wyoming and later south to Texas, had two beautiful daughters—Sarah and Emily—and after a few years in business administration found her niche in teaching elementary school students how to read and do math.
By chance, we were both drawn back to the foot of the Rocky Mountains for family reunions during the same week one summer, both of us at the time also in the midst of rocky marriages. We met for dinner in Larimer Square one evening, to catch up. In a popular song from The Lion King, the meerkat Timon’s intro goes: “I can see what’s happening, and they don’t have a clue, they’ll fall in love…” You wouldn’t be completely wrong, because in fact after that dinner we started to build a new relationship, relatively slowly and scandal free. Six years later, and on the 40th anniversary of the day we first became a couple in March 1972, I asked Cathy to marry me and move to Los Angeles. In sort of a surprise ending to the Dave Loggins song “Please Come to Boston” […Please come to Denver… Please come to LA to live forever], she said YES! We have now been happily married almost 11 years, we’re friendly with our exes, and we regularly share visits with our four daughters and now four grandchildren, all of whom live on the east coast.
Thank you, gentle reader, for allowing me to reveal my terrible secret and the story of my love affair with Cathy, complete with the Hollywood ending, in this rather unconventional biography.
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