The Bonfils-Stanton Foundation Awards are a very big deal; they’re considered Colorado’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize and are given annually to distinguished leaders in the fields of arts and humanities, community service, and science and medicine.
The awards are presented at a dignified and well-planned lunch where the recipients are joined by previous honorees, foundation principals and a tightknit group of special friends. The food, the location, the ambiance are always first rate, and everyone leaves feeling very good about having been a part of it.
Humor, though, is rarely factored in.
But this year, when Mayor Guillermo “Bill” Vidal and recipient Marion Downs changed things up a bit.
“Heaven can wait!” the 97-year-old Downs exclaimed as she accepted the award for Science and Medicine. “This boggles the mind, or what you can call what’s left of my mind.” The still sharp-as-a-tack pediatric audiologist is credited with starting what is now a universal program that screens 95 percent of all newborns in the United States for hearing loss.
Vidal pointed out that “nothing wrecks a good lunch like a long speech” and then proceeded to relate a funny story about how he’d gotten to know Maggie Divelbiss, the Arts and Humanities honoree in 2007-08. She was director of the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo when he headed the CDOT office there and one of its sprinkler systems flooded the arts center.
Read more about it — and honors for Bruce and Marcy Benson, Dianne Perry Vanderlip and the new class of Livingston Fellows — in my Seen First blog: blogs.denverpost
Joanne Davidson: 303-809-1314 or jdavidson@denverpost.com
