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CU alumnus attributes athletic successes and love of learning to Boulder childhood

By Lara Herrington Watson

Ray McKinnis (Phil&Psych’61) has won marathons in race-walking and has worked with the FDA to release the very first AIDS drug. Now in his mid-70s, he says he’s led a charmed life. It started with an unorthodox childhood growing up on University Hill in Boulder.

When the University of Colorado Boulder alumnus was just 6 years old, his mother moved their family from a farm in Kansas to Boulder, to support them and rear her sons in a better educational environment.

This had a profound, lifelong effect on McKinnis.

“It was just after World War II, and with the G.I. Bill, campus was flooded with students,” McKinnis says. For 10 years his mother supported her family with her successful boarding house on the Hill, where she cooked three meals a day for at least 45 students.

“She felt it was a mission. During vacation or before school started, she would invite in foreign students from all over the world to our house, to eat and sleep,” McKinnis says.

Not only did she procure free in-state tuition at the University of Colorado Boulder for her five sons, who lived in the boarding house basement, but she also exposed them to the university atmosphere.

“Just being there on campus along with other students made it seem like being an adult meant being a student. You didn’t have to be registered for classes. I could go to the library or the Shakespeare Festival,” says McKinnis, who felt like a part of the university community long before attending the university.

Many of his Boulder High School teachers also taught at CU-Boulder, and he credits them with connecting him to the university and making him a life-long learner.

When McKinnis finally began attending CU-Boulder, he took full advantage of summer seminars and guest lecturers, poetry readings and experimental movies.

“There was such a variety of offerings. You could decide what you wanted to be,” he says.

"Just being there on campus along with other students made it seem like being an adult meant being a student.”

McKinnis did decide what he wanted to be, pursuing a large number of degrees and smoothly navigating a variety of successful careers throughout his life—“realizing that what I learned would go with me wherever I went, like a set of tools.”

He holds a Master in Divinity from Yale University, a Master of Science in biostatistics from the University of Alabama, a Master of Arts in counseling from Argosy University and a Ph.D. in biblical studies from Drew University.

After leaving Boulder, he started teaching at a small black college outside of Birmingham, Alabama, during the peak of the Civil Rights movement. He says growing up in Boulder among students from all parts of the world helped him navigate culture in the South.

“I knew nothing about the movement, but learned quickly,” McKinnis says, crediting his students with teaching him.

He then went back to school for biostatistics, completing research in cardiovascular disease at Duke University.

“Changing from humanities to math was one of my worst years,” McKinnis says. “But I survived and got a job. Don’t let anything that anybody says stop you. Try it, and the universe will support you.”

With his biostatistics degree, he worked with the FDA to get the first AIDS drug approved, as well as the first pulmonary surfactant for premature infants, which has now saved the lives of millions of babies, McKinnis says.

Deciding “human beings are more interesting than computers,” McKinnis left a statistical programming job to pursue a counseling degree.

At age 70, he used his counseling degree to treat a group of prisoners with addiction issues. This year, he published a book, Putting Spirit into Spirituality and Order into Religion: For Counselors and Others Who Care.

“I believe life is flexible,” McKinnis says, a belief he formed during his childhood in Boulder where so many people were involved and passionate in so many things.

He credits Boulder with imparting to him not only a love for book-based learning, but also an athletic ability discovered later in life.

When he was 40, McKinnis got tired of his regular running scene, so he learned how to race walk.

“In my first race, I thought I must be doing it wrong, because no one else was around me,” he says.

In fact, he was doing it right, and he was winning his race with a mile split of 8:13. His personal best time for a mile is 6:57.

This was a shock for McKinnis, who had never been athletic as a kid. As an 11-year-old, he had a slight case of polio that weakened the left side of his body.

He is sure Boulder’s high altitude and hills contributed to this success.

“Walking up those hills every day must have regenerated the nerves and muscles on my left side,” he says.

Twice McKinnis won the masters’ race-walking division of the New York Marathon, which he completed in just four hours.

“I wanted to experience the best my body had in it,” he says. “If you want something, go for it. You’re never too old to try something new.”

Now he’s looking for his newest adventure.

“My whole life from the very beginning has been a gift,” he says. “What’s next? What else should I be doing? I’ve already had more than 50 paying jobs in my life, ranging from mining molybdenum in Climax, Colorado, to dating potsherds from the Middle Bronze Age from Palestine.”

McKinnis wants to continue teaching, and he’s looking for a school or university that might work with him

While he’s teaching, he plans to keep learning.

“Learning makes you a better person at the end of each day,” McKinnis says. “And you can always take it with you.”

Lara Herrington Watson is a CU alumna (’07) and freelance writer who splits her time between Denver and Phoenix.