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The University of Colorado Boulder’s Center of the American West was proud to present the Wallace Stegner & the Humor Initiative’s Fools for a Day Awards to Senator Alan Simpson, Pete Simpson and their wives Ann and Lynne.

The Center has combined the Stegner Award with the Humor Initiative to celebrate the Simpsons’ contributions to our understanding of the West, and to embrace the opportunity to laugh as we do so.

“As public servants, and as people who have contributed their great gifts as story-tellers to the well-being of the West, the Simpson Family occupy a central place in the cultural identity of the West,” Patty Limerick, Faculty Director of the Center of the American West said. “With the Simpsons in our midst, the West has cornered the market for honest, forthright, and very funny commentary on the whole nation’s successes and defeats, the charms and the vexations, the ideals realized and the ideals still in need of our attention and action.”

Each year, the Center of the American West presents the Wallace Stegner Award to an individual or group of individuals who have made a sustained contribution to the cultural identity of the West through literature, art, history, lore, or an understanding of the West. The Center also presents the Fools for a Day award annually to celebrate those individuals whose skills and temperaments support the central conviction of the Center of the American West: A dose of good humor is essential to constructive public discussion, and not coincidentally, to public health.

Thank you to Al and Carol Ann Olson, for their support of the Stegner Award, and to Bill and Jane Reynolds for their support of the Humor Initiative.