If you mentioned to Sheldon “Shelly” Steinhauser back in his days as head of the local ADL (1950-1985) that one day he would be building up a pharmacy school at CU, he would no doubt have responded with a quizzical look. Or that one day he would be deep into academia teaching about aging, he would likely not have understood.
Which means: Steinhauser has taken his bedrock commitment to civil rights and inclusion and found new ways, new doors, new contexts, to carry this commitment forward as society has grown and changed. Some people, committed though they are, cannot detach their values from the original context in which they flourished. These people become relics of history, perhaps very esteemed, but nonetheless identified only with the past.
Not so Shelly Steinhauser. He put the local ADL on the map. To this day, no one has even come close to the length of his tenure there. At one point, Steinhauser could have gone on to national ADLleadership in the post eventually filled by the legendary Abe Foxman. But Steinhauser = Denver. Of course we always need national leaders, but what can they do if they have no firm local bases? Steinhauser has always provided that firm local presence, committed to making civil rights work where they actually take place: locally. When Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics is local,” he had the likes of Sheldon Steinhauser in mind.
So when Steinhauser had a chance to take his commitments to the professional leadership of the Allied Jewish Federation, based in Denver, he took it. When he had a chance to take his commitments into academia, he took it, at what then was called Metropolitan State College of Denver.
Now look at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the CU Anschutz Campus — in Denver. Steinhauser has built it up as senior director of development, bolstering both its clinical and research sides.
CU responded with the Sheldon Steinhauser Diversity Scholarship — a most fitting tribute, speaking for a much larger segment of Denver than the university itself.
Incidentally, if you bump into Steinhauser these days, you’ll be surprised to find that he’s retired. He’s trim. He works out. He’s energetic. He may have retired in a formal sense — “to let others come forth,” as he puts it — but he’s hardly retired from making his trademark contributions individually, just as he made them for so many decades professionally.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
