CU legend still pushing physical, intellectual limits

Accident investigation and an interest in natural history are just the latest chapter in the remarkable life of Joe Romig, CU football legend, Rhodes Scholar and distinguished astrophysicist

Joe Romig has spent his life pushing limits, whether on the football field as an undersized but overachieving All-American for the University of Colorado, in the classroom as a Rhodes Scholar with an eye for astronomy, even in outer space as part of the NASA Voyager Missions.

Now at 73 years old, Romig’s football days are far behind him, but he continues to tackle intellectual challenges with his work at Lafayette-based consulting firm Ponderosa Associates, where he uses his background as an astrophysicist and NASA scientist to solve problems on Earth.

In addition to current research (writing papers whenever he feels like it, happily avoiding any pressure to “publish or perish”), Romig devotes his time to supporting the University of Colorado’s Museum of Natural History, where his wife, Barbara, works.

“It’s not physics-related; it’s a natural history museum—it’s about archaeology, about biology—but I think [his involvement] is a real sign of how big his brain is and how broad his is curiosity is,” says John Stevenson, dean of the CU-Boulder Graduate School.

“Renaissance man” is how Stevenson and many others describe Romig, who represents a well-roundedness that seems rare in today’s specialized world.

But before any of his talents had been realized, Romig was just your average student athlete. Except he wasn’t average at all.

Football meets science

Romig lines up on the Colorado practice field. He fiercely eyes the ball carrier settling into a stance 20 yards across from him.

With a blast of the whistle, the two are off, hurling themselves full speed at one another, meeting in the middle with the resounding crack of protective padding.

Instruments light up, and so does the face of an attending Stearns-Roger Co. technician. Sensors attached to the players’ pads register a G-force spike of nearly 75 Gs.

This wasn’t any football drill. This was a science experiment.

“I have never hit anybody that hard or been hit that hard,” says Romig, before admitting that the drill, which was organized by Stearns-Roger Co. as a way to prove the safety of an ejector seat the company was designing for the U.S. Air Force, likely wouldn’t have been allowed in today’s concussion-concerned society.

This harmony of great intellectual and physical pursuits defined Romig’s time as an undergraduate at CU.

When Romig arrived in Boulder in fall 1958, he realized that he needed to make a decision: “When I came here, I thought there are three things you can do in college. You can study, you can play a sport, and you can socialize. But I figured I only had enough talent to do two of those.”

And since coach Sonny Grandelius would always remind him that, “You can’t eat a football,” Romig figured that his time away from the football field was best spent studying.

"I have never hit anybody that hard or been hit that hard.”

Today, maybe you can eat a football. Take CU alumnus Paul Richardson, for example, who, just last summer decided to forgo his final year of school in favor of a high-paying career in the NFL.

In Romig’s day, however, pro football players often worked side-jobs to support themselves.

For Romig, football was just a means to pay for his education. “I maybe had one date a year…all I did was study and play football,” Romig remembers.

To use his time most efficiently, Romig planned his class schedules around athletic demands, taking lighter loads during the fall semester to focus on the football season, and then buckling down in the spring.

As a 5’10”, 199-pound kid out of Lakewood High School, Romig was at a definite size disadvantage on the gridiron, but his determination and grit drove him to succeed as a two-way offensive guard-linebacker in the one-platoon days.

“He was just one of those players that when he played, he was kind of like a bulldog. Just a fierce competitor,” says David Plati, CU sports information director.

Romig finished sixth in Heisman voting in the 1961 season. That season, he won the Knute Rockne Award for best lineman in the nation. The two-time All-American (the first in CU’s history) would later have his jersey retired by CU and would eventually be enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame.

Such an impressive college resumé earned him attention from the New York Giants, but Joe Romig’s attention was on loftier goals.

Fighting the world’s fight

British businessman and financier Cecil Rhodes was so pleased with the experience he had attending Oxford University that he used his vast fortune to establish a scholarship allowing others to share in his success and “fight the world’s fight.”

Individuals who possess “literary and scholastic attainments” and the “energy to use one’s talents to the full, as exemplified by fondness for and success in sports,” among other criteria, are eligible to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship and for full financial support to pursue a degree or degrees at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom

Joe Romig fit the bill. In addition to his list of playing acheviements, Romig maintained a 3.9 grade-point average while earning his bachelor’s degree in physics.

In 1963, Romig applied for the award. After barely making it out of the second interview phase due to self-described “civil disobedience” during a question about whether he would obey the law even if it meant turning over his grandmother (he wouldn’t), Romig managed to breeze through the rest of the selection process, eventually finding himself among the 32 people selected annually each year for what is commonly regarded as the most prestigious international scholarship program in the world.

He joined his fellow Rhodes scholars in New York City, where the group of the brightest young minds in the United States all embarked on the SS France to England to begin their graduate studies together.

Among those onboard were John Edgar Wideman, who would go on to win two PEN/Faulkner awards for his writing, and future CIA Director R. James Woolsey.

Once at Oxford, Romig pursued a master’s degree in plasma physics. In his spare time, he saw the world.

“That was part of the deal that [Cecil] Rhodes wanted,” says Romig. “He wanted you to be exposed to people from all climates at Oxford, but he also wanted you to travel.”

The first winter abroad, he remembers traveling to Italy, to the coastal city of Brindisi where the tracks of Roman Legions chariots are still visible in the limestone.

He went to Athens and walked in the Parthenon. He remembers Delphi, Istanbul, taking a train across Turkey and Syria to Lebanon. He spent the night in Qasr Azraq, sleeping in the very same place where Lawrence of Arabia spent the winter of 1917.

Romig went on to Egypt, where he rented camels that took him to the pyramids of Giza. “In those days, you could go to the top of the pyramids,” Romig remembers.

Return to Colorado

After earning his master’s in 1965, Romig announced plans to pursue a doctorate. However, he had a change of heart during Christmas at home in Colorado, when he decided to get married.

“Now this was a stupid move,” Romig remarks of his failure to follow through with his plans to complete a DPhil at Oxford. Stupid, he says, because he was divorced just seven years later.

Romig returned to CU, this time to complete a Ph.D. in astrogeophysics.

Also at about this time, Romig went to work in the advanced planetary program section of Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin). His job was to determine specifics for mission packages being sold to NASA. He had to guess science payload, how big instruments were going be, etc. and would communicate these specifications to engineers.

With the space industry booming, Martin Marietta was earning tons of money. Romig was doing satisfying work and slowly finishing his Ph.D.

But in the mid-70s, the cash stream began to dry up as a shrinking NASA budget meant fewer and fewer bids for private aerospace contractors. Martin Marietta was forced to respond by lowering costs, which involved a layoff of Romig’s division.

Luckily, the freshly minted Ph.D. didn’t have a problem adapting his skill set to find a new living: “I thought a lot of the principles we’re using to characterize planetary environments can be used on Earth to detect leaks of flammable gases.”

So in 1975, he started working as consultant for venture capitalists, and meeting people who knew other people led him to Ponderosa Associates in 1980, where he began forensic investigation of fires and explosions.

He even did some work on the NASA Voyager Missions in the early ’80s, working to understand planet emissions.

Remembering humble beginnings

While his single mother studied at Washington University in St. Louis in hopes of a better future, a young Joe Romig was raised by his maternal grandparents on a small farm in rural Missouri. He remembers a time when there was no electricity, when the field was tilled with horse and plow.

Romig also remembers an astronomy book given to him by his stepfather, which inspired a love for the stars in the 10-year-old.

He would split time between the Missouri farm and Colorado Springs, where his father’s parents lived. Romig’s paternal grandfather was a famous missionary doctor in Alaska whose successes likely made an impression on his young grandson.

After Romig’s mother completed her degree, she moved with her son to Boulder to take a job, and committed to keeping Joe enrolled in a good primary and secondary education. He said he owes a lot to his mother, one of the major forces in his life.

Romig jumped around a few different towns and schools before eventually settling down at Lakewood High, where he was able to fully realize his love of sports through football and wrestling. There he would also start dreaming of playing for Michigan State, a football powerhouse in the ’50s.

“Lo and behold, I came to Colorado,” says Romig. But he was happy being in a place where he grew up. And when former Michigan State All-American Sonny Grandelius took over CU’s head coaching job in 1959, Romig considered it a partial fulfillment of his high school dreams.

“In effect, I played for Michigan State,” Romig jokes.

But Romig wouldn’t leave any more of his dreams to chance. Buckling down on the field and in the classroom at CU helped him launch a career.

A contemporary Renaissance man                                       

Today, Romig still lives in Colorado, married to his second wife, Barbara. He continues his consulting work and devotes a great deal of time to giving back to his alma mater.

He serves on the Graduate School Advisory Committee. “Joe is a very loyal, longtime contributor on that panel. He’s a longtime friend of the graduate school and has been a privilege for me to work with,” says Dean Stevenson.

Romig has developed a keen interest in natural history, devoting time to CU’s natural history museum and also serving on the museum’s advisory board.

He has even taught some freshman astronomy classes at CU Continuing Education, seeking to make the material challenging for the best students while also trying to keep things relevant for those who weren’t necessarily going to make a living out of astronomy.

One of Romig’s fondest teaching memories involves a non-science major: “I remember a girl who was a music major, absolutely terrified, and she ended up calculating the lifetime of the sun, and she was so pleased with herself.”

Although a physicist at heart, Romig has an enthusiasm for biology, the arts and just about everything. One of the many books he is currently reading is “The Double Helix,” an autobiographical account of James Watson’s discovery of DNA. Romig is fascinated by the book’s exploration of the very human side of scientific progress.

And, likely as a side effect of an Oxford education that stressed well-roundness and diversity, Romig is convinced of the importance of the humanities and the liberal arts.

“In order to get along, it is vital to understand others, and the way to do that is through the humanities. … The humanities are just as important as science because we can’t implement our science without working together.”

He stays physically active, too. He and his wife recently took a trip to the Cayman Islands, where they spent a great deal of time scuba diving.

In his later years, Romig has taken some time to make sure he doesn’t neglect the spiritual aspect of life and the big questions. “Earth is a spiritual bootcamp,” Romig remarks. “It’s tough.”

And for Joe Romig, it’s just another to challenge to face head on.

Robert Stein is a CU-Boulder senior majoring in English and an intern for Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine.