BOULDER - After he retired, Lucien Wulsin opened up a new career as a super volunteer.

He was honored with the Minoru Yasui Community Volunteer Award for June.

Wulsin, 90, is on the board of Naropa University. And he founded Society for Creative Aging.

Way before those endeavors, he was with Baldwin Piano Co. out of Cincinnati.

"I went to work for them, following my father's directions until finally I said 'no more,' " he said.

His dad was president of the company. Wulsin didn't like working for his father.

After graduating from Harvard, he served in Army intelligence in World War II.

"I got blown up in Normandy," he said.

He was a passenger in a jeep that ran over a mine. He was hospitalized for months. Once he was able to serve again, the Army sent him for schooling at Camp Ritchie - now Camp David, the presidential retreat. The war ended and he was discharged shortly after.

"I came back and decided enough of doing what my father wanted me to do," he said. "I went to law school at University of Virginia."

He returned to Cincinnati to practice law. Then his father asked him to join the company again. He did.

He helped negotiate a buyout of a German company that became part of Baldwin. And when Baldwin expanded into the finance world, Wulsin moved to Denver, serving as president of the company.

"Money isn't in the manufacturing and sales, but in the financing," he said. "To grow, we had to grow in the finance part."

After moving to Denver in 1979, former Gov. Dick Lamm appointed Wulsin to serve on the Colorado Council for the Arts and Humanities.

While working, he served on various boards, using his business and law books experience. But after he retired in 1981, he volunteered in earnest.

He joined Naropa to help it get accredited, and served as chairman of the board of trustees.

"So I moved to Boulder in 1986," he said. "I founded the Society for Creative Aging around 1987-88. We have a performance once a year. We dance and move and talk."

He has served on the board of trustees of the University of Denver, National Public Radio and Boulder County Aging Services Foundation.

According to a nominating letter, Wulsin "continues to seek a path of living with awareness and dying with choice, of sharing that path with others through a place where the wind blows, the mountains glow, and the earth blooms."

He's almost as busy in retirement as he was when he was drawing a salary.

"It's kept me alive," he said. "As you get aged, one thing you tend to do is close up. You tend to insulate yourself from the world going on around you. I felt as long as I'm active and being part of something larger than myself, I won't close up."

massarog@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5271.