The Importance of Being Holly

A Denver native who had attended Colorado Academy and earned a bachelor's degree in English and communications from Stanford, Rich was a natural for the broadcasting industry. After his parents divorced when he was fifteen (his dad owned a ski and marine shop near Sloan's Lake), Rich's mother married Ken Palmer, owner of the once-legendary Denver rock station KIMN. Palmer sold the radio station, then bought three others out East and converted them to Christian formats. When Palmer died of cancer in 1984, he left his broadcasting company, Communicom Corporation of America, to Rich's mother, a Stanford-educated clinical social worker.

With no training in how to manage radio stations, she asked the elder of her two sons to look at the company's finances. Rich discovered that the stations were in trouble, so he closed out the Bayard Fund and concentrated on the radio stations, which he then turned around. "I sold those stations, then bought more, then sold them," explains Rich, who now oversees one AM Christian station in New Orleans and is negotiating the acquisition of another. Raised Episcopalian, Rich says his family's religious beliefs have nothing to do with the operation of the stations. In fact, his mom, Lee Everding, is now married to Ed Everding, a Methodist who used to be dean at the Iliff School of Theology, and his younger brother, Bob, who works for Sony Digital Pictures in California, has converted to Islam. "I look at it as a First Amendment thing. We're a broadcast facility that offers churches the ability to communicate with their audience. We don't allow hate, but otherwise we don't get involved in their doctrine. You're not going to hear Jerry Falwell on our stations; these are local churches doing community things like coat drives."

Thanks to the success of the radio stations, Holly didn't have to work when she married Rich in 1996. She'd tried using her journalism degree during an internship at a local advertising/public-relations agency, but "I decided it wasn't as glamorous as I thought; I wasn't exactly writing commercials," she says. She also held various marketing jobs, including one at a computer training firm. "It was interesting, but not as creative as I needed a job to be."

Plus, she says, only half joking, "My interest in travel was competing with an 8-to-5 job." As a member of the Young Presidents' Organization, a networking group for people who head corporations or corporate divisions that fall within certain income criteria, Rich had opportunities to travel with his fellow professionals. Holly's first trip abroad was to Egypt when she was 23; since then, the Kylbergs have traveled everywhere from the North Pole to the South, from Africa to Asia. But despite an adventurous jet-set life, Holly felt lost.

"I said to Holly, 'If you don't actually need to have a paid career but still want to do something worthwhile, you could do non-profit work,'" recalls Everding, a Southern lady who can trace her roots back to Civil War generals on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

"Charity work for my mom started when she was a little girl in Texas," explains Rich, himself a member of several boards, including those governing Children's Hospital, Rocky Mountain PBS and the Webb-Waring Foundation. "She would play missionary with her friends; she was president of her high school class; she was an officer in the Junior League; she was on the Colorado Academy board and on the boards of St. Joseph Hospital and the Denver Foundation."

Not only did Rich's mom set an example through her volunteer work, but the nannies she hired to help care for her boys were pregnant teens from the Florence Crittenton Home who lived with the family until they gave birth. "It was expected of my brother and me to give back to the community," Rich explains.

It was expected of Holly, too. "My mom pressured Holly to join the Junior League, but Holly was kind of a failure at it," Rich says, chuckling.

"I think when Holly joined the Junior League, they had certain expectations and rules for volunteer work, and trying to tell Holly what the rules were didn't work," adds Everding. "She needed to put her own oar in the water, so to speak."

Holly's rebellious nature and rock-star style certainly didn't lend themselves to selling cookbooks, one of the League's big fundraisers, so in 1999, she contacted the Metro Denver Volunteers Board Bank and asked to be paired with an organization that helps animals. She had always envisioned living on a farm, having been surrounded by a menagerie of animals throughout her childhood, including dogs, cats, ducks, ferrets and rabbits. "My mom was always bringing animals home," says Holly, who has a cat and a Belgian sheepdog of her own.

The board bank turned her on to Harrison Memorial Animal Hospital, where her brother-in-law also happened to be working. Next came seats on the boards of the Denver Zoo, Planned Parenthood and the Denver Film Society, which she just rotated off of. She now chairs three to five charitable events a year, is in charge of four or five Choice Affairs fundraising parties annually and helps friends organize several more events.