OLLI-UO Events

BEND—In early May, OLLI-UO in Central Oregon will move to our new facility at 80 NE Bend River Mall. This newly renovated facility will provide a new home for the Duck Store as well as headquarters and instructional space for OLLI and other University of Oregon programs based in Central Oregon.

The week of April 30-May 4 will be one of transition as we move out of the Shevlin Hixon building and into the new space. OLLI members should consult their May newsletters and the weekly eminder for schedule notes about the May 1, 2 and 4 meeting places for our popular DVD study groups.

Curious about how to get to our new location? Council member Ed Lee has provided a map for your reference (see link below). If you have difficulty opening the file please call the OLLI-UO/Academic Extension office at 800-824-2714 and the registration staff will send you a copy.

OLLI-UO in Central Oregon Headquarters

BEND—OLLI-UO has partnered with the COCC Great Decisions program to bring Middle-East specialist Dr. Peter Bechtold to Bend. Bechtold, chairman emeritus of the Near East North Africa Area Studies program at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, is now based in Portland, OR. A frequent lecturer at Portland State University, he has presented several series on the Middle East for OLLI-UO in Portland and Eugene-Springfield.

In Bend, Bechtold will first present an evening lecture on Afghanistan for the COCC Great Decisions series. The next morning, he will meet with OLLI-UO members at for a brief re-cap and discussion. OLLI-UO members may attend both events at no cost.

Wednesday, April 25, 6:00-8:00 p.m., Great Decisions Afghanistan, Hitchcock Auditorium, Pioneer Hall, COCC Campus

Thursday, April 26, 10:00 a.m.-noon, Talking About Afghanistan, DesChutes Historical Museum, 129 NW Idaho Ave., Bend

Bend—OLLI-UO in Central Oregon is pleased to present a series of five lectures on the Eastern Oregon Indian Wars during April and May. The first in the series, The Cayuse War,  covers the renowned Cayuse Chief, Five Crows, and the war of 1847-1855. A part of this story involves the Whitman Mission, the history of this site is still being researched. Paul M. Patton, Eastern Oregon Region Interpretive Coordinator for the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, will lead our voyage of discovery on Wednesday, April 18, from 2:00-4:00 p.m. at the Bend Senior Center, 1600 SE Reed Market Road.

Other lectures in the series include:

• Thursday, May 3  Joseph and the Nez Perce War of 1877,         4:00-5:45 p.m. Bend Public Library, Brooks Room, 601 NW Wall St.   Presenter: Dr. Mark Spence, Author and Instructor of History, University of Oregon.
• Wednesday, May 9 Paulina and the Snake War of 1864-68 Presenter: Dr. Jim Gardner, Author, Historian and President Emeritus of Lewis & Clark College. Open to OLLI-UO members only.
• Wednesday, May 16 Captain Jack and the Modoc War of 1872-73  Presenter: Eric Iseman, Park Ranger, Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.
• Thursday, May 24, Eagan and the Bannock-Paiute War of 1878  Presenter: Paul M. Patton, Eastern Oregon Region Interpretive Coordinator for Oregon Parks and Recreation.

Unless otherwise noted, all lectures are scheduled for 2:00-4:00 p.m. at the Bend Senior Center, 1600 SE Reed Market Road, and will be open to the general public.

Tuesday, March 12, 2:00-4:00 p.m. at the Bend Senior Center, 1600 SE Reed Market Road, Bend

Bill Hoppe, award winning professor of fine arts and communication at Central Oregon Community College, will offer an insider’s view of a life in the studio. While chronicling the development of a body of work he has created from 1965 to the present, Hoppe will emphasize the simple themes and variations that reoccur, change, and evolve with time and practice in the studio to create a personal visual language.

Hoppe has had recent one-person exhibitions in the Bend, Portland, and Seattle areas and has created large-scale public art projects in Oregon, including the entry wall at the Salem Hospital Birthing Center, and at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

Voted the Oregon Art Education Association (OAEA) Higher Education, Art Education Teacher of the Year in 2011, Hoppe’s advice to student artists includes getting involved in the community, devoting time to the studio, and steadily gaining experience. In an interview with the COCC Broadside he said, “Live life and get experience, and in getting that experience, figure out what forms you can use to express yourself in your art.”

This event is open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.

Join OLLI-UO in Central Oregon for our fall open house and presentation on Thursday, October 6, 2:00-4:00 p.m. at the Bend Senior Center.

A naturalist, a biologist and a physicist visited the Galapagos Islands in April 2011. While this could be the start of a joke, it in fact happened when Jim Anderson, Jay Bowerman and Jim Hammond joined five other Bend area residents for a tour of the Galapagos Islands. The tour was a culmination of a 2010 lecture series, “Darwin’s Legacy: 200 Years of insights and challenges” sponsored by the Sunriver Nature Center, COCC and the Nancy R. Chandler Visiting Scholar Program. In this presentation, we will experience the tour from the perspective of three different individuals with emphases on different aspects of the trip.

Jay Bowerman served as executive director of the Sunriver Nature Center between 1973 and 1999. He continues to work for the Nature Center as Principal Researcher and has been an author on more than a dozen scientific articles on amphibian biology. Jay has a M.S. in Biology from University of Oregon. Jay will focus on several of the videos he took of small wildlife and share his perspective as a three-time visitor to the islands.

Jim Anderson writes columns for The Source Weekly and the Sisters Nugget Newspaper on local nature and wildlife issues and has many years of experience as a naturalist in Oregon and the western United States. Jim will show some of his photos of Galapagos wildlife, discuss Darwin’s challenges, and discuss the role of Ecuador’s Parque National Galapagos in protecting the unique environment of the islands.

Jim Hammond, a retired physicist and OLLI-CO member, approached the tour with no special knowledge or experience as a naturalist, but with a love of science and adventure. Jim will present some of his photos and videos taken on the tour, particularly of the underwater scenes experienced while snorkeling.

If visiting the Galapagos is one of your retirement dreams, or you just enjoy being an armchair traveler, then join OLLI-UO in Central Oregon for a tour of the magical islands that inspired Darwin.

This event is free and open to the public.

OLLI-CO Book Discussion Group resumes their regular schedule in October, with a non fiction selection:

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Our politicians and voters have split into two, irreconcilable camps.Each group is certain that their shared view of reality is right and logical (based on facts) and that the other group’s is irrational and dangerous. These opposing dogmatic views stop politicans from working together for the common good at a time of national crisis. How have we come to this? What can we do about it?

In his New York Times Bestseller “How We Decide”, Jonah Lehrer describes the how our brains decide what to believe and what to do. That superficially bad new is that few of these beliefs or decisions are rational. The really bad news is that the beliefs we’ve convinced ourselves to be the most rational are the most likely to be at odds with reality, and our most rational decisions usually leave us less satisfied in the long run. When the brain makes its best decisions, as measured by numerous controlled experiments and long term results, those decisions involve our emotions, pleasure and pain centers, centers of empathy and a thousand other subtle things which the brain has evolved to incorporate in its decision making process. Our logical explanations of our beliefs are, as Jonah Lehrer puts it, more that of lawyers picking and chosing things that, post facto, justify beliefs and decisions produced for other reasons.  Once we make decisions, our rational mind proceeds to whip other brain centers into shape to ignore data which contradicts its decisions and to enhance and change memories to support those decisions. In other words, it acts like a General, Politician, Pope or corporate CEO who sets out to eliminate dissension in the ranks after he’s chosen a course of action. What’s the payoff for doing this…. when we reaffirm our decisions, the brain releases dopamine which produces a sense of pleasure and well being.

A heathy brain’s processes, of which reason is merely one of the last to evolve and one of the weakest, enable people to be creative, playful, empathize with others and anticipate their reactions. Brain’s of psychopaths lack empathy for the feeling of others. Psychopaths and sociopaths are actually very rational like Dr. Spock from Star Trek. They are without natural feelings of fear or of empathy for others because certain, tiny, regions of the brain are damaged. The damage can result from physical causes or from emotional traumas, particularly abuse or isolation in early childhood.  For those who are convinced that without Christianity we would lack ethics and morals, this might not be a comfortable book. The book describes research which conclusively demonstrates that healthy brains have built in ethics and morals; which the 10 Commandments and the New Testament merely codify. Even healthy chimpanzees exhibit some ethical behaviors!

This interesting book is packed with relevant stories about airline pilots and football quarterbacks (and the rational, but useless tests the NFL employs to predict their performance) and a few pertinent metaphors. Jonah Lehrer worked as a technician in a neuroscience lab, but he is first and foremost a top-notch writer who knows how to popularize difficult scientific topics.  Chapter headings include: The Quarterback in the Pocket, The Predictions of Dopamine, Choking on Thought, The Moral Mind, and The Brain is an Argument.

Links for more information on the book and its author:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/books/review/Johnson-t.html

Ed Lee will serve as facilitator for the sessions on Tuesday, October 4 and 18, 10:00 a.m.-noon. Newcomers are welcome—we’ll see you at Dudley’s Used Book Shop, 135 NW Minnesota, in downtown Bend!

Join OLLI-UO in Central Oregon for the summer Documentary Film Series, Wednesdays, 10:00 a.m.-noon. Don’t miss these upcoming sessions — discussion facilitators are listed in parentheses after the film titles.

The schedule for the last three films of the series has changed since the August and September newsletters were published. Please note the boldface listings for the current schedule.

July 27 Archaeology of the Hebrew Bible (Scott Mason)

August 3 Inside Job (Bill McCann)

August 10 The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg (Nancy McCullough)

August 17 Food, Inc. (Jim Hammond)

August 24 Operation Homecoming: Writing the Homecoming Experience (Don Hartsough)

August 31 The Buena Vista Social Club (Margaret Young)

September 7  Gasland : Natural Gas Extraction in the U.S. (Mike McAllister)

September 14 Encounters at the End of the World (Joe Jezukewicz)

The Documentary Film series will be held at our newest meeting space, the Shevlin Hixon Executive Suites, 500 SW Bond Street, Suite 105

Directions to the Shevlin Hixon Executive Suites (aka Brooks Scanlon):

Over the next few months, many of our classes, discussion groups and committee meetings will meet at the Shevlin Hixon Executive Suites at 500 SW Bond Street, Suite 105. The building originally housed the Brooks-Scanlon executive offices, and it is located directly south of the Wilson/Bond roundabout in the Old Mill District. Enter through the front door on the west side of the building and walk straight back. Our meeting room is on the right, across from an inside courtyard.

Tuesday, August 9, 10:00 a.m.

Get ready for another OLLI-CO field trip. This time we’re off to the Cada Dia Cheese farm and factory in Prineville. Plans for the trip have changed since the newsletter went to press—please read this notice carefully for the changes in meeting times and places.

Our farm and factory tour begins at 10:00 a.m., Bend members will meet at 9:00 a.m. at the Pilot Butte Theater at 2717 E. Highway 20. Redmond members will also meet at 9:00 a.m. at the Albertson’s parking lot at 1655 S.W. Odem Medo. Both groups will gather  at Cada Dia for our 10:00 a.m. tour.

Our next stop after the farm and factory tour is the historic County Courthouse for a second tour followed by lunch.

RSVP with the OLLI office: 541-617-4663 or 800-824-2714

Thursday, August 18, 10:00 a.m.

Attention OLLI history lovers! Members are invited to join Des Chutes Historical Museum manager Vanessa Ivey for a Heritage walking tour in and around downtown Bend. Newcomers and long-time Central Oregon residents will learn fascinating facts about the city of Bend and some of its landmark buildings.

Our tour will begin at the historical museum, 129 NW Idaho Avenue, and it will end at Bend Bungalow at 937 NW Wall Street. The walking tour is about an hour long, and some of the route is over uneven ground. Vanessa suggests wearing good walking shoes, and bringing drinking water.

Cost of the tour is $3.00 per person, payable to the DesChutes Historical Museum. Please RSVP to the OLLI-UO office: 541-617-4663 or 800-824-2714.

Thursday, July 14, 4:00-5:30 p.m.

Friedl Semens Bell, retired teacher and author of She Cried For Mother Russia, grew up on the central California coast during World War II listening to her mother, a recent German immigrant, and Tanya Kelley, a refugee Russian noble woman, lament the loss and destruction of their respective countries. Tanya, the former Princess Tatiana Volkonsky of czarist Russia, had escaped death at the hands of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Tanya died in 1988 but the discovery in 2005 of a small box of Russian documents provided clues in reconstructing her brutal flight from Russia, the part of her past the young princess could not bear to remember. Ms. Bell, of Eugene, published Tanya’s story in October 2009. She will recount the tale and tell of the discoveries made after the princess’ death.

Join OLLI-UO at the Deschutes Public Library, Brooks Room, 601 N.W. Wall Street in downtown Bend. This lecture is open to the public.