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Hello and welcome to Focus on OLLI. What is OLLI? OLLI is a program at UNLV dedicated to active retired or semi-retired individuals who understand the importance of keeping themselves engaged. OLLI is the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UNLV. Every month this program will dig into favorite classes, interesting teachers and members as well as special events offered through OLLI.
Announcer 0:00
This is a KU NV studios original program.
Wesley Knight 0:03
The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 jazz and more the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.
Keith McMillen 0:16
Hello and welcome to focus on Olli. Olli is a program at UNLV, dedicated to retired or semi retired individuals who remain engaged and active in civic activities and lifelong learning. Olli is the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UNLV. Olli is made possible by support from the Bernard Osher Foundation, established by philanthropists Bernard and Barbara Osher with a mission to support lifelong learning, higher education and the arts. This series is designed to give you an in depth look at the Olli program and encourage you to join in the fun. Hey and welcome back Today, we're going to do something just a little bit different. Olli is involved in a lot of things besides just our basic classes, and some of our members have come up with an idea for a second podcast, and its title is boomers and Zoomers. Now, most of the Olli students qualify as boomers, but we're interested in the life around us on the UNLV campus, and a lot of those people are what you'd call Gen Z, or what we like to call Zoomers. Today we're going to talk to two people who are going to develop this idea, and if it works out, well, you shouldn't be able to hear the first boomers and Zoomers podcast at the end of March. And leading this drive is a gentleman that I've known at Ollie for a long time, Mr. Blaine Benedict, and helping him is a lady who has been a big support for all kinds of us here. Chris Salinas, so Chris, let's start with you. How did you come into Olli in the first place? How did you find us?
Chris Salinas 2:09
I was working at an elementary school, and one of the retired teachers who helped out told me, you know, you need something to do this summer. Check out Olli. It's a great program. And I did, and that was in July of 2016 and it's been great ever since then,
Keith McMillen 2:28
incredible just for the summer. Yes, you were still employed, correct? All right, that's somewhat unusual for our members. Blaine, how about you?
Blaine Benedict 2:37
Well, I was involved in environmental education out at Red Rock in my second career, and UNLV had the public lands Institute, which was also a partner in public lands education. And their headquarters used to be at that old paradise school. So occasionally I would go over there and talk to the public lands Institute staff, and I knew that it was an old elementary school because I've lived in Las Vegas for over 70 years, and I'm thinking, well, what are all these old folks doing wandering around the the this elementary school campus, and I found out about Ollie, I checked it out, and I was getting ready to retire, and looked at the catalog, and there were some great courses. And so I signed up and have been involved, I think, for eight or nine years already. Wow.
Keith McMillen 3:48
And just because you happened to stumble across it on the old paradise
Blaine Benedict 3:52
campus, right? I never knew anything about it before, but everyone walking around was smiling and chattering, and it just seemed like a really positive atmosphere. So here I am.
Keith McMillen 4:07
Still amazing. It's wonderful. We still think that Ollie is one of the best kept secrets in Las Vegas, agreed, and we have a lot of members, and we're getting more, it's wonderful, but now we've got this idea of boomers and Zoomers, intergenerational stuff. Now this is a new idea, and I'm curious of where the idea came from. You want to start us off?
Blaine Benedict 4:34
Blaine, well, one of the classes I attend is called professor's choice. So every week, we have the Olli staff and students send in recommendations to have a professor come talk to us about their specialization and fields of interest, and we. Last Last year, in November, we had Avina Artis, who is the membership coordinator of public radio here at UNLV. And I really knew, I knew they had a station. I didn't know how sophisticated it was, or really what it did. And she came in and explained it the role of public radio at UNLV. And, wow, this is interesting. And one of the good things Keith, you know, at Ollie, is there's always a little chatter in the class where we're not like in third grade anymore. We can talk, you know, quietly and among ourselves sometimes. And we were saying there was a little chatter that all those Zoomers have their their own radio station. I wonder what they listen to. I wonder what they talk about. And then Bruce Ewing, who, you know, one of the he's an instructor and a student at Olli. He said, Yeah, the boomers need a chance too. And we were chattering back and forth while Avena was speaking about boomers and Zoomers, and she kind of got wind of it. We asked a question, and she said that she would check it out. Check out the idea. And here we are.
Keith McMillen 6:35
How about that? So the radio station was involved
Blaine Benedict 6:38
from the very beginning, Chris, what are you hoping to get out of this?
Chris Salinas 6:46
Just a better understanding of all the young folks around. We have nurses, nursing students, who come and make their observations of their during their geriatric units, and we hear stories from them, and it's important to know that, and it's important for them to hear our stories as well. I think more knowledge is better. So, yeah, I look forward to meeting these kids.
Keith McMillen 7:18
Excellent we have in a previous podcast, actually talked to some of our nursing students and the instructors, and we offer them a very unique viewpoint. This is obviously an aging community. Some of our members are well up into their 80s, and are still functioning members of society, and unfortunately for nurses, the easiest place for them to get any exposure is in a hospital situation. Well, some of us hope we never show up in one of those so it's very important. So what kind of things do you hope that we can do with this podcast? We're only going to be broadcasting this on the fifth Sundays of the month, which means there's only going to be four of them this year. So what can people expect to hear? What kind of topics are we going to talk about?
Blaine Benedict 8:14
Well, Keith, there's, there's literally dozens of topics that we could bring up, music, film, all aspects of the arts, what their views of the future, how they anticipate their careers will be going, what things have the unique things have they done in their life? What adventures or travel would they like to do? And compare that with with our own? Like you said, we're aging out, but we're we're still around, and maybe we could contrast and compare, not not to judge, but to contrast and compare. You know, what kind of professors did we prefer in college that that type of thing and kind of let it flow fairly freely, maybe stick to one or two topics during the half hour, maybe three topics. Like one of the things I'd like to bring up. I mean, all three of us sitting around this table have our phones, but in the 18, in the 1800s you didn't sit around a phone and center your life on a phone. You sat around a campfire. So one of the questions I would have for them is, Have you ever sat around a campfire and it just puts things in perspective. What are their who are their favorite TV heroes? Who do they participate in civic activities? Are they registered to vote? Do they volunteer with anything? And they could ask us the same questions, where did you first volunteer? And there's just a there's quite a bit of there's like 50 years difference between us. A lot has happened in 50 years between when we were born and the current time. And you know, it should be fun, not too complicated. We're not going to pressure anyone. We're just going to have this free and easy discussion and try to understand each other a little better. We'll be like their grandparents so they don't they'll have a little more freedom with us than if we were the age of of their parents. I agree, yes.
Chris Salinas 11:06
So we're we're like, fostering relationships, and we're giving them a some ideas about things that they might want to consider. You know, volunteering, mentoring mentoring people, and looking at the perspective, our perspective when, when they go out in their jobs.
Blaine Benedict 11:28
And you know, there's also the aspect too, that you can learn from older people. They could ask us, What advice did we get on on the job or in our careers or in any activities from an older person that we took to heart and still abide by it today. So should be, should be a pretty interesting conversation.
Keith McMillen 11:59
Now, obviously you're going to be drawing the Zoomer participants, probably primarily from the UNLV campus. How are you going to recruit these people? How are you going to be able to reach out for them and get them included in this program?
Blaine Benedict 12:19
Well, one of the ways is there are a number of UNLV students who visit the Olli campus across street on Maryland Parkway, either to to learn about what we do. And there's continuing education there that has a Zoomer population. I'm hoping maybe we could go through the the School of Journalism here and recruit some and just like we have both genders represented in the hosts. I think we'd like to balance that as guests too, have a male and a female guest each week, if possible. And then I had an idea that maybe for one of the one of the podcasts, we could go on campus and just recruit the
Chris Salinas 13:28
Student Union. I think we need to set up a table at the Student Union
Blaine Benedict 13:32
and just grab some people by the arm and say, Hey, do you want to? Do you want to? We need you on a podcast. And they'll say, Well, what's it about? Well, it's about you, so we need you to be with we'd like you to be with us for about 30 minutes, and it'll be fun and just kind of extemporaneous,
Keith McMillen 13:56
one of the things that fascinates me about the Zoomers and in fact, people that maybe even fall outside. That is how slang changes over time. We remember things from I came of age in the 60s, so I was exposed to all kinds of bizarre things, if you will. And we we had words that didn't mean what we thought they meant. And today, the same thing exists. I I'm sure you could do an entire program just on slang, right? Excellent. So we also have students working with Ollie, we have some student employees who fall into the Zoomer category. And I believe a couple of them, when they heard about this, stood up and said, Yes, please. We would like to join you, which is wonderful. We're getting some response, and hopefully they can start a chain of things. To their friends and everything else. In fact, we've had a good conversation with the engineer here, who is just maybe slightly outside the Zoomer category, but yeah, he's on the fringe, and so are most of us. So what kind of, have you picked any topics for your first couple programs? Or are we still in flux?
Blaine Benedict 15:27
Here? Go ahead. Well, I think we're still in flux. I mean, there are, there's almost an unlimited field of, you know, range of topics. So Chris and I will get down, sit down and talk about how we might want to open it up. It might come naturally after we introduce ourselves and say we're going to talk about some of the things that interest you, and some of the things that interested that are of interest to us, and maybe start out real low key, like, do you play games on your phone? And they'll say, oh, yeah, I play games on on our we play games on our phones, and I could say, Yeah, I used to like to when I was young, I played a lot of games too. You can still see the games that I played, but they're at the pinball Museum. Have you ever been there? And we can kind of do every subject like that, and we can talk about how Chris and I started our careers, which will be, I think, totally different than the Zoomers we never did on online interviews. Ever. You know and we can talk about engineering, one of the things I'd like to do is bring one of my slide rules to one of the sessions and ask the students if they know what the what it is, and ask them to name one, one activity that was completed with the use of this little, little simple tool that just has one moving part.
Keith McMillen 17:33
Don't forget, the bees.
Blaine Benedict 17:35
Oh, so there's two movies.
Keith McMillen 17:37
I still I still have mine. I still have mine too.
Blaine Benedict 17:40
And of course, they they built Hoover Dam with slide rules
Chris Salinas 17:45
and sent men to the moon. Yes, they slide to rule.
Blaine Benedict 17:49
That's how Apollo 13 came back by using a slide rule as backup navigation tool. So it'd be interesting. And that gets into another thing. Who were your heroes? We had, we had a whole slate of heroes when we were growing up that that now most of them are famous. You know, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, wilt, Chamberlain. You can do it in sports. You can do it in politics. And we just want to hear from them, what, what, what they think of our heroes, and who were their heroes? What's their music like
Chris Salinas 18:30
in music class? Yeah, in music class, the the the heroes of the music, Heroes of the 70s. He showed the Rolling Stones and all these other people, and the nursing students had no idea of who they were. And after we left, I told Dr Michael. I said, you know, if we were trying to get them to engage and and I finally said, next time they they come and you're doing something like that, have them do thumbs up or thumbs down, and maybe that will get them engaged, right? Well, maybe I like it, and maybe I don't, but at least they're thinking about it. And then, you know, maybe when someone will say something, so we just have to figure out how we're going to engage. And I'd like to hear some of their experiences and how they compare with mine and and today's perspective, because that's important to
Blaine Benedict 19:27
know, right? And then there's a lot of things they do that I'm just curious about because I can't do it or don't understand it, like online dating. How does that work?
Keith McMillen 19:42
You that's a very good question. Yeah, we, I've got stories about that, but they're not for a large audience. Yeah, they're embarrassing, but it was, it was an adventure, I will tell you that, and I survived with no scars. So we're. Are in good shape. Okay? In terms of Olli folk looking back at your experience with Ollie, are there any classes that you've taken that have changed your life or impressed you in ways that you didn't expect? Wow, I'm throwing this out of left field. These people were not prepared.
Chris Salinas 20:28
Oh, so many. I mean, they're all the classes that that you didn't get to take when you were, you know, you go for a degree or something like that, right? You know. So I've done music. Music is just, is important to me, and let's see, I had several people mentor me and and like Kathy wonderful Kathy Lowe, who did great courses history and the things that I learned, I loved it. She was fun. One day, the nursing students came in, and she greeted them, and she taught me about humor. She greeted them and and then she turned to the class and and said, Now these nursing students are here doing their geriatric unit, and they're here to observe normal, healthy seniors, so please try to look normal and healthy.
Keith McMillen 21:24
Okay, for some of us, that might be a challenge. What can I say? Blaine, what about you?
Blaine Benedict 21:31
Well, I've taken several courses that have really enlightened me. Chris and I both are in soap box, which has an incredible array of speakers. We've had the governor, the mayor, and it is just like an old time soap box, people who are significant features or members of society come in and talk about their work and explain the problems and challenges they have or their successes, and we as students, get get to ask them questions, and In some cases, you know, get get to meet them for even briefly, but to shake their hand, and that's been a fascinating class ever since I took it. Professor's choice is incredible. It shows you how much UNLV has grown as an institution from a little, little place on Maryland Parkway with a couple of buildings, I can remember that growing up to a renowned and highly rated institute of higher learning that that's fascinating, and then to meet some of their faculty is great. Then I've taken a movie history course, and I'm a big fan of TV westerns and half Gun Will Travel. That was a great one. Yes, was, was one of my favorite shows, and we had a class on that, on that show, and what it actually was about, which was totally different than I understood it as a as a teen, and What the what Richard Boone, what characteristics he portrayed and and used in each episode were that was the interesting part of the program was much more sophisticated and mature than I imagined. It just wasn't a guy riding wearing black, riding a horse, and, you know, giving out his business card. It was about social justice. Social justice. It was a great class. Yeah, it was, that was one of the best classes I ever took about anything, yes.
Chris Salinas 24:15
And I've enjoyed soap box and Public Affairs roundtable, because, because I'm on one end of the spectrum, and so many of the folks in at all, they are in the other end of the spectrum. And so it gives me a chance to see both sides of the story and then sit down and think about it when I get home and figure out what I need to think. You know how I feel about it. So it's good stuff, fantastic.
Keith McMillen 24:44
This has been a wonderful experience. This program could be, who knows, maybe we'll swap them out, and we'll only talk about Ollie four times a year, and we'll talk about Zoomers all the time. It's always possible. I. Yeah. Anyhow, thank you so much. Anything you want to add to this before we wrap it up?
Blaine Benedict 25:06
Well, I'd say Keith, that we'd really Chris and I really want it to be fun too. We want some humor to be there. You talked about slang. There's all kinds of things. I'll just give you a quick example. When I was growing up, one of the big adventures someone could have who owned a car or had access to a car, was to drive across the country. Now this is while the Interstate Highway System was being constructed, so driving across the country was a nice adventure. And not only was it fun, but you got to see how large the United States was, how many different how many different styles of living there were. And it was just a very unique experience. And I wonder how many of the of the Zoomer generation have ever even thought about that
Keith McMillen 26:12
questions for the future. Thank you. Thank you both. Thank you for having us. Yes, it's been enlightening. I hope we've added some ideas to the to our listeners and remind them that if they're curious about this, they can check in. I don't know what the exact schedule is, but this, boomers and Zoomers will be aired on KU NV on the first and the last the fifth Sunday of the month of March. So if you're involved in Ali, I'm sure we'll be mentioning it in our Member memo, and it should be available in other places also. So for focus on Ali. Thank you both. Thank you. Call it quits for the day. Thank you. Thanks for listening to focus on Olli. There are several ways to get more information. Our web address is Ali o l, l, i.unlv.edu You may also email us at Olli, at U N L V, that's Ollie. O L, L, I, a T, U, n, l, V, at sine, unlv.edu, you can also just give us a call at 702-895-3394, Monday through Friday, between the hours of eight and five, except, of course, on university holidays, you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai