Special Issues & Guides

When Lawnae Hunter moved to Bend, she wasn't expecting to challenge the status quo. A former waitress and single mother who attended community college in Aptos, Calif., Hunter worked her way up the real estate food chain and developed the largest real estate company in Central California, Hunter Prudential Realty. The company was eventually sold to a subsidiary of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway.
After the sale, Hunter was looking for a change of pace. In 2003, she bought a house on Awbrey Butte and in 2007 moved to Bend full time. She brought her daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren and joined one daughter already living here.

Lindsey Elias is 24 and has been a rock drummer for a full decade. She has one hell of a stage presence and it all comes in one surprisingly small package.
Watching Elias and her 105-pound frame push out the power and speed of an enormous male drummer is really something to be seen when she's up on stage with her band, Empty Space Orchestra. Take a look at the audience at an ESO show and you will see people's necks craning just to get a better view of what she's doing. She has a magnetic, natural beauty on the drums as she pumps out incredibly fast, hard-hitting licks. There is something contagious about the joy, the passion and the pure rock n' roll in her facial expressions that radiates out to the crowd who watches with mouths agape or perhaps smiling in delight.
“She's so fun to watch. She just gets so into it. It's surprising to see so much noise, such loud and harsh noise, coming from such a small person,” says an ESO fan named Griffin after one of the band's packed Silver Moon residency shows in January.

If you walk beyond the showroom at Sara Bella Upcycled, which is currently located upstairs above O Mo Mo in the Old Mill District, you will likely see a sea of plastic bags. Sara Wiener, owner of Sara Bella Upcycled, swims through the bags, creating one-of-a-kind products including tote bags, wallets, aprons, wine carriers, belts, and more. The greatest part about swimming through the sea of bags every week is that you do so knowing that the bags won't end up polluting our oceans and killing the sea life.
Before opening Sara Bella Upcycled in 2010, Wiener operated Sara Bella Custom Outdoorwear, which sold Polar Tec polar fleece clothing. Wiener ran the business for 14 years, but closed because she felt burnt out. After closing the business she spent the next couple years doing development work in Africa. One night a family came over to her house for dinner and brought their food in a bag that sparked Wiener's interest. The family's middle-school-aged son looked up online how to make a messenger bag out of black garbage bags.

The question seems ridiculous today but only 99 years ago, in May 1912, the Bend women you see in this picture met on the steps of Drake Lodge to voice an answer to that question. Oregonians defeated measures to legalize the vote for women five times between 1884 and 1910. By 1912, on the verge of the sixth attempt, state suffrage leaders realized the fight was not to be won by campaigning in the Willamette Valley alone. They needed to go beyond the Cascades.

Motocross, the sport featuring people riding souped-up dirt bikes around a muddy track and flinging themselves off of jumps, doing tricks like the “superman,” has been growing in popularity since it was introduced in the United States in the 1960s. Today, some riders are as popular as rock stars and those at the top of their game are showcased at high-profile competitions like the X Games. But, for the most part, women have been left out of the sport, especially in television coverage and prize pools. That is, until Miki Keller got involved.

Harriet Dickson has plenty of stories. She can tell you about the time she performed on a radio show in New York when she was just six years old, or when she survived civil war in Iran, or the years she spent as close friends with Sammy Davis Jr.
But now, at 79 years old, this great grandmother has another story to tell and it's about the new album of some of her favorite songs that she recently recorded. Dickson has done a lot with her life and played a variety of roles, ranging from mother to businesswoman to artist, but she could never shake her desire to be a singer. She always had dreams of making it in the music world, but life tended to get in the way, not that she's particularly minded.

The Homebrewer
Name: Maura Schwartz
Age: 51
Occupation: International Development Consultant
Beer-ography: Schwartz started brewing about six years ago after flirting with the idea for years. She won second prize at the Eugene Beer Festival for her first homebrew, a pale ale. After that, she was hooked. Schwartz, who has graduated to an all-grain system, kegs all of her beer and says she never makes the same recipe twice.