Weekly Newsish Roundup, September 22, 2016 – 8 News Stories in 6 Minutes and 56 Seconds!

In the news this week,

• Bid For Life
• Vote For (Insert Candidate)
• Upcoming Events
• Local Sports

Hey LaGrandeAlive, this is your weekly Newsish Roundup brought to you by Grande Ronde Hospital, Valley Realty, Northwest Furniture and Mattress, Marketplace Family Foods and Direct Music Source.

You know, you may not like a lot of elements of small-town life, but there are a few positives. Like when you jaywalk, instead of calling the police people will actually wave at you. Like not playing the gunshot or firework game every night at the home.  Or like if you get cancer or have a brain aneurysm, your friends and loved ones just may step in and host an event to raise money to help you out and cover the medical costs of your recovery. And that’s exactly what’s happening this weekend at not one but two silent auction events going on both Saturday and Sunday. Both both are being held as fund raisers for people who are having a hard, hard time with health, and we scored interviews with people helping coordinate both of the events.

This Weekend Two Fund Raising Events

Essentially, there are two events going on this weekend fund raising to help local people in their health crisis. At both events, there will be food, beer, and a silent auction. A Lori Mack’s event, they’re auctioning off a puppy. A real live greyhound puppy, plus hundreds of other items. Lori Mack’s event is Saturday at Benchwarmers bar and grill from 6 to ten pm, and the Tyson Johnson and Cory Bevell event is from 2 to 8PM on Sunday at riverside park. Both events are family-friendly. So if you want a puppy or a hot dog, you should go down and support these events this weekend. They’re for a good cause and the people who organized them put a lot of hard work into them. Plus I will personally interview the person who buys the puppy at Lori’s event on LaGrandeAlive.tv. LaGrandeAlive–we love puppies.

The season of really bad suits, haircuts and lesser-of-two-evils dichotomies is upon us–politics is in full swing, both local and national. And at LaGrandeAlive, we’ve scored a couple recent interviews with some political candidates including Bud Pierce, the GOP gubernatorial candidate for the state of Oregon, and Steve Clemens, one of the candidates for the La Grande mayoral race.

Both of these Coffee With Wills can be viewed in-full on lagrandealive.tv’s Facebook page or our website. We’re hoping to have John Bozarth on the show as well, as soon as he gets back to us. Elections are coming up and so I ask you, La Grande, who are you voting for and why? Your comments in the section below.

Alright La Grande, what’s happening this week? Well, the fat lady is singing yet again: little mermaid is returning to the Elgin Opera House for yet another weekend. Showings Friday at 7:30 pm and Saturday at 2:30 and 7:30 pm. Also Friday, there’s another ragtime piano concert at the Carnegie Art Center in Baker City Oregon. And across two whole valleys, Alpine Fest is happening at Wallowa Lake this weekend. What is Alpine Fest? Well, it’s a celebration of Swiss-Bavarian culture every year at Wallowa Lake. My girlfriend and I went last year and, well, we weren’t that impressed. We ended up just going out to dinner at some local restaurant. But then again, that’s probably we were late and, well, missed pretty much all of alpine fest including the parade, the hand-crafted bratwursts, Terminal Gravity micro-brews and live music. We also missed the Swiss yodeling, folk dancing, alphorn singing, accordionists and all the food, jewelry, goat-soap and quilt vendors. That probably would have made us have a better experience. So, what’s the moral of this story? Don’t be like Will and be late for Alpine Fest. It’s September 22-25, this weekend, and if you don’t show up fashionably late you should have a good time.

Local Sports

In sports, the valley had its first wins of the season. Imbler beat Riverside 34-23 this weekend. Union beat pilot rock 34-6, and Elgin beat Pine Eagle 21-7. Cove and La Grande, however, couldn’t match the other members both losing their respective games against the Sunnyside Christian Leopards and the Sunnyside Washington Grizzlies. Sunnyside had its way with the valley, Cove losing 58-14 and the La Grande Game wasn’t much better. La Grande lost 61-20, falling behind early in the game and, we’ll, never recovering. Our sports director, Steve Hendrix, snagged a quick interview with the coach for the Tigers about their upcoming game and strategy this weekend.

That full interview is available on LaGrandeAlive’s website and facebook. La Grande’s next game is this weekend in La Grande against Ontario, 7pm on Friday. Imbler plays Portland at Heppner at Heppner same time same place. Elgin will play Riddle also same time same date at home. Union plays Weston McEwen at Weston McEwen and Cove will play Powder Valley at home, all 7:00 pm this Friday in hopes for continued wins for the valley.

The EOU football team didn’t have a great weekend either. They lost 20-7 to their out-of-state rival University of Idaho, falling behind after a early-game touchdown. The rest of the game, according to the EOU sports website, was a rainy downhill slope as the Vandals scored three more touchdowns after the first quarter to polish off the ailing EOU team.  EOU now 2-1 overall and frontier conference. Next game, they’re gonna play Montana Tech at home Saturday at 1PM.

The EOU volleyball team, on the other hand, is smashing it, quite literally. On Sunday they trashed Evergreen state three to none 25-16, 25-15, 25-13 notching up the margin incrementally as the night went on and on. They are still 6th in the NAIA coaches top 25 poll, and will play Warner Pacific and Multnomah university this weekend Friday at 7PM and Saturday at 5PM respectively.

And that’s your weekly roundup. This roundup was brought to you by Grande Ronde Hospital, Valley Realty, Northwest Furniture and Mattress, Marketplace Family Foods, and Direct Music Source. Tune in for more local content. I’m Will Bowman.