Wednesday Classes   

Utilizing a Power Point presentation and short video clips, this class will look at the lives of four individuals who contributed to the advancement of the motion picture industry. Yakima Canutt was the only stunt performer to win an Academy Award and was John Wayne’s stunt double during the 1930s and 1940s. Walt Disney holds the record for the most personal Academy Awards, 32 by some measures. Academy Award winning Herbert Kalmus was a movie producer who also invented the first reliable color film process in 1922, Technicolor. Alfred Hitchcock was a director who minimized dialogue and actor emotion, to allow his unique cinematic techniques to better tell a motion picture story but he never won an Academy Award.

Visit the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources Center for Mollusk Conservation and learn about its efforts to restore and recover rare and imperiled freshwater mollusks. These efforts include mussel releases, advances in mussel culture and propagation, applied research, and field surveys. The Center has also recently begun propagating and rearing the imperiled eastern hellbender.

**Transportation for this trip is on your own.

This four-week, team-taught course will ask participants to read two novels: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Percival Everett’s James (2024). The class will explore how the two novels echo one another in their treatment of major themes that span the generations separating both books, including each author’s treatment of social ills such as poverty, class barriers, and above all racial prejudice. 

READING SCHEDULE: September 11: Please read before our first class the first half of Huckleberry Finn. September 18: Read the second half of Huckleberry Finn. September 25: Read the first half of James. October 2: Read the second half of James.