”In reading the book, I actually learned a lot about my family,” said Jay Bowerman to a round of hearty laughter. The remark was an aside about Eugene author Kenny Moore’s biography of Jay’s father, Bill Bowerman, famed Oregon track coach from the late ’40s to early ’70s and the co-founder of Nike.

”As youngsters growing up, it was always a sort of standing joke within the family that, if we wanted to know anything about each other, we had to read the newspaper,” continued Jay, who lives in Bend. ”There was just not a lot of talk around home about oneself or each other.”

There was, however, much talk of the Bowermans on this Wed-nesday evening in early March.

Like many comments Jay made, these remarks garnered good-natured laughs from an enthusiastic audience of two book clubs that, like several in the area, have been reading Moore’s biography, ”Bowerman and the Men of Oregon.”

The book is the official read of Deschutes Public Library System’s 2007 A Novel Idea … Read Together program. Events kick off at the Bend Public Library at 3 p.m. April 15, when Jay and his brother Jon will share stories and music.

The groups, Widgi Readers and the Athletic Club of Bend’s book club, met at the Awbrey Butte home of Ann and John Kiefer to hear Jay and his wife, Teresa, share stories of Bill.

Lois and Tom Gibbons, long-time friends of the Bowermans, summed up the mood in the room at the talk’s start when Lois said, ”Welcome to the Bowerman book. It has sparked so much interest in town,” she said to the audience of about 25. ”It’s really exciting.”

As the evening progressed, the book discussion evolved into a full-tilt storytelling session, with those who knew Bill Bowerman sharing anecdotes and recollections. But the gathering also shed some light on Jay, a former Olympic skier who garnered four paragraphs in the biography. In the course of the conversation, talk also turned to his brothers, Tom and Jon, and their 93-year-old mother, Barbara, who lives in Fossil.

One reader told Jay that, while reading the book, she wondered if Barbara ”wasn’t nominated for sainthood.”

Gibbons told the audience how her husband and Jay became acquainted through cross-country skiing and recalled the delicious spreads Barbara Bowerman used to put out for racoons she used to feed outside the family’s home above the McKenzie River.

Among other things, the crowd heard about Bill Bowerman’s conflicts with the Raj-neeshee cult in the ’80s. ”Neighbors out there were always in fights with each other, and for a brief period of time they were all friends.”

They also heard about Bill’s clashes with the Nike board of directors.

Jay said that on several occasions, Nike CEO Phil Knight told him he cherished ”that my father would come to board meetings with one mission only: that if they’re going to make shoes, they were going to make the best possible shoes at the most affordable price that they could.”

Further, he said, for about six to eight years after retiring from coaching, Bill would go to meetings angry and sometimes leave even angrier. He’d try to resign, but Knight would never accept it.

”I’ve never talked to a professional psychologist,” Jay said, ”but we finally decided that after a life in which he had a programmed confrontation every week, that to suddenly be free of that, he just needed to have something to focus on. As long as there were track meets and cross-country meets … he had things to focus that energy on … he continued to have that need to confront some sort of enemy.”

One book club member brought up an anecdote from the book that mentioned how one had to first get an athlete’s attention, just as one had to do with mules. And for mules, that usually required a two-by-four.

”My question to you is, did he use that strategy to bring up you three boys?”

”No. He might have tried that with Jon, but it didn’t work,” Jay said of his oldest brother, who lives near Fossil. ”The rest of us slipped by.

”The thing that Kenny captured well in the book was the methods with which (Bill Bowerman) got people’s attention – the two-by-fours – usually were not physical. Once in a while they were.”

Though many of the stories Jay told were sparked by ”Bowerman and the Men of Oregon,” little resembled a traditional book discussion.

”This has been an enjoyable evening,” Jay told the group as the evening drew to a close. ”But I’m not sure I want to do this for every book club.”