[Music]
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people of a lion to energy who bring safe, reliable
and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods, and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
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[Music]
You're looking at the natural beauty of Kettle-Murrayne
State Forest Southern Unit, which is where we are
this week for In Wisconsin.
Hello, I'm Patti Lo.
The Southern Unit of Kettle-Murrayne
State Forest covers 20,000 acres in Walworth, Jefferson,
and Wakusha counties.
There are lakes, prairie restoration areas, and of
course the forest itself.
Throughout the program tonight we'll be showing
you some of those sites.
We'll also head across state borders to our neighbors in Iowa
to meet the man who holds the world record as a card-stacker.
And back here in Wisconsin, we'll visit a man in Walworth
County who has created a public tribute to those
killed in the war on terror.
That's coming up later in the show.
But first, we continue with our "Where in Wisconsin Road Trips
with US Senate Candidates."
Remember the candidates don't know in advance where they're
going, who they'll be with, or what they'll be asked.
Frederica Freibert reports on the road trip with Republican
US Senate candidate Robert Gerald Lorge.
They began their day in Milwaukee.
I'm Robert Lorge, a woman for the United States Senate.
From the suburbs of Wakusha County to Central
City, Milwaukee.
All the way to the lake.
Republican candidate for US Senate, Robert Gerald
Lorge, hits greater Milwaukee on his leg of the "Where
in Wisconsin Road Trips."
First appearances serve this candidate well, one stop on
Milwaukee's near south side.
With Robert Gerald Lorge, there will be a lot of listening.
He's got a lot of ideas and doesn't mind detailing them.
At this business development firm in Milwaukee, Joe
Scotarsack worries about the cost of employee health care.
"As a small business owner, I mean, what do you do?"
"You need to have, you know, tax credits for some things,
tax deductions for the rest.
I have a plan called Partible Personal Individual Family
Health Group Coverage Plan."
Lorge's plan to provide health insurance isn't easy to
explain, nor is its acronym, PPIF-HGH, particularly catchy,
but he's happy to detail it at length.
And when he explains that his plan is similar to
a medical savings account, it goes over pretty well.
"I've got to start somewhere, so it sounds like it is a very,
very reasonable plan.
Let's at least start talking about it."
Another member of the business consulting firm wants to
talk with Lorge about unfunded mandates from Washington.
"So as Senator, you'll end all..."
"I think all of the 100 mandates are wrong.
If the federal government is going
to tell you what to do, then they ought to act for it."
Steve King also offers positive feedback.
"I thought the answers were good, you know, because it's
all a matter of, well, if you're for reducing the size
of the federal government, so that's what we need to do.
We need to get a shrunk down and get things back to the
state's words intended to be."
At the Swank Milwaukee Art Museum, another group
of citizens mingles to chat with the candidate.
"Special essential cities that have other issues
that are not equipped."
But really getting down to brass tax in a museum meeting room,
Lorge takes a tough series of questions on Iraq from
one member of the group.
"I think the hundreds of billions of dollars we're
spending on Iraq is contributing to the deficit, and do you
think we should be there in the first place, and do you think
that that unilateral nation building has hurt our ability
to fight the war on terror?"
"Thank God America had the guts to do it, even if we had to go
it alone.
I think we need to be in Iraq to set up a democracy,
which will be a shining beacon of what is possible
in the Middle East.
This may be the turning point
where we can, in the future, not lose American lives."
"You do think that it has contributed to
the war on terror."
"I think it was, unfortunately, a necessary war we had
to fight in order to fight the war on terror."
Andy Tarnoff doesn't let Lorge off the hook.
"I don't think he really answered the question to
ask him.
I'm confused just how he can say, "Depth,
the deficit's a bad thing."
"But we should be the world's policeman, and we should
spend money on education, and then we should cut taxes
and get rid of the deficit.
I don't see how it adds up."
"And that's kind of what I've been hearing from Washington
the last four years anyway."
But Robert Gerald Lorge considers himself a
maverick outside of Washington politics or even
Republican party politics.
"It's at a part," he says, from career politicians, even though
his brother and father served as long-time state legislators.
"Sometimes his message goes more toward ranting.
His literature says we must defend against
the culture wars of the liberal left and fanatics abroad."
"It says to save America we must end Communist
Chinese slave labor."
"It's one message he brings to inner city Milwaukee."
"Lorge assures two community activists, he meets on
their lunch break, that he understands the plight of
the jobless and the pool."
"So are you the man to be our voice?"
"Well you have someone with arm in the community and
you say you, you come back now and after you get elected."
"I don't know what religion you are, I'm Catholic, I'm
Christian, and I really think what would Jesus do in the
same situation?
Isn't that person my neighbor?
Isn't that person my brother or sister?"
"Metta Robinson likes what she hears about bringing
Christ into the discussion."
"But Minces know words and how she believes politicians
will be ultimately judged."
"But a lot of people are going to burn in hell, people in
power, but no, a lot of people are going to burn in hell for
these kids who are dying at a serious year of mortality
rate. The young, black babies are dying and this community
nobody's talking about it.
The welfare people, they say, "Oh, well they're also welfare
but they're under the bridge.
They have nobody to stay."
"I'm not going to need somebody who will burn in hell for this."
"Talk about putting the fear of God into a political
candidate." "I can do anything for you, just give me a call,
email or write me, and I answer all my phone's personal."
"Well it's refreshing to hear that you believe in
God and that you have, just have to remain to be seen."
"The streets of Milwaukee can be unforgiving.
The ball feels a book field, stand in contrast."
"What do you guys think is the most important thing
facing America right now?
Just shout out or baseball?"
"Baseball and jobs."
Coach and college junior Justin Schweikert asks Lutge about the
lagging market for graduating engineers like himself.
"The problem you're running into is that places like
China, India, other places, they're producing just a China
in particular, Communist China.
They're producing just as many grad students as we
are, just as many bachelor degree students as we are.
"So if we're deluding ourselves into thinking we'll do the high
tech stuff and they can have all the old factories, we're making
a big mistake.
We're going to need people like you to actually
invent the new businesses."
"I thought it gave a pretty good answer.
Let's go."
So not a home run, perhaps more about base hit for
Lord here in the suburbs.
"A lot of people are going to burn in hell."
But a far cry from being confronted in the central
city with the prospect of burning in hell and a little
closer to the sensibilities of startup business.
"I always listen to a guy that's wearing cowboy boots."
"We still have two more US Senate candidates to spend
the day with in our road trip series.
Two in and two weeks from today to find out
who we follow next and where in Wisconsin he'll show up.
In the meantime, you can find more information about
all of the candidates in Wisconsin's US Senate race
by going to our election year resource, Wisconsin Vote.
The address is wisconsinvote.org
[Music]
Looking around the forest, nature's architecture is
everywhere. When something falls down here, it
creates its own beauty.
But when something falls down for Brian Berg, it's
not so good.
Berg is from Iowa and holds the world
record for stacking cards.
Even though he's not in Wisconsin, we thought he was
worth crossing the border to meet.
Iowa Public Television's Chris Gurley introduces us.
[Music]
Brian Berg stacks cards for a living.
But you don't have to worry that you'll lose
all your money if you're playing Blackjack or poker
with him.
That's because when Brian stacks the deck,
he's actually stacking the deck one card at a time.
"When I build with cards, I don't really have to think
that much.
It's just kind of a natural thing.
And I have done it for so long that
it's kind of like riding a bike or driving a car.
It's not always something you
think about.
You just do it."
In 1992, at the age of 17, Brian broke the Guinness World
Record by building a tower of cards 14 feet 6 inches tall.
The current record, which he holds, is for a tower
that was over 25 feet tall.
Took 2,000 decks of cards, weighed over 250 pounds,
and took 2.5 weeks to build.
But believe it or not, it was an article that appeared
in the National Enquirer that actually launched his
career as a card stacker.
"And they wrote a perfectly good, perfectly true story
about myself.
And then that was kind of the beginning for
me because it wasn't long after that I started getting
calls from all kinds of companies, fairs, etc.
to do.
Something that I love to do as a hobby for hire."
The structures that Brian creates are about much more
than size or breaking records.
It's about art and architecture, about space and design.
One of his most difficult creations was a replica of
the Iowa State House that he created at the Iowa State
Fair in the summer of 2000.
"It was probably the largest sculptural project ever made.
The only house of cards ever built that was larger was
the Guinness Record.
But the State House required me to
build a dome larger than I'd ever built.
It required me to make a structure so large
that I couldn't really reach the center.
So I had to build it like a loaf of bread,
basically starting on one heel and working towards the other."
The structures Brian creates come from years of trial
and error and learning from his mistakes.
Brian started building with cards when he
was eight.
But long before he put his first two cards
together, his grandmother recognized his love of creating
things and every Christmas gave him a box of junk.
That was always my favorite Christmas present because I
could make stuff out of that.
Everybody else would give me all these nice toys and those
would just be sitting there and out of the way they were
playing with my box of garbage.
Later on in life she wouldn't do that on him work because
she was embarrassed that she was giving me.
She'd always give me the box of junk and
she'd give me something nice just because she felt guilty.
I told her, "Just give me the box of junk."
So that was the beginning of my
creative enterprises and my grandfather on the same side
of the family is the one that introduced me to card stacking.
But neither one of those people would ever claim to be
a creative person, Adelaenna.
Once Brian began stacking cards he always did it in the
living room and always right in front of the TV.
That is until his projects became
so large they blocked his father's view of the television.
Then certain building ordinances and zoning laws were enforced.
But Brian credits his older brother with helping him fine
tune his building skills.
He used to come home from school, get there before me,
destroy everything I had made and then claim to be innocent.
He used to stomp through the living room like with
as much force as possible creating like a seismic zone.
And so I have to give him some credit I guess because
of his demolition tactics that have perhaps helped
me become a better builder.
Brian says he doesn't know of anyone else who is making a
living stacking cards.
In fact he quite literally has written
the book on stacking cards.
It's titled Stacking the Deck and it is filled with designs
and hints on how to build a house of cards.
Some of the hints that are in the book
he agreed to share with us.
This is a cell and it's the initial building block that
I make to start all card structures.
And if you can learn to build one of these you
can build just about anything that you've seen me build.
So to start one of those I'm going to make a T and I'm
going to keep this hand here because I can shake all I want
is not going to go anywhere.
See I'm still shaking still shaking whoops even
threw one up against there.
Okay. And then I'm going to make a box just like that with the
tail sticking out and that's how you start.
And then after you have those there you can keep
adding on to where you have more boxes and then you have a
grid in the grid is what makes my structures actually possible.
And makes them so strong.
Now this is a cell just like the one I built earlier only the
cards are vertically oriented and when I build with my cells
vertically oriented I have to pre-stress the card so they
remember which way to bend.
And that way they all fail in towards each other so that when
they fail they don't explode just to give you an idea how
strong this is there's one deck.
There's four decks that's enough to build 50
stories just like that.
There's eight decks which is enough to build
100 stories like that.
And a couple more for good measure.
Brian has found that it's even possible to move his
creations after their build.
He does it by placing his fingers on the foundation and
giving them a gentle push or pull.
It's just that easy.
This sample of Brian's skills took him a little over
eight hours to construct and nearly 140 decks of cards.
We were able to condense the entire process
to under a minute.
You can't live in a house of cards with a brand new deck
and a big backyard in a fall.
When the wind blows hard you can't live in a house of cards.
Everybody's going to ask you sooner or later
what you do for a living.
Imagine yourself in a position of like having to explain
to people that you build with cards for a living.
They're going to either think that you're completely
wacko or that you're lying.
And what's even more disturbing I guess to me is that some
people would say well why would you want to do that?
And the answer is well it allows me to be creative.
It allows me a lot of time to just do what I
want to do and that's probably the biggest perk.
The structures Brian builds rarely last more than a
week and he never uses the cards more than once.
A lot of times he's responsible for tearing down what he builds
and it would appear he gets almost as much enjoyment out
of destroying his creations as he does building them.
I can remember a day when I could hardly get two
cards to lean together.
Then once I figured out a few simple things, it became really
simple. It's just that easy.
[Music]
I'm on the Ice Age Trail, a trail that runs the full
31 mile length of the Kettle-Marine State Forest.
In all there are more than 160 miles of trails
in the southern unit and that's just half the story.
Just a little ways north of here you'll get to Kettle-Marine
State Forest Northern Unit.
It covers 30,000 acres in Washington, Vondalac
and Shabwagon counties.
Videographer Frank Boll brings us a video postcard
of Kettle-Marine North.
[Music]
As we enjoy the beauty of this state forest and look
ahead to a three-day weekend, it might be easy to overlook
the reason why Monday Memorial Day is a holiday.
It's the day set aside to remember those who have died
in service to our country.
And at this time when the nation is at war, those
memories are all too fresh.
In Walworth County, one man has taken it upon himself to
create a memorial and the list of those it honors grows daily.
[Music]
People say in-war casualties happen, but casualty is just
a word.
Behind that word are really flesh and button men and
women who give up their lives.
I think it's still important to put this information up.
It tells that men and women are
still dying each and every day.
Each and every day, at the end of the day, Chet Burowski
heads out of his house to the edge of his property on
Peters Road in Sharon Township and performs a daily ritual.
He changes the number of U.S.
and coalition soldiers who have lost their lives
in Iraq, Afghanistan, even the Philippines as
part of the war on terror.
I have a lot of respect for all these people that are just
doing what they're told for whatever reason, whether it's
loyalty or patriotism or a job.
They're making a tremendous sacrifice and I feel
driven to make them known.
The list of the casualty, the name, their picture,
one available, their hometown and how they died.
What Burowski has created here is more than a marker for
the dead.
He has created a memorial, a way to remember each
and every coalition soldier.
From near.
Specialist Michelle M.
Whitmer. She was 20 years old with the 32nd Military
Police Company, the Wisconsin Army National Guard.
And a far.
The most recent coalition casualties, the two Ukraine
soldiers here, Constantine Mahalif and Jaroslav Slocovits,
who were killed by hostile fire in As-Suara, Iraq on April 28th.
He records the fallen from 16 coalition countries
who have lost soldiers.
When men and women were dying and it wasn't the lead story,
that was very upsetting to me.
So I just, I began to make it the lead story,
at least in my life.
Do I want others to see it and to pay tribute?
Sure. Everyone is.
It's a free country.
You're welcome to just drive on by, but
my hope is that more and more people come and pay tribute.
Burowski began the memorial in April of 2003, shortly
after the invasion of Iraq.
On the fallen, numbered only 58.
He started with this stone.
By wrap this in black as a sign of mourning and
simply began to tally the best I could, the number of
dead from day to day, and unfortunately it goes on and on.
The coalition memorial has grown from a black-taped
counting stone to panels of plywood that name each soldier.
This is a four by eight sheet of five-inch thick
plywood painted black.
Helled up with posts and in advance, an event of
storm, I'll hold it up as I have in the past.
It's a simple handmade memorial that requires sometimes
hours of work each day, sifting through websites.
There are over 130 casualties in the month as there
were in April, quite some time, two, three hours.
Again, it's dealing with that fog of who died where.
Burowski has a full-time job working as a therapist for
the county.
He uses his free time to take on this job,
to penetrate that fog of war, to get the true picture of
exactly who died and where.
They have confirmed five US Navy sailors and one US
Army soldier assigned to the first Marine Expeditionary
Force were killed may second in an indirect fire attack
on a military installation in the Alonbar province.
Yesterday, this news was out as a mortar attack on a military
base in Iraq.
Now there's more information.
Again, yesterday, the news and the
media was it was five Marines.
Today, they're confirming it's five United States Navy.
The story that emerges from the details can hit close to home.
One of the five sailors killed was petty officer's second
class, Michael Anderson, born in Ashkash, and shown
here with his seven-year-old daughter Brandy, just
before he left for Iraq.
Burowski has begun to collect news stories of coalition
casualties from local papers to add to the memorial.
This is the story of Casey Sheehan.
He was a rock sister, Carly's 23 said.
Anything he did, he did it with all his heart.
Casey as a toddler.
Casey in elementary school.
Casey as a soldier.
Casey's grieving family.
His sister, Carly.
His sister, Jane, 18.
The details tell the story.
The name, the age, how many years on this earth that this
man or woman had and gave, and who grieves for them?
There is no politics to it if you're a pro-war,
come-patri-bute. If you're anti-war, come-patri-bute.
If you value human life, come-and-patri-bute to the
men and women that have died.
I'll take all political sides as long as they
come and pay tribute.
[Music]
On this memorial day weekend, we thank all of those who
have served our country and given so much for freedom.
For In Wisconsin, I'm Patty Low.
Good night.
[Music]
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the people of
Alliance Energy, who bring safe, reliable, and environmentally
friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods, and life in
Wisconsin running smoothly.
Alliance Energy, offering energy-saving ideas on the
web. Additional funding for the We're in Wisconsin
reports is provided by these We The People Sponsors.
And by contributions to your PBS station, by
viewers like you.
Thank you.
[Music]