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Tonight in Wisconsin, it's politics, but it's
your life.
Andy South searches for the connection.
The icons of Wisconsin's landscape are torn
down and reborn.
A Madison man makes music out of thin air and in Milwaukee,
wheeling towards a hat trick.
It's all ahead in Wisconsin.
Welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Low.
If I tell you our first story is about politics, there's
a good chance you'll pick up the remote and tune us out.
So I won't say that.
But what if I tell you how
much your property taxes will increase this year?
Or that your child's school just ran out of paper?
Or that your garbage may not
be picked up this week?
It's all connected, as Andy South found out a few weeks
ago when he searched for the politics in everyday life.
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Good morning.
I thought it would be an interesting idea
to take a digital video camera and try to document the way
that government and politics are part of my everyday life.
At least it seemed like a good idea last night.
I thought I would start my assignment by seeing if my
mattress still had one of those do not remove under
penalty of law tags.
Because you might not want the government in your bedroom.
But you really want a mattress you can't trust.
Like finding that mattress tag, today I vow to notice
the way government and politics are all around me,
often hidden the benefits and costs frequently unknown.
Like breakfast cereal.
Am I paying a fraction more
because the FDA mandates the company provide this
nutritional information?
I really have no idea, but it's great if I want to
track my riboflavin intake.
It's hard to swallow, but a simple act like taking
pills connects me to a world of government regulation,
even the political lobbying of pharmaceuticals.
And if my taking out the trash were not part of a government
managed system, I'd have a mountain of garbage in my yard.
And to wake up, sweetie.
Now the hardest part of my day, waking the children.
We have two children, so on our way to school, I appreciate
that education is a big part of what government provides.
I'll see you later.
And because we all pay for schools, what happens here
is also part of politics.
My daughter's choir and drama may be cut because
of state budget problems.
Music is fine.
My younger daughter goes to preschool.
It's not public, but government is
very involved here too, as I learn from her
teacher, Debbie Ward.
Okay, here's the license for the preschool.
It's from the State of Wisconsin.
This is the city license.
It shouldn't take any of the responsibility off
the parent from also being on top of things,
but at least you feel that there's a guardian
angel kind of looking over the program as well.
That state license costs them 700 bucks and means they
meet state safety standards.
The city license carries no charge.
In fact, it qualifies them for grants
that help lower our tuition.
So the government has been helping pay for a small
part of my child's care, and I was totally in the dark.
My next stop is this nearby community center, where
I can work out in their fitness room for a small fee.
It was built largely with federal housing funds, with
this stipulation that it served elderly, minority, low income,
and other underserved groups.
I asked a manager Brad Weissinger if I should feel
guilty using the facility.
Absolutely not.
After all, there are tax dollars,
roughly $300,000, and it should be utilized by as
many people as possible.
Well, thank you, America.
I'm having a great workout.
On the way home, there's a stop for gas, and to return
an overdue library book.
Then a quick shower, courtesy of the city water
department, and because the University of Wisconsin
has a huge parking problem, employees like me get a free
bus pass.
But no rider really pays a full fare because
public transportation is always taxpayer supported.
My route goes by the capital, a building I usually see
as symbolizing government.
But today, the political debates that happen here seem distant.
Living a different world.
You don't get it!
My accuracy is ugly.
And that is the way government works in this state.
I feel like I get more service from this guy
than anyone I voted for.
At work, I'm struggling to make a copy of the
footage I've already shot.
When it strikes me that when it comes to benefits
from government, today I'm looking like a winner.
Andy, so come on down!
You're the next Madison Citizen
to win public schooling.
Government childcare support, a subsidized workout, free
book use, and a brand new bus.
But is the price really right?
The true value of these things is hard to judge, and
after all I do pay taxes.
I pay thousands to every level of government, federal, state,
local, and my property taxes do.
I wanted to spend my day in touch with government,
so what better way than to write a check?
I make it out to this guy, Dane County Treasurer Dave Goende.
I told him my property taxes worked out to about $10 a day.
I'm curious what am I going to get for that money.
Well, as a general rule of thumb, about half of
that money goes to support your local school system.
About 20 to 25% probably depending on whether
you live in a township or a city or a village.
We'll go to that local unit of government.
About 15 to 20% to the county.
And about 5% to the technical school in your area.
And a very small amount to the state forestry
program of all things.
I suppose that forestry fund helps keep the
government in paper.
Like this sample ballot I picked up for an
upcoming school bond issue.
I didn't have sample ballot.
Yes. I just learned that schools
take half of my $10 a day.
By voting in this upcoming issue, I'll help choose
whether to pay a fraction more.
But if taxes are the lifeblood that keep government
going, they are also the fuel that drive politics.
In the newspaper on my way home, the bond issue is
in the editorial pages.
And yet, as personally invested as I am, this political
discussion leaves me cold.
It's one side's complaint about high taxes versus the
other telling me to, "Please, think of the children."
I've spent this day looking for different ways
government touched my life.
And finding ways politics turned me off.
I started the day seeing a divide between daily life and
the workings of government.
I ended seeing the divide between the daily life
of government and the workings of politics.
And so, our evening walk and home to bed.
And tomorrow, it will all cost me another $10.
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If you're still not enthused about politics, we're hoping
you'll at least get good vibrations from our next story.
The Theraman is an instrument that makes it sound
like this one that you might recognize from the
classic Beach Boys song.
You've probably also heard it in old sci-fi movies.
It's a unique instrument that you don't even touch to play.
Reporter Art Hackett discovered the Theraman
is making a comeback.
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Jeff Brady is the percussionist who performs with rock
bands as well as with the Madison Symphony Orchestra.
As the percussionist, Brady says he's always searching
for new things to bang on and new sounds to create.
I'm going to show I got more interested in improvising
and doing more like kind of irritating weird sounds.
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Whether the sound of the Theraman qualifies as
irritating is a matter of taste.
But the story of the Theraman's inventor, of
Theraman, definitely is weird, weird enough to rate
a feature-length documentary.
Theraman invented the Theraman in Russia in the 1920s.
After a series of highly publicized concerts
in New York City, I mean, disappeared, apparently
abducted by Soviet agents.
The documentary interested Brady in Theraman's.
You would set it for about an arm's length and stand
in front of it like that.
The search of the internet led him to Chuck
Collins of McWanago.
It's just incredible that this would be at a 1929 home.
It just seems too futuristic to me.
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It's highly unusual.
Collins has a whole rec room full of Theraman things,
including an original 1929 RCA Theraman, just
like the one in the movie.
But first, you ask, what's a Theraman?
To understand the Theraman, you have
to imagine listening to a weak distance station on an
old AM vacuum tube radio.
If you got your body too close to it, trying to
tune it, you'd hear a howl.
That is the principle behind the Theraman.
And those big coils, those must be cool.
A Theraman is essentially a radio.
Two big coils generate electromagnetic fields.
You make the radio howl by moving your hands
past two antennas sticking out of the box.
But Collins can't make a melody.
He's not a musician.
But he does design and build Theramans.
He sold one to percussionist Brady.
It's a wonder there is a market for Theramans today.
The original instrument, despite promotional efforts
like this record, was a flop.
RCA built only 500 Theramans.
Collins blames the instrument's high price and
the fact that Theramans are almost impossible to play.
Theramans made a reappearance in the late 1940s in sci-fi
movie soundtracks and laced into cocktail lounge music,
which was kind of sad for an instrument which was promoted
as a means of popularizing Gentile classical music.
We don't know what left Theraman would think
of Brady's band, the Theramans, as in the Ramones.
The Ramones were one of the founding punk entities.
They were doing what probably
people couldn't even figure out to call punk yet.
I joined with a stipulation that I could play
Theraman all I wanted.
This Sunday afternoon outing at a coffee house on
Madison's East Side was the Theramans' first performance.
And given the puzzled looks from the audience, it may be the
first Theraman concert they've ever attended.
Or maybe they just aren't sure why the music
is there in the first place.
The whole idea of like, since you don't touch it, you're kind
of like drawing music from out of the very air around you.
Brady got his Theraman two years ago, but only recently
started playing in public.
Even with musical training, Brady describes playing the
Theraman as disorienting.
You have a tactile point of reference.
Like if you play a keyboard instrument, which
is what I'm used to, you have a bunch of notes sitting
there and you know that if you hit the A flat and the
B flat, you're going to get a certain kind of sound.
But the Theraman, you're just like, you know, there's like,
you know, in a tent there and you have to like try to
like find the point and you're just like kind of in space.
Which may explain the frozen faces of Theraman
players, old and new.
You have to like concentrate really hard on like a lot more
so than other instruments.
Like the most like kind of my nude movements,
their hands are making.
You have to stand like totally, totally still, especially to
do high notes because like, and if you remember like notice
when you're just standing there, you're actually like swaying
back and forth ever so slightly.
So you have to like be conscious of that and everything.
You really have to be conscious
of your whole body in a sense, which might account
for like the kind of pained look that Theramanists get.
Jeff Brady may or may not be at the leading edge of a wave
of a Theraman revival.
As we produce this segment, we ran
into three other people who not only knew about Theraman's
but claimed to own one.
Maybe Theraman players have been all around us all along.
Kind of like the music they draw from seemingly thin air.
What can you do when the bread like that, what was on your
back, what can you do?
What can you do?
What can you do when the bread like that, what was
on your back, what can you do?
Just as Theraman players seem to pull music from thin
air, the man in our next story also creates something
out of virtually nothing.
Rick Baud of Barabou is using materials that have long been
abandoned and he's transforming the old into something new.
I've always had a passion for these old
barrens as I was a kid.
I have a great deal of respect for the people originally
built these buildings and these barrens stand
really as a monument to our ancestors to settle the state.
Unfortunately, many of these buildings are disappearing.
In a lot of cases, they're simply burned for fire
practice or they're allowed to deteriorate to the point
where they're just basically settled into the landscape.
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What we try to do is reuse this, and we can do anything
from salvaging barnsiding that can be reused as paneling,
but we can also re-mill it, we can re-sought, we can make
it into the flooring, trim, we built furniture out of it.
The old wood has a beauty and a quality and a patina that
is unsurpassed by any other material that you can get.
This was milled from barnsiding off a barn in northern
Illinois that rumor has it alchipone actually stabled
horses in for a while.
These little holes you see here are from buckshot.
Somebody must have, you know, took
out a pigeon or something up against one of the walls.
We'll pay a numb, we'll feed, we'll salvage the building,
but primarily what we're doing is we're taking down
a structure that is becoming a danger to our clients.
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Possibly it's the point where it's in liability
because of insurance and because of the tax rolls.
This is not just the case of just going out taking a crowbar
to a building and hauling it away into a pickup truck.
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What you have to do is be able to utilize as much of the
structure as possible, not just the most premium parts.
Jat Lake, guys!
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Alright, the point is to not produce kidney.
I got started doing this back in the 70s when I was working
my way through college and we would take a few bars down the
sound of the material from them.
And gradually we developed techniques for using more
and more of the buildings.
So it was a learning process.
The closest we've come to ever really scrolling out, there were
a couple times when we would have built a little bit faster
than we thought it was going to.
We just barely got out of Harbsway.
This is not something that you would amateur us to do because
the learning curve can be quite short if you don't get it right.
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We'll come in and we'll strip the siding off very carefully
using specialized tools to pry it off so we don't damage it.
There we go.
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Then we make a series of pre-pops in the structure
with very key places.
Then we change the building up and we tip it over.
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It comes over just like pulling over a large tree.
It makes big crunch everybody gets a kick out of it.
And if we do it right we make all our pre-cuts properly.
We damage very little material.
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Wisconsin as a state was blessed 150 years ago
with some of the finest standing timber in the world.
Particularly some of the old growth white pine.
These are massive trees that grew in the
northern part of the state.
Often they would grow six or eight feet apart and they'd be
six feet in diameter and people would speak about them like they
were standing in a cathedral.
These trees took centuries to grow, so often 500 years.
And because they grew so slowly
the quality of the wood was far superior to the lumber that
you could possibly get today.
You'll never see a lumber like that again.
It's just not going to occur anywhere
except in very remote regions.
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The house is built almost completely out of recycled
materials. They came out of old birings, old warehouses,
all that say from landfill.
When you work with this kind of wood it just puts everything
else out there in shame.
This is a good example of post and beam work.
This is a little more finished than a
lot of buildings that we do.
We use large power planers that surface the timber.
We take a little bit of the old rough surface off.
And then you could finish the beams with either
an oil or polyurethane or a good quaggish lac.
There's not staying any lumber in this building.
All original patina.
And you can see the deep rich
tones that you get from it.
Most of what you're looking at here would be
in a landfill.
This is recycling on a grand scale.
And I could achieve this look or this finish if
I was using new lumber.
The only way you could really view this and do this is
effectively is to use the old growth lumber from the old
barns, the old warehouses.
Here it's going to have another hundred years worth of life.
Whenever we take down one of these old buildings and we
see it come down we always have a little bit of regret.
Because it's such a magnificent structure.
Wisconsin wouldn't be Wisconsin if we didn't have these
old barns in the landscape such an icon in the state.
But if the building has to come down it's far, far
wiser to at least use as much of it as we can and
recycle it and give parts of the old barn a new life.
We'd like to know what you think of our report on barn
recycling and all of the stories on in Wisconsin.
You can contact us with your comments by sending an email
to inwisconsin@wpt.org or you can call us at 1-800-253-1158.
This is our pilot season up in Wisconsin and we're
anxious to get your feedback.
Hockey can be a brutal sport.
It's tough to keep your wits about you as pucks fly by
your head at lightning speed.
Now imagine trying to keep an eye on the puck while navigating
the ice in a wheelchair.
Tricky, not for the League of Milwaukee players
who showed reporter Jerry Huffman how it's done.
Alex Carey, the young man in the wheelchair,
is breaking the barrier.
With a gentle push from his mom Alex was about to
add hockey player to his list of accomplishments.
There are a lot of firsts you notice at your first
wheelchair hockey game.
First no one really just watches at these games.
If you're there you're going to help.
Then there are the others who don't want the help or need
it. Most of the young people glide effortlessly onto the ice.
Focus on their abilities, not their disabilities
the organizers tell me.
So much of their lives are wrapped up in what they
can't do.
On the ice it's all about what they can do.
Take the case of Tony Sylvester, he's the young man in the
high school letterman's jacket, who can tell you about
fighting for your rights.
Tony's wheelchair basketball team made the national
finals, but some school officials originally told
him he wouldn't get a letter since the basketball team
wasn't part of the school.
Guess who won that argument?
I don't think they would have never gave it to me in the
first place and I think we decided to fight for what
I wanted and everything.
So you stood up for yourself, didn't you?
Yeah. Yeah I did.
Meanwhile young Alex is learning some of the do's
and don'ts about hockey.
He's out there and he looks like he's having a lot of fun.
I don't think he knows where the
puck is, but he's doing great.
Chris Kerry is Alex's mom.
He used to be such a shy kid and really nervous to
try new things and nervous about being different
from all the other kids.
And here he's just one of them.
And like I said, the older kids kind of take them under
their wing and show them the ropes and their soul.
Then there's something else you notice that these games that
doesn't always happen at others.
It's the sound of kids and often their parents having fun.
That was close, nice pass.
Laughter as a father and son play as one.
Individually they face the world of obstacles.
Together on the ice they can do anything.
This really isn't any different than any other
father's son activity.
Not to me.
Actually I can participate more.
It's more fun than my other two sons when they play sports
I only could watch them.
Go! Hey, the girl!
Very cool!
Another player, Becca Murray, is in the seventh grade.
She finds an energy on the ice that may someday lead to
her career helping other kids.
They're fun to work with and they're energetic.
I like working with energetic stuff like ice hockey.
And maybe sometimes you understand how tough
it is to be a kid?
Yeah. Ironically the only crash of
the evening was one of the able-bodied kids who helps out.
She had a bit of trouble keeping both her wits
and wheels about her.
In the end this evening was about focusing on
the good things in life.
If you want me to come I can help push you
around if you like.
We're celebrating a moment when anything is possible.
These young people already know how thin that line
is between can and can't.
But they also know a wheelchair can't stop them
from making a difference.
I just want to work with other kids and get them where
I was and see how it was.
When I was a little kid and then seeing what I was going
through when I was a little kid and taking all the fears out
of camp and not being with your mom or dad and going to camp
and having all the fears and trying to work with the
little kids to make sure they don't have the fear anymore.
Alex is packing home.
Oh Alex, go!
Yeah baby.
Remember Alex?
What was your favorite part out there?
He's not afraid anymore.
Just one night in the net and one more hurdle
passed for a young man learning what he can do.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of In Wisconsin.
Please join us again next week.
Good night.
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