[Bell]
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the people of a
lion to energy who bring safe, reliable and environmentally
friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods and life
in Wisconsin running smoothly, a lion's energy, offering
energy saving ideas on the web.
Coming up in Wisconsin, in the midst of Milwaukee's
inner city, homeowners create a thriving middle-class
neighborhood. This musician has been tickling the
Iberis for Shatech residents for more than eight
decades, and a high-tech device frees a Madison woman
from a rare disability.
The device was invented here in Wisconsin.
Hello and welcome.
I'm Patty Lo.
Every week in Wisconsin explores life in our state,
from profiles of interesting people to critical issues
confronting all of us.
Tonight, we begin by asking you to imagine a world
where nothing is in balance.
The floor constantly shifting under your feet.
We meet a woman who has lived like that for more
than five years, the side effect of a drug that
destroyed her balance.
But as Jerry Huffman reports,
it hasn't hurt her sense of humor, especially once
a team of middle-town scientists came up with
an invention that takes the wobbly out of her world.
Life isn't easy for Cheryl Schilds.
Cheryl's so-called normal world is a constant
struggle. One marked by how difficult even everyday
tasks like walking can be.
Floating, tumbling, spinning around, but it's not a
spinning like I feel like I'm going there's times like if
I get out of a vehicle, I swear that that vehicle is moving,
and it's not.
And I'm not moving.
It's almost like just being sucked out into
outer space.
That's what it feels like all the time.
Hey, good.
Did you hear about the sport where started?
Cheryl Schilds' difficulty started five years ago.
She was given an antibiotic for a post-operative
infection. That drug destroyed the microscopic
cells in her inner ear that made it possible to keep
her balance.
Now, normal for this former sales rep means a
constant battle to stay upright.
As long as I stay still, I'm fine.
But if I go like this, then you go like this.
What happens if I go like this?
If you do that, then it makes me feel, then you start
you're blurring and it makes me feel out of balance
and I'm going to hold on.
Schilds' visual world is constantly shifting,
exacerbated by everything from floor patterns
to light reflections.
As a self-professed wobbler, Schilds navigates the hallways
of a local technical school, armed with a king and a
self-deprecating sense of humor.
Vaheeming is a real hoot, doing laundry, anything, anything
that you do in a normal life, taking a shower.
In my garage, many times I feel
like I'm just going to fall right out and I have
fallen. I'm wobbly.
I'm a wobbler.
Exactly. That's exactly.
That's an affectionate name that we have
within our support group that I'm involved in.
That's what it's called as wobbler synonymous because
we wobble.
And then one day Schilds' life took a
turn from one of constant frustration to one that
offered a tantalizing glimpse of freedom.
To me, it looks like the yellow brick road.
Schilds' yellow brick road is a hard hat with
a miniature sensor, an electrode strip that goes into
her mouth and a computer.
The computer, through the electrode, sends tiny
electrical impulses to her tongue when she wobbles.
Think of those impulses as messages, messages
that used to come from her inner ear.
Now it's her tongue telling Schilds'
brain when she's in balance.
When she's got the red box in the middle of that
gray box, her posture is perfectly upright.
She's in her normal position.
And she feels normal now?
And she feels normal.
That's what she says.
And also the system is giving
her that feedback.
She feels that on her tongue.
"Sharup, can you hear me?
Give me a thumbs up on how you're feeling."
I'm astonished.
At a startup company called Wicab, Cheryl,
in the handful of other wobblers, spend anywhere
from a few seconds to several minutes using the
TDU or tongue display unit.
A prototype developed by Tyler and a group of researchers.
Yuri Daneloff is a neuroscientist on
the project.
"It looks now that we awaken some hidden mechanisms
that we even didn't expect to exist in the human body.
Because how she, I don't know, really.
I was a skeptical person, but I have to
use the word "wonder".
Yes. "wonder, I hate this word, but I have to use
it. We don't know what's happening."
Remember this image of Cheryl?
This footage was shot just before a
recent test with the TDU.
Now watch what happens after only 20 minutes with the TDU.
Cheryl's world is normal again.
No more wobbles, no more feeling of floating in space.
The woman who just 20 minutes ago needed
help standing is now jumping rope.
And if that doesn't make you feel like
dancing, nothing will.
That was completely out of the blue.
Tyler and Daneloff had hoped Cheryl
and the others would get some relief from the constant
feeling of tumbling.
But what stunned them was the
fact that all of the test subjects, Cheryl's results
being the best so far, have gone from a world
of near total dependence back to independence.
No big deal, right?
I feel like a little kid that's
just discovered Christmas for the first time.
It's just the best ever.
It's what?
This is the best thing that could ever, ever happen.
It's just light and happy and bright and free of
constant struggle.
You know, I'm like being able to
say hello to myself again.
Because now walking through a store is fun again.
I'm riding an escalator would have been disorienting, but
not after using the T.D.U.
Amazing. I cannot believe this.
If she's always had a barely having her own
looking out of the ground.
I can't believe it.
I am in absolute awe.
I cannot believe it.
That's the best thing is I can walk and I
could turn my head from side to side without feeling
that I'm going to fall over.
So colors are more vibrant.
People passing doesn't bother you.
No, it's amazing.
It is just amazing.
That would have made me shift and want to fall
to the floor.
For about two hours Cheryl lives
almost symptom-free.
But then it happens.
Whatever pathways are opened by
the electrical impulses start to close again.
The researchers aren't sure what hidden resources are awakened
when Cheryl uses the T.D.U.
And an even bigger mystery is why the pathways
always close down again.
I can tell it.
And that's just, no.
It's chasing me big time.
It's right behind me.
I can feel it quite intensely.
I could tell just like the
background noise here.
It's really difficult for me to
carry on our conversation.
Wow. Yeah, I could feel it coming back.
Tyler Mandaniloff have already come further than they expected
by creating a system that gives shilts and countless
others even a temporary glimpse of their old life.
But the final steps may be the toughest.
Shrinking a desktop T.D.U.
to the size of a dental retainer
is feasible but financially challenging.
And then there will be even more
government testing.
A final act in one woman's struggle to make her
world a little less wobbly.
Good news this month for WeCob, the Middleton High Tech Company.
Scientists there just received word that the National
Institutes of Health has granted them funding
to continue research and development on the T.D.U.
Our next story takes us to Milwaukee, a city with
challenges not unlike those facing just about
every major city in the country.
One of those challenges is attracting
new residents to an often run down inner city.
That's where the concept of
urban renewal comes into play.
It's relatively easy to demolish old dilapidated
buildings. The trick, however, is developing a
thriving neighborhood in their place.
In Wisconsin reporter Art Hackett visits
one area in Milwaukee that appears to be an
urban renewal success story bringing new life
to an old neighborhood.
If you pass through North Milwaukee on North Avenue,
this is what you'll see.
Some stores which are struggling, some
stores that are no longer there at all.
You'll see vacant lots where urban
renewal projects have yet to yield the renewal
they projected.
But a few blocks to the south,
past some homes that have seen better days, you'll run into
Gerald Hobson's neighborhood.
Hobson remembers house-sunning here when only a few
new homes had been built.
Yeah, my wife and I drove by the area and did not
even stop and look.
We just decided no, we think we'll
just keep looking.
The Hobson weren't interested
even though the city of Milwaukee was offering a deal.
The lots were a dollar.
Subsidies brought the price of a new home
down to $75 to $80,000.
The catch, location, location, location.
Initially, we were not going to
move here because of the location.
For one thing, this neighborhood I think
has a stigma or had a stigma attached to it.
The stigma had grown from the reality of the late 1980s when
the area around 23rd and Walnut earned the nickname Burntown.
Back to back, multiple fatality fires in 1987
helped set the city record for annual fire douts
at 31.
It was from like North Avenue to a bottom
part of the district.
It's like the worst house in
Stonker in the whole city.
Meer John Norquist on the job for less than six
months toward the area talking about redevelopment.
You know, we're not going to come totally
solve it, but we can make things a little bit
better. There is no market for houses in this area.
That's why they are abandoned.
So many houses had been abandoned that by
the mid 90s, the area was a six square block vacant
lot. Meer Norquist leveraged a mix of federal and
private funds to create a development of new homes
that would blend in yet still attract middle class
families who ordinarily would look elsewhere.
It was dubbed City Homes.
After six months of looking at
existing homes elsewhere in Milwaukee, the Hobbsons
came back to check out an open house and they bought
one. I've lived on the Northwest Addie town and
lived in apartment buildings where I never knew my
neighbors, but here we know, you know, all of our neighbors.
I've met most of the folks who have built homes here and it's
more of a close knit community.
Call us the Burb in Burntown.
[Music]
This summer, on a Saturday afternoon when people have
turned out for a block party, it's hard to imagine a more
idyllic place.
Colonel Nichols is president of the
Neighborhood Association.
When I talk with some of my other African-American
colleagues, a lot of them thought that a majority
white people lived in this subdivision and that kind
of just blew their mind that middle class blacks would
you know invest and stay in the central city.
Nichols is an administrator at
the UW-Nawaki.
He could live anywhere he wanted
to. Many other residents of the neighborhood are
city and school district employees who have to
live within the city of Milwaukee.
That is the catalyst that you know,
keeps us populated.
I think that's part of it I
think. But Colonel Nichols says the bigger factor was
the project concentrated a critical mass of
the middle class.
This project was unique in that
before from what I understand there was a lot
of scattered housing.
It didn't really catch on for a
lot of people.
I think when they decided to take a whole flat
land basically within a you know certain acreage like they
did here in the City Homes Initiative and put
a concentrated number of homeowners it really
just kind of anchored the whole the whole area.
Frank Miller was one of the first people to buy a house
in City Homes even though he worked for the City Department
planning the project he at first had doubts it
would work.
I thought it was a risk.
I couldn't understand how you could put 40
or 50 homes in the middle of basically a ghetto type area and
expected to succeed and it did.
The fact that we could get a new home out of the deal kind of
influencing more than anything.
And we met a lot of new people who were
willing to take the same risks as we were and we
kind of like those people Jareen County being two
of them and some of the other neighbors and we figured
we'll just all go together we'll be pioneers and we'll just look
out for each other.
Since we've been here we really haven't
experienced any problems.
I mean late in the evening we'll sit
out on the front porch and it's like you know like home right.
Some people were attracted by the spontaneity one
finds in an urban area and location location location.
It's close to downtown it's close to everything
so it just made sense to be closer in the city.
At the time Mario and Rita Higgins started looking
for a home she worked in the suburb of Port
Washington. I'd always lived in every city so moving out to the
sub-bubes was just really not something that I was
comfortable with.
City Homes drew mixed reviews from
people who had lived in homes surrounding the
project. Elijah Andrews is a retired meat cutter
who's lived on 22nd Street for 50 years.
We would do for face lift and I would knock on
it at all.
Andrews known in the neighborhood for his pet
python had seen the area decline and then with city
homes come back to life again.
Crime within the new development has been
limited to a rash of garage break-ins several
years ago.
Because of the fact that he is some of
the crime cut down because they haven't got the
total of the wind got the gang bangers we ain't
got what's it's black on black crime and stuff it
cut down tremendously.
But long time residents had
to live with the imposition of order on what had
been no man's land.
So the area had to get used
to these 70 or 80 or more new homes in this area
and realizing we weren't going anywhere we were
going to we're here to stay and we we we we care
about our housing we care about our lines we want
to keep it nicely managed here and I think over
the last few years I've seen kind of a level of
respect and a level of of interest on the part of
neighbors to least respect what's going on
here. What's been the biggest challenge so far?
Probably getting our lawn in but other than that
I mean you do have a lot of cars that play a lot
of loud music at times to kind of come through the
street a little fast on vine here but other than that
it hasn't been much.
When the city developed these
homes officials hoped they would spur commercial
growth and jobs in the surrounding area so far
that hasn't happened but as you cruise the
surrounding area what you do find is more new homes
filling in the vacant lots that surround the
fully developed city homes tracked new homes which
caught Gerald Hobson by surprise.
Actually I didn't even realize that
they were putting new homes over on this street.
Neighborhood Association President Carl Nichols
says he'd rather see more homes than stores to him
city homes was about homes and we can get more housing like
this and more neighbors and more families like us who are
interested in raising their children and going
to work earning a day's work for a day's pay
that we think that is really what makes our community better.
[Music]
We travel now from the inner city of Milwaukee to the
northwestern part of the state.
That's where Chateque Piano player Babe McCarty has
been entertaining area residents for the last
eight decades weddings funerals parties you name it.
If you need live music and you live in the
greater Chateque area Babe is probably getting your call.
If it's noon on Monday chances are the senior league will
be knocking down the pins and Chateque lanes.
A pesky eye ailment doesn't keep
one spirited boulder Babe McCarty from having fun.
Spotted 88 years old it's amazing Babe bulls it all.
[Music]
But Babe isn't even the oldest boulder here.
Meet Alice Gotham.
At 93 Alice claims to be the oldest
league boulder in Wisconsin.
But whether it's Alice or Babe getting strikes isn't the only
way to keep the blood pumping in this small
northern community.
Oh! See all the natives of camera.
That's right.
Babe is best known for a talent she loves to share with others.
Music is my big thing.
I like the bowl I like the sociability and the
my main thing is music.
Babe let's do sailor.
Today like most weeks Babe and her longtime music partner
Lenore Berg have a gig.
We feel music together we both play by ear and we just seem
to when one makes a mistake the other one likely will make a
mistake. We just we just have that same feeling for music.
I know we never cover up for each other because we both make
this mistake in the same place.
Whether it's a wedding or a funeral or some event that
needs live music for gospel, pop tunes from the 30s 40s and
50s or old time dance music in the greater Chateque area,
chances are you'll get this dynamic duo.
There's not a lot of people
around today that plays the old songs.
These two women know more song
titles than they can count.
We could play forever.
Have you noticed?
Would you say over a hundred?
Oh yes.
Talk about staying power.
The Rolling Stones have nothing over
these ladies.
Lenore and Babe had a steady gig at
the Coachman Supper Club in Baldwin every Friday
night for 15 years.
But don't confuse this hard driving
style with rock and roll.
She has her own style and a lot of people think it's hunky
tunk but I don't think so.
I know it's just it's just an natural I can't
tell you what it is.
I guess I wouldn't know what to say.
What do you say?
Don't tell me it's rock.
I didn't tell you that.
Oh no.
What would be so terrible about rock and roll?
Well, we like it.
It's not our era.
Some of Babe's favorite memories are accompanying the
singing group from Blumor, the combinations, a labor she
loved for more than 20 years.
We played in all the towns around here, O'Cairr,
Blumor's, Family, Rice Lake, Barron, Hudson,
Thorpe, all the place, Barron, Barron, Rice Lake.
And they were truly wonderful bunch of girls.
What does Babe, the woman whose music is entertained,
consoled and celebrated, the lives and times
of generations want for her memorial?
My plans are that they will play my tape.
The special music will be from the tape of the
combinations. There will be no active or live music.
Okay. And we have good times.
It makes you feel good.
It really does.
If I want something to really relax me, then I just sit down.
[Music]
If you'd like to find out more about the stories you
saw on tonight's program, just go to our website
at wpt.org/inwisconsin.
Join us again next week when we'll tell you how
lakeside residents of one small town are battling
mother nature.
Guess who's winning.
This has been coming up for years and
so it's a never-ending flood.
It just keeps coming up.
And then the winds, of course, that's a big factor
through you.
Get your dicks built up.
You know, when you get a high wind
during the week, you come in and knock everything down
and it's pretty discouraging.
We'll also introduce you to a gardener who uses live
fish to help grow his crops.
I kind of look at the food system as this big puzzle with
all these different pieces, which involve working with
youth and getting young people to understand
where the food comes from, how it's produced, the kinds
of food that's healthy for them to eat, all the
benefits around growing food, which a lot of
young people, even adults don't understand today.
We leave you tonight with a trip to Iron County for a look at
the fall foliage of Frog Lake.
I'm Patty Lo.
Have a great 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.
[Music]
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