(upbeat music)
- You're looking at a tribute to the men and women
who have lost their lives since the President declared
a war on terror.
Hello everyone, welcome to In Wisconsin, I'm Patty Lowe.
We're here on a windy day commemorating
Memorial Day weekend in Sharon Township
and Walworth County in front of what's called
the Coalition Memorial.
We'll tell you more about this tribute
and the man who created it in just a bit.
Also this week, travel into one of our states privately owned
for us and learn what it means to care for the land using
full vigor for us today.
And tour a whimsical collection of folk art
that combines snow white in her dwarves
with some historical figures.
We'll have all this plus a trip to a hidden waterfall
in Wisconsin.
(upbeat music)
- Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided
by the people of a lion's 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.
- Well, many people are looking forward
to a three-day holiday weekend, but we shouldn't forget why
we commemorate Memorial Day.
It's a day set aside to remember those who have given
their lives in service to their country.
Here in Walworth County, one man has taken it upon himself
to create a tribute to recently fallen soldiers.
And the listed honors grows daily.
(upbeat 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 US 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,
list the casualty, their 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 30-second 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 Slochovitz, 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 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 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.
When the fallen numbered only 58, he started with the stone.
- I wrapped 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, I don't know.
- 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, held up with posts
and 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, fight some time,
two, three hours.
Again, it's dealing with that fog of who died where.
- 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 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 Elanbar province.
Now, yesterday this news was out as a mortar attack on a
military base in Iraq.
Now there's more information.
So again, yesterday the news in 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 Ashkush,
and shown here with his seven-year-old daughter Brandi,
just before he left for Iraq.
Barowski 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.
(footsteps tapping)
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?
(dramatic music)
- There is no politics to it.
If you're a pro-war, come pay tribute.
If you're anti-war, come pay tribute.
If you value human life, come and pay tribute
to the men and women that have died.
I'll take all political sides as long as they come
and pay tribute.
(dramatic music)
- We first brought you this report a year ago
and the memorial's creator, Chet Barowski,
it joins us now.
Chet, how has the memorial changed in the last year?
- The memorial is grown by close to 1,000 recorded
coalition deaths.
It's grown from 16 countries represented to 23 countries now.
23 countries have lost men and women
and casualties as of this date are 2,125.
So we've gone from three walls to six walls.
- What kind of reaction are you getting from visitors?
- Some individuals are truly shocked.
For the first time, they see the memorial
and as they get closer and closer,
they become, I think, more saddened in that.
They see that as you approach the walls,
you see the names and the faces of the whole.
- The enormity of that.
And I understand that you've now created a traveling exhibit.
- True, since last year, there was a traveling
coalition memorial whose goal is to reach
out to the community, the communities of interest.
With the same concept, the traveling coalition memorial
is a replica of the standing memorial.
- Chet, thank you so much for joining us today.
- You're welcome, Patty.
Now here's more I'm a memorial day.
(dramatic music)
- We shift gears now to travel into one of the states
privately owned forests where we meet a man
who practices what he calls full vigor forestry,
respecting the land while still making money from the forest.
(birds chirping)
- The most important thing to our family is this forest.
And we love the big trees and we love the wildflowers.
And anytime I'm out in the woods with a saw,
I'm always cutting vines and pruning trees
and trying to tend the forest to make it a little bit better.
We want a natural, beautiful place,
but we also have a farm that has a lot of costs.
But we want to manage that to produce some income too.
When I started in forestry 30 years ago,
the oak was the real common species.
And the way we were trained that this woods is over mature.
And so we used to harvest these stands very heavily,
looking at the grow threes and looking at the forest.
And I could tell this was bad.
This wasn't, this isn't good for the forest.
After a few years in forestry, I quit.
And just came and sat in the woods a lot
and started to cut a little bit.
And gradually learned to do things just the opposite.
And as long as the tree's healthy
and vigorous, we let them grow.
An industrial harvest would want to cut
most of the big trees down here at one time.
And then come back in 20 years or 30 years and do it again.
It's efficient for the big harvesting machines.
This is a whole different system where taking out just the
trees that are losing a vigor.
The industry's going to bigger and bigger machines.
Where you grab the whole tree and cut it off.
Set it down.
And then in other machines, scoop them up and take them out.
(water running)
As a landowner, I don't ever want one of those on my land.
We need a steady supply of young trees coming up through here.
And they say, well, these big machines
have just a couple pounds per square inch of pressure.
But you run over all these little cherry trees
and all these little maple trees.
And where's your regeneration?
A harvest should always improve the forest.
It should never damage it.
We carefully cut the tree down and then sneak it out
here without doing any damage.
I've got a two-wheel drive farm tractor
with a winch on the back that runs off the power takeoff.
It's got a 165 feet of cable.
And we use our winch line to drag the wood over to the trail.
To make that easier, we've got several arches.
They're a little mechanical device that
you take out in the woods with you and it actually carries
the log back out of the forest instead of dragging
it through the dirt.
It helps me in a lot of ways to save power,
keep the logs cleaner and minimize the damage.
The loggers take the nice straight trees
and they leave all these crooked, bold trees.
But the practice natural forestry we had to develop
markets for the crooked ones and the different species
and the trees that are dead.
There's about 24 species here, trying tree species.
And it's just amazing.
We've got a four-wheel.
We've installed all 20 species.
And it's not only the different species,
but we use different widths.
One and a quarter inch red oak and cherry
and two inch locusts, red maple, white oak.
More locust, hickory, sugar maple.
Here on our farm, we have every piece of technology
we need to produce hard wood flooring.
Just recently, a Swedish company has
introduced a small molding machine.
So you can put a rough word through and come out
of the finished piece of flooring or miller.
By making it symmetrical with both sides good,
that gives me a choice when I install it,
of picking the best side fruits part of the board.
In each one of these boards, there's about
six quarts of water.
And as this board dries, it's going to change shape a lot.
So we have to dry it very carefully.
So the kilns essential to this process,
we saw a solar kiln being used in May's
Mayni back in about 1984.
And the idea just struck me that let's use a renewable
or a natural energy source to dry our wood.
We call it a solar cycle kiln, this kind of our trade
need for it.
Most of the water is just taken care of with natural evaporation
of the wind flowing through.
But we do heat it to get from 12% moisture down to 6%
moisture so we can use it for flooring.
So it takes a little bit of heat and a little bit of electricity
to circulate the air through the kiln,
but it's very, very old cost.
And we just feel good about it.
It's probably the most important step,
because it costs about a penny of board foot
to run the fans and we gain a dollar of board foot.
So that's a pretty important value at its step.
Now this wood can be shipped anywhere in the world.
In the last few weeks, some of the wooden products
have gone to Japan and China and Europe.
So it's just amazing how your wood on one little farm
can be spread all over the world with it.
So we're able to make a very good income from our forest.
And what's important for forest owners to realize,
this is like a retirement account.
You build up a forest, the full value,
and you don't cut it down.
You don't blow your retirement account on one big thing.
But you live off the interest every year.
(applause)
Jim Burke-Meier's methods for processing timber
seem to have global appeal.
He's been building email questions
from places as far away as Guatemala and Indonesia.
Of course, there are many ways to manage forests.
His approach is a bit different from Wisconsin's program.
For more information on Wisconsin's state run
for a street program, log on to our website at
www.org/inwisconsin. All across Wisconsin,
you can find people who have a passion to
create something unique.
People like Chetbarowski, who created the Coalition Memorial.
Another man in Hollandale also had a passion to create,
but he turned to Folkart.
Our next story takes you on a tour of his work.
It's one of the state's lesser known folk art sites,
but it's getting international attention.
Years before anyone thought of pink flamingos,
Hollandale dairy farmer Nick Anglebert
mastered the art of lawn ornamentation.
There are dozens of statues made during the 1940s
of concrete and broken glass.
Anglebert's house even got the treatment.
Grandview is an artistic attraction.
Lisa Stone brings students from the art institute of Chicago
by on a field trip of Wisconsin's Folkart sites.
Because Anglebert in building the tabloes, in many of them,
he was representing the people that immigrated to this area.
Anglebert's art was significant enough that
the Kohler Foundation of Shaboygan purchased the
site in 1991 to save it.
In 1997, Grandview was transferred to the Peccatonic
Foundation of Hollandale.
Rick Rolfsmeyer now oversees the preservation
of Anglebert's creations.
What do you think he would say if he knew that his sculptures
were the subject of scholarly visits
from the art institute of Chicago and a
wealthy industrialist foundation is paying good
money to rebuild his stuff?
If he saw the kind of effort going into this,
I think he would be very proud, but I think he'd also
be very amazed too, because I don't think he ever
meant this to be an institution.
But simply a place that was a lot of fun.
Grandview is a fun place.
It serves as a community center of sorts in the summer.
Kids come from all over the Peccatonic
Valley to learn everything from bike repair to egg decorating.
But Grandview isn't as grand as it used to be.
It's losing the battle with the elements.
A statue of Neptune was smashed by a falling tree.
Snow white is swooning backwards due to frost heaves.
Duarves stand by silently, fearing the worst.
These statues standing under a Swiss flag
may have suffered the greatest insult.
They stand only with the help of two by fours.
German speaking Swiss, up the road in New Glarest,
referred to the statues as De Dry, I'd Gunnelson,
the three patriots, Albert Nordzvai, but only two remain.
It was depressing to me to see the incomplete sculpture.
And the dedicated to a plaque has a photograph
of the original sculpture.
You could see what was.
And then to see what remained of this sculpture
sort of cried out to be dealt with.
Buzz Holland of New Glarest says he'd
been driving past the statues for years
while making the rounds as a lumber salesman,
but he never paid much attention.
Until I had moved from Madison to New Glarest in 1968.
And the year that I moved to New Glarest,
I became involved in the Wilhelm Talpay.
Their names are rally thousands in New Glarest.
New Glarest puts on the Wilhelm Talpay
every Labor Day weekend.
Wilhelm Tal is the legendary figure who
refused to salute the head of the sheriff,
the local representative of the emperor of Austria.
After being forced to shoot an apple off his son's head,
Tal then shot the sheriff.
Tal's heroic act spurred the founding of Switzerland in 1291.
This was the moment commemorated when these three
representatives of the Cantons, Erie Schweetz,
and Hunter Walden swore on all the confederation.
Victory and defeat in life and death.
And in life and death.
When he came back to explore the site,
Holland realized the roadside statues depicted
the same historical event.
He was disappointed to see not the famous hand class,
but stumps of limbs.
About a year ago, Holland and others
decided Swiss history, along with Snow White, Neptune,
and the rest of Nick Engelberg's creations,
deserved a better fate.
They started a campaign to rehabilitate the statues.
It's beautiful cultural expressions
from an seemingly uncomplicated countryman.
It's the beauty of the human spirit.
Over the course of the summer, Don Howlett of Spring Lake
worked to recreate the missing patriot
and restore other statues at Grandview.
Well, there were remnant parts of the sculptures
that were in storage in the basement.
And by going through and organizing those,
I was able to define what was left of this
particular sculptures.
Tubes protrude from the Patriots' legs.
It looks like Howlett's been doing
Verico's Veins' Regerie on concrete.
What you see is ports that I'm able to put in here
to put a material inside that will help neutralize
the corrosive concrete, as well as literally fill up
the ankle area to give it much more strength.
In a shed are the beginnings of the new third patriot.
Had one leg left.
That's the original leg that was salvaged.
Whatever happened to the rest is unknown.
And next to it is a molded casting of that leg.
And then this will be a new hand.
And here's the base of the rest and the original.
Two weeks later, the steel frame of the third statue
is in place minus its head.
Howlett was spot welding internal support,
the class, pan, symbolizing confederation,
have been reattached.
I don't know if I'm going to get it apart.
Well, I should.
Later in the day, how it was able to check on the progress
of the mold for the new patriot's head.
Howlett pulled the mold from a model he had carved from wax.
Using photographs, I had to recreate this missing head.
And there is only a profile shot and a back of head shot.
So I had to rely a lot on the existing sculptures
to get the dimensions.
And then finally to get the characters of their ears
from some of the other pieces.
The mold will be used to make a concrete casting.
Success. There's the nurse
whose patriot had.
Two weeks later, the head is cast and is in place.
The statue, still gray and unpainted,
looks like an English schoolboy.
Buzz Holland watches Howlett trowel the final layer
of mortar on the statues tie.
Howlett then applies pieces of broken pottery.
Yeah, using the tile pattern on the other patriot,
trying to keep as close as I can, perhaps what,
make angle of what have used.
Howlett tries not to let his own artistic ability show.
My input here should be nonexistent.
All I am is a sculptural technician.
The restoration was dedicated at the end of July.
I adjusted for time zones.
It was Switzerland's birthday.
I believe this site and other sites like it,
Wisconsin concrete parks, certainly in the Sparta Grotto.
They're all about the celebration of the people
who have settled these areas and their statement of,
actually it's love.
It's a pure appreciation of the environment they came to
with remembrances of things from the past.
You can find out more on How to Tour Grand View
by logging on to our website at www.wpt.org/inwisconsin.
Once there, you'll see information about
all of this week's reports and more on
the Coalition Memorial.
And on this Memorial Day weekend, we'd
like to remember those who have served our country
and given so much for freedom, including those from Wisconsin
who are currently in war zones overseas.
For InWisconsin, I'm Patty Lo.
Thanks for joining us.
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[music]
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