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Hello everyone and welcome to our summer season of In
Wisconsin. I'm Patty Love.
This week, travel in search of inspiration through
a wintery forest with our state's poet laureate.
Check out some unusual performance spaces found
throughout Wisconsin.
And meet a man who approaches his job and
life with a lot of soul.
All that plus will meet a man who used auto engines to
power small planes.
You can still meet devoted followers
of his work in Wisconsin.
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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.
In the lion's energy, offering energy saving ideas on the
win. And by the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive
Cancer Center, providing cancer research, education, and
treatment, UW Comprehensive Cancer Center, comprehensive
as designated by the National Cancer Institute, information
available on the win.
Wisconsin is home to more than a thousand performing arts
spaces. And while many of those performance centers have
grand elements, you don't need grandeur to enjoy the arts.
As we discovered in this tour around the state, you can
catch performances anywhere.
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Reach your hand out before you reap what you sow.
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From an inner city Milwaukee nightclub turned over to
original poetry and song.
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To know region singers and dancers in an outdoor
park pavilion in the hills of western Wisconsin.
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All the way to an up close theater experience inside
an Appleton Historical Museum.
These are some of the kinds of varied and
alternative performance spaces all around Wisconsin.
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At Mecha Nightclub in the heart of the Central City, this act
is called Liquid Word.
It's part of a growing performance scene
known as Spoken Word Artistry.
Original poetry, drama, rhythm.
Milwaukee has a strong scene.
There's a growing scene in Madison.
There's also a venue in Green Bay.
Nightclub owner, Dasha Kelly, says she wants to provide
a forum for the genre.
She is herself a Spoken Word artist.
My son died today.
Kelly transports the audience to her own place of personal
pain. She says her poetry is about expressing human
messages that connect people.
I give me a $5 microphone and a $15 amp.
I'll preach poetry to all the people as they pass by
on busy interseges and speak.
Other Spoken Word artists write for the sound and the
cadence. Still others deliver political or social messages.
Smoke that on crack, cat children, but the
state took care of that.
It's such a thrill to be able to come down here and relive
it like the past you know.
Oli Berg of Hickston is a world away from the Central
City, but enjoying his brand of performance in
the hills near La Crosse.
A nature center and historical farmstead called Norse Godalen
or Norwegian Valley offers a park shelter for performances,
a taste of the old country.
I've been coming down here and offered quite a few years,
thrashing us and shredding corn and then we danced
all time music and talked a little nerve-idgin with some
of them good people of you.
And we always have a good time.
We've been doing some of the stay-at-home games they've been
publishing in the post-present.
At the Outa Gaming Museum, history comes alive
with actors performing inside exhibit spaces.
This play relives the days of the polio epidemic
and the Salk vaccination.
204 kids got polio from the vaccine they were getting.
Actors say the audience is so close it can be
awkward, but also rewarding.
Someone comes up to you and they want to tell you about
their experiences with what you are talking about.
Sure, but he was still tied up, suspended, underwater, up.
That's really cool because that means that they not only
bought into the illusion of the play, but they were
emotionally affected by it.
You get to see it more and nobody's in your way.
Yeah, you have a better view.
And you can hear.
Different spaces, different places, performance art in
all corners of Wisconsin.
We're not sure if she competes in poetry slams,
but Denise Sweet is Wisconsin's poet laureate.
Last winter, we took Sweet and a videographer from
Wisconsin Public Television to the Green Bay area.
We asked them to create a visual poem about red banks.
That's the place where the explorer Jean Nicolay first
reached the shores of Wisconsin.
The result is this chapter from our poems about
places series featuring the collaboration of poet
Denise Sweet and our veteran videographer, Everett Sorenga.
Beauty at its best is undisturbed in winter.
The white wings of ice and snow wrap around this forest
without so much as a whisper.
This dry oak savanna fills and fills without
warning, without witness.
And then one day we're buried in our own mock amazement.
Where did all this snow come from?
As though drifts of snow and slates of ice would not be
here had we paid attention.
Had we not slept through the howl of storm or let go of the
rope that tethers us to autumn.
I wander the wooded corridor on the way to red banks,
surrounded by silver maple, poppled and birch.
Slender red cedar stemming skyward.
I'm left to plod and stammer through drifts of
snow. No tracks for me to follow or posted map with
arrows and stars to mark the spot on which I stand.
You are here.
The sky is all I recognize.
The star stories and the legends
of naked eye astronomers stir and sway within the wind.
As I whisper my real name and reach through to the
Anishinaabe Atasokhan.
In my third season of life I have finally learned
to be still.
I have finally learned to wait.
Here the people of the thunders gathered around the stranger
on the shore of this inland sea.
They listened to the one who spoke with eloquence and grand
gesture. His splendid robe or an aid with feather stitching,
folds of satin and tiny beads.
The one who could throw lightning with his hands and
split open the sky with a crashing report no one could
remember ever hearing before.
A red tailed hawk has begun to follow my curious
wandering. I tighten my shawl and wrap my thin coat
closer to me as I leave.
Beyond this stretch of forest is a highway and the distressing
sound of 18 wheelers and SUVs sailing through this moment
towards an urgent other place.
Some may be unaware of the slow searing stare of the
hawk or have not witnessed the mintsing steps of a white
tail deer before she leaves the wooded grove, before
she races frantically back and forth and then across the
highway into an open field or another stand of trees.
But we can imagine what moves, moves, what moves within can
bring us back to the remembered earth, back to the shores
of where we began together.
A star story sweeping through the sky pours over us each
dawn hoping to be remembered, hoping to be told to the
children of the seventh fire.
The story of the heart of the earth shuddering like thunder
beneath our feet with a pulse who recognize as our own.
The work of the man in our next story is to help people
a bit down on their heels.
George Fabian was a cobbler for many years but it took
his lifelong friends at the Park Street Chew Repair
in Madison to bring him out of retirement and put a
little soul back in his life.
My name is George Fabian and this is the Park Street Chew
Repair in Madison's County.
I'm putting some glue down on a shoe because I'm
going to glue this soul on.
So I put a lot of glue on it and let it dry and then I will
hang it down with a hammer.
I learned from my father.
I started down here when I was 10 years old.
My friends were from the old country, from Italy.
They said to go to work.
Maybe come down here.
What do you remember, Hammy?
You used to run as a tonsil.
Do you remember Mac?
Do you remember?
I remember.
He was hanging around at the gas station.
Those are friends of mine.
We all grew up in the neighborhood down here.
Just down the block here in Greenbush.
At that time, the Italians, Blacks and Jews
who all lived together.
We were diversified before it was fashionable.
We were all very poor.
Of course, we didn't know it until the city came in.
My feeling is there's two things that bring
together poverty and combat.
And we lived in the poor neighborhood so
we needed each other.
He's going on a floor.
It's a week.
Yeah, you got to play cards today.
He's going on his own.
His wife says, "Let's go, he goes."
This is not every day I've ever heard.
This is only part of it.
The Billy lived on the side until we brought him here.
My wife died April 20th.
My kids actually passed away.
They focused just on this.
It was originally between the two of us standing at the
church at our son's wedding.
It's hard.
You know, I'm not the only one.
You know, you've got to pick up the pieces and go on.
I'm going to take a look at the pieces.
I like off-ice official.
Jesus. A few of the guys coming
here still because they live in Madison or in the area.
I'm the only one.
You're the only foreigner in you.
That's very true.
I'm the only one like Green Card.
I know that.
Yeah. You're supposed to be
ready for UW, guys.
Guys, I'll keep going.
Yeah, he was looking for-- That's why he was talking to me.
Okay, I know.
Sit down, man.
I'm having a man.
Gotta go.
Yeah, I'll bet you a winner.
You'll see me.
Yes, they are.
Oh, no, no, no.
Oh, no.
I'm going to take a drink.
Hey, Georgie.
Yeah. We argue and scream at
each other like you think.
We're going to kill each other, but--
I'm going to kill each other.
Sovus, well, I'll see you later.
We connect tomorrow.
That's the same thing.
Maybe Jiggles and the other.
Jiggles can deal with that.
But I don't know what I'm doing now.
They make my days go fast.
Yeah.
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There's something you might not know.
The Experimental Aircraft Association's first annual
flying convention was actually held in Milwaukee.
It wasn't until 1969 that the EAA moved the event to its
current home in Oshkosh.
This week's Wisconsin Retro Story was produced
20 years ago in 1985.
And features a flying enthusiast whose work is still celebrated
at the EAA Air Venture Oshkosh today.
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Tom Wolf is no dummy.
He knew that if you write a book about airplanes, the kind
with lots of pretty pictures, it blinds up on the coffee table.
But if you write about the man behind the planes,
Chuck Yeager, John Glenn.
Son, we've got a movie deal for you.
This is the story of one of those men, Bernard Pietenpol.
Sort of a Chuck Yeager in bib overalls.
John Glenn, as he would have been if he had grown up in Lake
Wobagon, Minnesota.
The Lake Bernard Pietenpol, a man who believed cars,
or at least their engines, could fly.
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I guess I should have flown her when she was running.
The engine is from a Model A Ford.
The plane is known as the Pietenpol Air Camper.
Well, this is a fuselage of a Pietenpol Air Camper airplane.
It's not quite finished yet.
Air Camper, you're expecting a winged winnebago.
But it is your basic airplane.
Very basic.
And really all it is is a big model airplane as all it is.
It's just bigger, larger pieces, except that you obviously
need a big place to work in.
Dick Weeden and Francis Saunders, along
with a third man, Ted Davis, all of Broadhead,
are building a Pietenpol.
It is being built from scratch out of Sikasprus and Mahogany,
from a set of plans that date back to the 1930s.
Plans drawn up from the designs of Bernard Pietenpol.
Bernard Pietenpol is a man who wanted to prove
that a car could fly almost.
Right, that is a car engine.
That could be successfully used in an airplane and he proved it.
Oh, the guy was a genius.
He has been raised to a tan of a cult figure,
like he say, by certain people.
But that's not the way he was at all.
He probably would be doing flip flops right now.
If he was just a very common soft spoken, honest type person.
Real sincere gentleman, wanted Noah.
Nothing in no variety or recognition.
He is an unlikely cult figure.
He was, apparently, one of those shy Minnesota people
Garrison Keeler talks about.
But the people who build planes from his plans
felt compelled to journey on moss to visit him
at his hanger in the middle of a Minnesota cornfield.
He's been dead for two years.
His hanger has been moved to the Experimental Aircraft
Association Museum in Ashkosh.
His followers are still getting together, though,
as they have for a decade each summer in broadhead.
From Swati, Georgia.
Let's hear it grow higher.
Yeah. We have a few more on fire.
Each fly-and-dross people with planes in progress
eager to swap ideas.
He talked at the convention a couple of times.
All right, so we used his design.
And we kept getting three grand on the engine.
We were hoping for like 24 or 26.
Yeah, it was always way too high.
Yeah, well, we climbed with three grand.
We come down with three grand.
When you go to ask the guys how they built it,
nobody builds to a like.
Yeah, nobody does quite so much.
And it's just matter of trying to pick those ideas
where the ones that were going to work the best.
The most important thing is don't deviate
from what Mr.
Pete and Paul told you to do in the first place.
Because usually deviations result in something
less than an amount of performance.
Frank Pavellingov can feel Ohio has become
Bernard Pete and Paul's unofficial historian.
Well, it goes back to when I was a little boy.
Back in the late 30s.
I used to watch a Pete and Paul fly just a few miles away
from our home.
And I would say from that time on,
I had a love affair with the Pete and Paul airplane.
So fascinated was Pavlinga that he was one of the first builders
to journey to Pete and Paul's hometown of
Chirigrove, Minnesota to meet Pete and Paul and
learn more about this man who once built a steam
powered phonograph.
This pilgrimage, as we say, is really the result
of a sincere respect for a man who we feel stood
for the highest standards as a man.
And we've come to really admire the man.
You know why?
He won the airplane.
And at that time there were very few airplane engines
of this power.
So he adapted the modelate, which is very plentiful.
And it's certainly worked out.
But it still put them in, still brilliant with the man.
This is Al Rudolph's second Pete and Paul,
bought from the man himself.
Well, I was built by a farmer up here in Lyon, Minnesota.
In 1933.
And he evidently sold to Pete and Paul
and four other guys.
He called it the club plane.
And I learned to find another Pete and Paul,
but it got wrecked in Winstorm.
I just noticed this day in 1940.
So then I went out to see if I'd get in the safe.
He says, "Don't buy it.
I'll sell you this one."
So that's how it happened to Vass.
You bought it from Pete and Paul himself.
Is that make it kind of special?
It's a little reunion like this.
Well, a lot of people think so.
[GUNSHOTS]
As we said, it is a basic airplane.
Very basic.
The Muslim fabric on the wings is courtesy
of the white good section of the Montgomery Ward catalog.
The suspension is tied together with bungee cords.
That is not a makeshift repair.
It's supposed to work that way.
Bernard Pete and Paul was a man, always on the lookout
for a new way to fly.
Two methods, most people didn't think of.
In 1928, he used Model A engines.
By 1960, he spotted another chance to make a car fly.
[GUNSHOTS]
It's a Corvary engine straight out of the car.
We bought the engine from the man that designed the airplane,
Bernie Pete and Paul.
He had it ready to go.
It was the last engine he built up.
He was 18 years old, I think, at the time.
He started experimenting with him in 1960, I think.
I think they came out in '59, but in '60, he had won
an airplane or everything.
He said they were natural for airplanes.
He did not do it as a business venture.
He did it strictly through a love for mechanics and aviation.
We asked him very specifically, was he an aviator first,
or was he a mechanic first?
He thought very, very strongly.
At length, then finally, he said, mechanic.
[GUNSHOTS]
There are no examples of a failure, a structural failure.
In these airplanes, despite the fact that Mr.
Pete and Paul had never had an
education beyond the high school education.
So he was an intuitive engineer, so to speak.
Even when there is a crash, as there was
during this year's fly-in, Pete and Paul's followers are
quick to point out that the plane involved in this incident,
which seriously injured the pilot, was not a totally
authentic Pete and Paul.
Changes had been made in the master's plans,
and as accident investigators reports point out,
the plane was being flown in ways that Pete and Paul's just
weren't meant to be flown.
This is, after all, your basic airplane.
Well, this is a very impractical airplane.
It's slow, the short range.
It's strictly a fun airplane, as all it is.
Its range is around 200 miles at 65 to 70 miles an hour,
and it's, frankly, your butt hurts when you get out of it.
And you fly that far, but it's just the idea of being
able to fly two people with this old car engine.
I think it appeals to a lot of people.
We don't know if Chuck Yeager ever met Bernard Pete and Paul.
We do know they both wore leather helmets when they flew.
As the legend goes, Yeager used a broomstick
to pull the door shut when he first flew an airplane
through the sound barrier.
That's the sort of thing that probably would appeal to a man
who would build a steam-powered phonograph.
And as the legends go, they both have reputations as,
although it's not an apt phrase in this case,
down to earth, kinds of guys.
So there is something compelling that brings them here.
And that compelling element, there's this basic qualities
that Mr.
Pete and Paul have, quality of sincerity,
honesty, integrity.
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Pete and Paul's hanger remains on the EAA grounds
and continues to be a draw.
The idea of using auto engines to power a
small plane still exists and people are still using
Pete and Paul's designs.
That's our program this week.
Thanks for joining us and thanks to Ulbrich Botanical Gardens
here in Madison for hosting us.
We leave you with a walk through Parfrees Glen State
Natural Area in Sock County.
For In Wisconsin, I'm Patty Low.
See you next week.
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