(upbeat music)
- Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Lowe.
Tonight, the amazing work of Cordelia Taylor,
a nearly unstoppable woman, making a difference for
young and old Imawaki.
Then an unlikely pair help out at the Nature Conservancy's
Crooked Creek Preserve.
And just in time for Valentine's Day,
great news, chocolate is good for you.
Or so says a monomony truffle maker.
These stories plus the wind swept beauty of top's point
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.
UW Health, providing specialty and primary care
for all ages throughout Wisconsin.
Information on UW Health Physicians and Clinics
and on University of Wisconsin Hospital
is available on the web.
Wisconsin's technical colleges, providing local education
for the crucial occupations essential to our communities.
Wisconsin's technical colleges, communities first.
- Our first report tonight celebrates
the can-do spirit of a Milwaukee woman.
When Cordelia Taylor saw something was wrong
with the way nursing home residents were treated,
she didn't just look the other way,
she set out to make a change, a big change.
And that's just the beginning of the family house story.
(upbeat music)
- On Milwaukee's north side, on a quiet street across
from this boarded up home, sits a row of beautifully
maintained houses.
Little on the outside would tell you
that this is a residential care facility
for low-income seniors, or that it's the life work,
the mission of Cordelia Taylor.
- That's all right.
- This is family house, so named because it started
with the Taylor's original family house.
- And the early 70s, we moved to the suburbs
because our last child had gone off to college
and we didn't need a house of this size.
So we rented it to another family
and we moved to the suburbs.
- There, Taylor worked as a nursing home administrator,
but she became discouraged by how the institutional needs
of the facility dictated how residents
had to live their lives.
- They were told what time to get up
and told what time to go to bed, told what time to sit
down to eat and how long and all of this.
And I'm a believer when people have worked very hard
all of their lives.
When they get to the end of their life,
they should have freedom of choice.
But when she proposed changes, her boss wouldn't listen.
And she said, "Your job is not to write policy.
Your job is to take care of people."
And I went home in tears and told my husband,
and he said, "Well, why don't you open your own
and shut your mouth?"
- Taylor's husband also suggested
turning their old family house in Milwaukee
into the care facility.
Then Taylor learned that to get a license,
they would have to live within 15 minutes of the home.
- So I went back home in tears and told my husband
again and he said, "Well, we came from down
there, let's go back."
And we moved into a boarded up house right down the block.
- That was in 1987.
They quickly learned they were not coming back
to the same old neighborhood.
- I had a ruby to wake me.
There was shooting at night.
There were people gambling on the sidewalk.
There was a corner bar at the end of the street
where there were parties and drugs.
And it was just not a very good situation.
I had gotten myself into it and I couldn't back out.
And I didn't want to tell my husband
that I had made a mistake.
So the way I would deal with it is I would tell him,
"All day, everything is just fine, just fine."
And when everybody goes bed at night,
I'd go in the bathroom and cry and ask God to help us
get out of this mess.
Well, you see, God didn't, you can see
God didn't help me get out of this mess.
He just kinda fixed us so I could live in this mess.
- Soon after the Taylor is fixed up,
they're old home to house eight residents.
They expanded and put on an addition.
But that wasn't enough to fulfill family house's mission.
So soon they bought the house next door
and so on down the block until almost every house
on the block was a family house.
Now, 58 seniors call family house home.
Like 96-year-old Jesse Coleman, she appreciates the
home's flexible schedule, particularly on
day she comes back from being on dialysis.
- When I come in, I won't eat my dinner.
And go to bed, five, six o'clock on the hour ago.
Nobody said, "You can't go, go away,
it's too early, nobody said it."
I like that.
- All right, and that'll get your strength back.
- Your will look as well.
- So I will cook you some greens and cornbread,
then if that'll get your strength back,
that's an easy thing to do.
- What's remarkable about family house's growth
is their policy to admit people regardless of ability to pay.
- Be 14.
- While most residents eventually receive funding
from Milwaukee County, family house will admit them
even before they're enrolled in the government system.
- Oh, God, what?
- How many men?
- My mother was in her 80s, and she had been
diagnosed with dementia.
- Gloria Billings moved her mother into family house
while on the waiting list for county support.
- The county told us it would be from two to three years
before Miss Taylor would get paid.
So Miss Taylor let me volunteer two days a week.
They have paid for living here.
And from the first day I came here as a volunteer,
I wanted to stay here.
- I was looking to see you over time, you know me?
- No, no over time.
- And she has stayed, now on staff,
as the family house scheduler, one of dozens of local
people Taylor is hired.
Volunteers, donated goods and services
are the life's blood of family house.
- Oh, God bless you.
- You're very beautiful.
- Taylor has also received funds from supporters of
faith-based organizations, like the Bradley
Unpeded Foundations, as well as from a
few celebrities.
- This is one of our gifts from Oprah Winfrey.
She have been very instrumental in helping this mission
survive as well.
- Your daughter from Mississippi called about
six o'clock this morning.
- That mission has expanded beyond
the senior care facility.
- You, if, is also served, you're an after-school program
and in the family house garden.
- The vegetable garden are put in by the children
in the community and the seniors that live here.
And as much as we enjoy the fresh vegetables
we get from the gardens, the purpose of it is, is
to bring people together.
- The garden occupies a space where a drug house once stood.
- So this house, one night burned.
And when the police came, they told me it was
because people were just kind of hiding
out there doing crack.
And that's why it burned.
So they tore it down and I was able to buy the light
for a little nothing.
And we planted flowers there.
- Planting seeds of change has become Cordelia
Taylor's specialty.
In addition to food grown in the garden,
Family House receives donations from second harvest,
which they make available to the neighboring community
with certain conditions.
- We won't just give about some food
and send somebody out of the door.
We find out how many people are in the house.
And then we teach them about proportional cooking.
We find out where do you shop?
And if there's a better place to shop,
we talk about when the sales are on on that particular day.
It's not just to help people for today,
but hopefully it is to change lives.
- Another way Family House nourishes people
and tries to change lives is called food for thought.
It's a twice-monthly free dinner with a speaker who addresses
health care or financial issues.
- Is that okay?
- I'm glad.
- You're welcome.
It's a food pretty good.
- Yeah.
- Good.
- But you know what?
- You eat with your head, oh.
- I want her to say that.
- Does that better?
- Yeah.
- There you go.
- Opening Family House to the neighborhood
has taught Taylor about the community's many needs.
- One evening in the after-school program,
a little girl had a elevated temperature
and I told her I said, "I'm going to take you home."
And your mom can call the doctor and she said,
"We don't have a doctor."
And I pulled the children in that room
and only one child had a private doctor.
And I asked them, "Where do you go to the doctor?"
emergency rooms.
- Seeing the need for primary care,
Taylor opened a neighborhood clinic.
Kevin Isard is the clinic physician.
- I grew up at neighborhood and I was understood the mission.
And part of the mission is that, you know, this is grassroots.
This is one person, touching one person, touching one person.
- There's my friend.
Hi, my friend.
How are you doing?
- It would be hard to count the people touched
by Cordelia Taylor, but she would tell you
she's just doing her job.
- We all here to make it go.
I always tell the maintenance man
that if he don't clean the building,
then I don't have a job because nobody is going to come
into a dirty building.
So that means his job is just as important
as my job is to founder.
- We are going to see the thing.
- We all have gifts.
And God expects us to use those gifts.
God is not coming down here to do anything.
He put us here to do it.
And He expects us to help each other.
And that's what we should be about doing.
-
[singing]
- Cordelia Taylor is currently working
on a community center for young people,
just four blocks from Family House
and on a major bus line.
If you'd like more information, check out our website at
www.wpt.org/inwisconsum.
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We head now from the city out into the country.
On a former farm in Walworth County,
the nature conservancy is engaged in an unusual activity.
It's cutting down trees, but it has good ecological
reasons for doing so.
Producer Liz Kerner set out on a warm winter day
to find out which trees are coming down and why.
[music]
- The wine of a chainsaw is not a sound you'd expect to hear
in a woodland owned by the nature conservancy.
An organization known for preserving wilderness.
[music]
They're cutting down pine trees because they aren't native
to southeastern Wisconsin.
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Their goal is to store the land to what's called an oak opening.
- We have found a great representation of
oak openings in here and they're in good enough
condition that we can work towards restoration.
- Okay, good.
- The restoration is on the nature conservancy's
crooked crepe preserve.
Scott Thompson is the director of conservation
for eastern Wisconsin.
He says these remnant plant communities are very rare.
[music]
- It's what's termed as a globally endangered
plant community.
In fact, it's one of the most globally endangered
plant communities there is.
- Oak openings once covered 5.5 million acres
in the upper Midwest.
Today only about 500 acres remain.
One reason they disappeared is government programs.
These programs encouraged planting pine trees
to control erosion and provide wood products.
The problem is that over time the pines grew taller
than the native oaks and covered them with shade.
- You'll see them start to reach for a sky
because they're trying to get that light and they're
trying to get that moisture that they can't get because
the pines are blocking that light moisture.
[music]
- Logging off pines here is a challenge.
The hills are very steep.
And once the soil is exposed, it erodes into the river below.
[music]
- That's a critical issue here because we're dealing
with the McQuantago River and McQuantago River
is the cleanest river in southern Wisconsin
and the most biologically diverse small river system in
the entire state of Wisconsin.
- Thompson said that he was concerned that
commercial logging machines were tear up the soil.
So he turned to a team of experts.
- And because we're doing the work,
we aren't gouging up the ground or tearing things up.
- Dave Schrupp raised this pair of burly boys.
He named them "dot" and "dash".
- Come on, Dave.
- Gee.
- Schrupp explains that Oaksiner, the only work animal,
suited to these steep hills.
- Gee, I know they had some horse loggers come
out and look at this job and when they saw the steepness
of the slopes over to our right, they weren't interested.
- Oaksiner suited to working on this project in some
other important ways.
- For the most part, they're really easy going.
They're real good with little kids.
And they're bothered by very little, the
chainsaws, the trucks, whatever's going on, it's not
that they're oblivious to it.
They're with me so they feel very comfortable.
They trust that I'm not going to get them into any trouble.
- Volunteers seem comfortable with the Oaksin too.
The shifts on these work days fill up quickly.
But Schrupp says that even though his boys weigh
in at about 4,500 pounds, his team is light on the land.
- Are we on hook?
- Yeah.
- If you come back here in the spring,
the only thing you will find is some spots that are
more fertile than others that will mark the fact
that we've been there.
You probably won't even find a track.
- And in time, the hills will return to
wildflowers, prairie grasses and majestic old Oaks.
- Dave Schrupp occasionally travels to elementary
schools for show and tell with Dodden Dash.
His next date is March 15th at Meadowview School
in Ocona, Milwaukee.
- We transition now from the bright light of day
to the dark of night, specifically the night shift.
Bruce Algazin has been working the night shift since 1979.
He drives a cab in Madison.
Videographer Mike Eiker wrote Shotgun One Night to show us
Algazin's life on the streets.
- Go buy yourself.
- Yeah.
- Where do you want to go?
- Uh, a lane of street.
- Where about some lane?
- Okay.
- I've been driving a Badger cab since 1979.
That's 26 years.
And I'm by no means the most senior member
of that fleet here.
We all complain about it.
But at the same time, doing a, what I would
call a straight job, where you've got a supervisor
and somebody going over your head to know.
I just couldn't do it, I don't think.
I mean, it would be difficult at this point.
The best drivers are kind of natural born gamblers.
Because you're putting yourself, you know, you're
throwing yourself on the mercy of the public.
You're trusting me.
- I don't know.
- I have a very small.
- It's good night.
- Yeah, I was here.
- I had one kid one night show me a gun, you know.
And he was going to try and rob him.
And he was in the cab, understanding outside the
cab, which was a big mistake.
So I just hit the accelerator and, you know, you're probably
seeing an amateur at it.
Statistically driving a cab is the most dangerous
jobs in the country.
There are more homicides of cab drivers than anything else,
even more the so-called cops.
But interestingly enough, the Madison, the real danger,
isn't so much being robbed or beaten or assaulted
as it is drunk drivers.
War of my friends have been killed and hurt by drunk drivers
than any other single factor.
- Do you need to sell the pair of the ass in the cab?
- I don't care.
- How the radio works.
You're competing with all these other cab drivers
and you're calling in your location all the time.
And this bachelor has to make a determination when you
call in your position as to who is closest to the call.
So it's very important to tell the truth.
You can't lie.
Because the only thing that keeps you from lying
is the repercussions in terms of your reputation.
Say you exaggerate.
We're right now in the 1400 block of Williams City.
If I call in and tell them I was English, I'm willing.
That's two blocks, three blocks ahead of where I am really am.
That's called long hooding.
That's as though my hood were actually three blocks long.
And if you're caught long hooding, you could live with
that reputation for 20 years.
- You get down here a lot?
- No.
- This is the first time I'm been here.
- I've been here for 11 years.
- 11 years?
- Yeah, I've been here for 11 years.
- What do you think?
- It's a change.
- You're also a lot younger than you speak.
- Yeah, I know.
- Probably could have predicted that.
I went to high school in Denver, I came out here in
1965, go to college, major in English and philosophy.
And of course that led immediately to Cadran.
- But I'm also a writer and I just completed a novel just
recently, which is my third.
And hopefully this one is going to, something will happen.
There's so much poetry and so much drama here.
It's really unbelievable.
I picked up a woman today, a girl about 17 years
old, had been to Westtown to have pictures taken of
her and her newborn child.
And she was alone and treating herself to lookab
right there and back.
And I mean it was just, it was a very poignant situation.
Really something, and you know, I mean that suggests
a multitude of things, an entire drama in there.
- So the party has begun here, down on Stacey Street.
Some drivers will sit down here and they won't ever leave.
It's lucrative and it's good money and it's
quick and it's easy.
But we call this cream puffer.
And what it means is that you're just, you know, you're
taking the cream off the top and not doing the real work
that requires you to go far long distances into the city.
Or take any risks, buddy guy.
And it's very much looked down upon you.
Another real cab driver, of course, don't cream puffer.
I'll be 60 years old for just another couple
of years, another year.
And so I'm facing the situation of being physically not
being able to do this anymore.
I mean it's something.
And you wonder when that's going to come and how I'm going
to know when it does come.
Because I don't know what I'm going to do when it's dead.
And it's not because there are other things I could do.
It's just I miss it.
I miss the streets.
I miss the freedom.
I miss the excitement and I miss the camaraderie
of the other cab drivers.
We recently met up with another man who, like our cab driver,
loves what he does for a living.
And many people love him for it.
Mike Roberts makes chocolates and he believes that high
quality chocolates shouldn't be reserved just for special
occasions like Valentine's Day.
Producer Andy Sof had the enviable job of reporting
on this delicious topic.
The sun is rising over downtown Monomony.
At legacy chocolates, coffee lovers are already coming
in for their favorite drink.
But it's a little early for most to sample one of the
more than 30 varieties of chocolate truffle sold here.
Maryland like that cider?
Good. Good.
I love coffee and chocolate together.
They're both personal passions of mine.
You got to make something you might as well make it
something that you really like.
Owner Mike Roberts serves coffee out front and makes
the chocolates in back.
A filling called a ganache molded from butter, cream,
cocoa and flavorings is dipped into melted dark chocolate.
Just don't call it candy.
I don't sell candy, I sell chocolate.
This is a chocolate shop.
This isn't a candy shop.
Candy may be dandy, but chocolate is food.
It is food.
It's the perfect food.
Chocolate is the world's most perfect food,
chemically speaking.
For what the human body needs to subsist on,
it's all in chocolate.
Chocolate is a ton of antioxidants and other
vitamins and minerals.
You can't get anywhere else.
So for Roberts, then, the more chocolate, the better.
The truffles are sorted and sold by the percentage of cocoa
solids in the outer coating.
From a deep dark 85% down to a creamy brown 41.
That's still four times the cocoa you'll find in a certain
great American chocolate bar.
Our milk chocolate is 41% minimum with the dark center.
You're getting over a 55% piece of percentage of
chocolate, whereas here you're just getting a lot of sugar.
And that's what Roberts calls candy.
But without a lot of added sugar, or even worse,
high fructose corn syrup, chocolate can be a helpful
addition to the diet according to Roberts.
Having eaten chocolate as extensively as I have now
for the last four years, I find that if I eat a
little chocolate every day in high percentage,
my appetite is satisfied with much less food.
So maybe these coffee drinkers should add some chocolate
to their morning routine.
Like coffee, the secret to quality chocolate
starts with the bean.
In this case, the Criollo bean grown in Venezuela.
It's very fine flavored, very elegant, very wonderful
chocolate that only grows under the rainforest.
Like shade grown coffee, cultivation of the Criollo
helps preserve the rainforest, support small farmers, and
deliver a superior taste.
And Roberts uses only local milk, butter, and
cream from small producers.
Uh, malt and it's two shabby.
Okay, 85.
Yes.
Good work, Mark.
Good well.
Good work, Mark.
The Roberts may be doing well by doing good.
He's open to branch in St.
Paul and business is booming on his website.
Ever since Newsweek named him to a list of 15 top so-called
artisanal food makers.
These cooks make food by hand using the
finest raw ingredients.
I just made the white chocolate cream cheese brownie.
That recognition is important because Roberts
thinks the public's taste for quality chocolate
is ready to explode.
Liz will jump on all the trends we can, right, Nicole?
The trend in chocolate right now, I feel, is just beginning.
It's where it's chocolate now, where coffee was 15 years ago.
And Roberts intends to be along for the ride, helping
us all appreciate more fully this perfect food.
Oh, Jesus.
All these years, I still like them.
For those of you who are hopelessly unromantic, a
reminder that Valentine's Day is right around
the corner, this coming Tuesday, February 14th.
Also on Tuesday, tune in for a special documentary, Front
Line, The Meth epidemic, airs at 9 p.m., followed at
10 by a half hour in Wisconsin special, Methan Wisconsin.
That's coming up on Tuesday.
And of course, we'll be back next week with another
episode of In Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, we leave you with the beauty of Toffs
Point in Door County.
I'm Patty Lo.
See you next time.
[Music]
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the
people of Alliant Energy, who bring safe, reliable, and
environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods,
and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
Alliant Energy, offering energy-saving ideas on the web.
UW Health, providing specialty and primary care for all
ages throughout Wisconsin.
Information on UW Health, Physicians, and Clinics and on
University of Wisconsin Hospital is available on the web.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges, providing the
people of Wisconsin with the knowledge and skills
they'll need for the economy of tomorrow.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges, Communities First.
[Music]