[Bell]
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the
people of a lion's energy who brings 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.
Coming up in Wisconsin, the small town of Barron is a safe
haven for Somali refugees.
If you don't want to kill somebody or somebody kill you,
you have to get out of there.
Researchers on the Mississippi River exert some muscle to
save an endangered species.
And a Milwaukee woman helps horses put their
best feet forward.
It's all ahead in Wisconsin.
Welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patti Low.
Each week we bring you stories from around the
state, stories of the people, places, and issues that make
life in Wisconsin unique.
Tonight we begin in the small town of Barron.
That's where refugees from Somalia
make up more than a tenth of the town's population.
How and why did so many people from that civil war
torn country in Africa end up in northwestern Wisconsin?
In Wisconsin reporter Art Hackett explains.
Track practice after school is an everyday ritual for
15-year-old Muhammad Diri.
It's a ritual shared with countless other high school
students in Wisconsin.
But here's another daily ritual for which the Barron schools
have had to make accommodation.
Every day, shortly after lunch, Somali students make their
way to a small room filled with study corrals to fulfill the
prayer obligations of Islam.
While Muhammad Diri is alone at prayer, he is
not alone at the school.
When Barron High School held its graduation
ceremony last spring, 142 students crossed the stage.
33 Golden Bear Grads were Somalian.
In three years, Muhammad hopes to be a graduate of Barron
High, a world very different from his homeland in Somalia.
Muhammad left that country when he was two and a half years
old and spent the next 10 years in refugee camps in Kenya.
He eventually wound up in Minneapolis.
In the cities, always you get trouble without a kid.
And this small town is good for our family.
I know the kids don't want to get in trouble.
So my mom said, I don't want to get in trouble.
My kid just don't want to get in trouble.
Especially when we're here.
Barron is home to about 3,000 people.
Norweagen primarily.
But near Pedalson says the town's ethnic makeup began
to change several years ago.
Today, better than 10% of his constituents are Somalian.
Have they tried Lutifist yet?
Not that I'm aware of, but I'm sure they'll be encouraged to.
What brought the Somalians to Barron wasn't Norweagen
codfish, it was Turkey.
Processed the Jenny O Turkey store plant.
Nasrassashi moved to Barron six years ago after a
friend told her about jobs available at the Turkey plant.
She told me that this is small town and they have a job.
So you can able to work.
I mean, over time, it's not as you wanted.
So that was the other reason that I came to Barron.
We're worried about the jobs spread among the Somali
community in Minnesota.
Soon, Nasrassashi was running Barron's newly
created international center, where Somalians come
for help with jobs, housing and other needs.
On any given morning, the center in the basement of
the county extension office is filled with Somalians
crowded around computer terminals, seeking news
from their homeland.
Okay, so why did Kavina move to this country?
What are we going to say?
English is a second language classes are offered twice a day.
To talk about why she is family.
As Barron, Somalian community grows, there's talk of opening
businesses to cater to it.
We're planning to get opportunity to open
some business like Somalia and Ristran.
Also, some people looking to open some
Somalia and closed shop.
Some Somalians are starting to move to jobs other than
those at the Turkey plant.
47-year-old Osman-Mosea works as a translator at
the Barron Medical Center, providing health care
and other services to a non-English speaking population
is one of the greater challenges Barron faces.
When you ask a Somalian why they're in Barron, you'll
hear about the advantages many would find in
small town life.
Everything close together, a grocery shop, a house, a
home, a school, everything.
And you'll also hear about why they're not in Somalia.
Not safe there.
Civil war going on.
If you don't want to kill somebody or somebody kill you,
you have to get out of there.
While an influx of immigrants can create
strife in a small town, so far there have been
few conflicts in Barron.
We have different, you know.
So it was a little bit intention, but I mean,
getting better all the time.
Right now we have, I mean, the community are welcoming
and we don't have any problem.
They came here for jobs.
I think that was important.
For people to understand they came up their own free
will, transferred in here.
You know, there was no effort to bring groups of people here.
My thinking was let's see if we can do some things on a
proactive basis, build some bridges so that when those
conflicts inevitably they're going to arise when they do come
up that we can deal with them.
One thing the people of Barron did realize was that
if you've got Somalians, you need to have a soccer team.
And I started playing soccer when I was like four years old,
honestly, I love playing soccer.
It's the only sport that we play in Africa.
And while there is apparently self-imposed separation
between races in the lunchroom, there seems to be easy-going
contact as Muhammad passes through the
hallways between classes.
I know last year, you know, the year before this, they
would sit and they wouldn't even be out at lunchtime.
They would kind of be in a room together.
It would be at all walking around
the halls or nothing.
This year I've seen a bigger change where they're in the
library, you know, they're talking to people and they're
feeling more comfortable.
At first time, it was a hard to communicate the people,
to go out with the other kids that you'd know no.
There are some people who chart your color and the some
people that are very nice.
Most of the people out there are very nice.
Communication has been difficult for Anglo students, too.
Because there are some times where we have no
idea what they're talking about and we just have
to keep on asking them.
And we just go through it and we finally figure out
what they're talking about.
But sometimes it takes a little bit.
Next year, parents students who aren't primary English speakers
will have to pass a stiffer English proficiency test.
The goal is that graduates be prepared for work
or for their studies.
Donna Schuster is one of the ESL teachers hired to meet
the needs of the district's growing Somali enrollment.
You have students who have had a very disrupted education due
to the Civil War in Somalia.
We may have not gone to school some second
grade and now they're 19.
And you know, that was due to their parents being killed
in the war, them having to move in with relatives,
moving to a refugee camp, not having access to education.
So you have students like that.
You have some students who have had a pretty rough, a pretty
continuous road on education.
If there's a lesson to be learned from past waves of
immigration, it is that once people come to America,
they tend to stay in America and so do their children.
But Nasrushashi says he still thinks about moving
back to her homeland.
If we get a better, if we get a government and willing
to go back and help them, students maybe become a
teacher over there and help them establish a great start.
It doesn't sound as if this is something you
expect to happen very soon.
I don't know.
It might be who knows.
I only got knows.
[Music]
Still to come, a mineral-poid artist plays with fire.
I haven't been burned in a long time and it's put out
like, but when I started I was.
That's ahead in Wisconsin.
We traveled from the northwestern to
southeastern area of the state for our next story.
That's where Milwaukee resident Lea Seder spends
her days creating shoes.
But the footwear of Seder creates isn't worn by runway
models or track stars.
Instead, these shoes are for the four-legged kind.
In Wisconsin reporter Andy Soeth caught up with Seder
as she worked her suing skills in monomony falls.
[Music]
The foot belongs to Talley, a retired Arabian showhorse.
The hands are Lea Seder's, a Milwaukee failure.
I got into this because I really love horses and that
was what I wanted to do.
And I think that shows a lot of the time.
Yeah, you especially.
And I do, I feel for them.
[Music]
The shoes protect the horse's feet from being
worn down too much.
So their shoes have to be reset every six to eight weeks.
Talley was donated to the ranch in monomony falls to a
program for disabled riders.
As an older horse, he has special problems.
He has two completely different front feet.
His legs are even a little different length up front.
So he wears a very bizarre suing job.
This wedged shoe called an egg bar will keep Talley
comfortable on his feet.
When you can actually fix one all by yourself with a suing
job, it feels really good.
That desire to help out horses is what drew Lea
Seder to horse shoe it.
I got accused of being too soft ones.
I am caring too much about the animal, but I feel
like that's part of my job.
There are a couple of hundred people horse suing
professionally in Wisconsin.
But only three women make it a career.
I wasn't sure that I could do it.
I wanted to try though.
I figured I could.
I'd been raised a very ardent feminist, so I
figured I could try anything.
You're silly.
I was very lucky, the guy that I apprenticed with, the one
time that I was very frustrated and couldn't get something done
and said, "I can't do this."
He grabbed the tool away from me and said, "Of
course you can do this."
And I think that was the nicest thing anyone ever said to me.
This is called hoof packing to keep her foot moist and
to keep her disease out.
This is oakham waterproof.
Another attribute, Seder, brings to her job is
perhaps more unusual.
She majored in English.
And the English degree has been very helpful in communicating.
Sometimes you need to be able to talk to a person and really
get across the idea of what it is that their horse needs.
And as a former bookstore manager, she understands
customer service.
I get so many compliments because I'm always on time.
Though a bookstore never offered this kind of excitement.
I got kicked in the face.
Otherwise, I got a nail ripped through my finger and
so it can be very dangerous.
A couple guys die every year doing it.
I try and be very careful.
And I think I might say no a little more than some
people do because I don't have any macho to deal with.
Nope, that looks like it's going to hurt me.
That's my definition of a good day when
nothing tries to kill me.
So today was a good day.
You're great.
Leah Seder is not only a fairie or she's also
trained as a blacksmith.
We move now from horses to clams.
The Higgins Eye muscle is rapidly disappearing
from the upper Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers.
And researchers in Genoa, Arana campaign to save this
tiny and endangered creature.
20 miles south of La Crosse near the Mississippi River
is a small laboratory called the clam palace.
Inside a team of scientists is trying to save an endangered
4-inch molisk from extinction.
This is a Higgins Eye Purly muscle.
And then to the upper Mississippi River, that's
the only place in the world you'll find one.
The Higgins Eye muscle was named after Frank Higgins, who dug
up some from the Mississippi River in the mid-1800s.
But the Higgins Eye Purly muscle has been on
the federal endangered species list since 1976.
The molisk started to die out when the dams were built on
the upper Mississippi River.
The dams slowed the river current and created
stagnant, silt laden water.
And there are other problems.
Some farm practices, bad land use practices caused
habitat degradation.
And that was the main threat back in the 70s.
In the early 90s, late 80s, the zebra muscle
made its appearance.
And that's the number one threat to the
Higgins Eye at this time.
Saving the Higgins Eye is taking a cooperative effort
among several state and federal agencies led by the
Genoa National Fish Atrophy.
The hatchery built the clam palace.
The Higgins Eye is a major scientist and fast between
five and 7,000 fish each year with Higgins Eye muscle larva.
We started here at the hatchery in 1999.
And this is our fourth year of infestations now.
And I think we're finally getting it right.
The Hiddleston-Ebrating is a muscle propagation
biologist with the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service.
He cries open a female muscle and holds it open
with a rubber stopper.
He then shoots a stream of water into it.
This flushes out larvae or glachydia from the
muscle into a dish.
That's the final results.
The cloud of world dust in the water.
The samples are called glachydia.
Several hundred thousand.
Right now the muscle larvae are only microscopic thin membranes.
They look like clear clams with their shells open.
And what we want to do is check if they're ready to be used.
We take a little bit of salt.
Add in water.
And that lets us know that the glachydia are viable
and they will readily attach to the fish host.
The larvae are put into buckets with small mouthbass.
The water is aerated to make the fish open their mouths.
And the larvae attach themselves to the fish gills.
Roger Gordon is a fishery biologist.
He examines the fish to see if the muscle larvae have attached.
See all those little white dots?
Looks like salt on there.
It's probably about 300 flyer by a catch for this fish.
The infected bass are put back in the water.
Soon the host fish, full of muscle larvae,
will be put into cages, kind of bottom of
the Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers.
Well today we're placing a lot of well-bearing host fish
for the glampsel seconds.
I think it's like a perlimus on a Wisconsin river.
Yesterday we were here and we placed 23 metal
bases in the streambed.
And now today we come back with the fish, place
them in these cages, and then they're swam
down and buckled into those pre-existing bases.
25 fish per cage, largemouth bass, fingerlings,
about 5 inches long.
Each or holding approximately 200 pig and zi.
We hope larval and a glauquiti attach to their gills.
The muscle larvae don't hurt the fish.
And after they grow to a certain size,
the muscle larvae simply drop off and live on their own
and search out a good habitat.
Gordon says about 10% of the baby muscles can
be expected to survive.
We release approximately 120,000 juveniles today, you know,
10% of that would be 1200.
That would be a lot of endangered higginzai
muscles for this area.
I don't like this area, which is a very big dam or something.
In a few weeks after the muscles have dropped off the fish,
divers will come back and release the fish from the cages.
The state benefits twice.
They get the endangered muscles and then also
hundreds of sport fish.
The cages will then be received to protect the
muscles that remain.
We found in other areas that we have much higher survival
rates of photomuscles that stay right in the cage.
No predators can get out and get out of the fish here.
Next year we'll come back and do some sampling,
put down some grids and sample downstream of here
and see if we can find any little higginzais.
For such a small creature, the higginzai muscle causes
big problems for some people.
Repairs to the I-94 bridge over the Mississippi River
were delayed until the endangered clams located
there could be moved.
On the St.
Croix River, about 50,000 clams had to be removed
and relocated in 1996 before a bridge could be constructed.
And in 1998, the little muscle stopped repairs
to a dam near Hudson.
There are certainly projects that have been delayed because
of what some people would say is an insignificant critter.
But the projects that have been delayed have been able
to continue once we relocated the animal to proper habitat.
So just a small delay to save a critter, I think.
Well, in my point of view, it would be worth it.
This is realistically in terms of some of
your other charismatic, high profile things.
This is a pretty low end operation for what
you get out of it.
So we're really happy that we think it's
pretty cost effective.
Good feeling when we actually get the place these fish in
the water, because it takes at least a year to grow the
fish, the sufficient size to be able to carry the
infestation well that we put on.
It's a good feeling when it actually happens.
[Music]
Our next story introduces you to a man who makes his living off
goofballs. Chuck Pound is known as the marble man of mineral
point, because he uses fire and glass to transform kid stuff
into beautiful works of art.
In the basement of an old cigar factory in mineral point, Chuck
Pound is playing with fire, several hundred degrees of fire.
The glass, what I'm working with, is between about
1,200 and 1,902,000 degrees.
Safety glasses are a must.
Often referred to as the marble man of mineral point,
Chuck Pound is a hot glass sculptor creating pocket-sized
art in a hazardous medium.
I always like hot things for some reason, played with various
kinds of pyro techniques.
When I was young, not supposed to.
That's part of the attraction, it's part of the danger of it,
but it's once you work with it, it's...
I haven't been burned in a long time, let's put that
like. But when I started, I was.
Pound forms his playful shapes from hot glass,
using a centuries-old method developed in Venice.
A method used by only about
100 other torch work marble artists in the United States.
I'm what you call a torch worker or a lamp worker,
which means I'm working with a torch playing, I work
with natural gas and oxygen.
I was working with my partner and we were doing
a stained glass piece that incorporated hot glass in it.
And a friend of ours was doing the hot glass and we were
doing stained glass.
And he got tired of doing the hot glass
parts, and Chuck, it's time for you to learn something new.
He works with fire, he works with glass, and when he
works, he has to work fast.
Once you start, I have to know what I'm going to do and
complete the whole piece.
If there's any interruptions that
marble's ruined, you have to know each step that you're
going to do so that you can do it quickly, because the glass
is not going to wait for you.
Working quickly, the molten glass seems to become paint
in the hands of Chuck Pound.
Just a little bit more black glass to here.
Add some green dots on the black.
Now I've got all the colors that are going
to go on to this marble.
A guidebook to marble collecting states, the language
of the marble collector is different and not easily
understood by most other English-speaking people.
Well, that could be set of the marble creator as well.
A goofball is not a mistake.
It's a name that we gave to one of my styles of
marbles. They're goofy.
It's just a solid colored spiral marble, twisted marble.
It comes in all kinds of colors.
Another popular one is this one, which is a woody, and it's all
adventure-ing and clear.
It's all there there is to this one.
And it's made in such a way that it looks like a wood
grain. Pinky is a solid, adventure-ing ribbon, in case
of a clear colored glass.
My favorite style of marble is an RPM.
This is one that a marble collector, someone
who collects contemporary marbles, would know exactly
who made this marble.
It's a chuck-pound marble.
This one also, which is a willard,
is definitely my marble.
And as far as I know, there's no one
else that's making this marble.
What you see inside this marble is actually a white
ribbon, and it's trimmed in adventuring material, which is
a copper suspended in glass.
So I'll start with a little disc of glass that is the white
ribbon. Put the colors on that disc and then grab it with
two pieces of glass and twist it to get the spiral in there.
A chuck-pound marble, whether it's a pinky, woody, goofball,
or willard.
Each piece carries with it the individual
stamp of the craftsman.
People's reactions to my work is probably the most fun.
People walk into the shop here and have never heard
of a handmade marble before, and they look at them and
they're just amazed by them and never realized that they
would pay $50 for a marble and they walk out with one happy.
And the other part of it is just the magic of working
with the glass and taking rods of glass and making
minda something beautiful.
A centuries old art in the hands of a contemporary
artist in entrepreneur.
Check pound, the marble man of mineral point.
A chuck pound is just one of many artists living in the
mineral point area.
Every year dozens of these artisans open
their studios to the public as part of the fall art tour.
The event is an opportunity to get a behind the scenes look
at the creative process.
The tour happens this weekend
and you can find more details by logging on to our website
at www.wpt.org/inwisconsin.
When you get to our site you can also find a link
to more information about many other fall art events
happening in Wisconsin.
Well that's our program we leave you now to enjoy the
fall canvas of frog lake in iron county.
For in Wisconsin I'm Patty Low.
Good night.
[Music]
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 to energy offering energy saving ideas on the web.
[Music]