- Coming up next on Wisconsin Life :
- It's you against the target.
One target at a time. (gun fires)
- It's been a confidence builder for myself
and the other women.
It's a sanctuary.
- When the collection started to grow to the kitchen,
that's when we started to brainstorm
what are we going to do with this.
- The average age is now 67.
It's about having fun at the old ball park.
- Go hard! Go hard!
(upbeat instrumental music)
- Funding for Wisconsin Life is provided in part by:
Alliant Energy,
Lowell and Mary Peterson
and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.
- I'm Fritz Thistle, and this is my Wisconsin Life .
(acoustic music)
- [Fritz] Pull!
(gun fires)
- Fritz Thistle is at home on the range.
- [Fritz] It's you against the target.
One target at a time.
Pull!
(gun fires)
- Like a lot of sportsmen,
Fritz has been shooting since he was a boy.
- I actually got started shooting
when I was really, really young.
- Of course, learning to came later.
- As I tell my kids a lot of times,
at my age, they all taught us how to hunt,
but nobody ever taught us how to shoot.
So I hunted really, really well.
I mean, I could find the stuff, but I couldn't hit very much.
(gun clicks)
- Still, Fritz kept at it.
After high school, he joined the Navy
with assignments in Scotland and the East Coast.
Along the way, he was drawn to trapshooting.
Gun sports that involve shooting a moving clay target...
- [Fritz] Pull!
(gun fires)
- Out of the sky.
- So I found a guy that I used to know in New Jersey.
And he took me out to a local trap club,
and I broke a three out of 25.
And I said, "I can do this."
I broke a five out of 25.
Well, I found a Winchester gun club up there,
and I started going there a little bit.
And before I was out of school up there,
Navy School, I ran my first 25 straight.
So I knew I could do it.
- After he retired and moved home to Wisconsin,
Fritz moonlighted at this conservation club
near Sauk Prairie and honed his skills.
In 1989, he decided to compete.
- I went to the Wisconsin State Shoot in Waukesha.
And at that time, in fact they still do,
they shoot 100 targets in the morning,
100 targets in the afternoon, total of 200 singles
for the singles championship.
Well, I broke in 97 in the morning out of 100
and 97 in the afternoon out of 100
for a 194.
Well, that didn't win me anything,
but that really got me hooked.
And it wasn't long, I was winning stuff.
- In the early 2000s,
the wins started stacking up.
- Pull! (gun fires)
I won the all-around Wisconsin State Championship.
I shot off in the singles, I shot off in the handicap.
I ended up second in doubles, had them all together.
I had the all-around in Wisconsin too.
- But if getting to the top was hard,
staying there was about to get even harder.
- I was right at my peak, went to Iowa
for the Iowa State Trap Shoot,
and I was shooting a singles event
with some friends of mine.
Missed my last target out for a 99.
And my good friend next to me, Doug Zerobic,
looked at me and gave me the darnedest look
and put his gun up and broke his hundredth target
for his hundredth straight.
Well, what they didn't know
was that I'd been having a heck of a headache.
And all the way through,
it was getting worse and worse and worse.
I went back to my camper, went down,
and that's the last thing I remember for 10 days.
I had a brain hemorrhage while I was shooting.
And they flew me by helicopter
down to the University of Iowa and saved my life.
- As he recovered,
support poured in from other trap shooters:
cards, offers of help,
even a temporary home for his dog.
But there was a problem.
- When I came out of the hospital,
paralyzed on my right side.
No movement in my arm or my leg.
And I lay in that hospital and I say, "Move you buggers."
Looked at my toes, and one day, my toes moved.
I called my wife and said, "I'm going to be alright."
- And he was going to shoot again.
- And I can stand at station one,
miss all five left-hand targets.
And that was so frustrating because I knew I could do it.
And again, a good friend of mine said,
"Well hold a little further off the house."
Well, I wasn't thinking at the time, but I did.
Started breaking targets again.
And that set me off.
Then a lot of hard work, and I was back.
And that was in 2004.
And I made the All-American team in 2007.
And in 2013, I was inducted into the Wisconsin Hall of Fame.
- Today, Fritz is at the range for practice.
Not for him, but for them.
- Pull! (gun fires)
This is my first year.
- I've been shooting for three years now.
- I've been shooting for five years.
- I think this is my sixth year.
- Pull! (gun fires)
- For the past few years,
Fritz has helped coach this team from the Sauk County
Youth Trapshooting Association.
- I knew most of the kids,
but I never got into coaching with them
until Vic Waylin came, and he's heading up
the coaching right now and said,
"We need somebody to help teach the kids doubles."
I can do that.
Maybe I can't shoot them quite as well at my age,
but I can sure remember how to do it and teach them.
- Like Fritz, these kids are champion shooters.
- Pull!
(gun fires)
- They compete at youth tournaments in Wisconsin
and beyond, winning titles and cash prizes.
- Pull!
(gun fires)
- In Eau Claire, I got third place in rookie.
- We went to Rome on Sunday
and I shot an 85.
- Went to Colorado two times so far
and got silver in the doubles.
- As a coach, Fritz helps teach these shooters
how to turn a solid clay pigeon into a ball of soot.
(gun fires)
- One of the things I told them was
you put one of these in your gun.
(gun fires)
There's a soot-ball in every one of them.
And it's up to you to make it happen.
- And yet, Fritz says the lessons he teaches
about trapshooting apply beyond the shooting range.
(gun fires)
They're lessons he's learned firsthand.
- You know, setting goals, accomplishing goals,
readjusting your goals.
That's everyday life stuff.
And if you miss a target, you gotta forget it.
You got another one coming up.
And that takes all your attention, all your effort.
Whether it's coming back from a brain hemorrhage
or shooting trap,
if you think you can do it, that's half the battle.
- Pull!
(gun fires)
(uplifting instrumental music)
- Hi. I'm Mary Beth Volmer
with the Friends of Plum and Pilot Islands,
Founder of Women in Preservation,
and this is my Wisconsin Life .
(instrumental music)
It's a big dream.
I'm glad I didn't fall.
(laughing)
- Mary Beth Volmer is on a mission.
- [Mary] Yes, yes, yes!
- On this day, she arrives on the northern tip
of Door County with other volunteers
ready to preserve Plum Island's maritime traditions.
- Okay, welcome everyone to Plum Island.
Yay.
(people cheering)
- Mary Beth is not only a volunteer.
She is on the board of The Friends of Plum and Pilot Island
and the founder of Women in Preservation.
- The Women in Preservation had gotten started
by my introduction to some
wonderful, wonderful women that just wanted to come
and learn things, and be a part of this preservation work.
- The idea came to her a few years back
while working in the ruins
of the old Plum Island lighthouse.
- And we were all sitting around and pulling out
all the weeds, and we started talking about
how some of us were retired, some of us were married,
grandparents, just starting a family,
and thought, how great that this is for us
to be working together.
- Right then and there,
Women in Preservation was born.
- [Mary] Hi. - Hi!
- I'm Mary Beth. Are you going to help us out?
- I am, wherever you put me.
- These are people who come from all over the place,
from Chicago, from Milwaukee.
And they give up their time to this restoration work.
These instructions are awesome.
Even I can follow them.
- On this trip, volunteers will assemble
Aldo Leopold benches to set out along the trails.
- Let's get rocking, guys.
(people cheering)
- We have men that mentor us on how to use hand tools,
and saws, and building materials,
and allow us to be a part of this project.
- So you want this hole to be bigger,
and this hole to be smaller.
- Okay, all right.
Bigger, smaller bite.
Got it.
(drilling noise)
Is it a women's movement?
I think a little bit of it.
Yes, it's equality.
It's seeing that women can be doing
things that have been in the past,
relegated to men.
They didn't treat me as a woman.
No, I'm sorry.
They did, but they didn't like, say,
"No, you can't do that because you are a woman."
That's fine.
I think if we make a couple of...
We arrange them in a couple of stations,
then they can just come drill, drill, drill, drill.
- Right.
- And without Mary Beth,
other women wouldn't have made this same discovery.
- [Mary] I've learned about the strength that women have inside.
Just because something looks so daunting,
building a kiosk when this takes six people to lift it.
I never thought I would be able to do that.
(acoustic music)
- For more than 150 years,
these buildings were critical to navigation.
Today, they are listed on the National Historic Register.
- Which means that any type of preservation work that we do,
we need to work with the state to assure
that we are keeping it true to its vintage.
You look like your almost enjoying yourself, Kristin.
- She's gettin' to play with power tools.
- Okay, right here? - [Man] Yup.
- Okay.
(drilling noise)
- [Man] All right!
- Oh, my beautiful workshop.
The sun beating down on us,
(water lapping)
the lapping of the water.
We don't need to have any kind of background music,
we have it all.
- Preserving the past on a remote island
in the middle of the Green Bay National Wildlife Refuge
can have its drawbacks.
- [Mary] There is no electricity.
Cellular is not all that great either.
- But that can really draw you in.
- We're not checking our Facebook and our emails.
We're just being with one another.
Look at that, guys, it's perfectly plum.
- The volunteers feed off of the natural energy
in this island oasis.
- It's a sanctuary, it's a refuge.
It's a place to come to be recharged.
The island was abandoned in 1990 from the Coast Guard,
and every time that I come out here,
I can see where Mother Nature is continually
trying to come back.
There's new wildflowers, there's new birds.
There's so many monarch butterflies.
We see how Mother Nature has just been so resilient
and has rebuilt every time that she had been torn down.
We can do that too.
(drilling noise)
- Whoa!
Yay, perfect.
- Works a little better that way, doesn't it?
(laughing)
- The Friends of Plum and Pilot Island
have grand plans for this 325-acre stepping stone
to the past.
- Our plans are to be able to open the island
from Memorial Day until Labor Day.
(drilling noise)
Yahoo, our first one.
This bench was built by the Women in Preservation
and placed in honor of William J. Thomas.
And William J. Thomas served on this island many years ago.
So we're going to place him right over by the
Lifesaving Station.
In the past, women came out here and we did weeding,
and we did women kind of things.
(drilling noise)
Now we're building and we're restoring,
and we're learning these new skills.
It's been a confidence builder for myself
and the other women.
When they come by on the ferry they can say,
I was there, I did that!
The motto of the Women in Preservation
is that no woman is to leave Plum Island
without dirt underneath her fingernails
and a learning experience within her soul.
(acoustic music)
- Still to come on Wisconsin Life,
Charlotte Fung Miller explores the natural world
with watercolors.
- Chinese painting is not like
western-style painting.
It's very quick.
You have to capture the moment, the spirit.
- Can the Wisconsin wilderness
mix with Asian art?
Find out later on Wisconsin Life .
(uplifting instrumental music)
- Hi, I'm Phil Sklar and this is my Wisconsin Life .
The first bobblehead in the collection,
a bobblehead of the Rockford River Hawks mascot.
- And that one spring-loaded doll
sent heads bobbing and tails wagging
for UW-Milwaukee grads, Brad Novak and Phil Sklar.
(slide whistle)
- We were sports fans anyways, so you'd go to the game.
You'd get a bobblehead too, so it's a win-win.
One to ten to 100,
and the collection just really grew from the Brewers,
the Admirals, the Bucks.
We're all giving out bobbleheads.
(people cheering)
We've been to 25 of the 30 major league baseball stadiums.
Jack Brickhouse making the call
for Ernie Banks? 500th home run.
- Ernie Banks just got number 500.
- We have sort of a man cave,
and that's where the bobbleheads really started.
And when the collection started to grow into the kitchen,
that's when we started to brainstorm
what are we going to do with this?
- That's when they quit their jobs
in a game of chance.
- It was a leap of faith a bit,
but it was a measured leap of faith.
- For six months, they worked in the corner
of an empty store, bouncing around ideas
for a website and museum.
- We know how crazy people are in Milwaukee
for bobbleheads.
- And some might call these entrepreneurs
crazy until they went public.
- Got another bobblehead shipment.
- Once that we announced the hall of fame museum,
we just got inundated.
We're getting calls from people across the country
who want to donate bobbleheads.
So it looks like they're the Red Sox.
Just a couple of weeks ago, we had a hundred
some-odd bobbleheads from somebody on the east coast.
- In their quest to create the world's
largest collection of these nodding noggins,
they outgrew their condo, office,
(garage door rattling)
and a storage locker.
- It'll be interesting to find out
if we can get to the bottom of where these two came from.
Are you running for president in 2016?
I don't know.
(laughing)
- When the hall of fame and museum
opens in 2016, they will have thousands
of bouncing bobbleheads.
- We are approaching the 4,000 unique bobblehead number.
By the time we open, we think we will be at around 10,000.
(bat hits ball, crowd cheers)
- There are so many different unique Wisconsin angles
that there's going to be just a unique section
for Wisconsin bobbleheads.
(crowd cheering) - [announcer]: Safe!
- Here's one with the Wisconsin flair:
Maynard from the Mallards.
They did a Star Wars where he's a Jedi on one side
and Darth Vader on the other side.
The Chris Farley bobblehead has the Madison connection.
It's a bobblehead of him in his Saturday Night Live
Matt Foley pose.
There's a person we bought it from on eBay,
didn't have any clue that it was for the hall of fame museum
but she included a note and it said,
"P.S. I hope you're not living in a van down by the river."
(laughing)
- In the business of bobbleheads,
these two friends since middle school saw potential.
- If somebody wants to have one bobblehead
made of themselves, we can do that.
Or if a team wants to have 30,000 bobbleheads made,
we can accommodate that as well.
We have teams from Syracuse, New York to the west coast
reaching out to us to do their bobbleheads.
The first step really is just to create a rendering.
From there, they make a mold.
And this is done in China.
Once this is made and approved,
that's really where the mass production starts.
The Brew City Bruisers,
who are the Milwaukee Roller Derby League.
It would be the first Roller Derby Bobblehead giveaway.
(urban traffic noise)
- So in this town known for beer, Bucks
and baseball, Phil and Brad are banking on bobbleheads.
- There's a lot of great museums
here in Milwaukee.
Come see the art museum and the beautiful Calatrava,
and you can see the world's largest collection
of bobbleheads at the same time.
That's just a sign of good things to come.
(upbeat instrumental music)
- Hi, I'm Charlotte Fung Miller,
and this is my Wisconsin Life .
Rose petals and fern leaves embedded in it.
- For Charlotte Fung Miller,
beauty begins
(paper tearing)
with a blank sheet of paper.
- When I get started, it's a ritual.
So I said, "What should I paint,
"and what type of rice paper should I use?"
- Her preparations are few.
- [Charlotte] Chinese painting is not like
western-style painting.
It's very quick.
You have to capture the moment, the spirit.
There's no sketching ahead of time.
Consequently, I don't really know how to draw.
- Her tools?
Deceptively simple.
- It's all with the brush, you draw with the brush.
You use the angle of your brush, the side, the tip.
All kinds of different ways of holding the brush
and loading it with different paints to get the shading.
- And her inspirations can be boundless.
- I daydream a lot.
I look outside my window.
It's my quiet time.
I really can relax doing my artwork.
And one thing leads to another.
I'll paint a painting and say,
"Oh, what happens if I change this and this?"
And I'll do a second one of the same subject,
and even a third one.
A lot of times, the first one's the best.
It's kinda interesting.
The second one, you're trying to perfect it
and sometimes the perfection is more deliberate
so you lose the spirit.
Yeah, I notice that a lot.
But sometimes it's better.
(laughing)
- Charlotte grew up
in San Francisco's Chinatown.
She attended American schools during the day
and special Chinese schools in the evening.
- I had to do a lot of homework,
Chinese homework as well as American homework.
And who knew, after all these years,
I developed a technique of Chinese calligraphy,
which is using a brush and ink.
- That calligraphy is the basis
for traditional forms of painting,
and as a young pre-med student,
Charlotte began learning a technique called
Chinese brush painting.
- I took lessons in Chinatown from professor Lu Sang Won
in a little alley in Chinatown.
- As an undergrad at the University
of California-Berkeley,
Charlotte met a young man named Bob.
When Bob was accepted into medical school
in his home state of Wisconsin, Charlotte joined him.
- So when we moved here, he went to medical school
and I continued my Chinese painting.
And I started getting stacks and stacks of painting,
and my lab mate, I was doing cancer research,
and they said, "Why don't we look at lists of art shows?"
I said, "What art shows?"
So I entered my first art show that I could,
meeting the deadlines.
I won second prize.
I said, "Oh, I can't believe this! I love it!
"I love doing art! I won a prize! I'm switching my career!"
(laughing)
- In the decades since,
the awards have piled up,
and Charlotte has been featured in art shows
around the country.
She's even passed on her love of painting to her children,
Matthew and Kimbirdlee.
Their paintings line her walls.
- We started all together.
I would paint.
I had a little coffee table and they would paint with me
pretty soon.
I taught them my style of painting.
They were born and raised in it, and embraced it too.
- Now, Charlotte and her husband, Bob,
live in a lake house near Mukwonago.
Charlotte says being close to nature
is critical for traditional Chinese painting.
- So, it's based on Taoism, and you learn from nature.
You don't take it over, you don't destroy it.
What we do is the human object.
There's a lady and a man, they're hiking.
You notice how tiny they are relative to the trees
and the mountains?
The sailboats?
Any man-made thing is small.
The bridge is small.
The pagoda on the top and the little houses.
Living in Wisconsin made me have all these colors,
so autumn colors of the bright reds,
the yellows, the golds, the greens, the browns,
even a little purple.
- But there's another color
that calls to Charlotte,
the creamy white of blank sheet of paper
waiting to come to life.
(violin music)
- I'm never bored with my artwork
because I have so many different subjects.
(violin music)
(upbeat instrumental music)
- My name is Bob Ruhland, and this is my Wisconsin Life .
(funky organ music)
- I guess we're ready to play ball.
- What do you mean by ready?
- Well, I'm not hurt.
(laughing)
- Batter up!
- Bob Ruhland has spent a lot of sunny
summer days on a baseball diamond.
- [Bob] I played ball all my life basically.
- And he's not ready to give it up yet.
- [Bob] You gotta love it, so
I wouldn't be here if I didn't love it, right?
- That's why he was one of the co-founders
of the Greater Madison Senior Softball League.
- Here's my 80-year-old guy, soon to be.
How's vacation, Larry?
- Wonderful, wonderful.
- Go, go, go, go, go. Get at her.
- Exclusively for players over the age of 55.
(cheering)
- The average age is now 67,
because most of the guys...
We don't get a lot of guys in their 50s
'cause they're still working.
- All right, let's go.
(electric guitar music)
- The League was an overnight success,
(athletes shouting)
with people calling non-stop to sign up.
- [Bob] We had eight teams that first year.
We thought we'd get three.
The second year, we ended up with 10.
Atta boy.
- Now more than 200 players
show up in Middleton every Wednesday in the summer...
to swing the bat and stretch a single into a double.
(athletes shouting)
- [Bob] They come from all over.
And they drive in, they'll carpool
just for that hour and 10 minutes of fun.
They wanna play.
- Of course, some of them don't run
as well as they used to.
- [Bob] You have to know your limits, you know?
You can't, again, play like you did 40 years ago
when you were kids.
- While the games and the players
are still competitive,
- Tear the cover off!
- Bob says the guys know
they're here to stay active
and get out of housework for a day.
- All right, Keith.
- It's not always about winning or losing.
It's about having fun at the old ballpark.
And you never know when it's your last day on the diamond.
- With that perspective, even if you lose,
it's still a good day.
(athletes shouting and clapping)
- What nicer way to spend a Wednesday morning
at the ballpark,
playing with people that have played the game and enjoy it?
We're here to have a good time and be able to participate,
just be thankful that we can come out and play ball
at our age.
That's the big thing I think people realize.
- Go hard. Go hard! Yah!
- Good game, guys. Good game. Good game.
- Nice game, guys.
- Curious to know more about the people
featured in this week's stories?
Go to [WisconsinLife.org] to learn more about Fritz Thistle,
Mary Beth Volmer, Phil Sklar,
Charlotte Fung Miller and Bob Ruhland.
We want to know, what's your Wisconsin Life ?
This week, our Wisconsin Life videographer, Mike,
shares some video he captured with his phone
while on the road for a story shoot in the Driftless Area
in southwestern Wisconsin.
Go to [WisconsinLife.org]
to find out how you can have a chance
to see your Wisconsin Life moments
featured in an upcoming program.
(instrumental music)
- Funding for Wisconsin Life is provided in part by:
Alliant Energy,
Lowell and Mary Peterson
and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.