- This week on Wisconsin Life :
Meet a world-champion log roller with something to prove.
An artist preserving an ancient culture
through contemporary art.
Friends who turned sand traps into a hole in one.
And a uniquely Wisconsin troubadour.
It's all ahead on Wisconsin Life .
? ?
- Funding for Wisconsin Life is provided in part
by Alliant Energy,
Lowell and Mary Peterson
and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.
- Hello, and welcome to Wisconsin Life .
I'm your host, Angela Fitzgerald.
I'm in northern Wisconsin and as you can see,
I'm getting ready to talk to some titans of timber...
lumberjacks.
One of the best places to catch up with a modern-day lumberjack
is here at the Fred Scheer's Lumberjack Show in Woodruff.
This small north woods town is located in Oneida County,
just north of Minocqua.
Woodruff, like many of the towns in this area,
has a rich history in the timber industry
and housed many a lumberjack
in the camps located around here.
You can get a sense of what life must have been like
for those timber workers back in the 1800s
by checking out the Fred Scheer's Lumberjack Show.
You can catch the action here in Woodruff or in Hayward,
which also happens to be the hometown
of the man featured in our first story this week.
Our team caught up with him in Menominee,
which is where he lives now
and discovered his story
is one of learning
to roll with the punches life can throw at you.
- From an early age, J.R. Salzman had a destiny.
- I grew up in Hayward, Wisconsin,
home of the Lumberjack World Championships.
- Life here revolves around logrolling.
- I started logrolling the summer I turned six.
As a kid, it was just what you did.
In Hayward, that sort of thing was normal.
You're standing on a floating log in the water.
The object is to roll your opponent into the water.
- Announcer: Unofficially,
it looks like J.R. Salzman may have won that match.
We'll find out for you.
- Nobody could foresee what it was going to turn into.
[rock music]
- What J.R. "turned into" was a world champion.
In his hometown, J.R. was the last man standing six times.
Six times a world champion log roller.
The awards and accomplishments kept rolling in.
- I've also won three world titles in the boom run.
I set two world records in the boom run.
When ESPN had the Great Outdoor Games, I won 14 medals,
tied for the most ever.
- Back in 2005, he earned an ESPY Award
for Best Outdoor Sports Athlete.
In bestowing the honor, ESPN called J.R.
"among the preeminent outdoors athletes of the last decade."
- In terms of lumberjack accomplishments,
you might say I'm right up there.
- And then,
this happened.
- It blew me away that somebody could do this.
Yeah, it clearly affected me emotionally.
I saw joining the military as doing my part.
- J.R. was deployed to Iraq
to the front line.
- It was December 19, 2006.
I was the first truck on the road.
- And first in the line of danger.
[explosive sound]
- So one second, I was telling my driver to slow down.
And then the next second, I was waking up.
As I came to, after being knocked out,
I couldn't figure out why I couldn't open the door
and why my arm hurt so bad.
And I looked down and my arm was on fire.
- J.R. had been hit by an EFP-- Explosively Formed Penetrator.
- I told my gunner, I said, "Hey, get on the radio.
"Get a hold of gun truck 3
and see if you can get Doc up here."
I go, "My right arm's been blown off
and if I don't get a tourniquet on, I'm going to bleed out."
Just like I was in charge still, stayed calm.
I've had people ask me "How did you stay so calm and collected?"
I said, "Well, have you ever logrolled
"in front of 3,000 people before?
I have."
If you can handle that pressure,
you can handle getting your arm blown off.
- A medical helicopter arrived.
- Finally somebody says, "Well, how you doing?"
I said, "Oh, I'm good.
"Just looking for the other half of my arm. Anybody seen it?"
And it hurt.
It hurt unimaginable pain.
And the doctors were like, "Yeah, we'll give you morphine."
I'm like, "No! No morphine! I'm allergic!"
The whole room stopped, and looked at me.
They're like, "You're allergic?"
I go, "I'm allergic to morphine.
Do not give me morphine. You could kill me."
- When the shock wore off, reality set in.
- I remember they just woke me up
and I looked down and my arm was gone.
And I was just like, "What the hell?
Like, what do I do now?"
Lost my right arm, half my left hand.
Acquired a traumatic brain injury
that affects my memory and my concentration.
This is a hollow, carbon fiber, super-sleek, super-light arm,
which is great-- unless you're a log roller
cause it makes your balance off
cause this natural arm's heavier than this one.
I can still remember getting on the log for the first time.
I taught myself how to roll again.
- Nothing was going to come easy.
And nothing was going to keep J.R.
from getting back into the water.
- "There's ice on the lake?" I don't care.
I'm going to start training now.
I have logrolled in a hole in the ice.
My first year back was 2008.
And I was dealing with a lot of issues.
We all have our own demons and I was dealing with mine.
And I trained harder than I'd ever trained before.
And I had so much pressure on me to win.
Everybody wanted me to win
because they wanted that hometown hero story.
I absolutely choked.
And I rolled worse--
I lost to somebody
who I hadn't lost to since I was 14 years old.
You know, it was embarrassing.
And I wanted to quit.
I said, "To hell with this sport.
I'm done."
- Just like that, this six-time world champion was done.
- I just said, "You know,
I think it's time to hang up the spikes."
And be a different kind of lumberjack
and play with wood on a different level.
- J.R. pursued his passion as an urban lumberjack.
- I was 27 when I lost my arm.
Very skilled with my hands,
I made a living with my hands building houses.
I went from being right-handed to being left-handed,
to having only three working fingers.
I'm going to roll the dice
and I want to do what I want to do
and pursue my dreams.
And a few years later, here I am.
[saw whirring]
- J.R. opened his own urban sawmill
outside of the city of Menomonie.
He took his passion for logrolling
and laser-focused it on woodworking.
- I'm entirely self-taught.
I never went to school for it.
The reality is I do everything from start to finish.
From the rough urban log, saw it, dry it,
right down to the finished piece of furniture.
My niche is slabs.
Once the slab is dry, really, the sky's the limit.
Whatever you can think up.
I can walk through here and look at all the pieces of wood.
They're like my kids.
I can tell you where they came from, when I cut them.
You do brand a bit of your personality into the wood
when you work with it.
That is rewarding.
- Rewarding like logrolling had been,
but yet, something was still missing.
- I can be laying in bed at night in January
and I can start thinking about competition.
My heart's going to start beating faster.
But I thought back to my first world title
and that year, I wanted to quit, too.
- That's when this wounded warrior and Purple Heart recipient
had a change of heart and thought,
"Let's roll."
[rock music]
- I said, "Let's just hang on a while longer.
Give it another go."
So the following year, 2009,
it was actually pretty refreshing
because all the pressure was gone.
I could tell that people had kind of written me off.
You know like, "Oh, it's great.
"He's coming back to roll,
even though he'll never be world champion again."
You doubt it's going to happen?
Okay, challenge me. Watch what happens.
[cheering]
I went in and proceeded to
win my 7th world title and my 1st with one arm.
It was this amazing feeling of...
you know, getting my life back in order.
[applause]
- J.R. would win three more world championships.
- Announcer: J.R. Salzman, one fall away
from taking the title for the 10th time.
[cheering]
- Announcer: And there it is, ladies and gentlemen!
[excited cheering]
- Now with ten titles, he's tied for the most ever.
- Announcer: Mr. J.R. Salzman, ladies and gentleman.
How about a hand for J.R.? [applause]
- It's just amazing to be able to come back and roll again
after everything I've been through, losing an arm in Iraq.
Um...
[cheering]
I had a hard time keeping it together.
I'm the only person ever missing a limb to ever win.
Not once, not twice, but four times.
[applause]
- In 2015, J.R. retired
as one of the greatest timber sports athletes ever.
- I'm going to roll until the day I die.
I'm just not going to be competing.
In hindsight, I never thought it would turn into what it did.
You know to be one of the best logrollers
to ever walk the face of the earth.
And especially for what it's done for my life.
To be sort of that core support
and to help me get my life back together.
Bad things happen.
Things don't go your way.
Life's not fair.
Believe me, life is not fair.
Fully knowing the journey that I've been on, I mean,
I'd do it all again.
And I'm not done yet.
I'm just a small-town guy from Hayward, Wisconsin,
who wants to saw logs and play with wood
and roll on logs in the summer.
- We're here in Woodruff, exploring Wisconsin's history
with lumberjacks and logging.
The industry was slow to start.
It only picked up traction by the mid-century
with the help of railroads.
Lumber quickly become the backbone of the state's economy.
Lumberjacks would harvest trees in the winter
and drag them to water's edge to await the spring thaw.
At the height of production, these waterways
saw millions of cubic feet of timber pass through.
We'll find out more of what it means to be a lumberjack
in a bit.
But first, we head to Stevens Point
to meet an artist working to preserve her culture
with a needle and thread.
[peaceful violin music]
- All I know is
I was gifted with great teachers.
And so, now I'm at a place in my life
where I need to thank them,
and pay forward what they have given to me.
And the only way I know how to do it
is with a needle and thread.
[friction as needle threads through backing material]
[soft music with drumming]
My name's Karen Ann Hoffman
and I'm an Iroquois-raised beader.
I live in Stevens Point, Wisconsin.
I've been doing this kind of beadwork
ever since I took my first raised beadwork workshop.
And I'll betcha that's going on 25 years by now.
[soft music with drumming]
Iroquois raised beadwork
is a rare and beautiful form of Native American beadwork.
A lot of Indian people use beads,
but only members of the Iroquois Confederacy
use beads and velvet
in this embossed, raised combination.
In the middle 1800s,
there was this whole network of Iroquois people
who were using raised beadwork as an economy.
And those are the pieces
most Americans are familiar with now.
But there's another strain of Iroquois raised beadwork
and those are things that are made
for inside the community.
And so that's clothing, that's regalia,
that's ceremonial items.
Those are things that the outside
doesn't get a chance to look at.
[soft music]
And now, there's this third stream,
the stream that I'm involved in.
This use of ancient techniques
in very contemporary art forms.
It's my passion to create pieces
that have never been made before,
but are deeply, deeply linked
to those pieces that give rise to our art forms,
10,000 and 12,000 years ago.
I put our origin story in here, into these pieces.
I put the stories of the stars into these pieces.
I put the stories of how the earth came into being
into these pieces.
I put the stories of contemporary political climate
into these pieces
because they're all part of our Iroquois heritage.
[sound of needlework]
I think it's critical for all people
to know who they are.
And I think that sense of identity
is what keeps all of us grounded,
keeps all of us making good choices.
And these things are what I try to express
with such simple materials.
Little bit of thread, a steel needle, some glass beads,
a bit of fabric, boom.
I hope that someone will pick up these gifts
and carry them on forward,
but I know that it's my responsibility
to be this link in this chain.
I think sometimes when I'm beading,
I swear, I hear those old people whispering in my ear.
You know I swear I hear them saying,
"That's good, Karen Ann.
"Keep going, Karen Ann.
Do a good job for us."
And I can't disappoint them.
I can't.
[peaceful music]
- So what better way to get a feel for the lumberjack life
than at the Fred Scheer's Lumberjack Show
here in Woodruff?
Hello, lumberjacks,
or should I say "Yo-ho?"
- Yo-ho!
- So who's going to give us a demo?
- I will. - Wonderful.
- So for chopping,
to make our own footholds, we chop in here.
And then, two biggest tips are
hit it as hard as you can
and hit your lines
and it's more of a break instead of a clean cut through.
So here we go.
[Darby breathes with exertion] [axe cracks into wood]
? ?
- Wow. That was amazing.
Are you okay? - Oh yeah.
- Need some water? - I'll be fine.
- Thank you for that, Darby. - Yeah, you're welcome.
- Next up, we head to Danbury,
where a group of friends came up with an idea
for a golf course that was a hole in one.
[club smacks against ball, then whooshes through the swing]
- Right down the middle.
- Hang on, Jack, hang on.
[club swings, cracks against ball]
- Oh, nice. - Oh, right down the pike.
- Very nice. You're on.
- Little bit short.
- The Yellow Lake Golf Course
will never host the U.S. Open
[clink]
or any other prestigious tournament.
- Right down the middle.
- Well, we'll try a little 8-iron pitch and run.
[thud]
- Oh, you might have it. Whoa, whoa.
- Get on, get on. - All right.
- But this humble course does offer
a unique challenge for even the best golfers.
- Ohhh, soft sand there.
- The greens are green in name only.
- Lookit there. - Ohhh.
- Well anybody's used to playing on a regular golf course,
it changes your whole game
'cause your putting, everything changes.
- There's a hard pan underneath the sand,
so sometimes it blows off it a little bit
and you'll have kind of a hard pan.
And then, there'll be some thicker sand,
which can slow your ball down and just stop it right there.
- Most golfers are used to raking the sand trap,
not dragging the sand green.
- That way it's smooth
for the next people that are coming behind you.
- For a real par? - For a real par.
- Chuck Anderson says when the course was built in 1928,
sand greens were standard.
- Back in 1928, you didn't have a whole lot of irrigation.
- Over time, most courses installed sprinklers
and converted to grass.
That was Chuck's plan when he bought the course in 1988.
- We're going to change those into grass greens
as fast as we can.
[plink]
- There it is. - Look at that.
- And then we got up here
and found that everybody was having such a good time.
- Ooooh, hit that rock and jumped up.
- And the maintenance was so low.
- Look it there.
- We said, "Let's promote the sand greens
and see what happens."
- C'mon Jack.
- John O'Fallon lived next to the course
for more than three decades.
- I don't think I--
I don't remember ever scoring good.
[laughs]
But I have a lot of fun afterwards.
[guffaws]
- This is why it's a friendly place.
If you get thirsty out here,
they bring you out one when they see ya.
- John and Chuck have golfed a lot of rounds
and learned not to take it too seriously.
- There it is!
It's the best shot I've had since I was born.
- This course is for fun.
It's a recreational course.
If you're a good golfer,
you're going to be very frustrated out here.
- Oh, don't get no better.
- That's it. Look here.
Right over the hole. - Group: Ooohhhh!
- None of us really worry too much about score,
just out to have a good time, you know.
[grunts, thumps ball]
- There. Give it a little extra boost.
- It's the way golf was meant to play for us duffers.
Because we're never going to be on the pro circuit anyway.
[clink]
So we might as well have fun.
- Over the hill to grandma's house.
- There's always tomorrow neighbor.
- Yup. - Always tomorrow.
- The lumberjacks here
at the Fred Scheer's Lumberjack Show in Woodruff
compete against each other in front of a live audience,
demonstrating some of the timber harvesting techniques
used in the 1800s and today.
Let's take a look at some of the highlights of the show.
[cheering]
[splash]
Wow, what an exciting show!
The same can be said about the performance
put on by the man in our next story.
You might call him Wisconsin's wondering warbler.
- David H.B. Drake is a traveling man...
- My job is to drive around this lovely state
and sing for people
and they pay me to do this?
- He's a folk singer, storyteller...
and historian.
- I mean this is the coolest job in the world.
- He's turned his love for Wisconsin
and a background in musical theater into a career.
- Well, I mean, I am born and raised Wisconsin.
- On this day, he performs for grade school kids in Muskego.
- Actually, you get to sing along and here are the words.
? LA's got the climate
? Boston's got the sea
? Denver's got the Rockies
? Wisconsin's got to me
Try it again.
? LA's got the climate
? Boston's got the sea
? Denver's got the Rockies
? Wisconsin's got to me
All right!
- Inspired by his travels across Wisconsin,
David's lyrical language evokes the impressions
etched on our state's historical footprints.
- If you were walking through the fields and the valleys
and around the lake maybe 500 years ago,
you might hear music that sounds like this.
[Native American flute music]
- A Native American flute, you just play it.
Whatever comes out of you is what it was supposed to be.
Where I grew up, we didn't have a TV set,
we didn't have a telephone,
and we used to sing together and tell stories.
And I just liked doing it so much that I kept on doing it.
- Now, David is helping teach Wisconsin history
through his performance called Wiscon-Sing.
- What Marquette wrote in his journal as the name of the river
was O-I-S-C-O-N-S-I-N-G.
Wisconsing.
And when I saw that on a 300-year old map,
I went, "Wiscon-SING." Ba-dum-bump.
And you'll hear French names in this song
because the French people made the maps
and you'll hear Native American names
because they were here first to name the places.
I'm going to play the song on an instrument we call a concertina.
["Music Rivers of Wisconsin"]
? I crossed the broad Flambeau
? I've portaged the Fox
? Swum the Little Copper
? And followed the Black
? The Sugar is muddy
? The St. Croix is clear
? Down by the Eau Claire,
? I courted my dear
Here we go!
You can be educated and entertained
and not know the difference.
To me that's always been--
The breakthrough thing about teaching is
history can either be really boring,
or it could be really fun.
It's all in presentation.
What I'm trying to do here is not just present
the songs of a long time ago
in the history of Wisconsin,
but what it actually sounded like.
>> When I couldn't find an authentic old song
that worked well as a sing along,
then I wrote my own.
For mining, and for the Great Lakes,
I wrote my own songs.
["Big Bevans Mine"] ? My name is Will Penrose
? I am a lead miner
? In southwest Wisconsin
? I spent of my time
? In Platteville
? The year was 1845
? When I went to work
? In the Big Bevans Mine
So I literally took a tour of a mine
in Platteville, Wisconsin, the Bevans Mine,
and this is the trick of song writing--
you write down the vocabulary.
Came out of the mine.
Saw the flag of Wisconsin
with a miner on it and went...
there's the song.
[singing]
I've been doing this professionally as my living
for 35 years.
My parents still want to know
what I'm going to do when I grow up.
I'll be 70 next time around
and doing this keeps you young,
keeps you excited,
keeps you interested.
- Well, that'll wrap up this episode of Wisconsin Life .
Watching these modern-day lumberjacks
has been fun and pretty eye-opening.
If you'd like to learn more about
how to check out this lumberjack show
or any of the stories we've shared today,
visit WisconsinLife .org.
And remember, we'd love to hear about your Wisconsin Life
so send us your ideas at WisconsinLife @wpt.org.
I'm your host, Angela Fitzgerald and this is our Wisconsin Life .
Yo-ho!
[cheering]
[chopping]
[breathing rapidly from exertion]
- And that's how you climb. [laughing]
- Funding for Wisconsin Life is provided in part
by Alliant Energy,
Lowell and Mary Peterson,
and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.