- Announcer: The following program
is a PBS Wisconsin original production.
- Angela Fitzgerald: Coming up on Wisconsin Life:
We uncover the mystery of mascots in Milwaukee,
a group of ladies flipping the script on pinball,
a Verona farmer sharing culture and crops,
and a Madison couple in the business
of terrifying their customers. - There we go.
[prop shrieks]
- Angela: That's all ahead on Wisconsin Life.
[bright music]
- Announcer: Funding for Wisconsin Life is provided by:
the Wooden Nickel Fund,
Mary and Lowell Peterson,
the A.C.V. and Mary Elston Family,
the Stanley J. Cottrill Fund,
UW Health,
donors to the Focus Fund for Wisconsin Programs,
and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.
[birds chirping]
[bright music]
- Hello, and welcome to Wisconsin Life.
I'm your host, Angela Fitzgerald.
Summer in Wisconsin means it's berry-picking season,
and I'm ready to head into the fields
as we visit Jelli's Market in Jefferson County.
This family farm is in Helenville
and sits between I-94 and Highway 18.
Depending on the season,
visitors come to pick their own blueberries,
raspberries, strawberries, apples, flowers, or pumpkins.
Husband and wife Steve and Jody Knoebel
followed in their grandparents' farming footsteps.
They started their berry-growing endeavors in 2001
by planting 25,000 strawberries.
They named the farm Jelli's Market,
combining their daughters' names:
Jessica, Lindsay, and Libby.
Now, the daughters who the farm is named after help to run it.
Over the years, they grew to include apple orchards
and a commercial kitchen, baking sweet treats here daily.
I'll head out to pick blueberries in a bit,
but first, we travel the state
to see what else is popping up and flourishing.
As we head to Milwaukee, to uncover the mystery
behind some of our state's most beloved mascots.
[crowd cheers]
- You just kinda have to move your hands
and hope for the best.
Simply no other job like this I can think of.
? Flexin' like a winner ?
- The most important thing, I think,
is to have fun.
? Got it all ?
? Got, got, got it all ?
- So I'm a little bit like a superhero, in a way. [laughs]
? Winner ? ? Winner ?
- You have everybody in the stadium
looking at you, and you just run out.
It's a big responsibility, I would say.
? Hey, hey, hey, hey ?
? Winner ? ? Winner ?
[sewing machine clacks]
[playful music]
- Brian Adams: Olympus Mascots was created
at some point back in the 1960s.
We have 250-ish total employees.
- Amber Micoliczyk: They reached out to me
and they're like, "Hey, do you wanna be a mascot sewer?"
And I'm like, "I have never heard of anything
like that before, so sure, why not?"
- Brian: We've probably done 25,000 to 30,000 mascots
through the years.
- Steve Deau: We did a forklift,
like a wearable forklift costume.
And it had the forks in the front
that just kinda went up and down.
And a hidden button on the other side
for, like, the backup noise.
Full-body robot. [electronic noises]
Top to bottom.
The Racing Sausages come through here.
We probably make new ones every, I don't know, five years.
- We're working on a very high-profile project
right now that I can't tell you about.
[machine buzzes] [sanding]
- Brittany Jacob-Thacker: Most of our costumes
are in between 60 to 120 hours, with the average of them
being probably in the 70 to 80-hour range.
We consider, like, the performer's activity level.
We go a lot by, like, height range too
to make sure it fits, like, a certain height range of person.
There's a lot of different aspects
that all kinda go into it.
- So when I see the picture, I have to navigate
how I'm going to make this a 3D thing.
I go on to the mannequin, I start measuring out things
so that I know what the proportions are
so I know how to make something what it should look like
on the form.
- Brittany: So, a lot of it's fur.
We have fur, Tempo, double knit
are probably the big ones that we use.
I particularly like when we do fur costumes
just 'cause it's cool to put different colors together
and different textures. [lion roars]
[monsters exclaim]
- We work with hundreds of customers
every single year.
Pro sports teams, collegiate sports teams,
restaurants, brands, different characters,
you know, representing everything
down to even elementary schools.
[soft brushing]
? One, two, three, whoo! ?
? Give it to me, give it to me ?
? Give it to me, whoo! ?
? Give it, give it, give it to me ?
? Give it, give it to me ?
- It's very strange, sometimes, to just be like,
watching a Packer game or something,
and a commercial comes on and it's like,
"Oh, I made that," you know?
It's like, you know, it gives me a certain level of pride
and just, like, this costume made it onto TV
and looks pretty good. [chuckles]
- John Sidem: Feels like art come to life.
Like, our art that we're working on here,
you know, becomes this full-scale, realized thing.
? Whoo! ?
- And then, it's like,
you forget about all of that hard work,
and you're like, "Wow, like, this is what
it comes down to at the end."
- Brittany: The people that work here are just amazing.
It's the reason why I come back every day.
It's the reason why I have a smile on my face.
It's the reason why I love coming to work
because it's a great group of people
and we get to make some really fun stuff.
? Whoo! ?
- Angela: Next up, we're off to link up
with a Sheboygan woman sharing her passion for pinball.
[bright electronic music]
Pinball is part of American pop culture.
- Rachel Ristow: It's been around forever.
It's like this big, gigantic puzzle of chaos,
but it's fun.
[game chiming]
- Angela: Pinball's popularity has had its ups and downs.
- Rachel: Oh!
Seeing a resurgence in the hobby is great.
[game clacking]
- Angela: At home, Rachel Ristow plays a vintage machine
alongside her cat, Rigby.
- Rachel: It shuts off everything else in my head
because you have to focus on flipping your buttons
and nudging the game and hitting the ball.
[game chiming]
- Angela: You can also find Rachel
getting her adrenaline kicks at the Plymouth Tap.
- When I first started playing in 2019,
there were no games basically in Sheboygan County,
and now, we have a place like here.
I think he's got 12 games.
- Angela: Rachel's heart pumps
on the unpredictable fun of pinball.
- Good game.
I missed my extra ball.
One ball to win 'em all.
- Angela: She is a paralegal by day
and a pinball fanatic all day, any day.
[dark music tone]
- Hey, I'll take that.
232 million, I'll take that any day.
That was a good game.
- Angela: To get others in the game,
Rachel founded Ladies Flip Wisconsin,
a statewide club helping women take the pinball plunge.
- Rachel: Women's pinball is a whole different vibe.
- All right, now I'm done. [laughing]
- The pinball community is pretty incredible.
It's made up of all sorts of people from all walks of life.
- Angela: Home base for Ladies Flip Wisconsin
is the Diamond Plate Arcade.
It's a unique private collection near De Pere.
Pinball is also a place
for these women to connect, converse, and compete.
[cheering on pinball machine]
- Recording: Please welcome, from Hollywood, Guns N' Roses!
- Yeah, whoo!
Women's pinball creates a safe space for women
in the hobby so that they can learn
and so that they can feel supported.
I've been able to meet so many new people in my life.
A lot of folks, I think, struggle with,
where do you meet new friends at different stages in your life?
I'm in my 40s.
I don't have children, I'm divorced.
Women's pinball is really important.
It's very important to me.
- Angela: On this evening, Rachel has organized
a women's pinball boot camp.
- Welcome to Ladies Flip Spooky Season.
Yay! [group cheering]
This is something new that I started doing last year
because we wanna build your skills.
- Hey! - Hey!
- I love to think about pinball as controlling chaos
when you're able to find the skills to control the ball.
- Player: No, no. - Group: Yay!
- Rachel: That's what I'm talking about.
You're able to score and have a bigger game
and more points, and you can win the game.
- Angela: Winning isn't everything, but for Rachel,
it is a close second.
- Rachel: I've never been competitive
about anything in my life until I met pinball.
Get in there, you little jerkface.
I played a couple of women's world championships.
My current open women's world ranking,
I think, is 25th overall in the world.
I ended last year at 13th.
I think that, in Ladies Flip Wisconsin,
we have some very competitive players
and other players that don't care at all.
- Angela: This magical box with flashing lights
is more than a game for Rachel.
- Rachel: Because you get into this hobby
and then you meet people that just become your friends,
and it becomes more than just pinball.
It gives me the feeling of, like,
I have always a woman in my corner looking out for me.
It makes me happy.
[bells chiming]
That's pinball.
That's pinball, baby.
- I'm in Helenville at Jelli's Market,
learning about one of Wisconsin's
favorite summertime activities: berry picking.
[lively music]
I sat down with Libby,
whose parents bought this farm in the '80s
but didn't start strawberry farming 'til 2001.
- Libby Hafften: They've got a little bit
of farming background,
but kind of jumped into strawberries headfirst.
Didn't really know anything they were doing,
but it's kind of exploded since then, obviously.
And now we have blueberries and raspberries, apples, pumpkins.
One thing for sure that makes us unique
is we don't have an admission fee.
That is one thing that my parents really were against
when they decided
that they wanted to be more of a u-pick farm
and let people come and get their own produce.
It's just nice that we allow people to come
and just hang out if they want to
and be in agriculture and be away from the city
and learn something new while they're here.
- Customer: Thank you.
- That's truly creating a space
for the community. - Yeah.
People can come in the farm store and buy meat
like pork and beef and lamb, chicken, turkeys.
And then any of our other products.
- Angela: There's an array of different food items
that people can enjoy fresh throughout the year.
- Libby: Absolutely. - Well, welcome.
Thanks for coming.
- So you and your sister still run the farm?
- Yes.
My sister Lindsay and I co-manage Jelli's together now.
She does a lot of the berries and the vegetables.
I'm mainly in charge of our orchard.
So I get to work with not only my sister, but my best friend.
And, you know, we get sick of each other
and bicker like sisters do, but at the end of the day,
we both want our business to succeed
and we want to make our family better,
so we have the same goal in mind.
- Angela: I love that.
And you're able to continue your family's legacy together.
- Libby: Yes, exactly.
- So, Libby, I do want to go out
and pick some blueberries with you.
- Okay. - Before we do that,
is there anything I should keep in mind?
Anything unique about blueberry picking
for a first-time blueberry picker?
- [laughs] Well, what color are blueberries?
- They're blue. - They are blue, that's good.
So we should probably make sure
we don't pick any green ones, right?
- Okay, I'm assuming that means they're not ready, or?
- That would be correct. - Okay, okay.
That's good to know. - That's the biggest tip.
- Make sure they're blue at the time of picking.
- Yes.
And other than that, it's pretty easy.
- Okay, awesome.
Well, can you go show me? - Absolutely!
- Thank you.
With my first blueberry picking lesson under my belt,
we headed out to the field.
With a little help.
So which ones feel ripe for picking over here?
- Well, we want the blue ones.
- Angela: And a taste or two.
- You wanna try one? - Mm-hmm.
These are good. - Mm-hmm.
And we allow people to, y'know, eat while they pick.
That's part of the fun. - Aww.
- Part of the experience. - I'm sure that's appreciated.
Whether in the field or in the shop,
Jelli's Market offers a tasty way to enjoy a Wisconsin summer.
[gentle music]
Now, we hop over to another Wisconsin farm in Verona,
where one grower cultivates a taste of home.
[gentle music]
It's a sunny fall day on this rural Verona farm.
Juan Gonzalez is pulling up the papalo.
- Juan: [speaking Spanish]
- Angela: And picking the purslane.
- Juan: [speaking Spanish]
- Angela: These herbs are not typically grown
in Wisconsin farms, making them hard to find.
- Juan: [speaking Spanish]
- Angela: But for Mexican immigrants like Juan,
they are a taste of home, especially for those
from the state of Puebla.
- [speaking Spanish]
- Angela: To get to the point where Juan is today,
growing herbs for himself and others, has been a journey.
From the rancho where he was raised
to the farm fields of the West.
- Juan: [speaking Spanish]
- Angela: To a chance encounter on a Madison city bus
more than 20 years ago.
- Juan: [speaking Spanish]
- Angela: But to grow from hobby gardener to full-time farmer
would take time, and an unlikely friendship.
Juan told the community garden director
he sought larger fields to grow more.
- Juan: [speaking Spanish]
- Seth Riley: Linda and Gene Farley lived on this land.
They were radically generous people
who opened up their home and their property
to farmers who were looking for space to grow.
- Angela: Gene and Linda Farley spent their first years
after med school together tending to the needs
of the Navajo in the Southwest.
Then they brought their spirit of public service
to southern Wisconsin.
Eventually, they met Juan.
- He knew Linda and Gene
before our program and organization was started,
and he worked with Gene to develop the incubator farm,
what would become our collaborative farm.
- Angela: Today, the Farleys' farm continues
what was started with Juan, a path to agriculture production
for dedicated newcomers.
- Juan: [speaking Spanish]
- Angela: Like Juan, many of the aspiring farmers
have been immigrants.
- People have come from all over, many from Latin America,
as well as a lot of people from Southeast Asia and West Africa.
- Angela: Many more come on tours.
They learn about the farmer program
and the organic and sustainable practices the farm employs.
Through a translator, Juan talks about his specialty crops.
- But then, you also have, like, purslane...
- Angela: The number of familiar plants from home
Juan has brought to Wisconsin
has added new flavor to the community.
- [speaking Spanish]
- Angela: El Sabor de Puebla, literally "the flavor of Puebla"
is the restaurant owned by Juan's sister.
She's a big customer for his produce,
including flowers that will decorate the ofrenda
in the lobby.
- Juan: [speaking Spanish]
- Angela: On Halloween Day
at the Centro Hispano Farmers' Market,
Juan's vegetable stand has plenty of marigolds
for use the next day, the Day of the Dead.
Flowers and other tributes will fill these
altars of remembrance to those now gone.
And in the highest perch of honor at the restaurant
are the Doctors Farley.
- Juan: [speaking Spanish]
- Angela: No doubt Los Abuelos Farley would be happy
with all their farm has provided.
- Juan: [speaking Spanish]
[gentle music]
- Angela: Our last story is a spooky one,
as we meet a Madison couple who's making it their business
to terrify their customers.
- BJ Winslow: I feel like every place has a spooky factor.
But I do find it is unique here in Wisconsin.
- Eileen Winslow: There's definitely a weird factor.
It's something that we enjoy tapping into.
Hi, I'm Eileen Winslow. - And I'm BJ Winslow.
- And we run Dapper Cadaver.
[spooky music] [prop shrieks]
- Who wants to play a funny little trick tonight? [laughs]
- We make and provide death-related props and decor
for a number of industries, including productions,
attractions, and educational facilities worldwide.
- BJ: We also have the shop.
We're located here in Madison, Wisconsin.
We do stuff that is, like, Halloween characters
that you're gonna see in a haunted house
or an amusement park.
And then we also do realistic dummies for film and television.
- We've provided things for American Horror Story,
Law and Order, 911, Shogun.
- We start with a liquid material.
Urethane, polyurethane, polyfoam, silicone.
We've got a fab team that are gonna be filling the molds.
A lot of our molds are realistic heads,
are realistic bodies and body parts.
Those are life cast off of actual people.
Once it's all set up,
the liquid material becomes an expanding foam.
So a small piece can be set in, like, an hour
and a larger piece over four.
And then, you know, once it's all set up,
you can crack open the mold, pull it out,
brush the skin layers,
and you've got yourself a realistic body.
- Eileen: I'm originally from Milwaukee, south side.
- BJ: I'm originally from California.
I grew up in northern California.
I've been making things for as long as I can remember.
- I had graduated
from the University of Southern California.
We met through friends in LA.
It was actually right after BJ had moved down
from northern California.
And I started doing props after I got out of college,
working at another guy's shop.
And I wanted to branch out on my own,
and, y'know, we were able to.
[spray paint hissing]
- BJ was making props in our garage,
and then I had helped him set up a website,
'cause actually at that point, I worked in internet marketing.
- And that was huge.
Nobody else was doing prop shop websites at the time.
- It started to grow to the point
where then, it wasn't sustainable
to keep doing it from the house.
We started the business, we got married,
went on a honeymoon, came back, and then--
- And opened. - And opened, yeah.
We moved back here in fall of 2020.
We really like the business environment in Wisconsin.
There you go.
- Customer: Thank you. - Thank you.
It's really great for the bulk of what we do,
which is manufacturing.
When we were moving, there was no guarantee
that people would continue calling us.
And we're just extremely happy and grateful that they did.
It's been a leap of faith
in terms of continuing to grow the business
in new ways as well.
- We've done a number of dummies
for UW-Platteville forensic training.
These are people that are going to school
to become forensic investigators.
And we recently did a brand-new type of dummy
where it has lividity that's like bruising.
It will actually bleach when you touch it
and then go back to pink,
so we developed a type of paint that does that as well.
It's nice to go into work and have, like, both sides of things
where it's like, "Today, I'm gonna do something really stupid
and I'm gonna love it,"
or "Today, I'm gonna do something
that could save lives."
In the fall, we like to do the night market.
There we go, cool.
We like to put out one of our great characters.
And people love to take their pictures with 'em.
And that's always fun.
We do September and October here 'cause that's our season.
- One of the things I loved with working with BJ
well over a decade now
is just seeing him grow as an artist and as a person.
- Yeah, I can't imagine doing this on my own.
- I love working with creative people
and I love working with people that are helping other people.
If you can do that for a living,
what else can you ask for in life?
- Yeah, and it's fun. [chuckles]
[groovy music]
[prop shrieks]
- We've got a taste of Jelli's Market in Helenville
while sharing stories of people and places
that make our state sweet.
For more, visit WisconsinLife.org.
Connect with us on social media or by email
at stories@wisconsinlife.org.
Until next time, I'm your host, Angela Fitzgerald,
and this is our Wisconsin Life.
A very berry goodbye!
[gentle music]
- Announcer: Funding for Wisconsin Life is provided by:
the Wooden Nickel Fund,
Mary and Lowell Peterson,
the A.C.V. and Mary Elston Family,
the Stanley J. Cottrill Fund,
UW Health,
donors to the Focus Fund for Wisconsin Programs,
and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.