I can't believe it's been two months since we talked, it's like yesterday.
It's always great to be back. Thanks for allowing me on and chatting from the far northern outpost
of Manitwish waters, Wisconsin. It finally just warmed up here. It's been chilly, a chilly, cold spring.
Yeah, the lakes are warming up and it's green and up and it's summer.
So you're protecting the borders up in Manitwish waters, protecting our state up there.
That's going to be outpost.
Yes, not far from Lake Superior. I'm running the Navy.
But before we even get to anything inside our Wisconsin magazine this month, we're going to talk about this cover.
Is this a photograph or drawing? It's, it looks so perfect. I can't believe it would be a photograph.
Well, yeah, thanks so much. People, people like this cover. They, they responded well and I was a little unsure of putting it on the cover.
We, we go with bright, bright color on the best paper we can find, slick.
And we do that on purpose to put a little bit of quality in there.
The, the cover you're describing is fireworks. No, fireworks happen at night.
Okay, that tends to be a little bit dark. But you know what we're showing is fireworks along the shore of Miller's Bay,
and Monomony Park in Ashkash, Fourth of July fireworks. Of course, some, you know, all over the state.
And we've got some fireworks there. No, this is not drawn. It's not, it's not manipulated really.
It's just a shot by Jim Capnick, who is a very practice photographer in, in Ashkash.
For the longest time, he ran the photo section of the EAA, the, the air, aircraft concerned down in, in, in Ashkash.
But we've got fireworks along Lake Winnebago. And you've got people, you know, happy picnic, sort of look for scene, watching the fireworks go off.
And it, truth be told, it's got a little bit of clutter in the foreground with people on their chairs watching, wrapped, watching this show.
And everybody who saw this cover says that's what people in Wisconsin do in the summer.
It's summer to me. There's red, white, and blue colors on there. And it's, it's a celebration. So thanks for noticing that.
Oh, little, little out of our orbit, but it, it works.
Well, if people want to see it, our website guy, Dakota Lavada, he, Dakota put this actually in our Facebook promotion for you being here today.
He actually made a cell phone and he put this on the cover of the cell phone.
And I looked at it and said, that's the cover of the magazine. How do they do that?
Thank you. Yes.
Dakota, thank you. Yeah, Dakota did a very good job on that. You know, I got to tell you, we had celebrations where in the town I grew up with and grew up in.
But when I first moved to Brown, dear Wisconsin, I had never seen a fourth of July celebration was an all day thing with a fireman's contest.
They had houses. They had to get this barrel from one end of the rope to the other. It was really fun day. And then the fireworks kicked off at night.
And my parents first came to visit their diehard New Yorkers. They couldn't, but they never went to a fourth of July celebration before.
I mean, we saw fireworks and stuff where I grew up, but never in all day celebration. They just loved it.
And now when you come here, when I moved to Racine, I'm on the parade route for the fourth of July parade, the big fourth fest parade, one of the biggest in the country.
It runs like three hours. And so I'm on the parade route for that. And then at night, you've got the lakefront at festival park with a light off.
Not festival park, but the beach area, North Beach area with a light off the fireworks.
This is like small town, fourth of July. And I didn't grow up like this. I grew up with, you know, in a big city where they didn't really have a lot of that stuff.
So I love this cover.
Well, thank you. That fourth of July, especially in the small towns, it's kind of neat.
You just talked about the bigger metropolitan areas. Some of these small towns, just nine miles down the road from us here is Boulder Junction.
It's a summer tourist type town. It's in the middle of the lakes and woods.
And they'll, at noon, they crank up the parade. And they've got the lit up fire trucks and several other towns.
Some that don't have their parade send the fire wagons here. Press Kyle is one that sends their lit up emergency vehicles.
And all the churches and the local hardware store, they will make floats and down the street they go.
If it's a short parade and there's not that many people marching and walking along, they'll run it around the block and do it twice.
That's that small town. The other cool thing about fourth of July in the evening when there's fireworks.
If you happen to be traveling across the state, driving down highways, you know, whatever your destination may be, it's interesting to pass these towns off in the distance.
You don't know quite where they are, but they're sending up fireworks all the way.
Let's say you're going north to South and the state down Highway 51, 41.
Yeah, little town sending up fireworks and it's kind of, it feels good.
It must be, it must be weird to fly in a plane the night of the fourth of July.
And I should travel across America. All these fireworks going off. You can see them from the planes.
I mean, planes on their high. Yeah. There's a movie called Born on the Fourth of July with Tom Cruise. I don't know if you've ever heard of it before.
So he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for that film, Born on the Fourth of July.
And the opening scene is a fourth of July parade. And on the screen, it says Massa Piqua, 1957.
Oh, that's my town where I grew up. Massa Piqua. It wasn't filmed there, but that's the thing we had.
We had a fourth of July parade. And the little league baseball league was the last thing in the parade.
Then they put the teams in order of what they, you know, in order of how they were doing.
And my team, the arrows was in last place. So we were the last team in the parade.
Then they took from smallest to tallest. And I was the tallest. So I was the last person in the fourth of July parade.
That's how I got there. My mother maybe wear dress slacks and dress shoes and a dress shirt.
All the other kids wearing jeep, you know, they're blue jeans in there. They're sneakers. My mother maybe get all dressed up.
They probably thought I was some kind of like, all right, he's some official in the parade. He can't be one of the kids. He's all dressed up.
Anyway, let's get to an honor. Let's get to some of the stories in here. One of the stories you wanted to talk about was the woman with the bear.
The wild work for the wildlife. Talk about that.
Well, yes, what we have. I love stories like this. And it's the reason really the main reason I had a magazine.
So again, even farther north Wisconsin around the village of Hurley is the scene where the story takes place.
Now, it's a small town. Town just a little bit to the west of there is Montreal.
A small string of towns which was set up for the mining, the iron mining communities for the workers to live.
The last iron mine up here closed in 1961. But there's some tidy little bungalows in a stretching a little bit west of town.
He had an off toward toward the trees. And a fellow by the name of Jeff Wilson lives up here in Mercer.
He's a career now retired Wisconsin DNR wildlife technician. And he handled, quote, unquote, nuisance wildlife complaints.
Okay, usually that has to do with food. You've got some bird feeders, some garbage, some something that's an attractant to different wild animals.
And the people need to be, they want the animals to be gone, but they really need to be educated a little bit about what to do and what not to do with food attractants around their house.
Jeff got a call from the game warden up there, Harold Schmouty, who said he got a call from a woman and a bear was in her house.
So he said, what? Now, Jeff has trapped and relocated some 300 bears across his career 30 years.
He's used to this kind of stuff, but actually in the house. So he went there and he met a lady named Marge.
And she came to the door and introduced him to her cats. And she told the story. She and her back door was hanging by one hinge.
And the story was she set out some food for cats. It was a summer evening. The screen windows are open, back screen doors open. It's the evening.
And she had her dinner and she's feeding her cats, cracked the door a little bit so the cats could come and go as they pleased around her house in a little northern neighborhood.
And she's done with her own dinner. She's fed the cats. She goes to the living room, sits down, turns on TV, watch her favorite detective crime drama from the 1980s.
Yeah, Hunter. Hunter. Yeah.
Okay, she's watching TV and hits a commercial break and she gets the feeling something. There's a presence in the room.
She turns around and here's this really big bear sitting back on his haunches behind her, staring at the TV, watching Hunter along with her.
Yeah, so she screams the bear leaps up, flies out the door and tears, half tears it off. And she calls the DNR. So Jeff looked around and he said, well, this is just a little too strange.
Just bears a little too tame and we don't want anyone heard. So he said a trap.
Next day, Marge calls him up all excited. The Hunter bear is crap. So he came out and he picked it up and he relocated this bear. He re-homed him.
But he said in his entire career, he never had another bear actually enter a house when somebody was there. But you know, then again, all those other bears he handled never probably never had the opportunity to watch Hunter.
I love the drawing that goes with the with the article because it shows her and the bear both relaxing and chairs watching the TV. That's a great drawing.
That's a piece by Joe Heller. He's he's a pretty well-known political cartoonist in newspapers.
I don't know hundreds of them, but every once in a while he does a little comic drawing for us a little cartoon in color. It's quite a break from his usual stuff that he does artwork.
And he gets a kick out of doing these fun stories and we love working with him.
Before we went on the air, my dad and my mother went on a land seat tour of Alaska. And while they were on the land part of it, it was kind of a desolate area.
And there was a shack there, you know, they kept supplies if everybody needed something. And the group leader of the tour said, stay close to me. Do not wander off. There are bears around here. Stay with me. I'll handle it if you see any.
So, of course, my father not willing to listen to anybody wandered off. And they're coming around the corner and I have a photo of it was a giant bear headed right to my father.
He leaned down and took a picture head on with the bear and the tour guy grabbed my father by the collar and yanked him. He said, stay with me.
And the bear didn't do anything, but I have a great photograph of that bear rounding the corner and my father took it. And they're going to be careful out there.
Okay, we got a whole bunch of more stories, a whole bunch of stories coming up here. And I want to save this one as soon as we get back from the break stone warriors. Now these are the people that preserve the
tombstones and cemeteries because my wife and I tour a lot of cemeteries across America. And some of them you can't read anymore.
Some are just so dirty and from molds and whatever nature put on them, you can't see them. So these people clean them off.
And there's there's a caveat. And I'll tell you the story real quick here before we take the break. I read the story about not not yours.
This woman who goes around cleaning and she used a very harsh chemical and she wiped off all the information on tons of these stones that can't be recovered.
She whatever she uses way too harsh on it. And they can't they can't put them back the way they were now. So they and some of them they don't they don't know what was on there.
There's no record of it. So now they're just blank stones sitting on people's graves. You got to be careful.
So talk about that. You've got a couple of stories you want to talk about. We're going to tell how people they how they can subscribe. Let's do it now.
How can you subscribe to our Wisconsin magazine? It comes out once every two months and it's on them. It's very good hard stock real shiny hard stock paper.
This is and it comes. It comes like the old playboys used to come, not that I would know, but it comes in a sealed cover. So it's it's the elements aren't bothering it.
When it puts in the mailbox, nothing can hurt it. So how do you get our Wisconsin magazine?
Before I give you that number, I will tell you it's also like playboy because there's a big fold out in the middle.
That's right. It is like playboy with a fold out the gateway.
Anyway, if you'd like to get a copy of this, you can call 877-717-8925.
Now, we've been getting it since the very first step of very first issue. And there was a man living across the street from us a veteran. He was in his 90s and toward the end, he was kind of homebound.
So we brought all our issues to him so we can sit and read them and he loved them. They even mentioned it in his obituary that we brought over all those magazines to him.
And he just loved reading them. And he did pass away. But at least he went out reading our Wisconsin magazine from issue number one.
All right, we're talking for doing that. Oh, yeah, he was a veteran and he was just a great guy.
Before we get to our story about the people who clean cemetery stones, grape stones, let's talk about what you've got Wisconsin scenes, Wisconsin scenes in the middle.
And this is where the big gatefold is. This is wow, what photography about just pictures from all over Wisconsin summer photos of what goes on around the state.
This is like taking a vacation right in your easy chair while reading the magazine. Those are wonderful photos.
Yeah, thanks. That is the center section of the magazine as we've been talking about and it really highlights scenes all around Wisconsin.
We work with about 40 different professional photographers live all around the state who supply these photos for us.
Mostly this magazine, 82 pages, most of what we have in here comes from the readers themselves, which is to say not professional writers or photographers.
We invite people to share, chip in a story about what it is about their corner of Wisconsin that makes life really special.
And break up your neighborhood a little bit, you know, puff up your chest with pride.
Now here and there in the magazine though, we anchor it with a little bit of professional photography.
We got about 10 pages worth here from those 40 photographers I talked about and also the covers.
You've mentioned several times the 4th of July cover that we have there on the back cover.
We've got a kid tubing being told behind a book on Lake Mandota.
And people tell us that they like this most about our Wisconsin, the brilliant color photography that you're talking about.
And that just warms my heart because as an editor, I'm responsible for that ugly gray stuff that we wrap around the pictures.
Those words we have to read in.
Yeah. So anyway, it is meant to be a visual tour and thanks for noticing that done.
Now on the gatefold, I thought that when I at first glance when I looked at it last night, I thought it was the Mississippi River. It's not.
No, it's, that is Robert's Lake, New York, Wabino, Wisconsin, that's up toward Crandon.
And that's one of our photographers.
You mentioned Rob Resnick who lives in Oshkosh.
His family has some vacation property up in this area.
So a lot of what you see in here from the woodlands is from him. He travels up there.
What you're, what we have here on these three pages is a common sight of North.
It's a pontoon boat at sunset where there's a group of about six, seven people having a nice evening, maybe a little cocktail cruise around the lake slowly as the sun's going down.
So that's Robert's Lake. It's in the middle of some national forest up there.
Wabino, you're Crandon, Lake Lucerne, beautiful evening up north.
Let's get to the article we were talking about.
These are the people in the article who clean creep stones because if you go to a cemetery, sometimes it's hard to read.
They're all black with some kind of, you know, nature puts some kind of cover over it.
And it's really tough to read, but these people actually clean it with special chemicals because I told you before the break that we had a story on the air once lady cleaned the chemicals.
They were too harsh. You actually wiped out all the writing on these old, but mainly the sandstone ones that are, you know, the older cemetery stones.
But these people take great care in what they do. What you talk about them.
Sure. This is Heidi Marie and Leo Berna.
They are, they're from Hazelhurst, which is a little bit South Menachua.
And they are volunteer stone warriors.
And they've taken it upon themselves to voluntarily go and clean grave stones that maybe are covered with algae.
You know, the black algae may be lichens. Some of them that are flush with the ground sometimes have side grown right over them.
And they will, they're willing to travel up to 100 miles voluntarily if someone needs their volunteer assistance.
And they, Leo is a Vietnam veteran. Where is this cap?
And they, they go out with their dog. They're their Achilles. They're pig German Shepherd for companionship.
And they clean these stones very, you know, fastidiously. Now you're right.
No power washers, white, no wire brushes, metal scrapers, abrasive scrubbing pads.
None of that can be used because they can scar stone. Harsh chemicals like bleach can leave some damage.
So they pull on their gloves and they use soft brushes, plastic scrapers, cotton swabs, toothbrushes.
And they have little hand pumps for applying some very light solution, nothing harsh.
And rinsing with water, non-toxic stuff is what they're using.
So they're scrubbing the stones by hand. And sometimes there's black and surfaces but slowly as they work, the names and dates come forward and are once again revealed.
And you mentioned sandstone, you know, on granite maybe it's a little bit more forgiving, but not all stone is created equal.
And you have to touch, you have to go with a very light touch. One other thing that, you know, they pay special attention to some of these veterans graves.
The oldest one they've worked on was one from 1889. And the tradition with some of these veterans is to leave a coin on the gravestone.
But he leaves a penny. The tradition is, there's different levels of connection, denominations. A penny means you visited the gravesite.
This is for the family to see. A nickel signifies you and the deceased trained together. A dime means you and the veterans served together in a quarter shows you were there when the veteran died.
So that's a little tradition and they're hard at work. They do hundreds of stones every year.
I'll tell you, my wife and I, when we go on road trips, we visit cemeteries and my wife does all the research on them. I'm not going to go into all the stories because I can fill up an hour with the stories of some of these gravestones.
But we've gone through the ones here in Wisconsin. We visited Robert Strouds grave. Robert Stroud is buried in Matropolis, Illinois and a really not well kept cemetery.
You know Robert Stroud is name sound familiar at all to you.
He's the bird man of Alcatraz. He's buried in the Tropolis, Illinois. Yeah. Well, he was a criminal, but he was a murderer.
Yeah, he was a murderer, bird man, and he set records and he studied birds and their diseases never got out of grammar school, but he became the world's foremost authority on bird diseases and cures.
We went to Al Capone's. He's in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Beretta right outside Chicago and went to a whole bunch, Charles Stark, whether who was the subject of three movies, one starring Brad Pitt, California with a K.
It's spelled. He was a subject of that, one with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spasic, Badlands and one with Woody Harrelson and Juliet Lewis. I think it was the name of the movie was.
Anyway, so yeah, so you visit these graves. You find a lot there. Now I sent you a photograph. This is in Union Grove, not the Union Grove veteran cemetery.
This is the cemetery for just the regular folks like us. And in there, this is my future home, by the way, in there we took a picture of the tombstone of Frank Lamping Frank Lamping in Union Grove was a local historian.
People love to hear his stories about history in Union Grove. He was also inducted into the Green Bay Packer Fan Hall of Fame at Lambo Field. They actually have a fan hall of fame and he's in there.
And on his gravestone is a now his wife is still alive, I believe. Let me see here. Yes, wife is still alive, but they put a picture of he and his wife in the background is Lambo Field.
He's a big packer fan and they also have a Green Bay Packer helmet hanging in front of his tombstone. Well, just to the right of him, not to be undone is a Minnesota Vikings fan.
Oh, no, right next to because he's a big sign that they put next to his tombstone Minnesota Vikings and he's got all the Viking stuff all over his gravestone.
So there could be a lot against that side by side in eternity, a Green Bay Packer fan and a Minnesota Vikings fan.
They will spend eternity together in their graves.
And what's in what state is this in? This is Union Grove was constant Wisconsin. We got it. Okay. Well, we've got an invasion from Minnesota, but oh well, all in good fun.
Now, I'm going to be buried in back and I'm thinking maybe a New York Jets.
But yes, so that's it. That's in Union Grove. That's going to be our family graveside. But anyway, we're talking with Mike Bino, editor of our Wisconsin magazine, their latest issue out for the summer.
And it is a wonderful issue. Photography, the stories, everything is wonderful. Even we were talking during the break, even the ads because they could lead you to places when you see this place is like, I told you, we ate a little fat gretchens.
You got the ad in there for that in Wapaka. And you never know what you're going to find just by reading the ads alone. So that's great. It's a great magazine.
You want to talk about your, I just had my article. Let's talk about yours now is deep dive into a better world. I've never seen so many lures in my life.
We're talking about a real character here. Gentlemen at the diver. He's from Marinette. He's got a place in Marinette and also one in Green Bay.
So he's on a crusade. He's a scuba diver. He's on a crusade to clean up Wisconsin's lakes and rivers. And there's some 3,200 small lakes around, around Wisconsin, 15,000 miles of rivers.
He's got a big job ahead of him. But Ed came to the conclusion that it's correct. People love the water and things that people have naturally flow into the water.
He's down there with his oxygen tank in his mask and he makes little videos of these that he post online. He's down there cleaning up things like he calls a kayak with him up on the surface.
OK, glass bottles from long forgotten breweries, wooden planks from docs. There's cell phones. There's fishing tackle. There's, there's fishing tackle boxes. There's coolers. There's lures. There's wrenches. There's golf clubs. There's toilets. There's firearms wallets, watches, dolls, miles of fishing line. People even lose their clothes in the water. And I'll leave it at that.
He finds that he is on this crusade to pick this stuff up. He finds apple. He finds apple watches in the water too.
He does that, you know, and he'll find people will hire him to come to the marina and find their cell phone or find apple watches.
And he charges a fee when he travels to do that. This clean up is volunteer. But if he finds a watch or if he finds a cell phone, he'll fire it up if he can get it started.
He will attempt to get it back to the owner simply not for anything other than the good feelings of returning things to people.
What's attractive here is you see these pictures and color of all these snorkels and hot these watches and all these things he's found in the water in a big blob of fishing lures.
Now any fisherman will tell you that Rapalas and muskie plugs. These things are pricey. These things. It's nothing to pay $25 for a muskie lure.
And you hook it up and you lose it under water. That's where the salt started. Ed and his kids were fishing along the Menominee River up near Marinette.
And he said it was it was spring walleye fishing, shoulders shoulder combat fishing. You know when the run is on, people are, you know, it's like in Fremont. They're fishing hard.
And he says pretty soon I'm hooking up my lures and losing them. The kids are all losing lures. They're, we're tying more on. The kids keep losing lures. These things are pretty expensive and my tackle box getting empty.
So he went with his waiters and a golf ball finder and he started picking lures. Okay. And retrieving them.
Now you watch some of these videos online. The man looks like somebody berry picking. He's down there finding these lures picking them off off of rocks off of logs.
He's freeing little animals that may be tangled up in line. He he and his friend went down there and found 16,000 lures in in one year.
He told me recently. Okay. He was on the Fox River in Depeer. They break off anchors there in two hours. He hauled up 27 boat anchors.
And he cleans this stuff up and sells it, but it's not really a living. He's got sponsors. The guy from Nicolay Law billboards all over the state is his largest sponsor.
But he also has meat skis quality meats in pound, which is near his childhood home in Lena. So the meat market sponsor is an ed is out there doing something for humanity.
They recently called him up to Monacoa to come and clean outside the bridge. He on Highway 51. He found two cash drawers. We were talking about criminal activity before.
It's a it's astonishing once down there. But the best story. His for all these efforts. He he made a bigger catch at the foot of the chano dam. He found a Barbie doll.
Okay. So he cleaned up Barbie. He auctioned her online and people started bidding. And he got a bid for 1225 dollars, a lady near named Christy parliament of Green Bay, one Barbie for that for that bid.
And so he cleaned up Barbie, put her in a little mermaid with a mermaid plaque and tackle box and delivered Barbie to Christy. And then they decided to go out to dinner. Well, they're engaged to be married now.
Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. Christy is his business. He's working with him on the diving detail fun stuff at the diver, but characters and people really the people of Wisconsin is what this magazine is all about.
He's got like 30 smart watches found one of these people taking their smart watches off and throwing him in the water. I mean, how do I know somebody get lost? I mean, how do they get up your wrist?
It the stuff slides off. I've heard from people. We had a story about one person who finds stuff underwater more around beaches. And they said the thing to do is take your get yourself a metal detector.
And then go in the beach about roughly knee deep or slightly deeper where a woman might stand watching her children rings tend to slide off when your hands get cold. That's that's a way to find to find some cold in the sand at the beach.
Sometimes these rings do get returned to their owners and we've had stories on that too.
It is a wonderful magazine. We didn't get to just touch the surface of all the stories in there. It's our Wisconsin magazine. We're going to podcast this interview in case you missed it.
Well, podcast is probably tonight or tomorrow morning. It'll be up. And again, how do people get our Wisconsin magazine? Can they do it online? By the way, can they look it up online?
Certainly, you can look it up online. Our website is our Wisconsin mag mag dot com or Wisconsin mag dot com or call the opposite and we can we can get a magazine to you.
Just with a credit card number that's seven one five five four three two three one one.
All right. It's a great magazine. I love what I just sit there in bed at night and watch it. Look at the pictures and read some of the articles. I love the photographs.
I mean top photography and again, occasion up familiar with the magazine. It's a high gloss high slick magazine. It doesn't feel like a regular magazine. It's really I've never seen the cover is so thick.
What kind of heavy paper stock is that? Thanks. Thanks so much. Yeah, it's a rare breed. The income paper magazines are getting a little more rare.
Think on paper magazines that are using very nice paper like that. There aren't that many. So and that's that kind of stands as a part. We do it on purpose.
All right. Thank you, Mike Bino. Are either of our Wisconsin magazine. Talk to you in two months.
Great to be with you. Don will look forward to it. Okay. So I know.
