I was found that the owners always have to do all the Monday and things and let's call it
a smile.
She's cooking bottle wash.
That's what my dad would say.
There you go.
There you go.
Okay.
You're shorter than I thought.
Yeah.
You can't do everything.
I know.
I know.
You know, when I was program director here for years, one of the managers, I was doing everything.
I was still opening gates for people for the guy mowing our lawn.
I was, you know, getting him to take him out the trash.
But it's good work.
It's good work.
It's way better than shoveling manure at the Lockwood black walnut farm in Worcester, Ohio.
So.
That's right.
Is this farm still there?
The farm is still there.
Although my mom and dad sold it this past September.
About a year ago, this year, we were, we were shoveling out all of the stuff and we
were cleaning out all of the trinkets and bobbles and then mom and dad moved to Florida.
Mom paw.
Mom paw.
Now, do you feel like, have you gone back there since?
I am going in two weeks.
Okay.
I have been back there.
Yes.
Do you feel like you still have the right to walk on that property?
No.
Now, you don't have the right, but do you feel like you still have the right?
I don't.
You know, for my wife, so one of her birthdays, I went back.
I'm not from here.
She's from Union Grove, though.
And I went back to the house she grew up in.
I knew where it was.
And I knocked down the door and I said, I said, I am on the level.
I just, I wanted my wife to take a tour of the house to see the house she grew up in.
Here are photographs of her in front of the house when she was a little kid.
And the guy, and I was going to get the police chief to help me get in there and all that stuff.
So the guy said, oh, no, come on in.
And as he said, when do you want to come in?
So Union Grove, though.
And I said, well, he just bought the house.
And he said, yeah, she can come over this weekend.
He has come on over.
And he said, bring more picture.
I'd love to see what this place looked like back, you know, a thousand years ago.
So anyway, when in there was very nice.
And I went back to her second place.
And the guy said, sure, but he wasn't there when we went there.
But yeah, the guy just let us come in and she told stories of how this became this.
And that became that.
It was kind of interesting, but, you know,
some people won't let you in when I was when I was little growing up in in Worcester, Ohio, the thriving betropolis.
I had I had that was so my parents were like working and whatnot in my sisters and I were home.
And this this lady came to our door and said the same thing.
And so I've been able to like be able to be go full circle.
But I have I have my friend Ron Kurtz who still lives on the on the old Fox Lake road lives.
It actually works across the street from my parents old house.
He sends me pictures now.
They took down the fence, Denise.
They did this, Denise.
They took down the big tree.
So I've been like having this running documentary of what happened to the house.
Well, I have never gone back to the house.
Yeah.
That I grew up in.
Oh, we went back to visit the house in the Bronx where I grew.
And where I started.
We went there, but the house in Massapigua.
I, you know, it was okay.
I don't know anybody in the neighborhood.
Everybody's dead.
Who was in the neighborhood.
So they're all new people.
And I don't know who they are.
So I don't bother going back.
But it's fun.
You know, for me, like the that particular house when we grew up,
I grew up in a couple of different places prior to that.
But that particular place had my heart and soul.
I ate a lot of dirt there, right?
I learned to barrel race.
I learned to show pigs.
We, we, I just ate a lot of dirt in that house.
It was, it was where I, I got my chops of, of actually entrepreneurship
because my dad taught us how to, to buy new more animals.
And so we had like a little like animal purchasing plan with my dad
because he sat us down.
I said, I want to buy a horse when I was 11 years old.
He's like, okay, let me, let me show you how to budget, right?
So, you know, it was those kind of things that really made me who I am.
And so it's a very special place for me.
So, now his daughter is a crime-busting reporter.
He would not say that.
For a seeking county eye.
How are things going ever seen county eye good?
Fabulous. Fabulous.
You got new offices.
I am so excited.
Now, where are the, where are the offices?
So, you know, the old, or like, melted milk factory right across the street
from sacred heart.
Yeah, there's coffee shops there and everything that.
Yeah, in fact, we're going to be right next to the coffee shop, the inclusive bean.
The address is 1926.
I can say that officially because I signed the lease.
A little on the scary side, but we're fine.
We're fine.
So, we're going to have half of the second floor to,
the space is really interesting.
This is the old machine shop.
And I love walking back in there.
And you just feel the energy of the time period of which that was built.
There's cobblestones.
The buildings are big and old.
But they've all been rehabbed in Bell City Square is what it's called now.
But we have that lease.
And basically, half of the space is going to be, it's a very large space for our tiny little newsroom.
So, it's about 1900 square feet and half of it is going to be our newsroom.
The other half is going to be called the thought collective.
And we are going to host a lot of thought leadership kind of projects around there.
A lot of events that we're going to do some live podcasting.
We're, I really want to bring people together that can meet news makers.
So, we put a lot of energy into writing news.
And I thought, you know what?
Why am I in the way?
Why don't we get these folks together and really solve some of these issues that we have
so that we can have better policy making and a better community.
And that's really what I think we, the soul of our scene and our scene county needs right now.
So, high school sports huge.
We have high school sports on here.
Dick recephadas are basketball and football.
You're branching out to do a whole high school sports section now.
I want to talk about that.
So exciting about that as well.
So, our good friend Matt Herdesty, he is kind of spearheading that.
And he was with the journal times and he came over to her scene county.
I also have Nick Payne Jr.
And Rob Lour who used to also be with the JT.
He was doing some on again.
Like he does some special projects.
He's not like going to be consistent.
But he's consistently going to be covering golf.
So, I'm super jacked about that because nobody else on the face of the earth wants me writing about sports.
Because I, as my husband, Lisa remind me, root for the wrong team.
You do?
I do sometimes.
I'm horrible.
What you have to do is go to the betting tables in Vegas.
The sports bet.
Find out who you think is going to win and bet the other team.
There you go.
There you go.
And I'll make a fortune.
No, sports writing is a very different type of journalism.
And so, there is a nuance to it that I do not own.
And I own that part of me.
But you had to find someone who did own it.
Right.
Right.
That's all you got to do.
Find the right people.
Do everything yourself that's just find the right people to do it.
We're very lucky here to have Mike Clemens, who lives and breathes sports.
And he's got ins with it with the packers and the brewers and the badgers where he can get in there.
Right.
He knows the coaches.
He knows the managers.
He knows.
So, he's in on all these things.
So, he gets right up on.
Well, somebody should be because Denise isn't going to do it.
I mean, neither.
My mother would let me play high school sports.
She says, I don't want you getting hurt.
You know, they want them to play basketball in high school because I was, you know, six, four, six, whatever.
And my mother said, no, no, I know what you're getting hurt.
You're not going to play it.
So, I played a league that was under the lights of summer league.
I didn't play in high school.
And Mr. Sweeney, who was our gym teacher and basketball coach, what do you mean your mother said, no.
I said, my mother said, no.
They won't be getting hurt.
Oh, no.
Did you agree with that mother decision?
Yeah, I didn't like doing it.
Yeah.
You know, I was at the school.
I had other things I wanted to do.
I was in the drama club.
I was too.
I was too.
But I couldn't speak to that.
So, yeah, I was the stage manager.
I was in speech and debate.
I also did choir and drama.
See, I couldn't be debating because I'd say, hey, stupid.
That what a dumb opinion that is.
That's my debate.
That was kind of frowned upon.
Be liddling the other person next to you.
I thought you had to listen and really think critically, not only of what other people say, but what you're saying as well.
And so being able to take that in is one of the reasons I can do the things that I do, right?
See, I would say, I'd get up there and say, by opponents and idiot, here's the truth.
No.
That's what I would do.
And that's why I wouldn't be good at it.
I would be right.
So the sports.
And now we're seeing county eyes that we're seeing county guy dot com.
That's a scene.
Smell the word county.
E-Y-E with everything I these days, iPhone, I tech.
You gotta remember, it's actually spelled at E-Y-E dot com.
You can find everything, the sports, everything, the news, everything's right there.
It's true.
I know because I have a bookmarked on my phone.
I love this for us.
I was so happy.
I got a bookmarked.
I love, you know, what I love about the what's going on in media is that collaboration.
And that's the juice that we really need, especially since, you know, this is a hard
business, Don Rosen.
It's done.
It's darn hard to do this work.
And so being able to collaborate with you guys and with TMJ4 and WGTD.
All of that helps elevate the work that we're doing.
And I couldn't.
I'm so grateful that we we have the cupcake.
And Stuart, when he does the news, he doesn't have 20 minutes to describe a story.
He's got a few seconds.
He'll give you the newest headlines.
And he always says for a more in-depth look, go to Racine County.
I know real estate.
You guys have all the time in the world because it's online where he doesn't have it.
He's got a few seconds because we got to get back to playing the Rolling Stones.
I know.
Details matter.
But I want to go back to some of the other things that we're going to have.
So just to kind of give a little flavor of some of the events that we're having.
We're actually going to be doing a whole series called Made in Racine.
And it's all going to be about elevating historical stories about things and people
that were made in Racine.
And we're the first one is we're going to be doing some live podcasting.
The first one is called Haunted Racine.
In November is Makers of Mavericks.
And in December we're hosting a podcast called A Very Racine Holiday.
You know, we had a guest on our show, Rory Graves.
I just heard about her.
We wrote the book Haunted Racine.
And if you go to our lobby, you'll see the first place award from the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association.
It was my interview with Rory Graves.
Really?
And we won first place in the entire state of Wisconsin.
I literally just heard about her just yesterday through a friend.
And I asked my one of my reporters, Cheyenne Linciani,
to reach out to Rory.
So Rory, if you're listening, contact us.
Yeah.
She, I mean, the story she could tell you, they're on the book.
Right.
But I asked her to pick out some of the, you know, the best scary one.
My skin was, you know, crawling.
Listen to these stories.
Did she tell you about Roseman's bar?
No, she didn't tell me that.
She told me, maybe you'll have to have us on in October.
She told me the story.
I will.
The story she told it's two of them.
One was about on Main Street.
The, I think it would, it's like you're one of the fraternal organizations owns the.
Oh, Masonic Temple.
Masonic Temple.
Actually, the Wendy Spencer is going to be at our Haunted Racine podcast.
Yeah.
So we're featuring her and Ron Helmick.
And she told this, or Ron Helmick, he's been in here before.
And he came with a little ghost thing to see if there's any spirits in the building.
Did he find any?
It was like a little ghostbusters thing.
I know.
Well, he, he was in a cast for this leg.
And he couldn't go to our basement where it probably would have been.
Okay.
And I didn't want him going down the steps of that cast on his leg because he'd be the next spirit
haunting the building.
Yeah, don't do that.
So anyway, as she told the story about, as the cover of the book, about a school, it's
like, um, I guess on, 14th Street, where a century is there.
Are you talking about Taylor home?
No, not Taylor home.
Not Taylor home.
There's another school there.
And, uh, I guess kids were digging there.
And back in the 1800s, there were bodies buried there.
Uh-huh.
And they found the bones.
Yes.
She told some great stories.
And I could have gone two hours with her.
She, we were born about twice because they were so good.
So we'll bring her back this October again.
Rory Graves.
That's a great name.
I know.
Rory Graves.
Hi.
Oh.
And she comes in.
And I had the book.
And I'm like, I guess it's true.
I think haunted stories are so much fun to tell, especially from a journalistic standpoint.
Because you know, you're like, people are sometimes skeptics, but we just love the story,
right?
It's up to you on what you believe and don't believe.
But at the end of the day, it's a fun story.
Well, the interview was so good.
Yeah.
I mean, she told that the people who judged the awards for the state of Wisconsin, that's
first place.
That's amazing.
And so we wanted with Rory Graves, the best interview in the state of Wisconsin.
I love this.
She was good.
I mean, she, she had me scared because she knows I had to tell a story.
Right.
I mean, yeah, you got to get hold of Rory Graves.
And another one is the Beast of Bray Road.
There is a check that one out.
There's the author.
And I met her, the woman that wrote it.
And I can't remember her name to save my life right now.
She used to be the librarian for the, one of the West End schools.
I want to say Dover School.
Kansas Phil School, right?
That's, that's the one.
And so she had written, written, she was a journalist and she was bored one day, which sometimes
we were out in the West of the eye, right?
And she started digging through the DNR files, the Department of Natural Resource Files,
and found this whole file of the, this beast that they keep kept getting calls on the DNR
at all file.
The beast of Bray Road.
You know, you mentioned Maiden Racine.
Right.
So we're out in Murdo, South Dakota.
Have you heard of it?
Nope.
Nope.
Nope.
Okay.
I didn't think it did.
Nobody ever heard of Murdo.
But it's on the interstate on our way to Mount Rushmore.
Okay.
So we stop in Murdo because there is an auto museum there.
They're being claimed to fame as they have Elvis's motorcycle.
So we stop by because, you know, we can do something, you know, it's a nice trip.
The person who works there also has people that live, work at Ascension in Bracine.
So there's a tie right there.
So we're walking through and it's just acres and acres and acres of old cars.
But they're antique cars and they're in good condition.
One barn after another and after that, I said, I can't see anymore.
I mean, so we come across the last barn and there it is, the J.I.
Case Car.
Oh.
It looks like a model to you.
I can't tell the difference.
Right.
But it's a J.I.
Case Car and everything there's for sale.
How fun is that?
Yeah, everything.
So here I am in Murdo, South Dakota, and I see the J.I.
Case Car manufactured in Racine.
That is fun.
That is fun.
Doesn't like when you when you have feel that connection, what does that do for you?
Yeah, it does.
It does.
It gives you a lot of civic pride.
Why?
And I told the people back.
I said, you know, that car is made from where I come from Racine.
And the guy was telling, well, I got a relative, works in Racine.
That's fun.
I mean, so there's a can in Murdo, South Dakota.
Right.
That's in the middle of nowhere.
Well, we at one point were the middle of nowhere.
No, this is really the middle of nowhere.
I don't think it's ever going to be anything but the middle of nowhere.
Murdo, South Dakota.
Okay.
If you look at a map, there's one named Murdo and nothing for pages and pages in your
Atlas.
Wow.
To go see, but it was when I came across that, I said, and now do you sell it?
He says, everything here is for sale for the right price.
So I would love to see.
I don't know.
We have now the museum here that we're seeing Heritage Museum has one of the
Mitchell cars there, I think.
Right.
I should get their hands on this chair.
I can't see car.
It looks like it looked a great condition.
All right, Chris Poulson from Heritage Museum.
There you go.
I hope it's still there.
If Murdo, South Dakota is one of the barons and they have all these.
It just looks like a Model T. I can't tell the day.
I'm sure there's a difference.
Okay.
Got a few more made of stuff.
Give us a quick rundown of some of the other things going on.
Oh, wait.
So we're going to we're actually planning a whole series of stories around
artificial intelligence.
Basically, what I want to start focusing on is culturally and from a
work standpoint and from a business standpoint, what does this mean to
recines economy, right?
So we've got Microsoft.
We've got a second data center that may or may not be affiliated with
Microsoft that's been proposed in Caledonia.
So what is this AI thing?
And what does it mean to us because it is a very from my understanding
dramatic change to how we do what we do, how we live our lives.
And also, I want to look at it through the lens of education.
So the question I want to know is as a parent or a grandparent watching
your children do their homework, should they be using AI?
Why?
And how do the teachers tell?
Exactly.
You know, when I was a kid, you copy that of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Yeah.
And the teacher knew it because she knew what was right.
Encyclopedia Britannica.
So we copied out of there today, you've got AI and you can tell AI,
change the wording.
Right.
How do you know?
How can you tell the difference?
I think I think there's a lot of big questions.
But also when you're finding work, the type of work is changing, right?
And I'm really sensitive to this specifically in Racine because one
out of five people of working age in Racine doesn't have a GED.
And so the pivot to different types of work is going to be substantive.
And from a trend standpoint, I'm really keyed into like Department of Workforce,
the data, the nerdy side of this.
I really want to keep on top of so that I can help the community,
pivot, adapt, figure it out, be that place where people can figure things out.
So that's what I'm planning.
You know, I put those to you.
You started from nothing.
I'm saying caveat.
And you know, it's difficult to take on the other major news source in town,
I'm eating the newspaper, but I think you got it at the right time.
It's been 13 years in the making front.
Yeah, you couldn't have done this 20-some odd years ago because the journal
times are so huge.
Right.
And newspapers today, I hate to say it because I still love newspapers.
They're on the decline.
And it's a hard business, especially I think one of the things that really stuck
with me when I was starting my career in journalism.
I actually did a story that has zero to do with journalism and everything
to do with the business that I'm in.
So I did a story on agricultural sustainability.
And as I was watching a lot of our neighbors, family farms, disappear.
And I did a story on an ag economist that was giving his speech at the Ohio
Agricultural Research and Development Center.
And he said, do you know why we don't have buggy whips?
Are buggy whips manufacturing?
And it's not because they weren't good at making buggy whips.
It's because people, the companies failed to understand the industry they were in.
And that's stuck with me.
That was the weirdest thing.
It was like very telling.
And that always stuck with me as a business owner that you need to pivot.
I keep this here, right?
These are carts.
It's a radio thing.
All the music, all the commercials used to be on these in the 50s and 60s.
They no longer used anymore because they're taking it.
This is archaic.
Nobody touches this anymore.
But I keep five of them right here to remind me where I came from.
You know, that's funny.
You say that because when I was a little Denise, my grandpa and I had all of...
We had Modge Podge, these masked heads of these newspapers from 1973,
onto these just cheap little pieces of board.
And I have them hanging in my office.
And I look at them frequently because most of those newspapers are gone.
And it's not that newspapers are bad.
It has zero to do with that.
It's that we've changed our...
The meat, how we consume news.
Oh, yeah.
And I go with the flow.
This is all computerized.
I mean, I go with the flow.
It wasn't like this when I started way back and...
But we have to go with the flow very quickly on this AI stuff
because it's very, very hyper-disruptive.
But also, there's a lot of opportunity that if you've got a mindset of pivot,
you can ride, like, have an entirely different life
because you knew what was coming.
Denise Lockwood, founder, Racine County guy,
so much coming up, follow RacineCountyI.com.
Spell out the words RacineCounty and EYE.com.
If you missed any of this little chat we were having here,
it's going to be podcast tomorrow morning.
So you can listen to WRJN.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's going to be everywhere.
Thank you, Denise.
Always fun having it here.
How is so fun?
Do you want me to get some bail money so when you go back to your farm?
Do you want us to start a collection now?
So when you go on the property?
No, I don't want to have to because I have Ron Kurt who works
at the John Deere dealership across the street.
He's a fees fund.
He's going to bail your out?
He has to bail me out.
You're bailing me out, I promise.
Thank you, Denise.
Always fun having it here.
You're going to have it here more often.
Always fun talking.
