So the other day I opened up the mail and there was my new issue of our Wisconsin magazine.
I just up for another two years and I said, I hope the subscription goes through and
it did.
And I got my new April May issue of our Wisconsin magazine.
My wife and I look so forward to this magazine every two months and we stretch it out reading
the articles so they don't, you know, all go away in a month.
And with me is the editor of our Wisconsin magazine, Mike Bino.
And again, I praise you.
I don't know how you put this thing together every two months.
It's such a wonderful magazine.
The pictures, the gloss, the stories, the way it's well written and kudos to your staff
for putting this together.
Well, thank you so much, Don.
It's, I'm glad to know somebody's reading it.
That's, it feels good when somebody notices some of the small things that we put in.
You mentioned the color of the pictures.
We try very hard to make the color pop as so many magazines are kind of going by the
boards these days.
I'm talking, you know, about in-con paper and they're trying to survive.
They're going to lighter paper, they're going to smaller sizes.
It's not quite what they used to be.
We take it in the opposite direction.
We kind of gamble and we think people like the tactile heft of it of the good paper,
the glossy paper and the bright color that we try to bring forth.
So for those who like to put their feet up by the fire, it's been cold lately.
Put your feet up by the fire and have little relaxing or entertaining reading.
That's what we're going for, not looking at a little screen.
Let me write that down, tactile heft, maybe that's redundant.
I'll probably never be able to use it in a sentence in my life, but I'm going to write
it down just in case it comes up for discussion, tactile heft, maybe sound like a college graduate.
Okay.
Let's talk about some of the articles in here.
I saw the eat corn article.
It's funny how just spotting that word, a corn brought back a childhood memory of when
I was a little kid, I must have been about five years old, four or five years old going
to Michael Tillelli's house, he had an oak tree in his backyard and we used to get buckets
and buckets of acorns and we were going to sell them five years old to go door to door trying
to sell acorns.
Some people just gave you a dime and said, keep the acorns, but we used to get buckets
and buckets of these from his oak tree.
And I'm reading this story and it brought back those memories from a long time ago.
And you can make money, you were reaching out to the wrong market.
The Wisconsin DNR will pay people to harvest acorns.
There is a program you can look online to harvest acorns, bring them viable acorns, the
ones that sink in water are viable, the ones that float aren't used, aren't usable.
They then take them to the DNR nurseries and make seedlings.
And they rely on citizens to find the big caches, crops of acorns and bring them to them.
And I don't know what you can make, but I don't think anybody is getting rich on it,
but I think that memories, how long does that memory you're talking about?
I don't want to age it, but I mean, it turns it.
1961.
Okay, and you never forgot it, so the story, I'm glad you told me that because you're
connecting.
This is, the story was written by Matt Noon of Madison and by the way, our readers of
the magazine are invited to chip in their stories and very few in here are professionally
written.
They may be helped with little editing, but Matt Noon of Madison, he came from Connecticut,
loved some of the big trees that he saw as a kid, he'd go with his bicycle and go hunting
big trees.
He was just taken with these very old, oh, hundreds of years old.
He moved to Madison Dane County as a environmental resources planner, and he became the head of
the Dane County Tree Board and took on the inventory of keeping tabs on the largest
and oldest trees in Madison.
Those are usually oaks around here, usually white oaks down there, so passing 200 years
of age, and he spent two summers doing that with his young son.
His young son got four or five years old, went along with dad, and he taught his son
about acorns, and he taught his son that from that tiny little seed with that jaunty cap,
that's where these big trees come from.
So he goes to pick up the kid at kindergarten, and he comes breathlessly back, dad, dad,
wait till you see the acorns I found, and okay, okay, follow them.
The kid found a tree that was dropping so many acorns near his school that you couldn't
see the pavement, and they started, they collected over three to five years, fifty thousand
of them, from five or six trees.
This was the most this man had ever seen from any tree, okay?
The beauty of it is this five-year-old recognized it and found the mother load, and from there
they got the principal of the school involved.
Now many elementary schools are involved getting kids to not only harvest acorns, but they've
set up small nurseries and they're growing seedlings for transplanting all around Wisconsin.
There's five or six schools, and there's more.
They set up a whole heritage or progeny project, and they've got seven self-sufficient
nurseries just in Dame County alone, a thousand trees they've grown from it, and there's
probably eight or ten elementary schools involved, so they've set up a little learning program
with that could be absorbed into curricula of elementary schools, and they're letting
this go statewide.
And isn't that cool from that one little acorn in this kid?
The money grows.
There we go, oak trees are good, deer love them, turkeys love them, all wildlife love
them.
And you know, one little side note here, several years ago, my brother who's an optometrist,
one of his patients comes in, it's Michael Tillelli, and he goes, wait a second, do you live
on Westgate Road?
He goes, yeah, he said, you go to school with my brother, Donald, he goes, yeah, what
are the chances of that, happening like, you know, 40 years later?
He's an eye doctor, and so what he, you know, he could spot acorns early on, and I'm
way down on the ground, so I mean, prophecy was going on right there.
Mike Bito is here with me this morning, and he's the end of their power with scouts
in magazine.
We're talking about some of the articles in there.
If you haven't ever seen this, if you've never seen this magazine before, you've got to
check it out.
It's just a beautiful work of art, this magazine.
Let's talk about descendants from the American Revolutionary War, the Suns.
Now we all heard of the D.A.R., the daughters of the American Revolution, but you and I both
said, we never heard of the Suns of the American Revolution, but obviously they're there,
right?
Yeah, I heard about this from a fellow named Bruce Deadman, originally from Green Bay,
he lives up in near Luxembourg, and our field editor for Brown County, we have people's
volunteers being our eyes and ears in counties all across Wisconsin.
They write stories, but they also tip us off on stories.
And Bruce said, you ever hear of the Suns of the American Revolution?
I just became a member.
Well, no, I'd never heard of that, but the Suns are about as old as the daughters of the
American Revolution.
It turns out.
And to be a member, you need to prove lineage to a revolutionary war ancestor, somebody
who was served, and they have methods for doing that.
It sounds difficult.
But if you establish that, then you can be part of this group.
And what drew me to this story in particular was a more Wisconsin native.
I never knew that there are 41 veterans of the American Revolution, soldiers buried in
Wisconsin.
They made their way here after everything happened to the Lexington and Concord and up
and down the East Coast.
They made their way here, and some are Native Americans from Wisconsin.
And they were big in that whole phrase well from the coast down out to here eventually.
Highly interesting, like I said, I always think of Massachusetts when I think of the Revolution.
Now I will tell you, my final resting place will be in Union Grove, Wisconsin.
Not the the veteran cemetery, it is the the regular folk cemetery on Highway 45.
It's a smaller cemetery in Highway 45.
I think it's called Union Grove Memorial Cemetery.
And my plot is going to be right and back of a Green Bay Packer Hall of Famers in the
fan hall of fame.
You see all the Green Bay Packer stuff all over his tombstone and gravesite, take two steps
back, one step to the left and that's where I'm going to be.
The interesting part is when you come into the cemetery right near the opening is an
American Revolutionary War veteran buried there.
So you say they buried all of Wisconsin.
There's one right in Union Grove.
They redid the tombstone because the older tombstones, they'll sandstone once they just
kind of fade away, but they put a nice one there now to mark his gravesite.
America, and I stood there staring at I said, there is somebody who fought in the American
Revolutionary War six feet below me.
I mean, that's something when you think about that.
It is.
It's a neat tie to history.
And the sons of the American Revolution in Wisconsin, they have a website with a listing
of all the veterans' websites.
They go in ten the graves.
It's wissar.org, W-I-S-S-A-R, dot org.
They've got all these sites noted.
They're all over the state.
As I mentioned, are tied to the United Nation, some are tied to the Stockbridge tribe,
but they're not all Native Americans.
And it's a piece of history that's not always thought of, not in bringing this forward.
And America is 250th birthday this year, I think, is interesting.
The sons of the American Revolution, you can see them, they do color guards at different
events.
You'll probably see them on 4th of July parades, for sure, around the state.
But they also will come to schools, middle schools, usually, and give presentations, wearing
their full regalia with their three quarters in the whole works.
And they have a chest of relics of the war that travels with them, and they, it's kind
of show and tell.
They let the kids have hands on with some of these musket balls and things like that.
They go along with, you know, you see pictures, pictures painted from back then.
Interesting history that they bring to life with a lot of color, memorial days coming
up, color guards are all around.
That website I told you about wissar.org.
You can go there too and find out where they are performing the flag ceremonies, color
guard, and also you can set up something at a school if you want to.
Spell out the wissar.
Okay, that is w-i-s-s-a-r dot org.
Yeah, pretty easy to figure out.
We do at every year, we go to the Union Grove Sanitary because my father-in-law and my mother-in-law
buried there.
And the local American Legion post does a gun salute.
They do the whole thing, plane taps, and they pick one person out of this cemetery has
been a vet.
My father-in-law was in the Marines during the Korean War.
And so they, they do that.
We don't miss it.
We're there for that and they bring a high school around to play the trumpet and it's
really good.
And that's the way we spend our Memorial Day morning, every Memorial Day because you got
to remember what the holidays about.
I mean, it's about having fun and everything, but the real reason is to salute the veterans
who died.
Now my father-in-law didn't die in the war, but he served.
And to remember all those people that died, their one rule is at Union Grove, like when
I had my father-in-law scheduled a year in advance, they said, if someone dies, it's
in a current war and they pass away in the buried here, we do them first.
And I said, that's fair, luckily no one died in a war.
It was a buried in Union Grove.
Talking to Mike Bino from Our Wisconsin Magazine, we got a whole bunch of stories we got
to get to.
Including the bird story, we've got the Ice Age Trail Stork, that's a whole bunch
we got to get to within.
They're in the latest issue of Our Wisconsin Magazine, how do you get the magazine, Mike?
Well, you can get the magazine pretty simply, it's with a simple phone call.
You can call 1-877-717-8925.
And I just stopped it for two years.
I didn't want to do it every year.
Just do a two-year subscription and get a big discount, and that's what I do when I was
out here.
Well, bless you.
You went for the two-year option.
And you suck it, I could depend on you.
I fell for it.
We got him.
Yeah, Our Wisconsin, I was worried that I wasn't going to get the latest issue, because sometimes
when you're new subscriptions, there's a leg time, not a leg time with me.
Speaking with Mike Bino, editor of Our Wisconsin Magazine, the new issue, the April May issue
is out.
And we're chatting about some of the articles in there, but we don't go so in-depth, you've
got to read the articles yourself to go more in-depth.
I want to talk about the, the bird guy, the bird man of Wisconsin, out in Sparta.
Okay.
This guy, the bird man of Sparta, he, by Fort McCoy, he takes care of birds and those bird
houses.
And then I've got a story to tell you.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, we, who doesn't love Bluebirds?
The Bluebird of Happiness, Henry David Thorough famously said they carried the bird that
carries the sky on their backs.
Oh, I like that.
Yeah, that's lyrical.
He thorough the naturalist.
So we got a Bluebird on the cover.
And we have a feature story about a fella named Gordon Weber from Sparta.
Now, back in about 1964, when he was in high school, he started on a project, building nest
boxes to help Bluebirds, help propagate Bluebirds.
There are species that needs to nest in cavities.
And cavities are a little bit difficult to find.
A Robin can weave a nest with mud and any kind of grass it can find, sticks and twigs.
They're very resourceful.
These birds, these Bluebirds need cavities.
They need a hole to get into.
They need to be protected in that way.
But snags like that are in short supply and also predators can also get in them fairly
easily.
And there's a number of things that like to dine on their eggs and can mess up the nesting.
So this is a species you can give a little hand to.
At one time in Wisconsin, there was only 700 nesting pairs.
But people like Gordon and other Bluebird boosters in the state, in 2024, they counted 17,660
fledglings.
And that's a 16% increase over 2023.
So this is a simple project that people can do, even involving kids, that can have a very
big impact.
And Bluebirds keep the insect population beaten back.
Gordon, now, okay, he's a military veteran, he's in his retirement years, the caretaker
for 90 Bluebird and nest boxes running online on the southern part of Fort McCoy, 264 total
at the military post.
In addition, so he gets on his ATV, he's got to cover a lot of ground.
And what he does is, first of all, he's involved with keeping these things up.
The houses need to be repaired.
They need little screen predator guards on them.
They need to be cleaned out, maintained a little bit every spring, looked them over.
But then he monitors the birds coming to these boxes.
So he's saddles up his ATV to cover miles and miles and miles.
And it'll take him over five hours to make that run, and then boxes are numbered.
And then he keeps tabs on his, who's nesting in it, who's nesting in a box, who's not,
if there are Bluebirds in there, then he keeps tabs on the clutches of eggs.
They lay three to six eggs.
And then he keeps tabs on how many hatchlings nest out of there.
You can tell if an egg was viable and if a bird came out of it by examining the eggshells,
the way they're left, the membrane, things like that.
And he keeps count.
In addition to this, he's got his own private trail with 22 boxes.
So anyway, the man is into it, and he's doing this voluntarily.
And it's something that's highly worthy.
And I think that if somebody wants to involve kids or grandkids in a hands-on project, you
don't need to have thousands of acres, I've seen them on golf courses.
It could be anywhere there's open fields.
You can put up Bluebird houses, but you need to watch them a little bit.
And that's part of the learning.
Bluebird caretakers, they meet annually at Wisconsin Garden and Green Living Expo at
the Alliance Center in Madison, Bluebird, the BRAW Bluebird Recovery Association Wisconsin.
They've got 900 members and they're monitoring 7,000 nest boxes.
So there's a lot of information out there of people wanting to get involved.
The Bluebird of Happiness.
It is.
I love watching birds.
And this is story I read this morning.
Actually, I saw the video yesterday on my prep service.
This is out of New York City.
A tiny American woodcock became a star in Bryant Park.
That's in Lower Manhattan by performing.
It's cute little dance for spectators.
Now, the describe, he's just like, he's keeping the beat with his body and it's just walking
around, keeping the beat.
You can actually put a song to it.
It really is cute.
People are stopping by after work to check out the bird, do his thing.
They're even making friends with other bird fans.
These are diehard New Yorkers.
And in the city that rarely pauses, it's cool that one small bird is giving people
a reason to connect with nature and each other.
What they, one of the bird, aficionados there said that these birds looking for a green
spot to take a rest on their travels.
And of course, in Manhattan, you got Central Park and that's about it.
They're very little green spots, but in Bryant Park, this little American woodcock found
the spot and he's just there.
He's resting.
He's not what, they don't miss any, that's his dance and everybody starts, wow, look
at that.
Taking videos of him.
And one guy said, and this is a quote from him, I came down to see what all the hype
was to see was really hype and he says, you know what?
It lived up to it.
So they're coming down from all these big tall skyscrapers to watch his American woodcock
a little birdie in Bryant Park in Lower Manhattan.
Isn't that something?
I'm, I'm heartened to hear that there are woodcock in New York City, woodcock, there
are many around Wisconsin, they are a migratory bird and they're famous, we're going back
to Thoreau, but many writers have talked lyrically about how they saw, they dance, they fly
up into the skies, part of their mating ritual, usually in the evenings and they're
drawn to wetlands, they've, they've got a long, long beak and they find their, their
worms and their food in, in wet areas.
And they're, I would say they're, they're an indicator species of when there's a decent
little piece of habitat there.
So New York, I wouldn't have thought about that, but they're drawn to wetlands and you
can find them there, oh, usually in the fall, usually about September, something like
that, but this time of year, they're migrating as well.
So they're, they're a harbinger of spring, they are around in the fall, some hunters hunt
them, but mostly they're laying off on these days.
And it's, there's a heritage of them in the, in the state of Wisconsin and I'm, I'm glad
that you brought that up.
Yeah, it's, the, the person said he's on a journey and the stop for a few days and he'll
be on his journey again and probably never come back.
So enjoy it while you can.
I saw the video channel seven, I witnessed news in New York City that old story on this,
on this little bird and the people watching him and they're, you see the smiles on these
faces when he does his dance, they are, they're looking birds, they have that, they have
a big eye, they have a long, long bill, they have short wings, they're not all that big.
And somebody once said they look like a bird that was put together with a bunch of parts
from other birds.
Aww.
This one's so cute.
We're talking with Mike Bino, out of the Ravara, Wisconsin magazine, there's so many things
of this new issue of Ravara, Wisconsin magazine, the April May issue, I just stopped for another
two years.
So I can relax.
I'm set.
I'm going to work.
It's going to go in my mailbox every, every two months.
Let's talk about testing the waters, hitting the road, Wakashaw County, and when you get
to Ten Gymnese Paws, I will do that.
Wakishaw, actually I lived in Wakishaw for a while, that's the way they say it there.
And nowhere else when I grew up in Green Bay, I always heard of Wakishaw.
So in Wakishaw, spring city, spring city, in the spring's era, they call it 1868 to
about 1914.
Wakishaw was famous for its helpful spring water.
It became known as the Saratoga of the West.
Doctors, when people were feeling a little peaked, would recommend that they go there and
try some of the helpful waters, that there were public baths, there were places, downtown
Wakishaw tied to this.
And it was big business, people would come in on the trains from great distances away
to partake of the helpful spring water.
To over time, that phased out, and to this day, there is still some of that going on, just
south of Wakishaw, Wakishaw townships, heading toward the Littleberg of Big Bend, down
off Iway 164, there is Hygia Spring, okay?
The Greek goddess of health, Hygia.
And the owners of this little piece of property have a standpipe coming up, they have a pretty
little park, and it's across from the local church and in plain view, and people are
invited to come there, bring their vessels, their jugs, what have you, and stand at this
little spigot at the standpipe and take all you want home.
We do that here at the Rustic Springs in Kenosha, same thing.
Super.
So you can still get some of this water, some of this Wakishaw water, that's just the
beginning of it.
Talking about 10 chimneys, I don't want to run out of time, you're moved to 10 chimneys.
Okay, 10 chimneys, that's a little bit further away, that's kind of a little bit west
town heading into.
Genesee Calmerane, and there were two famous stage actors, Lynn Fontaine and Alfred Lunt,
and they retired to this place in Genesee Depot, 10 chimneys, it's a beautiful mansion,
not all that big as mansions go, but it's beautifully adorned with antiques in such
a period.
You have something, have you been there four times, and I went there, my wife bought me
an evening with, what is the guy's name from Turner Classic, when he was the first host
of TCM, I just went out of my head, bought me an evening with him, and he's no longer with
us, but I got to talk to him, and they have these people come in from master classes and
so forth, where you can speak to actors, they come in, they chat with people.
Here are some of the famous people that have stayed over as guests of the Lunt Fontaine,
and by the way, there's a Broadway theater, because you're Broadway musical or something,
Broadway show, the Lunt Fontaine theater on Broadway, named after them.
Here are some of the famous people that slept over there as guests of the Lunt Fontaine's
Noel Coward, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Catherine Hepburn, Helen Hayes, Carol Channing, Helen
Hayes, the list goes on and on and on, of all these famous people that stayed there, 10
chimneys, 10 chimneys, 10 chimneys, and I got to tell you, it's in Genesee Depot,
and back in the day, that was a big schlep to get out to Genesee Depot.
I mean, it's not like he could just, you know, hop on a train and be right there or a bus,
and these people did it because it was out in the country, it was relaxing, it was a beautiful
home, and by the way, you can take tours of 10 chimneys, the home and everything.
They have docent's giving out the tours on a regular basis, they have a beautiful gift
shop there and you walk the grounds and just to know that you're in the bedroom with
Sir Lawrence Olivier slept, whoa, a great is that.
So anyway, I loved it, four times we went.
Is there actually 10 chimneys?
Yes, they claim there are, didn't count them, but the docent's say yes, there are because
there are fireplaces all over the property, and you have to count the outhouses too,
they have like the smoke houses, things like that that have chimneys in them, you count
them all.
I've heard there are 11 chimneys, but I don't know, I can't count that high, but she's
it was an English actress and she took to the woods here, you're in the Kettle Marine,
which is, you know, that rolling, glaciated part of Wisconsin, which, you know, you've got
a lot of highs and lows in with the woodlands around it, it's a very special place.
And it doesn't surprise me that they would leave the big city and retreat to a place
like this.
It's still very wooded and pretty.
Yeah, they were the toast of Broadway.
They lived in Manhattan and they were in all these Broadway shows together.
They made one movie together, only one, wasn't a hit movie, it was just, it's notable
that they were both in it together and that's it.
But Alfred Lunt was the, was the cook, the, he loved cooking.
You can go into his kitchen where all the cooking was done.
It looks antiquated by today's standards, but this is where he had the guests and he made
all the dinners for his guests.
He made him from scratch and it's very, it's interesting.
I love going through that place.
And by the way, we're just running out of time, and I gotta tell you, you have a contest,
a monthly contest, a bi-monthly contest now where you have to spot the hidden W's in
the ads in the magazine.
And I was looking through the list of winners and I see you had a winner from Brown Deer,
Wisconsin, where I used to live at home in Brown Deer.
I see you had a winner from there.
And Newport Richie Florida, where my daughter lives, there's a winner down there too.
So I guess you have subscribers all over the country, huh?
We have subscribers in all 72, Wisconsin counties in all 50 states, several foreign countries
as well.
Yeah, we're the hidden W contest.
Very briefly, we hide three W's in ads sprinkled somewhere throughout the magazine, challenge
readers to find them and they can get in on prizes.
We'll have about a hundred dollar value to a prize, there'd be anywhere from 30 to 40
of them in an issue.
They're donated by the advertisers.
And yes, we list all the winners, the 40 winners of this drawing.
There's go right to that list and look for their neighbors and they call their neighbors
and say, hey, you won, you won.
And sometimes that's the way people find out because we send out paper meal to them and
say, here's what you want.
Here's how you get your prize, et cetera.
So yeah, people are, people get buzzing about that.
They look for it.
That's what I did.
I ran right to it to see anybody I know win.
And the guy in Brown Deer out of Noam, but you know, Brown Deer is a small little town.
And also Newport Richie said, look at the call, my daughter, somebody won, like she's
going to care.
Very, very quickly yesterday, we got a call from Bruce and Jody Will see some winners in
Boulder Junction, Wisconsin.
Same thing.
The people at their church learned that they won on age Danish Kringle from Racine.
A big package, right, is coming up to them.
All the church people started beating on them, bring it here for coffee.
You got to share with us.
Did you read the magazine?
No, I read the magazine and found the W's.
OK, real quickly again, how do you subscribe to our Wisconsin magazine?
It's very easy with a call to this number.
Just give a call to 1-877-717-8925.
And you'll get the issue every two months.
It comes in a plastic wrap and it's well protected and it's just a wonderful magazine.
We look forward to it every two months in our house and we just love it.
You do a great work and kudos to you for taking such care of the stories and passing them
on to us.
I really enjoy it.
And if you missed any part of this conversation today and the stories, they'll be podcast.
And you can check it out at WRJN.com, just search Don Rose and Show and it'll be there.
And you can listen to it again in case you missed any of it.
Michael, we'll see you again in two months.
Say hello to your staff for us.
They're very nice when I call.
I say, is Mr. Reno there?
This is Don Rose.
Oh, God, hold on.
And they parked the waters and you just have that effect on people, Don.
No, normally I get the click on the phone.
Mike, enjoy yourself, enjoy the next two months and we'll talk to you then, OK?
OK, we'll see you then, Don.
Thank you.
Mike Pito, everybody from our Wisconsin magazine.
