I cannot wait to delve into this issue, the latest issue of Our Wisconsin Magazine.
And with me on the line right now, Mike Bino, editor of Our Wisconsin.
Hi, Mike.
Hey, Don, great to be back.
And I will tell you, because of your magazine, we have picked out a perfect Labor Day weekend trip.
We're going to the Clausen Music, what do they call that?
The Clausen Family Music
Show up in that theater in in
Kaloma.
That's where we're going.
We got our tickets.
We're ready to go all based on the ad in your magazine.
Well, there the Klaus and family music show has been going for a lot of years, at least 15.
And they're in Kaloma and they have it's a very talented musical family along with their friends.
and they have many different shows there uh... they have christmas programs they will do the music up uh... music of famous performers uh... they'll do country music barn dance type things bluegrass type things uh... show tunes things like that and you eat they serve food there and uh... it's busloads people come in uh... there in coloma uh... northern end of marquette county uh... washer right in the edge
And that's a beautiful part of the state, middle of the state.
And you still have some rolling hills there and it's starting to get up toward the Central Sands country.
You chose a good one.
Any particular show you're going to see or you're just going to hear some music.
My wife chose the show.
Now I can't think of what it was because we did it back in April and now I can't.
That's how far in advance you might have to do it to get, you know, get good records.
The food there is good.
Sometimes they do Norwegian theme food.
Um, and they'll have shows like Patsy Klein or Hank Williams or, you know, name it more, more contemporary performers too.
I think she chose the greatest hits show where they do a little bit of each show.
Sure.
Yeah, the greatest hits.
A lot
of energy.
Yeah.
So that was it then, your magazine.
So we got our Labor Day weekend all planned out.
Now, thank you very much.
Well, you're way ahead of me.
Uh, and people tell us with this magazine, we printed on pretty substantial paper.
uh... slick color printing the magazines tend to hang around for a while people tell us uh... they're too good to throw away cuz uh... they they they are built on high quality paper but what they do is they will flag things that they see in the magazine that it places you know places that they think are pretty cool events places uh... scenery and they mark them for the future
and then they hang on to them and it's like, okay, let the time take a little, little, little travel here, little, and they will use this as sort of a little day trip planning tool or weekend planning tool around the state.
Let's talk about the first article in here today in the new issue, a dog that likes jet skiing.
Now, I've told you off the air, my dog like to lay around and eat and then lay around and eat.
This dog goes jet skiing in the summer.
Well, yeah, you're talking about Jack the Hound Dog now.
Pickerel Lake is about 1,200 and some odd acres around Pearson and to go that area of the state.
Because it's not far, far to the north, like where I'm sitting right now, Manitowish Waters, it's within reach of a lot of population centers such as Box River Valley, Milwaukee, Racine.
uh... not too long a drive so there's uh... it's been a very popular vacation area for generations and uh... uh... one of our readers and we invite readers to send in their stories uh... about cool things unusual things that happen in wisconsin or in their memories in their fond memories have happened in wisconsin talk about jack the dog uh... so jackie learman of appleton talks about
their summer visits up to their cottage on Pickerel Lake.
And along with them would come one of their son's dogs.
He's a hound dog mixed by the name of Jack, pretty sizable guy by the look of the photos here.
And hounds are known, if I can stereotype dogs, hounds are known for being strong trackers, as you well know, and I think we've discussed,
uh... they followed their nose there's a reason why they use uh... hounds to uh... track people track animals that find stuff and their runners they're very athletic uh... high-energy dogs in general jack was one of those okay hounds meanwhile are not known for their swimming capabilities at so much as a retriever like a labrador or or a golden uh... or a chesapeake
uh... with the big hit have heavy web feet jack for some reason love swimming jack the hound a big long and lanky hound love swimming on picro lake okay not only did he love swimming he loved hopping aboard a jet ski in the lap of the driver his uh... it is master uh... son son of jackie lerman
And go bombing around the lake as soon as he heard one of those craft revving up at the dock, this dog would go running for the dock, standing there shaking in anticipation, hoping he could get aboard.
So they'd tour him around the lake a little bit, and ears flying in the breeze, almost like a dog with his head out the pickup truck window.
That'd be done.
They'd deposit them on shore and they'd park the craft.
Well, the dog just loved the water.
He'd continue in the water.
This hound would continue swimming and playing with the kids.
Now, the most memorable thing about Jack, this big, long, lanky, glump of a dog, he'd go to get out of the lake.
But instead of just stepping up on the beach, stepping up on the shore, he swam up
to the dock, and a very rudimentary swim ladder.
Now I'm not talking about a nice one with great big rungs that are comfortable on your feet.
I'm talking about an old fashioned cobbled together one made out of pipe, probably about a one inch pipe, maybe something like that.
The side rails are pipe and the foot pads, the rungs on the way up are pipe.
Okay, not real big.
This dog would feel his way, he would climb the ladder, a hound dog climbing a ladder.
He would climb this ladder with very small pipes and he would painstakingly put one foot on one pipe and another foot on another pipe and little by little as people watched him, he climbed up to join them on the dock and they would all cheer because it was so arduous.
He needed a sherpa to help him.
He'd get up there and shake off and just, you know, as dog owners know, dogs can smile.
He'd have a big grin on his face, shaking the kids' returnum.
And for that ability and sheer joy of summer, Jack remains, he's no longer with us.
He goes back to the 70s.
Jack remains memorable on Pickerel Lake, and sometimes dogs, when they leave, they leave heart prints in your heart.
He left heart prints in their hearts, but also still on the dock, I think.
I know.
I have my dogs in urns all in my house.
All my dogs.
I have seven dogs there.
Seven dogs.
Yeah.
Well, that's from years and decades now, and most of them are beagles.
You know, there's an old saying that the dog is part of your life, but you are all of his life because they don't live that long, you know, 14 years, maybe, you know, a good life.
So, yeah.
Oh, that's good.
I'm glad I saw that story about Jack.
I love dogs.
Mike Bino from Our Wisconsin Magazine joining us this morning, as he does every other month.
We're talking about some of the stories and the latest issue of Our Wisconsin Magazine.
Before we begin, tell people how they can get their glossy copy like I have.
Well, you can give us a call at 877-717-8925.
Okay, that's good.
Could you go online anywhere in order it?
Yes, you can go online as well.
Go to our website at ourwisconsinmagmaj.com.
I guess you were afraid people couldn't spell the full word, right?
So you just went with mag, is that it?
Well, our Wisconsin is pretty long as it is.
So now magazine, you know, it's so much easier to make typos when you have unending
words.
Let's talk about moose on the loose in the latest issue.
And by the way, after that, we're going to do at home in the old world, the story about people living the stagecoach in.
But let's talk about moose on the loose now.
Moose on the loose.
That's
That's the story of Amanda Griggs, okay, an interesting young lady.
I'm gonna call her a citizen scientist.
She lives in Springstead, Wisconsin, that's far up north in Iron County, nearest cities would be Mercer Park Falls, where she makes her home.
She was an educator for many years, a teacher, and
She's good at what she does here when we connect her up with Moose in a moment.
And Amanda, she now has a full-time job.
She works in health care at one of the clinics in the area, I believe.
Amanda took a shine to the large herbivores known as Moose.
And they're in Canada.
They're in Alaska.
They're in, you know,
those farther northern climes that when you think of moose you don't usually think of wisconsin maybe minnesota and upper michigan uh... for some populations that you know actually breed and live and have young right in uh... in in those in those places you don't think wisconsin and truly the wildlife biologists uh... and books uh... that they've written on this species in wisconsin has
always considered moose to be visitors, if you will, some that have strayed over from Minnesota, that have strayed from upper Michigan, traveled around, and they're spotted here from time to time they are.
And so she was one day on her way to the grocery store in the vehicle in her car, and she was heading down Highway 47 toward Mercer, and she, it's summertime, and she spots
What's that up ahead?
That's no deer.
It was a moose, and it was a moose lumbering down the road slowly.
No one else around.
And she slowed down, stopped, and watched.
And she watched.
And she watched in fascination, because she'd never seen anything.
It was bigger than her car.
She'd never seen anything like this.
And then she starts making video with her cell phone.
and she became intrigued.
What's this guy doing around here?
Where does he live?
What's this all about?
She starts spending time, she never made it to the store that day.
So she started taking hikes with the thought, I mean way back in the bush, on her own, little young lady, on her own, looking for signs of moose.
Are they around here?
What's going on?
uh... now this is more than ten years ago she has now been on uh... uh... jihad she's been she's been moose obsessed she's now made seventy one sightings of moose in the state of wisconsin mostly in uh... iron and vile as county and she has been keeping a database of these sightings where and when okay she has
then out in the woods.
It's upland woods, but also kind of mushy, marshy environments.
These animals need water and they hang out where there is a lot of water and it's not easy walking.
She's climbed trees, she swam rivers across, tracking and following.
And everything you can think of to get close to moose.
She saw some antlers in the very beginning of her quest and some other antlers because she's in thick stuff.
Pretty soon these two bull moose are sparring.
And she's right there.
They're grunting.
They're charging.
They're sparring.
It's breeding behavior.
They're hammering into each other.
Anybody else would be frightened by that.
No, I had to stay.
Why did you have to stay, Amanda?
I had to get pictures.
I had to stay.
And that's how dedicated she is to this.
And what it's resulted in, though, it's more than a hobby, because the sightings that she has documented, she's also got other sightings from other people, because she's got websites.
And she invites people to share their sightings.
So she's got 10 years worth of sightings, 71 of which are hers.
I think there's more than a hundred and a half in the north central part of the state.
She shares that information with the professional scientists in the DNR who are look at long-term trends.
They're not real quick to say, yeah, this animal lives here for sure.
You know, they need a lot of data.
And some of her
data has changed a little bit of the thinking on an official level in the DNR.
As I mentioned before, the common belief was that among the scientists was that these moose that are in Wisconsin are just visitors.
But they've seen this database of sightings that Amanda and other people have put together here include the sightings of calves.
The bulls travel a little bit more with their big grand antlers and they're much more visible.
The cows and calves are secretive and stay a little bit more stashed away.
You're not as apt to see them.
The fact that
they
have confirmed sightings on trail cameras of calves with young.
excuse me cows with young in central kind of centrally located in the state indicate would indicate that this is a birthing area because the young the calves do not travel very far they're not trucking from state to state the little ones they're growing up they're kind of hanging in in the cover with their mother so just the fact that cabs are being documented in the state is enough
for the scientists to agree there is some natural reproduction going on here.
They agree with that, but how much of that is this just temporary?
Is this going to be long-term?
That's a lot of stuff that's open to question in the future.
But the point is, one person working for free, a volunteer citizen scientist on this quest on her own, picking up shed antlers,
taking them to schools, letting children handle them and learn about these gigantic herbivores that really are among us.
It is something really unusual, unique, cool, and that's the kind of story we look for in this magazine.
People in Wisconsin who are doing unusual things and Amanda Griggs from Springstead really is doing some unusual things.
I attended one of her lectures among children and adults and children had a local school up here.
And to see an eight-year-old pick up this moose antler, the shed moose antler, and just stare at it, and he'll drop it and all of a sudden he'll look mortifying us.
Just say, you couldn't break that if you tried, son.
You know, here, hand it to your friend.
It's pretty neat.
And tell me if there's one person in our listening audience who didn't think of Bullwinkle.
and rocket chase squirrel.
What are you thinking about Bullwinkle like I was?
And there's a map there with all the dots of where she had these sightings.
You can see they're all over the upper part of the state.
Mike Bino editor of our Wisconsin magazine is joining us as he does every other month when the new issue comes out of our Wisconsin magazine.
We're talking about some of the stories in there.
Not all of them.
You're gonna have to read some on your own, but we do have some of them to talk about the kind of wet your appetite.
Now, the stagecoach inn, there is a stagecoach inn not far from where I live, not far from Racine, and it's now a restaurant where they put a quarter pound of butter on your baked potato, a whole stick of butter, excuse me, a whole stick of butter on your baked potato.
That's what they're famous for.
But this is not that stagecoach inn.
Let's talk about it at home in the old world, because people lived in this place.
It was an old stagecoach inn back before they had cars.
And people can go see it now.
It's standing.
currently at the open-air museum known as Old World Wisconsin.
That's in Eagle, Wisconsin, Waukesha County.
And it's an outdoor museum with period buildings as people would have seen and used in the 1800s.
For example, there's a
You can go see, there's a farm with some animals.
There's General Store, Creamery, Town Hall at Church.
It's called Crossroads Village.
And Blacksmith Shop, you can see some of that working.
And it just depicts the lifestyle and traditions of 19th century immigrants and settlers that have come, came to Wisconsin.
And you catch it during the...
the high season there in their their docents there wearing costumes from the the address from the period uh... in doing some of these things uh... it and it makes an interesting day in the educational day cool thing for kids there are some of these old refurbished buildings there and what we're talking about here is one called for milehouse now it wasn't built in ego far from it uh... this was a stagecoach stop
between towns and it's from rolling, it originated in rolling prairie.
It's a Greek revival building.
Now where's rolling prairie?
It's Dodge County, near Beaver Dam, and it was called Four Mile House because it stood four miles from Beaver Dam to the west and four miles from Horecon to the east.
And so that, you know, about, you're gonna make that trip, it's eight miles.
uh... you gotta stop and water your horses kind in between their their travelers from further uh... away of course and that the stage stop so uh... stage line uh... before there were rail lines in in these areas uh... and it provides a place for a meal and some rest you can change your horses water your horses uh... and and that's what it was
These were very important between many of these small crossroads communities.
They were set very close together because that's the distance a horse could travel.
I always heard it was about seven miles, it was about max.
And that's the reason there are so many little ghost towns on Wisconsin maps today, which amounts to a crossroads in some old buildings.
It used to be much more bustling than it is, than those places are now.
When the railroad came through in 1856, a line from Milwaukee to Beaver Dam, they didn't need the stage line anymore.
People weren't using that, so this home became a hub for social activities.
It was a boarding house, and then eventually a private residence.
Well, as I said before, our readers
of our wisconsin send in their stories what's going on currently like moose lady amanda griggs this is somebody sharing a memory so back in nineteen seventy one she and her husband.
Yeah i just been married at a couple of young kids ages one and four and he got a job at john deeren hurricane and he they needed place to rent place to live.
And this old house came up for rent.
One of his coworkers, someone in the family owned it.
It's out in the farm country.
So in 1971, they moved in.
They moved into this cool house that was way too big for just four people.
And they got to know it a little bit.
And the interesting thing was there was an entire upper
they didn't use, they closed it down in the winter so as not to have to heat it.
But in their world, newspapers, they found in the walls for poor insulation, but the newspapers dated into the 1800s.
They found some of those.
But it was an empty dance hall up above them and on the third floor.
And when it was warm enough to be up there, they pretty much just showed guests this.
who stayed with them, but there were signatures of all the people who came there and were part of this when it was a boarding house or who attended dances there, community events, they signed the walls.
So this person, Charlotte Lang of Juno, who wrote this story for us, recalled vacuuming up there and doing just household chores clean in the place as you normally do.
getting lost in reading the names and messages and I'm assuming dates and things from people from Over a hundred years ago who had been there and she would wonder about them and and wonder what it looked like and and her two children Christine and Marilyn she sent up photos of them in this home Got to grow up in that place at least for a good part of her They're they're growing up years the whole as she said this whole place was an antique
And now what's really neat for Charlotte Lane, and this home has been written up quite a bit in Greek revival home.
Main wing is 27 feet by 40 feet.
The story about picking the historical society, state historical society, buying it over Wisconsin and moving it.
all the way to Waukesha County and then setting it up as part of their outdoor museum.
Well, Charlotte can go visit it now.
Show people where she lived.
So that's very neat.
They were renting this for three years in the early 1970s.
And she returned there in 1983 after it was renovated and part of Old World Wisconsin.
And she's now taking her family and kids there, but
and has helped chaperone field trips for youngsters to go through this, not only old-world Wisconsin, but this four-mile house and then show them where she slept, where she cooked, because she came later than the pioneers, neat piece of history.
We're talking to Mike Beano this hour, editor of our Wisconsin magazine.
Our next article is a little closer to home, Franklin, which is just a stone's throw away from where I'm sitting right now.
And we're going to talk about a guy
who puts together the mighty Worlitzer organs.
And we had a guy in Racine who did that too.
He had one of the old theater organs down there.
But this is not an organ that you would see in your living room.
This is huge.
Let's talk about this guy with his mighty Worlitzer.
Yeah, we are talking about the largest theater pipe organ in the world.
And it has been brought to Franklin by Paul Welbing.
He's of the family that came up with the well-known lip balm, Carmex.
His father cooked up the first batch of it, I think in West Alice or Wauwatosa in the 30s.
It caught hold and that has been the family business for many years.
Paul is, I think, third generation of that family.
And along the way,
Paul's father exposed him and his brother to organ music.
He loved organ music, particularly theater organ music, and also played in orchestral fashion.
I mean, these things are so complex, there can be a whole orchestra at a player's fingertips.
The instrument we're talking about here is the 1931 Wurlitzer.
He had it installed in a 20,000 square foot Carmack's warehouse in Franklin Business Park.
That portion of their complex was empty, a big cavernous space.
And Paul had the opportunity to buy this organ and it's 7,000 pipes ranging in length from a size of a number two pencil to something 32 feet tall.
That's what makes it the largest theater pipe organ in the world.
And you can get percussion sounds out of this.
There's like marimbas, xylophones, gongs, sleigh bells, hand bells, bird whistles.
It's really a marvel as all of these things were back in the early 1900s.
So they had this large warehouse.
Paul became
aware that this massive organ was disassembled and could be purchased only out of 5,000 of these that were built in the United States probably a few hundred are only left.
He brought this disassembled gigantic unit to that 20,000 square foot empty warehouse.
Why there?
Why so big?
Because
It has a six second reverb.
Okay, there's an echo in there.
It's so big.
It gives the sound time to travel.
Travel and meld, I would say, because there's so many different.
And there's a photo in here of his tiny couch in the middle of this warehouse with all the pipes sprinkled around it.
And he sits back and just
enjoys the music coming from it.
But not just alone because he also shares the music from this.
They have concerts and events at the Karma Lab warehouse and people are invited to come and see this and listen.
They can play music from roles, they can play music from computer, they can have
a real live organist right there playing symphony music.
Skilled organ students, Paul hopes, will come to use it someday.
But the Dairyland Theater Organ Society's website, I'll give it to you now, DTOSWI.org, talks about, gives information about when some of these events happen.
But this reaches back to the days
of before the 1920s when they had in the advent of talkies in the movie theater they just had music and subtitles that went along with the silence and the mighty whirlitzer organ was part of it you'd get a little concert tied to the movie and this whirlitzer would rise up on an elevator from down below often
and uh... up would come the organist uh... you know playing entertainment paul saw some of this himself at the capital theater nursing on the walkie's riverside navel on theaters so this is a throwback to those old days uh... of of grand entertainment in the movie theaters uh... silence and then talkies came uh... and you can still catch a little bit of this in franklin uh... there's really a piece of history there
You know, I was telling you off the air that when I was a kid, I used to go to Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan and go to the movies.
That was a movie theater.
And I went to go see True Grit there one day.
It was my last movie I saw there, True Grit with John Wayne.
And if you got there early enough, you got to see the entire show.
You got to see the Rockettes, a circus act, and a concert by the Mighty Whirlitzer.
This was all day long.
This was before every time they showed True Grit, they would do this whole show.
So for a buck and a quarter, you got to see this whole thing.
And the Mighty Whirlitzer came up from the ground.
And it makes its way up to this eye level.
And filling Radio City Music Hall with over 6,000 seats, this was wonderful to hear this sound of this organ.
I was a kid, and I still loved it.
And then John Wayne shooting them up with the true great.
Well, you've got a piece of that not far down the road from you.
And there are opportunities to see it.
see it yet.
And I think what you just described, a piece of that is available to be seen at certain times.
And it's heartening to know that some of these things have been preserved and saved.
And we only have about a minute left here.
Who's in the gatefold?
The center section.
There's beautiful hot air balloons.
in the gatefold.
The beautiful hot air balloons.
Talking about people, I know which magazine you're reading.
Come on.
All right.
This is the hot air balloons.
Hot air balloons.
So we have a three page gatefold fold out in the center of every magazine showing some cool parts of Wisconsin.
Often it's a daylight landscape with rolling topography.
This time, we've got a balloon glow on the Wisconsin River in Rhinelander.
It's along the Wisconsin River and at night, when they had the balloon rally, nightfall comes, they stand these balloons up and fire them up.
They fill the envelopes, as they call them, the colorful big balloon, with hot air.
And they glow, of course, because there's fire going up in there.
And so they stand up all these colorful balloons, fire them up, and they light up the surrounding area.
This one, the next balloon rally here you can catch, the 2026 one, Saluting Heroes Balloon Rally, that's July 31st through August 1st.
Tethered balloons, colorful and you can see them.
And they're given balloon rides too, that's in Rhinelander.
I know the magazine you were referring to, and it's no longer in publication anymore, so there you go.
You're still around, they're not.
So anyway, there you
go.
Well, there's weren't enough people like you and me
around,
obviously, to support that.
Ourwisconsinmag.com, ourwisconsinmag.com.
I subscribe, I've been doing it for years and years, and my wife and I just love reading these issues.
It's great.
It's a great magazine.
You guys put a lot of work into it.
The paper stock is high gloss, and it's the way magazines should be.
And it's all about your state.
The ads are great, too.
I was telling you earlier, when we started this whole thing, I got my trip to my Labor Day trip based on that ad.
Thank you, Mike.
You have a great rest of your summer.
Okay, you too.
Thanks.
