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It's
John
and
Gordy.
John and Gordy.
It's John and Gordy.
Coffee.
I did, yes, I saw that too.
And actually, my roommate went to the game, and he saw it for himself with his own two eyes, and yeah, it was legit.
Wait, were they naked?
So naked people, just guys in underwear.
Yeah, and their boxers, just...
I mean, what else do they have to root for you know, so Okay Just part of our world.
Okay.
Just as weird as it
Yes, and he was like
the first speaker and just blew everybody's socks off.
Absolutely.
This is a pastor and judge Everett Mitchell.
And I pieced this together.
I got rid of some of the crowd noise and all this other stuff.
So it's down to about four minutes and 50 seconds.
But you know, it is, it is so good.
I just.
I gotta pass it along to you if you didn't hear it or you weren't there.
This is the kind of talent that we have here in the Madison area.
Judge Everett Mitchell, by the way, like Raphael Warnock, graduated from Morehouse College, so he's got some cred in.
And this was provided by Linda Ketchum, the one to thank her for sending this video along.
Let's listen.
again to judge Everett Mitchell, great speech at the No Kings Rally.
I recognize it calls as many of us to question what kind of nation are we living.
For many this moment in our nation and our world feels monumental if not suffocating.
The air is thick with uncertainty.
The anxiety being built after every five-minute news cycle or tweet and breaking headline, changing from one controversial and consequential issue to the next, is leaving the most passionate advocate grasping for breath with little or no time to organize.
Unwitnessing immigrant families living in the shadows of a nation built upon the DNA of the enslaved.
the blood of the indigenous, the sweat of the Asian community, the hands of the immigrants, and the whip of injustice.
Despite all of that major siege of mounting the only line of defense, you got to learn how to organize.
organize, we must.
The temptation in this moment is to sit idle.
staring at the television and scrolling on your phone, tapping at the screen, just hoping that if we keep our heads under water long enough, the shadow will pass and normal will return to our shores.
But let me be the bearer of bad news.
Whatever normal was, is, or could be, is not returning to us.
We're not going back.
The only way is for us to go forward.
Because right now,
We are living in the redefinition of our democracy.
Right now, our legal systems are being retooled, reconfigured, and realigned to incentivize ultimate power.
From the United States Supreme Court all the way down to individual classrooms, the war for civil rights is being waged all over again.
So as we stand here on King Street...
It reminds us that the Voting Rights Act, the seminal legislation that sought to protect my vote, the black vote, your vote, everybody's vote of the marginalized, has been sliced and diced from one justice to the next.
And for what purpose?
Yeah, you better move about that.
And for what purpose?
If we think it is merely an attack on voting, you are missing the larger picture.
This is about power.
about consolidating it into the hands of a few who can control the outcome before it happens.
So this is not new territory of Wisconsin.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his letter from the Birmingham Jail offered an intellectual blueprints for how institutions consolidate power while people wait.
Dr. King smuggled from his cell.
He said, for years now, I've heard the word wait.
And it rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity, this idea that weight almost means never.
And we must come to see that justice too long delayed is justice denied.
So this is the message I want you to consider.
How are we using our time?
Yes, time.
Yes, time.
How are you spending your time?
Because make no mistake, our time is being stolen with algorithmic precision.
Time.
Attention space.
Time.
Reading durability.
Time.
The capacity to sit, think, refocus and reimagine the world.
Time is being stolen.
The calmness that allows for creativity to find us.
Time is being taken away and after scrolling for 30 seconds, it teaches a generation that if you don't want to face hard things, just scroll to the next one.
And the feed keeps feeding us.
It stars the very story that we need time to understand.
And while we scroll the system tightens, the black unemployment rate rises to the level that it was in 1968 as DEI programs are being gutted.
$350,000 of black women have lost their jobs in spaces that were created to bring inclusion.
And why is this the moment?
Because I got to remind you right now, Wisconsin, now is that time.
Because if now is not the time,
I don't never know when time is.
Now is the time.
Now is the time.
Now is the time for us to wake up.
The time to stand up.
The time to build up.
The time to sing up.
The time to live up.
The time to read up.
No Kings Day.
Pretty impressive.
Yeah, emotional.
Also, Mallory McMorrow, she's a state senator, but she's running for the U.S.
Senate.
And she went out into the crowd on No Kings Day and did a few interviews, asked people what they thought.
Let's listen to, she's pretty good.
Let's listen.
Donald Trump and the Republicans are telling Americans that protesters are being paid to be at no-kings protests.
So we came to a no-kings protest to find out.
How much were you paid to be here today?
Absolutely zero.
Zippo zero
nada.
I wasn't paid a penny.
It was my pleasure.
I
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
came out
for free.
Zero dollars.
Zero dollars.
I see a shirt that I think gives me the answer.
How much rebate be here?
Zilch.
Not paid zero dollars.
Zero dollars.
So are you telling me that Donald Trump might have lied about this?
are you here
defend democracy.
Defend democracy and labor rights
labor rights.
Absolutely.
Yep.
So we came out here and we talked to dozens of people and we couldn't find a single person who was paid so I don't know who Donald Trump is talking about but we found a lot of people with a lot of good reasons to be out here protesting for our country.
We have it.
She's good isn't she?
Yes.
You know, she's running for the U.S.
Senate.
I think she deserves to be there.
She is a state senator in Michigan and great stuff right there.
Fantastic.
All right.
Well, you know, the No Kings Day, it was exciting time.
It really was.
And a lot of people were there.
Catherine was hanging out in
In fact, I think we have some sound.
I just sent you something here.
Oh, all right.
Moments ago, yeah, she was out before the rally.
And she was telling me that, you know, this as the March was coming up East Washington, yes, that that was an amazing site.
In fact, there was some video on Rachel Maddow last night from Madison.
Oh, that that high speed video of the marchers.
They showed that on
you
He was at the very top of the cap.
He climbed to the top of the rotunda somewhere.
The cap was open.
WMDX.
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started.
Thank you so much for that speech that you had previously from Mr. Mitchell.
That was just absolutely stunning.
I'd love to have you return to that again at other occasions because what he had to say was just very, very inspiring.
I wanted to owe up to a mistake that I made on air yesterday when I was speaking up about Representative Galvalda from Arizona.
Speaker Johnson refuses to swear her in because once she's in, of course, that vote can happen, that allows the Epstein files to be voted on.
And boy, he does not want that.
So his latest is to say, I had said that she doesn't have key, you know, she can't get in her office.
I was wrong about that.
She can get into her office.
However, once she gets into her office, she doesn't have squat.
She doesn't have government email, no budget to hire people, no computers, no phones, no government website.
She can't do constituent services such as helping people with the VA or IRS or Social Security problems, which is a big part of what representatives do because she's not been sworn in.
Go ahead and do your job.
The phones don't work.
The computers don't work.
You don't have a staff.
But go ahead and do your job.
That's where he believes that she should be going.
And I wanted to let people know that the AG of Arizona is looking at this situation
the fact that those people don't have representation and looking at a lawsuit.
And it gets very interesting because you get into the weeds about
who can actually swear a member in.
And there was some talk by a representative from the Cato Institute, a very conservative institute that said, you know, technically, a notary public could do it because what you're saying is you affirm that you're going to, you know, honor the Constitution, all of the things that are part of that.
And it is customary to have the speaker do it.
And some would say legal by some points.
And this is where this is going to blow up.
There's going to be a big lawsuit about
who can actually swear her in.
And I thought, this is what we're spending our time on.
I cannot even believe it.
It's just, we're going to be spending our resources on, can you swear in a person who has been voted in by her people?
It's a shame.
is.
It's a shame.
Thank you Joe.
It's not normal.
Yes.
Yes, where I mean immediately no matter what right government shut down or not doesn't really matter when yeah This is a definite lawsuit now.
Let's go to the dark left and and I don't know who this guy is I think he's from Wisconsin because he's got a Wisconsin type team hat on stuff on the back wall so Whoever he is he's good and he he's talking about fascism and it's
how it becomes normalized in society.
This is really good.
Check
this out.
Okay.
They were taken during the height of fascism in Nazi Germany.
No insanity or chaos in every corner.
Just people buying bread or reading the newspaper or going to work.
And that's the point.
Fascism doesn't necessarily look like chaos.
It looks like normal life or something evil spreads quietly underneath it.
See, a lot of people say today, well, my town looks normal and my life's the same, but that's not how it works.
Sure, they see the chaos on TV, but then they turn the TV off, walk outside and say everything looks fine.
They drive to work and traffic is still bad.
That's how it fools you.
Fascism doesn't.
look like a movie, it looks like you're mourning commute.
And too many opt to ignore what the Trump regime is doing because it's easier for them to sleep believing there's no way we're headed towards 1930s Germany than to admit that this administration's actions are of a fascist nature.
For fascism to work, it needs your comfort, your avoidance.
It needs you to look away and think everything is fine because that's how it wins by quietly taking your freedom while convincing you that you still have it.
Yeah, no, I gotta tell you I talked to Everett Mitchell, right?
I guess moments before he spoke, you know, because I used to see him in the street all the time.
When I was in the fight for 15 Vosin De La Frontera, poor people's campaign, and the guy just lit a fire under me, man, I'm ready to go again.
This is the time.
I mean, we said that back in 2011 and 12.
If we don't stop this now.
We're going to be a fascist nation.
And of course, we were criticized for calling people Nazis who practice Naziism.
I mean, I'm tired of these clowns asking me to define it.
Open your dictionary clown.
It's right in there.
are we are
by it and it really is it's the visual part of it that we're seeing that's just outrageous But at the same time we go along our lives.
We're shopping.
We're doing stuff all and and and it's becoming normalized We are accidentally normalizing fascism by not having it in front of us constantly and a reminder of it
So it's like scrolling, you know, you move on to
Well, right around the corner.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll take a break from all the politics here for a while and talk to Tom and Christie Manis.
Explore Wisconsin.
Yes.
They go all over the state.
They go all over the world, but we're going to focus in on what's happening in Wisconsin, especially this time of year with all the fall leaves changing colors and
Fun things you can do around the state.
That's coming up after we check in with the Midwest Food and Farm reports.
Stay with us for more of John and Gordy WMDX.
That's I feel better 735 Clear to partly cloudy skies this morning look for rain this afternoon high near 50 today.
That's it and it's gonna be really windy tonight
with the showers and moving on through and then weather.
It just clears up and gets nicer for the rest of the world.
Isn't that nice?
Yeah.
This time of year when it's fall, you know, the leaves are changing.
You want to travel around the state.
Who better to talk to this time of year than Tom and Christie Manus?
They are the authors of a couple of books.
One of them is Secret Wisconsin.
Yeah.
What's the other book titled?
Historic Wisconsin roadside.
Well, we left Eau Claire at 3.30.
3.30.
you can camp out a little bit
It's a great idea.
yeah, somebody needs to restock the Snickers.
OK, I agree.
I only found one.
OK.
Well, at least there was one left for you.
OK.
But now let's get to some of the, you know, besides just the books that you have here, you've got some new things for us here.
And I believe this is one of the great times of the year for me anyway.
I love Halloween.
I love ghost stories.
I love all of that.
The trappings.
Unfortunately, we don't get many ghosts and ghosts guests in here.
You know, I wish we could at least talk about spirit world and in hunting them down and stuff like
Yeah, but you've got something for us, right?
Oh,
Well, there's this unique place in, do you say it, Wanna Walk?
Yeah.
The spiritual camp.
They should call it Spook Hill.
That's what the locals
I never knew about it,
learned about it.
they have seances.
And if the spirits are coming, that's where they're going.
for the most part.
Oh, I like the music.
That's perfect.
Thank
you.
You can stay there.
They have rustic cabins.
I'm not going to stay there.
But one of the cabins is lucky number 13.
Oh.
And it has a light bulb on the door
that
has been glowing steadily for like 30 to 40 years.
So they call it the living spirit.
I don't know.
That is
Yeah.
you can go and walk the grounds.
It's free Supposedly spirits live in the
Yeah You guys going I'm not.
Now have you been down to the Orpheum?
Yes.
You know that's haunted, right?
what's right
Yeah.
haunted.
Yeah.
There's supposedly a Usher, a teenage Usher fell from the balcony and still can be seen sitting in a seat when there's nobody there.
Yeah.
But if you walk in and see him, he disappears.
the projectionist from way back when committed suicide in the projection room.
And he haunts the place and the way he does it is he moves things.
So there's things that are constantly moving around.
That's right down the road.
I
some of the
are you talking
focus?
No, the focus was bad, too.
It was not a
Now, up near us, just outside of Eau Claire, there is an Elk Mountain.
If you're driving on the interstate, it's on the north side.
You can see a big flag.
It's a two-story castle with a lookout on the top.
Wow.
But it's in our Secret Wisconsin book.
But this Elk Mountain Castle is what it's called.
It was dedicated to dead postal employees.
And what they did is underneath the flagpole, they have every single rural route.
I think if I remember right, there might have been 13.
Don't hold me to that number.
But they have dirt from each of those rural routes underneath the flag.
Wow,
nice.
And it has an incredible view.
You can, you know, walk up to roof, you know, look it up.
But it's also rumored to be haunted.
It's the rumor is a family was there and a ghost or somebody as they were walking down the stairs.
push the wife down the stairs and they witnessed it and they said well yeah there was nobody around but it was obvious something pushed her and it has you know weird sounds at night also weird lights at night screams in the woods you know things like that
this it's an elk mound it's it's just west of Eau Claire a few miles okay right off the interstate
Well, anything dealing with post-employees is scary.
Matt, are you
Well, isn't there a bar?
That's pretty haunted.
It's like the most haunted place in
Well, down by Delavan.
that?
There's the Circus Cemetery.
In
Right, there's Crown Cemetery.
There's two cemeteries.
And both of them have, I mean, it was a huge
a wintering home for circus
and stuff.
And so both of the cemeteries have a lot of circus performers there and each one is marked with a sign, you know, it tells about the performer and the name and so forth.
But it's also haunted.
Yeah, that's scary.
If you think about it, clowns haunting.
I know that
right
And St.
Andrews is the other one.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay, I never would've guessed.
I thought it'd be something like a Sharknado
Well, I don't like any clowns, so I don't want to see a scary
yeah.
if you want a unique haunted experience, yeah, that's definitely one of them.
And those are in our historic Wisconsin roadside
of
his head.
time.
Well, ironically, at the park, Tower Park in Delavan, they have a bubbler that's the mouth of a lion.
Oh, really?
There you put your head on that.
It's kind of
us?
Well, have you guys been to the Wonder Bar?
Yes, yes recently closed Where's that that was on the old one and
John Nolan right here in town.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Oh that
Yeah, tell us about that That
It was right near the Coliseum, right?
Yeah, it looks really good.
We haven't been there, but it looks really
building.
Yeah, it's got a lot of history Yeah, it was
yeah, they bought it in 1929
so it was a competitor for
Who was it the gangster in Chicago?
Capone.
Thank you.
Oh, yeah, how can I forget?
Yeah, yeah, it was it was competitive for him really In the North Chicago area Well, he sent his brother up to open the the North Tower and so it had you know, if you remember it had the turrets on both sides Yes, and they had little slots for the Tommy guns the Tommy machine guns really easy and And there's a lot of things that happen
at this wonder bar.
One is underneath it, it said that there was a tunnel that went to Lake Mandoda where a lot of people supposedly lost their lives that crossed them.
And also the one of the brothers is they he disappeared and they think that he's buried or was buried in the walls on the second floor next to the fireplace.
So it was it was notoriously haunted for years.
Until it shut down and
and major major Mafia names also visited babyface Nelson.
I mean all the big names They used to frequent but
Yeah
the bar,
for
never thought about that
We have all kinds of stuff we can talk about.
us, you know, that we like the things that don't necessarily show up on the first few pages of Google search, right?
You know, the Delft or counties, you know, things like that.
Well, Stevens Point bought the boy with the leaky boot in the 1800s.
Yeah.
And
is
a statue and it pours water out.
And supposedly it was from like the Civil War or whatever.
Anyway, Stevens Point got it.
It was in disrepair.
It used to be in the center of Stevens Point.
The fire department took it over, put it in front of fire station number one.
Right
downtown.
Yep.
And the original is in the basement because people with the campus there.
People kept stealing
decapitating it.
So they put I know so May through August it's out other times it's in the basement.
They have to bring it in during school.
Okay,
You're listening to Civic Media.
Find the latest news, information, and archives of all your favorite shows on the Civic Media website,
Wisconsin road
That's right.
loves a yo-yo.
It is.
From 1946 to 1964, they were made in a little town in northwestern Wisconsin called Luck.
Luck?
Luck.
Population 900.
900.
Wow.
Everybody worked there, and they made about 70,000 yo-yos a day.
a day 20 million a year during those years.
We
they did because they were made of wood at the time
sure and maple is what they
the one at the hardwood.
So
that
was the ideal, ideal wood for the yo-yos.
And the reason they shut down is they started to lose popularity.
So a company, Flambeau, bought them and made them out of the plastic that it is today.
And I believe Flambeau.
make tackle boxes and stuff like
that.
There's
a museum there.
You can go see the museum.
The world's largest yo-yo
is in the museum.
actually,
high
Dan.
Don.
Don
I think so, yeah.
He was also, he also invented or created the good humor.
Good humor.
Yeah, with the ice cream.
that's
yeah.
They moved the factory from Chicago to Luck because they could find workers for one, but it's also right there where the wood was.
Yeah,
flambeau at
It was after that.
on, we care, right?
In the Philippines.
OK,
crazy popular.
Wow.
And they're doing all the tricks
keeping it going.
Yeah,
Okay.
So the, um, Lucky Yo-Yo Museum is in our book, Secret Wisconsin, as is the Cozy N in Jamesville.
And the Cozy N is, is a Chinese restaurant that everybody drives by, you know, every day.
But it's the second oldest Chinese restaurant in the same location in the United States.
And it's also the oldest Chinese restaurant in Wisconsin.
But the thing is, we call it traveling egg rolls because people are, they're notorious for ordering, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, even 100 egg rolls at a time to take back on the plane when they go home or in the car on a road trip in coolers.
And they're that famous.
And we actually had a friend of ours in Northwest Wisconsin.
She came down here and bought 48.
Put them in the cooler because she's doing everything in the book.
Or they're doing everything in the book.
invited us over for dinner and shared them.
But the story not only is about the egg rolls.
The owner's mom was a famous Chinese chef at Toy's Chinese restaurant in Milwaukee.
I don't know if you remember
Cool.
I think it was a six-story building, but that's also in our new book coming up in the spring.
But she wanted to buy a restaurant so she found the one and knew the people that own the Jameswell restaurant the cozy and she bought it her kids grew up there as teenagers But an interesting fact with this is Tom Fong and his wife Amanda Tom is the son they run it now and his dad was a One of six Chinese survivors from the Titanic And they said that he was the last person rescued from the wreck
They found him floating on a door, strapped on what they think was a state room door, but he was strapped on with a belt.
So there's a lot of history there.
But the thing is, when you pass something, you have to look deeper and go, hmm, is there a story here?
Sometimes there's not, but oftentimes things you pass every day have a story.
would blow you away.
Yeah, that's really
because
Oh, they're incredible.
They're very good.
They must
Are they big, small, long?
They're big.
They're handmade every day.
No kidding.
Right.
It's a two-day recipe and they have a hint of peanut butter.
That's kind
It does.
It's a family recipe that takes two days.
it's not like the process.
Once you get now and you get off the truck,
it's actual, you know, cabbage and pork and stuff.
Yeah.
And if you want to see more about it, we we do a show with NBC or TMJ for NBC Milwaukee, where we take Stephanie Brown around to these places and introduce them to them because the end was one of them.
So
It's Lost Treasures of Wisconsin.
Okay.
It's about things that aren't here anymore, but everybody has good memories of
Facebook?
You can go to Tom and Christie Manus on Instagram.
Our website is smalltownplussize.com.
You can order the books from our publisher, Reedy Press.
Just do a search for us.
You'll find us everywhere.
Thanks for coming.
back.
Oh, we love
you.
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