(soft music) (upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to another edition of "10thirtysix."

I'm your host Portia Young.

We're still playing it safe so I'm still working from home, in just a bit, we're going to talk about moving forward during this pandemic.

Plus, you'll hear how the pandemic has been life-changing for this local collage artist, and... (indistinct) Hear from a livestock auctioneer about the heartbreak he sees when Wisconsin dairy farmers call it quits.

And in honor of women's history month we'll revisit our Emmy winning story, on Shorewood native and combat photo journalist, Dickey Chapelle.

Right now we want to talk to a local infectious disease doctor about how we can move forward during this pandemic.

As you know, more people are becoming eligible for the vaccine, Mobile sites like this one at Mitchell Street Library in Milwaukee have been set up to reach more people particularly those in the underserved communities.

Now that people are receiving vaccines.

What does this mean for getting back to some sense of normal?

I recently spoke with Dr. Njeri Wainaina infectious disease specialist and internist with the Froedtert and Medical College of Wisconsin.

You may recall Dr. Wainaina joined us last month for our vaccine special.

Are you concerned at all about spring break approaching and the Easter holiday?

- Yes, I am because it's been more than a year and we are also tired of, you know, seeing one another virtually and not in person.

And that could lead people to just throw caution to the winds.

And I'll just go back to what the CDC's announcement was that, there were very specific and we really do need to keep to what they said.

We're talking about fully vaccinated people interacting with fully vaccinated people or those who are very low risk of getting severe COVID.

I just worry that there are, it's easy to say, "Okay, no, it's spring break, I've had it, I just need to go out and enjoy spring break and people are getting vaccinated so I'll be safe."

No, we're not quite there yet.

When you think about it, if you look at Wisconsin we have fully vaccinated, 10% of Wisconsin.

Another 10% are half vaccinated, Meaning they've gotten one dose of either the Moderna or the Pfizer the J&J hasn't yet started going out widely.

It will, and it will help those numbers go up.

But we need to get to about 70 to 80% to achieve herd immunity to get to the point where those who are vaccinated protect those who are not.

10% is not enough.

- So to get to 70, 80%, when is that timeframe?

- That's a good question.

So all that is really dependent on how quickly vaccine can be manufactured.

That's one, and two, how quickly it can be distributed and get into the arms of people.

So that's where the logistics comes in.

- Do you think the worst is over?

- I am optimistic.

I think, I'd like to think that the worst is over.

Now, you know, they are potential twists.

If you know, a particularly nasty variant emerges, there isn't anything in the numbers that's particularly worrying.

There's constant surveillance on what the virus looks like to try and identify those quickly.

We've learned a lot about how to treat COVID when it does occur.

So even when patients get it we have a lot more in our arsenal than we did a year ago to successfully get patients through in this country.

The one thing that maybe that is concerning of course is, while we, while this country in Europe and some other countries like Israel, Israel is quite the star.

As far as vaccine distribution is concerned, are doing really well.

There's a large part of the world.

That's hardly getting any vaccines and until we vaccinate everybody, we cannot rest.

- Thank you, Dr. Wainaina.

We all have stories about how the pandemic has impacted our lives.

Local collage artist, Rod Clark spent 30 years with the local insurance company.

He says the pandemic has influenced his creative side while inspiring him to streamline his life.

- It was my very first one.

It's really what I call a pep talk to myself.

So the piece is a study piece.

It's also a storyboard, but primarily it helps me focus on really what I wanna be focused on, and that's my art.

So I start here, right in the middle where I started building it.

"Art, get inspired, pass it on."

"We are not at our best perched at the summit.

We are climbers at our best when the way is steep, struggle."

The pandemic has really been, it was really tough up front because I just needed to, like everybody else.

It's like man, best laid plans, Kaboom, gone.

So another large piece of it was I needed to sit down and write it out and journal it out and get organized.

So that's what I did.

Now, old corporate term, "set up your environment for success Rod, what do you need around you to fly in here?

Get busy creating."

- [Narrator] Rod's meditation and daily exercise routine helped give his life a structure which he missed from his career days.

He took up collaging after having volunteered for many years at a kid's summer camp, which stressed art therapy.

His work ranges from the motivational to the sublime and is infused within the train storylines.

Most of all, however, his work brings him peace.

Consider his Lip Series.

- "The old 41 outdoor," in Franklin, great story.

I've been making these which I call lips, of course.

And I think there are now close to 30 of them that I've made.

And I'm just going to keep making them in the exact same format like that.

Until the tickets sources exhaust.

- [Narrator] Clark has created a number of sports pieces, including this large Packers theme collage inspired by a friendship between his dad and number 27, Veryl Switzer, a Packer defensive back from the mid fifties.

- Number 27 up there, that's a Veryl Switzer.

He's from Nicodemus, Kansas.

- [Unknown Man] Where's that you say?

- Oh, I believe it's about 10 miles from Hill city, Kansas.

And that's where my dad was born and raised and went to high school.

And the Nicodemus Football Team played the Hill City Football Team.

And my dad and Veryl became friends.

And that friendship was really powerful.

And that's how my dad became a Packer fan and ultimately how I became a Packer fan.

And that's how that story began.

Yeah, this piece is really fun 'cause it started out in such a dark place.

Yeah, this was a piece that I did when I was at my absolute worst, mentally.

And I love it so much now because it's just full of joy and fun and laughter and just might.

So the piece turned into a story about a traveling team of Carnival workers that this gentleman right here, Otto, he invents the first steam powered carousel.

So they pulled together this group of people they know they have a success on their hands.

So they go travel the countryside putting this steam engine together.

This merry-go-round together for communities in the countryside.

And it's just joy in my heart.

- [Narrator] Like it did to most of ours, COVID interrupted Rod's life.

But he used this suddenly available time to create a piece which was a gift for a virtual wedding and to create some election theme pieces.

- COVID here don't care.

Oh God, it was so fun.

Wedding gift for friends of mine who got married during the pandemic.

So I went to my library and I'm looking for stock images and there is a beautiful book where imagine like a hundred artists are asked to do their version of Barbie and it's all published in one book and I'm like, "these are really cool."

So I tore that Barbie book apart.

And so artists like Andy Warhol.

- [Narrator] Andy Warhol has served as an inspiration for clark.

- I'm at goodwill at the book section.

I love going through their old books.

I'm just like, who knows What's gonna be donated?

And so I go there and I browse through it quick and I found it's the smallest little book about this big and it looks like a children's book.

So I picked it up and I'm like, "Oh, this is Andy Warhols work."

And I never knew that he did, he loved to, you know, just sit down and all of a sudden draw women's shoe, like, well, excellent.

So there's a whole series of them and I'm using 25 of them in a collage in the kitchen.

It's really a tribute to the hundred year anniversary of women's right to vote.

So you start here with the 19th amendment.

And I always like to point out that these are individual panels that I did, about this big, pages of a book from Andy Warhol.

So you can see the rhythm going on, but some of them are so tiny, but I preserved his work inside of my work and I did each panel individually.

And then I put them all on the canvas and then I layered another top layer on top of it.

And then another layer on top of that, and again, another layer on top of that when Biden announced that he was gonna be running for president, I started a new collage.

(instrumental music) I had a lot of presidential history books, beautiful imagery, so I just gathered them all together and I had over 50, that I used for this piece.

And so it's called, "I love a parade."

And so every president gets one.

And so it kind of starts here and kind of storylines, storybooks itself all the way down the San Francisco streets here, imagery of presidential campaign motorcades coming down the streets of San Francisco like, "Oh great starting point."

And I just started weaving in all the other like imagery from the award-winning photographers that follow the presidents, had books on all of that.

And so it's just high quality award winning material that I'm now using, and I'm hoping it does the same thing.

- [Portia] Clark's website rodclarkart.com will be online soon.

In the meantime, check out more of Rod's work at milwaukeepbs.org.

In honor of women's history month, we turn to a story about Dickey Chapelle, a Shorewood native, and one of the first female combat reporters.

She was the first American woman to die on the job.

This Emmy winning story shines a light on her life and on her photography that captured the ugly realities of war.

(plane engine roars) (gun bangs) - [Mike] When you say combat reporter it usually brings to mind the picture of a battered on the shave and the weary correspondent trudging through the mud.

Now, it may surprise you but this lady who was covering Wars and violence and danger ever since she was 18 years old she is a woman who has covering seven wars in the past five years.

And her name is Dickey Chapelle.

- [Jackie] It's very honorable what she did.

And you know, I'm shocked that people don't know who she was or don't even know her name.

- [John] No, I had never heard of Dickey Chapelle in my entire life.

And when I was actually first in the coast guard, one of the people that I had worked with said, "you've gotta check out this book called "Brown water Black Berets" And in that book, there's a chapter about Dickey Chapelle.

She did something that was not very common at a time where it was not easy to do what she did.

- The thing that sticks in my mind, is that she said, "the main thing you have to always remember about covering combat is, you've got to survive to get the story and the pictures out to the world.

If you get killed in there, it's all for nothing."

- [John] The sum of her core was that she really was doing this, because she felt she was doing the right thing.

That she was telling people, things about war that they needed to know, and that she was a good person to do it.

And just as good as anybody, she felt that her gender should never get in the way.

- [Dickey] I grew up in the heart of the United States.

And I believed that I could do anything I really wanted to do.

And I still believe it.

The first place, I hope you will never say it without a sense of its uniqueness.

You have just defined Americanism because nowhere else in the world, and I've now worked in my 44th country.

Nowhere else in the world can a woman about 17 or an old lady in her forties like I am, nowhere else in the world can she say, "I can do anything I wanna do."

- Dickey had an eye for a dramatic picture.

(suspenseful music) My father taught her photography.

He taught her composition and she grabbed on to that, like an artist.

I mean, she was a Rembrandt of composition.

(soft music) - I like the photos that she took often of soldiers just being soldiers, you know, not necessarily the battle shots.

And I think that we tend to look at a conflict and revered the people who take the photos of the of things blowing up.

(soft music) But to understand a war, you have to be in the back of the of the line, you know, behind the frontline.

And, you know, she spent a lot of time in the front as well.

But, but I was really captivated by her images from the back of soldiers having a smoke.

And they're timeless in many ways because I could take that same image and in my mind, I could see, you know, soldiers or Marines that I had spent time with in Iraq or Afghanistan.

And if you go honestly, to tell a story, to document what you're seeing, how can you miss the civilians?

They're part of they're part of the conflict, they still lived, even as they were trying not to die.

(soft music) - [Unknown Man] She could capture a moment.

She could see a moment that was very dramatic and she could capture that.

And the one thing about a shooting war or actuality they don't stop and wait for you to get the picture.

When I see the world war two photos, I see more of that kind of reflection of somebody who has more of a of a student, you know, taking those types of photos.

Plus the war was a little bit different for her because she spent most of the time on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

She was covering field medical units where she was on the hospital ship on a couple of hospital ships, actually.

And so the action's a little bit different you know, you have less urgency of getting a photo now and getting your head down.

I think that that it's important that people know who our heroes are.

All of them, even the ones that are non traditional.

- [Unknown Woman] She seemed very curious about the experience she was living.

She noticed details.

She wasn't necessarily focused on, you know, what she thought people wanted to see, you know, or images that would support a certain storyline.

Mean, she, her images suggest that she just went with a camera and a pen, you know, and just documented what was going on around her, you know, and all the research I did on her and all the reading and looking at her photos kind of find much ego.

It was refreshing in a way, but it suggested a humility that she carried with her as she went about documenting war.

- I think that the camera probably helped her focus her fears.

You know, she's got a job to do.

And so you can't avoid that camera, that you've got hold it all in front of your face.

And I always feel that, at least the way I look at it is that, you know, that having a camera does provide that sort of sense of mediation.

You're out of the moment because you're focusing on something else.

And so I think that the probably helped her continue to move forward.

Her camera was probably her shield.

- [Unknown Woman] Her photographs are so telling, which is, what's so remarkable about this book is that you really get to see the war as she experienced it through her camera.

And, you know, she saw a lot and you know I didn't see her stopping herself from taking a picture.

I mean, she took some remarkable images, on instinct.

- [Unknown Man] She was a pioneer, a real pioneer, and you don't go into that lightly.

You go into that, trying to prove something, you go in there trying to prove you're just as good as any man at that job.

And I think she proved that.

- [Portia] You can watch her full documentary on Dickey Chapelle "Behind the Pearl Earrings" on milwaukeepbs.org.

"10thirtysix" producers continue their work with our partners at the "Milwaukee Journal Sentinel" on Wisconsin's dairy crisis.

For the first time in Wisconsin, dairy history the number of dairy farms in the state has fallen below 7,000.

Our crew has interviewed many people involved in the dairy industry, including a young livestock auctioneer who shares the heartbreak he's seen inside his auction barn.

(tyres humming) - As per usual if you're used to coming here, everything's been through the shoot.

(indistinct) Let's start off on some really top shelf counts.

(cow mows) (Mark murmuring) We run over hold to dairy cattle and auctions here in Loyal, Wisconsin specializing in selling dairy cattle but also selling feeder cattle, all classes of livestock.

(indistinct) There's been people that have sat here.

And when I'm on the block selling and you see a grown dad crying in the stands as you're selling his cows, that's not an easy day for them or for the auction staff.

Talk about a fine cow, tailor-made to milk, boys which one's prettiest, depends who's looking, but I know which one's mine.

(sound of auctioneeing) (Mark auctioneering) We originally grew up milking cows.

About 10, 12 ago.

We started buying and selling some cows that developed into running a livestock barn.

The dairy sale, it varies from week to week but it'll probably run from 11 o'clock to three o'clock and then we'll sell some fat steers.

(Mark murmuring) There's a lot of sellers that, they've farmed for 20, 30, 40 years.

And they're very attached to their cows.

There's some sellers that you feel bad for them when they leave that, here was their whole livelihood.

And now it's dispersed.

It's a pretty big change for them.

They've gotten up at five o'clock in the morning to go milk their cows for the last 40 years.

And tomorrow morning, they're still gonna wake up at five o'clock and the barn is gonna be empty.

Some of these touch home, I mean, they're, sorry.

They are family, families that have lost loved ones.

Whether it's a farming accident, lost a brother to cancer.

(Mark murmuring) (crowd chattering) As far as the sale process itself the cows will come in the morning of the auction.

The farmers will bring them in.

Some farmers hire a professional trucker to bring them in.

We'll brush them up, clean them up to the best of our ability, do health and soundness checks on them.

(Mark auctioneering) Myself as an auctioneer, my job when I'm selling is to work for the seller.

So I will drive for the highest dollar I can get for the seller and still there I can, everything I recommend has to be honest or people aren't going to believe it, or aren't going to come back.

So the sale process on the good cows they might be in the ring for 45 seconds.

It's a fairly fast paced process.

(Mark murmuring) To some extent we as dairy farmers are our own worst enemies.

If the price goes up, we produce more.

If the price goes down, we produce more.

If the price goes up, we produce more to create more income.

If the price goes down, we produce more to create more cash flow to offset the price.

The fact that it went down.

So it's, it becomes a kind of a vicious circle.

(Mark auctioneering) Farmers have a huge impact on what the cost of your food is.

If everyone quits raising beef or quits producing milk on their farm, and there's a limited supply of it, supply and demand is gonna get way out of whack.

Your price is gonna go up.

For us, it's better when milk price is higher, but on the other hand, there's less cattle that gets sold when milk price is high because the farmer is making money.

So they try to hang on, try to stay in business more.

So, there's advantages and disadvantages to being in when it's good or in when it's not as great.

(Mark auctioneering) - [Portia] Please go to milwaukeepbs.org/dairy for much more on our continuing coverage of dairy land in distress.

That'll do it for this edition of "10thirtysix."

We leave you with some signs of better days ahead from above Park Arthur and historic Linie Lac Lake in Waukesha County.

See you next time.

(soft music)