- Vroom, vroom!

Rev those engines.

Jump on in.

We're gonna go hot rodding.

You gotta see this.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - One of the favorite nostalgic memories in small towns, and even Peoria, was Friday night cruising, when kids would go up and down Main Street, honking, revving, just having a good time blowing off steam.

- And it's so much nostalgia when you see those hot rods.

It reminds me of movies like "Grease" and "American Graffiti."

So fun.

- Yeah.

Mostly a young person's game.

But these days, in central Illinois, the biggest hot rodder, he's 85 years old, and still cranking out customized machines.

- Well, let's put the pedal to the metal, and head on out to Elmwood to see.

(engine rumbling) - [Narrator] Hot rodding is iconic Americana.

Depending on your viewpoint, the high-speed hobby can be seen as perilous (engines revving) (tires screeching) (dramatic music) or playful.

(engines revving) (tires screeching) (upbeat music) (metal clunking) At least, that's how Hollywood sees hot rods.

All drag racing and danger.

A rite of passage for young, swaggering gearheads.

That's not exactly the life of one of Central Illinois's biggest hot rodders.

One of the area's most renowned hot rodders is 85 years young, and still putting together mean street machines.

(engine rumbling) - I liked tearing stuff apart and fixing it, making sure I could make it work.

It just became a hobby from there on.

I mean, I've done it my whole life, and I still enjoy it.

- [Narrator] As a teen, he got bit by the speed bug when he bought a 1954 Sears Allstate Scooter.

- I extended the frame and put a Harley motor in a scooter, and didn't realize how fast it was until I tried it.

I headed up to 60.

I was afraid to drive it any faster at that time.

I bought a helmet.

It was actually a football helmet that I bought when I was at Woodruff High School, and I wore the football helmet when I was riding my scooter.

- [Narrator] After graduating from Woodruff, he joined the Air Force.

- I had a '49 Chevy Business Coupe, and I was stationed at a radar base in North Dakota, and the motor went bad.

Talked my way into getting to know the guys in there, and took it in there, and the mechanic helped me.

We tore it down and rebuilt it in the motor pool, and I put it back in.

That was kinda the beginning of becoming a passion for me to play with cars.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] In 1959, while on leave, he married Sharon Minnies in Peoria.

After his discharge in 1962, he returned to his hometown, where the couple raised two sons.

He expanded his car hobby, which his wife enjoyed on the open road.

- My wife was my biggest supporter, and my wife was my best friend, and she was just... My wife was a saint.

(chuckles) She supported everything I did.

Now, we did a lot of traveling together over the years.

- [Narrator] Over the decades, Phelps has worked on 300 cars.

In dollars and cents, for cars, parts, and labor, how much has he invested?

- Probably millions of dollars.

- [Narrator] Many of the projects have been rebuilds for others.

He doesn't race, but he does like speed.

(engine roaring) Especially in his modified 2016 Ford Mustang.

(engine revving) With permission, he's taken it out to the runways of the Peoria Airport.

- I've had my Mustang up to 175 on a runway, you know, out on a runway at the airport.

And I've had it up to 135 on Interstate 74.

- [Narrator] So far, no speeding tickets.

And he's been in only one wreck in 2015 in Elmwood, where he now lives, and in a car he'd built from scratch.

It was totaled in the wreck, so he decided to build a new car, nicknamed Therapy.

- Well, I went through a lot of physical damage and a lot of mental damage because of the accident.

This was to kinda get myself motivated to get up and get moving again.

(engine rumbling) - [Narrator] Now the hobby is helping him handle grief.

Wife Sharon died late last year.

- Well, we got along pretty good for 64 1/2 years.

- [Narrator] Traditionalists like Phelps often favor auto designs as old as 100 years.

- Well, the younger guys, the guys probably from 60 on back, the new hot rods to them are the Hondas and the Subarus and the, you know, the Toyotas.

They like these store-bought muscle cars.

You can do all kinds of things with 'em to make 'em fast, and you got all kinds of cosmetic things to put on, make 'em look nice.

So that younger generation of people don't do the 20s and 30s like I do.

(upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] How long does Phelps plan to keep working on street rods?

- Till I can't stand up and walk out in the garage.

(laughs) (engine revving) (gentle music) - [Narrator] The Legacy Building on Front Street in downtown El Paso is undergoing a big transformation to teach people about the past.

- There are things that are in here that are original, such as this mirror.

The infrastructure is original.

You can see the plating right here.

- [Narrator] In the 1800s, the basement of the building housed a barbershop run by David Strother.

His name may not ring a bell, but as history students at El Paso Gridley High School and their teacher Michael Melick found out, Strother was a trailblazer.

- And one of the students did a story on David Strother.

And when we watched her YouTube video, we found out that this man lived in El Paso for 40 years, owned a business, and was the first African American to vote in Illinois after the passage of the 15th Amendment.

And my class of students is like, "This guy's from El Paso?

This is wild.

We need to do something about this."

- [Narrator] In 1870, Strother made history when he became the first Black person in Illinois to vote.

The current owner of the building, Tabitha Norwalk, was also learning about the history of Strother, and like Melick wanted to do and learn more.

- I invited Tabitha up to the classroom to present her ideas for what our potential exhibits would be.

And then, after we presented, she's like, "All right, let's do it."

And I'm like, "No, no, no, no, this is just a hypothetical."

She's like, "No, we're doing it.

We're gonna make this museum.

People need to know Strother's story.

People need to know the story of voting rights in America."

And I'm like, (exhales) "Here we go.

This is out of my comfort zone, but let's go for it."

- [Narrator] The Project 15 Museum is named after the 15th Amendment, which states that, "The right of citizens to vote shall not be denied on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

You may be wondering how a Black man in small-town El Paso made history.

Well, to explain that, we need to explore how Strother wound up in predominantly white Woodford County.

David Strother's mother was a slave in Missouri, and was able to buy her freedom when her owners died.

She eventually moved to Peoria, where David was born in 1843.

- He was a cook with Company F in the Illinois 17th Infantry.

And they went south into the Civil War, and they were with Grant at Vicksburg, and so he has Civil War experience.

And then, while he's there, some of his buddies in company F are like, "Hey, you should open up a barbershop in El Paso.

- [Narrator] The 15th Amendment went into effect on March 30th, 1870.

The following week, there was an election.

Under a special charter, El Paso held its election day one day before most other elections.

That's why Strother, and not a Black person in Chicago or another part of Illinois, made history.

- The first time he went to the polling place, one of the election officials actually turned him away.

He said, "If there's any law that's passed, I haven't heard of it."

And so they didn't let Strother vote the first time.

Later, they telegraphed to get a copy of the 15th Amendment, and then they came back and got David, and said, "All right, we've got a copy.

Let's go."

He went back, showed them the 15th Amendment, and that's when they let him vote.

- [Narrator] The Project 15 Museum isn't just about honoring David Strother.

We got a sneak peek during construction.

When finished, it will be the first voting rights museum in Illinois.

The nonpartisan, non-profit group will also focus on education, outreach, and signing up voters.

- This is gonna be our Landscape of Today section.

We're hoping to have a kind of interactive, another interactive section over here.

So it's gonna have, like, if you've ever been to a children's museum, and you have, like, the colored lights, where you get to play with the lights.

We have a motto that is, "Diversity creates beauty."

And so with that, we're gonna have these colored lights.

Then, when people move, their shadows create different colors, and the different colors represents the beauty that comes with diversity.

- [Narrator] Board member Liyah Williams says the museum will also look at the history of struggles other minority groups and women have endured.

- I found out what this museum was about.

I was like, "I have to do something to help raise David Strother's voice, and all these people who have been disenfranchised.

Today, there are people who don't have voting rights that everybody else has access to, and so I have to also lift up their voices.

We are gonna be creating the first voting rights museum of its kind in the country.

We're gonna be doing an all-round coverage of voting rights, so Native American voting rights history, Asian American, Latin American, African American, women's suffrage.

And then we're gonna also dive into David Strother and the history of Black barbershops.

And it's gonna be an overall just incredible project.

(gentle music continues) - [Narrator] Didi Drake's hometown is smack dab in the middle of nowhere.

- It's hard to explain why anybody would wanna live in such a remote place to the people who don't understand it.

And living on a farm, you have the joys of being amongst the agriculture.

I love the fields, I love the smells and the sounds, and everything that comes with it.

But there's also a beauty to living in the middle of nowhere.

- [Narrator] But it's also in the middle of everything.

Welcome to Chestnut, Illinois, the geographic center of the state.

(upbeat music) That distinction is the focus of an old marketing effort, under revival by Drake's group, the Chestnut Geo Center.

She loves Chestnut, and she thinks you'd like it too.

In eastern Logan County, Chestnut is about 50 miles southeast of Peoria, 50 miles northeast of Springfield, and 30 miles southwest of Bloomington.

- Heart of ag country.

- [Narrator] Chestnut was founded in 1872, named after a conductor of the railroad that pushes through town.

The population has always been about 250 people.

- Chestnut's always been a small town.

Way back when, early 1900s, we actually had about three or four different storefronts, grocery stores, a hardware store, mercantile center.

We had the restaurant.

There used to be three different bars in this town, which is now a dry town.

It's pretty much the grain elevator, a bank, and a restaurant, and that's pretty much what we're down to business-wise.

- [Narrator] Still for more than a century, Chestnut quietly has kept going as a peaceful community for raising a family.

- Well, it's a good place.

I've lived here 86 years.

It's a good place to grow up, you know.

- [Narrator] Then, in 1992, Gary Calvert came along.

- Gary Calvert was a student in Peoria, from Midstate College, and he had this idea to find the exact center of Illinois.

He found it was just right outside of Chestnut.

And he came to our town with this idea of building a monument, getting recognition.

The town at first was a little leery.

You know, you come into this little bitty town of 200 and some people and start talking about tourism and all these people coming in.

Well, everyone kinda looked at him a little odd.

- [Narrator] The Illinois State Geological Survey checked his figures and said he was right about Chestnut.

- He was off by just a few feet.

The exact center of Illinois is down Illinois 54, one mile down, and about 1,300 feet into a cornfield.

- [Narrator] But it's hard to market the middle of a cornfield.

Calvert wowed Chestnut with the idea of promoting the place with T-shirts, ball caps, and other tchotchkes boasting, "Chestnut, the Center of Illinois."

- He really loved the quaintness of the small town and the community spirit, and he didn't wanna see the small towns dying.

So that was one of the things that I think drew him to this project.

- [Narrator] Chestnut boosters sold bricks to raise funds to put a monument in the middle of town.

The 1993 dedication drew state officials, along with Charles Kuralt of "CBS News Sunday Morning."

- We put the monument up first with the bricks, and then we added the gardens and such, and it gets a little larger every year.

- [Narrator] Calvert wanted it to get a lot larger.

He suggested building a tower hundreds of feet into the sky to really draw attention to Chestnut.

But before he could do anything more for the town, he died in 1994.

Still, the town would hold a yearly event in the park to celebrate its center-of-the-state designation.

- We are about to do our next celebration this June, and we're gonna continue the tradition.

We started calling it a fun day, is what we started marketing it as.

We try to be very family centered.

So June 1st, it's a Saturday of this year.

But we're gonna have bounce houses for the kids, face painting, balloon animals.

We're gonna have craft and food vendors out.

We have four placards, one on each corner, that are representing kind of what the committee believed to be the foundation of our town.

So we have a placard for agriculture, family, and the railroad.

So we have those three corner designs, and then we have the geographical center on the last corner.

- [Narrator] Indeed, on any given day, the monument might bring tourists to town.

- There's quite a few people who stop.

They go through the bricks.

I think a lot of people are people who have ties to the community from way back when.

- [Narrator] In fact, Chestnut enjoyed one brief moment of nationwide intrigue.

- The geographical center of Illinois was a "Jeopardy" question.

And getting Alex Trebek to talk about Chestnut, Illinois was a highlight of my day.

So that was, like, the late '90s.

- [Interviewer] Did they get it right?

- I don't think anybody got it right.

(laughs) - [Narrator] But in Chestnut, she says, it's all all right.

- The quietness, the camaraderie, your neighbors.

I mean, there's people I've known here all my life, and I have friends that range from 18 to 86 that I consider close and dear.

And I don't think that happens so much when you are in the large cities, and the metropolitan areas are so disconnected.

So the middle of nowhere sometimes isn't a bad place to be.

- Memorial Day is a special time of year where we honor those who have lost their lives during their military service.

- With that in mind, we wanna take a look at the remarkable life of a Central Illinois sailor.

He survived one of the darkest days in US history, the attack on Pearl Harbor, where he rescued and recovered many fellow servicemen.

(aircraft engine buzzing) (dramatic music) (gunshots banging) (explosions booming) - [Narrator] Sterling Cale was one of Central Illinois's greatest World War II heroes, and the area's last Pearl Harbor survivor.

You probably don't know his name.

Cale died earlier this year in his adopted home of Hawaii, the site of his remarkable bravery on December 7th, 1941.

Cale grew up in several Central Illinois towns, including Macomb, Monmouth, and Galesburg.

After graduating high school in 1940, he decided to join the Navy.

The Navy sent him to pharmacy school, after which he was asked where he might want to be stationed.

- Gee, I've heard about a little island out in the middle of Pacific there, Territory of Hawaii, where the girls have long black hair and wear grass skirts and live in grass shacks.

(chuckles) Well, that was our idea in those days.

I said, "Oh, hell, give me Pearl Harbor."

- [Narrator] Hell?

Actually, island life was heavenly.

Hell would come late the next year.

Cale worked the third shift at the pharmacy.

On December 7th, 1941, he got off work at 7:00 AM, and started walking to his barracks.

He then heard a buzz in the sky, and looked upward.

- We had a mock on Pearl Harbor about once every month, so I just stood there and watched them.

And then suddenly one of the planes turned off to the right, and I saw the Rising Sun on the fuselage and the wingtip, and I said, "Hell, this is not our planes.

This is the Japanese."

- [Narrator] He dashed to the armory, and bashed open a locked door.

As Japanese bombs began to rain down, other sailors rushed over.

Cale handed out the only weapons available, old single-shot rifles.

- We handed out rifles and bands of ammunition to anybody that wanted to receive it, and these guys were firing at the planes intermittently.

I don't think they ever hit anything, but they were firing at 'em anyway.

- [Narrator] Meantime, the harbor exploded in chaos.

- Some of 'em, they would drop a bomb on, and there'd be big, big explosion.

A lot of (water splashing) bombs falling into the water.

The water would be all aflame.

I think the oil was running all over, and it would catch fire.

- [Narrator] Cale, who'd had training as a frogman, rushed to the torpedoed USS Oklahoma.

- The water was all aflame from the oil, and I said, "Well, I'm going to try to see if I can save some of the people."

So I'm diving down into water.

I'd go out, break water, look around, see where somebody is, go down underwater again, over there, pick somebody up, put 'em on the ship, on the barge.

Some of 'em were alive.

Some of 'em, I'm sure, were dead already.

Many of 'em that were injured and wounded.

- [Narrator] Two days later, Cale was put in charge of a crew of 10 sailors tasked with recovering bodies from the USS Arizona.

The work was grim.

- They were buried in there about 3' tall, most of them solid charcoal, just jammed together like a bunch of sardines.

And we tried to spud them apart.

Maybe the head would come off, or the arm or the leg, and we still try to get one person and put him in the (indistinct).

- [Narrator] The work went on for six weeks.

Cale and the others removed the remains of 109 personnel.

- I often wondered how I dealt with those things.

I didn't spend too much time thinking about 'em, actually.

I'm sort of a, I'm a funny person.

- [Narrator] After the war, the pharmacist switched to the Army for better career opportunities.

He would serve in the Korean War and Vietnam War.

He later served with the Department of Defense, before retiring in 2005.

That's when he began volunteering at the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii, sharing his Pearl Harbor experiences with visitors.

As for those pretty Hawaiian girls he envisioned back in 1940, he married one, Victoria.

They raised two children, and enjoyed more than 70 years of marriage before she died in 2019.

In his late '90s, as his voice and strength weakened, Cale worried about keeping alive the memory of Pearl Harbor.

As he once told me, "When we're gone, there will be no one left to tell the story."

More than 2,400 US personnel died at Pearl Harbor.

Today, there are only about 2,400 Pearl Harbor survivors.

Their ranks were diminished January 20, when Sterling Cale died with his family at his side.

He was 102 years old.

Now you know his name, and now you know his story.

Thank you for your service, Sterling Cale.

(upbeat music) (music ends) - Let's take a walk on the wild side again.

This time, we've entered to the Miller Park Zoo to meet a misunderstood creature.

We're hanging out with a nocturnal marsupial, a cousin to the kangaroo, with human-like hands, crazy whiskers that stick out everywhere.

That's right.

The possum.

(upbeat music) Or is it opossum?

We're in the Midwest, and I grew up calling it a possum, but it's truly opossum?

- It is truly opossum.

I looked it up right before this, because I knew it was gonna get asked.

So opossum and possum are two common words.

We use it for him both ways.

There is a possum in Australia and New Guinea area, and it looks different from him.

But how we typically refer to it when we're writing professional papers, opossum for this type, and then possum for the other type.

But Merriam-Webster says they have both in their title to acknowledge that.

- So it's opossum.

I didn't wanna offend Ringo- - Ah, it's okay.

- and call him the wrong name.

- He understands.

- [Julie] He's called Ringo, after another very famous Ringo who sang with The Beatles.

But this Ringo loves to eat beetles.

In fact, he loves bugs of all kinds.

- Virginia possums are opportunistic omnivores.

They'll eat anything almost.

You'll find 'em in your garbage can.

I've seen one or two.

But at the zoo, we feed him fruits, vegetables, cat food even, and his protein, which is typically superworms.

- Superworms?

What's a superworm?

- They almost look like little centipedes, but they're the larval form of a beetle.

It's a baby beetle.

- [Julie] Opossums are great for the environment, because their eating habits help control bug populations, especially ticks.

(upbeat music continues) These fuzzy creatures have been misunderstood for a long time.

Have you ever heard of the phrase, "playing possum"?

- So the young possums, when they are threatened, it is a natural response.

It is hormones in their system that causes them to just play possum.

But the older ones, when they're more mature, and have learned that, they do an open-mouth hiss, where they show all 55 of their teeth, the most teeth of any land mammal.

- [Julie] Ringo is an animal ambassador, which means he interacts with a lot of zoo visitors, and has a pretty chill personality.

And he's a staff favorite too.

- He comes to staff meetings whenever possible.

- What's his role at the staff meeting?

- Well, you would think he's the boss with how much people pay attention to him.

But his favorite is just to find a random person anytime, and climb up their leg and sit in their lap.

- Oh!

- Sometimes it's the person who brought their lunch to the staff meeting.

- Oh, that makes sense.

- Maybe there's an ulterior motive there.

- [Julie] He has those sharp teeth and claws, but he's not what you might expect.

- He's very soft.

I thought you'd feel very wiry the first time I touched him- No, he's real soft.

- but he's incredibly soft.

- But he has some fierce-looking nails there.

Something you have to look out in the wild, I'm sure.

- Yeah.

So his hands, he can grab with them.

They're almost like our hands.

So if I hand him a snack sometimes, sometimes he'll reach out with his hand to put it in his mouth.

- [Julie] Opossums can be spotted easily by their bat-like ears and long, hairless tails.

But it is a misconception that they can hang by their tails.

- So his tail is prehensile.

That means he can control it.

So he uses it to grip onto branches as he's walking by.

He is terrestrial, but he does climb a lot.

So his tail is really just helping him keep balance.

- [Julie] While staff and visitors alike love Ringo, we wanna be perfectly clear that these guys may look cute, but remember, they are wild animals.

- They are not good pets.

No.

At our zoo, we have the capacity to be able to handle him and fulfill all of his needs that he needs.

But he can be very stinky.

He can cause a big mess.

So we do not encourage him as a pet.

- [Julie] While Ringo is adorable, I think I'll stick to goldfish for pets for now.

(upbeat music continues) - Lot of stuff this show.

Interesting and informative.

Like, did you know that Chestnut is the center of Illinois?

- I had no idea.

But I do know what's the center of my world, and yours too.

"You gotta see this!"

- Time to go home.

- Thanks.

♪ Time to go ♪ ♪ We're totally exhausted ♪ (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues)