- (imitates horse neighing) We've got some really interesting guests today.

Two-legged and four-legged.

- Well, I hope one of them is at least a therapist that can talk to you about this horse obsession.

(Phil imitates horse neighing) - You've gotta see this.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) - We really do have some interesting guests on this show.

- Absolutely.

We do have some Bradley students that are creating video games, and music to go along with it, but the music is so good that a symphony orchestra is gonna play it.

- Very impressive.

We're also going to tell the story of an inspiring 100-year-old Peoria woman who died doing the thing she loved most: collecting money for charity.

- But first, let's visit the small town of Alexis where the Clydesdales are taking them into the future.

- Small town, big horses, right now.

(carriage rattling) - [Julie] It's a sound that's unmistakable.

(hooves thumping) (horse snorts) A site rarely seen in Central Illinois.

Almost an echo of the past.

(horse snorts) It's the sights and sounds of Clydesdales.

They're big, beautiful draft horses that, believe it or not, once called the small town of Alexis, Illinois Home, thanks to the town's founder.

- Alexis is known as the American home of the Clydesdale because one of our founders, Robert Holloway, brought them in from Canada across the border and settled them and became one of the most nationally known Clydesdale breeders in the United States.

- There's a lot of people that don't know the history of Alexis.

We're a small town, and we've really never promoted it.

We're actually probably promoting it more than anybody ever has our history.

But it just ties in with what we're doing.

So it's a marketing tool also.

You know, come to the American home of the Clydesdales and see some.

- [Julie] Alexis and F & M Clydesdales are embracing their history and bringing back the nostalgia to this little town.

- They're a beautiful symbol of power, a symbol of grace.

It's just something that I think a small town like this could kind of hang their hat on, a symbol of pride.

And it's a conversation piece.

It's something that we should be proud of for our history and just something to bring people into Alexis and have a reason to come and enjoy themselves.

- You get some people looking, I mean, it depends on what time of day.

There aren't many people in this town.

But yeah, they come out if they see you come.

We went down to the sign and took pictures and had several cars stop and take pictures.

So yeah, they're interested in it.

- [Julie] Alexis is small, with only 800 people in the town, but last December Robbie and Holly moved in from Canada, and by next spring both will be mothers to two new Clydesdale colts.

You can hire F & M Clydesdales for wagon rides, carriage rides, or parades.

But this business has become a family affair.

Kyle Flowers loves how it connects his kids with nature.

- When you can put the screens down and have a connection between another living thing, whether it's a human or a horse or a dog or whatever, I would take that 1,000 times over doing anything on a screen or a video game like that.

So we encourage them to come along all the time, and even if it's just giving them treats or petting them and stuff like that, they're always with us.

But they are our pets.

We love them dearly.

They're a part of the family, but we are trying to incorporate it with the history of the town.

So we're trying to make a business out of it to where people can actually physically see the horses physically take a ride, touch them, pet them, tell them they love them and all that.

- [Julie] So after many years of absence, this duo of horse enthusiasts decided not to horse around anymore and start raising Clydesdales.

- I've threatened to go back to work, get some rest, 'cause yeah, it takes a lot of work.

But it's something I like to do.

(upbeat music) So that makes it easier.

(upbeat music) - Like I said, I'm 40 years old, and all my life there's never been a Clydesdale in this general area.

And I always thought that was a shame.

Even as a young kid, I was like, like I was saying before, it's such a cool symbol.

You know, all these things that you could tie into the town.

I just thought it was a shame that we never had draft horses in the last, you know, half decade.

So that was really the driving factor as to why we decided, okay, let's do this.

(air whistling) (meteor explodes) (upbeat music) - [Julie] It's an explosive idea that combines the unlikely partners of video game creators, (triumphant orchestra music) a symphonic orchestra, and a budding composer.

Xavier Chapman is a senior at Bradley University studying music composition.

Little did he know that when he started working on a project two years ago that it would lead to his music being performed by a professional orchestra.

- Lynnsey Lambrecht in the music composition department is the one that I think deserves the credit.

If I remember correctly, she came to me with the idea of having some of her composition students working on the games.

And we thought that was bloody brilliant.

- [Julie] Soon after, Xavier was introduced to the Bradley Gaming Design Program students and their capstone project.

Their task was to design a video game from scratch, a step that he wasn't confident with at first.

- At first it was terrifying, 'cause it was just a new environment for me.

It was just a bunch of people that I didn't know, really.

But I had meetings with them.

I talked with them a lot.

And then they like, asked me what I could do, and they showed me like, what they want.

And I helped deliver as much as I could.

- [Julie] What he did deliver was the music that goes along with the game "Disaster Golf.

: - A game can be fun, and that's it.

And some people mute the game.

Like, I know some people that like, just don't listen to the game.

But when you add in that other element, it just like, clicks.

It adds a whole new layer, a whole new dimension, and it just like, makes it feel more real.

- You're doing creative work as part of a team on a schedule.

And so it's not just we need it to be fun and look good and sound wonderful, it's we need it to be look good and sound, look good and play well and sound wonderful, and you all need to agree on how it's going to do that.

And then it's gotta be, and can you do it by Thursday?

And that is insanely difficult.

Key skill is knowing how to have a shared vision amongst the entire team.

How to communicate.

How everyone can be going in the same direction.

'Cause if you're not, everything falls apart.

- [Julie] This dynamic team of students started planning and executing the graphics programming and essentials to make the game come to life.

- For me, the first thing that I did was like, I asked them, I was like, "What music from other like, mediums are you like, looking to like, mimic?

Stuff like that.

They sent me a bunch of them, and then I looked.

And like, the marimba was like, the big thing that I wanted 'cause- - It does.

It creates that tropical theme, for sure.

(upbeat music) (hippo groaning) (air whistling) - The importance of teamwork and all of those emotional skills, all those things that people have to do to be collaboratively creative, that's what an orchestra is about.

- [Julie] So with video games, music, and a full orchestra, the Video Games in Concert Musical collaboration was born.

- These days, everybody knows and loves symphonic music, but they may not know that they do that.

But they've been to the cinema, and their experience has been enhanced by these symphonic scores, right?

And the excitement.

I mean, you think about Spielberg and John Williams and their collaboration and these great hits, and it's symphonic music that brings it alive.

Well, video games use music to intensify the experience of the gamer.

- [Julie] With Xavier's ability and the orchestra's skill, They hope to spread the joy of music to a whole new audience.

- You know, I've talked to gamers, and I've been to some game stores and some conventions in there.

All will say, "Whoa, this is great.

You know, this is amazing.

You know, we want to come."

And that was my hope, but I'm also looking forward to regular classical concertgoers coming who either themselves have started doing a little gaming, 'cause more and more an older generation is doing that, right, or they have children or grandchildren who are into gaming, and they say, "Come on, let's go see this."

- [Julie] Gamers will get to hear musical segments from their favorite games, including "Halo," "World of Warcraft," along with the original compositions from Xavier - Experience what's happening for Xavier is it's thrilling.

And it's not just of the excitement and the affirmation for him, but actually the challenges that Xavier has to face now.

- It's like, completely different.

I added strings and gave parts to like, different family groups.

And it still has the same core and same things and everything, but there's just more to it.

And honestly, from like, what I've been working on, I'm really excited to hear it come to life.

- I have a couple lists of students, and it changes every year.

You've got the students that you think can make it in the industry.

But like any competitive industry, it takes some luck.

It takes a lot of effort.

It takes knowing people.

And then there's this small, small list, usually each year it doesn't have more than three or four students on it, of if they don't make it in the industry, the industry is bloody idiots.

- Okay.

- [David] Xavier's on that list for me.

(hippo roaring) (gentle music) - [Phil] Amid a swirl of drugs in danger, Steven Snook had a dream.

The life-changing vision was sparked in prison and is now under development in Peoria.

The 46-year-old credits God in lifting him up from what looked like a wasted life behind bars.

- I was in such a state in my life where life or death meant nothing to me.

- [Phil] Born in Virginia, he was raised by a female relative in Danville, Illinois.

At best, she was indifferent to young Steven, as well as a parade of alcoholic and abusive boyfriends.

- I was literally raised by wolves, in a sense.

There was no love.

It was just, it was madness.

There were guns shot off inside my house.

I was sexually abused as a child.

I was beaten more times than you can count as a child.

- [Phil] He yearned for meaning and belonging but had no spiritual guidance.

So he began to experiment with pot at age nine, eventually moving on to harder drugs.

- I've never read a Bible.

There was not a Bible in our house.

- [Phil] But something else caught his attention.

- There didn't seem to be another escape out of that.

And I was able to see through my neighborhood that some men had escaped.

Some men had nice things.

And they were all drug dealers.

- [Phil] At age 15, he started dealing.

- By the time I was 19, I was a full-fledged drug trafficker.

I would get on airplanes at Indianapolis International and fly to the Mexican border.

- [Phil] Eventually, drugs and other trouble led to arrests and prison time.

At age 24, he got out of prison for the first time.

- I get out, and I start trafficking cocaine again.

I mean, it's just all I knew.

So you're living that life.

That life almost always encompasses a lifestyle of using drugs, drinking alcohol heavy, because every day is life or death.

Many times you don't know if you're gonna get robbed and killed that day.

You don't know if the law enforcement's gonna kick down your door and put you in prison that day.

So there's a lot of factors going in there to numb that experience for you, that stressful life.

- [Phil] At age 26, he was arrested again, caught with hundreds of thousands of dollars of cocaine.

He got slammed with 22 years in federal prison.

Yet even there, he quietly continued to run drug operations, at one point asking a brother to drive to an address and collect money.

En route, the brother crashed his car, leaving him on life support.

The news shook Snook.

- That was that coming to Jesus moment.

And I set the phone down, I walked into the prison cell, and I made a deal with the Lord, because I didn't know anything else.

And I didn't know religion, but I had heard about Jesus, 'cause we all have.

'Cause we're from America, man.

We're blessed to have heard that.

And when there's nowhere else to go and nowhere else to cry, you're really in a great spot, because that's when you can come to God with a real heart.

And I went to Jesus and I said, "Lord, if you save my brother's life, I'll give you every breath in my body for the rest of my life."

That was the prayer.

And that's what happened.

- [Phil] His brother lived.

Snook began reading the Bible.

His rough edges smoothed out.

Inmates asked about the change.

- I couldn't explain it.

I'd say, "I'm not really sure what's going on," because I was a gang member as well.

I mean, I've got a giant gang tattoo on my chest.

I was a rough, rough guy, in the streets and in prison.

And I said, "All I know, man, is I found Jesus, and this thing is real."

- [Phil] Inmates asked him to hold Bible studies and preach the Word.

- So you have bars in front of the cell.

So I'd have to walk up to the bars in front of my cell, and everyone else has also got bars in front of their cell.

There's a giant fan rotating out here that makes a little bit of noise.

So for someone to be able to hear me six or eight cells down, I have to be yelling the gospel.

I would be yelling the Bible, be yelling what I was preaching out the bars, so that they could hear me on both sides.

I was baptizing guys in the shower in prison.

You know what I mean?

They'd give their life to Jesus and ask me why they couldn't get baptized.

I'd say, "Let's go."

And I'd baptize them right there.

We'd work with what we had.

- [Phil] Last year, he was released to a halfway house in a place he'd never visited: Peoria.

He remembered a prison dream he says came from God.

A vision of framed scripture verses that kept changing.

But the technology flummoxed him.

- I told him when I woke up, I said, "Lord, I can see it, but I don't understand it," because I'd never seen a smartphone.

Facebook hadn't been invented when I went to prison.

There was no TikTok.

I didn't know how to send an email.

I didn't know how to send a text.

- [Phil] In Peoria, after figuring out his first cell phone, he began Googling suggestions about how to go into business.

He ended up at Peoria Next Innovation Center, Bradley University's startup incubator.

- That was kind of the unique aspect and opportunity, is really working with someone who's very intelligent, but has been structured in a way that hasn't been able to participate in society for so long.

To really, you know, get up to speed on where that is in order to make sure that it's in the best situation for that business to succeed.

- [Phil] Peoria Next helped Snook formulate plans, find investors, and hire a manufacturer for his business called Jesus Speaks.

He sells his frames online.

He is also working on an autobiography.

To credit it all, he points upward.

- You can't really even hear my story without hearing about the supernatural and how God does things.

(gentle music) (perky music) (relaxing music) - All right, my name is Nick Graffman.

I am the manager of Sheets Creek Saloon.

And today, the cocktail we're gonna be making is called the Creek Old Fashioned.

It's just our take on this classic cocktail.

So first we're gonna start off with one or two dark cocktail cherries.

Every customer's a little different.

Some want it sweeter.

You know, someone wanted a little more whiskey flavoring.

Next we're gonna add one orange slice followed by a couple dashes of black walnut bitters.

This is something different.

Most bartenders choose to use the regular bitters.

Out here, we like to give it a little different flavor.

So after that we're gonna add about one ounce of simple syrup.

Then we're gonna give it a nice muddle.

You kind of want to get all this fruit juice, you wanna get the bitters, everything mixed together.

That's really what makes this cocktail.

After that, we're gonna fill the glass with ice.

Today, we're using a Four Roses Small Batch Select.

It's their little higher-end, their higher-end bourbon.

So we're gonna use two ounces.

Approximately two ounces of bourbon.

We're also gonna add a splash of club soda.

And after you're done doing that, you wanna give it a nice swirl.

You wanna get all that stuff mixed in there.

We like to take the orange rind out here and rub it on the rim, because when you're taking a drink off the ice, it just gives it a nice aroma and a nice taste.

And finally, we like to garnish it with another rind and a dark cherry and then a cinnamon stick.

When you take a drink of this cocktail, you'll smell the cinnamon as you taste the drink.

That's it.

(upbeat music) - A cup of hot chocolate and a cup of tea are two ways to cozy up to the winter.

And I have just the recipe that has the best of both warmer-uppers: white chocolate matcha tea.

I use coconut milk as the base for this recipe so my entire family can enjoy it, including my daughter who has a dairy-free lifestyle.

Matcha is the special blend of green tea leaves, and it's known for its calming effect.

Look for premium-quality matcha, free of any added sweeteners, as we're using agave nectar or honey as our sweeteners.

Start with a spoonful of matcha powder.

Put it in a small sauce pan.

(upbeat music) I'm gonna add a small amount of coconut milk, whisking that in.

We just wanna form a paste.

(upbeat music) Add the remaining two cups of coconut milk and whisk that together.

And bring it up to a low simmer.

(upbeat music) I have four ounces of finely chopped white chocolate.

I'm stirring that in till the chocolate is completely melted.

Make sure to scrape the sides.

(upbeat music) Ooh, that's starting to look good.

For an added touch of sweetener, I'm adding honey.

You can add agave nectar as well.

It's to taste.

Make sure you don't overdo it.

Just before serving, I love to put a dollop of whipped cream on top.

(upbeat music) And I love to garnish it with a mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamon.

This is the perfect blend, white chocolate matcha tea.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) - This next story we didn't expect to have such a somber ending.

- Shirley Meagher, I met her several years ago.

I was just taken by her attitude and just her inspirational way of going out every morning for a walk and collecting money for St. Jude.

She'd just find money on the ground, and she'd give it to the telethon every year.

And this year she kept doing that even into her 100th year.

It was just always great to meet up with her, catch up, and hear what she'd been doing.

And not too long ago, while she was out doing what she loved to do, she got hit by a car and passed away.

- And we present this next story to you as a tribute to a remarkable woman.

(gentle upbeat music) - [Phil] Step after step, day after day, Shirley Meagher walked.

She walked for exercise, and she walked for St. Jude.

On her daily stroll, she'd searched for coins, which she collected for the annual telethon for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital.

(gentle upbeat music) Over the years, she raised thousands of dollars.

And the daily coin search continued into this year, even as Shirley Meagher pushed past her 100th birthday.

- I walk because I think it's good for me.

And I enjoy it.

And picking up pennies is just a bonus.

- [Phil] Walking had been a part of Shirley's life since childhood.

- I grew up in the Depression, and by golly we walked.

(laughs) I lived a block from Troy High School.

And we walked downtown, walked to the library, walked everywhere.

- [Phil] After graduating from Peoria High, Shirley got married and raised five children.

Divorced at age 44, she took a new route.

She went to college, then taught kindergarten for 17 years.

Her path took other detours.

Longevity runs in her family.

Several relatives lived well into their 90s and beyond.

- We have genes that don't wanna quit.

- [Phil] Over all her decades, she kept on walking.

12 years ago, at just 88 years old, she moved into the Buehler Home in Peoria.

She mapped out a new route of about one and a half miles round trip.

To tag along, you might've had trouble keeping up with her.

We're following you.

I don't know which way to turn.

We going this way or this way?

- This way.

- This way.

Okay.

She bustled along over dry pavement or even grass soaked in dew.

- Are your feet getting wet?

Mine are.

- Oh yeah.

(laughs) Along the way, she'd sometimes say the Rosary or admire flowers.

- Look at how pretty they are.

At least I think they are.

(laughs) - [Phil] But she couldn't stand litter.

She couldn't pick up all of it, but she did what she could.

Meantime, she'd keep her eyes peeled for treasure: lost coins.

Some days she'd find just a penny or two.

Other days she'd pick up nickels, dimes, or quarters.

Her biggest haul, a $5 bill.

It all added up in a jar at Buehler Home.

Plus, residents there and elsewhere knew about her daily search for coins, so they'd donate to her jar as well.

How much in a year do you come up with?

- Oh, 6, 700 dollars, somehow or other.

Ah, another penny.

I mean, it isn't the only charity I like or even contribute to, but it's the only one I really walk for.

- [Phil] Each weekday walk ended at the 7:00 AM mass at St. Philomena Church.

But she didn't get there August 11.

As rain fell during her morning walk, she tried to cross University Street but was struck by a car, likely dying instantly.

We're going to miss Shirley Meagher.

She was an inspiration to the end, still making Central Illinois a better place at age 100.

(gentle upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music continues)