- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(loons singing) (gentle upbeat music) - [Announcer] Coming up next "Off 90," memories of a nearly 70-year-old food stand at the Mower County Fair, a tour of Rochester's Plummer House, a watercolor artist in Albert Lea, and a radio-controlled car racetrack in Blooming Prairie.

It's all coming up next "Off 90."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (children chattering) - I am Barb Granholm, and I'm owner of Herb and Murl's out here at the Mower County Fair.

69 years ago, they started out with a popcorn stand down the line by where the Carol Plager building is.

And then this stand became available to rent, so my dad rented this.

In 1960 sometime, they tore the old building down, and my dad and my two uncles rebuilt this stand that we have here now, so.

So then we had both stands for a while, the popcorn and Herb and Murl's.

And then eventually my dad built a new popcorn stand and had that for a few years and then sold that and just had the Herb and Murl's.

And then eventually the guy who had the Wonder Bar stands across from us, he retired, so my dad took over the Wonder Bar stand.

- I'm John Mueller, and I'm a former Mower County Fair board member.

So I grew up just south of the fairgrounds, and I used to ride my bicycle, to the Mower County Fair every day.

And I came up here because I always wanted to live on a farm but didn't quite get to do that.

So I came up here and helped a gentleman milk his cows during fair week, and part of coming up here and milking cows, my treat was to get a Wonder Bar from Herb and Murl's.

Just about every day I guess I got one.

Literally the favorite of every kid.

You know, get 'em...

They're hand-dipped, and you would get it rolled in the peanuts.

And boy, you'd just see a lot of 'em walking around the ground being eaten.

That probably has always been my favorite part of Herb and Murl's.

- So, and then as we got older, my mother always said, "When you're 12, and you can make change, you can come to work."

- Thanks.

- Thank you.

Have a good day now.

- [Customer] Sure.

- That's Herb and Murl.

- [Crew Member] Yep.

- And then here's the menu.

Years ago we had the hamburgers.

We had potato chips.

We had pies.

We had rolls and donuts, pop, which was in a bottle in a cooler that just slid the bottle out at the end to get the bottle out.

And they were all returnable bottles.

And pies were homemade.

Got rid of some of the others, and we got the fries, and we got the onion rings, and we got cheese curds and corn dogs, hot dogs, and the Wonder Bars, of course.

One without nuts.

Oh, it's been great.

We've met a lot of nice people, kids growing up with 4-H and that, and now they're taking...

They now have kids in 4-H. - Been showing at the Mower County Fair since 1951.

John Grass, lived down at Le Roy 72 years ago.

I've been coming for 72 years to the Mower County Fair.

Herb and Murl's, well, they started in 1954, so I remember 'em from then.

This is our main place to eat, plus the 4-H building, was the two places where the fair people that are exhibiting.

And then it says and what they had told me that they didn't build this stand until a little later.

It was a small one at first, and then eventually they put in this bigger one.

Been here showing at the fair and have always had lunch over here and stuff like that, so got to know 'em personally.

- Boys appreciated that about them.

They kept the business in the family for all these years.

They haven't had to deviate from what they're doing 'cause what they were doing was good and successful.

- Such a friendly family.

More generations just kept on taking it over for the older folks.

- It's been fantastic working with family.

I can't thank 'em enough.

They've been wonderful.

If you need anything, they'll do it for you.

- Been exciting to be part of it and how the fair has grown.

Most of these buildings weren't here in '51.

They've been replaced, burnt down or whatever.

- [John M.] They have been such a mainstay of the Mower County Fair as things change.

- But the thing that has stayed the same mainly is Herb and Murl's.

- [John M.] You know, they were always the steady.

- It's meeting new people, seeing the same ones come back year after year and the kids that have been in 4-H and grown up, and it's just been a great ride.

- I'd like to thank 'em for the service they have given to Mower County exhibitors and the fairgoers.

It's been kind of a tradition that's been here, well, since 1954.

- A lot of people have stopped and said, "We're gonna miss you," and, you know, we're gonna miss them too.

Yeah, she looks really good.

- [Customer] Okay, thank you.

- Yep, see you later.

- Bye.

- Bye.

(laughs) (bright music) (gentle upbeat music) - The house was built between 1917 and 1924, and Henry Plummer was one of the first doctors outside of the Mayo family that the Mayo brothers hired.

I'm Les Cookman.

I'm the resident director of the Plummer House in Rochester, Minnesota.

The house has 10 bedrooms and nine bathrooms.

It was built on a quarry.

In fact, the house originally was called Quarry Hill, and I've seen cards that say, "Dr. Henry and Daisy Plummer, Quarry Hill" they had made about the house.

The living room is 20 feet by 40 feet, has a wonderful fireplace at one end, and it also at the other end, then it walked right out into the greenhouse.

When the family lived here, Daisy loved playing the piano, and they had a baby grand that they played.

Sometimes they had two baby grands so that Daisy could have duets with some young doctors or nurses from the clinic.

She also had what she called a bean pot Sunday night dinner, which was for young nurses and young doctors to kind of... She was kind of a matchmaker.

The favorite room for both Daisy and Henry was the library.

It's lined with books, had a big desk for Henry to work in, which was his original desk.

We have a real comfortable chair, an ottoman that were original.

They'd been recovered.

Had its own fireplace.

And so they spent a lot of time there.

Then you have the dining room, and they had a large dining room table.

Off the dining room, then there was a very nice screened porch they spent quite a bit of time on.

Then you went into the butler's pantry, where they prepared a lot of the food, a rather large kitchen with many cupboards that stored a lot of dishes.

Then you take a nice grand stairway up to the second level, where you have two guest bedrooms that were right at the top of the steps.

And then down a little bit farther on the front side of the house was their master bedroom.

Across from the master bedroom was their daughter's bedroom at that time.

The next bedroom was Robert their son's bedroom.

Off of that, there was a quarters that was used by the maid.

She had her own private quarters with her own bathroom, her own bedroom, and you could lock it off from everything.

On top of that, then on top of the second level, then there's a beautiful ballroom, and they entertained a lot.

They had a special place for extra chairs and tables, and they were wonderful to their help.

But they had one rule, and that was that the help when they were coming up to serve food or other things took the back stairs rather than going up the main stair level.

The house is equipped with a dumbwaiter, and there's a room just off the kitchen that is called the butler's pantry.

There are a lot of dishes in there.

That's where they kept their original dishes.

The dumbwaiter then also went up to the second level so that they could...

In the back maids quarters, they had a door where it could be brought, the food and things could be brought up at the second level and then taken to their rooms if they wanted to eat in their rooms.

And then the dumbwaiter went all the way to the third-level ballroom.

Moved into the property or when they had the property built, what we call a bell and buzzer system.

They had intercom in every room, and if you go into the master bedroom, you can still see the board where they pushed the button, and then they would call like you used to just have your earphone, and they could call the servants or whoever.

Every room had that intercom system.

People always ask questions about if there are any secret passageways or things like that.

If you go in the master bedroom closet, there's a piece of wood that covers a hole in the floor, and the story is that Henry worried a little bit about Daisy, about them having a break-in and someone stealing Daisy's jewels.

So he put them in a bag, and he could drop 'em down into this chute.

And then if you went downstairs into the library, you had to take a shelf of books off, and it opened up, and that's where the jewels would drop down behind the wall.

We have a beautiful tapestry hanging in the foyer.

The family had it in the same spot that we have it today.

And there's a lovely portrait painting of Henry that as you take the expansive steps up to the second level, Henry's picture's right on the wall.

Now my wife tells me and others that if you look at that picture as you're going up the steps, Henry's eyes will follow you as you go up the steps.

Now, I don't know if that's true or not, but she swears that she's seen that before.

So we tell people that anyway just for the fun of it.

There's a long mall area, they call it, that ran down to the water tower.

We have lots of weddings down that way and lots of weddings in the lower garden.

But we've hosted weddings from 15 people to 100 people.

And so you can do an intimate wedding, or you can do something a bit larger.

And a wedding and reception can both be held here, and we have a lot of that also.

(water splashing) (birds chirping) The Plummer House actually is a public facility, and it's a grand historical mansion that is now open to the public some days.

It's not shut off.

The grounds are open all the time.

I think it's a little gem in the community, and many people don't know that it's a public park.

You can come up here, sit out in the grass anytime that we don't have a rental event.

The majority of the furniture we have in the house is original, and it's been recovered in some cases, but the dining room table, dining room chairs, the living room furniture.

We have one natural rug that was in the living room when the family lived here in the later years in the '40s.

We kind of feel like we owe it to the family to make sure that it's maintained like it has been for years and years and that it'd be accessible to the public.

I hope it doesn't ever get to a point where the public is not able to walk around as they are now.

And the rental rates are quite reasonable for events.

We have events from 25 to 100 people, so it is accessible.

My kids have grown up here.

My grandkids have never known any place else as grandpa and grandma's house except for the Plummer House, and that's pretty unique.

That's pretty special.

(bright music) (birds chirping) (gentle upbeat music) - It's still really powerful because I get to paint something that never existed before.

I'm Bonnie Broitzman, and I'm a visual artist, and watercolor is my favorite media.

And I went through North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, which I loved.

And the art instructor was a beautiful watercolorist, but it wasn't considered a permanent media at that time.

So you had to major in oil if you were a painter.

Husband didn't care for the smell of oil paint.

And then after we had little children after I had taught for a while, and then we had a family, the children and oil paint is not a good combination.

So I decided I need a real quick and fluid media, so I took up some watercolor classes and absolutely fell in love with it.

I was real interested in art history and European art, so our family did move to Europe.

We lived in Germany for a year, and I did a major art history graduate course.

I was offered a job in Austin, Minnesota, and I taught in Austin public schools for 13 years.

And I took the job because they offered me a job right on the same block as where my father and mother's home was.

And my dad was a paraplegic, and I thought, "Gee, I'm supposed to come back to this area and help my parents out and teach school again."

And I taught elementary art at Banfield and absolutely loved it.

And by then I had met Carolyn Holman, who's a international artist, and she was encouraging me to quit painting and start painting all over Europe with her and doing international workshops.

It was a wonderful decision.

It was kind of an exquisite risk to quit teaching and head out on my own, but I absolutely had the grandest adventure.

And I had purchased this home on the lake when I quit teaching in Austin because I wanted to have a working studio.

I was taught the color wheel, where you have three primary colors, yellow, red, blue, and they make the three secondary colors, orange, green, and violet.

But I took another look at it because I was studying the Enneagram.

I have a wonderful friend that grew up, Kathy Scheid, in Austin, and she was an an Enneagram instructor.

She said, "You have to know about this because this is all about personalities.

There's nine personalities."

And I looked at that Enneagram, and it had the same configuration.

It had that same primary color, that triangle.

It had colors on the side, and there were nine of 'em.

And I looked at that, and I said, "What if I took those nine points and did it with each one with color, each hue?"

So I did yellow, and then as yellow moved to red, I made a warm color.

And as yellow moved towards blue, I made a cooler green color.

Well, that makes sense.

So then I did the red.

And as the red moved to yellow, I got yellow-orange, which is warm.

And as that red moved towards the blue, I got purple.

So that was a cooler red, a more dynamic red.

Then I did the same thing with blue.

And when the blue went towards the green, I got blue-green, and when the blue went towards the red, I got red-violet.

And each one of those big painting are full of energy and full of dynamic, and each one has their very own personality.

And as you move around the Enneagram, and you look at those colors, and you start saying, "Well, you know, this personality could change.

If you would just pay a little more attention to this personality over here, you could be more well-rounded."

And that was a real big success because I had all nine paintings in a circle like the color wheel just the way they are, and it just flows.

Well, guess what?

When something flows, there's no boundaries.

There's no fences.

Without boundaries and without stopping, I start on a wet piece of paper.

I add those really beautiful fresh watercolor pigments on that, and they explode, and they move, and they mingle.

Well, you don't have white in watercolor.

The only white you see is always the white of the paper.

So it's a really, really special experience because the bottom line is the water colorist has two beautiful things, water, which bursts everything, and color, and color has been here even before the Earth.

The colors have personalities just like people, and you learn those, and you learn who to put next to each other, who to let mingle, who to keep apart.

And your pictures are gloriously clean and pure and radiant.

That's what it's about.

Color system is the most universal system.

Color is one language, one universal language.

It really is a wonderful system for people to be involved in to help them enjoy their world and understand their world.

Take a risk.

Learn to paint and draw or do music or dance.

So no matter what else is going on in the world, you can have your own private, personal access to happiness and joy by being an artist.

It's a wonderful thing, and I'm very, very grateful that I've been a part of it.

(bright music) (motors whirring) (upbeat music) - RC car racing to me is fun.

I get to do it with my family.

It's a learning experience.

Every time we race, we learn something new.

I am Justin Dokken from Austin, Minnesota here at Southern Minnesota RC Raceway in Blooming Prairie.

I'm originally from Albert Lea.

Friend of mine from Clarks Grove owned the gas station there right off the interstate, and he had all the land in the back, and I asked him one day, "Hey, can I build an RC track back there?"

He said, "Clean it up.

Cheers."

So we were there for probably about, I wanna say five years.

And so I started looking around for a place.

He ended up selling the gas station, so he had to move anyway.

And this one fell into my lap, and it's been a godsend ever since.

(motor whirring) We're known pretty well now, so I mean, everybody knows we're here.

But when they do all show up, we have one, you know, it's one big race, so.

Classes we run, we have a rookie class, which is under 13.

That's basically, you know, "I just got my car.

I don't even know how to charge my battery" type people, kids, you know, stuff.

Try to keep the adults away from that class, We got a sportsman class for them.

So we pretty much got, you know, there's probably nine classes, and then we just added...

This summer, we added a rock crawling course outside.

Derek.

(motors whirring) The scales on the cars is the size.

So you start off with... You can start off with 24th scale, which is size, you know, like this big.

Then you go to a... Let's see, you go to...

There's 12th scale.

There's 14th scale.

There's 16th scale.

There's 10th scale.

There's eighth scale.

There's fifth scale, and there's 1/4 scale.

All these determines the size of the car.

I mean, the 1/4 scales, you know are like this.

They're like four-feet long.

The fifth scales are a little bit shorter, not much, but they're a little bit shorter.

And then we have the eighth scale and the 10th scale stuff is your most common.

You know, so that's the difference in the scales.

That's really the only difference between them.

Now the difference between nitro and electric is you run a battery with one, and you run, it's kind of like, I wanna say like diesel fuel, you know, 'cause some people don't know what nitro fuel is.

So it's like diesel fuel.

It's combustion fuel that runs the nitros.

(alert chimes) (spectator whistles) Steve.

Jesse.

- [Spectator] Jesse.

- Avit.

In the heat races, I'll call your name when I want you to go because I try to spread everybody out 'cause you're not racing against the next... You're not racing anybody in a heat race.

You're going against yourself on your time.

All the timing is done by my laps timing system, which is all electronic stuff.

So you just fill in the information, and it does everything else for you.

You just gotta... Zach.

Now the mains, main's when the tone goes off, everybody goes.

Like when you drop the flag or whatever, everybody takes off the same time.

The heats are ran differently just to give everybody more of a chance to, you know, get spread out so you're not... 'Cause if everybody takes off at the same time in a heat race, they're all gonna end up in the same corner, and they're all gonna end up smashing in the same corner.

Now when it's the main, everybody's got it in their head, "Well, I'm not gonna go in there that fast now.

I'm already in the main, so let's just get around that first corner," 'cause the first corner's the killer.

You know, when everybody's racing their first corner, you all start out this wide, but by the time you get down to the end of the track, it's like this wide.

So you can't get everybody through there at once, so somebody's gonna get short of the stick.

So you just gotta drive's all you gotta do.

- [Spectator] Hey, we'll need a volunteer marshal.

You wanna tell 'em?

- What the marshal means is that when you're done racing, you go out on the track, and you pick a cone.

We got cones set up around the track where you go stand by one 'cause it's normally where somebody's gonna crash.

So if they crash, your job is to flip them over and get them back on the track as quickly as possible.

(motors whirring) Thank you, sir.

Well, at our events, I give out awards.

What I mean by awards, it could be trophies, could be plaques.

I have giveaways from sponsors, from manufacturers that send me stuff to give away at our events.

That's just at our events.

On our club racing, we have, it's like a point series through the whole summer.

It'll be Wednesday night point series, and there's a Saturday point series, and at the end of the year, we tally up everything, and we just, you place 'em by that.

Then they'll get a plaque at the end of the year.

(motors whirring) This sport has got the biggest age range of any other sport 'cause anybody can do it.

You don't have to be, you know, good at, you know, hitting a baseball or driving a car or whatever.

You just gotta go out there and have fun.

I think what makes this real appealing to a lot of people is that, one, it doesn't cost as much money to get started as people think it does because some of these cars, you can buy 'em used pretty reasonable.

Number two is that you can go to a place and meet a bunch of new people and hang out and have a good time.

Three, it's a family affair, where, you know, not just one can go, and everybody can come, you know?

You can come and watch.

You can come and try it, you know?

And the more we get that show up, it's the more that wanna do it.

You know, even if they just come and do it once or twice, they can say they did it.

It's something affordable, really affordable for a family to get involved in.

(air hissing) It doesn't matter how long you've been doing it.

There's something new to learn all the time, and I think that's the key that gets at why we're so interesting, is 'cause it ain't the same boring thing over and over and over again.

That's what we're trying to make this, one facility that you only gotta go one place to have fun.

My favorite part of racing is competition, who can carry the bragging rights to the following race, you know, to the next race or whatever.

So that's where it really gets fun, when you're out there having a good time.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (light upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(loons singing)