(upbeat music) [Narrator] Coming up on Nebraska Stories, How a tiny Nebraska town became part of America's space race.

(upbeat music) Thinking big about living small.

(upbeat music) Portraiture and the healing power of art.

(upbeat music) And a statue honoring the first Native American doctor.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (wind howling) (wind howling) -[Howard] Sometimes you couldn't hardly see across your yard, just so dense with dust.

(wind howling) You kind of wondered, how did we exist?

(wind howling) (wind howling) -[Nathan] In the early 1930s, there's a proto space race that has emerged between the Soviets, the United States and independent French aviators to reach the highest levels of the stratosphere and prove that human beings can ultimately survive at high altitude, and then eventually space.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) The Explorer I project was a collaboration between the National Geographic Society and the Army Air Corps, the precursor to the Air Force today.

The National Geographic Society paid for the construction of the gondola, the balloon, the scientific equipment.

(ambient music) The Army Air Corps would provide the infrastructure, the pilots, the technical know-how to actually operate this balloon.

(ambient music) This private-public partnership between these two entities (ambient music) allowed for an expensive and successful expedition to happen in the middle of the Depression.

(ambient music) (ambient music) (ambient music) They needed a place that would have ideal weather conditions, (ambient music) but then also, on the ground, you needed something that would protect the balloon as they were inflating it.

(ambient music) You can't have that thing flailing around, 'cause it takes a while to get all the hydrogen into the balloon.

(birds chirping) (ambient music) They ultimately settle on the Stratobowl outside Rapid City, South Dakota.

(ambient music) They built a military base at the Stratobowl.

Had a hospital, two radio stations, barracks, and then thousands of hydrogen containers (ambient music) just lining the rims of the Stratobowl.

(ambient music) Miles upon miles of rope that is required to control the balloon.

(ambient music) The balloon itself requires under three acres of fabric, (ambient music) which took five months to fabricate it.

(ambient music) It was linen that was rubberized and then produced by hand by the Goodyear Zeppelin Company.

(ambient music) The gondola itself was produced by the Dow Chemical Corporation.

It was a magnesium alloy and it weighed 700 pounds.

(ambient music) (ambient music) They picked some of the most talented men in the Army Air Corps.

(ambient music) One of the men has the parachute record at this point in time, 24,000 feet.

(ambient music) You've got the first human being to photograph and see the curvature of the earth.

(ambient music) You've got men who have been in the air, (ambient music) who have been in balloons, high-altitude situations.

(ambient music) Some have combat experience in the First World War.

(ambient music) (ambient music) These are men who are trained, who are experts.

(ambient music) They know what they're doing.

(ambient music) They're very well aware of the dangers of what could happen.

(soft music) (soft music) Hydrogen, like helium, is a lighter-than-air gas.

(soft music) Very abundant, but has the unfortunate side effect of being very explosive, as we all know from the Hindenburg explosion, which happens a couple of years later.

(soft music) (soft music) (soft music) (soft music) They are constantly checking the weather.

They work all through the day and then all through the night.

They've got to put all the pieces together.

They've got to get the batteries in, as well as radio equipment, all sorts of different sensors.

They load cold-weather clothing because this is not an insulated gondola.

They are going to pass through some very, very cold portions of the atmosphere.

(soft music) They are getting everything prepped and ready to go.

(soft music) (soft music) (soft music) And they just lift and lift and lift.

(soft music) They begin to drift south.

(soft music) They're going over northwestern Nebraska.

There are spotter airplanes that are following them.

(soft music) The equipment is working, they're making their observations and everything is going real fine.

(soft music) There's suddenly a shutter.

(soft music) A tear forms in the envelope, and they realize that they're not going to be able to make it to the 75,000 feet that they wanted.

(soft music) They need to slowly and have a very controlled descent if they're going to survive.

(soft music) (machine whirring) They're about 5,000 feet above Loomis, Nebraska.

(machine whirring) They are in preparation to jump.

(soft music) Somebody steps on Captain Anderson's parachute and releases the parachute in the gondola.

And so he has it bunched up in his arms and is at the top of the parachute, and he and Major Kepner are having a debate about whether he can just heave his parachute out and will it catch?

Will it land?

Will he survive?

(soft music) The balloon explodes, and the gondola just becomes a bomb.

(soft music) Captain Anderson just heaves his parachute out.

It catches.

(soft music) Major Kepner kicks Captain Stevens out one of the portholes.

(soft music) (soft music) and then Kepner is the last one to land.

(soft music) The gondola lands about 150 feet before them, just exploding all over Reuben Johnson's cornfield.

(soft music) At the time, everyone in the nation was glued to their radio sets listening to this live.

(soft music) After the crash happens, Major Kepner makes his way to the Johnson farmhouse, gets on the phone and calls headquarters.

He's talking with headquarters, and then a voice breaks in and says, "It's NBC.

You're going live.

Tell everybody what's going on."

(twangy music) And in this moment, thousands of people are descending upon this cornfield north of Loomis.

(twangy music) Everybody in central Nebraska wants to be a part of it.

(upbeat twangy music) There's no crowd control.

(upbeat twangy music) People are pocketing pieces of the envelope.

(upbeat twangy music) There's a gentleman who takes an entire hatch and later donates it to the State Historical Society in Lincoln where it remains.

(upbeat twangy music) They're taking the scientific equipment, they're taking really whatever they can get their hands on 'cause they want to be part of this event.

They want to have a souvenir.

(upbeat twangy music) (upbeat twangy music) This becomes a problem.

(upbeat twangy music) The National Geographic Society and the Army Air Corps want everything back so they can figure out what happened.

(upbeat twangy music) There are calls that are put out in all of the local papers saying, "Did you take something?"

The "Kearney Hub" leads this effort, and locals are sending things back to the National Geographic Society.

(upbeat twangy music) The cause of the crash is ultimately determined fault with the envelope.

That it froze, opened, it cracked and tore, and the National Geographic Society sends stuff back.

(upbeat twangy music) Today, the Nebraska Prairie Museum, Fort Kearney Museum in Kearney, as well as History Nebraska all have artifacts from this expedition.

(upbeat twangy music) (upbeat twangy music) -[Howard] My dad was a souvenir seeker.

He took something that he shouldn't have, but at the same time, we, today, get to share in what it was.

This is little tiny pellets of lead, and this was used as ballast in the balloon.

I was four years old and my parents, they were out observing.

I thought, "What would cause them to be looking up at the sky for something?"

They had gotten news by the radio about this balloon coming across from South Dakota, and I remember, finally I said, "Oh, I can see that white spot up there."

(soft music) We were four miles northwest of the crash site, (soft music) so my dad went to the site, came home, he put it in the bottle.

(soft music) It's been in his bottle for 90 years.

(soft music) (soft music) But I also remember days in that period of time, we had severe dust storms.

(soft music) Some days it'd last for days and days, (soft music) and sometimes almost blackouts, just dust.

(soft music) -[Nathan] It was a media sensation.

It has been forgotten and remembered and forgotten and remembered.

People in central Nebraska, in the darkest of their days, finding support or comfort or connection into a wider world that they could be part of something, they could be part of something greater.

(soft music) (soft music) (soft music) (soft music) (soft music) (gentle music) -[Jason] Great architecture will raise our senses, you know, enhance our senses.

(gentle music) I started to appreciate the beautiful remoteness of this place, and I think in designing a building like this, what we hope to is to help other people appreciate that beautiful remoteness.

(gentle music) (gentle music) The initial stages, the concept design of this project, was really to set up the shape of a building, the concept of it being a micro-dwelling, and then to work with students over time, into developing those details.

(cart engine whirring) -[Doug] Well, you sit in the classroom and you do designs and you have papers and you do crits, right?

And they stand there and they look at it and say, "Well, this can happen, this can happen, this can happen."

Here, we come out here and we can physically touch what we built.

It's no longer a concept, it's a reality.

(orchestral music) -[Jason] These are the students that I'm working with here.

You know, we're just doing a few adaptations of it, but again, you get a good idea of how enthusiastic they are about building things here, (gentle music) about getting hands-on experience.

- This?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, we just need it even.

- Yeah.

No, that's good.

-[Jason] In Nebraska, in the Great Plains region, there's a deep tradition of people knowing how to build their own buildings and a strong connection between the land and architecture.

We are really indebted to the way that students are really passionate about doing things that matter to their community and doing things that matter to the places they come from.

It was really set up to think about the relationship between what we do in the architecture school and the state of Nebraska.

What we try to do is to find ways of making... Inventing ways of using trees, particularly within this part of the state and the type of trees that may get discarded.

Eastern red cedar is definitely one of them because it's regarded as being an invasive tree.

It's not.

It's a native tree, but it's regarded as being invasive.

(gentle music) We've looked for ways to use the eastern red cedar tree and other native trees in the most efficient possible way.

Even though we build most of this building out of Eastern Red cedar, we're also inventing new ways of using it for things like cabinets here.

We're using it for doors, we're using it for work surfaces like this, and that's part of the student's process of learning to use the whole tree.

(gentle music) -[Jon] What's important to remember about Mizer's Ruin is it is one aspect of a much larger partnership between architecture and Cedar Point Biological Station.

So I'm very interested in sort of portraying this image for a field station as being sustainable as possible.

And that plays in really well from our vision for the station, adding in these housing units.

(gentle music) -[Jason] Over 90% of it was built with materials that came from within one mile of the site.

What that does is help reduce what we call the embodied energy of the building.

Embodied energy is the amount of energy that it takes to bring materials from their location to the site.

So we've managed to calculate in this building that we're actually sequestering or pulling out of the atmosphere, 1.4 tons of carbon.

Now, if you took a building of an equivalent size built conventional construction, we'd probably be putting about seven tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

So when students are working on these projects, milling trees, cutting them up in a mobile mill that we have down here and getting them to the sites, they're directly invested in the energy flow.

(gentle music) We're not just producing a building, we're talking about materiality, we're talking about the rural context, and we're talking about what it means to consume materials when we're making architecture.

(gentle music) So we've been working on this building for the last four years.

There are a few finishing touches that we need to make and then we're going to be able to welcome visitors into this space.

And that's really exciting for us and really exciting for the architecture program and all the students that have been involved in this project.

(gentle music) (gentle music) (charcoal rubbing) [Mark] I don't worry about things like precision.

(soft ominous music) What I'm trying to do is to make sure that every mark I make is a direct and honest response to who's in front of me.

(soft ominous music) Each mark is also, not just drawing what I see which is fundamental, (soft ominous music) but it's also to a certain extent drawing what I'm experiencing, what I'm feeling.

(soft ominous music) [Narrator] There's a symmetry in the journey of Scottish artist, Mark Gilbert.

(gentle music) Nearly 20 years ago, Mark passed through Omaha with an international tour of his landmark exhibition "Saving Faces".

(gentle music) Which featured arresting portraits of patients before, during, and after dramatic and sometimes disfiguring facial surgeries.

(gentle music) [Mark] To be showing in this space, (gentle music) especially in this space.

'Cause this is where it all started with me, in Omaha.

So I'd never been here before and so so it's lovely to be back here.

(gentle music) [Narrator] Now Mark is a professor of medical humanities at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where the first exhibit took place.

(gentle music) Still an artist.

He continues to do portraiture.

(gentle music) This work is part of a study exploring the experiences of frontline healthcare workers across the country.

(charcoal rubbing) [Mark] I often talk about the sort of vulnerability that it is in both sides of the easel.

When you're working on these portraits.

(gentle music) I've worked with people who know that they're in the last weeks of their life.

I've worked with people who are caring for people who they know are terminally ill and so on.

(gentle music) And I've never worked with people who are so, that their emotions were so on the surface and so raw (gentle music) that they broke down in a way that had never happened (gentle music) with anybody else I've ever worked with in the last 20 years.

(gentle music) You know, they were working crazy hours.

They were working with huge uncertainties about the care that they were able to deliver for the patients they were working with.

About their own wellbeing.

(gentle music) About when is this going to end?

About am I going to infect the people I care for, my family, my children?

(gentle music) [Narrator] Mark has probably had a dozen sessions with nurse practitioner, Sarah Lane during the past few years.

Even during the height of the Covid Pandemic.

[Sarah] And I remember after my first meeting with Mark we talked about a lot of things that I hadn't ever really maybe like tapped into.

And so I remember going home and just like being like exhausted.

(gentle music) It brought on so many emotions of just overall sadness for the patients and, you know, my coworkers and the struggle that, you know, we were all having.

(gentle music) That's what really prompted a lot of the, you know why I continued to come back because I just knew that this was important.

(gentle music) People will ask me about it and I can't really answer it.

Like in my head, I know, you know, what it was about and what it did for me but it's hard to share that with other people to put it to words.

(gentle music) [Mark] But I'm not an art therapist.

I don't do these pictures to make people feel better (gentle music) but often it does.

So, and when that happens, we recognize that and record it.

And I'm pleased.

[Narrator] Even in silence, there can be a therapeutic dialogue.

(gentle music) As Gilbert's most recent exhibit involving dementia patients in Halifax, Nova Scotia, reveals.

(gentle music) It took me years to properly recognize this that that silence isn't an empty void.

There's a huge amount of communication that happens in that silence.

There's a huge amount of expression.

(gentle music) Either, you know, with us both looking at each other (gentle music) and the drawing facilitates that facilitates the relationship building.

(gentle music) When we think about people with dementia, sometimes we end up thinking that they've, kind of lost so much that they have nothing left to give.

(gentle music) That they've lost the capacity to be productive or to be purposeful.

But hopefully the exhibition is able to allow people to really engage and be maybe even reengage with that notion that people who are living with dementia still have an amazing sense of personhood.

There are still are things that nourish them.

There are still things that bring joy.

(gentle music) [Narrator] Every frame is a window into a deeply private world.

(gentle music) [Dr Kelly] We don't often see this depicted in art.

(gentle music) You know, that there's a veil across that chapter of life that I think that your work helps to lift.

(gentle music) [Narrator] Gerontology professor Dr. Chris Kelly says, "The lives of older adults are often overlooked."

(gentle music) [Dr Kelly] Our last days were spent among family and friends.

Those who are closest to us.

(gentle music) The rest of the world is kind of outside of that veil.

What Mark has done with this exhibit has pulled back that veil and to show us the beauty of life in that penultimate chapter.

And to have a better understanding of just what individuals are going through.

(gentle music) The feelings, the fears, (gentle music) the many emotions that they are experiencing.

(gentle music) Art and literature and music and everything that the creative world is about is a part of our lives from our earliest memory to our last moments on Earth.

(gentle music) That lifelong education doesn't stop.

And, I think that for the subjects of Mark's paintings, I think that they were aware that they are, they were participating in something incredible, that they're participating in the education and the understanding of people of all ages, about what it means to be human.

(gentle music) (gentle music) [Mark] So this was a piece, yeah, so it was done in 1992.

And so it's just kind of typical of the kind of drawings that my dad would do.

You know, prior to every single painting that he did, he always did a series and we all had to sit for him.

You know, I had to pose from him.

[Narrator] Mark's own mom, had Alzheimer's and died of a stroke before this project began.

(gentle music) [Mark] It's called "The Chair" but I think, I always call it "The Empty Chair".

So it is the empty chair, it's the chair my mum sat in.

So again, it's that testament to bereavement and to loss.

(gentle music) [Narrator] This is the first time Mark's work has hung side by side with his dads.

Both of his parents were artists.

They met at the Glasgow School of Art in the 1950s.

It wasn't unusual for him to be sitting for me in the morning, and I'd be sitting for him in the afternoon, this is when I was, we were in Glasgow.

So these pictures are kind of unique in as much the picture my mum on her own.

(gentle music) [Narrator] When Mark's mom, Pat, was in her final days, his father Norman made these drawings of her.

(gentle music) [Mark] I was staggered that he was doing them.

Frightened to look at them, you know, I didn't wanna look at them.

(gentle music) And I remember he asked me about two or three times, "Do you wanna see them?"

And I said, "No, not yet."

And then when I saw them, I loved them.

You know, I, and again, it kind of forced me to come from behind the easel, you know?

So I kinda was almost like I became like one of my participants.

Those pictures sort of present some of the most traumatic times of my life and I love them.

(gentle music) [Narrator] Norman passed a few years after his wife Pat, and never had the chance to see these works displayed together.

(gentle music) But the drawings serve another purpose to soften the medical gaze and invite new understandings of the deeply isolated worlds of dementia, death, and dying.

(gentle music) The meaning of the pictures doesn't reside with my dad or with my mum.

Or with the, you know, with the people in these pictures.

You know, the meaning's constantly in flux.

And so that you know the audience, you know bring their own meanings bring their own experience to the pictures.

(gentle music) For me as a son, (gentle music) they've taught me more about the healing power of art than anything else I've ever experienced.

(gentle music) (gentle music) (suspenseful orchestral music) (orchestral music swells and crescendos) (music crescendos further) (music resolves) (music crescendos to finish) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Watch more Nebraska stories on our website, Facebook and YouTube.

Nebraska Stories is funded in part by the Margaret and Martha Thomas Foundation, and the Bill Harris and Mary Sue Hormel Harris Fund for the presentation of cultural programming.

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