(uptempo cheery music) - [Will] This week on "Wild Travels," we'll sample the suds at a brewery inside a Catholic church.

Burn some rubber at Orlando Speed World's Test N Tune night.

Examine the nutshell dioramas of unexplained death.

Meet celebrated folk artist, and roadside produce purveyor, Ruby Williams.

And then take in the Amazing Creations at the Bread and Puppet Theater.

That one looks just like me.

(uptempo cheery music ends) - [Announcer] Wild Travels was made possible in part by Alaska Railroad, providing year-round transportation to many Alaska destinations.

Traversing nearly 500 miles of wild landscapes between Anchorage, Fairbanks, Denali National Park and more.

Alaskarailroad.com.

Buy "American Road Magazine."

Get your kicks on Route 66, and everywhere else a two-lane highway can take you.

"American Road Magazine" fuels your road trip dreams, and by It's a wild Take care out there, wear a life jacket, paddling or boating.

Learn more you otterdo to keep you and the planet safe at mthoodterritory.com/otterdo.

(uptempo whimsical music) - If you look hard enough, go off the beaten track far enough.

You'll find an America teaming with the unusual, the odd, the downright strange.

I'm Will Clinger and I'm your guide on a package tour we like to call "Wild Travels."

(uptempo whimsical music continues) (car engine roaring) - Raise your glasses everybody, time for a toast.

- [Will] Devout Catholics might be alarmed to see their former church turned into a brewery and brew pub, but why fight it when the beer is this good and the oompah music is this loud.

- [Sean] Hey Will, welcome to Pittsburgh.

- Good to be here, and this is the Church Brew Works, right?

- [Sean] Yes, this is the historic old St. John the Baptist Church.

This was built in 1902.

- [Will] And it was deconsecrated when?

- They issued a Decree of Suppression in 1992.

So the building loses any religious significance to it.

It's available for other alternative uses.

- Such as a brewery.

- Well, a restaurant brewpub.

Yeah, a boutique brewery.

- [Will] Back in '96, when you walked in here, what made you think this would make a good brewpub?

- If you've been to Europe and Germany, and you look at some of the legacy beer halls that have been around for 200 years, you have a similar feel.

(uptempo oompah music) (singer singing German) - Ziggy Zaggy, Ziggy Zaggy.

- Oi Oi Oi!

(uptempo dramatic music) - [Will] Do former parishioners ever come in here and say, "Blasphemer, blasphemer!"

- [Sean] They actually come in here, and eat and drink, get together with their family and sort of enjoy it.

It was part of their community and part of their fabric of life for quite a while.

- [Will] On the other hand, maybe some people come in here expecting to go to mass, and they stay for the beer.

- That might happen.

I think that's a little chicanery with some of the guests, the customers, they bring people in and say, "Let's go to church," and then voila.

- [Will] You're a beer drinker yourself, I assume.

- Oh yeah, rightly or wrongly.

I think my Uncle Samuel used to let me sip the foam off his beer when I was about six years old, so.

- [Will] I'd say wrongly.

Yeah, now that might have been a mistake.

You know, being a Presbyterian where they gave us grape juice for communion, I feel almost naughty being in a place where they're brewing beer in a church.

- [Sean] That's okay, Will, Jesus turned water into wine.

Yeah, I think if he had better malts back then, he would've turned water into beer if he could.

(Will laughing) (uptempo oompah music) - [Will] Hey, you're Justin, right?

- Yeah.

- And can I call you the brew master?

- How about brewery manager?

- What have we got in Tank 15, Justin?

- This is our Thunderhop IPA.

- Thunderhop?

- Yeah, it's Thunderhop.

It's got Zeus on the label.

He is throwing little lightning bolts of hops down onto the beer, so.

- I like where that's going.

Now we can actually do a taste test from this actual vat.

- Yes, this is finished beer now.

We'll still process the beer into the, you know, conditioning tanks for actual packaging, but this is good to go, this is ready to drink.

- Is it unfiltered?

- It's unfiltered.

- I'm not usually a day drinker, but that's thunderous and unfiltered, very unfiltered.

- [Justin] Thank you.

(uptempo oompah music continues) - [Interviewee 1] I'm from Michigan.

- [Will] You came a long way to drink beer in a church.

- Yes I did, and it was well worth it.

- Really?

- Yeah.

- Don't feel a little sacrilegious.

- It was a little weird when we first walked in, but you kind of get used to it, once you have one of those, then.

- Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy as Benjamin Franklin told us.

So let's go with that.

- The confessional is the booze closet.

So I'll tell you what, you go in there, you have a little of that, you'll be confessing to everything.

We played here about two or three years ago, and there was a couple here who was married in this church when it was a church 50 years ago, and they came back on the day of their 50th anniversary.

They just had a great time, and they said it was much better now than it was 50 years ago.

- [Will] Well you can drink the beer in here.

That's way better (patrons applauding) (uptempo oompah music ends) (uptempo whimsical music) Let me get it.

(uptempo whimsical music continues) Geez.

(uptempo whimsical music ends) (crowd cheering) (uptempo electronic music) (crowd jeering) (car engine roaring) (tires screeching) At Orlando Speed World's Test N Tune if you've got a driver's license and a motor vehicle, you're welcome to come to the track, and burn rubber, just make sure to make time for some healthy one-upsmanship.

Here we are at Orlando Speed World.

- [Wade] Yes sir, right here in Orlando, Florida.

- [Will] And it's the Test N Tune, what is the Test N Tune?

What's going on here?

- [Wade] What this is is a place where the motorsports enthusiasts bring his hot rod out, his hot rod, not something we supply and come out and get his weekly dose of adrenaline without having to worry about running from the cops without street racing.

- [Will] Are there any restrictions or can anybody just show up with their car here?

- Well, as long as you're a licensed driver and you're about yourself, and you have the proper safety equipment, your helmets, your glove.

- And you don't have a six pack in the front seat.

- Yeah, exactly.

(upbeat music) (car engine roaring) - I pulled up beside him 'cause I wanted to pick on him.

I wanted to intimidate him.

- [Will] What kind of engine you got in this baby?

- This is a 413 small block Chevy.

I think this guy over here is running like a 572 big block or something.

- Is that right?

- No, 460 7.5 Liter.

- Big block.

- Yeah.

So who's got the advantage?

- Me.

- Less weight.

- [Will] He says he's got the advantage.

- I guess we'll find out here in just about maybe 10 minutes who's got the advantage, won't we?

- [Will] These things are stripped down inside, right?

It's just the seat, and that's it.

- Console, steering wheel.

- And a doll.

(car engines roaring) This looks like a pretty nice piece of automobile you got here.

- Yeah.

It's a 1980 Buick Regal.

- [Will] What are you gonna try and find out tonight?

- Oh, just to see what it do in the quarter mile.

That's an outlaw car.

You ever heard outlaw.

- Is that as opposed to in-law?

- Yeah, yeah, you right.

Stock suspension, small block.

- Criminally fast.

- Criminally, yeah.

(car engine roaring) - I can call that a monster truck, right?

- [Interviewee 2] It's taller than you a little bit.

If you go towards the back.

- [Will] Yeah, you step outta that front seat, and you drop three stories to the street.

- [Interviewee 2] You gotta have strong legs buddy.

- Now, are you limited to what you can race?

Can you only erase against other trucks?

- Oh, I'm not racing trucks here.

I'm racing this car right here.

- Oh, you just brought this to show it off?

- No, this pulls my car here.

(car engine roaring) - You're one of the few women racers out here.

What kind of engine you got in this baby?

- It' a V8, six liter.

- [Will] And is this guy your competition over here?

You know what, it's a good sign.

He's got his hood up, it's like he's having problems.

- Now, he's just cooling it off.

- Oh, you seem pretty confident.

- I think I can do it tonight.

- But it worries me that you're looking in your manual.

I'm worried about a flashing light on my car.

(Will laughing) (car engine roaring) (upbeat music) - Would you call yourself a motorhead?

- Yeah, definitely motorhead.

Obsessed with it.

There ain't nothing better going down a quarter mile, and just hammering the hell out of it.

- It's like a church for us, it's our fellowshipping.

We all hang out.

- It's a very loud church.

(car engine roaring) (upbeat music ends) (uptempo cheery music) (logo popping) - We've got about 700 different types of bottled soda from all around the United States, and around the world representing roughly 17 countries and just about every state in the United States.

They come from the small mom and pop bottlers all the way up to the big boys.

A lot of the fun is really just kind of browsing through all the various types of sodas, seeing what types are out there, things that people have never heard of or never seen before.

So that's a lot of the fun is being able to go to the cooler yourself.

The food type sodas, your buffalo wing soda, your bacon sodas, a lot of it's just to satisfy curiosity.

For the most part, you know, they go for the staples, the oranges and the grapes, try to keep it safe, but it's a wide range.

You've got Sodasgusting line out of Avery's that has everything from Monster Mucus to Kitty Piddle.

You never know what you're going to get when you're coming through here.

I have tried every single one of them, and I can tell you not every one of them is good.

We tried a master list, didn't work out real well only because they changed so often.

The best thing to do is obviously come and experience it for yourself.

There's never such a thing as too many sodas, or too many pops here.

We are located in Arcadia, Oklahoma, which is northeast of Oklahoma City, right on Route 66.

(uptempo dramatic music) - [Will] There are more than a dozen Star Trek fests held annually in the US, but none so homespun as the one in this small Midwestern farming town.

On an episode of the original series set in the 23rd Century, Captain Kirk revealed that his birthplace was Riverside, Iowa.

The local city council seizing upon a tourism opportunity, erected a monument to the yet unborn Starfleet captain.

There behind the beauty salon is a landmark recognizing the future birthplace of Captain James T Kirk on March 22nd, 2228.

Not to be outdone in grabbing the intergalactic spotlight, Murphy's Bar just a block away, put up a sign declaring the floor underneath the pool table will be where Kirk is conceived nine months prior.

Riverside's Trekfest is always held.

On the last Saturday in June.

(uptempo cheery music) Folk artist Ruby Williams got her start painting advertisements for her roadside produce stand.

But now her work is shown in galleries, and sold for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.

We paid a visit to her farm in Plant City, Florida, and it took a little while for Ruby to warm up to our microphone.

Ruby Williams.

(uptempo cheery music continues) This is your fruit stand and art gallery.

- Yes, yes.

- You sell both fruit produce and art.

- Right.

- [Will] Do you still do your own farming as well?

- Yes, yes.

Back over there, we've got rhubarbs, carrots and mustard, collar, collard.

We got watermelon, and we can grow potatoes.

- Would you rather sell art or produce?

- At this age, it doesn't matter.

(Will laughing) You could eat the bread but you can't eat the art.

- [Will] Were you surprised when your art started being sold in galleries?

- No, I wasn't surprised, because I had went up to New York, Guggenheim sold a few up there, and I know if they sold theirs, I would sell mine one day.

- I love the outfit, by the way, you've painted yourself as well.

She won't tell us her age, but I heard she was born in the '20s for God's sake.

- [Interviewee 3] Well, she won't let nobody know her age.

Yeah, she won't.

She won't let anyone know.

- Not even you, you are her relative.

- No, she won't talk about age.

She has a lot of paintings on the side of the road, and it gets there, it's like an attraction.

And when they pass by, she's waving, she's painting, and she's waving, and they fall in love with her.

- He's a farmer guy.

- Farmer guy, yeah.

Got very long legs.

You always work on wood, right?

- Well we used to work on canvas, but they won't buy it so we had the wood.

- [Will] And very, very bright colors too.

- [Ruby] Yeah, they like the colors.

- Is this a jockey?

- [Ruby] No, you know the guy that do a bowling thing?

- Oh, bowling pins.

He's a bowler.

- [Ruby] Bowler.

Sonny School teacher.

- Teacher loves kids.

What inspires you, Ruby?

- You see here, God give all us the gift, and that's mine.

- We're at the Jeanine Taylor Folk Art Gallery.

And you're Jeanine Taylor.

- I am.

Yes I am.

- And right behind us is Ruby Williams.

- She is.

People who really want folk art will look for Ruby's work.

Her folk art really is kind of an extension of her farm and her community.

So her sayings on her paintings really do come from her life story.

Things that have happened to her.

- [Will] This is your studio in here?

- [Ruby] Well, art studio.

I got art that I wouldn't even know if I saw it today because you can do a lot of work in a couple years.

And I've been doing since '91.

It's got to be a lot out there, right?

- This looks like an Eskimo or somebody in a- - Her name is Bonnie, Bonnie is one of my first piece of art I did for a human.

So you see a lot of them?

- [Will] Yeah.

Bonnie, I've seen her.

- She had a bonnet on her head, high shoes, high heels, and a purse.

So I called her Bonnie Bon Bonnie.

The kids like that one there.

- [Will] Don't shake my apple.

- That went to Smithsonian.

I have to pray to put my shoes on.

You have to have this to do Either I did that, or been a detective, but I wanted to be a songwriter.

And then I got to be a minister.

So I do the minister and art, 'cause I love the art.

- So you're a minister as well as.

- I'm a minister of the Word of God.

- You're making me feel like a slug.

You're a minister, an artist, and a farmer, and a- - [Ruby] I'm all that.

- Where.

do you find the time?

- You got seven days a week.

- Ruby, if somebody wants to pay you a visit and check out your produce and your art, where should they go?

- 2001, Highway 60.

- Thank you Ruby.

- You're welcome.

(slow dramatic music) - This is the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

The purpose of a death investigation being to convict the guilty, to clear the innocent, and to find the truth in a nutshell, they're all based on actual death scenes, actual cases.

They're not all homicides, they do include some accidents, suicides, natural causes, undetermined.

They're basically a thought exercise.

They're really not who-done-its to be solved.

But they're an exercise in observing indirect evidence, and trying to tease out information from what little you're given.

The models, the dioramas themselves.

They're so full of detail that you're forced to stop, and think, and look, and really think things through 'cause you don't know what you're supposed to be looking at.

These were created by Frances Glessner Lee, who was a socialite from Chicago, who used her fortune to elevate the profession of homicide detectives, and really made death investigation a scientific discipline.

Frances is the mother of CSI.

She gained an interest in death investigation in the 1930s.

At the time, a lot of people were getting away with murder, because there were no standards for death investigation.

Things were inconsistent from place to place, and she was regarded as the preeminent criminologist of her era.

She had an amazingly skilled hand in terms of the figurines, the way that they're finished, and the fabric.

And it is just the level of detail is just totally mind blowing.

I describe these as 1930s virtual reality, 'cause they are, each diorama is a moment frozen in time where something happened, and it's a still frame.

You as the officer are dispatched to the scene with very sketchy information, which is listed in the front of the cabinet.

When these are assigned to the police officers for the homicide seminar, they take it very seriously.

They spend a lot of time, and they'll spend a couple hours just looking at this little scene just as they would at a real crime scene.

While the solutions are kept secret, there's one person in the building who has the answers and they're kept under lock and key.

- [Interviewer] And do you know the answers?

- I know the answers to many of them.

If I gave them up, I would be, I'd be beaten, and I think I would be badly hurt if I did that.

(tense ominous music ends) (uptempo whimsical music) - [Will] Coming soon on "Wild Travels," a Sunday service at Daytona's Drive-in Church, the White House in miniature at the President's Hall of Fame, the cabinet of curiosities in Vermont's Main Street Museum, and sampling the stokes at Tampa's Tabanero Cigar factory.

Ah, ooh (coughs).

(uptempo cheery music) - The.

Bread and Puppet Theater has been around since the '60s, putting on shows with puppets that can be more than 20 feet tall.

Their museum in Glover, Vermont is a retirement home for their amazing creations.

And when you step inside, your eyes will widen and your jaw might well drop.

Elka Schumann.

- Hello.

- Of the Bread and Puppet Theater.

- Welcome to our museum.

- [Will] It's a hell of a history you have.

You started back in the '60s, correct?

- Early '60s, '63 was when the theater was founded in New York City on the low East side.

- You and your husband, Peter.

- Peter founded it.

He's the director, the artist, and the founder.

About 98.9% of the puppets you see are Bread and Puppet puppets sculpted by Peter in Clay, covered with paper mache by hundreds, and probably thousands of puppeteers.

- Elka, there's puppets and masks of all shapes and sizes.

- That's right, from tiny miniature cutouts to life size, including face masks taken right from people's faces, including our big giants.

- There's always been a political component to the theater, right?

- There always has been, but we've also done shows based on the Bible, on fairy tales.

- Now how about the White Horse Butcher?

What is this all about?

- The show was inspired by a postcard showing a slaughterhouse with real live butchers there with bloody aprons.

And Peter turned the butchers into bureaucrats with their bland faces, their nice suits, signing death warrants, and torture orders, and things like that, and the white horse is the sort of pure thing that is above and beyond them.

- A lot of the Bread and Puppet shows are on the street, right, outdoors?

- Oh yeah, we did demonstrations in New York City, parades, outdoor shows.

And then when we moved to the country, to Vermont in 1970, and Peter saw this beautiful meadow, he said, instead of touring in the summer, we're going to concentrate on working right where we are.

And so every year we created one giant weekend show with a circus, with a pageant, with little shows.

- [Will] And you still do that every year.

- [Elka] We're doing that now, but we stopped doing the once a year thing, it got too big.

It grew from a few hundred people in the audience to thousands, tens of thousands, and then there was a tragic accident, and we stopped it in 1998.

- [Will] A tragic puppet accident?

- [Elka] Two men who'd been drinking in a nearby campground got into a fight, and one was killed.

- Speaking of evil, look over your shoulder.

That's the devil, right?

- [Elka] That's the demon symbolizing nuclear annihilation.

- [Will] I get the sense that a lot of these puppets and masks may never see the light of day again.

They're here for the rest of their lives, correct?

- We used to take them out quite often, but the work of putting them back was a lot.

Especially upstairs where the puppets are so large.

(slow jazz music) - Wow, Elka, this is amazing up here.

You've got some huge puppets here, don't you.

- We do, our giants, our giant washerwoman, and their cohorts, the garbage me.

The Duke and- - And just over here.

- [Elka] Just over here.

- [Will] You got some presidents here.

- [Elka] The Founding Fathers.

- Do you have any idea how many puppets you have in here total?

- No, we've never counted them, but they're hundreds and hundreds, maybe a thousand or more.

- Who's this guy, this is Fatso, Uncle Fatso.

- Out first bad guy puppet started and built for parades against bad housing in Harlem.

- Sort of a slum Lord.

- Yeah.

That is the king of hell that you're looking at there.

Yama the king of hell, it's based on a Japanese legend.

- [Will] Some of your puppets are pretty horrific, pretty disturbing.

- Yes they are, but they're good- - Intentionally so.

- Yes.

- I just noticed that the whole ceiling is also covered with stuff.

- Peter suffers a very serious chronic disease called horror vacuii, the terror of empty space.

So anytime he sees that.

- Is that a real thing, come on.

- It is (laughs).

- [Elka] I mean that's one of the biggest puppets.

- [Will] What is that?

- [Elka] That is called domestic insurrection.

That's the giant butcher.

- How many people would it take to work that puppet?

- Oh, one strong person on the center pole.

- [Will] But then his arms.

- Then each arm has a stick on it.

And then you need well coordinated people who can make it move in a lifelike way.

And then the men have feet, so you need another person moving the feet.

- Oh, you got legs too, Where does the bread come in?

- That's from Peter's childhood.

He helped his mother make bread in Zalesie.

That's where his family came from.

And the bread of that region is a dark sourdough rye bread.

- And at your shows, you used to make this bread, and serve it to the audience, right?

.

- We still do, that's part of the part of the performance.

This is the Quebec style clay oven.

- For the bread.

- For the bread, and here's what it looks like inside.

- [Will] Are you doing anything to preserve these things or are they just gonna decay slowly?

- They will slowly or rapidly decay, they're paper mache.

The barn won't last forever, we won't last forever.

- All this returns to dust.

- Yep.

- And you're okay with that?

- Yep.

- [Will] Elka, if people want to patronize the Bread and Puppet Theater and Museum, where should they go?

- [Elka] We're on Route 122 in Glover, in the Northeast Kingdom.

20 miles north of St. Johnsbury.

- [Will] Get me out of this.

(uptempo cheery music) (audience cheering) (uptempo cheery music) (car engine roaring) (tires screeching) We're always looking for new destinations.

The wilder the better.

So if you've got an idea for our show, let us know.

And thanks for watching.

(uptempo cheery music continues) - [Announcer] Wild Travels was made possible in part by Alaska Railroad, providing year-round transportation to many Alaska destinations.

Traversing nearly 500 miles of wild landscapes between Anchorage, Fairbanks, Denali National Park and more.

Alaskarailroad.com.

Buy "American Road Magazine."

Get your kicks on Route 66 and everywhere else a two-lane highway can take you.

"American Road Magazine" fuels your road trip dreams, and by.

- It's a wild world.

Take care out there, wear a life jacket paddling or boating.

Learn more you otterdo to keep you and the planet safe at mthoodterritory.com/otterdo.

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