(music) Welcome to Prairie Fire.

I'm Sarah Edwards.

When you drive through the small farm towns of Illinois, you might notice that it's just a handful of businesses that make up the social and economic fabric of those towns.

And sometimes it's just franchises or big chain stores.

But in Tuscola, Illinois Flesor's Candy Kitchen Rules.

It's a family owned success story that nearly disappeared.

This is a pretty funny story, and I think it's going to leave you hungry for some chocolate my sister Anne Flesor Beck and I reopened our family's confectionary in 2004, we came back to Tuscola to do this because we are crazy women.

We missed our family's heritage and I guess wanted to recreate the Greek American tradition that was started by our grandfather in 1901.

Here on the corner of main and sale in Tuscola.

My grandfather and two other fellows, both of them, not too long off the boat.

were here in Tuscola.

It was Mr. Vaky, Mr. Vriner.

And my grandfather, they were trying to figure out how to, you know, make candy and have a soda fountain and whatnot.

And then my grandfather apparently decided he wanted to own this himself.

My grandfather ran it for over seventy years.

If you were young again, and you had to do all over once more, would you begin to shop like this one?

No.

Why don't you come back?

You wanted me to my father asked me to.

My father was just this crazy Greek guy who yelled a lot.

You don't have to buy candy.

You don't have to eat it.

And my mother was martyred.

Flesor's wife Betty helps with the candy kitchens business.

She was suffering from martyrdom.

Yeah, here working in the store.

Do you ever get tired of looking at Candy?

Yes, frankly, I do.

We have these big candy knives.

Apparently my grandfather chased my father out of the store, waving a knife, right.

He was gonna kill him.

My father did the same thing to my brother.

We're the only country that really gobbles up candy in large quantities.

I think that like 18 pounds a year per person.

My parents went out of business in the late 70s.

He had had enough.

Many years was this closed before the girls came back and open for a long, long time, wasn't it?

I was teaching primarily at Eastern Illinois University in the English Department.

My sister went to Iowa then Connecticut.

Then she came back to Illinois.

I was driving through town and there was a for sale sign in the window.

And I thought she invited me over to my mother's place and my mother was still living and and she introduced the idea of us going back into the family visits.

She introduced that idea while we were drinking wine.

Danger, danger danger here.

Let's do it.

I could kill them.

The building had been empty for decades.

At wait spent so much time scraping and scrubbing.

So I had heard a rumor because it's a small town right?

I had heard a rumor that our antiques are still in storage.

So I called the guy I called the guy I called the guy who have them and he said he'd be happy to sell them back to us.

The other thing we had to figure out how to do with how to make candy you because my brother he was the one who helped make candy with my father.

My brother was taught to make candy because he was a boy is kind of dangerous and it's and the kettles are heavy, heavy and all that.

My brothers still have the recipes that my grandfather had given to my father who gave them to Yeah, before we opened my sister and I sat in her kitchen island and ate chocolate for like two days is really kind of disgusting.

And we decided that we love good tard chocolate.

It's so good.

We use real cream, and half and half, and sugar.

We make our own fondant for our better frames.

If you come here, you should absolutely get caramels.

Peanut butter pudding better than Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, we have these little peanut butter squares.

We also make peanut butter eggs at Easter time.

Our toffee is very good.

So if you are old and have bad teeth, it might be a little hard to this really good.

We also have excellent peanut brittle.

And we have a real soda fountain we have you know, carbonated water.

We also serve breakfast and lunch.

We know how to cook ish.

We're like crazy.

Breakfast Nazis, I'm afraid and we end at 10 o'clock we cut off breakfast.

And if people you know dawdle in at 1010, we say no, you may not eat breakfast.

And we serve lunch from 11 to three and then we cut it off at three.

And we say no, you may not have lunch at 305 It's really kind of awful.

Love it.

We're awful.

We're awful.

Betty says both she and her husband Paul, when he was alive, wanted their kids to have a better life than this.

It is hard to rent a place like this.

It's physically exhausting, and mentally exhausting.

Look at them.

They're haggard.

Right, my sister and I while we were in business together, for almost every day, I thought she was a nitpick.

And she thought I was a space queen.

Our customers were used to us yelling at each other across the room.

And we made up all the time.

Our separate skills, made the store strong are separate personalities, I would argue made the store strong, I also found a new husband, so that helps.

He retired from his real job that paid and learn how to make candy with me.

If he had not come along 11 years ago, I think I might have given up.

And now that my husband has joined the business officially, right?

He can bring his personality into it a little bit too.

My wife and I are only gonna be able to work for so many more years, right?

We're gonna have to either train people or let them train people or give it up.

My husband would like me to say, of course, I'm going to retire.

You bet.

And we're going to live in a lovely log cabin on the side of a mountain somewhere.

Soon.

And I better not say what I'm really thinking.

I don't I don't know.

I like working.

Is that weird?

That is weird.

You know, we can make candy for the whole world.

Impossible.

We're a little one horse operation.

But we can serve a lot of people.

And we do.

By the way, we are haunted.

That's an aside.

There are other people here.

She is hysterical.

You know, my kids are major Chocolate fans.

So I hope they didn't see that.

Speaking of which, I was up in Chicago recently with my kids and we were at a museum.

And my son asked me, Mom, where do they get all the green leaves and all the fake roaring dinosaurs that we see around us.

And it turns out a company in Rantoul, Illinois is one of the largest fabricators of museum exhibits in the United States.

It's called Taylor studios.

Everything starts with a story the experience of any exhibit actually starts when you first get out of the car, off the bus, walk up to the building.

As soon as you enter the space, the first thing you do as a visitor, you kind of take it all in what do you see?

What's out there what are they reading?

What are they touching?

What are They feeling what are they hearing?

We can even do smells, what are they smelling?

Taylor studios started in 1991.

In the 30 years that I ran the company we did over 700 projects in 45 states and four countries.

I lived across the street from Joe Taylor.

And he was an artist, and he got a job with Gary Brees, who was a taxidermist at the time.

And Gary got a job to make some trees for a nature center.

And they had to just sort of figure it out.

And then Joe, and I realized this was an industry people built exhibits for a living, you can't beat that, like that is so cool.

So it was just Joe and I, in the beginning, doing the artifact and fossil reproductions, like selling our wares out of the back of the pickup truck going to events and trade shows.

So that was the sort of humble start, but knowing that we wanted to fabricate exhibits for museums, but that kind of got our name out there.

And we sold those all over the world.

We were in a very old farmhouse and Mahomet there was a chicken coop on the property that we renovated.

And then to the west, there was an old really beautiful barn, a two storey wood barn with a big, you know, hay loft.

So in 2007, I bought the old Walmart building, which is we're sitting in today so that we could do all production under one roof.

Exhibits are stories in 3d.

In a museum, you know, only about 2% of their collection is on display.

So it's really difficult for our clients to decide what story to tell, because there are so many.

And so you have to pick and choose what you think will engage your audience or what you think the important story of the time is.

A good exhibit as an exhibit that can transform you to another time and place a project usually starts with a museum having or Nature Center having an idea.

I want a mammoth.

All right, that's, that's a good starting point.

They're still in some interpretation and story to tell their how's that mammoth interacting with things around?

How do you want to see that mammoth?

Is it just looking straight?

Is it head up and rear to the left?

Is it up on one you know, up on three legs and one legs up in the air?

Or is it just standing there?

Is it grazing in the grass?

All those tell a story.

The overall process for Taylor studios amount of work for one gallery is usually about 18 months 12 months of design and about six months of fabrication and install.

The process starts with resource analysis which is gathering all the resources that the client has.

Then we go to schematic design.

Schematic Design is more of a fourth floor plan layout of the space and kind of divvying up budget.

Then after that then we get into what we call conceptual design.

conceptual design is when we what I say was we started making the pretty pictures.

We started doing some sketches, we put some color to them, we have renderings, and it really starts coming together give you that visual of the space.

Then we go into detail design.

detail design is when you start putting dimensions to those really pretty pictures.

You start calling out what material materials will be used.

And then we start fabricating, we fabricate everything and tailor studios and repurpose Walmart and we put it together there for the first time.

Then we disassemble we put it into trucks and we ship it all over the country.

shipping items is an adventure we always have to think about how does a piece get made in a Walmart in Illinois and get to an inside exhibit.

So a lot of our pieces do come apart and then they are then reassembled on site and seemed on site.

In our life cast figure fabrication method we used to have to stick straws up someone's nose, have them hold very still in cover them and alginate very claustrophobic, very scary.

We've now can 3d Scan someone's face on their head.

And we print that on a resin printer to give us quite a bit of detail on that on that face, then we can paint that head and paint it to look extremely real, let's say, now we still use the alginate molding and casting method on hands, so that we can get the very fine detail the pores in your fingers, the little fine cracks in your knuckles.

Usually the bodies are carved out of foam.

And then after that the foam was hard coded.

And then we actually have to make limbs removable, in many cases to help put on the clothing.

The fabrication of exhibits is definitely moving to a more digital age, we have a CNC router to cut wood and plastic, we have a CNC plasma that will cut metal.

We have PLA and SLA printers that we can actually 3d print objects.

We have a robot arm that can cut foam, but we see them more as a tool, you still have to have that artist's eye.

And I think the human element of it, and the artistic element will always be there.

And that's what really will give you a dynamic exhibit.

A lot of our client bases is natural history or history or a lot of nature centers.

But art museums are then a completely different ballgame.

Right?

And but I think the problem is with art museums is they're not drawing new audiences, you know, so it's almost like hoity toity, and you feel like I'm not rich enough to be in here or something.

So are you going to draw people from all the neighborhoods into this museum when they feel uncomfortable, because you design this space to feel like you don't belong here.

We can't do that in this industry.

We are in competition for people's leisure time.

So it has to be an exhibit that will draw people in, and they want to be there because they could just put a virtual reality headset on and stay at home.

But I think you know it once again, it's about a sense of place or the authenticity of a real object.

I think that is so much more impactful, emotional authentic than any virtual reality experience could be.

So I sold to studios in December of 2021.

I think a little bit I after 30 some years.

I hate to admit this, but I was a bit worn out.

You know, so all my sleepless nights were about the people.

You know, I mean, there's always cashflow crunches, and are we going to make sales and is this client happy, but it's about your people.

And so I knew that was important to take care of the staff and take care of the legacy we've built here as Taylor Studios.

You know, as the older you get, the more risk averse you become.

And I knew we needed to go in a different direction and build the digital fabrication studio, but you have to invest.

Reggie is doing that.

And so that's really exciting for Taylor studios right now.

So it's time for me to just manage sheep, and horses.

We'd like to end this episode of prairie fire with a fond farewell to a pioneer in the Champaign Urbana music scene.

Mark Rubel was an audio engineer, a musician, a music producer and an educator.

He died in early March of 2024.

Mark might have preferred to be called an audio nerd or a gearhead.

He was a fixture in the downstate Illinois music recording scene for more than 30 years.

At his pogo studios in downtown Champaign.

He recorded acts of all kinds from college ensembles and instrumentalists to bands like Hum Rascal Flatts and stars like Alison Krauss.

In 2013, Mark left Champaign Urbana to pursue his dream job running the Blackbird Academy in Nashville at Blackbird.

He educated the people who record the music you listen to at big arena shows at concert halls, on the radio and even at your favorite local music Hangouts.

And when he wasn't doing that, Mark loved a good jam session and wearing wacky hat as a bass player in his band, Captain rat and the blind rivets, which is a band he played with for more than 40 years.

Here's a look back at Mark's life in his own words.

Strangers in the night That's why I'm on this side of the glass.

My name is Mark Rubel.

I lived in Champaign, Illinois from about 1960 to 2013.

And I'm a recording engineer, producer, musician of sorts.

Audio educator, mainly better musicianship with louder amplified cigarette case, it's a guitar amp.

Here's a fun thing.

This is called the loop.

This is moving faders system, the faders are showing the levels that we have in the computer system.

I always loved music and there was always loved music around the house.

When I was about six or seven, my dad made a box for us called the monster which was a wooden box that had just levers and switches and a car dashboard and all sorts of things that made noise horns and things.

And I think that was an early obsession with mixing console, you know, sort of looks the same as the big box with a bunch of knobs and switches on it.

(music) In 1980 some friends of mine and I started a rock band sort of restarted a rock band called Captain rat on the blind rivets as a scam to get pool passes to the intramural pool at the u of i, which the show culminated in our guitar player, Tim veer skateboarding off the high dive with his guitar into the deep end of the pool, which we hadn't warned anybody about beforehand, ended up with our being banned from the pool.

But people thought it was funny.

They asked us to play more shows.

And that was 39 years ago.

And you know, 39 years of being in the same band is an interesting experience, you don't really expect to be in the band long enough for people to become grandparents, you know.

But if you're gonna get older, being in a rock band is good way to do it.

As a as an undergrad at the U of I had a chance to make a movie soundtrack in a recording studio called Silver Dollar.

When I walked in the studio, it was the epiphany moment where the angel sang and a blade of light came down from the heavens.

And I just knew it was what I wanted to do.

You know, it's just it's a magical place that recording studios full, you know, gently blinking lights, and it's always five o'clock in the afternoon.

And it's a place where you walk into an empty room, and you come out with some music that can live forever.

After I graduated, I worked as a booking agent, and a musician.

And I ran across a guy named Peter Fox Penner.

And Peter had had a recording studio.

He built it on his girlfriend's farm in Southern Illinois.

And then after she dumped him all the studio had to come out of the house, and was in storage when I met him.

So we decided we're going to make a studio in the house today.

We're renting for $100 a month.

So we did.

We just took the equipment that Peter had had in storage and wired it together and called it a studio.

And all the other partners had electrical engineering degrees in real jobs.

I had a crazy liberal arts degree.

And so I got elected to run the gear and do the sessions pretty much been doing that since 1982.

The original studio was 1980 was called Faithful sound.

And we were there for about three years, all sorts of interesting projects.

And it was a exciting time right around then early 80s was a great time on champions, I have to say just about every time is a great time champaign music as it gets a wonderful oasis of creativity and being a Nashville where this sort of the ultimate talent in the world.

There are players in Champaign who are every bit as good as people in Nashville just to Nashville, there are hundreds of them put in, in Champaign.

I mean, really the the quality of the musicianship quality of artistry is just unbelievable.

So we're just so lucky to get here.

So I started Pogo in 1985. started teaching in 1987.

And was going strong until 2013.

When I moved down here to Nashville.

I was happily ensconced in my studio building was paid for and downtown Champaign, and all the gear was paid for.

I had a wonderful job at Eastern Illinois University, in a community that I dearly love.

But I had the absolute opportunity of a lifetime.

I'd been teaching audio for decades at this point, and had the opportunity to start essentially the recording school that I've been building in my head all the time to see thinking you know, I wouldn't be the ideal recording school, you could come up with the chance to build it at Blackbird studio, which is possibly the greatest studio in the world.

And the chance to connect there and to be in Nashville, which is increasingly the center of the musical world and definitely the center of that recording world.

It'd be part of that community.

I had Do it.

So just when that opportunity came up with the consent of my long suffering wife, Nancy, we just, you know, sold the building and packed everything up and moved down into this building.

To start a school, I had no contract, no guarantee.

And we made it happen it was the second best thing I've ever done next to Mary Nancy.

Recording is fascinating because it it just involves so many different aspects and so many different things that one needs to know.

I think at the heart of it is a love of music.

And I love being around musicians, which is not hard because they're great people to be around, just to be involved in creative processes.

Fantastic.

There's so many other aspects to that, you know, this the psychology of it.

There's the music theory part of it, just being able to hear things and have ideas.

There's the engineering part, which it sort of looks like that's the most important part but really, all the technology and all the non twiddling so forth is just is really in service to the music and the creative process.

I think it's useful in a studio to have somebody who's calm and you know, relatively in control or and can, you know, sort of steer from behind and, and, you know, nudge people along the way, but stay out of the process when necessary.

The part of the process really is knowing what not to say and when not to interfere and then when to say the things that might be helpful.

So I think it's helpful to have the sort of bass players personality, which is you're supportive, you're laying the groundwork, but you're not necessarily, you know, upfront.

And although I'm a little different on stage, this is actually this is the costuming stage is actually the real money but that's a different story Check out the stories we've produced about Mark over the years on our website at will.illinois.edu/prairie fire we leave you with marks unreleased Hip Hop version of the University of Illinois alma mater (Alma Mater) (alma mater) (alma mater)