hi everyone and welcome to Prairie Fire.

I'm Sarah Edwards.

You know ever since I moved back to the Midwest after 16 years on the West Coast, I really wanted to go morel mushroom hunting.

People seem to go nuts about it here in Illinois.

It's supposed to be competitive and kind of mysterious and tons of fun and all of this to find these rare mushrooms that sell for a lot of money.

So I finally got in touch with two crazy morel mushroom hunters who really embody the spirit of Morel madness to give us a proper look at what a real mushroom Hunt is all about how can I follow you leave?

Oh, I'm Angie Rouley I'm Ruey Sandusky and we are going on a mushroom hunt.

Is that following leads?

Oh, sorry.

So where are we where we were?

We cannot reveal we are in the woods.

Yeah, no, we are in the woods.

We are in a county.

Can we tell him that?

Yeah, we're in Vermillion County.

And we are on public property not private property.

Not gonna reveal your location.

We don't know.

We can't tell this is just reminders don't reveal their locations.

You know, mushroom hunting is a lot like fishing.

You have to be okay with not getting anything.

Even though I say that I say that.

Like you have to be okay.

I get mad we're not okay.

I pout the terminology for going mushroom hunting and not finding any is called getting skunked don't want that to happen.

I think I started hunting.

I don't know.

Maybe 567 years ago.

I love the hunt of these because these are just elusive.

It's like treasure hunting.

Yeah, I always I always kind of liken it to an adult scavenger hunt.

The ground has to be right.

All the elements has to be right for these little suckers to pop.

You need need the moisture and the moisture you need humidity.

You can kind of tell you just by springing on it like if the ground is good.

You need proper nutrients because if you don't have all those things in, you won't find any.

Sometimes it's good to just stop and turn around when you're hunting.

Just pause in one place for a moment.

And you see things like that right there.

On the hill, sticking right out I see it.

It's so nice and squishy.

And that's the other thing too is normally if you find one you will find another so there's real Morels or false morels and the way to tell real morale.

I've never done this but I'll do this for the sake of it's hollow all the way through false Morels will be solid.

And if you either fall tomorrow, or you'll probably die you got to know what you're taking because you could die why found it whatever you find when you wait waiting for one of you guys to see it.

It's so exciting you guys.

When you first spot one, it's like so exciting.

You gotta get your mastermind.

This is great.

Oh look out look at this.

He is fresh.

That's a nice one.

And you always have to cook these things always cook them you'd have to rinse these really well when you before you cook them.

And you can take the water that has all the spores and stuff in it and dump it wherever.

And eventually some people have said that they've had mushrooms grew up in their yard and things from doing that.

You can cook them in butter wine, I like to bread them a little bit fried.

They're in such high demand.

chefs use them you know you can use You find them in the grocery store for about 50 bucks a pound.

It's because they're so rare.

That's why they're so expensive.

You cannot cultivate these things.

They're just too finicky.

Yeah, that's the whistle that I found one.

She thinks I found one.

Oops, well, that's the signal.

You can't do the signal.

Sorry, that was a signal.

The season is usually it's a few weeks.

It's at least four weeks if you start with the early ones.

So one of the ways that you can find that mushrooms are actually ready to come up in the woods is by the other plant life that you're seeing.

One of them is this flower right here, which we've just identified is actually called a bloody butcher.

The other thing you can look for is these Mae apples.

They almost kind of look like little umbrellas.

And least when they first come out, they've unfurled a little bit more this point.

What was the oh the bluebells?

These guys here when the bluebells have flowered.

We have some luck finding morels around some Bluebell patches to I did not know that Morales had nicknames.

Mali mucho dryland fish.

I have no idea about the Mali moocher but the dryland fish is because when you cut it in half fry it.

It looks like fish.

Makes sense.

I still say we should bring a leaf blower out.

I think that'd be cheating.

Looky here.

Look at this beautiful girl.

This yellow has a big one.

You always want to soak them in saltwater.

And the bigger ones especially cut in half, if possible to make sure there's nothing inside them.

But if you put them in a Ziploc bag and stick them in the vegetable drawer of your fridge, they'll last several weeks.

There's all kinds of methods for like saving them, you can dehydrate them, freeze them, like just eat them.

I mean, that's the best part is picking them to eat when they're fresh.

Now I can disclose the location of our next story.

It takes place in Rantoul, Illinois Rantoul used to be the home of shoot Air Force Base.

But these days, it's home to a really cool company.

That's one of the top manufacturers of museum exhibits worldwide.

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, just 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 breeze 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 her name out there and we sold those all over the world.

We were in a very old farmhouse in Mahamat, there was a chicken coop on the property that we rent evaded.

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 what 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 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 is an exhibit that can transform you to another time and place a project usually starts with a museum having or a nature center having an idea, I want a mammoth.

Alright, that's, that's a good starting point.

They're still in some interpretation in 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 four 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 when I say it 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 Walmart and Illinois and get to an inside and 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 in alginate very claustrophobic, very scary.

We've now can 3d Scan someone's face and 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 find 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 set 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 Taylor 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 wore 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 tailor 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.

If you have kids like I do, or grandkids or maybe you're just feeling like a kid, and you want to kill a couple hours with some retro entertainment, go to McLean, Illinois, a guy there with a passion for pinball has turned the downtown building into a gamer's paradise.

I'm John Yates.

I am the creator and owner of Arcadia, America's playable arcade Museum, and all the other arcade related attractions here in McLean, Illinois.

My first memory of video games was actually at my church, there was a guy at the church that owned a chain of donut stores.

And he also had games and all this donut stores.

And he also donated some games to the church.

And there was this old Pong game, just one of these tabletop generic things where he just the ball bounces back and forth.

incredibly boring, but it was just mesmerizing to me.

My parents did not mind me playing the games at the church because they were free.

And they didn't mind me hanging out at the arcade, but they thought it was a total waste of money.

So they never gave me any money to play games.

When I was a kid.

Most of my time at the arcade was spent just socializing with my friends and watching other people play games and just longing to play them myself.

I think I had a mild case of Oppositional Defiant Disorder maybe and I just the fact that they didn't want me to play him gave me even more of a passion to want to play them.

From a very early age, I learned that I was good at fixing things and I I think really what I've learned is anybody can be good at fixing things.

What what differentiates people is willingness to take things apart and try to fix them.

For me ever since I was a little kid.

Something's not working or even if it is working, let's take this thing apart and see what how it works.

I am an entrepreneur.

I mean, since I was a little kid, I mean, in third grade, I started my first business selling paper airplanes.

It's a long windy road, but it leads to me getting kind of stuck in this coin operated industry.

I needed a place to store all the vending machines I was acquiring and I found this like abandoned garage behind my apartment building in Champaign, found the owner called him and he said, Oh yeah, you can you can rent that garage from me but you got to clean it out.

It's full of junk.

So I cut the lock off of it opened the door, and it was full of arcade games, like 20 old video games.

Needless to say I was very thrilled I have that project.

Yeah, and it changed everything because then I realized, oh, man, these are a lot more fun to work on.

And if I can find locations to put them in, I make money without having to stock them, you know, with with soda machines, you got to keep buying soda.

And going out every week and filling it up with a video game, you just plug it in somewhere, come back, a month later, and it's full of money, it just seemed like magic.

I worked as a programmer for about five years, and then I got a job at a startup out in San Jose, California, then I did my own startup.

And all of these startups failed miserably, I lost lots of other people's money.

So I came back from California, kind of with my tail between my legs.

Not sure what I wanted to do.

So I decided I would renovate one of my buildings.

And I got the building done.

And I wasn't sure what to do with it, I was going to put a for rent sign in the window.

And I thought, well, I'll just fill it with games and put a for rent sign in the window and see if anybody nibbles.

So I did that filled it up with all my favorite video games.

And it didn't really do very well at all.

Because I didn't do any marketing, no signage, nothing.

In fact, I just had a handwritten sign that I taped in the window.

But over time, it started to get a little bit of a following.

I think putting it on Facebook was really what turned the corner.

But there was an easy way for people to tell their friends and to invite people.

And then it started really getting pretty popular.

It grew enough that I decided to start expanding it.

And I just kept growing it into other buildings.

And it is what it is today.

I've still not done any marketing other than putting it on Facebook.

Kind of my inspiration behind the splice was I've got three daughters, and I take them on date nights.

And there just wasn't anything to do with them.

I mean, you could go out to eat and you could go shopping, and there was really no other activity.

And I just thought, well, that's probably something everyone's experiencing, they want to take their kids out and do something.

So I thought, I want to create a family friendly place where dads or moms can bring their kids and bond with them and connect and say, Hey, here's what I did when I was growing up.

Let me show you some of my world.

And I didn't think growing up in the 80s that this was a time I was going to look back on fondly.

But boy, it is.

It was such a simpler time.

And it was we weren't all addicted to our phones.

And we didn't have like constant stimulation coming from every angle and constant pressure and stress on us.

And we could just go and hang out in the arcade for three hours and do nothing but just talk and laugh and tell jokes.

I guess that's kind of one of the reasons I did this.

It's the nostalgia of a simpler time, a time when entertainment was just innocent and family friendly.

You know, you can bring your kids in here and not worry about them leaving disturbed or offended or angry or hurt.

So I really like giving people a place they can come and they they have no choice but to interact with their kids.

Because I know every minute spent interacting in a kind way and in a fun way where they're enjoying their each other's company is going to benefit them and benefit their relationship.

So anything I can do to create a space where more that happens, I'm gonna do it.

And finally, on this first season of prairie fire, we have had a lot of fun, introducing you to kind of a reanimated version of the great author Charles Dickens.

He toured the Midwest as part of his grand tour of the United States in 1842.

And he wrote a book about it called American notes for general circulation.

Well, we thought that what he had to say about the Midwest was particularly rude, and also really funny.

So without further ado, Charles Dickens thoughts on the prairie and the Mighty Mississippi.

American notes for general circulation by Charles Dickens, Chapter 13, a jaunt to the Looking Glass prairie and back.

It will be difficult to say why, or how, though it was possibly from having heard and read so much about the prairie, but the effect on me was disappointment.

Looking towards the setting sun, there lay stretched out before my view, a vast expanse of level ground, unbroken, saved by one thin line of trees, which scarcely amounted to a scratch upon the great blank.

There were Bear black patches on the ground, and the few wild flowers that the eye could see.

But poor and scanty.

greeters a picture was, it's very flatness and extent, which left nothing to the imagination, tamed it down and cramped its interest.

I feel a little of that sense of freedom and exhilaration which a Scottish Heath inspires, or even our English downs awaken.

He was lonely and wild, but oppressive in his barren monotony.

It is not a scene to be forgotten, but it is scarcely one I think at all events as I saw it, to remember with much pleasure or to covet the looking on again in afterlife you know, I don't think it's all that ugly here on the prairie.

Don't you think you're being a little harsh?

I don't think so.

I know it's disturbing my peace.

While I mean look around you.

It's pretty beautiful around here.

Do I think you're being a humbug?

Humbug.

I'm not a humbug.

But what a word?

Humbug.

Excellent.

I should remember that.

Yeah, you do that?

Yeah.

I also have some thoughts on the Mississippi, chapter 12, Mississippi.

In good time, next morning, we came again inside of the hideous waters of the Mississippi.

But what words should describe the Mississippi, great father rivers, who prays me to heaven has no young children like him?

An enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud.

nothing pleasant in his aspect.

Excuse me, Powell.

But this river of mud, as you call it, powers roughly 92% of this country's total agricultural export, and roughly 78% of the world's total exports in soybeans and feed grams.

Well, no surprise.

You even know what a percentage is.

Oh, he's a charmer and Nate.

As I was saying, the trees were stunted in their growth.

The banks were low and flat.

No moving lights and shadows from Swift passing clouds.

No pleasant scents.

No songs of birds are in the air.

Hour after hour.

The changeless glare of the hot, unblinking sky shone upon the same monotonous objects.

Excuse me.

60% of the birds in North America use the Mississippi River flyway to migrate.

Our whole Midwestern ecosystem depends on it.

Come on, man.

Think about it.

Rude.

There was some relief in this boat, though, for the captain was a blunt, good natured fellow.

But nothing could have made head against the depressing influence of the rest of the passengers that there was a magnetism of dullness in them, which would have beaten down the most facetious companion that the Earth ever knew.

A jest would have been a crime, and the smile would have faded into a grinning horror.

Such deadly leaden people such systematic plodding, weary, insupportable heaviness, such a massive pen immediate indigestion, in respect of all that was genial, jovial, Frank, social or hearty thank you to Alan Parker for playing the role of Charles Dickens.

I'm Sarah Edwards, we leave you now with more gorgeous shots of Illinois from above.