- Buzz!

You see those bees behind us?

- Yeah?

- The buzz is we've got a really tasty episode tonight.

- Ooh, but it's really sweet, too.

You gotta see this.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Okay, so I told you it was gonna be sweet.

- Yes.

- But you know what we're gonna talk about?

Do you?

- I don't know, what are you gonna talk about?

- It's maple syrup!

- Well, that sounds delightful.

- It does.

- But it's not maple syrup like you just buy at a grocery store, right?

- Oh, no, no, no, it's homemade, it's pure, it's delicious, it's sticky, it's sweet, and it's made right here in Central Illinois, but you can get it at Forest Park Nature Center.

- Where do they make it?

- Camp Wokanda.

Check it out.

(gentle music) Nature provides for us in many ways, and Jacob Mol of the Peoria Park District has found a way to build a sweet business in the woods of Camp Wokanda.

For about 10 years now, he and a team of volunteers have harvested maple syrup right here in our own neighborhood.

- You know, we had a slow time of the year in kind of February and March for rentals, and we kind of thought to ourself, "What could we do to do something productive and interesting during that time?"

And so when I grew up in Michigan, my dad would tap our trees in the backyard.

And we had about 20 trees back there that he would tap, and we'd make syrup in the backyard.

And so I had a very small base knowledge of how to do it, kind of in a backyard setting, and so that's kind of what we started out with the program side of it.

In Central Illinois, you don't think, "Oh, that's a maple syrup state."

You know, it's not, it's hardly ever anything in maple syrup here.

So mostly, you know, it's northeast, you know, Michigan, Wisconsin, that sort of thing.

My supervisor is, you know, pretty willing to try anything.

I give him the kind of the profit and expenses, you know, just to give him an idea, and he's like, "Well, that sounds all right, let's do it and see what happens."

- [Julie] With an intricate tubing system throughout the camp, Jacob and his team harvest sap from the sugar maple trees, a unique setup for this part of the country.

- And we use tubing on all of our trees to collect the sap.

When we are tapping a tree, we would drill the hole into the tree, and then we take the tap fitting and then tap it into the tree, and then I have a little hammer, small hammer, to make sure that's set in like it should be.

And then the sap comes from the tap pole down the tube, and then tees into the run of tubing that then goes down to the next tree.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) And that tank will go inside, feed the reverse osmosis machine that will take most of the water out.

And then when we're ready to fire up the evaporator, it will send it from reverse osmosis machine to our blue tank, which will feed the wood-fired evaporator.

- [Julie] Every 40 gallons of sap collected will undergo a reverse osmosis to remove the excess water and high heat cooking to make just one gallon of syrup.

- It comes in this side and will actually go through the channels back and forth until it makes its way over to the other side.

And so as it cooks along, on this side, it'll actually be finished syrup.

And so that's when we're taking it off of the evaporator at this side over here into our pre-filter set.

- [Julie] And this process has been a series of trial and error.

- So years ago, when we first started this, we would just use these cone filters in a gravity sense, but it took forever.

And so a couple years back, we upgraded to what's called a vacuum filter.

The top pot right here, we're gonna pour the syrup into, and then the bottom pot, we have a vacuum hose hooked up to, and we'll turn it on to create a vacuum inside of the pot, and it'll help pull the syrup through the filter very quickly.

Now, we switched to that because we used to have, like, three or four cone filters of the syrup, kind of juggling it around, and it would take forever, and the syrup would cool down and it wouldn't go through.

Whereas this, we'll put it in and we'll turn it on, and it's like five seconds and it's done.

(upbeat music continues) - [Julie] But all the work is worth it when you taste the difference between this natural process and your average grocery store syrup.

- You know, table syrup, as you're referring to, is just like corn syrup that's been, you know, processed and added sweeteners and flavors and whatnot.

It's always interesting, we'll have kids out here on field trips, you know, and some of 'em are inner city Peoria, and some of 'em have never tasted real maple syrup before.

They just know table syrup, you know, and whatnot.

So, you know, that's part of our field trip process, is to do a sampling, so it's always fun to see, you know, just when it hits their tongue, they're surprised and in awe of how good it is.

- [Julie] All the profits of the Camp Wokanda maple syrup goes back to help with the maintenance of the camp.

(upbeat music continues) - I think for me, you know, it's nostalgic, 'cause we did it when we were kids growing up.

But also, it's just, it's very unique to this area, and I dunno, it's just cool.

This whole operation we started from nothing, essentially, and I've kind of had to engineer it all, you know, myself.

And so just being able to kind of put something this complex together and, you know, make it the success that it's become, is, you know.

I don't know, it's really just kind of a personal success as well as, you know, that everyone likes it so much as well.

(gentle music) - [Phil] For almost a quarter century, Andre Petty has been saving lives as a Peoria firefighter.

Now also an artist, he rescues people from grief and other heavy emotions.

- Doing these paintings is every bit their joy that they get from 'em, that I feel from them, is every bit as much as encompassing as hit you in your heart and your soul as someone coming up to me, thanking me because of what we did to save their loved ones.

- [Phil] Now 54, Petty grew up in Peoria with a love for drawing.

- Earliest memories, I'm a big comic book fan.

You know, was when I was a kid, obviously, and I just always thought that the best way to be an artist would be to draw exactly what you saw, so I was always, you know, drawing Spider-Man exactly how they drew it in the comic books.

- [Phil] But in time, art mostly went to the wayside as he entered the Navy, went to college, and joined the Peoria Fire Department.

In his 24th year of service there, he is now a captain.

Meantime, in 2009, wife, Angie, helped set a course that would change his life.

- And she's like, "Maybe go back to painting.

You always seem to enjoy that, and it seemed to come easier for you."

- [Phil] As he set up a studio in their garage, his revival with painting gave him a new perspective, peace, and clarity, and far beyond only art.

(gentle music continues) - My artwork or doing something creative, probably, probably, I don't mean to sound too melodramatic, but probably saved me.

I'm not perfect, my life has not been a perfect ride from start to finish, and it seems like the times when I wasn't doing artwork, when I especially look back on it, anything creative, that I was probably some of, like, the lower points in my life.

- [Phil] Amid his newfound focus and inspiration, a friend of the couple mentioned an upcoming art fair in Peoria Heights.

- And she said, you know, "Why don't you put in some of your work and, you know, see if you get accepted?"

And I didn't really know about art fairs, how the process went.

- [Phil] He set up some paintings and soon experienced another life-changing moment.

A fair goer noticed a painting he'd done of Bruce Lee with a price tag of $250.

- His first statement was, for the price that I was asking, he said, "That's all you want for it?"

And I said, "Yeah, that's the price that's on there."

And he pulled out his money and slapped it in my hand.

And I was like, I was like, "Wow, that's cool.

I'm gonna remember you, like, for the rest of my life, 'cause that's never happened before."

- [Phil] Petty realized he could paint as more than just a hobby, but as his paintings began to draw more attention and sales, he was motivated by more than cash.

He began doing commission works.

- I've been in tears, my wife has been in tears at times over how happy the people have been on reveal day, that it's just like, you know, I can't even put a price on that.

You know, it's not worth any amount of money.

Some of the changes that these people have went through in their lives, and something that I painted that's hanging in their homes have given them this type of joy, it's just incredible.

If I can bring them some kind of solace or joy just from a painting, you know, then, man, I'll do it forever.

- [Phil] You might have seen some of Petty's works in public, such as this mural of Richard Pryor in the 1300 block of Southwest Adams Street.

Amid the commission works and other projects, Petty finds less time to do paintings on his own to-do list, like this depiction of his son Henry, now 13.

- Henry was the one that basically kind of got the ball rolling, where I liked using all the colors and it seemed to manifest itself.

- [Phil] He gets his biggest joy not out of making just the right brushstrokes, but in seeing reactions from others.

- I'll do it to make as many people happy as I can, you know, because we're only here for a little bit of time, and you gotta get as much happiness outta life as you possibly can while you're here, in the time you can.

(gentle music continues) - Right behind us is one of Andre Petty's murals of, of course, Richard Pryor.

- I love it, it's so colorful, and there's a lot of emotion in it too.

- And it's a great painting.

The problem is the traffic on Southwest Adams goes that way.

- Yes.

- And to see it, you gotta look this way.

But if you know to come down here, and we do, you pull over on Pecan or one of these other side streets, look around- - Right.

- There's this mural, there's other murals.

It's one of those special places in Central Illinois that's got so much to offer if you know where to go.

- And we do know where to go.

In fact, we're gonna go to one of those places now.

Mark Welp is taking us to McLean County, where a famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh, had a crash.

Check it out.

(upbeat music) - Charles Lindbergh is the most famous aviator in US history.

Lindbergh worked as a stunt pilot and wing walker around the Midwest before training with the Army and joining the Missouri National Guard in St. Louis.

In 1926, the 24-year-old began flying mail routes from St. Louis to Chicago.

The 278 mile trip included stops in Springfield and Peoria.

In fact, there's a marker at the intersection of East High Point Road and East High Point Lane in Peoria, which is the location of the city's first airport.

It says, "Near this marker, Charles A. Lindbergh landed his de Havilland biplane on the St. Louis Chicago mail run, 1926 to 1927, prior to his transatlantic flight."

Lindbergh earned the nickname, Lucky Lindy, the hard way.

Four times as a pilot, he made emergency parachute jumps.

Two of those happened in the skies over Central Illinois.

On September 16th, 1926, Lindbergh was on his way to Chicago, but couldn't land due to heavy fog, and then he ran out of gas.

He bailed out about 10 miles north of Ottawa in LaSalle County.

(engine roaring) It turns out a mechanic replaced the fuel tank with a smaller one and didn't bother telling Lindbergh.

The LaSalle County Historical Society dedicated this marker in Wedron on the 75th anniversary of the crash in 2001.

Less than two months later, visibility and weather would again become an issue.

On November 11th, 1926, Lindbergh couldn't land in Peoria, so he circled the area, but was running out of fuel.

He decided to find a sparsely populated area and parachute out.

Flying 70 miles an hour at 13,000 feet in total darkness, Lindbergh jumped.

He landed on a barbed wire fence surrounding a farm in McLean County near Covell, six miles west of Bloomington.

Lindbergh told a newspaper reporter he walked about a mile to a general store, where he asked a group of men, "Anyone hear a plane crash?"

Lindbergh then got a ride to Bloomington, where he hopped on a train to Chicago, then flew back the next day to retrieve his mail.

In 1977, this marker was erected on East 1000 North Road.

It says, "On a regular mail flight, November 3rd, 1926, Charles A. Lindberg parachuted near Covell, Illinois.

His plane landed on the Charles Thompson farm, 500 feet south of this marker."

Documents at the McLean County Historical Museum show the incident made big headlines.

If people didn't know about Charles Lindberg then, they certainly would know six months later.

That infamous night in 1926 wasn't even Charles Lindbergh's first crash.

But the crash would happen, he survived, and then he went on shortly thereafter to make history.

- [Reporter] And at 7:52, the Spirit of St. Louis began to roll down the muddy runway.

- On May 20th, 1927, Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris.

(upbeat music) He became the first person to make that specific nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

The 3,600 mile, 33 and a half hour flight made him an instant celebrity and hero.

As we approach the 100th anniversaries of these crashes, you can actually see parts of Lindbergh's crashed planes at the LaSalle County Historical Museum in Utica.

(engine buzzes) (funky music) (funky music continues) (upbeat music) - So, today's a really big day.

It's National 8-Track Tape Day.

And that's probably really exciting news especially for those fans of you out there of "8-Track Time Machine".

Check out the groovy new shirt, right?

And we wondered how to best celebrate and commemorate this special day.

So we came to Younger Than Yesterday.

This is the record shop in Peoria.

It's been here 40 years.

And we wanna talk about 8-tracks, celebrate 8-tracks, and to do that, let's go to owner, Craig Moore.

- Got a lot of 8-tracks, they're sort of scattered around in boxes and carrying cases.

But yeah, I've always accepted 8-tracks, and over the last few years, I've discovered that there's, you know, there's a world of collecting 8-tracks.

- And there is a little bit of nostalgia with them.

You've gotta really... Albums, there's that warm feeling or that warm sound, and you play 'em, and it's a big album, there's lots of art.

Those are considered cool.

You really gotta love 8-tracks to collect 'em, right?

'Cause it's not the same.

- Well, it's not exactly the highest fidelity on the planet.

And, you know, you've got to sort of become accustomed to a certain chunk in the middle of your favorite song.

- There's a little bit of a, oh, the 8-tracks, it is that low fidelity, but they did play a huge role in the progress of music, especially portable music, because I think people forget, and for those of us who weren't around exactly at this time, but in the early '60s, there was no way to listen to music in cars.

You couldn't have a phonograph in your car.

And then along comes 8-track.

- Yeah, well, you know, Elvis had a 45 RPM record player in his Cadillac.

- Well, he had a lot more money than you and I did back then.

But it was great, because all of a sudden, there's music in cars, and people...

There were some cars that came factory installed, but a lot of people, like you, went to JC Penney or whatever and got an 8-track installed in your vehicle.

- Oh, yeah, all the chain stores, Penney's, Sears, Ward's, you know, they all got in on the car stereo scene.

And it was huge business.

Portable music really started in big numbers in the 8-track tape.

- And it wasn't just the cars, there were also 8-track portable players.

You had to have a whole bunch of D batteries that weighed a ton, but you could have those.

And then people are like, "Well, I got this 8-track for my car, I better get one for my home."

So, 8-tracks are riding high from the early mid '60s to about the early mid '80s.

Along comes the cassette.

- They could more accurately duplicate a master tape with the cassette, because they didn't have to worry about how much tape they could get into the case.

- Right.

- Therefore, they didn't have to split songs up and, you know, all of that stuff.

- And plus there's forward and reverse, and you can flip it over.

- What a concept!

- Yeah, flip it over and all that stuff.

8-tracks almost disappear, but a few of us held onto ours.

And the problem is they're brittle, right?

I mean, they don't stay together well.

Or at least a lot of 'em didn't.

- Yeah, no, they weren't.

I don't think there was really probably much attention paid to longevity.

- So, how are you gonna celebrate National 8-Track Tape Day?

- First I have to find a working player.

- [Phil] (chuckles) Gotcha.

(Craig chuckles) (funky music) (funky music continues) - This story talks a lot about history.

It's not a fun story, but it's really fascinating.

- This story blew me away when I found out about it.

And this is back in the day when disease could strike so quick and horrible, and in this case, all because one person made a really weird and inexplicable decision.

Let's see this story.

On an otherwise joyful summer day, death floated up river, then struck hard and fast.

A pleasure boat arrived at the Illinois River village of Liverpool.

But within days, 13 residents, more than 10% of the town, would be sent to their graves by cholera from that boat.

The brutal outbreak became known far and wide as the horror of 1849.

As recounted by the book, "The History of Fulton County", "Homes were entered by the dark monster of death, and loved ones were carried off without a word of warning."

It's one of the darkest episodes of Central Illinois history, but there's little left as a reminder, unless you know where to look.

And there you'll find the Cholera Cemetery.

"You Gotta See This" found it, and we'll show you around in a bit.

First though, let's look at the horror that led to the cemetery.

In the 1800s, cholera would periodically devastate countries and cities worldwide, from India to England to New York to Chicago.

Amid unsanitary conditions, the cholera bacteria often passes via fecal contamination of foods.

In the United States, sanitary system improvements largely eliminated cholera by the turn of the 20th century.

But in the mid 1800s, the world had no defense to cholera.

The only treatment was to drink copious amounts of water.

Victims, meantime, experienced violent diarrhea and vomiting, often leading to a torturous death.

Liverpool was a bustling town, and a lot of that came from down river up here.

Pleasure boats, big pleasure boats, coming up from St. Louis.

July 3rd, 1849, was a swelter.

But the torrid temps did not stop a throng of townsfolk from coming out to greet a riverboat from St. Louis.

But word quickly passed.

There was a passenger on the boat who had come up from St. Louis, and he had cholera.

And the disease might've stayed on the boat if not for Robert Summers.

The Liverpool man decided to visit the passenger with cholera.

Soon after going aboard the boat, Summers returned home.

He turned ill two days later.

Meantime, friend, Jordan Pritchard, tended to Summers at his bedside.

Two days later, Summer's wife took ill.

The next day, Pritchard died, as did three of five Summers children.

July 15th brought the fastest attack of cholera.

The victim was Pritchard's wife.

As recounted in "The History of Fulton County", "Alive and well at sunrise, the red sunset lit up her new-made grave."

The fate of the infected boat passenger is unknown.

In Liverpool, some cholera victims survived after ingesting copious amounts of water and salt.

But all told, 13 locals died.

Five were taken six miles away to be buried.

This is the entryway to the Cholera Cemetery.

But time and nature have reduced its public recognition to almost nothing.

The small graveyard sits amid trees and brambles on a 15,000 acre property owned by the Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago.

As you can see, there's a crude fencing that goes around this small cemetery, and within here, it hasn't been maintained in decades upon decades, generations.

And obviously, everyone who might have been connected to that outbreak, long gone, very long gone.

But it's still here, it stands as a witness to one of the most horrible episodes in Fulton County history, and it's just rather remarkable.

Henceforth, it became known as the Cholera Cemetery.

When the first grave was dug here in 1839, it was known as Salem Cemetery.

But not after 1849, not after cholera hit the county.

And back here is what's left of about 22 graves that were throughout this little cemetery.

And as you can see, they've crumbled over the past 170 some years.

And about five of these graves, at least, are from cholera victims that were brought this far from Liverpool.

Why would they bring them this far, about seven miles?

Maybe to get cholera as far away as possible from them before somehow it might take more victims.

And as you can see, there have been, these graves have been placed around this tree, possibly by somebody who just wanted it to look a little nicer, rather than just having broken markers strewn hither and yon.

There's this piling here, and it's really hard to read much of anything that's left on there.

I mean, it's been a very long time.

And as "The History of Fulton County" long ago solemnly declared, "We have read with interest carefully prepared accounts of the cholera visitations in many cities and towns.

But we doubt if ever this country witnessed so rapid and fatal an epidemic."

- That really was a good show.

It kind of had a little bit of everything.

Sweet and tasty, and art, and all kinds of fun stuff.

- History, sad, funny, all sorts of stuff, goes all over the place, just like we go all over the place to find all these interesting stories.

Where are we gonna go next?

- Oh, you'll have to check it out on the next "You Gotta See This".

(upbeat music) - Yes, please.

Wait!

- [Phil] Oh, Kayla, Kayla.

(chuckles) (tone beeps) ♪ Checking it out, checking it out ♪ ♪ Checking it out, checking it out ♪ (tone beeps) - We're here at beautiful Wrigley Field!

There's (indistinct) taking off the whole plate!

Harry, there's nobody on base.

(tone beeps) - Check it out.

Okay.

- Three, two, one.

(crew laughs) - Hmm.

We suck again.

- Three, two, one.

(upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues)