(soft music) - [Narrator] Funding for Off 90 is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and the citizens of Minnesota.

(birds cooing) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Cruising your way next Off 90. we learn about the Schuller brothers and their journey to the United States.

We meet Dudley Edmondson, an author with a passion for getting young people outdoors.

And a recipe from Chef Shari Mukherjee.

It's all coming up on your next step Off 90.

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Barbara Keith.

Thanks for joining me on this trip Off 90.

Karl Schuller was born in Romania during World War II.

His father was drafted into the Romanian army and as the Russian army entered Romania, Karl and his mother fled to Hungary.

Later, they were reunited with Karl's father, Gustav, and lived several years in a former army barracks that had tarped roofs and rats.

Once when asked what he wanted for his birthday, Karl said, "Get me to America, the rest is up to me."

(bright music) - [Narrator] Karl Schuller was born in Romania in the early part of World War II.

In 1944, his father was drafted into the Romanian army, leaving just he and his mother to fend for themselves.

Soon, Karl and his mother would be forced to leave their home in Romania.

- September of 1944, the Russian started moving into Romania where we were living, and my mother had to make a decision as to leave or stay behind.

And she decided that we're going to leave.

The only thing we could do it, at that point was just take with us what we could carry.

- [Narrator] They fled to Hungary, but when the Russians advanced into that country, Karl's family was forced to move again, this time to Austria.

- There was war going on around us and that was very scary and trying to get food and shelters.

- [Narrator] Throughout World War II, and even after food was scarce.

To get food, most people had to barter for it.

And cigarettes were a valuable bartering currency.

Youngster Karl would sometimes get cigarettes from American soldiers.

- The American GIs came by.

They told us cigarettes or part of the flip part of it and what we'd do, we'd pick up the stubs of cigarettes and take them home and dry them out again and mom, when we riffed out to them to even the new cigarettes and use the cigarettes that is barter for food.

- [Narrator] In Austria, Karl's youngest brother, Peter, was born.

The family stayed in a small brick house on a farm next to some railroad tracks.

- When the house we lived in was close to some railroad sidings and there was a train of oil, basically train cars.

And this was Easter time and here came the swarm of American airplanes right over the house and went actually came so low.

The wheels clipped part of the roof and they shot that whole train on fire.

(bright music) But the scary part was there especially they were shooting both directions on the train before front part of the house was totally shot full of bullets.

That was kind of scary.

- [Narrator] Later Karl and his brothers and mother would be reunited with the boy's father, Gustav.

And they would move into an army barracks that had the thin walls, tarp roofs, no indoor plumbing and rats.

They lived there for several years.

Once during their time there, and prior to Karl's birthday, his parents asked him what he wanted.

He said, "get me to America, the rest is up to me."

- And when you live in that kind of situation, you have nothing to lose.

So whatever from that point on forward, whatever it is, you're bound to move up.

And especially once you got here, you saw how everybody lived and on and on.

(cool music) So really to me, it was, it's really up to you, if you wanted to get ahead on or not.

What you only have to do is work for it.

- [Narrator] Six years after applying, the Schuller's application was approved.

Once in the US, Carl and his brother, Peter, learned English, went to college where Peter studied business administration and economics, and Karl studied business, architecture and marketing.

Several years after college they got together and founded a construction company in Rochester, called AB Systems.

They went from living in a tarp shack to growing a tremendously successful business in America that employs more than 30 people.

They've worked for and lived the American dream.

(dramatic music) (country music) - Rochester chef Shari Mukherjee shows us how to make a beautiful tomato and burrata salad.

- Hi, I'm Shari Mukherjee, and today I am here to show you guys how to make this really delicious end of summer, early fall tomato salad.

Here I have a bowl full of chopped, roughly chopped.

They're not very pretty at all, and that's fine.

I want it to look nice and rustic.

So you can see they are about half inch diameter or half inch pieces chopped up into here.

On top of this, we are gonna go ahead and add some burrata.

Burrata is a really delicious cheese.

It's basically a mozzarella that's been kind of blown into a ball and then stuffed with like cream and really, really delicious more cheese.

So we're gonna go ahead and just add this grate onto the top of our salad here and we'll kind of flip it.

I have our oven set to broil.

Now what?

Here I just have a couple pieces of just sourdough bread.

I'm gonna add some butter to this.

A little bit on both sides and onto a sheet pan.

All right.

So, we're gonna go ahead and get this into the broil, we want to watch it.

It's gonna take, maybe three to five minutes in the broiler.

I like to flip it halfway just to make sure both sides are golden.

We're looking to get that bread nice and golden and crispy.

So into the oven, we're gonna put this.

Again, it's set to the broil and we're gonna put a timer on, we don't wanna forget about it.

So I'm gonna set the timer for three minutes and then we'll check back.

To finish our salad we have our burrata, our tomatoes.

We need a little bit of green on that plate.

So we're gonna go ahead and use some basil.

We are going to julienne this basil.

So we're gonna stack them up really nicely and then go ahead and roll it tight like a cigar, take your knife and just simply chop.

Now into our salad, we're simply going to take some olive oil.

This is just an extra virgin olive oil and be generous.

This is really the only flavoring of your salad so be generous.

We're just gonna pour some in over the cheese a little bit.

We're gonna add some pepper.

And I always like to add my salt last because the moment you add salt to tomatoes, all the moisture's just gonna seep out.

So I like to do that a little bit last and the cheese is also pretty salty.

So you're not gonna have to worry too much about there not being enough salt in our tomatoes.

Now our toast is out of the oven.

You can see it's beautiful golden, a little bit more golden on one side, you choose what side you want.

(chuckles) We're gonna go with the less golden on top.

If you wanted, you could rub this with a little bit of garlic.

I'm not gonna do that today.

We're just gonna go really simple.

So, here again, we have our tomato salad.

I'm now gonna add just a little bit of salt, just around the edges.

We are gonna top it with a little bit of salt too.

So you'll see how that goes.

Now, the burrata, like I said, it's like a mozzarella ball, that's filled with cream and other cheese.

And you go ahead and you take your knife and you slice into it.

When you slice into it, you'll see it almost looks like cottage cheese in there, it kind of oozes out.

Now how I like to eat this and the outside you can eat as well, so that outside is mozzarella.

So, go ahead and eat the whole thing.

Don't throw that away.

It's not just a casing.

How I like to eat this though is you take your nice toasted piece of bread.

Put it on a plate here.

All right, our nice toasted piece of bread.

I like to take a little bit of that burrata and just spread it onto the bread.

And then we're gonna go ahead and really reach in.

Grab those tomatoes with that basil.

Pile it on top.

If you want, you can top it with some extra basil, if you've chopped a little bit more, we're just gonna top it with just a little bit of extra salt.

And this is it.

This is delicious.

This is amazing.

Really, really tasty That cheese with the tomatoes and the basil, I'm telling you, there is not a better match anywhere.

This is so, so good.

I wish tomatoes were in season all year round, honestly.

(laughs) Enjoy.

(upbeat music) - Dudley Edmondson is an author, public speaker and filmmaker, whose passion is nature and getting people of color outdoors.

He's an avid outdoors man that loves to inspire young people.

- My name is Dudley Edmonson.

I live in Duluth, Minnesota.

I'm a freelance photographer, filmmaker and author.

(water bubbling) I've been an outdoor person pretty much my entire life.

Even as a kid, I actually, really started when I was a kid.

My parents used to take us on picnics.

I'd wander off into the woods, near the picnic area and just explore and hang out and stuff, and that for me was very therapeutic, getting away from the city and stuff.

So I really enjoy being outdoors.

And so just nature in general has always been something that's been a huge part of my life.

Birdwatching really started in junior high school, but it wasn't until I got into high school.

And my art teacher was a big time bird watcher, and he formed a birdwatching club with some of the students, and I was one of maybe four nerdy kids who joined.

We raised enough money to go on a birding trip to Texas, from Ohio.

And seeing all the birds in Texas and his ability to identify those birds with, really with just a glance.

He would just look at a bird and say, "crested caracara," or "plain chachalaca," or something like that and it's like, "wow, how did he do that?"

And that really just, really got my interest.

After I graduated from high school, I just really stuck with birds, and then later became a bird photographer.

For a long time I specialized in birds of prey, so that's also part of the reason why I live where I live in, in Duluth, Minnesota.

And it's nice now to just be able to really sit in my backyard and just look up and see hawks flying.

I'm always birding.

I'm either birding, visually I'm looking at birds or I'm birding by ear.

If I'm out of doors, I'm birdwatching.

(water bubbling) I came to Minnesota, in the early 90s, and I just wanted to be among wild things and in wilderness.

And there was really nothing like that in Columbus, Ohio.

I wanted to move to Minnesota because I love wilderness and it's super accessible, particularly on the North Shore.

There's just plenty of places to access the out of doors and wilderness.

There's a combination of taking pictures and then the process of developing them that really got me first interested in photography.

But I stuck with it because it was a way to keep track of the birds I was seeing and also I got into photographing wild flowers.

The ability to photograph nature and show people the beauty of nature, at least the way I see it.

And so that's really what got me doing photography and got me interested in sticking with it.

Didn't really consider myself to be a professional until I moved to Minnesota, and that was in 1990, '89, '90, and I felt like, this is the beginning of my professional career because I specifically moved to Minnesota for the sole purpose of being a professional photographer.

Originally I thought that I wanted to be either a wildlife biologist or a game warden.

Of course I wanted to be connected to nature but then I started thinking that eventually I would end up stuck at a desk.

At some point in my career, I would be stuck at a desk and that horrified me.

So I just decided that I wanted to be a nature photographer, also because of the creative aspect of it.

The creative control of photography, and then still being connected to nature, for me, was a good combination and besides I suck at math, so I just felt like being a biologist or a game warden at some point, the math would come back to haunt me.

For me, water it's one of those things that everybody is attracted to and we don't even know why.

Water is constantly moving, for the most part, which makes it a fascinating subject to photograph.

My photography really is my way of showing people how I see the world around me.

You can't see the way I see what I see, but if I capture that with a photograph, then you can see what I see.

Because two people could be looking at the same thing and not necessarily see the same thing or see it in the same way.

And a camera and my photography, I feel like, gives me the ability to do that.

To show people how I see the world, which I would imagine it's very different from the way other people see the world.

When I go out to take a photo, I don't often know exactly what I'm looking for, but I don't know exactly what I'm gonna capture.

Nature moves very, very, very slow and when you're in the out of doors, you have to adjust yourself to that and slow yourself down to nature's time.

If you're lucky, you will come home with one, maybe two, images you like.

I've been an outdoor person as I've said, all my life, as a young high school grad and I started traveling around the country, solo.

Camping, and hiking and birdwatching and things like that.

I just found that there weren't a lot of people of color, particularly African Americans in the out of doors, at least in the places that I was going.

And so after I became a professional nature photographer and started traveling even more, going to national parks and other public lands around the country, again, I just found that there weren't a lot of people of color, at least Americans.

There was some diversity in these spaces, but they were oftentimes people from other countries that were visiting our national parks and our public lands.

That got me interested in trying to figure out how I could get more people of color into the out of doors.

My philosophy has always been, I belong wherever I choose to be.

Because I'm passionate about access to public land.

I refuse to allow anybody to deny me that privilege.

And so I often times try to encourage people of color and other African-Americans to feel that same determination and passion for accessing public lands.

I take people out, I show them spaces that I visit and show them that, these spaces can be safe.

But mostly to me, they belong to you, and if you have to take ownership of them.

I always encourage people that when you go into the out of doors to remember to slow down and move at nature's pace.

(water bubbling) (upbeat music) - Rochester band Fires of Denmark is the brain child and musical project of Mike Terrill.

Who writes, performs, and records all his work.

We're so happy to share their music video with you.

Enjoy.

(synth music) ♪ We found ourselves ♪ ♪ Up here ♪ ♪ Surrounded by ♪ ♪ Silence ♪ ♪ and empty space ♪ ♪ Space ♪ - [Radio Voice] His remarkable keyboard plays the same tone and sends signals along the nerves to the brain where we receive its sound.

Of course, the outer ear operates in here, but the cochlea is filled with liquid and transferring sound waves from air to a liquid is one of the most difficult problems on the science.

But in the ear, this problem is beautifully solved by the precise design of the middle ear with its two diaphragms, just the right size.

Three connecting bones that provide the exact memory (audio swallowed by loud music) ♪ We weren't ♪ ♪ Too strong ♪ ♪ We can get it ♪ ♪ Together ♪ ♪ We can get it ♪ ♪ Together ♪ (upbeat music) (county music) - We've reached the end of this tour Off 90.

Thanks for riding along.

See you next time.

But before we go, we meet Karl Schuller's brother, Peter.

Ater World War II, his family lived in a refugee camp in Austria, in a tar paper army shack without running water and without heat, except for the cooking stove.

The family moved to the US when Peter was 10.

After college, Peter and his brother, Karl, started a construction company that has built more than 2000 buildings, over 50 years.

- [Narrator] 1946, World War II recently ended when Peter Schuller was born in Austria.

For the next 10 years, he, his parents and two brothers would live in a refugee camp in Austria.

World War II was over, but the hardship continued for millions of people impacted by the war, including Peter's family.

Times were tough.

Food was scarce.

- So we ended up in a refugee camp in (indistinct), Austria.

(bright music) So we lived in that camp from '46, until '56.

It was a tarpaper army shack, barbed wire fence on the outside, no indoor plumbing, outdoor toilets obviously.

The place was rat infested.

I remember, having to go to the bathroom at night and going out there and being scared about rats.

No indoor heating, other than a stove that we used for heating as well as, as cooking.

So that's where we lived then for, for 10 years.

we did develop some friendships, with other people that lived in that camp with us.

We had a river nearby.

We had a forest and all that.

So you could get out of this camp, you could go out there and play.

We picked berries out there and all of that.

So that was not that bad of a place to live.

We didn't have to live in a tent.

We didn't have much food, but we did have a little food.

My father was working for a factory at that time, making about 25 cents an hour.

- [Narrator] While living in the barracks, Peter's parents applied for citizenship in the United States.

They had family there and to them, it looked like heaven on earth.

(cool music) When Peter was nine, he had an opportunity to leave the tarp roof, army barracks.

- The Red Cross, they had a program in, in Austria.

They would take these children out of the refugee camps, and they would make provisions for these children to live in another country.

And I was one of those lucky kids.

(bright music) I ended up then living with a family in Denmark.

So I was in first grade and I ended up with a family by the name of Karl and in Dagmar Yacobson.

good Danish people.

- [Narrator] Overnight, he went from living in a tarp shack to a house with controlled climate, indoor plumbing, warm showers, and plenty of food.

- It was a brick house.

I had my own bedroom.

They provided clothing for me.

We had food every day and I look back at that time and I said, you know what?

This is the way I'd like to live someday.

- Peter returned to live with his family in the army barracks.

Fortunately, his parents application for US citizenship six years earlier, was now approved.

The family, moved to the US when Peter was 10.

- When you move from another country, you can say, "poor me," or you can say, "you know what?

I'm gonna work just a little harder.

I'm gonna put in a little more effort academically, sports-wise and all of that."

I was that kind of a kid when I was growing up, I just worked a little harder academically, sport wise and all that and had some relatively good success.

- [Narrator] Peter began learning English at age 10 and worked full-time through high school and college.

Several years after earning his business degree, he founded a Rochester based construction company with his brother, Karl, called AB Systems.

The company has worked a little harder and has been extremely successful.

Peter, his brother, Karl and AB Systems have built more than 2000 buildings over the last, nearly 50 years.

(bright music) (upbeat music) (bright music) - Funding for Off 90 is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(birds cooing)