- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(bright music) - [Host] Coming up next on "Off 90," join us as we travel to Rochester to learn about Soldiers Field Aquatic Center, visit Conger to hear from an organist who has been playing for over 50 years, and revisit a feature about the "Mousenik Rocket."

It's all just ahead, "Off 90."

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) (bright music) (upbeat music) - So we're having a pool day today, just the family, end of summer fun.

(kids screaming) They get all of their energy out.

We get to soak up the last of the Minnesota sunshine and we get to have fun together.

- Soldiers Field Aquatic Center.

It's a great place just to come and cool off.

It's a great place to come and escape from everything.

- My favorite thing is the water slides.

(upbeat music continues) - When I think about the Soldiers Field Aquatics Center, I think about the wide variety of community members and visitors that are able to come here and have a great time.

I think one of the big things that's changed about this facility compared to what it was previously is that there's really amenities for people of all ages.

- We serve all sorts of communities and groups here from the Parks and Rec Accessible Program, individuals with disabilities and other sort of physical ailments.

And we serve different diverse cultural groups who may not be able to afford the pool.

We offer passes for those groups as well.

And we have the normal everyday individuals who just come as part of larger families, smaller families, individuals come in.

We try to serve as many groups as we can.

(kids laughing) We do have a lovely splash pad area for the kids.

We have a Lazy River and we do have a 50 meter pool along with our three awesome slides.

(upbeat music continues) - I'm going on the water slide to get bigger and bigger.

- When you get bigger, yeah.

- And some other slides and climbing wall and a zip line that goes into the bigger pool as well.

People love anywhere from just laying out in the sun, hitting the slides or getting some laps in as well as just hanging out with the family and being able to take a second away from everyday life and just having fun on the Lazy River.

The Soldiers Field facility here used to be a pool and it opened in 2024, so we were nearing the end of our second year of operation here.

(upbeat music continues) Soldiers Field Pool was here from 1936, I want to say.

It was one of the oldest, biggest 50 meter pools in all of Minnesota.

(water splashing) - The previous version of the pool, I mean, it was a nice pool, 50 meter pool with a couple slides and you know, there was a lot of patronage here, but we really, I think as the community provided feedback and the design elements came together, again trying to really create that diversity of options.

You can have water walking here for aerobic exercise in the mornings and lap swimming and then the open swim time for all community members and visitors.

We do some evening lap swim as well.

So kind of a full day of opportunities of a variety of options for folks.

(kids chatting) - You know, we've had ongoing maintenance issues with our pools for a very long time.

It's just been a struggle for our team to maintain.

Park system plan in 2015, we had a big engagement with our community about what they wanted to see in our entire park system, wanting more amenities, a better pool, higher quality, and for the next, oh, seven, eight years, and we talked about how can we fund this program.

We got the referendum approved in 2020.

We had some allocated money we put towards the pool itself.

Soon thereafter, DMC stepped in and said, "Hey, we're willing to fund some part of the program as well."

And we also got a federal grant of $5 million.

So 10 million from DMC, 5 million from a federal grant plus our own dollars.

The entire park project was about $22 million and that included the east modifications, the west side new shelter and playground area, the aquatics area, new trail area, art throughout the area, a new walkway going into Discovery Walk downtown area.

So all of that was about $22 million.

The aquatics is about 12 million of that dollars.

- Hey!

(upbeat music) (water rushing) - So every day of the week we do have morning programming, lap swimming and water walking and splash time for the kiddos, as well as, we have 12 to 8 every day of the week, open swim, and some evening programming as well.

So we try to give as much possibilities in the summer for people to come and swim.

So we close the day before school starts and we usually open the day after school ends.

(water rushing) (upbeat music) Primary customers are any age groups, any financial groups as well.

We serve very low income groups and we serve some higher income groups as well, as well as all sort of cultures around the board.

We have a lot of ethnic different communities that we serve.

I think this is a place for everybody and everybody deserves to swim here.

(upbeat music continues) - Now we're into our second summer here at the pool and seeing how busy it is, it's busy all day long and we can handle up to just about 1100 people here at a time, and on some of those warm weekend days, we'll hit capacity and people will be waiting to get in.

So, you know, I think there's a lot of indicators there of it being successful.

(children screaming) - And again.

- We really enjoy the Splash Pad kids area.

It feels very safe and clean.

And the older guy likes the big slides and the Lazy River.

We like the Lazy River too.

(upbeat music) - I think it would surprise people how many water rescues we have every summer.

We usually have about 200 water rescues a summer.

And this can range from water emergencies, which could be a heart attack in the water, it could be a dislocated knee, or it could be something like, which is more regular, which is a child or an adult going down that can't swim, gets too far in the water and goes down.

- It doesn't surprise me again with the number of patrons we have over the course of the summer to have some times when a younger child jumps in a little bit deeper than they maybe expected the water to be, things like that.

So those lifeguards have gone through all of their training.

They'll come and do practice saves and make sure that they're really in tune and ready to go.

So, you know, paying attention and whenever any of those moments happen, they're right on top of it and jumping in and taking care of our community members who are here enjoying the park.

- Hi, I'm Shannon Penney, and I'm a head guard here at Soldiers Field Pool.

I think that people would be surprised about the amount of times that we have to rescue people.

Sometimes it's just like little assists where somebody is struggling like by the wall and so we have to like hand them our tube or just get in to help them.

But then a lot of times people just kind of really overestimate their swimming abilities or they're tired and don't realize it.

So then we have to jump in and grab them.

My favorite part of being a lifeguard is being outside.

I love the staff, I like being with my friends.

I also really like feeling like I'm contributing and like giving back to the community by keeping people safe, so.

- And we get to make some fun summer memories together.

(upbeat music) - [Sam] Coming to a pool just like this is a great place to escape from everyday life.

Obviously you have a day off a job maybe, or bring your kids out and make some memories with them at the pool.

Teach 'em some valuable life skills like swimming or just get 'em out in the community and having fun, getting that interaction going.

(upbeat music) (uplifting music) (lively organ music) (lively organ music continues) - I am Deb Mortensen.

I'm organist here at St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church in Conger, Minnesota.

I have been playing the organ here in Conger for 55 years.

I started in 1970.

(lively organ music continues) I started by playing for Sunday school when I was 10 years old.

The superintendent at that time asked me if I'd be interested in playing for Sunday school, and I said, "Hey, yeah sure, but I don't really know the hymn book or the hymns."

And so he says, "Well, you pick out a song you wanna play every Sunday."

So I did and I went to my piano teacher and she helped me with the timing.

So every week I picked out a song for Sunday school.

I was hoping to someday play the organ, you know, was probably my dream after I started playing piano and really enjoyed it.

And in fact, the organists we've had before were like high school kids, and they played for our church for a little bit until they went to college.

And we knew that they knew the organist that was organist at that time would be graduating.

And I think they were looking to get somebody local and that was interested in playing.

And I was.

(lively organ music) To play the organ, you need to be dedicated.

Lots of practicing.

I guess, just have a love for music and a love for God and praising God with your music and just be determined and dedicated, I guess, yeah.

It's fun.

(lively organ music) Oh, I have lots of memories from the 55 years of playing here.

I think my favorite memory was last year when we had our 75th anniversary when past members, present members, community members came to our church to celebrate our 75th anniversary.

And it was so fun to play for a full church and hear all these beautiful voices singing the hymns.

I love playing for a full church.

You can hear it, it's wonderful.

Memories, there's lots of memories, lots of sad memories of people have passed away, and to play for a funeral, it's hard.

You gotta get your mind ready for it and say, "This is what I need to do for this family."

Some have been very hard, but I hope my music brings them comfort and peace.

(lovely music) There have been a few challenges playing.

I remember one time coming to church in the morning to plug in the organ and there was a dead mouse.

That kind of scared me.

And another time I was playing and ants came out of the keys.

This was on the old organ, and that was kind of scary and challenging.

And I had all these ants crawling, and I guess it was what it was (laughs).

I didn't stop or scream or anything, but I thought, "Oh no, all these ants!"

But that's about it, I guess.

Now, if it was a spider, I don't know what I would've done (laughs).

Playing an organ is different than playing a piano.

A piano you pound, you have to hit the keys hard to get the music out.

An organ, you need to hold the notes.

You don't want to play it like a piano 'cause then the music would be choppy.

And the pedals, I love the pedals.

I just play with my left foot because I control the volume with my right foot.

And you play the bass note of the bass clef of the notes of the piano music or organ music, and it's just fun, fun to play.

You get that extra bass sound and, than not playing the pedals.

(gentle music) Oh, when I play the organ on Sunday morning, I hope I'm bringing joy to other people with my music.

And it's peaceful and comforting for me to play these hymns.

I like to play hymns for the preludes, offertories, and postludes.

I think it gives people encouragement and hope for the coming week.

And maybe it's a favorite song of theirs that they loved from years ago that I hope I give them joy and comfort.

It's peaceful to me.

Oh, I have so many favorite hymns.

There are so many good hymns.

I just enjoy playing "Crown Him with Many Crowns," "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," "In the Garden," "Precious Memories," "What a Fellowship, What a Divine."

I just have a lot of, a lot of favorite hymns.

There's some hymns I don't really care to play, but some, I really love it.

And when I play on Sunday mornings, my husband says, "Oh, I can tell you really loved playing that hymn."

(laughs) (lively organ music) My mom, Genevieve Krueger, always wanted to play the piano when she was a little girl.

And she gave me this opportunity to play because she wanted to play so bad and never had that opportunity.

But in fact, in later years I taught my mom piano lessons and she started to play hymns, easy hymns.

I bought, buy easy hymn books and she would start playing hymns and she was so proud and she was thanking me for teaching her and I'm thanking her for giving me lessons.

So what goes around comes around, I guess.

And my dad, Bill Krueger, he was on the building committee for this church and he rang the church bell.

He tended to the flowers around the church and he was on the council.

And my mother was on the council too.

And I guess their faith in God and always taking us kids to Sunday School, and they were just good role models and gave us good morals.

And I thank them for that.

And I thank God for giving me those good parents.

I just can't believe for 55 years have gone by this fast.

And my mother, oh my goodness, my mother was so patient even when I was in high school, when I was just starting to play, my mother would bring me in on Saturday afternoons to practice the organ and she would sit all over the church to hear what it sounded like.

And she would stay for hours with me.

She never told me to hurry up because, and she always had company for dinner on Sundays and she would never tell me to hurry.

"I gotta get home and do this and do that."

She was so patient and would let me practice as long as I wanted to.

I give her credit 'cause every Sunday, that was a big commitment for her.

(gentle music) I just wanna give thanks to my mom and dad for encouraging me to take piano lessons and for supporting me for all these years while they were here.

And to my husband for being a great, my cheerleader and coming in and supporting me playing the organ.

And of course, thanks to God for giving me this gift of music that I can praise him with and help other people be comforted and be at peace.

I continue to play the organ here because this is my home church.

It's my home family.

We're a small congregation, but we do big things, mighty things for the community and for our church.

It's just, it's just part of my life.

I can't think of playing anywhere else.

This is, this is my home church.

I hope the love of playing music flows through my music that I play for people.

I enjoy it and I hope they enjoy it.

(enchanting music) (uplifting music) (celebratory music) - [Reporter] More and more, teenagers are passing up rock and roll for a rocket roll.

Sister Duns Scotus, a physics teacher, supervises members of the Austin, Minnesota, Rocket Society attempting to send a mouse aloft.

- Sputnik was a Russian rocket that worked and went up into space and at the same time the US government couldn't get a rocket off the ground.

(dramatic music) Somebody sent me a paper, a newspaper from Moscow and it says, "high school students can launch a successful rocket, but the US government can't."

On the front page in English.

So it was- - It was in English?

- Yeah, that one was in English.

Yeah, that was during the Cold War.

(intriguing music) - Three or four of us got together, had an interest in science, anything science and rockets were a pretty good way to have some fun and shoot 'em and see if they worked and find places to like the high school where Dick and I actually went into the machine shop and machined nozzles, other parts of the rocket.

I always liked science a lot and read most of the books at the library on science and stuff.

One day I was in there, I read a "Scientific American."

in the back of it, they had the amateur scientist.

And I looked at it, I looked at it one month and my God, it was a rocket.

They have directions how to build a rocket.

They even gave you the fuel mixture.

I walked into that place over a three week period, the Wold's Drug Store at the corner.

I used to live three blocks from it and bought a couple, about four or five pounds of potassium nitrate, a couple pounds of charcoal and a couple pounds of sulfur.

And I walked right in, handed him the money, and he handed me the chemicals in the back and that was it.

And went home, made gunpowder.

'Cause that was, that's what makes gunpowder.

And we tried to make rockets using that.

Before we did anything, we'd figure out what's gonna happen and how does it go off.

Like when you made gunpowder, ground it up and you grind things separately, you don't have a problem.

When you start mixing them, that's when you have a problem.

But we was very careful by following directions we could read and find.

That's all.

- Remember my basement?

- Well, Dick had a little thing in the basement, yeah.

- We were melting zinc dust and sulfur in my basement under our chimney, furnace chimney.

And it didn't comply.

It ignited and we had smoke all over the place and it made enough noise that some of the neighbors came over and thought there was a problem.

It was just a zinc dust and sulfur smoke that went up the chimney and put out a signal to the whole neighborhood.

(mouse squeaking) - We didn't, come on, mostly, but I mean, whose idea was to put it in the rocket and fire it, was it really?

- Yeah, it was you.

- Yeah.

Thinking back, I probably was.

- And then Gary and I agreed almost the minute you said it.

(charming music) - Long story short is we were cruelty to animals.

There was a humane society, ended up taking us to court here in Austin at the old courthouse.

And we had sort of, it wasn't really a trial.

I wouldn't call it a trial.

- No, it wasn't.

- But it was a hearing.

- It was a hearing.

- Yeah, hearing.

And we to this day we're banned, I believe from putting a mouse in a rocket.

- [Reporter] By now, veterans of the younger generation's newest enthusiasm, the rocketeers go to their Red Rock proving grounds.

The first firing is a test rocket.

(rocket firing) - We thought we had a way to put 'em in all kinds of cotton and stuff like that to take up the shock when it hits.

It didn't work.

After we lost, lost the poor mouse and we couldn't use mice anymore, a friend of ours designed a capsule so that when the rocket tipped over, it would eject the mouse.

We had a fake mouse, a rubber mouse, and it would eject it and it would come down by a parachute.

And it worked beautiful.

(triumphant music) (triumphant music continues) At the time it happened, there was three of us, Dick, myself, and Gary Solis.

- [Dick] After we got on the news, we went from three to... What was it, 14?

- Something like that.

- Within a day or two.

(inspiring music) I went into engineering.

I worked for Hormel pretty much several places in the country.

- Spent six years in the Navy, submarines, nuclear powered submarines.

Went up to Maine, worked at Maine Yankee for 20 years.

- We, this is one thing we were informed of when we bought the farm 43 years ago.

They launched just on this side of the woods over there.

They didn't have to worry about it crashing into a house, hopefully, or blowing up next to a house.

- What would it be, 10, 15 years since I've been out here?

One of the members of the Rocket Society, his mother, after many, many years, decided that they should be remembered.

We should have a memorial out there.

"Mousenik rockets on 5 January 1957 at the Red Rock proving grounds.

One quarter mile north of this marker, the Austin Rocket Society launched a four foot, 10 inch rocket, Mousenik II.

The rocket carried a live mouse as a passenger.

The launch received international attention."

- [Controller] 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, fire.

- [Reporter] But Mousenik fails to fire because of an ignition defect.

- We don't consider our failures as too great disappointments because we know that they're all necessary.

We've had many failures and we learned by each one of them, and we use what we learned to better our next project.

- I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

- I wish they would've had a little more knowledge back then.

- I wouldn't change anything to this day.

It was a great time.

It was a great time to grow up.

Everybody was behind you, and I just enjoyed it very, very much.

And I still like to see it again and watch videos of it because it was really, really great.

(lovely music) (lovely music continues) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (bright music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.