(upbeat music) - [Narrator] On this episode of "Postcards".

- You know, when you're coming by Highway 10 and I hope you see the Batcher block and I hope you think about I wonder what's happened there.

- They ask me all the time, "Do Americans like this?

Do your friends like this?

Are they buying your artwork?"

And I say, "Yes, they are.

They really like Thewa.

They think it's interesting."

- But when one family caught more fish we'd have bragging rights.

You know, we sing and dance and tell everybody, "Well, what a wonderful catch we caught today."

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] "Postcards" is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleene on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms.

A retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails, and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar and Arts and Cultural Heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West Central, Minnesota.

On the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits, 96.7kram online at 967kram.com.

(upbeat music) - The Batcher Block Opera House was built by Charles Batcher in 1907.

Charles Batcher was a renowned architect in our community.

He built over 200 homes here.

He had a lumber mill.

We've had many architects walk our building and they said that whoever built this, built it right.

Charles Batcher put his heart and soul into this building for Staples.

(upbeat music) 1920 was a big thing because it was a very vibrant time in our state at that time.

but things were changing with technology.

So that's where these talkies came in and these, the riskiness of it and, you know, really the stage and the plays and stuff became kind of a thing like there's other things interesting to come.

Charles Batcher was at the cutting edge but then the '30s happened and then it was depression.

So they were doing fundraisers and when presidents got off of our train here and he came to celebrate birthdays for them.

It all came to a head and they closed the doors and turned it into roller skating.

But of course, this was about I wanna say five years before they had the circus up here.

For over a hundred years the type of bands that performed here in orchestras from John Philip Sousa to Lamont Cranston.

So, I mean, it is a fascinating history.

(soft music) In 2002, I had breast cancer and at that time I had a one-year-old and I was told by the doctors with my diagnosis that I only had a year to live.

It was just too far and many people have had this experience but coming from where I was, I was just really wanting to find a way to leave a history for my son.

So my twin brother thought, "Well, let's not even talk about cancer.

Let's find her an extreme home."

So he did, you know, it was really a good push for me to be told I only had one year 'cause we would have never probably invested in this.

But come to find out, Staples really did save my life.

(soft music) So it's okay to be told you only have one year.

Look at the mountain we moved and look what became of it today.

And 17 years later and 16 years of chemo, you know, I think I've done a pretty good job showing people how to fight.

It's been a blessing to live as if you only had one year.

(soft music) - We want it to be a cultural historical space.

Something that we will continue to keep true to its original purpose which was performing arts.

We are going to include it as a cultural type center.

It would be a city owned building.

The stage just blows me away every time.

The original backdrops there, the lights around those, those are original and it just blows me away to walk into a space and you literally feel like you stepped back a hundred years in time.

It gave me goosebumps my first time coming in here.

(soft music) - I've been almost a lifelong resident.

I've been here for over 40 years.

I even utilized this building when it was a department store.

So, I mean, I got a lot of history with it.

(soft music) I think it should be saved and refurbished, restored because I think history is important.

It shares a story about our community and, you know, every community has its stories, its history.

And I think also the building provides an opportunity to bring people together.

You know, out of that comes the peripheral impact of greater community growth and benefit and so I think that socialization aspect also provides a great opportunity.

(soft music) The favorite part about this building is this room itself is that it actually was the wedding dance of a best friend.

So I got a wedding memory in here.

(soft music) - You know, when you're coming by Highway 10 and when you stop at that stoplight, I hope you look up and I hope you see the Batcher block and I hope you think about I wonder what's happened there and I hope that we can design it so you can see it's an opera house.

That's my dream.

And then when you drive away, I really think people are gonna stop.

I think they're gonna stay.

I think they're gonna fall in love here.

I mean, this is a magical place.

So that's what I really wanna invite is to invite you in to celebrate your history and then to help us create more.

(soft music) (upbeat music) - I grew up in Ortonville, Minnesota and my family is a family that appreciates art and appreciates fine craftsmanship.

And so I spent a lot of time in my family's backyard shop watching my mother and father refinish and restore antique furniture.

I grew up in a household that had beautiful old objects and I learned to appreciate that.

I started making jewelry at the Milan Village Arts School and I was about 13, 14, 15.

And there I had the opportunity to work with an experienced silver smith.

His name was Tom Johnson who's a really loving, caring, patient man.

And I was the youngest student in his class.

And so he taught me how to make very simple bracelets at first by twisting wire together and soldering the ends.

And so that was my first exposure to jewelry making.

(plane engine roaring) (upbeat music) My first experience studying jewelry abroad was in Florence, Italy.

I went first as an undergraduate student studying art history and metal smithing for a year.

And then I applied for a Fulbright scholarship to Kosovo which is in Eastern Europe and I was accepted.

And when was there I worked at a masters filigree studio learning the art of filigree.

I enjoyed Italian Renaissance art history so much that I decided to get my master's degree and go back to Florence, Italy.

I worked at Syracuse university and Stanford university as a teaching assistant and then in my own time I would apprentice with a Buccellati master in a Florentine studio.

And Buccellati is known for hand engraving work.

And so I learned from this very old Florentine goldsmith how to use engraving tools and to create this ornate textured surface on metal.

Following my time in Florence, Italy, I became quite curious about Asia.

I had never been to Asia besides my time as a foreign exchange student in Japan in high school but I really didn't know that much about Asian metal smithing techniques or adornment traditions in Asia.

And so I sought out to apply for a fellowship with the Henry Luce Foundation.

I flew to New York city for two days of interviews and I was accepted as a Luce scholar.

And I chose to go to India.

(upbeat music) In India I was placed at Mehrangarh Museum Trust.

A 15th century fortress that was transformed into a museum in the 1970s.

I worked as a curatorial research assistant and I spent my days in the vaults inventorying and researching about 600 objects of armor, decorative arts, and jewelry.

I got to spend my time everyday looking at objects in my hand and trying to reverse engineer how they were made and perhaps research who made them and in what region of India did they come from.

And so all these things were very interesting to me as a metal smith.

(singing in foreign language) Outside of my time in the curatorial department, I spent time seeking out goldsmith communities and spending time in their workshops and just watching them make jewelry.

(upbeat music) I lived in a room that was once one of the many Queens of the Maharajas rooms.

So that was quite an exciting and inspiring in and of itself.

And that's where I made jewelry.

I would finish my job around four or five.

I would go into the city and shadow the artisans until they closed their workshops around six or seven.

And then I would go back to my room inside the fortress and I would make jewelry until 11 o'clock or midnight.

So I would spend hours into the night but it was something that I was enjoying.

It never made me feel exhausted.

I felt tired, but I didn't feel exhausted.

(traditional music) I stumbled upon a group of goldsmiths that do Thewa work.

T-H-E-W-A Thewa.

And it is a technique of fusing 22 karat gold foil that has been punctured into a pretty design, to colored glass.

And I really enjoyed and was interested in this technique because of how colorful and flamboyant it was.

And it's not a technique that is done in the United States.

And so I sought to collaborate with these artisans to design a couple Thewa pieces and I would set them into sterling silver settings and create an adornment using their Thewa art.

And so really the goal of my line, a Laura Margaret design is to combine traditional Indian metal smithing techniques into a Western contemporary adornment.

What I like most about working with Thewa artisans and other Indian artisans is the sort of cross-cultural dialogue that we've created.

I feel like I'm highlighting their art and I'm giving it new life and I'm re-imagining it.

And they're very curious to see American's reaction to their art.

They asked me all the time, "Do Americans like this?

Do your friends like this?

Are they buying your artwork?"

And I say, "Yes, they are.

They really like Thewa art.

They think it's interesting."

I feel really grateful that they have trusted me enough to do that and 'cause they don't know in what form their Thewa pieces are going to take in my necklaces and earrings.

(soft music) I love to back to Ortonville, Minnesota and to the Western edge here and sort of recollect myself because when I'm out in the world in India or in Kosovo or in Italy, I'm going, going, going barely have time to sleep.

It's very overstimulating.

And so when I come back to the Western edge of Minnesota it's quiet, it's calming, and I have time to sort of think about what I've done and what I've experienced.

The journey that my work has taken me on has made me traverse oceans and go to different countries in search of different culturally specific metal smithing techniques.

And that has given me a great deal of inspiration for my own work as a jewelry maker and metal Smith.

And it's given me a wonderful set of skills to create jewelry that I feel has meaning and was made with care and was made with great craftsmanship because of the teachers that I've had in these various countries.

(soft music) (upbeat music) - Well, my dad had six brothers and they were all involved from 1940 up to about '85 when the (indistinct) passed away.

And my dad was named Adolph and I growing up in Browns Valley was a commercial fishing town.

There were about 25 different commercial fishing groups out of Browns Valley that did this commercial fishing seining.

I did commercial fishing since I was 14 years old off and on for about 45 years and everyday was a joy.

Commercial fishing does take place yesterday.

There's one fellow out of Browns Valley, Terry Miller, he lives right on my home front where I was born and reared.

(soft music) - I always said like everybody else, I'm never gonna be a fisherman but here I am, 58 and I'm a fishermen.

Well, I grew up with it.

My whole life never been away from it.

There was five fishing companies, the best of my knowledge that operated out of Browns Valley and several other smaller ones that processed fish.

I mean, it was a booming industry here in Browns Valley in its day.

(soft music) - We worked at the department of natural resources.

They wanted the underutilized species of fish or they call them rough fish out of their lakes, carp and buffalo fish, suckers.

After we took all the carp and stuff out it made better fishing for the lake 'cause we didn't have all those rough fish in the Lake.

One year down and lack of peril.

We caught over 15,000 pounds of 12 pound walleyes and we had to throw all those back in the lake and we had a lot of spectators and they wonder what was the deal.

So we would say, "Well, we have to throw those back because we can't keep the game fish."

That's a state law.

You can't keep game fish.

(soft music) (soft music) We drive our equipment on a Lake and then we'd drill a big hole.

And then the next thing we do, we'd have to drill a bunch of holes, make it like a (indistinct) scene.

It goes a round circle.

And then we have pulley ropes and we'd have augers in the (indistinct).

It'd be about 18 on the crew and we'd put the seine in and then we get around the Lake and then we'd have to have a great big hole to bring the seine out.

And what they'd have is a great big pulley on a tractor that would pull the seine out.

And then once we got away in the end of the seine there'd be a light bay and that's where all the fish would be.

And they could be anywhere from a half a million pounds or a 100,000 pounds or there could be nothing.

But we usually caught a lot of fish.

(soft music) We seined during the summer in the winter also.

Most of the fish went down to Spirit Lake, Iowa where they processed them and they ended up in Chicago and New York.

They would fly them out and they call them carp sandwiches or fish sandwiches.

And we'd sell millions of pounds, all the different commercial fishermen from Minnesota.

We used to smoke fish, Richard my cousin that we smoked 10,000 pounds of carp every couple of weeks and we sell to Hy-Vee super value, Red Owl stores when they were going.

Smoked carp is a delicious fish.

And then there's also in Browns Valley there was a company a few years back that made fish baloney out of carp.

(upbeat music) The seining when they first started out well, years in 1920 they used horses and wagons.

And then it got a little bit better where they had cars and tractors.

- So everything has gotten quite modernized.

We've got little remote control submarines that pull a rope around underneath the ice.

Before they pushed one by fours nailed together.

That's what pulled the rope around.

So it's gotten, just like anything else it's gotten modernized to help.

(soft music) These tractors that you see here in the background now are today's best.

You know, I mean, basically everything's hydraulic compared to years ago, everything was done literally by hand.

Okay, these are tractors here.

This is called a pulling tractor.

It's not a winch on the backside there for winching the rope in winter time.

This is an auger tractor that you see it's got a big auger here on the back that drills the holes.

And that tractor follows over there, the winch tractor that pulls the seine.

These boats here, my open water boats that I seine with in the summertime.

And naturally this is, we've got two trackers of each.

Here another auger tractor, another winch tractor here.

And that concludes for the winter besides the one outside that dips the fish.

So that's the operation.

Like I said summertime these are the boats and I have three other boats basically we haul fish with besides these after we catch them.

It was, this is what they used to chop the hole layout or seine hole with was this right here and now we use augers.

These are just used to trim stuff up basically.

That part I don't miss right there.

I'll take the hydraulics and the power team takeoffs any day.

No, this was a great invention when they came out with that.

They have Rod design these.

Another commercial fishermen that we wind the net up on in the winter time.

(group chattering) (wind blowing) (upbeat music) Whichever land on the bottom is gonna get caught in the net.

Couldn't be good, couldn't be bad because a lot of times it tears the net up.

Traverse in Big Stone Lake actually had grand barges that ran up and down them.

That's how they shipped the green.

And they said that's where the anchors came from that broke loose off of the barges in the boats.

(upbeat music) - In December, 1960 we pulled a million pounds of carp from (indistinct) Lake.

My uncle Joel, that's when my dad's brother, you know, he said, "We're gonna have a lot of fish everybody."

And I didn't know what he meant by that.

And once the seine started coming in, all these fish come in, you know, everybody was jumping around and saying, "Well, we made a big haul."

The other fish come on.

They weren't, we all worked together as commercial fishermen.

We got along as family but when one family caught more fish we'd have bragging rights.

So, I mean, it was kinda comical or we would say, "Well, we caught a million pounds."

And this other guy said, "No, that's not the truth."

But we had pictures of it.

And we had records so we'd have a kind of a party over it.

You know, we'd sing and dance and tell everybody, "Well, what a wonderful catch we caught today."

(soft music) Well, I mean, a lot of people say winters are cold but our fishing company we'd have rubber gear.

So that would make us a lot warmer now we have insulated pants, gloves.

So it made it very comfortable but unless it got 30 below then we wouldn't be out in the Lake.

One time I fell into this great big landing hole.

Well, what dad did, he took one of these ice hooks and he get me out with this ice hook.

And when I said, "Well, dad, I can go home now."

And he said, "No, son you can't.

We've got a pair of dry clothes in the truck.

We'll change and come back to work at 15 minutes."

(Curtis laughing) (upbeat music) - It takes a special person to want to get wet in the summer and cold in the winter.

It can be very rewarding.

It's like any other business and it can be quite stressful at other times.

Back in the days I've heard stories where they dip for three days to get the fish out of the net.

Nowadays our volume is not there like it used to be.

There's no little fish coming back where it used to be years ago.

It didn't matter where you went the lakes were just full.

And you know Martin, fish them down as we'd say catch out the surplus and two years later they were just as thick as they were before.

And now you don't see that anymore.

That's what I'm saying.

I don't know.

Our whole ecosystem has changed.

(soft music) - There are about six left commercial fishermen left in Minnesota right at the moment.

Whereas there used to be about 30 of us.

You know, it's kind of a dying art but there is history to it.

You know, I kinda hate to see it go down the wayside but then I have good memories.

On a personal level it'd be me with my dad and my uncles.

I got as a young fellow, I got to know life.

I mean, they taught me so many things.

They taught me how to be courteous and all this other things.

And especially Richard, my cousin.

Richard was a top notch guy.

He took over the fishing when my dad died and I got involved with Richard about two weeks later.

We'd always be around family and it was a family affair.

So we worked out really good (soft music) - The smaller life, that's what I like.

This is where I was born and raised so your let's kinda dig in a little bit.

You know, I mean, there's a lot of great places I always said I'd move but now I'm, I guess I'm old enough where I'll probably just finish staying here.

(soft music) I mean, I love the outdoors so I guess that's why I do it and we have a good time when everybody works together.

Rework is not that bad.

It's a great life.

(soft music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] "Postcards" is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms.

A retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails, and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar and Arts and Cultural Heritage funded digital calendars showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West Central, Minnesota.

On the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits 96.7kram online at 967kram.com.

(upbeat music)