(steady rock music) - [Narrator] Coming up on Nebraska Stories music, from an immersive string machine, a young woman grows her own boat from mushrooms, a harrowing tale of being lost in the South Pacific, and a new take on a Husker classic.

(steady rock music) (various guitar notes) - [Charley] I'm primarily concerned with signs and symbols.

How society, how people, how an object becomes sacred.

Guitars are very symbolic.

One of the most ubiquitous symbols for popular music in the country is the guitar.

- [Narrator] In an industrial neighborhood east of downtown Lincoln, visual artist Charley Friedman is putting the final touches on a new work that's been years in the making.

- How do you make something experiential, but not something that is just something that is done to you.

- [Narrator] It's an idea the artist traces back to a sketch he created a decade ago, featuring a suspended constellation of guitars, basses, and mandolins.

- There's an unpredictability there, it's not A to Z in one single shot.

It's all over the place.

It's A, it's J, it's B, it's Q, it's all over that.

It's not a logical coordinate system, and that's what excites me.

(random guitar notes play) - [Narrator] Fast forward ten years, and the art studio has become a maze of ethernet cables, digital hubs, and dangling instruments.

All connected a computer that triggers each mechanical pick of a string, as it plays music composed just for this guitar symphony.

With no amplifiers, the volume level of each note depends entirely on the path and proximity chosen by the listener.

- It is about a subjctive experience, your own fate, how you choose things, how you don't choose things.

It's very much about that.

You sit in an audience, and something is kind of fed to you.

The listeners are over here, and the players, the composers, are over there.

And it's left and right.

And here, I did not want that at all.

(giving instructions) I want minimum amount of contact with the string.

- [Narrator] Charley had the vision, but had no idea how to execute it.

- So much of it was out of my wheelhouse, I had to say like, "Hey, you know, I don't know how to write music, I have no idea how to mechanically design anything, or design software."

(tools buzzing) - [Narrator] Charley approached a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

- And he said, "Hmm, I'll think about what grad student I can use, I'll get back to you."

And all of the sudden, maybe a week passed, and he says, "You know what, I'm going to stick my best computer programmer with you, my son."

And I was like, your son?

He's in high school.

The adjuster's awesome, it's a great idea, Luke.

We don't have to take this whole thing apart to adjust it, and we can use a thicker pick and just glance along the top of that and we get a brighter sound.

- [Narrator] Luke is now a college sophomore, but he was only 15 when the two began working together four years ago.

With a background in music and computer programming, he was the perfect fit.

- [Luke] I've always kind of been very techy growing up.

I like to tinker with things, like to build things.

I was thinking you could just put like, two strings on here, just to balance out the pressure.

- For sure.

- At the time we didn't really, kind of understand each other's brains, we didn't kind of understand each other's world.

I was very technical, didn't really know what kind of themes he was going for, didn't have a good picture of that.

- [Charley] They're just kind of stuck in there.

- As we worked on the project together, we developed a better understanding of each other and also of the different worlds that we come from.

- [Narrator] Charley and Luke realized their differences were an asset to the project.

- [Charley] Sometimes engineers, they look for logical solutions for results.

And I don't have logical end-results.

I have metaphorical results, I have emotional results.

- A lot of times, Charley will say, "I want 'X'", and I'll think about it and say "Listen, I think that's interesting, but maybe it would be a lot more efficient if we do 'Y'."

But Charley's not interested at all because that completely ruins the aesthetics.

- [Charley in studio] Yeah, three.

- [Luke] It's a very different way of thinking about things.

- We need two more of these things and then all the mandolins.

- I'm really not sure, that's guesswork on my part.

- What's that one?

- [Narrator] But the pair was struggling with how to make it all work as one collective musical instrument that could make music, not just sound.

(guitars strumming) That's when Luke had the pivotal idea of making each guitar serve as a piano key.

- It's a B so right there.

(piano sounds guitar note) Awesome.

- It was really the miracle moment of the piece that we had been kind of waiting for to transform it into a piece of artwork, and I think that's when the collaboration was like (snaps fingers), it just sang.

(various guitars strum in harmony) - [Narrator] As they put the finishing touches on the string machine, composer Greg Simon, drew on his Chilean roots to create an original composition for this unique instrumentation.

- [Greg] It's equal parts love letter and meditation on the role of the guitar in music generally, but especially popular music, and folk music.

(guitars strumming) I want this piece to feel as though there is a ghost in the room playing the guitars.

And inside of it embed all these really thinly veiled illusions to all of this music that I loved.

(guitar strums loudly) There you go, so having any sustained message afterwards gets rid of it.

- [Narrator] But there were still technical challenges to resolve, both composer and artist wanted the guitars to play in a random, unpredictable way.

- Basically we're getting to like the end of that big 'bom, bom, bom, bom' sort of part of the piece.

But what's on the page right now isn't really working for me, so what I want to try is, I want to try using an arpeggiator, which is bascially a little plug in within the program that randomizes the notes of the chord, that makes random arpeggios out of the chord.

(arpeggiated guitar chords play) - And does it randomize it every single time it plays?

- [Greg] So right now it's following a pattern.

If you feed it a collection of notes, it will randomly trigger those notes.

And when you do things that way, it just becomes a much more elegant solution.

(arpeggiated guitar chords play) - Yeah, aweseome.

That's cool, I like that.

(chords continue) - For me, it's just about the experience, you know.

I love the experience of walking through it.

I think that is just incredible, it's very ethereal you know, very kind of heavenly almost.

(guitars strum individually) - [Narrator] Finally, this unique experiment in sound is ready for a potential national tour, beginning in Omaha's Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.

(guitars strum melodically) - This is a piece that I think really brings people into the space and introduces them to something that, wow I've never thought about this, or you know, we've had people refer to it as feeling like their inside a music box.

(guitars strum randomly) - I want a five year old child, I want an old person, I want a bonafide card member of the art world, and someone who thinks it's all BS to be able to come in here and to get it, and to get something out of it.

That's really important.

And that's why music, organized sound, is so important, because it can bridge that gap and bring people together.

- [Narrator] Laura Brackney, visiting from Texas, is in her final year of a doctoral program in music composition.

(guitars strum hauntingly) - [Laura] I love this piece, it's so cool.

It's immersive, it's multimedia.

It's different from other, maybe automated analog computer things, because you actually get to walk through it and experience it in different ways.

(guitar strumming continues) - It's nice how it's different.

- [Woman] Yeah because it brings it to different, not one plane.

- It's like a cloud.

- Like a cloud, okay, yeah.

- The most powerful aspect of it is how the participant experiences this, and how they're not in awe of any bells and whistles.

You take all these different parts and you hope that all the sum of parts make a bit of magic.

(guitar strumming continues) (gentle guitar music) (bright music) - I love fishing and being out on the water is just something I've always loved, but boats are kind of expensive.

So I thought, well this is buoyant, why not try to grow a boat?

My name's Katy Ayers, and I grow things out of mushrooms, basically.

(water splashing) - [Narrator] Not just mushrooms, but mycelium, the unseen vegetative body of a fungus that forms mushrooms.

- This is the hard part.

Uh-oh, I might be too close.

I grow things out of mushrooms because I think that it can really impact the way that we interact with our environment and our job as environmental stewards here on this planet to keep us from crashing and burning essentially.

It smells very earthy, like a mushroom.

- [Narrator] Inspired by an English paper she wrote on sustainability, Ayers took a particular interest in mycology, the scientific study of fungi.

- The fact that there's so much that we don't know about fungi, it's like this giant mystery.

They estimate there's about 1.5 million species of fungi, yet we've only identified a little less than 200,000 at this point.

- What we do know is that the mycelium breathes air, it creates a network of threadlike material interconnected to make a watertight biomaterial that feels a lot like skin.

- Every time we take it out it usually grows a few mushrooms on it.

- Ayers worked with a local mushroom grower to design the build of the canoe, and to figure out how to direct the growth of the mycelium.

- [Katy] We made a wood steamer out of a downspout, and then built a skeleton, and then paper mached around that to create our mold, and then grew it in a hammock for about a week, took it out and let it dry in the sun, and then next thing you know we were on the water.

I was a little nervous, we definitely tried to push it underwater at first, but it popped up like a beach ball.

So, it would be hard to sink that thing.

- [Narrator] It floats.

- Catching rays.

- And it's in the Guiness Book of World Records as the world's longest fungal mycelium canoe.

- I love it.

It's definitely a workout too.

- The goal wasn't just to make it into the record books, the canoe was meant to inspire people to consider the possibilities.

- You could grow a boat, you can grow packaging, chairs, lampshades, insulation, fireproofing, there's so many things.

One of my favorites is bobbers, I really want to grow some bobbers for people to take out.

A little bit less garbage in the lake would not be a bad thing by any means.

So this is the fun part.

- [Narrator] Ayers hopes to one day have a doctorate in mycology.

Until then, she's using what she's learned with the canoe to develop grant funded research that involves creating hotels for bees.

- We're focusing on conservation biology of our native pollinators.

Pollinator numbers are dwindling rapidly and we have over 400 species of bees and wasps that do pollination here in Nebraska.

So we thought we could provide them some habitat with a native fungus.

So we're growing bee my-hotels, which is a bee hotel made out of a fungus.

It's gone everywhere.

People from different countries are reaching out and it feels really good to help push this movement, a myco-revolution almost, forward.

(gentle guitar) - I want people to experiment and realize there's so much that mushrooms can do, and here in the western world we tend to be a little mycophobic, when really we should look to mushrooms and learn to love them a little more.

(mysterious music) - [John] This is our crew right here.

The radioman would call the name of O'Neal, Skuda, the pilot, and myself.

- [Narrator] It's been more than three quarters of a century, but memories of early 1943 come easily for John Boosalis.

- I've been very flattered a couple times when I ask people to pick me out, people pick me out as the pilot.

- [Narrator] He was a 23 year old Navy radioman and a gunner in World War II, stationed aboard the U.S.S Suwannee in the middle of the South Pacific.

On February 27, Boosalis and his crewmates began what was supposed to be a routine anti-sub patrol.

They were about two hours into the flight when their engine gave out.

- The pilot came on the intercom that we were going to go down.

We landed at sea, a lot of people have the impression that landing on water is kind of a soft landing, but this is not true, it's like hitting a brick wall.

- [Narrator] Uninjured by the hard landing, it took less than a minute for Boosalis and pilot BJ Skuda to get out of the sinking plane.

They quickly deployed a life raft and grabbed an emergency survival kit.

- We had a hard time getting the radioman in, because the navymen couldn't swim, he was reluctant to jump in the water but he knew jumping in the water was the best of the two options that he had.

- [Narrator] In the distance they could see an island, so they started paddling.

Progress was slow and there was no sign of anybody coming to rescue them.

- Trying to help things along, the pilot and I got into the water and tried to push the raft, that was all well and good until we saw some shark dorsels, we got back in the raft in a quick hurry.

- [Narrator] After four days of paddling and nearly getting pulled back out into the open sea, the three men landed on the rocky coast of Erromango, a remote island about 30 miles long and 19 miles wide, more than a thousand miles from the east coast of Australia.

They had seven ounces of drinking water left.

- A short ways back from the shore line, there was a slab of rock and there was some water in that that didn't have the saltwater in it, and we got some of that and we just rested, we just plopped down and regained our strength before we started walking.

- [Narrator] After days of sun and saltwater exposure, Boosalis' feet were swollen and raw.

- These shoes here, where I had to cut them, my feet were so swollen.

- [Narrator] The men explored what they could, avoiding sharp rocks and coral snags.

They had run out of food on the life raft.

- March the fourth, that's Thursday: In a cave, treating our wounds and resting up, begin to get hungry.

- [Narrator] Boosalis reads from a report he wrote in 1943.

- "Half mile inland we find oranges, limes, papaya, all very nourishing."

- [Narrator] After four days of wandering, Boosalis and his crewmates spotted an island native out looking for a lost pig.

He took them back to his village, where they were fed chicken stew and given more fruit, including pineapple he'll never forget.

- That pineapple vine ripe, was the sweetest pineapple, the most tasty pineapple I'd ever eaten or have eaten since.

- [Narrator] A day later the natives lead Boosalis and the two others to the other side of the island where an Australian man named S.O Martin had a cattle ranch and a small house.

- We got a little disturbed when he first saw us, he started to laugh.

And it kind of bothered us a little bit but then he told us that his hobby was collecting American airman because there was others that had crashed there before we did.

- [Narrator] Boosalis, Skuda, and O'Neal spent the next 25 days recovering at the ranch.

Boosalis came down with malaria which the rancher was able to treat.

He spent his twenty-fourth birthday on the island, reading books and riding horses.

- If it wasn't for that native being there, there would have been hardships, no doubt about it.

We had all the comforts of home.

- [Narrator] Soon a supply boat stopped by the island and later notified a radio operator at a nearby island that there were Navy Airmen stranded there.

- [George] The island that you went to to get picked up was?

- [John] Tanna.

- Tanna, just south of there is that correct?

- Yeah.

- [Narrator] A couple of days later Boosalis, Skuda, and O'Neal were picked up by sea planes and returned to their carrier, one month after they disappeared into the South Pacific.

The experience changed Boosalis.

- I don't let things bother me like I used to before, you know?

There's too many good people without worrying about the bad ones.

It helped me in that way, I didn't get all real uptight, like I used to.

- [Narrator] After the war, Boosalis returned home to Minnesota, and eventually moved to Nebraska, arriving in Lincoln in 1961.

He opened a well-known restaurant and golf club, and later turned the business over to his son, George.

His sister-in-law, Helen Boosalis, was Lincoln's mayor from 1975 to 1983.

John Boosalis celebrated his one hundreth birthday in 2019.

He's had some time to reflect.

- [George] There were a lot of heroes back at that time.

- A lot of heroes.

- He was one of them.

- Eh, I don't know about that.

- [Narrator] He doesn't talk much about his experience in 1943.

He knows many others had it much worse than he did.

But he did learn a valuable lesson about the human spirit.

- The will to survive is very strong.

Very strong.

(upbeat rock music) (crowd cheering) - [Narrator] Each home game, The Pride of All Nebraska marches onto the field to play the familiar tunes associated with the Huskers.

(band plays "Hail, Varsity") But did you know that before "Dear Old Nebraska U" and "Hail, Varsity" , another song was synonomous with the Big Red.

("The Cornhusker" plays) ♪ Come a runnin' boys, don't you hear that noise?

♪ ♪ Like the thunder in the sky.

♪ - [Tony] "The Cornhusker" is the official title of the song, it was written in 1909 by Robert Stevens, he was a huge football fan and he wasn't happy with the school songs that we had up to that point and he wanted something a little bit more rockus and it would get people's blood up so he wrote this.

It varied in popularity for the first few years and then it had a real revival of popularity when the 1941 Rose Bowl team kind of adopted it.

("The Cornhusker" continues) - [Narrator] The song, also known as "Come a Runnin' Boys" held a deep connection to that '41 Rose Bowl team.

- [Al] When we sang that it was almost, I would say, comparable to those things that happened when a man in the military is going into battle, knowing that his life is at stake, and that he has to draw together with all of his comrades, to get the desired result.

It was an tremendous emotional lift, and you know, it brings tears to your eyes.

(band plays) (people cheer) - I'm not sure, it kind of faded from use over the years.

I'm not sure all the history of that, when it stopped being played.

I found out about the song when I got the music and then we started playing it again.

So it's kind of been steadily coming back in popularity.

- [Narrator] Bringing the song back to the zeitgeist of Husker fans was a local band from Lincoln, The Killigans.

("The Cornusker" by The Killigans) - Here's The Cornhusker song, put your hands together Nebraska ♪ Come a runnin' boys, don't you hear that noise, ♪ ♪ like the thunder in the sky.

♪ - [Narrator] In 2014, the folk-punk band recorded their version of the song.

("The Cornhusker" by The Killigans continues) "From the sons of Nebraski" - [Chris] As we kind of grew up with this genre of music where there was this folk-punk, Irish-punk bands, you know there's bands that kind of are out there in bigger cities that have allegiance to a certain professional team.

We all came up in the mid '90s, in that second kind of glory age of Nebraska football, so it was huge for us.

You know , we had told ourselves, you know what can we do song-wise, can we write a song?

- [Pat] My wife was in the marching band for several years in the early 2000's, and the one tune that didn't quite, you know speak very well to a lot of people was "The Cornhusker" or "Come a Runnin' Boys" is what it was, so we kind of wanted to adopt that.

There was lyrics to it that a lot of people don't know, and so I took the time, I looked all that up I got the sheet music for it, got all that figured out.

- We went back to the drawing board and then I think over the course of about two weeks, Chris and I met a few times here in the shop and we broke the entire song back down into Pat's original recording of all the different parts but took away some of the, like you said, the Sousa-esque, the marching band quality of it, and turned it into something that was a little bit more of our own.

("The Cornhusker" by the Killigans) ♪ For Nebraska and the Scarlet, for Nebraska and the Cream ♪ ♪ Though they go thru' many battles ♪ ♪ Our colors still are seen ♪ - So I think it's worth noting that this whole project was sort of a pet project of Chris and Pat and I's.

We had no expectations of it going anywhere or were really getting any notice.

So the initial reaction that we got was pretty alarming and pretty overwhelming.

- Looking to the online comments and seeing the reaction to the YouTube videos, and the download numbers, the number of people that are downloading this song, it was kind of amazing to see, because it went quick.

- It kind of went away for a couple years or so.

- The rain out.

So they were playing music for the crowd and people were dancing in the rain, and then all of the sudden, right in the middle of their playlist, here comes The Killigans.

And then you're sitting at home, maybe watching Big Ten Network, and they have that in-stadium sound and you hear your voices playing back to you on a live football broadcast, and you're like, this is surreal.

♪ And we'll always be a Cornhusker ♪ - A lot of people that would hear this and like it, they're not going to listen to this genre of music, or especially a smaller local band like us.

Yeah, it definitely has turned them on to us.

- At the end of the day, we are Husker fans.

And we happen to be musicians.

So we feel very very fortunate to have been given the opportunity to have a lot of people exposed to what we're doing.

- [Narrator] Nebraska fans, young and old, are once again helping this song become engrained in gameday traditions.

♪ Like the thunder in the sky ♪ - It took hold and got popular again, and this group The Killigans took it on and it's got a great old history, it's our oldest, really our oldest fight song.

♪ That will sweep all foes away, so with all our vim ♪ ♪ We are bound to win, and we're going to win today ♪ ♪ In the days of old, Johnny Bender bold would just take ♪ ♪ that ball in hand ♪ (steady rock music) - [Narrator] Watch more Nebraska Stories on our website, Facebook, and YouTube.

Nebraska Stories is funded in part by The Margaret and Martha Thomas Foundation.