right music) (gentle music) - Thanks for watching another episode of "My Wisconsin Backyard."

Hi, I am Traci Neuman.

- And I'm Brian Ewig, and as the year draws to an end, we take a look back at some of the great places and communities that we visited during our last revolution around the sun.

- [Traci] We go inside Yerkes Observatory and discover where some of the greatest minds in astrophysics studied and introduce you to some inspirational basketball players.

- [Eric] Come on in.

- [Brian] Plus, we traveled to Burlington to visit the oldest mushroom farm in the Midwest and see how mushrooms are grown without chemicals or pesticides.

(calm music) (mysterious music) - You're in Yerkes Observatory.

This is considered the birthplace of modern astrophysics.

It was really the first thorough astrophysics school in America.

It opened its doors October 21st, 1897, and it began to combine astronomy and physics to study the disposition of space, the personality of space, not just discovering a moon of Jupiter, but telling you how fast that moon was moving, how that moon was imploding.

Was that moon young or old?

So we really set the astrophysics world on its ear because no one had done this kind of stuff before.

And this is a full school.

It was a 50-acre campus where the students lived in the attic and the professors lived in the houses dotted around the woods that were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and his son, John Charles Olmsted, certainly the preeminent landscape designers in American history who had designed the US Capitol grounds, Central Park in New York City, and many things in Wisconsin and Chicago as well.

Most observatories are a dome and a telescope.

Yerkes Observatory is a full school with the most famous refracting telescope in the history of the world, and it's an architectural masterpiece.

(door creaks) Welcome aboard the ship.

(machinery buzzing) And this entire floor goes 23 feet up to the balcony.

The floor weighs 74,000 pounds, and that's how you get up to the eyepiece.

This was built in 1896 and 1897.

It still works remarkably well to this day.

Away we go.

And here we are.

Now, a refractor telescope uses lenses.

All modern telescopes use mirrors to gather light, but before mirrors got really great technologically speaking, lenses were the norm.

And this has two 40-inch-diameter lenses that were made in Paris in the 1880s.

The tube and the base weigh 160,000 pounds.

The tube rotates 360 degrees and goes up and down.

So this is how you move the telescope up and down.

It is this giant, and it just moves by hand.

And so you can move it sideways.

You can move it up and down.

Over the past month, I've looked at the Andromeda Galaxy and Jupiter and the moon and plenty of Messier objects, and it's like taking a road trip in space.

Although this style of astronomy observation is outdated, because telescopes are in the sky now and they're on mountaintops in South America, this is a really visceral human experience.

And to look at Neptune through this eyepiece is very rewarding.

Your eyeball is looking at the cosmos as opposed to looking at something on a laptop or a cell phone.

And the reason why this telescope became so significant and Yerkes Observatory's great refactor had a camera, and so Williams Bay, Wisconsin, took the first pictures of space beyond the moon that the world ever saw.

So you'd take them on glass plates, and the glass plates could then be photocopied, essentially, and put in newspapers and magazines.

(mysterious music) I mean, you're talking about Yerkes Observatory that had Edwin Hubble as one of its students and staff.

Edwin Hubble figured out that there was more than one galaxy.

Mary Calvert was here for many decades, one of the first people to map the stars.

Nancy Grace Roman was here for eight years.

She was NASA's very first chief of astronomy.

She's the central force behind the Hubble telescope.

William Morgan in 1951 in this building discovered the shape of our galaxy.

William Morgan figured out that our spiral arm structure was what we were.

The people that came through this building like Otto Struve, Gerard Kuiper, who pioneered the research that figured out everything on the other side of Neptune, Carl Sagan, the most famous astronomer of the second half of the century, they all lived and worked in little ol' Williams Bay, Wisconsin.

- There is nothing better than playing drums very loudly.

(laughs) - I feel like you can't really avoid music.

Like, everything around you is nothing but rhythm.

- It's fun, it's dynamic, it's fast, and so you get that energy that's kind of invasive almost.

You can't really help yourself.

You kind of just, you feel the beat.

- All right.

(drumstick tapping) Here we go, ah, ah, ah, ah.

(drums beating) Drumline specifically deals with marching snares, marching tenor drums, marching bass drums, and marching cymbals.

It's mostly rudiment style, or I should say rudiment-based drumming.

So you learn like certain ways of combining stickings or heights of your sticks into these kind of small little snippets that we call rudiments, and then those rudiments are built into longer sort of drum phrases, which eventually builds entire grooves and cadences and things like that.

(drums beating) All right, if anything, if we're coming out of the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, which is gonna be fortissimo, we just really drop it going to those first four measures.

It's very much a thing that a lot of young percussionists get into sometimes as early as high school, and there's not a whole lot of opportunities after high school to kind of continue that.

And so we're kind of trying to provide an opportunity for students to be able to come to this group no matter what their major is at MATC.

So if you wanna go into the- (drum tapping) the syncopated one too, that's fine, too.

But it's your show, man.

You do whatever you wanna do.

(drumstick tapping) - I've been doing music my whole life ever since like elementary school.

I've started off as a violin player in second grade, and then I kind of branch off into becoming a percussionist in middle school, and then since then I've just been playing the drums.

(drums beating) - So the instrument that I play is a snare drum.

It is quite loud, and it's quite sharp, which makes it the sort of front runner for marching bands, drumline, all that sort of stuff.

(drums beating) We aren't really worrying too much about tonality.

We are mostly focused entirely on making sure our rhythms are as tight as possible.

That's kind of where the energy of drumline comes from, is the rhythm.

- [Jack] Good, here we go.

(drums beating) It's getting better, one more time.

- I like how it sounds and how crisp it sounds and kind of like the rhythm and like how it makes me feel.

It makes you wanna to get up and dance.

(drums beating) - Drumline provides a sense of community, a place where musicians of all levels can get together and contribute on some level.

And the more drums you have, kind of the bigger sound you get.

- We might be a small group right now, but hopefully it expands to something greater.

- I would just like to see just more people here, and I think the more attendance I think the better, and I'd like to see us be able to play at sports events.

I think there's a lot of energy in Drumline, and I think we should share it.

(drums beating) (upbeat music) - [Jordan] We have our wheelchair basketball practice for Wisconsin Adaptive Sports Association.

- I find it fun.

I call it giant bumper cars.

- [Jordan] We've got our youth team, our high school level.

- Before I was disabled, I played baseball for a while, and I still wanted to play sports.

- So in order to qualify for adaptive sports, you have to have some form of physical limitation, whether you're missing a leg through an amputation or you've got a bum hip, bum knee, or like myself, I have my spinal cord injury.

Some of the kids here were born with their disability.

- This chair is different than like a everyday chair.

An everyday chair goes straight, whereas you could kinda see the wheels are angled here.

It's built for more aerodynamics.

This doesn't have brakes.

It's got like a wheel in the back so that you don't tip over.

And then this is meant to go faster than your everyday wheelchair.

- This game is the exact same as able-bodied basketball or stand-up basketball.

There is no double dribble, but there's still a travel, so every two pushes on your wheels, you have to dribble or pass.

Otherwise, if you take a third push, it's a travel.

- Well, I was injured in 2020 in August, and it's connected me to the disability world and just shown me all the possibilities.

It's pretty much helped me become stronger and more willing to be more adventurous.

- Kick it up to Cat, 'cause she's gonna be moving up.

I know what's, or having something affect your life in such a drastic way can do and what this does for all the people that get to play, all the confidence it instills, the freedom that it feels, and just the comradery that it, to be a part of it is awesome.

- I've met a bunch of new people and paralympians and everything, and I've got to do stuff that I probably wouldn't be able to if this didn't happen.

- [Jordan] What we have going on in Milwaukee, we've got a lot of cool programs where we encourage able-bodied people to come in and play with those with disabilities, and everybody gets to play on the same level playing field.

- All the sports still have the basic of teamwork, of leadership, of just working together, and that it's not fundamentally different.

Yeah, my goal, I would like to continue on to college playing basketball and possibly go to the Olympic level and professional level through that.

It's gonna sound really cliche, but never give up.

It really is, it's a true sentiment because if I would've given up the day I was told that I would have to be in a wheelchair, I would've just sat and wasted away, and now I'm involved in so many things.

- To try and make it into the Paralympics, the wheelchair Paralympics for basketball or track.

Don't think of it as, "Oh, I'm disabled," or "I have something like this," and you know, "I can't do things that everybody else does."

You could do same things that anybody else does, just adapted.

(lively music) - I think it's a combination of ping-pong and tennis, and you don't need the stamina for tennis.

You need the quickness of ping-pong.

So I like it, I like it.

Been playing about four months.

Been hearing about the pickleball craze.

My wife used to play tennis.

We found we couldn't play tennis together because she'd call it out, I'd call it in, so we're gonna get divorced over tennis, so we gotta stop that.

I play racquetball, but she didn't like racquetball.

So we found this, and it seems like it's a fit for both of us.

(upbeat music) - [Traci] To see more of our short stories, check us out on Facebook and Instagram or milwaukeepbs.org.

(upbeat music) - I've always loved agriculture, my dad being a farmer.

I was in FFA.

I was in 4-H.

I grew up here.

I grew up with a lot of, a lot of my classmates from high school are farmers, and I am fortunate enough to work in the area I grew up in, and I just really wanna do right by them.

(gentle music) And that was always my path to this.

Like, I was gonna stay around here and help the farmers here.

(gentle music) (goats bleating) Hey, goats, what are we up to today, huh?

There we go.

Okay, now we got a goat.

All right, well, the farmer was a little bit concerned about this guy, a little bit of a cough.

Just like you guys would, we look to see if they got snotty noses.

That looks good, nothing around the eyes.

Ears are pretty healthy, not drooping more.

Okay, then we wanna make sure gums are a good color.

That looks very healthy.

You're doing a very good job, buddy.

See if we can induce a cough or anything, but that seems good.

We gotta take a look at the inside, and we have to do that with a stethoscope.

So listen to the lungs, make sure they're breathing easy.

And then we can listen to the guts to make sure that they're moving.

You want the guts moving somewhat so they'll make like that when you're hungry sort of sounds.

But if that's really going a lot, then they might be getting a sign of diarrhea.

But if nothing's moving at all, then we get a little worried that maybe they're constipated or not eating like they should, hi.

They can lose weight real fast if they get sick, so I'd rather the farmers call me out early than late.

Are you gonna be okay, Ernie?

I think you will be.

Go join your friends.

You'll have to be creative.

You're gonna flip from different species.

You're not gonna have even like a computer resource or books at your disposal, and you're gonna have to use your intuition about, well, I've treated this before.

What's it like?

I treat it as problem-solving.

I want my farmers to be a part of a team.

I grew up on a farm.

I've done all the same things they have.

I want us to get together at the end because really at the end of the day what matters is these guys and their health.

(gentle music) Okay, guys.

Other way, Rainbow.

So this is Rainbow.

Rainbow's a very special cow that I met when she was only one day old.

She is now pregnant.

I confirmed her pregnant a month ago, and today she's gonna get her vaccine to keep her and her baby safe so they can be born in the spring.

It's gonna be just a tiny poke.

Oh, there you go.

Good job, girl, way to be.

That'll keep her healthy from like respiratory disease and anything that may cause that baby some harm.

I have to know how to anesthetize these guys.

I have to know how to do surgery.

I have to know their heart, their respiratory, GI.

I have to know vaccines for them and not just them but seven other species, and that's just so cool when I think about it, and I just love the challenge.

And these guys get bigger than us very quickly.

It's really, it's just understanding the animals, working with them at their pace.

It's really knowing that these are big animals.

They can hurt you, but they don't have to if you work around well with them and with your farmer.

(gentle music) I do my job my way.

I wear bright pink coveralls, and my farmers laughed at first, but they are like, "You know, you be you."

I have bright red dyed colored hair.

I am not tall.

But I just always tell women, "Go in and be you.

Be your authentic you.

Farmers appreciate someone who's authentic."

By no means do you have to look a certain way or you know, be a certain person to do this job.

If you care about their animals, they will not care down the road that you are a female veterinarian.

Good job, buddy.

I think you're gonna be okay, huh?

(gentle music) - Thanks for coming out.

We appreciate you guys coming to fly with us and see everything that the B-25 is all about.

We really like to share the history and get people involved and really, you know, spread that spirit of the airplane and let everybody enjoy it.

This is one of those airplanes that, you know, without the the younger generation coming into it and wanting to get involved and learning it, these airplanes aren't gonna fly anymore, and it's a piece of history that'll die off, and we don't really want that.

- My boys are ages 17 and then 13-year-old twins.

We came out today.

We're all involved in aviation in some form.

I'm a pilot, I'm a member here at EAA 838, and we love flying, love airplanes.

- It's a really cool opportunity to see it.

It's definitely a rare chance.

- It'll be cool to fly on this and get the full experience.

- It looks like everybody's dressed appropriately.

It'd be no problem.

You can start working your way back.

The airplane, this was built for combat.

It was not built for comfort.

There are sharp edges.

There are things to bang your head on.

If you just move slowly and deliberately, you'll be just fine.

- All right.

- If you're not familiar with radial engines and aircraft of this vintage, it's gonna be different than a modern aircraft.

And at start, that oil's gonna burn up.

So we're gonna have some puffs of white smoke when we start the engines.

That's totally normal.

(plane engine chugging) So this airplane was built in Inglewood, California, in 1943, and after that it was used for various purposes in the Army or the military.

It never saw combat action, but it stayed over here in the States.

After that, I knew it was going on to be a executive aircraft.

It had an executive interior, some speed mods put on it and various modifications by a famous actor from South America.

After that, it went through a couple series of hands, and it ended up, was used in the film "Catch-22."

It showed up in there as two different airplanes.

After that, it went through a couple more hands and it was donated to EAA, and it sat in the museum up in the Eagle Hangar there for a number of years.

And then they pulled it out, restored it, and it's out flying and giving rides today.

(plane engine rumbling) - It had such an impact on the history of our nation, the history of the world, and to have a living example of the plane on out doorstep is impressive and important.

(plane engine rumbling) (bright music) - We're at River Valley Ranch, and we're a commercial mushroom farm.

We've been in business since 1976.

Something more like this makes a nice burger.

The business was started by my father.

He was in the restaurant business and couldn't get fresh mushrooms of the quality that he wanted and decided he was gonna learn how to grow mushrooms.

And he got started, and he asked me to help him out, and I wandered in the mushroom house, and I've been trying to find my way out ever since.

We're going into a house here that is just starting production.

Today's the first day of harvest.

Come on in.

Take a look over this way a little bit, so.

This is our white mushroom.

So in this house, we grow three varieties of mushroom, white buttons, baby bellas, and portobellos.

The baby bella, or cremini, is our mainstay mushroom these days.

We started working on this crop about eight weeks ago.

At any given time, we have 10 crops in rotation on the farm.

And here is, this tray has about 600 pounds of specially prepared mushroom compost that we produce, and that compost becomes the food supply for the mushroom crop.

Mushrooms don't produce their own food, unlike green plants, which you know, produce chlorophyll using sunlight.

We provide the food source for the mushrooms in the compost we produce.

So compost is really the art of mushroom growing for us.

(tractor beeping) The basic raw material we're using is wheat straw-bedded horse manure we get from a few stables within 50 miles or so.

The first stage of the composting process happens here, preheating.

We manage it in a way that it starts to heat up through the growth of microorganisms.

The next seven days, the temperature will start to climb.

Usually about 36 hours after we fill, I have temperatures of around 140 degrees in there, and that pasteurizes the material, so it kills any pathogens, any pests.

The carbohydrates in the straw begin to actually caramelize, so the material starts to smell actually very sweet 'cause the sugars are burning off.

All of the darkening that goes on is a result of that caramelization process that happens at the high temperatures.

It's now going into what we call phase two.

We'll have a crew of eight guys on that, and we'll be planting or inoculating this batch of compost.

So we plant mushroom spawn.

This is millet grain, and it's been sterilized, and we put, this bag is 20 pounds, and we put about 3 1/2 to four pounds of spawn into each of those trays.

There's 150 trays in the growing house.

So it looks like a seed.

What we do when we're planting is basically try to mix that grain spawn, which you can see some pieces of here, throughout as uniformly as possible throughout the compost, and that gives us a pretty well-colonized tray.

And the compost becomes fully colonized in about 14 days.

(gentle music) We grow about 15,000 pounds a week of certified organic mushrooms.

It's been an evolution of growing process over the years to be able to grow food as cleanly as we do these days.

There's no chemicals or pesticides used on the farm at all.

But keeping a consistent environment's critical to the health of the crop, and really every day the crop has very specific needs that we're managing.

During the production and harvesting stage, we're keeping the air temperature at around 62 degrees, relative humidity about 88%.

We have a lot of circulation to keep air moving across the bed.

Earlier in the growing process, after planting, the crop stays very quiet, and the temperatures are warmer during the incubation phase.

We're taking a waste product and kind of complete the cycle of life.

Mushrooms are nature's natural recyclers.

But we take, you know, what is essentially a waste product and put it through our process, and it becomes a food supply for what is a really good, healthy food.

(gentle music) - Thanks so much to everyone for allowing us to share their great stories, and thank you for watching.

Brian, do you have anything to add?

- "And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

I wrote that.

- No, no you didn't.

I think we should say goodbye.

Thanks again for watching.

- I did, I wrote that.

(calm music)