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In Wisconsin Transcript #Great Lakes Connections: An In Wisconsin Special    Airdate: 08/23/2007
[Captioning made possible by U.S. Department of Education]

Wisconsin Public Television
Transcript: Great Lakes Connection: An In Wisconsin Special
Original Air Date: July 12, 2007


Patty Loew:
The Great Lakes. The largest available source of fresh surface water on our planet, 9/10 of our country’s water supply, home to 250 species of fish, visited by more than 70 million tourists a year. But the Great Lakes are more than a valuable resource. We have a deeper connection. Hello, I’m Patty Loew. For centuries, we’ve been drawn to their shores. For some, it’s a direct cultural link to the lakes. For others, it’s something harder to describe, a siren call that lures us to the miles and miles of deep, fresh water. Water that nourishes, quenches our thirst for adventure and provides countless hours of pleasure. Whether born near the shores of Lake Superior, or located hundreds of miles inland from Lake Michigan, we’re all, in some way, connected to the Great Lakes.

Announcer:
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the people of Alliant Energy, who bring safe, reliable and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods and life in Wisconsin running smoothly. Alliant Energy, offering energy-saving ideas on the Web. UW Health, providing specialty and primary care for all ages throughout Wisconsin. Information on UW Health physicians and clinics, and on University of Wisconsin Hospital is available on the Web. And Wisconsin’s Technical Colleges, providing local education for the crucial occupations essential to our communities. Wisconsin’s Technical Colleges. Communities first. Additional support for coverage of the Great Lakes is provided by the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Loew:
Welcome to “Great Lakes Connections: An In Wisconsin Special.” Hundreds of years ago, the Great Lakes were dotted with shoreline sentinels, lighthouses that were welcome sights for many a sailor. Today, few of those lighthouses remain operational. But still, we feel the pull of the fascinating history that connects us to those lonesome outposts. Producer JoAnne Garrett takes us to one of the Apostle Islands where that history is being lovingly restored.

JoAnne Garrett:
You go by boat, two and a half miles from Bayfield, on Lake Superior. Within the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore is Raspberry Island. It’s one of the wildest places in the state. Most of the island is designated wilderness.

But the call of the wild has been drowned out lately… (hammering sounds) replaced by the sounds of what might be called “This Old Lighthouse.” It’s rehab time for the lighthouse on Raspberry Island. Bob Krumenaker, Lakeshore Superintendent.

Krumenaker:
Raspberry has been gradually falling down. The last time it had a major renovation and a lot of work done was 1906. Raspberry, in a lot of ways, is the showcase of the Apostle Islands. It’s not the biggest lighthouse, it’s not the most dramatic setting, but it has a human side of it, I think, that really resonates with people.

Garrett:
As any rehabber will tell you, you don’t pay for a 100-year rehab job out of your maintenance fund. The staff here applied for a special federal grant for the funding.

Neil Howk:
This particular project was $1.3 to $1.4 million for the rehabilitation of the lighthouse and the keeper’s dwellings. So that does not include the dock. It doesn’t include the boathouse. It is solely just this one structure. There’s nothing like it. Most of our lighthouses are built out of stone or brick. They’re almost fortresses against the weather. This one is a wood frame construction.

Garrett:
Combine a wood frame with 100 years of Lake Superior weather, and it’s easy to see why this lighthouse is in need of work.

Ken Kontny:
When we first arrived here, the building was in quite a state of disrepair. It had been maintained to the best of everyone’s ability, but it’s over 100 years old.

Garrett:
Ken Kontny is the president of the construction company which won the national search for a contractor.

Kontny:
That’s Lake Superior at its best. We have, our predominant winds and storms come from the west/northwest. This is on the west side.

Garrett:
Kontny knows about Lake Superior. His is a Wisconsin company. They won this national contract. Add to it, their corporate offices are in Ashland. Lake Superior is in their backyard. It’s been a two-year haul, truly. All materials must be brought in or taken out from the construction site by tram. And all materials and crews must be hauled across that watery 2.5 miles of Lake Superior. This work has been complex and exacting.

Kontny:
Well, now you’re looking at some of the upper and lower sashes from the windows that are being re-shellacked and re-glazed. Each individual piece of glass was taken out, original glass taken out. The putty was taken out. The frame is redone, brought down to the original surfaces, where we could. Then the glass reinstalled and re-glazed.

Garrett:
Those are just the windows. They’ve tackled the whole lighthouse, from up top to the depths of the basement. Over 50 different types of trades people, painters to plasterers, have plied their talents here. And Raspberry has charmed them with a few surprises. This contractor is in love with this stairwell, built with no nails.

Kontny:
This is a stairwell, that’s to me, the neatest thing in the lighthouse, just the way it’s put together. You can’t find any indication of any nails. It’s all mortise and tenon. It’s the center post here that carries the upper and lower through to the stairwell from this elevation are just suspended in mid-air, and not carried off the structure. It’s kind of a unique piece of architecture and workmanship and carpentry here. It’s a testimony to the people that did it 100 years ago. It’s withstood the test of time. And it doesn’t hardly creak. And it’s in great shape. No nails that we could find.

Garrett:
No nails, no creaking.

Kontny:
The best part of the whole building, the view from the top.

Garrett:
If you’re wondering, the actual light from the lighthouse is in a museum on Madeline Island. Every other surface up here has been lovingly restored.

Kontny:
The workmen that worked up here put their names in a couple places, and that. And put them on the back side of some of their copper work. They have so much pride in their work and that. They want to take credit for it, somebody give them credit for it maybe 100 years from now.

Garrett:
Pride in their work, pride in this place.

Krumenaker:
Raspberry has always been the center of the lighthouse community. It was the social place. It was the garden place. It was always the place that they kept up the nicest. We’re trying to do the same thing. There were three men and their families in this place.

Garrett:
People lived here, raised their families, called it home. That culture is celebrated here, but always with the understanding that the keepers had a crucial job.

Krumenaker:
We have to remember why the lighthouses were built in the first place. In the era before GPS, before radar, before even very good maps, the lake was the highway, but it was also very dangerous. There were great hazards out there. Keeping people alive was what they were about. The most important thing that they could do was keep that light shining, because they were something that the mariners counted on. The worst possible thing would be if the light went out. People could die. So they had a tremendous duty and responsibility. And they took it incredibly seriously. That carried over to the care that they put into the facilities themselves. It’s one reason Raspberry was the showcase, because the keepers had this tremendous pride of ownership there and they made sure that it looked spit and polished.

Garrett:
Spit and polish. The tradespeople here seem to feel a similar duty and responsibility.

Kontny:
There’s people here on the island, myself included, that are fifth and sixth generation. Our families have been here for well over 100 years. Everybody has ties to the lake. Either they live in Ashland or they live in Bayfield. The lake is part of your life and you want to maintain it. And this is a part of maintaining it. This was a building of necessity 100 years ago. Now it’s a building of tribute. We’re paying tribute to the people that built it, the people that lived here, and the people that had the foresight to preserve it. It’s a tribute to these guys maybe 100 years from now, that have put it back together.

Loew:
Jo returned to Raspberry Island months later to see the completed lighthouse, which we’ll reveal later in our program.

Loew:
Wisconsin is home to dozens of gorgeous, sandy beaches that line the Great Lakes. But some beaches aren’t so beautiful. We have a pollution problem. That was the case in Racine, where the beach was once dirty and deserted. Reporter Frederica Freyberg tells us how city residents finally got fed up and took back their beach.

Freyberg:
When you think of Racine, you often think of smokestacks, industry, and not perhaps its most enduring resource, the Lake Michigan waterfront. But for decades, the beach here was neglected and ignored.

Man:
More major drug busts took place here than any place else. There was homeless people living in the trees in the woods around here.

Freyberg:
Besides that, who would want to go near the water?

Julie Kinzelman:
There was a perception that the beach was bad. It wasn’t a good family place. The water was dirty. You’d get sick if you went in there.

Freyberg:
But then something happened.

Dave White:
I just got mad.

Freyberg:
Racine native Dave White got mad about not being able to swim in the lake. He then tapped into community anger to form a group called “Keep Our Beaches Open.” That was ten years ago. In those days, health advisories for high levels of E. coli would force beach warnings and closures for more than 60 days out of every summer swimming season.

The group’s education efforts included marking every storm drain in the city with signs saying “No Dumping, Drains to Lake.” Connections about the sources of contamination were starting to be made.

Richard Jones:
The contaminants off of yards and roofs do wash into the river and the lake.

Freyberg:
So, Racine’s Department of Public Works spent nearly $1 million building a new storm water drainage system, a system that includes a series of nine basins. In the basins, sediment settles out of the water along with bacteria. The water then evaporates without flushing to the lake.

Jones:
From the testing that’s been occurring, the discharge from them are much cleaner than what the original design had from the 1970s.

Freyberg:
One source of beach-closing water contamination solved. But the biggest source of lake contamination is on the wing. Seagulls. That problem is not easily solved.

Kinzelman:
If we could get rid of the gulls, that would be great. They’re nationally protected migratory birds. We can’t just get rid of the gulls. But if you can reduce the impact of what they leave behind, that’s another way of getting at the same problem.

Freyberg:
Racine Public Health Department scientist Julie Kinzelman. She literally wrote the book of reducing the impact of what seagulls leave behind. In 2005, Kinzelman wrote her PhD thesis on water quality remediation for the protection of public health. She used the Racine beach as her research site.

Kinzelman:
We found that if there’s high waves, like greater than a foot and they wash over beach sands, they can act as a mechanism of transport, taking E. coli from the sand, which is likely from the seagulls, into the surface water.

Freyberg:
And so, Kinzelman focused on the sand, coming up with a new way to groom the beach. The new grooming method rakes the sand, leaving furrows. The old method compacted the sand, leaving a wet blanket of E. coli to wash into the water. Now, the sand dries out, allowing the sun to penetrate it, killing the E. coli. The city grooms the beach five days a week, eight hours a day.

Kinzelman:
The other thing is to put a lot of waste cans out for people, try to encourage people to throw away their trash, because seagulls are scavengers. They’re attracted to food left on the beach.

Freyberg:
The city Health Department tests the water off the beach every day. The results speak for themselves. In all, Racine’s beach had just one beach closure because of high levels of E. coli for the entire summer of 2006. It’s a to-die-for number for any beach.

Gary Becker:
Come on down and visit us. I mean, I would argue it’s probably the nicest beach in Wisconsin. And we take great care of it. We’d love to have you come on down.

Freyberg:
Much to the mayor of Racine’s delight, North Beach is now attracting a lot of new visitors.

Man:
It’s a clean sand and the water seems to be nice.

Freyberg:
All most people know is that the sand is clean, the water is nice and the beach is well-tended. What most people don’t know is that this is a so-called Blue Wave Beach.

Bonnie Prochaska:
It gives us a stamp of approval, like a Good Housekeeping Stamp of Approval for our beach. And it’s very unique, because in the Great Lakes we’re one of two beaches on all of the Great Lakes that have this designation.

Freyberg:
One of only two in the Great Lakes and the only one in Wisconsin. But to become a Blue Wave Beach as designated by the national environmental group Clean Beaches Council, it’s more than clean water. A beach also has to have facilities and services, lifeguards and first aid. It must be clean and safe, a place that attracts people to the shore.

Paul Curtin:
Hi, how you doing, buddy?
Freyberg:
Racine businessman Paul Curtin is a major reason more people are coming to the beach. He turned the abandoned beach bathhouse into the North Beach Oasis, a concession stand and outdoor music venue.

Curtin:
It’s about people being able to come down to the beach, like they do in Florida and California. The kids can have an ice cream and the parents can enjoy a beer.

Freyberg:
Racine’s North Beach is building on its own success. Volunteers erected a huge beach-front playground. And the city built a bike path along the lake.

Curtin:
This is one of the nicest natural resources that Racine has to offer. And we’ve got it back. And the people are using it. And it just keeps growing.

Freyberg:
More people using the beach brings water quality remediation efforts full circle, because the best gull-buster is a crowd. Seagulls don’t like people and will stay away. Fewer gulls means less E. coli and a cleaner beach.

White:
Because so many kids who live close to the beach in these neighborhoods are never going to go to the Dells or have a cabin up north. Here’s this great opportunity for water recreation that was cut off to them all those years. And now that’s available again.

Boy:
There’s much more people coming since the water is not polluted a lot now. They take care of the water much better and stuff. And I’m starting to like it.

Freyberg:
What do you guys say to the people who worked so hard to make this a great place?

Boy:
They did a great job!

Girl:
Thank you so much.

Boy:
Thank you, we’ve got our beach back now.

Loew:
Native Americans have ties to the Great Lakes that are centuries old. My tribe, the Ojibwe, also known as the Chippewa, settled along the shores of Lake Superior long ago. Today, the Red Cliff Band of Chippewa still live along that lake. This story introduces us to one of the Band’s tribal elders who describes how the waters of Lake Superior have flowed throughout her life.

Genivieve Goslin:
To the Indian people, it’s sacred. It’s part of us. Big water.

JoAnne Garrett:
This is a story about Lake Superior, the largest fresh water lake in the world, and the path of this woman.

Goslin:
I lived by it all my life. I was born in Red Cliff. I’m 86. On my business letters, I say, “Genivieve Anna Goslin.”

Garrett:
Genivieve Goslin was born with Lake Superior over her shoulder. And there it has been for most of her life. Genivieve Goslin is her official name. But on the Red Cliff reservation she’s called “Grandma Gen.”

Goslin:
You go to the left of the string…

Woman:
Oh, Grandma Gen, I’m so glad you have the patience you do.

Goslin:
Oh, dear.

Garrett:
Every day, she makes her way to the Red Cliff Community Healthcare Clinic, where she has a part-time job. Every noon, she joins the staff in the lunchroom.

Woman:
And I’m a very slow reader.

Goslin:
You say you are, but once you get started, you’re going just fast.

Garrett:
To share her years of knowledge of beading, moccasin making and Indian art. Through the years, she’s also become a leader in her community, a tribal elder and an elected member to the Tribal Council. What brought this young woman to this path, to this place in her tribe?

Goslin:
This is my husband when he was in the Coast Guard. That’s him with his friend.

Garrett:
She married when she was 22, during World War II, and settled in Red Cliff, with her husband Jim, when he returned home. They had two children, Rob and Diane, who still live on the reservation. But Gen’s story turned when her husband died in 1959. That unexpected turn in life spurred Gen to make a decision. A decision to get her GED, and then apply to college. She was accepted and graduated in Indian art. Gen returned to the state and taught. And slowly, she worked her way toward her master’s, earning that degree when she was 74. Gen’s dedication to education is a source of inspiration for the tribe.

She is indomitable. Perhaps it’s something in the water, something about those who have lived near this water.

Goslin:
My mother’s side, my grandmother got married to my grandfather in Canada. And they came by canoe. She was 13 and he was 20. They came by canoe from Thunder Bay, all the way to Bayfield by canoe.

Garrett:
It’s over 120 miles from Thunder Bay, Canada, to Bayfield, Wisconsin, as the crow flies. It’s at least that much by canoe. For the Red Cliff, this enormous expanse of water is home base. Lake Superior is sacred. Water is sacred and an important part of the tribe.

Last summer, just across from the big lake, the Red Cliff nation hosted an important ceremony, a water ceremony.

Man:
It’s always good to see, being able to participate in our ceremonies, because it’s always -- It always kind of brings you back to who you really are.

Garrett:
The ceremony is for a group of runners and walkers, traveling from each of the reservations in the state as a kind of healing pilgrimage to heal themselves of sorrow, or sickness, or to heal others. As part of that water ceremony Gen was asked, as a respected elder, to lead the first relay of walkers out of Red Cliff.

Goslin:
For peace and harmony in the world, and healing.

Garrett:
Years ago, this walk would have been an impossibility for Gen.

Goslin:
I went to the doctor and he sent me to get an MRI. He said, “Gen, I can’t do anything for you. You’re going to be in pain pills all the time.” I was laying there with my back killing me. And I got up from my bed and I said, “This is not gonna get me down.”

Garrett:
She walked every day by her beloved Lake Superior as a way to move through her medical problems.

Goslin:
So I went to walk. And pretty soon, instead of a mile, I was walking two miles a day, and then three miles a day. And I did that for a month. And at the end of the month, no more pain. It must have been from the lake, yes. And I think that it is healing. The lake is healing. I’m always looking at the lake. If I never see it again, I probably would wither and blow away. (laughs) It’s just in your soul, I think.

Garrett:
What we see every day can weave its way into us.

Goslin:
I thank God that I’m still here to enjoy this. It’s pretty, the lake, and the sky, and everything.

Loew:
You can go to: Greatlakesforever.org to see more of Grandma Gen’s story. Earlier in this special, we promised to bring you back to Raspberry Island. And that’s where we leave you now, to see how the lighthouse, first built in 1862, has been restored to it’s original glory. It’s a place that not only connects us to the lake, but that keeps us connected to history. Thanks for joining us. I’m Patty Loew. And we hope you enjoyed this “Great Lakes Connections In Wisconsin Special.”

Announcer:
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the people of Alliant Energy, who bring safe, reliable and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods and life in Wisconsin running smoothly. Alliant Energy, offering energy-saving ideas on the Web. UW Health, providing specialty and primary care for all ages throughout Wisconsin. Information on UW Health physicians and clinics, and on University of Wisconsin Hospital is available on the Web. And Wisconsin’s Technical Colleges, providing the people of Wisconsin with the knowledge and skills they’ll need for the economy of tomorrow. Wisconsin’s Technical Colleges. Communities first. Additional support for coverage of the Great Lakes is provided by the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

 
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