 Well good evening everyone. Just just a little introduction about what's going to happen tonight and that is that we'll have a slide presentation to start with and then you'll have a chance to wander through the building. We have lots of pictures set up of what this place used to look like when it was owned by Mr. and Mrs. May and they lived here so quite a transformation from what were bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms into how it's used currently. My name is David Cooke-Cook. I was the director here, retired and then just recently they sent out the shepherd's hook and grappled me around the neck and got pulled back in as a temporary duty to help them through a time when they're in the search for a new director. So the slides that we put together tonight this is just the first of a four-part series of programs for the 40th anniversary. So we thought well since this is the first of four programs let's focus in on the first decade of Maywood which would have been the 1980s. So we're going to be looking at some slides from just the 1980s. Don't be disappointed if you're expecting to see something from 2002 or whatever. That'll be coming in a later program at some point down the line. But since it's on the 1980s we thought how much fun it would be to go back in time and do the program the way we would have done it in the 1980s. So not we don't have to worry about routers, internet, the right kinds of cords, none of that because we're using the old-fashioned carousel slide projector. How is that? That is so much fun to be able to go over and flip the switch and it's on. You know you don't have to worry about all the cabling and all that kind of stuff so this will be great. So it's getting darker which is a good thing because these are old slides and the older they get the kind of the duller they get so they don't illuminate as well as what they would have when they were taken. And so hopefully it's dark enough that you can see everything clearly with the old slide format. Just to take us back in time a little bit what I wanted to do is to show you a couple things back at that time in the 1980s when Maywood was just beginning there were a couple of different fundraising opportunities that they attempted and one of the earliest ones was a thing called burly bears. Since there was an abundance of burdock on the property why not use all those darn burrs to make little teddy bears out of these things and then put a bow around them and sell them. Great idea. When I first started this job back in the mid 80s the first thing I heard from volunteers is don't ever do burly bears again. You can imagine sitting there trying to put these bears together and everything getting stuck to you but we did have a picture of them doing this and they were wrapped in what looked like garbage bags so that they didn't have all these burly bears stuck to them. Today I was rummaging around up in the attic here at Maywood and I found this hat and I remember this this hat that they were selling as one of their first items in the store. So the hat says take a hike and then in a really really fine tiny print underneath there it says at Elwood H. May Environmental Park. So there was a little marketing thing that was not you know it didn't work out that well everybody everybody thought that you were just being rude you know take a hike. So this was their first one of their first attempts at a at a cap for Maywood but there were many other opportunities many other items that they sold in the store and it was just kind of a unique start to how this place got going. Well what we're going to do is we're going to show you these slides and then after that if there's questions we'll be happy to answer whatever questions you have and then from there we'll allow you to roam through the building. We'll have some volunteer station at some of those spots that can give you some interpretation of what is what you're looking at or you know what that room is all about. There's lots of old pictures that are sitting there too for you to look at and reminisce. You may see some familiar faces in the slides I hope you do. I know when I look at the slides it's there's just tons of fun memories so with that I think what we'll do is we'll see about the old slide rejectors see if we can get this thing started and see what happens you know when I and I should tell you too that the other day I thought well I'll test this thing out so I turned on the slide projector there was a huge puff of dust that came out the back end so don't know what to expect but we'll give it a try you should be someplace right in here so just want to give you a reference point so in 1974 Mr. and Mrs. May decided to donate their property and their house to the city of Sheboygan and for those of you who have spent some time in Sheboygan probably know that Mr. May had a company here in town called Mayline where they manufactured office equipment and furniture and after we get done with this program there's a really nice catalog that I have from his company way back when just in case you wanted to still order something but in 1974 they gave the property and they said well we're going to turn it over to the city we don't really have an exact use that we want to see you use it for but they said if you don't have a plan for it in 10 years from now it will revert back to the May family estate okay now keep in mind this was given to the city so so what year would this have become Maywood? bing bing bing bing no we got to give them credit it was actually 83 so they they they did meet the deadline but in 1983 it became Maywood and so the city had accepted the property they invited people from the general public to come in and express their opinions on what they wanted to see the property used for and there was thoughts of golf courses and race tracks and ball diamonds and all kinds of other things and fortunately it did become what it is today interestingly enough in 1970 four years before this property was given to the city of Sheboygan Mr. May had also donated some property in the Watoma area to be used for a Boy Scout camp called Camp Maywood Wilderness so the Maywood name was originated with that Boy Scout camp and then eventually made its way here to this property and there they are Mr. and Mrs. May very generous folks they really um although they they didn't have children of their own they did have a son who died very early in life but they didn't really have children that they brought up and I know that Mr. May had just really a strong feeling about doing something for kids and so he got involved with the Scouts and as I mentioned gave them property and so that was an important part of his life so that's Mayline so I was looking on this catalog and I happened to notice on the back side of it see if you can see that on the on the back side of this catalog there are actually three pictures on there all of which are Mayline so he had a giant building for his woodworking shop area a giant building for his metal shop area and then another big building for the offices so it's far more extensive than what I ever imagined but I I like this picture because you have Mr. and Mrs. May and they're each they each have their own car there if you look closely you can figure out what cars they have they're not Kias so they're both driving Cadillacs so the property has changed quite a bit and this was actually a picture of the south side of their house long after they were gone and it's not it's it's definitely starting to show signs of aging in in this photo but Mr. May and Mrs. May both were extremely meticulous people so there this is the front of their house everything was manicured you can tell these these shrubs okay those would never be here now there's nobody on our staff that's going to be out there trimming the shrubs to look like that um so it changed vastly since he owned it and in fact this whole south hillside going down this way which would be going right down there that whole south hillside was also just manicured took me a while after looking at these photos over years of time to realize that there was an entrance that I didn't know about that didn't exist when I started in my job here at Maywood in 1987 and there is I might as well use this laser pointer as long as I got it but we we we had a pointer that we were going to use tonight we couldn't find it today it was this long stick with a light at the top of it and a button down on below I thought oh how cool would that be to bring out the old 1980s pointer so this is the the old front door here that still exists this entrance right here doesn't does not exist but um did when they gave it to the city and this went into a space where I'm sure there was their laundry room kind of a mud room type thing and tonight after you're done with the program if you go down the hallway you'll see where the old men's and women's restrooms are mr. mrs. may didn't have men's and women's restrooms in their house but that's where the that's where the laundry room was and that that entrance mr. may raised black angus cattle as a hobby so he would get home from his work day and spend time with his cattle and he had workers that worked here to to deal with the cattle for the most part although I did hear that he really enjoyed driving the tractor he really liked that I can just a picture this but like the program green acres I can just picture him out there with a three-piece suit on you know driving around on this tractor but I also heard that he did not like to drive it down the hill so he would have somebody else drive it down the hill and once he got down below he would drive it the rest of the way so there are his cattle and you also see these white fences there were white fences like that all over the property and in fact we have all those fences were removed but some of the posts that held up those fences are still there intentionally left behind to use as photography spots reference points so we could go back to those spots over time and take pictures and compare what it looked like at the time that mr. may was here to what it looks like today uh no yeah yeah no that that's that's just a cut into the hillside but yeah there's not a golf course there quite yet now one of the things that mr. may also did is since he has these cattle and he wanted to be able to graze them um he did build a bridge to cross the pigeon river right here so these cattle could walk down this way and then cross over um however he must have got started to get pretty good at this because he ended up having to build this bridge three times and one of the issues was that the ice would come down the river in the spring time and then take those bridges out and so this picture shows possibly i'm not convinced a hundred percent but this picture does show a lot of flooding and it may be because of a bridge that got taken out and now is blocking the river and backing up all the water in this area yeah yeah yeah yeah we also had some incredible droughts if you think back to 1988 that was a terrible drought year um the other thing that doesn't exist any longer but is about where we're sitting right now is this space right here this is called the sunken garden and in between mr. may's house is was this structure this was called the summer house and there was a rock wall all along here that separated this the land next to his house from the sun sunken garden this building right here you might recognize that's actually the sugar house that's still standing today i'd really like to know who got this bell because that would have been a really cool thing to have had here and um years later in the very early 1980s there was a company called leisure concepts and designs uh there were consultants that were hired by the city in order to produce a master site plan for this location and in their master site plan this building was included in there and in fact it was proposed to attach their house to this building to enlarge the overall space and this this would have been a combination of exhibit space on this end and then workshop and craft area on this end as it was it was a summer house so they did actually do cooking in there um the walls were wallpaper there was a garage at this end with a workshop in there but the foundation was terrible and so we didn't discover that until long after that master plan was was finished and years later when i was here in and uh well that would have been about 1989 we decided the foundation was so bad that there's no way that we can make this space usable so it came down this was the south side of that summer house so one of the other things that Mr. May had was this really fantastic straight driveway all planted with these norway maples on either side and if this doesn't remind you of sound of music where all those kids are climbing in the trees singing away um that's what this seems like to me and when we have our summer camp programs the kids are out there oftentimes climbing in these trees the ones that are still remaining at least but this was a problem having that driveway like that and we'll talk a little bit about that coming up here were three gentlemen that were really integral in this place becoming what it is today we have on this far left that's Jerry Waymeyer Jerry was the park superintendent on the far right is bob kuhman and that's him calling right now so bob was the department of public works director and then the the man in the middle his name was Ed Waymeyer Ed was Jerry's father and Ed retired from the Garten toy company and after retiring Jerry hired him to be the caretaker of this property at the age of 72 Ed decided to continue working for quite some time he actually retired from here in 19 when he was 92 in the in the year 2000 and so put in a good long time and I've joked with my wife about this many times that Ed had set the precedence of working till like he was 92 I'm kind of on track for that right now but we'll we'll see what happens now if you notice you can kind of tell the era that we're in just by looking at right here and right here both Jerry and Bob were pipe smokers both of them were very very supportive of Maywood and without them this place would never have gotten off the ground but there were also a lot of volunteers really important people that helped us get this place up and running and the woman in the middle with the red clothes on her name was Mary Knauf and Mary was the first president of the park and forestry board a new board that was established and shortly after she got into that position this property came into being and Mary went after it like you would not believe to make sure that this property became what it is today she was able to recruit some other fine people and this gentleman here his name is Roy Siebold there's a park down there at the intersection of Indiana and what is it Taylor Drive that is now in his name Roy Siebold Park Nancy Schreiber one of our first presidents of our board here at Maywood her what is it relative here Barb Schreiber sister-in-law very good see i've got some supporters in the group that know the history as well so that's great thank you tippy and this gentleman right here so his name was David Applin and David was a UW-Stevens Point student working on his master's degree who was brought in for his master's program to act as a consultant for the property to help us get programs going and also to oversee some of the implementation of changes to the property so he was here for about three years and finished up his master's degree i'm sure that if he wanted to he could have stayed on as the director but uh david had other aspirations and went on to work for the national forest service national park service and traveled around extensively throughout the u.s so here's one of their meetings where they're trying to discuss exactly well what are we going to do with this property what kind of programs are we going to have and tonight when you wander through the building you'll be able to see this exact same spot on that that's still the exact same place that's where where the meeting was held not much has been different but we were thinking you know if we really wanted to make this authentic we would have gotten the armory chairs for you to sit on rather than the chairs that you have tonight we do have quite a collection of them down in the basement um and my only concern was i didn't want any lawsuits from chairs that you know fold up on you or nails sticking out from these armory chairs but we do have them here one of the first major projects was you remember seeing that scene of how flooded it was so they decided well we don't really have a use for that barn down below so let's move it up the hillside and tonight when you leave well i'll be a little bit dark but when you leave once you get to the end of the driveway and you look straight across the road to the right slightly that's where that barn is sitting that barn is now used by the city's parks department they store things in there they paint picnic tables in there so it's it's still in in use the house that's directly across from the end of the driveway that was the caretaker that we had living here ed waymeyer but when the property was donated by mr may in 1974 part of the deal was that his caretaker mr may's caretaker who lived there had to come with the deal so he was allowed to continue living there for as long as he wanted to and once once he was no longer around once he passed away and that was the end of that house being used by him and of course then ed waymeyer waymeyer was brought in to live there instead we brought in a lot of restitution crews wcc crews scout groups to begin taking out some of the things on the property that were not uh were kind of hazards like the barbed wire fences these white fences that were starting to collapse um my angie told me i shouldn't have this slide in here and building trails so all done by hand um i know there was a gentleman by the name of jim gilligan i don't know if that name ranks a bell for anybody who supervised a lot of the restitution crews that came out here to wheel limestone chips all over the place to put in trails and of course we had tons of volunteers back then the the this community was just rich with volunteers who were willing to come out here and put in some pretty hard labor doing things like planting um we planted lots of trees of course and prairie plants as well and you can kind of see the driveway that's nice straight driveway that runs along here going out to miller road all right right out there so with the volunteers putting in prairies here at maywood out in the front um we were lucky enough to secure a grant back about 1984 that grant was about 18 thousand dollars to purchase prairie seed and maybe that sounds like a lot of money to you but i can tell you this um the first prairie i ever put in was at a park down in washington county the size of that prairie was a half an acre and what i got for my thousand dollar purchase was a garbage bag full of seed not just seed though there was a lot of dried leaves stems and other kinds of useless material in that garbage bag but because the seeds are all hand picked it's very expensive to plant that prairie down there just like these guys are doing here you'd reach into that bucket grab a handful of seed and throw it up into the wind and there goes 50 dollars worth of seed right there and another 50 here and you'd do that until your bucket was empty then you'd grab a uh piece of chain link fence and a lawnmower and drive around over and over and over the top of it until it works the seed into the ground and then the hard part waiting for the next three years while you watch burdock and thistle emerge from the ground thinking that your time and investment of energy was a total waste but it really takes three years for those roots to get established before those plants will emerge so we continue with the planting planting quite a few acres out front this lady on the left helen sponagle is her name she was just a bundle of energy that drove that whole planting process helen would be out there all the time not only collecting seed planting seed going out there to pull thistles and other plants too that were invading the prairie she was just forced to be reckoned with and I don't know the lady to her right so the volunteers didn't know what they were getting into though because once the prairie started coming up the next thing that you had to do was manage it and to manage a prairie the best thing you can do is burn it and I can tell you right now that the acceleration of my hair color from brown to white was almost like overnight once we started the burning process because it was terrifying so we all we had was this trailer lots of buckets with water a bunch of rakes and shovels and and a bunch of very enthusiastic volunteers there was no training program you know but we burn the prairie and I can tell you it's magical you burn the prairie on one day and then one week from that day that spot is green two weeks from that spot and you can't tell that you burn the prairie and the prairie that summer will look better than it ever has before the flowers are are bigger brighter it's far more lush it's just spectacular what that fire does to the prairie lots of volunteers including scouts came out to help us plant trees planted trees all over the property and to my estimation based on the trees that that I've purchased throughout my time of being here and records that I found from from other sources I would say that we're probably close to that 50,000 mark of trees that have been planted on this property again just tons of volunteers that came out to help us with that this section right here this was a school group that came out to help us with tree planting probably mostly fourth graders that was typically the age that that was allowed to come out here maybe fifth grade the gentleman that is walking right here his name is Paul Meyer and Paul was the city forester who was supervising the planting process process now just a few years ago probably about maybe five years ago I had an eagle scout that was working on a project out here and we were kind of he was kind of in awe of how this place looked and I said yeah well we had a lot of help and I said in fact all those pine trees that are up front those all got planted by fourth graders the father of the eagle scout raised this hand and said I was one of them so there's Ed Waymeyer working with this young kid to plant some trees and again Ed at 72 working till 92 I think that's what allowed him to live so long as he had such an active lifestyle here at Maywood doing so many different tasks every day that it was really quite special to have him around he was also quite the humorist as well and I've got lots of stories about him some of which I can't really share with you because they're hilarious but also not in mixed company but great guy in 1986 we completed building of the footbridge that has become the icon for Maywood across the Pigeon River and that was quite an undertaking and when you compare that bridge to what Mr May had done over the years with the height of this bridge off the water it is substantially stronger than anything that he had done this was designed by a company that I don't know what even know what their names are now it's changed names so darn many times it was it was Earth Tech and Rust and Donahue and who knows how many other names it had to it but they were the ones that designed the bridge now I can tell you this if you think back for those of you that have been in Sheboygan for quite some time if you think back to 1998 and we lost a lot of homes in 1998 because there was so much rain and flooding and this bridge in 1998 this water level was up to right about here the two ends of the bridge that are lower those floorboards were underwater one day I went down there just to check on it to make sure it was still standing and clinging to one of these railings right in here was a muskrat trying to make that determination of whether it would be better to just let go and let the river take it where it wants to or if it just should wait it out so I went back a couple hours later and it was gone so I'm assuming it decided to go for a ride so that was a huge major construction in fact we had engineers just recently go down and assess the bridge other than one or two boards that that they recommended that we replace the bridges in great shape so we're still good for quite a while yet there were changes going on inside the building as well and so we had to convert what was the home of Mr. May into what would be an educational center and so beginning with their living room obviously that wasn't going to serve as much purpose so that space was converted into an office and you'll see that tonight you'll also once you're back there in that office you'll want to look very closely at the at the ceiling because there's evidence in there of how the that space was structured with a master bathroom that's no longer there and where and there's a picture that you'll you'll be able to kind of figure that out there's Mrs. May she's on the right and her sister-in-law Catherine Jones on the left sister or sister-in-law tippy oh she's out of the room must be sister so anyhow the two of them sitting at this fireplace and again as you walk through the building you'll see this fireplace one thing you'll want to look for is if you examine real closely in this stone you'll find fossils in that stone the stone was imported from Florida to build their fireplace and they have two fireplaces in their house there they are exam again if you get to that space and you look you'll see that this paneling it's still there this doorway is now gone it's now a hallway so there's no door but you can walk down that hallway kind of where they were sitting is where the reception desk went originally when we immediately started to use their home as an ecology center their living room well it's pretty much like it was back then except without the decorations but this fireplace is still there and as I mentioned we still have the armory chairs we just don't use them much with uh in the nicer spaces of maywood they are downstairs in the basement in 1988 we started doing some major changes to the the topography of the land that was here you can see here is that summer house but we wanted to put in some ponds and so the we knew where we wanted to go with them but we did find up on this hillside that there was a spring coming out of the ground so we dug a channel all the way down to those ponds so the water from that spring would then feed the two ponds one was a 15 foot deep pond one was about a five foot deep pond the spring water would flow into the deeper of the two when that was full the excess water would flow into the shallower of the two when that one was full the water would flow back through a wet small wetland area and back to the pigeon river so there's this the construction going on again this is 1988 the big let me back up the big question from the board was they said to me one day well are you planning to put fish in the pond and I said well we definitely want to use them for educational purposes we want things to be living in there but putting fish in the pond would be a waste of time and money because the fish are going to get in there all by themselves and if you ask a fourth grader how that happens you're going to get some really great answers because they're going to tell you about how fish can tunnel and fly and crawl and all kinds of other things but the real answer is that we have wading birds like great blue herons and others that wade in places like the pigeon river the sticky eggs from fish attach their legs they land in the ponds the eggs wash off they hatch and well you've got fish and so now today we've got a really nice batch of bass bluegills turtles frogs and lots of ducks and other wetland birds that make use of those ponds as well as tons of kids that use them and will use them all as well well finally in 1989 we decided that was enough with the summer house we had to do something with it because it really wasn't functional and we had thoughts of other plans for what could go in that space so we tore down the summer house you can see just there's the we still have the um the sunken garden here the summer house would have been off to this side over here you notice that there's a large tree right here and for those of you who have been on this property you know that out front of this building there is another very very large tree out there the one out here is called a katalpa come back in June when it's flowering it's just gorgeous and this one happens to be a white ash years later we were just debating on adding onto this building and we could have gone to the north or we could have gone to the west and both of them were under a great deal of discussion based simply on the fact that we would we would be losing one of those two trees nobody wanted to see either of those trees gone this ash at that time had a larger diameter than the katalpa and so there was some votes for not going this direction but boy did we make the right choice now that we have emerald ash bore everywhere this tree would never have survived anyhow so this building that we're sitting in right now is right here this is it right here we had to reshape that sunken garden and make a trail that went down to the to the bridge area so that it was wheelchair accessible and in order to get this the gradient that we needed we had to do a lot of switchbacks and building a lot more mileage of trails just to get us that far we also at that same time decided well as long as we have all these these bulldozers and trucks here we might as well change the driveway because at the front of the driveway there were these two pillars there was that straight shot and there were there were those norway maples and i could sit in my office and i could watch miller road i could watch the entrance from there and i could see cars they would come down the driveway oh maybe maybe like 25 yards or so and they'd stop and they'd you could see the wheels turning in their heads i don't know this looks like we're going to need to have a sticker or a permit or permission or something and they would turn around in the middle of the driveway and drive back out so we we knew that we were going to have to soften that driveway make it look more park like less estate like and so the idea was let's get rid of these pillars let's put a curve in that driveway make soften it up and then that would give us an opportunity to expand the prairie as well so this this went uh was gone in 1989 that was removed we put in the parking lot and then from the the parking lot we decided to build a a boardwalk walkway coming up to the south side of the building so we're getting the gravel in place to make that boardwalk on top of it we're putting in these handicapped wheelchair accessible trails and i wanted to get an aerial view of what the changes look like so i was able to come across a gentleman by the name of walley coeler and walley coeler had an airplane at the schwaig and county airport so i was able to ask him if he would mind taking me up in his airplane and flying over the top of maywood and i would get some photos so he agreed so i went out there on a winter day and uh we got the plane out of the hangar and we hop in and walley turns the key and it goes click click click click click click click click click he said just just hang on a second he took off running it runs out to the parking lot gets his car comes back he says well we've got to jump start this thing so we hook up the jumper cables and you hook it through his car turn the key and sure enough that propeller and it starts up so walley says just hop in here sit down here keep your feet on both these pedals just keep them keep the feet tight on these pedals i'll be right back i gotta put my car back in the parking lot so those were the brake pedals that allowed us to stay to keep that plane in that spot um however it is kind of funny because walley didn't realize that i had flown sesnas like he owned many many many many times prior to that and uh so if i want i really was thinking kind of it'd be kind of funny just to start taxing down the runway to see what he does but i thought no i better not give the guy a heart attack so you know walley takes off and we are up here and i just had the had the window open and he just kept us banked like this and we could go round and round and round and took lots of pictures this is way before they had drone technology but well now that we've got the landscape pretty well under control the next thing was getting a lot of programs established and again here's Dave Applin the consultant from UW Stevens Point working with kids trying to develop some programs for for kids to come out to maywood and and learn about the environment that we have here this is one of the first summer camps in that sunken garden area prior to tearing down the summer house which is behind them what's interesting about this this must have been their um Norwegian camp every kid with blonde hair what the heck is that um and then we had lots of school trips coming out here back then already it seemed like the school district was very very supportive of our doing programs here and lots of fourth grade and fifth grade were the most common grades to come out here but we had just tons of kids on a regular basis coming out to enjoy the facility eventually we started increasing our offerings to older kids and even younger kids and giving them chances to explore other parts of the park obviously as we started increasing in size it became evident that space was an issue we got the tables and chairs and desks but we got no place to put them so there we are outside with our desks and I I know that many of you um you know the size of your living room and it's probably close to the size of the living room in this place but if you can imagine say 60 kids every day coming into your living room for a program of one kind or another that's kind of what we were dealing with we were told and you'll see it when you get back there we were told by the fire department that the limit the occupancy limit of that living room was 50 we proved them wrong many times and our summer camps progressed again to include a wider range of kids and this gentleman here his name was dirk hudson and dirk was an entomologist and he brought in all these insect samples that he had collected and college textbooks which I thought these kids are gonna they're gonna be way in over their heads they're not gonna want to do any of this they were enthralled they were right within the whole time examining all these insects it was just awesome now of course with mr. may having a strong attachment to scouting we did continue to bring out scout troops and have events like this clondike derby we've had campouts a lot with scouts as well in this clondike derby you can see these scouts they're at one of their stations where it's a fire starting station so you can barely see there's a string that goes across between these two sticks and the idea is to start the fire and see how long it takes you to burn through that string and then this one I don't know if this is supposed to be a snipe hunt or if I think what he is doing is a compass course so he's looking at his compass but not being able to see the surrounding landscape in the 80s the director here at maywood had to go to the kelmarine youth camp I do have somebody in the audience I think that is very familiar with this youth camp right here yes kelmarine youth camp um dnr owned kelmarine youth camp and in the uh at the youth camp all of the fifth graders from schweigens public schools went to the kelmarine youth camp for a three-day two-night program and so the director here at maywood which would have been me was there for a total of three weeks and it was always in september but the kids loved it my wife loved having the house to herself for that time except that I forgot to turn the furnace on once for her when it was really getting cold but the kids loved the activities there for many of them for example fishing was the first time they've ever done something like that and I can talk with many kids who became later became adults who said the fifth grade camp program was the best thing that they experienced throughout their educational time in the schweigens public school district that's a statement and unfortunately you know with budgets that became a program that that they had to to discontinue we did have lots of big seasonal events there was prairie day and frontier day and earth day and um just all these different special events that we had with different activities this was one called indian summer the gentleman here is is a native american from the like the flambo area his name is nick hawkings um nick actually started a native american museum up in like the flambo but um anyhow that was a pretty cool day they taught us all these different indian dances as well and this gentleman was a falconer um so he brought in one of his birds to demonstrate this the uh the sport of falconry I wanted to put this picture up there because one it shows just the tremendous involvement that we had to have for any of our special events from volunteers and I just wanted you folks to just take a look at that and see how many volunteers you know of that might be in this photo um I I know a few this woman right here is Nancy Eckert uh just amazing woman with putting together our newsletter in the early days Joyce Hewitt very instrumental in a lot of our programs and and parade floats that we used to put together um Bonnie Tago was another one that was very instrumental in in our programming and the woman here her first name is Deb I can't remember her last name but she's the one that got us the mascot eco the raccoon so if you've ever seen that giant raccoon walking around that was Deb's responsibility we also had a lot of unusual programs um like this craft program where I brought in Dr. Richard Snyder who was a professor at the UW Stevens Point to do a program on porcupine quill embroidery so taking apart taking the quills out of this porcupine and then putting them in to dye coloring them and then um embroidering different things like birch bark um the challenge of course was getting a porcupine I don't know when the last porcupine was that you saw down here in Sheboygan County um I've never seen one down here so uh Schneider who was from Stevens Point fortunately he said well I'll just contact our highway department and maybe they can pick up a roadkill for us which is exactly what happened so he brought that porcupine with him down here um and this workshop took place you might recognize these cabinets once you walk around the building it was actually in our kitchen started canoe trips had we got we've got great six really nice canoes and a fantastic trailer that goes with it and unfortunately the only thing we don't have is an agreeable insurance company that allows us to continue continue doing canoe trips lama treks I mean we ran the gamut on doing different kinds of programs for sure however one of the old standbys that we're still doing today is maple sugaring so um we just I just tapped trees on Wednesday sap was running like crazy and uh we'll have flapjack again again a flapjack day again in in mid-march but a lot of kids came out for for learning about maple sugaring learning how to tap a tree learning how to collect sap learning what real syrup tastes like and checking out the evaporator um and watching that sap boil away and turn to steam one of the amazing things that we did with our maple sugaring program for fourth graders was we wanted the kids to be able to sample real syrup on actual pancakes but we didn't have a whole lot of time and we didn't have a great space for it either we had our old garage was the original garage of mr and mrs may very typical garage like anybody else would have three light bulbs in the ceiling no windows dark and dingy paneling on the walls oil stands on the floor that was where we made the pancakes and the kids did that they came in to the garage and they they got instructions on how to make pancakes mix up the batter cook the pancakes eat the pancakes wash their dishes and out the door in 20 minutes yep that's pretty impressive ran like clockwork so here they are cleaning up their dishes we didn't have a sink we didn't have hot and cold running water we just had one faucet kids would do their dishes so we didn't have a sink to dump the dirty dishwasher in water into so they would have to take it outside and dump it in in barrels which we would haul away at the end of the day and as i mentioned probably quite a few times already this place wouldn't ever have existed without the volunteers we've had a tremendous volunteer force over the years help us out and it's to them i'm into i mean eternally grateful for helping us with everything from working with kids to creating newsletters to bookkeeping to cleaning to you name it we we use volunteers for absolutely everything so with this picture just wanted to take one last look from right where we're standing if we were looking out these windows and it was daylight we would be looking at what we're seeing here except that this this summer house is now gone the sugar house is still there the fences are gone but the maple forest is still there and after tapping trees from from about 1984 to present that's a pretty spectacular thing to have that as our mainstay of events and programming based on the natural environment that's still here so with that we can turn the lights on i wanted to mention a couple last things before i turn your loose to go exploring but this is the master site plan created by this organization called leisure concepts and designs and in here there is a diagram of what they were envisioning for the use of the buildings so on this diagram this whole part of this diagram is the existing house and we've utilized it just as it is this part of the building was to take that summer house and attach it to the existing house but because the foundation was so awful we decided not to do that but nonetheless we stuck pretty much to the plan and it was about um maybe eight years ago on a saturday afternoon at four o'clock i've already locked up the door out here i'm ready to head home for the day and all of a sudden there's a knock at the door there's a gentleman standing out there and thinking okay well he needs to use the restroom all right fine whatever so i opened up the door and i said can i help you and he said yeah i was a an architect for a company called leisure concepts and designs and he said we just happened to be in the area we thought it would kind of be kind of fun to look and see what you did with this place and i said seriously i said i have that master plan sitting on my desk said you have to come in and we walked all through the building showed him all about what we had done over the years he was so impressed with the addition that that occurred here and we got way back to where my office was or is and uh he said no where is that master plan i don't think he believed that i had it i went over to my desk grabbed it between the the books that i had there pulled it out and said right here and i still refer to this thing from time to time it has been a great a great guide the other the other thing i wanted to mention is too is we had a couple that stopped in here kind of like the same situation towards the end of a day on a weekend and knock at the door open it up and here it was a i think a nephew of mr maize and um he said well when i was a kid we grew up in this house we wandered all over on the property could we look around so i'm taking them through and they're looking at and they're talking about all of the hide and seek games that they played here and they remembered the kitchen really well they remember this really well and i said you know the only concern i've ever had about all of this all of the changes that have taken place here is the fact that um mr may was such a meticulous man and i thought what is he going to think of what we did to this place because it's you know the whole hillside that was manicured that's all natural now we've got all this prairie that's growing out here we have all these trees growing out here and there are no shrubs cut like this and he said to me you know mr may would have absolutely loved this he would have loved this so that made me feel pretty good