 Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community, a partnership for generations. Member FDIC. Welcome to Common Ground. I'm producer-director Scott Knudson. In this two-segment episode, Ann Johnson, an interior designer of Niswa, Minnesota, shares her passion for working with local artisans. Then Brandon Ferdig, originally of Black Duck, Minnesota, shares the insights into humanity he's gained as a journalist. My name is Ann Johnson. I'm a businesswoman. I'm an inventor. I'm married for 55 years to my friend and associate, Doug Johnson. What we do is we influence people on how to make their homes reflect their personality, and that's where we came up with the name for the business, Johnson's personality plus interiors. It's creating your personality, not a designer's personality. Your personality should reflect your values and who you are. The minute someone opens the door, this should say, this is who I am. I help people furnish their homes. I prefer to use artisans and craftsmen to create things that are unique. Come up with color scheme, a look that reflects what they value in life. What we're showing here is wall texturing. Everybody right now is looking at faux finishes or wall texturing to give your walls some character. Without wallpaper, wallpaper doesn't give the character. We have come up with a wall stencil. What it is is a metal stencil that I have designed. The trick to this is after you have painted your wall, then you come back with a stencil, any design. We have pinecone, we have maple leaf. We like to stick with botanical design. The way we have it here is just to show people the different designs. When you're doing a wall, you really want to create something unique. You want to just place them in different positions, at least three feet apart. I was born in 42, one of five children. I was the second daughter. There were three girls, two boys. My sister, Teresa, myself, Anne, and then I had two brothers, Marshall, Carl, and then my baby sister, Nita. So five children. My grandmother, who bought when she came to this country, the U.S. of A, bought two homes side by side because it was a huge family. My grandmother was actually 20 when she came to this country and she ended up having 21 children. I came here in 1960, married, expecting my first child. And my background was growing up in a very large family. My father was originally from the Cape Verde Islands, which is off the coast of Africa. So he was black African. He actually came here in 1910, came from a very large family. My mother was also, this is the ethnic diversity, she's Syrian and German. And they actually were in, I would call it, the neighborhood was really, truly very poor. And they met, she was 17, she was married at 19. They met, they fell in love. And back then the cultures were, we were all, there was Italians. If you know the New England area, it is where people landed when they came from Europe. So Jewish Italians, there was just a diverse ethnic and there wasn't any stigma to dating anyone outside of your race. It was just not, not even unheard of to not, you know, we just were all clinging together to survive during the 40s. Out of high school, I met my husband. He was in the Navy stationed at Quonset Point, which is a big Navy base back in the 50s. And we dated for a year. We were married in 1960, 61. And then we moved to Minnesota and we arrived here in 61, started our careers here. I had three children, three girls. At a time we established, rented a small little office building from Mr. Boberg down here on County Road 77 and started selling wallpaper and draperies. And then it just, it just grew and grew word of mouth. And after the first three years, we found this piece of property on Highway 371. We had established ourselves and we felt we could move on and grow the business. And we had met several artisans that were willing to work with us, make furniture or help us in our career because we were getting into wall coverings, carpeting, tile. And we really reached out to the community to see what did you do? What do you do? And how can you influence our business and how can we help you? I really think, like I say, our being able to communicate and talk to people and share that we can help you, you can help us, and that was our core belief, was to just integrate talented people into our business. And I think it's been a success. I really do. I have a very prolific imagination, have my whole life. But what I have done when we were in Texas, my husband and I, I sit with a drying pad almost always coming up with ideas. Now what I have created, and I think it's special, is a wool tufted rug. And because 90% of, I'd say 75% to 90% of the homes we do are lake cabins. This is to envision a lake cabin. It is a lake, it's called the pond. And so I did have my initials put on that, but it's two loons, cattails, some dragonflies. And I think it looks like a lake bottom. Top, sorry. And we are selling it now throughout the country. Right now, like I say, with the economic downturn, many of the skill craftsmen and many of the people in our industry, builders, contractors really found themselves lost because people started going elsewhere. I mean, there wasn't a Walmart when we were up here. There wasn't a Menards. There wasn't a Home Depot. And so we were really a full service decorating studio. What I hope now, like I say, we are past 70. My husband and I are proud to say that we still, I do, I still love what I do, advising people, helping people. I don't think I'll ever outgrow the passion I have for being, filling the void that people have when they come up here from the cities and they don't know who to talk to. And they don't know who to trust, which is the key word I'd say that if we want to give ourselves a title as trusted. We meet with people, we find out what their needs are, and we try to help them through the process of finding the right contractor. I have eight grandchildren now, and they're coming out of college. Two of them are going into design, fashion design. It's in their DNA. Some of the things that we have are passionate about is art and design. And if we can support them, and I think that's what we're all here to do, is support them, encourage them, and keep it priceless because what I do is priceless. Really popular right now, especially now in lake homes, is a timber, timbers and rustic wood. And so last year my husband and I constructed this table, and we have done tile top tables for years, hand painted. So the tiles are actually painted with China paint, and then they're baked in a kiln, so they're a permanent art form. And what we did, I wanted a beaver, something from the Outdoors. I really love to bring the Outdoors in, but this is a beaver artwork with a rope trim, and then the rustic timbers that we designed and built, and we love to do it. It's massive, but it's in keeping with the theme of a lake home. I don't think individually we can accomplish anything. I never have. I think collaboration is the key, and I think especially in this, when I go back to my ethnic background, the diversity of having a father who was dark skinned, had black African blood. My mother was Syrian. I mean the diversity was what uplifted me, what gave me strength. And I think diversity is what brings more of a camaraderie together. And I think in our diversity, we each bring something different to the table. You can't have everybody with one opinion. It just doesn't work. We have to have diversity, and we have to have a willingness to give respect. I like writing checks to guys who sweat, because they work so hard, and they're so dedicated to what they do. People who work with their hands are dedicated, passionate about what they do, and they need to be respected for that. And if they have dirty shoes, I don't tell them to take their shoes off. I'll clean it up after you're gone. You've put in a hard day's work, what you need is respect. What I have come up with, actually it was ten years ago, it's called the ripple rod. The design is fluctuates from six inches down. I have a formula that I came up with, so it looked like ripple or water shape. Anyway, this is now being made under our control copyrights. And it's perfect for cabin. And what you have to do is just take a blanket. This happens to be a Woolridge blanket that we've come up with, and just drape it across. So any fabric. But what I think the beauty of it is, is that being iron comes with the attachments, the brackets already on there, and we order it, custom made, any length. And you don't have to sew. It's just a blanket or a piece of fabric. And you don't have to do any sewing. It forms its own creation by calling it the ripple rod. The rod does the design. At this stage of our life, what we hope to do is introduce a artisan's colony. Now what that would incorporate would be a number of skill craftsmen and artists to join us here in our building on Highway 371 in Niswa to develop a strategy to create, to make people's lives better, and to serve the community. My name is Brandon Ferdig. I'm a writer and a videographer, YouTuber, some people might say. I was born in Blackduck, Minnesota. And I grew up there for the first 18 years of my life, graduated high school there, and then I went to college in the Twin Cities. After that, I began to write. I began a blog, began a cable access show where I interviewed people. Whether it's writing or interviewing, my content is most often about cultures, individual stories, really finding out what it's like to live in another person's shoes. What their experience is like, what life is like through their eyes. I remember I was in high school and a friend's grandmother and I were, for some reason, we were by ourselves. I think maybe my friend and I were visiting his grandmother and he was off, I don't know where. He may have been in another room. And her and I were just talking. And I noticed the picture of her late husband. So when I thought about it for just right there on the spot, I saw her late husband's picture on the mantle or on the windowsill or whatever. I thought, gosh, you were together with him for a long time. Do you still miss him? Do you still talk to him? And that's when she teared up. And so, and then she opened up to me and said, yes, I do. And it's difficult. You know, when we're young, we don't think about the flight of being old. Well, there were a couple of detours in my late teens, early 20s. I went to college for psychology, actually. There wasn't journalism like I initially thought it was going to be. What started to happen, though, was I started to travel. And that got me out of the Twin Cities and across the world. I lived on two different continents, between the years 2010 and 2014. And that led to a book about a year I lived in China and traveling around that country, feeling out the culture, interviewing people where I could, whether it was a disabled person on the street in China in the city I was in, begging for money because they don't have welfare there. I interviewed a 99-year-old woman with the little bound feet that China used to do with all girls a hundred years ago. They would bind the feet at about five years old, so they would stop growing. It's quite dark in here. There she is, that is grandma. You can see the arches are all bent up like they used to do. And she'd had those feet her whole life. And so I wanted to ask her about that process. And she was actually comfortable with me removing her sock and holding her little deformed foot. And so I threw a translator. I was able to interview her about the experience about China over the last 100 years. Rural China, you know, cities across the country. And then I came home and wrote a book about the experience. I remember, in fact, I was on a bus between the airport and the city I was going to live in. So we flew into Guangzhou, which is the largest city in the southern half of the country. It's not far from Hong Kong. And I lived in another city called Zhuhai, which no one here probably knows, but it's still a city of a million people. That's China. It's across the delta from Hong Kong. So it's all in that. It's called the Pearl River Delta, which is about the size of Connecticut and it has about 60 million people. And I taught English down in Zhuhai. So while I was on the bus from the airport in Guangzhou down to Zhuhai, which is probably an hour and a half or so, maybe two hours, I remember hearing a mother teaching her daughter the numbers. And those were the first Chinese words, other than probably Ni Hao, which is hello, and Xie Xie, which is thank you, that I picked up. Then I would take classes because my school offered them to the English teachers. And I just tried to pick it up from, you know, being in the country. Asking people how to say this and making a couple of friends. And by the end, I could speak some Chinese. I was proud of myself. So I would write frequently about that concept of how their culture in China would compare to ours in the United States. And it would come up frequently because I taught out of school. So what's education like there compared to how it is in the U.S.? What's law enforcement like? You know, we've had a lot of protests in the U.S. now. Not so much when I left in 2010. But there I went to a protest. And I thought, wow, in China, the protest is going to be a crackdown. We're going to see some, we're going to see some kneecaps being busted with some, with some nightsticks or something. But the police were so cool. Like they just sat there and they talked to the protesters. And that blew me away because I had this image of China as being... A Tiananmen Square. Yeah, just lockdown. I was able to compare the two countries, the two cultures, the East and the West, in many ways throughout my year. And I think at the end, when I practice martial arts, Tai Chi and Kung Fu in the mountains of central China were Tai Chi originated. And I practiced up there for nine days, which doesn't sound like a long time, but it's sort of like a boot camp. And so nine days of that, it was kind of a long time. And it was intense because I didn't have... There was electricity, but I didn't really use it. And no one spoke English. And you're up at 5 a.m. to jog. And it's Tai Chi all day. I don't know what it takes, of course, but it's a long day. And you really begin to see how my... I began to feel and see how my brain racing, wanting to go on the internet, wanting to watch TV, wanting to eat something, just want to be stimulated to a fault, I would say. Versus most of the students there were just very serene, more so, content. Throughout my time there, I was never good at this Tai Chi. And there would be some extensive choreography where beyond just this repetitive motion, there was like maybe 20 moves that they were having as choreographs. So we would go way down and we would go up like this and we might lift the leg. And everything had to be just so. And I remember trying to just figure it out perfectly and I had a heck of a time with it. I always struggled more so than the other students. And the other students, by the way, were from 10-year-old boys. There was a few teenagers and there were a few that were in their 20s and 30s. But where I did come through to help was nearing the end. One of the last days I was there, the students went down into the valley. So remember, we had this road and then we have this housing and then we have this dirt platform where they would also practice. And then it went down into the valley. And when we went down there, students were down there to get firewood and sticks for the oven to make food. By the time I got down there, they had tied up all these small trees, all these small logs, and had used vines even to tie around them. There was a problem, though, in that some of the branches from the logs were sticking out. And this was a narrow path down the valley. So had they tried to carry this bundle of logs up this valley path, the branches might have got hit trees on the way up. So they had to try to break off these branches. And one was short and stubby. And these Kung Fu trained men were trying to just break it off with their feet. I said, hold on, I can help you. And I saw a rock nearby. See, I thought of invention and they were always focused on the purity of the action. Whether it was a punch or one time we would shovel dirt and they were doing some landscaping, which in hindsight I'm not sure if it was even landscaping or if it was just shoveling to shovel. Like move the dirt over there and then move the dirt over back where it started. It was about the action of shoveling and I kept thinking, where's a wheelbarrow or where's a backhoe? Let's get this done faster. And they were criticizing and laughing at the way I was doing this because I was using my back, I wasn't using my legs and I wasn't thrusting the shovel in there. I was just sort of throwing it in the dirt and I wasn't doing it like an attack. I was just doing it casually. So it was about the method, not about the result. But I wanted the result of this branch that we broke off, these logs. So I saw this rock and I shoved it underneath the branch. To create a lever. And then I just gave it a little kick and it broke off. And they were all very happy. Oh, so clever, Feng Xiang, which is my Chinese name. And they knew a little English. So they said, so clever. They always said that. That's a great story. On the same journey down to get fire, where they were also getting kindling for the fire. And this girl was grabbing it with her bare hands and it was like pine needles and she was getting like cut. And then I saw these two like rake-like tools and I said, hold on, hold on. And so I grabbed these two rake tools and I picked up a huge bunch and I could put it in the bag. And she was like, oh, so clever. And I thought, well, you know, we just use salad tongs, that's all. And you guys use chopsticks. But it seemed like, I don't know. I mean, I know it was just one small example. But to me, it represented the the difference between or at least a difference between the east and the west. And they, at least this culture of the east, they have strengthened and exercised oneness, mindfulness, calmness, contentment, serenity. And we, at least for me, I go to invention. How can I get it done faster, quicker, better, stronger, whatever, cheaper, efficiency. That's good too. So I thought, wow, how good is it to have the best of both worlds here? And it was just a strong lesson in learning the strengths of other cultures to come together for a better whole. I got back from China in 2011 and I knew immediately that I wanted to live in another part of the world. I wanted that same experience just to grow my insight and knowledge and wisdom about humanity. So I had an opportunity to go to East Africa. I had met several people from there in the previous recent months. And so I thought, okay, the world, life is sort of pushing me in this direction. And I met a man in Minneapolis from Tanzania who had started a school in his home village. But they needed computers. So I said, I can help. And I did. I raised some money online. About $2,000. I was able to get a handful of laptops. And I went out there with those laptops. And from America bought me a ticket. So I flew out there early part of 2014 with these laptops. And I would go to this village school and teach these students who were about ages 12 to 17, 12 to 16. It's secondary school there. I taught them how to use computers. About half of which I've never used a computer before. So we're talking about how to turn on a computer, how to use a mouse, and then basic word processing is what I really focused on. I thought it was a lot of changing. Yet it was just the vehicle as teaching English was in China. To me it was about being in East Africa and soaking it all in. And I would go to church there. Very charismatic and theatrical church service where I saw 13 women on stage exercising demons and spitting up. It was crazy. What I think I'm able to do with my work is what I like to say is I like to go deeper than judgment. I like to play in the news or whatever. But if we have a conversation with them then we're beyond judgment. There are some issues that I like to tackle. That will come more carefully and periodically. The main driver are the stories of the people sharing the voices of the individuals that don't get told. So my website is theperiphery.com On my website is a link to my YouTube channel which is also called The Periphery and you'll find all my interviews travel videos from China, Africa. My book Life Learned Abroad Lessons on Humanity from China is also available on my website. But you can also just go to Amazon and type in Life Learned Abroad and you'll find it there too. It has the paperback and the ebook. One last bonus about the ebook if you read it on a color screen like a tablet or even a laptop or smartphone the pictures are color and there are links throughout the ebook which go to videos that correspond with the text. So when I'm writing about a fish market in China you can click a YouTube video and watch scenes from the market where I was. Yeah, whenever I've lived abroad the vehicle getting out there has always just been that. The vehicle. What I wanted to live abroad for is to live abroad and that basis that foundation from which to better understand obviously that culture and by comparison my culture and by triangulation perhaps my culture, their culture, humanity. Because if you understand humanity in this culture and that culture now you've got two points of reference and from that you can better understand the continuum of humanity as a whole. Visit LPTV.org or call 218-333-3014 To watch Common Ground online visit LPTV.org and click local shows. Order episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218-333-3020 Production funding of Common Ground was made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji continuing their second century a partnership for generations member FDIC Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008