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5:09 The World Bank has offices in more than 130 places and staff from more than 170 countries. Starting more than a decade ago, one of those staff members worked from a wood-paneled office overlooking a small lake outside Mercer. He was among the first telecommuters in Iron County, Wisconsin, a part of the first wave of work-at-home employees whose number has now spiked in the area. Gary Theisen had lived for years in Washington, DC, working at the headquarters of the World Bank and traveling internationally. Clear Lake. Credit Ben Meyer/WXPR In the mid-2000s, he wanted to move back to Wisco...

3:19 Cornelius Harrington, who was known around the state as Neal, was born in 1891 in the town of Hurley.  He entered college in 1909 and finished in 1913 with a degree in forestry from the University of Michigan.  During summer breaks he could be found working the Trout Lake Pine Nursery.  He went on to have a long and influential career with Wisconsin’s Forest Conservation Service.  But like so many young men of his generation, World War I intervened before he could get started. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, Harrington volunteered for the army.  Because of his education he ...

5:00 There were times in my life when I would worry, I suppose somewhat oddly, about where everyone is supposed to be buried. I even remember thinking at one point, “Where does it end? How much land can we afford to make into cemeteries?” Everything else seems like it can change—forest to grassland, grassland to cropland, farm buildings to forest, but cemeteries stayed cemeteries. I think it started with my childhood on the outskirts of Milwaukee, where occasionally I would ride with my grandpa to deliver funeral flowers and casket sprays to enormous cemeteries as part of his floral bus...

The cabin sits on U.S. Highway 8 between Crandon and Laona. When Johnnie Aschenbrenner was growing up, it was his home. Despite being on a major highway, there were no power lines until 1962, so the family used generators for electricity. Johnnie Aschenbrenner inside the home where he grew up between Crandon and Laona. Now, he rents it as a cabin as part of his resort. Credit Ben Meyer/WXPR Nowadays, the cabin has an updated yet rustic feel, and Aschenbrenner rents it out as part of his small resort on Wabikon Lake. It’s literally connected to the tiny bar Aschenbrenner also owns. All told,...

4:51 I was incredibly lucky to be able to spend most of my 2020 summer workdays conducting aquatic plant surveys on area lakes. I was hardly the only one out there – by all accounts, the place to be last summer was on a Northwoods lake.  As a member of the Vilas County Lakes and Rivers Association, I was asked to take the pulse of lake activity last summer, for good or bad. I asked eleven Northwoods residents with different backgrounds to answer a short questionnaire about their experiences on the lakes in summer 2020. This highly unscientific survey included a conservation warden, fishin...