said here stays here, but what's learned here leaves here. So we're going to ask people, rather than attributing quotes to a specific person. Oh, all of a sudden my mic came on. I don't need to yell anymore. Rather than attributing quotes to a specific person, to just kind of do the quote and then use the hashtag. And CCI as an organization is really excited to kind of support all the brilliant thinking coming out of these conversations. I'm going to pause them and see, are there any other kind of agreements that we may want to kind of lift up in honor as we move through the rest of our day together really quickly? I'm just going to do a scan of the room, awkwardly make eye contact with all of you. Keep scanning, keep scanning. Great. And so what I'll try to do if you're talking, I'll probably like go like this.  Great, we're going to go ahead and jump into it. Super excited to kind of follow the conversation that we all just had together. I'm ready to sign up for Noni's master class whenever she's teaching any of the seminars. Have Jessica and Lauren continue to kind of come in and be guest speakers as well. But we'll really want to kind of continue on the thread. And so to do that, our panel is called Building Economic Wealth to Transform Communities. And so we have Nia from the Boston Ujima Project and Ojon from the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative to kind of take us through some concepts that touch on this topic broadly. Just to provide a quick frame for what we're really trying to lift up in our piece is that while all of our projects are explicitly trying to build economic wealth for the communities that we are a part of, the communities that we support and serve, we're really clear that that's not the end goal, right? The work doesn't end there. Noni really lifted up that we need to kind of think about the long term governance and management of our communities. And in that same vein, I also really look at how do we leverage the economic power that we're building to be able to ensure that we're also building political power, right? So that people can continue to contest for the things that they need to make a thriving quality of life for themselves and their communities. And so we're going to kind of delve into some of the concepts around governance, around building political power, around how capital shapes all of those pieces, and then hopefully be able to also engage in some intimate and vulnerable conversations around the lessons learned to do this work. So I'm going to kick it off from the first questions. So the first question is really focused in around governance, right? And so one of the things I've been reflecting on in my work is that there's a way that we still kind of engage with governance as being transactional, right? Governance as about turning people out to vote, and that's it. And I think all of our work, we're also starting to see that we're understanding that governance is about how we're building community, really deepening relationships. And with that, governance is also really hard. So I wanted to kind of invite you to talk about your governance structures and to explicitly talk about how you design the governance structures for your projects in a way that helps to decouple capital from power, right? Really being able to ensure that the money coming in is not shaping the overall governance of the project itself. And it'd be great if you could maybe open the couple two sentences about your project as well for those of us that still don't know about the great work you're doing. Can you start it with me? However we want to do it. Sure. And can everyone hear me? OK, great. So again, my name is Nia Evans. I'm with Boston Ujima Project. I have never successfully really come up with two sentences to describe what Ujima does. So I always try. So I'll give a couple of different versions if that's OK. So it's interesting when Angie asks the question about who would lead such an economy that we're talking about. That's actually one of the ways I describe Ujima is I say, Ujima is a model of I don't really believe in models, but I do use the word model of what our economy would look like if it were run by us. And by us, I mean Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. And so that's one of the ways I've talked about Ujima. Something else we say is Ujima is a cooperative finance investment in arts ecosystem. Every single word in that phrase being important. So cooperative is important. Ecosystem is important. Arts, finance, and investment is important. And I'll stop there just with the two-sentence description. I also say cooperative economics infrastructure is something that we do. In terms of governance, so jumping from our ecosystem approach to what that then means for governance, that actually means that we have a lot of bodies and it's complex to your point about it being hard. At the simplest level, one body that I can talk about is our membership body. And we have, if you were with us in the early days, we had this giant sprawling ecosystem chart that we would show people that would be amazing and overwhelming at the same time. And smack dab in the middle was our membership body that we also called our general assembly. And our membership is placed into two broad classes. So there's our general membership, which we also call our voting membership. And that is comprised of people who are residents of Boston proper. We are explicitly focused on working class people of color. And so there's even within that a self-organizing principle that we invite people to use. So we say, if you are a resident of Boston proper, which it titles you to a voting membership, but you do not identify as working class, or you do not identify as a person of color, we invite you to consider our other broad membership, which is our solidarity membership. And that is for people who live outside of Boston proper. And we're happy to say that we've seen a good number of people exercise that option. So we've seen a good number of white people, for example, who live in Boston take our solidarity membership. And we've seen a number of people who feel like they're a little more solid financially than who we would like to focus on. Similarly. And so just in terms of governance and decision-making and power, it's built in upon your initial entry into Ujima. So your membership, or what I would say is the way we've designed our membership is with the principle that those who are impacted by decision-making should be the ones making the decision. And so if we know that we are wanting to invest in Boston proper, and right now we are focused on Boston proper, and we do know that we have to very soon think about areas outside of Boston, it is people inside Boston who should be determining those investments. So let's make it to our membership. So on that note, what do our members vote on? They vote on our investments, and they are direct votes. Our process is that we hold neighborhood assemblies. If anyone's familiar with cooperation Jackson's work, they'll be very familiar with the types of assemblies that we hold, which are essentially gatherings of community members and our members. And what we do with our assemblies is we say that half of the, for us, the successful assembly is half of the participants are Ujima members and in the other half are community residents who are not members of Ujima. And so what's important about that is we don't want to unwittingly transmit the notion that you have to have some type of organization affiliation to determine what's happening in your communities. So you are entitled to that decision-making by virtue of being there. And you should have that whether we exist or not, whether Ujima is around or not. And so at these assemblies, we ask our members three broad questions. We ask them, what are the businesses that you love? What are the businesses that we need? What's not currently in our communities that you would like to see? And what are the businesses that we need to replace? We've done another version of this where we've tried to be a little more interactive and we've kind of done a day in the life with members. So we've asked members and community members to think about their day and to think about all of the purchases that they make throughout their day, who they purchase from, what the service or product is like and what the experience is like and what they believe about that business's impact on our community. And so from there, we get a list of businesses and we also get an idea of why community members are naming these businesses. We do then have a bit of an intermediary body so we do have an investment committee and the charge of that investment committee is to take some of the early work that we've done with these businesses. We also run them through our community standards process which has also been created by community members and voted on by community members. So as an example, community members have said as a standard and this is a non-negotiable if a business is not meet this, they do not receive investment from us. It has to be at least 50% people of color ownership. There are guidelines with regards to ownership by women, guidelines with regards to the pay ratio so there can't be more than a five to one pay ratio for example. So there are 36 different standards. And so we have an investment committee, Deborah Fries from Boston Pat initiative is on the investment committee and then they do some of the more traditional diligence work that a lot of us are familiar with. They surface questions that we may not ask or that members may not ask, comment, et cetera. So that's another body. So that's another level of governance but they don't have ultimate power. So this is a body that has more traditional expertise and they understand they are there for guidance and they understand that ultimately it is a members who will decide. The investment committee makes a recommendation and then that recommendation goes to our members for our final vote. So our members are bringing us the list of businesses that we are to consider. There is as I said, some other bodies that do some additional work that complements the work that our members do and then our members have the final vote. So I think that's one of the ways that we disrupt so to speak some of the ways that decision making, for example, is tied to certain types of wealth or certain types of expertise or certain types of power. The last thing I'll say and I'll, before I throw it to Ajan to talk a little bit is each member gets one vote. And this is regardless of investment amount. This is regardless of participation amount. This is regardless of community stature or some type of other leadership position. If you are a Ujima member, you get one vote and that's it. And you do not have to invest to vote which is also important. And we have plenty of investors who are not members. And so we have plenty of investors that don't vote as well. Can y'all hear me? I love the way that this question is phrased because it lets me cover so many different things. So I'm the finance director at the East Bay Premier and the State Cooperative. You already heard a little bit about our organization from Noni. And we're a multi-stakeholder cooperative which means we have different categories of owners who are all co-owners in the cooperative. We're also a California Cooperative Corporation which through that legal structure gives us certain requirements for democratic control and also gives us a lot of flexibility in how we want to expand that democratic control through our everyday practices. This is a framework that we were introduced to and helped organize with the Sustainable Economies Law Center and we're still ironing up the details. There's always an iterative process to figure out how do we best do this. But I kind of want to approach this through the second part of the question around how we structure our capital so that it doesn't take the front seat. And this way of thinking about this that I'm going to share with you is actually inspired by Aaron Tanaka last year. So Cap went on a little rant about what it means to democratize capital and I was like, yeah, so let me... I want to share with you like what I see as it takes to democratize capital. And I think there's three components that at least that, with this perspective, I'm coming from. One is providing access to folks who don't have access to that capital, right? And for East Bay Prec, those folks are our resident owners. Folks who otherwise are renters for their lifetime aren't able to get credit. They're not made for the entitlement process that our systems use, sorry, the underwriting process that our systems use. So we're democratizing capital by giving access to those residents who don't have access to capital, but we're also providing investment opportunity for everyday people, right? Not just impact investors, not just accredited investors, but any California can invest up to $1,000 in the co-op. And next year we're going to be launching a direct public offering so anyone can invest more than $1,000 in the co-op. Because right now, a lot of folks' money is just sitting in Wells Fargo and it's actually funding the problems that we're trying to fix. In fact, I recently read an article called Workers and Renters of the World Unite in Jacobin talking about how a lot of labor unions' pensions are investing in the projects that are displacing those very workers. So yeah, providing investment opportunity to invest in local control of community assets. And then the last part is that we don't want only our investors and our residents to be in control. We actually want folks who are just a part of the community to be able to have a say, right? Part of democratizing capital is how do you have some control over what goes on in your neighborhood? So it's not just siloed to some banker and the person who's moving into the house next door. So we have a third type of owner, which is just our community owner.  And lastly, we have our staff owners who are our fourth category of ownership. And now with multi-stakeholder cooperatives, decision-making is sort of complicated. We have a yearly member meeting. We're actually gonna be having our first member meeting. I think on December 5th is our date, so we're gonna be excited to troubleshoot the problems of what does our try-out look like, and yeah, it's really exciting. But that's where everyone gets one vote. One member, one vote. We actually have an investor who's putting in $50,000 and many who are putting in $1,000. They get the same vote as somebody who put in $10 a year. Outside of the member meetings, the day-to-day operations of the co-op are modeled loosely off of something called holocracy, which is kind of a democratic decision-making system that was born out of tech that we're sort of adopting for our purposes and iterating on, where our members themselves, in particular our community members and our resident members, not really the investor owners, get to participate in the day-to-day operations of the cooperative as much as they want by creating circles or committees, subcommittees to work on whatever they really wanna work on, whether that's a group of community members who wanna organize around a project. They create a circle and the staff works with them to do the process of organizing, doing the financial due diligence, coming up with proformas, raising the funds, purchasing the project, or if it's just a group of folks who are interested in passing tenant option to purchase in Oakland, we can create a circle around that. In that way, one of our goals is to have place-based decision-making power and many a polycentric power structure, where it's not all the power is centered in one location, but based on who's impacted, who's interested, power can be held in many circles. Now one of the realities is that we have to own that the staff, the staff owners at East Bay Prec basically are given the trustee responsibility from the board to run the cooperative. So one of our challenges is finding the balance of how much power does the staff exercise? Because we're the ones ultimately implementing the ideas, the decisions of our community owners. And needing to do that in a way that one of the challenges, and I guess we're gonna go to challenges soon, but is really that capacity to participate. Front-line communities don't have as much capacity to show up to your monthly circles than folks who don't have to work. So maybe I'll leave it at that. I would have to that and start, I feel like my chair is breaking, so I'm gonna switch it out in a little bit. Is, you know, I think this is, as we talk about transforming communities, is like transforming people's understanding to governance, right? When we have a governance system where we are told to turn out in every four years in an election under the guise of voter suppression, under the attacks of Citizens United Laws, part of what we're also trying to figure out is how do we work with those frontline communities directly impacted communities that have been alienated from their voice and their vote to actively show up and participate in the work, right? One of my mentors, Saira Pinto, talks about she's trained in holding circles from an indigenous community in Canada, and they do not make a decision, they do not start any of their meetings until everybody is present, right? So it means people have to actively show up all the time and participate in being engaged. And so I'm wondering, and you start to touch on this, Ojamba wants to, if you want to add anything else, Nia, about what has been kind of the learning curve, the capacity building, the human development for people to actually recognize their agency and their voice and their vote to participate in the work that you guys do? Sure. So this has been a lot of fun because it's been very, very hard. We so far, I would say, we so far we have had two pretty big concerted voting efforts that have been drastically different. And for me, what's fun, I think, is what we learn about each other with these processes. Our very first election was for our community standards committee. So this was an election to elect six people from our general membership to be liaisons with the larger body about the community standards process. We have weekly meetings, which is hard. And in those weekly meetings for a period of four months from January to April, 2018, we would ask our members about topics from waste to ownership, to worker power, et cetera. And then the job of this body was to then take that input, combine it with their input and produce some type of proposal for community standards. We had a nomination process that we had to jumpstart by nominating a couple of people ourselves and encouraging our members to nominate other people, just thinking about the role of staff. And we had a candidate's forum at one of our meetings where our members had an opportunity to meet who was running if they didn't know them already. And we said, this will take about a week. For us, quorum is 50% plus one. We would like to have, at some point, we would like that percentage to be higher, but what we said was we wanted to be able to at least say that a majority of our members have chosen something to feel like it's properly representative. As an aside, our attorneys, when they heard that our quorum was 50% plus one, said, do you maybe wanna think about 10% or 20% because we don't know how you're gonna get 50% plus one. And we said, absolutely not. We're gonna go, did my mic go up? Oh, here it is. So we said it would take us about a week to reach quorum. A week came and went, we did not reach quorum. We extended the voting period for another two weeks. And so then that voting period was three weeks and we reached quorum. We reached quorum by me texting every single member that I knew and that I felt comfortable hounding the text message and saying, hey, vote and doing some phone banking. Okay, that's a guide. We then went into our second big election, which comprised four different questions. The first question was, what financial institution will we put our undeployed capital in? The second question was, we've gotten this list of 140 businesses from you all. We need a final ratification. We need an okay. There are no flags on any of these businesses. Let's send the list through and let's start working on it. The third question was, we have this list of 36 community standards. Again, let's ratify it and let's say we're gonna move on this. And then the fourth was a parallel process that we had created to create investment partners. For example, Boston and Pat's initiative. To first say, can we have an investment partner process? And then can you approve 10 investment partners that we have chosen? So for meaty questions, we needed to have those questions answered before we can make any investments. Particularly where we would hold our capital and what businesses we would invest in and the community standards. We said this will take three weeks. It took us three weeks last time. Let's do three weeks. Three weeks came and went, no quorum. A month came and went, no quorum. Two months came and went, no quorum. Three months came and went, no quorum. And this is with texting. The texting worked last time. Phone banking, emails, hounding. We finally reached quorum after four months on the first ballot. Two drastically different decisions. So what immediately opened up for, so as we're troubleshooting along the way, we are managing questions like, well, we asked members where should we put our money because members were asking that question. Members were asking, well, where are you gonna put it in the meantime? So it's our sense that this is important. And if it's important, we should put it to the whole body. Maybe it was not as important as we thought it was for everyone. So there's a question of, what is the important decision that people wanna make? People don't wanna make a ton of decisions. So we knew that for sure. We knew that we had to watch out for decision fatigue. So that was one thing. A second was, we got some feedback from members who didn't realize actually, I think to your point, just about the history of alienation. There's a context that we're all operating with and we're bringing tons of background information into these processes. We're not entering these fresh or new or naive. So democracy doesn't have the greatest rep right now in any corner. And so we did get some feedback from members who told us, I didn't actually think my vote was that important. And we had to say, we had to send emails, for example, that said we will not make an investment if you do not vote. So we have this money that will sit here and we will lose money and we will not invest. And this is not a joke. So there was definitely, I think that, and this is what I mean, I'm saying just learning about people, that kind of learning what motivates people and whether or not people understand democracy to be real. So just bumping into that. And so when people learn, it's like, oh, I'm holding up the process. My vote actually is important. They were moved. I mean, there are tons of other questions I can bring up that we're still working through. You kind of listened to Nia's comments. Anything that comes up for you? Well, first I just want to say that Ujima was a big inspiration as we were coming up with our bylaws and figuring out how we were going to do this. So just feeling really grateful for the work I'll have put in and continuing to learn as y'all are learning. There's a couple of things I guess I wanted to share. One is that even just being a part of a staff collective that operates horizontally and democratically, this has become sort of like spiritual, personal growth work for a lot of us. Imagine if every workplace conflict you ever had could only be resolved by really resolving it and not by just moving forward by your boss telling you what to do or you telling your subordinate what to do, right? And I think that's something that's coming up for a lot of our members too. They come to our meetings and we're really grappling with these questions about reparations and who's in the room. As Amaka said, our first member meetings coming up so I don't have a lot of lessons learned from that yet but trying to really prepare for that. One lesson that I feel like I'm currently learning is we have a community owner circle right now that we launched back in February after we had opened up the membership for the cooperative and we were like, great, we'll open up this community owner circle. It'll be a first place for community owners to get involved and we'll do it downstairs in our shared office space with Selk. And what's happening is that that community owner circle is becoming mostly white. And it makes me realize that we were maybe not, and I'll admit that I was the one really pushing for us to do that, the rest of the co-op was kind of like, well, maybe let's wait, we're not quite ready, but I was like, wait, we need to have community input. But the folks who were able to show up at that time and in that space, because it's downtown, it's not in West Oakland or in East Oakland where the black communities we're really trying to serve are, it just shows you who's showing up to that space. So I'm planning our member meeting, we're trying to think of how do we make sure that that's also a space that right people can show up to. And it's not just our investors who are mostly white and might have the time and opportunity to show up in the space we choose if we're not very thoughtful about it. So I would say this is definitely something we tried to think about early. And I think what we tried to do is design entry, well, we tried to create as many entry ways into Eugene as possible and design them so that they are diverse, for lack of a better word, to match people's lifestyles. And so try to be, what's the word, cognizant of the different lives that we all lead and what brings us to a place. So as I said, we have weekly meetings and that's definitely for the person who can do that. So for the person who has the time, who has that level of energy, passion, et cetera. But those are not the only entry ways into Eugema. I think one of the things that had us in conversation with ambitious, for example, is we have a very specific arts and cultural organizing focus, for example. And one of the things we thought about is kind of de-emphasizing the traditional community meeting as the form of gathering. And not prioritizing that at the expense of everything else. So one of the first things we did, for example, when we were staffed up, is we staffed up meaning, actually had a person working at Eugema, was we had a party. And we said, there are so many community meetings that look and feel the same. There's skepticism coming in the door because there's an idea of how that's gonna go and what's gonna happen afterwards. And usually people are not wrong. There used to be a joke that you should have with a couple of friends of mine that someone could actually make a lot of money like writing a sitcom about community meetings. Because they're the archetypes, they're the characters, they're like the course of events, we know what's gonna happen. And so some people have started to opt out because they're tired of that type of engagement. And so we said, well, let's have a party, let's have something that's agenda, we're not fundraising. This is a way people come together, people socialize. And so we just, we had a party. It was house music, maybe less house music, maybe more. Maybe more hip hop. So that's one of the things. We have a lecture series that we do. And the thing that made me think about responding to you is we're multi-racial, we're multi-class. And what's been interesting to me is to see how our different members engage differently. So we have a lecture series example where we have more of our members of color showing up in that lecture series. Then to the weekly meetings. I have some theories about why I get attached to why we decided to do a party. For example, we had an event in Ashi where one community member came up to me afterwards and said this was fantastic. And this was a restaurant, pretty much we were doing. A couple of friends, I said we had a community meeting because everyone just fights all the time. So I'm not going to tell them. So we try to think about what are the different ways, there are different types of engagement to have with us. There are varying levels of frequencies. The lecture I made happens bimuffly, for example. We use Zoom, so we use technology so we let people know if they're in the room, you can join us at home and a pushback. Then I set technology and then I get an automatic, we do people of color or working class, people have technology, yes we do, we use it. So that also should not be like an automatic response, like assuming we don't have the capacity to access technology. I'm getting these cue cards and so I really want to make sure we kind of get to the next piece and I want to kind of put this next question towards you, no pressure, but as a finance director, want to start actually talking about capital and the capitalization of these projects. And want to lift it up first from a place of just really honoring many communities, low income communities of color that have been marginalized, have been directly impacted by capital in a way that creates trauma when we start to talk about money, right? When we start to ask people about thinking about what does it mean to invest, what does it mean to fundraise, what does it mean to be in a relationship with an individual or an institution that you may have to kind of pay money back, right? And so as we kind of talk about culture and the role of culture in creating healing, I'm wondering if you could spend some time really talking about what has been your experience, right? And fundraising and financing the projects that you guys are supporting through East Bay Prec and particularly if you could kind of talk us through like the strategy and how you've sequenced the different tranches of capital that you've looked to bring into the project, right? So you started off by telling us about this community capital circle that you hosted, wanting to know a little bit more about why that strategy, what was that, what pool of money was that supposed to raise and how does that kind of relate once again to this question around building power. I mean, it's all right. Now I get the hard time thing, so we're gonna try to squeeze it all in, thanks. I'm not quite sure how to answer that question, so I'll just say that part of what we're trying to do is create access to a wide variety of forms of capital for these community groups who otherwise wouldn't even be able to qualify for a loan or know how to organize with their five housemates to try to purchase the property together. So we combine institutional funding where it's available and reasonably priced city or state regional funding and funding from community members, whether it's someone who considers himself an impact investor, but more broadly speaking, our community of everyday people who can invest in the cooperative. For this first project that we did, it was in partnership with the Land Trust, Northern California Land Trust. Presidio Bank brought in a chunk of the capital stack, measure KK from the city of Oakland, brought in a chunk of the capital stack and we actually finished the capital stack with our community investment campaign raising $200,000 from folks here in the community. And what that does is besides having the community invested more than monetarily, but like personally in our black and brown community staying here in Oakland, it also lowers the cost of capital. We're paying, we're offering a 1.5% annual dividend, which is optional actually. When you're investing in VPREC you can say, no thanks, I don't need my dividend. So that brings the cost of capital down which translates directly into lower rents for those residents. As we grow as a cooperative, right, this was our first project, which is why that institutional funding kind of came first in partnership with the Land Trust. As we grow that might change. We had an experience with the CDFI that I won't name, but this is probably pretty common practice where for this first property, we were looking to take out a loan or get a line of credit or something to allow us to purchase. And they asked what other assets we had. And we're a new company, we didn't have any. We had $100,000 in the bank, but that's not gonna take you very far in terms of real estate here. And they said, once you have a million dollar asset, we'll be able to loan to you on this other property. We're not gonna ask that this loan be backed by your other million dollars. It's sort of irrelevant, except we just want you to already have something. Even though their loan was gonna be backed by the property we were purchasing. So that's not great, but what we're doing is hopefully building our own capacity as an organization to say, oh wow, we have these five other properties. It's gonna be a lot easier for us to capitalize properties in the future because of the collective wealth that we're building. And that's why we're not just focusing on creating little pockets of limited equity housing cooperatives, but creating an overarching cooperative that shares these assets for community strength. So another thing that I think will also help to then weave together Ujima's capital stack is while we oftentimes talk about fundraising from philanthropy or getting money from financial institutions like CDFIs, really sorry to hear about that horrible story, what we've also been trying to lift up over the course of the last couple of days is that there's purchasing and buying power that already exists within our communities. And so the community capital raise has also been a significant part of both the projects that you guys support. And I'm curious if you have any highlights, aha's, bright moments of what the community has seen and their ability to raise money from their own income to really support a lot of these groundbreaking projects that you guys are working on. I can think about, I mean, not this current process because we're still raising, but the pilot process that we did in 2016, which was, we raised $10,000 from 175 community members then we received matching money from Boston Impact Initiative, the working world and LISC Boston. And so in a day, we allocated $20,000 in loans and we definitely received across the board positive feedback from people present who said it was inspiring. And for me, that is a key moment in the Jewish trajectory. I think that that was the only way really we could have enrolled community members was to have something successful. And so I think of something Jessica had said to me, well, not to me, but to a smaller room of people a little while ago. And I'm also just thinking of Noni just kind of talking about the history of black people in this country. There's a history of hope and failure. And so I think definitely pressures that black people move with is wanting to be hopeful. And one of the things that I've loved about Ujima is giving our communities permission to try and to experiment and possibly fail and also understand that we have community members who have that deep history. And so for some of our community members, it better go off, it better work. You can't just come and talk about something. You have to do it and you have to be able to show that it works. And so we did see that with a pilot. And I think if we were not able to pull that off, we would not have community enrollment in this. Everybody else might be excited about it, but community members would feel differently, I think. As you guys are still raising all the monies. I'm not sure it is true that, well, I don't know, I kind of want to give time to go to the next question. Well, yeah, well, good timing. We just got the time's up card. So we'd love to kind of pivot towards our Q&A. We're going to stop live streaming for this next portion. I plan for the group.


What's good, Josh boros back again with another video. So I'm going to check out 10 times WWE fans forced a heel turn now. Sometimes a baby face is just not getting over with the crowds not getting over with the fans, people are not finding into it. And sometimes an audible has to be has to be made now. The question is, will that audible actually be made? If it's up to Vince McMahon, that's need to hit, you know, that's need to hear nor there at that point because really, we can voice our opinion all we want, but Vince is the one that decides whether that person will turn heel or not. And we all want it for a long time. Roman Reigns to turn heel. We end up getting it eventually. And we've always wanted for a very long time. John Cena to go back to being heel at some point. We never really got that. So we're going to see the times where we actually did get a heel turn. We actually got it. It's very rare that they listen. So it should be a good one. Appreciate all love and support. Let's get right into this one, man. When it came to each and every miscast one time face occupying a space on this list, Vince, Paul and the rest of the folks calling the shots were given no choice but to give the people what they wanted. Gareth here from what culture wrestling and here are 10 times WWE fans forced a heel turn. Number 10, Edge 2004. Edge's most recent attempt to turn his back on the WWE faithful was a bit of a disaster from start to finish. Yeah. Who in their right mind wanted to heckle a bloke that had somehow found a way to come back for me. You're not one. They they they tried when he first created judgment or did the creation of judgment. They he tried it didn't really work because well, we like you, Edge, you're at that point in your career. It's hard to boo you considering how you came back. So it I get he was trying to get other people over in the stable, but it wasn't going to work. And it didn't make a rare ending. Neck injury after nearly a decade away from in ring competition. Nobody that's who this wasn't the first time the rated R superstar had found himself fighting against the tight somewhat. However, almost 20 years earlier, what was shaping up to be a promising runners. WWE's next up and coming babyface hero soon took a turn for the worst in 2004. Not long after returning from injury that year, fans quickly realized that Edge's general hero shtick had grown a little stale by the time the then intercontinental champion rocked up to his hometown of Toronto for SummerSlam 2004. The future world champion was actually booed out of the Air Canada Center. Sure enough, it wasn't too long before WWE sensed that a significant change up was needed to salvage their blond head main event project. And by the time the year was out, Edge had finally began to show flickers of the opportunistic slime ball persona that would ultimately carry him all the way to his first WWE Championship, which would nine liter 2005 now feels like as good a time as any to dive into Edge's one time real life and onscreen love leaders and forced turn to the dark side to after spending the majority of her much loved WWE runners and underdog hero leader soon felt the wrath of some rather pissed off parts of the fandom on the back of former partner Matt Hardy revealing the stars real life affair with Edge online. Yeah, once that came out, she was no longer going to be a babyface. There was nothing date. She had to turn here. They played into the story. I mean, she slept with the homie. You know what I'm saying behind Matt's back. Who's going to cheer for you?  No, and they played into it as you should before the team extreme icon knew what hit her a decent portion of the fan base took it upon themselves to rain down vicious chance of you screwed Matt and we want Matt whenever the onscreen phase popped upon the programming the most notable example of which went down during an awkward back and forth with a then heel Trish Stratus in April of that year rather than resisting the relentless venom being unjustly hurled leaders way though, the call was finally made to have the star align herself with the ultimate opportunist on screen and the pair would then go on to infamously help blur the lines between kayfabe and reality during their eventual war with Matt throughout the summer braves. Ronda Rousey 2019 when you can confess to being a legitimate badass former UFC band and weight champion having a fondness for genuinely snapping limbs and having exactly been shy about your feelings towards the average wrestling fan trying to make anyone believe in you as a plucky underdog or lovable anti hero is always going to be a bit of a tough task but that still couldn't stop them to be from stubbornly trying to force a heroic round around here's the thing it worked at the beginning but then it started to I guess started to get stale for the fans but in the beginning people were all for it all for Ronda Rousey and what she was doing and I was enjoying it. The match she had with Kurt Angle had forgot which WrestleMania was she was actually pretty good it was one of the best I think it was like the best match of that night. It was great Aussie down fans throats on two separate occasions during her somewhat brief time in the land of sports entertainment. The first infamous occurrence involved a noticeably flustered Ronnie struggling against the waves of boots in the lead up to WrestleMania 35 with the vast majority of the WWE faithful being more interested in cheering on the man at that point in time and just as the company were forced to have Rousey go on a heelish rampage back in 2019 2022 also saw the Smackdown women's championship challenger finally turn her back on the crowd during her fight with Liv Morgan at SummerSlam after never quite finding her feet or connecting with fans as a fighting babyface champ on the blue rander.  Yeah, number seven, even though she's about to be out the door, but that's it. That's all they had to do like once they started to see people, you know, we're going to change. All right, we're not going to book you to this babyface no more in the way she was commenting the people on Twitter.  The New Day 2015 after initially being unveiled as a set of annoyingly chipper preachers towards the back end of 2014. I forgot about this nothing to do with Biggie, Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods as a babyface unit. New Day rocks very quickly became New Day sucks. But instead of ignoring the fact that positive stick wasn't quite clicking in the way Vinny Mac initially hoped the group soon leaned into the negative reaction and doubled down on their painfully enthusiastic ways. The addition of some healish cheating tactics to get the job done in between the ropes fully cemented the unit as a gloriously entertaining collection of baddies and then given that little bit more freedom to commit to their goofy personalities whilst being forced to operate on the hillside of the divide. It was only a matter of time before the charismatic forces of nature became too hilarious to genuinely detest. Number 6 Seth Rollins 2019 Much like in 2023, Rollins had found himself organically getting over with the WWE Universe on the back of his consistently thrilling displays in between the ropes. With his weekly eye catching showcases and babyface fire establishing him as a clear favourite to best the beast at WrestleMania 35.  By the time the Beast Slayer had been massacred by Wyatt's demon clown at Crown Jewel, just about nobody honestly wanted to cheer on what their babyface Rollins character had become. That being a generic WWE corporate champ who probably should have kept his Twitter activity to a minimum. And so that inevitable fan-enforced heel turn finally went down in the wake of that year's Survivor Series. With Seth morphing into the first form of the eventual vibrant visionary persona, fans can't help but sing along with today. Number 5 Batista 2014 Much like Ronda Rousey fully expected to return to WWE as a full-blown heel just last year, Dave Batista also very much felt that making his long-awaited comeback to the sport entertainment world as a villain was the right way to go back in 2014. But with WWE clearly knowing best Big Dave was told by the Billy Wins That's equal to He do got that 10 The folks in charge that fans would be simply too overjoyed to see the animal to genuinely reject him with merciless booze. And while that was true for a minute there, Batista knew from the get-go that his strength lay in pissing off the WWE crowd and that his initial warm welcome would inevitably turn sour. And what do you know that's exactly what went down in next to no time at all. With the former world champion ultimately receiving one of the most jarring reactions in WWE history upon being the unfortunate soul who wasn't named Daniel Bryan to win the 2014 Royal Rumble. Vince finally listened to his MCU superstar not long after and allowed Batista to revel in the negativity. And when making his final return to the company 5 years later you better believe there wasn't an ounce of babyface fire to be found Which is good. He doesn't need to be one.  That sound is still legendary. A belly button tattoo equal stuff. That's funny bro. A heartless animal hunting down Ric Flair. Number 4 Alberto Del Rio 2013 Some folks are just made to be the bad guy. And that was most definitely the case when it came to the effortlessly arrogant Alberto Del Rio throughout the entirety of his WWE career. Despite exuding heal energy from the second he strutted through the sports entertainment door however, the strange move was made to transform Del Rio into a babyface who would ultimately go on to become a fighting world heavyweight champion. The only trouble was that most fans simply didn't buy the naturally cocky star as a heroic force of good from the off. And by the time Dolph Ziggler opted to cash in his Money in the Bank briefcase on the big tall felt wearer to the summit. One of the greatest cash ends of all time by the way. The final real babyface experiment was reaching its failure of a conclusion. The two would go at it once again at payback a few months later. And it was here when WWE successfully executed a double switch that had been forced upon them by fans refusing to react to either Ziggles or Del Rio in the way the folks in the back had once hoped. Number 3 The Rock 1997 and 2003 The Rocks doomed blue chipper days went on to influence the decision to not introduce debuting stars like Kurt Angle as a clean cut or conquering hero out of the gates. And it's not hard to see why. As there was a time there when it looked as though the great ones WWE career was pretty much over on the back of being serenaded with countless die rocky die and Rocky sucks chance during his disastrous early time on the roster. But it was that widespread backlash that provided Rocky my via with the fuel to fire up the loud mouth ball of arrogant charisma that was The Rock upon making his return from injury in 1997. And after said game changing creation of the character that would become the people's champion Dwen Johnson also just so happened to experience a similar wave of rejection 5 years into his near unmatched popularity. Fans were wise to Rocky's quest to lay the smackdown on Hollywood and were only all too happy to boo him out of the company after losing to Brock Lesnar at SummerSlam 2002. But this only provided Rocky with the tools to unleash yet another inspired villain into the universe in early 2003. A Hollywood Rock fund of running downtowns with a guitar in hand was brilliantly born and it simply didn't matter what you thought once again. 2. Bayley 2019 Many current WWE fans will likely be holding out hope that Bayley will once again be offered the chance to change things up a little sooner rather than later. Back when the hugger first made the decision to turn her back on her Bayley buddies around the globe, said call was hugely influenced by the star herself realising how her one-time passionate following had now grown tired of her pleasant underdog persona. After experiencing some pretty rough spells trying to make the gimmick that had gone down so well in NXT, work on the main roster, both Bayley and WWE clearly knew there was no option left but to finally allow the former raw smackdown in NXT women's and women's tank team champion the opportunity to give into her dark side in the latter stages of 2019 and those who had once began to overlook Bayley as a serious threat on the main roster were soon forced to sit up and take notice of the soon-to-be role model after witnessing the newly turned heel take an axe to both her signature ponytail and inflatable sidekicks. Bayley turning heel definitely needed to happen I think she still got something left to you know to show us with her heel turn obviously I think at some point EO and Bayley are gonna have to go at it and obviously EO should be the babyface in this situation so I'm looking forward to that feud whenever it does happen um so she still have some more to give us when it comes to her on her heel side before we even think about turning her babyface again so After shockingly becoming the youngest world heavyweight champion in WWE history Oh yeah they did try to ruin him as a babyface for a while The support being sent to Evolution's Randy Orton resulted in the company feeling they had no choice but to finally pull the trigger on the legend killer as their next main event babyface star but similarly to the likes of the aforementioned Alberto Del Rio after Triple H and the gang booted the apex predator out of their group the cocky as all hell Orton never quite managed to click as a likable babyface in his subsequent battles with his one-time mentor A month down the road Randy was beltless and he would continue to struggle to infuse the cool charm and arrogance that made him a fan favorite in the first place into his newly heroed up persona By March of the following year Orton's popularity and failure to keep fans from turning their attention to his one-time Evolution teammate led to him once again listening to the voices in his head before long His view would not take it was fucking great man And after ultimately being forced to pivot over to the animal on the road to WrestleMania 21 It would be a whopping 5 years before WWE even attempted to nudge Randy back towards the light again You better believe he's gonna get a babyface pop when he next turns up though am I right I'm glad he's our list nobody other time for sure he's whenever he does come back if he's able to come back that pop is gonna be insane and I hope they don't tell nobody about it but if there's anything we know Randy Orton has always been better as a heel and what I would love and I think what I think a lot of you guys would love and have said Randy Orton returns of course Matt Riddle is gonna show him love it's gonna be a great moment and he turns on him he turns on him he turns on him that and you know you come up with a reason maybe Matt Riddle didn't check up on him more Matt Riddle didn't seem as as hurt when Randy was out you took my moves you took my you know my wave or whatever you're like you want to be me but you can't be me I have to put you in your place something like that now will people boo him? it depends on how bad how rogue he gets he has to get really rogue cause fans like Matt Riddle for the most part I think fans will still cheer Randy Orton I will I don't give a fuck it's fucking Randy do whatever you want but they can definitely and they should at some point you can have him return for a babyface for like literally a couple weeks just to sucker in Matt Riddle and then have him be what he is a goddamn snake and attack and I think people will enjoy it so I'm all for him getting one more heel heel turn I think that would be great so comment down below let me know man who else do y'all feel needs a heel turn we're talking about right now who else do y'all feel like needs a character change they need to go to the dark side let me know down below but I appreciate all the love and support you guys on channel Rogue250k and I'm still here in the speedy YouTube wrestling champion of the world I appreciate y'all kicking me see y'all next one peace


Hi, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, host of theCUBE, and we're here at 18th Factor, Brian Shrabian, who runs the social media for the Giants, and if you know theCUBE, you know me, you know we love social, we love social business, we love social interactions, and best of all, mobile, cloud, and social, and big data all come together. So tell us, what a challenge it is, you have a huge fan base, they love the Wi-Fi here, they're used to all the amenities on the digital side, now you've got to come out with the social. How do you do that? What's going on? Give us the lay of the land here. You know, it is a challenge, but it's a fun challenge, and I think we're in a very unique and great opportunity here in San Francisco. Like you mentioned, the Wi-Fi gives us this huge advantage. Our fans are very social savvy. Many of them have iPhones or Android phones, they're taking a lot of pictures, they're posting on Instagram, they're posting on Twitter, and we try to foster and encourage that engagement with our fans day in and day out. The challenge is 162 games season, it's a long season, and there's a lot of content, but you're telling a, you know, as we like to say, we're telling a season long story, so all of it kind of blends together. So it's a really unique job, but you know, look at this place, this is our office, so it's an awesome job to have. It's a very social environment, of course, a lot of activities to talk about. So talk about the challenge of social in general, right, because obviously fans all use social.  We did a test before the stadium, 30 meg up on LTE, 40 on Wi-Fi, certainly that changes, but good uploading for the fan population that are here. Is there a software approach? Where's the innovation comes from? Is there best practices? It's an iterative, it's evolving process, it's fairly new, I mean, it's only, you know, less than 10 years since the iPhone really hit the scene, so what have you learned and shared with the folks out there for best practice?  It's a social experience, though. We come with our family and our friends, we take pictures, we share that experience. So now that we have social media, we're going to have a little bit of a real time update. We do whatever it takes to get the interviews here. This is what it is. This is what it is. This is the challenge at 18. We've got a lot of tough life we have here. We've got to let the field crew. Sorry, you can't do your job. The game's got to be delayed. We're talking social media, more important stuff. But seriously, so what are you guys doing in terms of apps? What are you guys, what's the philosophy of social media? What's the DNA of your group? It really is engagement.  We bring this community of our fans together, that it's all inclusive. And I think that's what we try to do in social media. We want our fans to be a part of that story. We want to share in that experience. It's a 162 game season. Some years you win the World Series and some years you don't. You don't know that until the very end and you kind of come along. And one thing we found is that fans love to be a part of that. They love to see themselves on the scoreboard. They love to see their tweets favorited. They love to see behind-the-scenes photos. They love to feel like they are an insider with our organization. And that's, I think, where we bring social media to bring our fans closer. One of the great things about social is that crowd can talk back and you have to listen. So what are you guys doing on the listening side to foster better engagement, to give really good actionable insights and pleasures to your audience. And the fan experience certainly now takes on a whole other dimension in the game, in the stadium. You have to listen. You have to respond. What do you guys do? How do you guys handle that? You know, I think we've done a fairly good job of responding in real time on Twitter using it as a customer service channel. But I think going deeper than that, this is a focus group for us. We're learning in real time what our fans think about the team. What do they think about the experience? You know, on the micro level, what do they think about their particular seats? You know, their experience at the ballpark. How can we learn from that? More so than responding to everyone. I mean, we try to respond and engage with many fans. But even more importantly, we're listening to our fans. We're taking a lot of the data that we see. We're talking about it. You know, everything from how we display replays off of challenges and are we doing that the right way? Is that, you know, giving our fans the utmost experience? So essentially, you know, our fans here give us feedback 365 days a year and we're able to take that and elevate our business. And certainly San Francisco, some of the most socially advanced fans technically. I mean, you got Twitter here. You got Facebook. You got Google, all in Silicon Valley. And the population of tech savvy. So the standards are pretty high. You feel a lot of pressure on that? Yeah, you know, I don't know if I feel pressure per se, but I think we definitely feel the bar is raised. And yeah, there is an experience, but it is baseball as well. I remember when we first built the ballpark in 2000, the overwhelming response of fans wanted to get away from the technology at the time, you know, 2000 was a different time. That's changed now that the iPhone really just changed people's, how they look at technology. So I think with all that being said, you know, technology adds to the experience. So, you know, we have at the ballpark app, which we're able to customize and make the ability for fans to customize for their experience at the park. So we're trying to use the technology out there to help our fans, everything from the minute they leave their house to the minute they're here. How can that help them experience this ballpark? So tell me two things. The most coolest thing you've ever seen come out of the whole social initiative from a fan base and two, the crowdsourcing dynamics. Yeah. What is the coolest thing you've seen come out of the crowdsourcing concept? But the fans are there. Probably some weird stuff. Probably some great stuff. What is the coolest thing you've seen? Well, I mean, I think that goes hand in hand. I think in 2012, when we were in the postseason and the whole rally Zito movement and it started, we were down three games to one in St. Louis and Barry Zito was pitching the next day and a fan started a hashtag, a meme rally Zito and it just kind of spread overnight to the point where it just kind of took over. And the Giants, you know, came back and won that game, launched them into the World Series and won the World Series, but it was really this engaged fan base that started that. It was almost, you know, as if one fan was clapping in the stands and the rest, it took fire. Same thing happened on Twitter and it was a really cool thing to see and that was crowdsourced and I think that's, you know, kind of the philosophy we have is that, you know, by no means are we controlling that conversation. We're part of that conversation and we want to foster that conversation. So you're saying that the fan experience in the crowdsourcing virtual space affected the team's performance. Almost as if they were in the stands themselves. Yeah, I didn't say that. I wish I could say that. But that's what happened. The fans' rally in a virtual stand in this world of saying that the baseball god shined down on us and that had a small part. Absolutely. Why not? The fans helped us win the World Series. Fans, if you're on social, you better get going because we need some offense. Let's see some offense on the Giants in some stretch. We need five runs today. That would be helpful. What was the coolest thing you've seen on a tweet? What's the most epic tweet you've seen on the scoreboard? Boy, you know, we see a lot of tweets on the scoreboard. I think the best tweet we ever saw going back to that and it was our tweet but it wasn't our photo. It was, here's how it worked, the team was on a plane and they weren't sure if they were going to St. Louis or if they were going to Washington D.C. or home and they were watching the St. Louis Washington Nationals game and our traveling secretary sent me the picture and I tweeted it out and it just captured kind of this emotion of the team watching the game and it just brought a lot of attention to the fact that social media takes you to places you've never been before on a charter plane watching a team that look like a bunch of little leakers. So from the team side I think we're able to get behind the scenes, we're able to get our players to kind of share a little bit about what they are privately as much as they're willing to give and our fans love that. So we're always looking to kind of bring our fans into the front row as they say. That you capture those moments that are behind the scenes. Yeah. Now accessible. Very nice. Brian, thanks for joining us. I really appreciate you coming on the field and talking to us at Silicon Angle on the Cube. Thanks for all your support and also congratulations on a really badass social program you guys out here. Really well done. Thank you. I appreciate that. I think we can say badass but it's not really... Sure show. You can do whatever you want. Social TV, social media, social interactions, this is the future and now the fans are involved, the teams are listening and certainly it's great for everyone. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. This is John Furrier live on the ground here at AT&T Park. We'll be right back. Thanks for watching.


All this month, get up to $50 off any Android smartphone from Appalachian Wireless, any Android you desire, all $50 off with two-year agreement, better service, bigger savings, that's today's Appalachian Wireless and East Kentucky Network Company. Two longtime Pike County judges have recently announced their plans for retirement, which means their positions will soon be vacant. Pike judges Daryl Mullins and Kelsey Friend Jr. will retire and a few are already vying for their seats. Robert F. Wright has been an attorney for 22 years. He announced his run for Division I District Judge this year. He says his experience will help him if he is elected. The volume of cases that go through the Pike District Court and the Pike Circuit Court and the Pike Family Court is enormous. It is a job that requires the ability to handle large volume of cases and to give each case its due. I have been doing that since the day one of my practice. I have basically been training myself without really knowing it. Pikeville attorney Tommy May, a 10-year veteran of judicial law, announced his run for District Judge Division II. He says his experience and honesty will hopefully bring him to the top. My friends and my family know that I try to help people and I hope that the county will allow me to even expand helping people. That's a position where you can really help people. It's an important position. Assistant Pike County attorney Kyle Deskins filed to run for Division II District Judge last week. However, he announced his candidacy earlier this year. He has been an attorney for 16 years. In a courtroom, I've done it all. I've been a defense attorney, a guardian at Lytum, representing children, and now a prosecutor. I bring to the bench a comprehensive set of skills and I think that I can do a wonderful job for the people of this county and I think that I can bring fair and equal justice to everyone. Both Mullins and Friend will finish their terms and the newly elected judges will take office in 2019. In Pikeville, Shelby Still, EKB News.


You are at the Sheboygan County Historical Museum and it is March 16th, 2013 and we are taking a look at model railroading today. We have lots of things that will be very interesting for all ages, young and old. We are very privileged to have Mark and Marv Pressler who are master railroaders and that is quite a distinction and they will tell you a little bit more about that. They have some slideshows of some master layouts that are around the country and then we also have a group that comes to set up our trains for us on holiday memories and they are going to be helping young and old to put together a train track and to put some things with the train track. So that should be kind of interesting. They are also an opportunity to make a wooden caboose or a wooden locomotive. Then we also have John Brown who is here and has a number of the very old standard gauge trains and many of them are very, very valuable and interesting to take a look at. We also have some trains that are in a suitcase and those are Maggie Huskies and she also has I think it's a Z layout. Then Ron Clunk has some HO layout that he has and we have a train track set up that you will be able to see. Ken Bailey will be cartooning a scene of a railroad during the time that we are here today and he has cartooned many different scenes of railroads and he also has had a number of them published in publications. Then we also have the society of model railroaders from Sheboygan here. They have the museum in our town and they have set up some different gauges too. And somebody from Danny Ostring makes trees out of actually a weed and he has many trees that he will showcase and then he also will give people the opportunity to make a tree if they would like to. We have Brad Bartek who has made a number of trestles and he is displaying some of his trestles. So we have lots to see, lots to learn and it will be an interesting time to see the different kinds of gauges of trains that we have in our community. We also have Jerry Thompson who has some displays that he is also showing. So it should be a nice day and we hope that you enjoy it as much as we are. I also would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to our new director. We are very pleased to have him on board. He has been a volunteer and he is on the board of directors for our museum. So Travis would you like to come in? So we are very happy that he is going to be a part of our museum and we are looking forward to working with him. I think it was 1957. I was about 10 years old and I got my first train and of course it came on Christmas like so many of the guys here and so many families and it is just really such a holiday tradition. If you get a train most likely it is going to be a Christmas time. The one I got then in about 1957 was a Marx train and that one is gone but this one I got in the 1980s. Just a real fun train. It runs nice and easy and smooth and just great fun at Christmas time and now I get it out for the grandchildren. Good morning. My name is Mark Preisler. I am a master model railroader, an NMRA member from Sheboygan, Wisconsin. I earned a certificate back in 2010 from the National Model Railroad Association. My brother Marvin also earned a certificate. He beat me to the punch in 2009 actually. So that brotherly competition continues I suppose. I have been involved with model railroading and I guess starting out with model trains all the way back to the early 1970s so roughly 40 years now. My dad was the one who got my start in it. He had a Lionel 027 railroad at the time that he would just set up at the holiday season. My mom and dad had a bar room in the basement and the train would just come out during the holidays as a display. The layout would be packed away of course after Christmas time, after the holidays and it would go back to a ping-pong table which was part of the rec room. I got my start with that moving on to about 1978, got into HO scale railroading. I would have been about 12, 13 years old at the time. Of course that's when your creativity kind of takes off and you begin reading books a little more and whatever. Through all that I wound up getting interested in HO scale. My dad wasn't really in favor of it at the time. He was happy with the Lionel display at Christmas. But after my whining and begging I suppose he broke down and we switched into HO scale and then my dad became a full-time model railroader as well. Shortly thereafter my brother who was about three, four years younger than I am he joined us and soon we were off on a model railroad journey I guess you would say. Several people in Sheboygan were really critical in our development as model railroaders and eventually earning that master certificate. Of course my dad Merlin got us the start. Other people as we went on of course he had to learn as well and her voice in Sheboygan here was our mentor. He had learned from a fellow by the name of Casey Buttein who was his mentor. So in kind of a weird sort of way the generations pass on interest in model trains and trains in general. The layout that I have now fills basically a 25 by 45 foot area. I model the Sioux line in 1955 between Wapaka and Oshkosh basically. My brother's layout, separate house of course. He's modeling the Green Bay and Western from the late 80s and early 1990s. We both I guess have achieved a little bit of skill in the hobby through the years. And have been published in various magazines. Model Railroad Magazine being the I guess the biggest one in the world for the hobby. And I was I guess honored to be featured in that as their featured layout in July of 2009. As far as the future goes with the hobby well you know that's part of the reason we're here today I guess to show what could be done with the hobby. We've got everything from toy trains on the carpet all the way up to you know realistic HO scale full-size basement layouts I suppose you would say. And of course the new electronics have really changed the way people think about the hobby. There are things now that I do with my model railroad and my layout that would have been impossible to do back 30 even 10 years ago for that matter in some cases. So it's not really a stagnant hobby there are a lot of people in Sheboygan that are into model trains. Most of them don't have maybe quite the extravagant setup of an entire basement. But you don't really need that to you know have fun with the hobby itself. And I guess we're kind of here today to point that out and hopefully I have a good time doing it. Thanks. This train you see here is all registered. Each car is hand-painted and it's through Hawthorne Village. And each car has its own number also. And it's a fun thing to play with but I don't let any of the grandchildren or the niece and nephew's kids play with it. But on the layout we have different setups of houses and businesses and little cars and trucks. And in the corner we have small cows and horses and little people in here. My name is Doug Leonard. One of the Lakeshore old gauges. And we're here running old gauge trains. Basically on the carpet calling it Carpet Central Railroad. And we figured the kids would like it better if we could get it down to some place where they like to play. And the trains are durable enough that little kids can play with them. They take rough abuse fairly well. And we like playing with trains as much as the kids do. So it's a win-win situation for us. And it's a great way to get out, play with our trains, play with the kids. And when I can't get together with my grandkids, this is just fine too. Okay, we're running the Lionel Santa Fe out here with a couple of cars behind it. It's old gauge which is 148 scale or there about. It's probably the first major large-selling scale railroad that came out. HO has gotten a lot bigger than old gauge in the last decade or so. But I like running old gauge because of the size. And it seems to last forever. The engine you see running here is over 50 years old and it runs just fine. It's hard to find another toy that anybody makes that you can say that about. So I started running trains probably back when I was about 7 or 8 years old. My dad bought it for the first Lionel set. And I've been dabbling with it ever since. I've got some of my rolling stock here. Some of the more exciting stuff. Missile cars, satellite cars, things that you can shoot through the air. Because the kids seem to really like that. And it seems like as soon as you start shooting missile cars, you can't run trains anymore because that's all the kids want to see is missiles flying through the air. But it's entertaining. And we like to play with the kids and if that's what the kids want to play with, that's what we go with. Thanks, Brayden. If you want to come by later, we're going to be setting up more track if you want to help us, okay? Awesome. Hey, Brayden, are you good with Lego? You play with Lego bricks? Do you like Lego bricks? Well, can you and Grandpa help us with some of our Lego dinosaurs? Or do you want to walk around a little bit? Alright, why don't you come back later and we'll be here. Hi, my name is Dave Malig. I'm a member of the Lakeshore O'Gage Railroaders. Just a loose association of guys that get together and love trains and run together and have a good time. Today we're going to talk about a little bit what we do and what we share. Here at the museum for holiday memories, we have a modular layout that we set up. It is 40 feet by 12 feet. And some of these black and white pictures show some of the members actively running trains for the museum. My son Alex and the first one. And the second picture is Dave Tauschek. And the last picture is myself. And another picture of my son Alex and I running trains together in the military section. We're having a little army tank babble there. So every year we come during the weekend of Thanksgiving. Since Christmas and trains were synonymous for many, many years, people like to set up trains underneath their Christmas trees, run them around. And the nice thing is to always get that new piece for Christmas that you can open up and put on the track right away. The layout runs on two main lines, all O'Gage, and we have multiple trains that we can run. And we run Lionel's new command system where we can run multiple trains on the same track. The fun thing for us though is to share with the young people who may not know about the hobby. So we allow them to run the trains with us with the new control system. We have some more pictures of the Lakeshore O'Gage ages here at the museum. The top photo is actually myself working on a locomotive that has a little running problem. But you can see some nice action shots of trains running around. And it gives you a good perspective of the entire layout. Our good friend Bill Whirly, who's also a member, comes all the way up from Indiana and comes and runs trains with us. And then on the good group shot towards the bottom of all of us that are members of the group. And we also run very whimsical toys. Some of the trains that we run are very realistic, like we have swimming fish in them that are animated. And other action cars that are based on movie characters like the Disney ones.  So we like the whimsical fun cars. My name is Ken Bailey. I'm a lifelong model railroader and railroad artist and cartoonist. And the man in this picture is Casey Butine. Casey and I were friends for many years. He passed away in the year 2000, just short of his 92nd birthday. Casey was a phenomenal man. When Casey was young, he was part of one of Sheboygan's very first model railroad clubs, the Chair City and Western. A number of men had a layout in the basement of a store downtown. And the size you see here, HO, which stands for half of O scale, in the 1930s was brand new. When World War II came, everybody but Casey was either drafted or enlisted in the war. Because of Casey's health, he couldn't go. And Casey had the job of taking apart and dismantling that model railroad club. But years later, he built a large layout in his basement as is pictured here. Lake Michigan, at one time, had car ferries. And the cars they're talking about were not automobiles but railroad cars. They would take a shortcut across Lake Michigan inside of big boats. You can see in a picture here, the cars would be loaded into the back of the boat. A big door would open up and the engine would push railroad cars in. And that kept the trains from having to go all the way down to the bottom of the lake to Chicago and around the lake. They could shortcut across the lake in this boat. One of the things Casey did years ago, these boats would stop at Manage Walk, about 30 miles north of here. Casey would go to watch them. And then he hand built this operating car ferry boat. He actually had his model railroad tracks connected. His model trains could push the cars into the boat. There were tracks inside the boat and the boat was on a large rolling table. It's behind this piece of wood.  He wanted to load the model railroad cars in his boat, then push the table and the boat across the basement floor and then have another model locomotive unload the boat on the far side. Sadly, he never lived to finish that, but you can see how far he got over here. His layout went all the way around the room. You even had to duck under it when you came in through the door. Casey and I were friends for many years and he was my inspiration. Thank you. Okay, my name is John Brown. I live in Chewagon Falls. And I got a model railroad, but I also collect old trains. And I started collecting and building trains in 1938. And over on a picture on the side over there, they got some of my 1938 layouts. These are standard gauge trains. And the standard gauge was the biggest trains that they made up until World War II. After World War II, none of these trains were made anymore. And I've got a variety of different types of standard gauge down here. These are American Flyer. And I've got an American Flyer engine and the freight train. And then beyond that is American Flyer passenger train. And that one is quite unique because it's called the President Special. And the President Special was made in 1927. So this was a 1927 train. And they quit making trains about 1938 of the standard gauge type. However, they still continue even today making trains. American Flyer now is owned by the Lionel Company. They bought them out. And the trains they make today are called S-Gauge. Okay, these trains are Lionel trains. And these on top here happen to be called the State Set. And the reason they're called the State Set, they have the state on the bottom of the car. And they're quite valuable. One of these trains in the original box just sold for $253,000. So most people didn't buy them because they were very costly even in 1932. And I happen to get this from a doctor's son who lived in Port Washington. And you had to be a doctor, his son, to be able to buy one of these. And this is pretty neat in it. It has all the interior seating. And it also has little restrooms. And the toilet seats even raise up and down. So there aren't too many trains that had interiors to them. And I have, down below here, I have a freight set. And this is a bigger freight set. They have bigger freight cars. They also made a little cheaper standard gauge one.  Now one of the cheaper Lionel trains is this passenger Maroon one down near the bottom.  And those passenger cars. So that was one of their cheaper sets. And this is, and the other ones are bigger sets. The train way in the front here goes back to 1910. And Lionel started about 1903. But that second car is about a 1907 car. And you don't pay them even though they're old because they lose their value. So I collect trains of all sizes and all types. And that's just having to be the biggest bigger sets that I've got. And I've been in a train business since 1938. Hi, my name is Jerry Thompson. I'm at the Sheboygan County Historic was excited today. Showing off some of the modern railroad displays that I have personally built over the years. I've been a modeler for about 50 years. And got involved when I was quite young because the Sulline Railroad used to run right through the middle of our dairy farm. So trains were always in my, as soon as I could pull myself up to the windowsill and look out the window, I was acquainted with trains. But as we evolve in life, I like to think that most modeler railroaders, whether they realize it or not, actually are historians. They actually want to recreate something from their memory or something that they've seen in the form of model railroad and displays. And I've kind of taken my modeling to the next level, I say, because I've actually built models of buildings that actually exist. And this is one that this is a line drawing that a friend of mine put together of the water tower that's actually in the city of Plymouth. And it also stands, it was built in 1886. And it's a very unique water tower. It used to pump water for the Houston house, but it's an enclosed water tower. And that's one of the reasons it's last and still exist today. Most water towers have actually disappeared because Mother Nature is hard on things. So this is a picture of what the water tower actually looks like right now. This is the top portion with the cupola up here. Our historical society would like to restore it and actually have the actual windmill on top of the water tower like it used to be. And so I built a model of the tower the way it appears today. And then we're going to be adding this to it. And the model is a very visual thing that people can wrap their head around their arms around and understand what we're up to. So this is something that will go on the layout for my purposes, but it's an actual historic building in Plymouth. Another building that actually was going to be destroyed is a blacksmith shop. This was built in 1887. And this stood behind the art center in the city of Plymouth. And the art center two years ago decided they wanted to expand. And this building was going to be destroyed. It was going to be taken down because it was in the way. So I and a couple of friends, we actually physically picked up the building and we moved it about a block. We have it up on blocks right now and we're going to restore it. So it is a working blacksmith shop so people can see how a blacksmith actually operated. But I built a model of it so people could see what it would look like. And this model depicts it the way it's sat behind the art center. But these two little additions that were put onto it really weren't unique. They weren't from the 1887, 1886 era. So I built it so that we can take this away. And this is what it'll look like when it's on display for our historical society. And it gives people a pretty good idea of what we're all about. Some of the other models that I have on the table here are models that I built over the years. I'd like to think the moderator is a good therapy. You can sit in the basement at two in the morning and just kind of do your own thing. And the rest of the world kind of goes on by and you don't worry about it. And I tell moderators and people that are in the hobby to do what you like to do. Don't do what you think is going to impress your friends. Your friends are fine, but don't let them dictate what you want to do. You just do what you think you're comfortable with and what you're happy with and call it a day, so to speak. Okay, this was my husband's love. He loved railroads and Jerry designed the layout in a briefcase so it was portable. We could take it along wherever we went. And this is the smallest gauge train that he had. And I helped with the layouts. I was his helper. And it was fun doing. So it proves that ladies can be interested in this as well as men and boys. So Jerry also has had the Engage layout. That was fun to do too. Marklin, isn't it? Huh? Marklin? I believe, yes, my husband was the collector. I was just the helper on the layout, so. Just for having the end scale here that fits on the cart gauge. And it was a lot of fun doing. They were armor balls? No. Oh, there you go. So I do have that yet. Photograph. Okay, we're running a Lionel O-Gauge. The floor system belongs to Margaret Heschke. We're running in a manual type mode. We're not using the remote control or anything. So if we want to run the whistle or the bell or the speed, we just do it manually on the remote control. By pushing this button, we get the whistle to blow. We want to increase the speed on the engine. We just turn the lever up. I modeled the Milwaukee Road O-Gauge in 148 scale in the Hiawatha series, starting with the 442 Atlantic, which was the first steam locomotive in the Hiawatha series. Then being replaced by the 464 Hudson, which was a more powerful engine. And then being replaced by the diesel locomotives, the AMD F7. The Milwaukee Road had very unusual end cars for their locomotives. On the diesels, they had the Sky Lounge, the double dome car. And the very first one was called the Beaver Tail Car. I also model the Milwaukee Road in the steam locomotives also. I have the 261. I have the Pacific Baltic. And I also have the EP2 Bipolar, which was used for going through the tunnels in the mountains. The locomotive we're looking at now belongs to Margaret Heschke. This is the Union Pacific Big Boy, the largest locomotive ever made. This is 129 scale produced by the manufacturer MTH. This is Garden Gauge. The body on the Garden Gauge models are made out of plastic. And in fact we have a few of the Garden Gauge, the Caboose, and the coal car. Garden Gauge people actually set up in their gardens often? Garden Gauge would be outside. It's something we don't put out in winter time. But if you're in a warm climate, you can have it out all year long around here. You can only put it out during the summertime. Hi, my name is Ken Bailey. I'm a model railroader and also a railroad artist, cartoonist, and caricaturist. And railroading, model railroading is a hobby with many different sides. And I'm part of two different groups. The large SSSME society and the next room. One of the fun things about being in a group is each person can bring their particular talents and interests and everybody can benefit. So it's a lot of fun that railroading is also a place where one can also, I can bring my art hobby into the railroading as well. This particular picture was drawn just now. It took about an hour and a half. And it depicts a passenger train from the 1950s stopping at Rangeley, Colorado, which is the town where I grew up and which was ironically on the route of what would someday become the real Grand. But the predecessor railroad building there went bankrupt going over the mountains and never made it. So this is what's called a fantasy shot. It's a what if. Sometimes even people making models will do fantasy models where maybe a railroad has been merged and there's no longer a round and they'll take a modern locomotive and paint it in the colors of the dead railroad as if it were still around. So like many hobbies, model railroading is only constrained by one's own imagination. I started cartooning about age five. It was my grandmother's father. She bought me a chalkboard and some chalk. And trains have always been a favorite hobby. In fact, when I was in the first grade, my first day of second grade, I was told I had drawn so many trains the first year that no trains at all in grade number two. I think I got even. That school was decommissioned in 1983. I'm still drawing trains. Had just a couple published in railroad magazines over the years, maybe 10 different cartoons, but mostly just a hobby. Okay, basically a simple tree to make is the sedum. And the sedum grows in a lot of people's gardens and flower patches. And this is what they are when they're dried out. This is a picture of them when they're in the garden. And basically what I do with them is I spray them with scenic cement, which is watered on umber glue. And get them wet, give them a good dosing. And when I get done, I'll take them and put them in the scenic foam in the bucket. And basically that's the way they come out. And I take hairspray, spray them good with hairspray. And that's all that's to it. Very simple to make. Another one I just made for the first time today. I just made this one for the first time. I went on YouTube and there was a guy on there making them. And I thought they looked pretty realistic. And what it is, is a sage from out west. And it looks pretty natural. And then I use this material that's import from the Netherlands. And I don't know what the name of it is. They call it super tree. And all I do is break pieces off and I stick them down in the sage. Just like that. I just break them off. I pretty much can use the whole sage plant. And once I get enough on, I'll take them and spray scenic cement. Dalsum real good. Because when that dries it will be glued on. And then I use this product from Germany. It's called knock leaves. And all it is is a leafy type flocking. And basically that's what I do with this tree here. It's got the knock leaves on it and the super trees. And I think it looks pretty real. And that's the first one I made. I got the idea off of YouTube. All the trees behind you. I use a varying amount of different products. I have this stuff. It's called poly fiber. And it comes in a big ball. And you take it out and you put it on these. These are plastic armatures that you can buy. And you just put it on there, stretch it out. You can put on as much as you want. And again, spray it down and you can put any flocking on it you want. The ones back there I put knock on. Knock leaves. And you can use regular flocking like this here. Made by Woodland Scenic. There's some labor intensive trees. I use a sage again. And I use this material finely foliage. And it comes like this. And all I do is take it and glue it onto the limbs. And it's pretty much done. Not this one ain't too much work. But the ones on the end down there are made up from a dowel that is tapered. And I put this crepe paper.  And I'll wrap it around the doweling after it's tapered. And I'll glue them down. And you notice it looks just like bark. And then I'll do one on top of it. Go all the way up to the top. And when it gets done I'll take some burnt umber acrylic paint. And paint the whole thing. And I'll dry brush white on it. And those are called furnace filter. This is the material I use to make the leaves and the bushes. This is what it looks like when I cut it down. You got to take the backing off. And then you take them and split them. Try to work the middle out. And once you think you got it then you just pull it apart. That's about all you do when you take a scissors. Cut it into, well I use these templates that I made. And I just cut like this is the one that's radius. And I cut the furnace filter. And that's your branches. And what I do is stick a screwdriver through the middle. And I take them and then peel them on the dowels. And then I'll spray them down heavily with the scenic cement. And I'll take a, I think it's called conifer. Right here, conifer coarse turf for conifer trees. And I'll sprinkle that all over it. And when I do, I'll probably have seven or eight different sizes going up the tree. So it tapers towards the top. And then I'll spray it all down again with hairspray. And that's how it turns out. And the other ones I just paint the dowel. And then I'll, when that dries, I'll take a trommel tool and drill in holes all the way around the tree. And I take a product like this. Wear foliage branches by JT. And what it is, is small little branches like that. And I'll take some super glue and stick it in the dowel. And those are the back ones there, I think. Yeah, right. And you can put in as many branches as you want.  Some got a lot of branches, some not so much. Some got them on the left side. The right side is very, you know. That's the main thing when you're making trees. It's trying to make it look a little bit like it would in nature. They don't have to be perfect, you know, because there's not perfect trees out there. And one thing, when you plant the trees and you plant them for in like a heavily wooded area, you've got to take your time and put every tree where it looks natural. And one kind of tree doesn't go all over here and one kind of tree over here. They get mixed up. That picture up there is of the layout. And those are all my trees. And I got pines in there and I got some that looked like birch. And I got some that looked like oak, you know. And they're all mixed together. The way the dock would operate is the train would back on and there's loading pockets in each one of the sections of the dock. And then they would open the hopper doors on the bottom of the hopper car and unload the car into the pocket. It operates pretty much the same way that the ore docks do up in superior. And then when they fill the boat, they have, each pocket is controlled by an operator that they load the different sections of the boat at different times to keep the boat from capsizing or tipping. So this is pretty much an idea of how a coal dock would operate or an ore dock on Lake Superior. My name is Leo Schneider. I'm president of the Cheboygan Society of Scale Model Railroad Engineers. We have our railroad museum at the corner of Kenton, Ontario in Cheboygan. We've been in that building since 1993 and we try to maintain an interest in model railroading and the history of model railroading in Cheboygan and the United States. In front of me here we have a display of various antique trains that have been donated to us over the years. We also have a few pieces of modern rolling stock, some kit cars, and we have here four box cars in various scales to demonstrate the various size differences in model trains. Our group has an open house usually twice a year. We've got one coming up second week in April. And the public is very well, very much invited to stop down and come visit us and see what we do.