Godsil/Hinterthuer On-Line Interview: Hinterthuer, a Happy Green Warrior

Godsil. You are a singer/songwriter/writer who has been involved for a decade or two in the center of Ozaukee County’s green movements. Might you share your “green story” and how it ties in with you commitment to your calling as a singer/songwriter/writer?

Hinterthuer. I have always had a “world view”, even as a young child. Our family had a dear friend, Helen Wilson, who traveled broadly, to Africa , Europe, and around the globe. Helen was a superb photographer who shot stunning Kodacrome slides wherever she went. Helen was also an Oneida or at least partially so. Although she didn’t speak to her ethnicity, it spoke through her. She was always very accepting of cultural differences and that wisdom was abundantly clear during her travelog presentations. Helen would practice them on us before addressing larger groups.

Godsil. How was it that Helen Wilson was a dear friend of your family?

Hinterthuer. Helen taught school with my mother. Her expertise was “Home Economics.” But Helen gave up teaching long before I met her. My understanding is that Helen didn’t marry until she was 40ish, to a man who was “wealthy.” According to my mother, Mr. Wilson had a heart condition that did him in about a year later. Helen inherited his fortune. It was enough money to assure she would never have to go back into the workplace. Instead she travelled. When she was home she often spent holidays at our house. To my knowlege she had no close family.

I recall that she would show up at our house on 26th Street, just north of Silver Spring, driving a 1932 Ford with a rumble seat. This was during the early ‘50′s. She was generally occupied giving rides until dinner time.

Later on, Helen had an occasional visitor. A blind man from Indiana named “Bob.” My impression is they were close, but I’m not certain as to the details of their relationship. Bob came on the scene between an around-the-world trip and Helen’s 8,000-mile jaunt through Africa. I’m guessing I was about seven or eight years old when Bob appeared.

The whole family traveled to Helen’s apartment on the Eastside of Milwaukee overlooking the lake. We were briefed to be on our good behavior. Mom explained that Bob read braille and had a braille imprinting machine with him. She said, “Bob may ask to touch your face. That’s how he learns what people look like.”

As I recall, I was the only one whose face Bob seemed to want to explore. Maybe my brother and sister objected? I can’t say for sure, but I was okay with it. I was curious about his life—what it was like—what he was like.

I believe Helen and my mom had a bond based on “the road not taken.” Their lives diverged at one point, Mom became a mom and Helen married a much older man. It is likely that “children of her own” were never part of Helen’s thinking. Instead, she lived a life of adventure as a single person, which may have been of vicarious interest to Mom, who was definitely “Type A.” They were each driven to be successful, and both were bright and educated. I know Mom recognized that Helen had tremendous gifts to share with my siblings and me. Clearly Mom was willing to share us with Helen.

The message that “diversity is a source of strength and interest” was clear, as was an understanding that the planet is a very interconnected, mutually dependent place. I learned it initially from Helen.

Godsil. Can you remember your earliest memory of Helen’s travelog presentations?
Do you have any pictures of her and your family together?

Hinterthuer. My earliest memory is probably of an “around-the-world” trip. She appeared schlepping an early ‘50′s era slide projector. It may have required hand-feeding one slide at a time. I think she came on a Sunday then stayed overnight for the purpose of repeating the presentation for my brother’s elementary school class.

Helen blitzed through Europe even though Mom wanted to dally. Europe was old hat to Helen but delayed gratification to Mom. Instead Helen focused on places like Luxor in Egypt, Bombay, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Osaka. Dad seemed to think each needed to be “modernized.” To me, it was beyond exotic, especially Helen’s stories about people she had met, their occupations, the food, how their costumes were adapted to climate, their customs and words of greeting, how they built their dwellings and why it worked, the flora and fauna, the whole shebang.

I must have been about seven or eight years old.

Africa was a later expedition. I’m thinking that just after returning from Africa Helen got deeply involved with the International Institute in Milwaukee, but she may have been a member all along. It’s just that after Africa, Helen always seemed to have interesting people from Africa join us for dinner at her place. Two, a married couple named Rondango, were Black South Africans. Both were doing graduate work at Marquette, developing non-culturally biased I.Q. tests for children. My brother Roger was squarely in Mr. Rondango’s test group, and I fit into Mrs. Randongo’s ten-year-old target. So they tested us. I think we skewed the curve a bit. Subsequently Mr. Randongo took Roger to Marquette to “retest” in front of the proctors. It seems they didn’t believe the first results, but the second time Roger actually upped his score to 160, which was/is pretty hot. I beat him the first round, but I wasn’t retested. My guess is that Helen wanted us to be exposed to hightly educated Black people, so we would be armed when kids at school would say, “Black People are stupid, or other nasty things.”

(I’m not sure if I have any photos of Helen. I will look. I will also ask my sibs. It’s likely one of us will have Helen photos.)

As a young child I lived in a neighborhood near the northern fringe of Milwaukee during the ‘50′s, with the city to the south and terra incongnita to the north, consisting of farms, woodlands, grasslands, ponds to fall into, places to fish, vines to swing on, etc. It was kid heaven. The experience created a curiosity about the natural environment that continues to this day.

About six years ago I became an empty nester, spending my days alone in my office at home writing freelance for “M” Magazine, Wisconsin Trails, Exclusively Yours and others. As a “people person” my isolation was problematic. I could talk to the cat, but the cat didn’t have much to say in return. So I applied for a part-time job doing the marketing for Riveredge Nature Center. Subsequently, the position was upgraded full-time, but I snagged it anyway. That move put me squarely at the center of Ozaukee/Washington County environmentalism, I met the players and the posers.

A year into it, Rick Flood, Riveredge’s Executive Director asked me to see if Riveredge could form a strategic alliance with Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, the Urban Ecology Center, the Ozaukee Washington Land Trust, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Field Station to propagate self-guided group study courses for adults, courses developed by the Portland, OR-based Northwest Earth Institute. Courses included Voluntary Simplicity, Choices for Sustainable Living, Discovering a Sense of Place, Globalization and Its Critics, and more.

For about a year I worked on establishing this group with lots of help from Don Quintenz at Schlitz Audubon, Chistine Kelly at Riveredge, and others. Eventually we created the Great Lakes Earth Institute and were accepted as a sister institute by the people in Portland . I traveled to Portland and explained the model and what we were doing to Dick and Jean Roy, Co-Founders of the Northwest Earth Institute. They gave us their blessing. The GLEI then became my part-time job. An additional benefit of my trip to Portland was that I got to meet environmentalist from all over the U.S. and Canada, people who are leading the charge at the grass-roots level. Subsequently the Midwest Renewable Energy Association and others joined the GLEI as institutional members.

I was also deeply influenced and inspired by a host of other people at Riveredge including Don Gilmore, the sanctuary manager and world class wildlife photographer; Mark White, Senior Naturalist and Ecologist; and the Habitat Healers, a group of Riveredge volunteers who joyfully create wilderness. Plus it was fun to learn more from David Flowers who designed the Engineered Wetland Wastewater Treatment System. The essence of it is that with knowledge and understanding we can use natural processes to do a superior job of cleaning-up our wastewater. These people, and others, are living proof that it is possible to create a more sustainable future.

Simultaneously I was launching my second band, Embedded Reporter. I met Darrell Smith (vocalist, percussionist, violin) at Riveredge. At the time Darrell was employed at the Urban Ecology Center and taking a course at Riveredge. So of course environmentalism is an interest we share—one of many. That interest, plus peace issues, conflict resolution, coping skills, social justice, and the human condition recur throughout our repertoir. But we don’t beat people over the head with it. It’s subtle and generally very optimistic. I believe that “if it ain’t fun, it won’t get done,” so I would say we are happy warriors in the struggle to make the world a better place.

We use the music to advance environmental causes, and that experience colors the material we create and/or select. Best of all, we’re not always preaching to the choir. Most of our gigs take it directly to people who drive Hummers or Lincoln Navigators. It’s a beautiful thing, especially when we get the check. I figure that if they make a more enlightened vehicle purchasing decision the next time, we’ve performed a public service. Greening the planet is an incremental, long-term process, but it is happening. We should celebrate victories—large or small.

About a year ago I had an opportunity to interview and do a story about Eric Larsen for “M” Magazine. Eric is the son of Riveredge’s Executive Director Emeritus, Andy Larsen. Eric had just returned from the North Pole, having walked there. More correctly, he and his partner slogged there over hundreds of miles of treacherous collapsing ice using skiis, special kayaks, and raw nerve. They were the first (known) individuals to do so in summertime, and they did a lot of science along the way. It seems that sattelite images are hard to get during the Arctic Summer due to cloud cover, plus sattelites can show the extent of the ice/ice melt, but they do a poor job of measuring the ice thickness, information critical to knowing how much fresh water is locked-up in the ice fields. After having a heart to heart with someone as committed as Eric Larsen it is impossible not to recognize the reality of global warming and it is impossible not to work for solutions.

I am currently serving on the board at Wellspring in Newburg, Wis consin. Wellspring is a CSA (organic/biodynamic) and conference center. A very exciting prospect is that our new farm manager is certified in permaculture. Hopefully I’ll be able to learn a little more about permaculture.

I’m also working with Mark Heffernan at Growing Power to package information about the aneroebic digester for various publics, explaining what it does and why they should care.

And there’s the bonobo project. They are being threatened in the wild, perhaps fatally. Zoo’s may be the only hope for species survival, but it is also clear that their captive environment needs to be rethought with an eye toward remediating physical and mental health issues that bubble up as a result of their unnatural confinement. But I am hopeful we can make their lives better and confident we will learn a great deal about the bonobos and about us as well along the way.