Rural Issue

The People Remember Project

As we go about our busy lives, seldom do we take time to contemplate how we got here and the people who went before us. Over the years, Ed Janus has been a dairy farmer, a journalist, an author, owned a minor league baseball club and built a successful brewery.  His audio features have been used by National Public Radio and Voice of America.  His book: Creating Dairyland chronicles the people who made Wisconsin “America’s Dairyland.”

His latest effort is called “The People Remember Project”. Janus says; “Throughout Wisconsin’s history, thousands of men and women worked the land and built up the soil and prosperity of our state. Sadly, they and their stories are gone, and with them a sense of our own deep connections to the places and people from which we ourselves have grown.”  So he is traveling the state, seeking out those few remaining contributors and recording their stories.

He has talked to a 93-year-old lady near Richland Center who raised nine children and still feeds her son’s calves every day: a farmer near Athens who composes poetry while driving his tractor: an old bachelor farmer who once saw the great Satchel Paige pitch in his small town: a dance teacher in southwestern Wisconsin who’s dance troop won the Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour: a farm kid from the Stratford area who is now a Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church.

Janus talks about the project:

The interviews are posted on The People Remember website and all will eventually be turned over to the Wisconsin Historical Society. “We’re getting farmers into history so they will be preserved at the State Historical Society.”  Janus is always looking for leads on people to interview for the project as well as people who would like to help in the effort.  Just click on “Contact Us” on the website.