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With white shutters warming under the bright spring sunshine, Dorothy Bertolas’ small one-story home sits quietly along the sleepy residential streets of Menomonee Falls, Wis. The house’s interior is warm, snug, and neat as a pin. Its walls, all painted in a crisp eggshell white, are laden with relics of a time gone by. Years […]

Gov. Scott Walker vetoed a provision in the biennial state budget on Sunday that would have turned all probationary contracts for academic staff in the UW System into fixed-term contracts. The Legislature would have mandated the elimination of indefinite status, the non-PhD equivalent of tenure, for about 158  academic staff at UW-Milwaukee, as well as more […]

“We’re ready for this, boys!” yelled captain Zach Lubin. “Everything starts tonight.” The thud, thud, thud of his goalkeeper gloves echoed inside the tunnel. I fiddled with my shinpad tape, stretched a quadricep muscle, and glared at the referees, willing them to get this landmark evening underway. I was understandably impatient. I had waited six […]

There are 158 employees at UW-Milwaukee whose probationary terms could be switched to fixed term contracts – likely two years long – if the full Legislature approves a Joint Finance Committee measure ordering the Regents to eliminate indefinite status for academic staff in the UW System. As a result, they are on what the chancellor […]

Fourteen students in the JAMS 500 Advanced Integrated Reporting class created this piece of collaborative student journalism in spring 2015. The goal of this “time capsule” is to document for future generations how UWM students live, work, study and play. Student collaborators were: Ryan Artman, Sean Cornell, Brooke Dowden, Katie Eggers, John Gingrass, Joe Halley, […]

Reaching across the top of a wooden casket as it slowly rolled past more than 1,000 mourners in the pews of the St. Monica Parish, sisters Chloe and Hailey tightly held each other’s hands. Walking in front of them was their little brother, Bryce, and father Michael. Together, as their eyes welled with tears and […]

It was a cold gloomy evening when the protest began on Dec. 19, 2014. It started at Red Arrow Park. Many people gathered, bundled up in their coats, hats, gloves and scarves. “No Justice, No Peace!” read the signs people held above their heads as they walked toward Interstate-43. “Shut it down! Shut it down!” […]

Karen Kramer pulled her wide-eyed, 22-year-old daughter, Becky, into a hug. She held her daughter tight, so she could hear her heart beating rapidly. As Karen kissed her daughter’s blonde head, tears rolled down Karen’s cheeks onto Becky’s pale, bruised skin. The two sat for hours, talking and crying. Karen begged Becky to stay. To […]

For Willie Bedford’s five siblings, his face was a distant memory. They lost their brother 45 years ago in Vietnam. In the decades since, one-by-one, their photos of him were also lost, especially after the family matriarch died. It had been about 20 years since any of them had seen his picture. Until Memorial Day […]

There were 64 names. Of supposedly unfindable photos of men from Wisconsin who’d died in Vietnam more than 40 years ago. Almost all of the men on the list were from Milwaukee, the state’s urban center. But had these men really vanished without a public trace, other than their names? A photo shows something more dimensional than letters on granite, […]

Many days, you can find Terry Kramer, a Vietnam-era veteran who lives in Baraboo, sitting in the Milwaukee Public Library and digging though records to find faces to put with names on a very important list. Kramer, who makes the 116-mile drive each way to Milwaukee for his research, has found many of the fallen […]

Andrew Johnson stood quietly in the front of a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee classroom with a poster that read, “Help Find the last 18,” as students filed in for their next class. Johnson, a small newspaper publisher, has taken on an incredible task—finding a photo for every person who was killed in the Vietnam War from […]