Weekend Roundup: Donations From Yelich, American Family To Upgrade Little League Fields

Donations from Milwaukee Brewers’ Christian Yelich, American Family and others are going toward fields for Beckum-Stapleton Little League, reports the Journal Sentinel.

Beckum-Stapleton Little League is a nonprofit, volunteer organization that’s been around since the 1960s, supporting baseball opportunities for youth on Milwaukee’s north side.

With the donations, the league will upgrade dugouts, uniforms and equipment.

“I’m glad to see somebody’s interested in helping us to improve the fields,” said James W. Beckum, 92, the league’s co-founder. “It’s exciting. It’s going to be great for the kids and also for the people to come out here to see the community making some changes and getting better.”

Wisconsin DHS: COVID-19 Weekly Recap

The seven-day average for new COVID-19 cases in Wisconsin is 2,746 as of Friday. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services has confirmed 7,912 total deaths from the disease.

Slightly more than 53 percent of Wisconsinites are fully vaccinated — 83.4 percent of people age 65 and older and 40.8 percent of children age 12 to 15.

This week, Pfizer and BioNTech announced results that indicate its COVID-19 vaccine is safe for children age 5-11. But rollout for the age group is still a ways down the road; the company must submit its analysis to the Food and Drug Administration for review.

Wawautosa West Is Home To Virtual Cadaver

The Anatomage Table is a 3-D virtual cadaver that features human and animal bodies — and there’s one at Wauwatosa West High School, reports the Journal Sentinel.

Students are able to perform surgical procedures and experiments on the virtual cadaver.

“With real cadavers, if you make a mistake, it’s a big mistake. With the virtual cadaver table, if you make a mistake, you can reset it. Slice the head open, you can put it right back on,” said Tina Kock, the school’s innovation specialist.

The tool gives students opportunities to get ahead in fields like nursing or science and technology.

The Anatomage Table is a $50,000 tablet, which the school paid for using a grant from Education Foundations of Wauwatosa.

Milwaukee Man Collects Seeds To Reforest Wisconsin

For the last 15 years, Benny Koch has spent his free time traversing parks, backyards and even cemeteries across Milwaukee collecting seeds from Wisconsin’s native trees.

Koch is among a group of people across the state including state Department of Natural Resources employees that help create the trees the department will sell in a few years, reforesting Wisconsin to combat climate change, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Joe Vande Hay, the DNR’s reforestation team leader and nursery superintendent, said the department distributed about 4.7 million seedlings across the state this spring. Since the nursery program began in 1911, the department has produced about 1.6 billion seedlings.

The hobby for Koch first began when he saw an advertisement noting the DNR was offering to pay residents to help collect seeds from oak, maple and basswood trees.

“I didn’t know what I was doing at first, but it was a fun thing to do with the kids when they were little and get outside and exercise,” Koch told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Madison Man’s New Pastime Is Picking Up Litter

Al Krieger enjoys long walks on the streets of Madison — to pick up garbage.

“It all started because I didn’t like looking at it,” Krieger told the State Journal. “I’m volunteering, trying to make my area look nice … down to the last cigarette butt.”

He said he began to notice plastic bags and other litter on his way to the grocery store. His shopping trips became longer and longer as he’d take extra time to pick up the trash.

With a bucket and a long metal grabber, Krieger circles his neighborhood on the far east side of town almost every day when the weather allows, and about twice a week during the winter.

His wife jokingly calls him “the garbage man.”

“This is an extension of my home. This is almost like my lawn,” he said. “It only takes a few seconds to pick (litter) up, and if everybody thought like that, it would be clean.”

Fall Fun: Get Out On The Trails, Lost In The Corn

Zip lining. Mountain biking. Canoeing. Hiking. Kayaking. Rock climbing. You name it — this Journal Sentinel article tells you where to do it.

None of that your style? Check out these Wisconsin corn mazes instead.

83 Percent Of Rental Assistance Funds Still Unspent

Only $7.7 billion out of $46 billion of federal rental assistance funds had been spent by the end of August, according to the latest data from the U.S. Treasury Department.

Even with the Biden administration’s relaxed program guidelines, the pace of allocating the funds is so slow, HuffPost reports, that many localities could lose their funds if they can’t spend them by the end of September.

The Treasury Department has said only 119 state and local jurisdictions had spent more than half of their allotments.

Rental assistance is more needed than ever, as the national eviction moratorium was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in late August, putting millions of low-income renters at risk of losing their homes.