(upbeat music) - We are back with a new episode of "You Oughta Know."

Here's a look at what's coming up.

It's his passion that powers this broadcaster's performance.

We board the biodiesel Boogie Bus with local musicians April Mae & the June Bugs.

Plus, bringing the ancient world to life for Philly students.

(upbeat music) Welcome to the show.

I'm Shirley Min.

Rowan University freshman, Allan Wiley, is making a name for himself as a sports color commentator.

He's really good and you'd never know from listening to him that he's blind.

(upbeat percussive music) - [Interviewer] Today, your Delaware Blue Coats take on the Osceola Magic.

My name is Owen Caldwell.

I'm joined this morning by Allan Wiley.

What do you want to see today from the folks?

- [Interviewee] I want to see a lot more closing out on the board.

- [Host] As the color commentator for Delaware Blue Coats games, Allan Wylie, who's blind, provides analysis and insight for Rowing University's radio station.

- [Allan] This Blue Coats team has has been outscoring Osceola ten to two, outstanding start to the second quarter.

(crowd cheers) - [Narrator] Allan listens carefully to the play-by-play, to the players and of course, the crowd.

He also studies meticulously ahead of games.

- I'll try to see on the internet, box scores of past games involving the opponents or both teams that I'm covering.

I'll look at video highlights of them on YouTube and then I'll read news articles from past games that involve one of, or both of those teams.

- [Narrator] It's almost like Allan was born to do this.

- I've listened to sports since I was a baby and it's just kind of snowballed from there.

I used to do little games in my head where I would make crowd noise with, you know, with my mouth and do the games.

(upbeat techno music) - You can't tell he's blind when you're listening to him analyze a game on the radio.

You just can't.

He's very unique.

He's a young man that knows what he wants to do, prepares exceptionally well and there's not a lot of blind broadcasters at Allan's level, at 18 years old doing what he's doing and broadcasting G League basketball games.

- [Narrator] Neil Hartman is the senior director of the Center for Sports Communication at Rowan.

Neil knows Allan's family well and he recruited Allan to come to Rowan.

- Allan has to audition for the Blue Coats job and he did it with a senior play-by-play broadcaster.

- Heat shot for him and he drills it.

Just like what I said, Jar, Browridge, proving my point right there.

Big three pointer to put the Coats back in front.

- It was seamless.

It was like they'd worked together for years and yet they only met a couple of times prior to that.

He's very poised and you can tell he's been practicing for a long period of time.

But for what Allan does and how he does it, I'd say he's definitely ahead of the game.

- Showtime!

- Yeah, Showtime is right.

- He's gonna be very successful in this business.

There's no doubt in my mind.

- And that's been the story right now.

This Blue Coats team has just not been able to find their rhythm.

Tough loss.

That's really what it was.

I hope that it kind of helps people realize that if you have a quote, unquote, "disability," it's gonna be hard and of course it's gonna be hard.

Of course it is, but you can still do what your heart desires.

I love it.

I love every second of it.

It's a lot of fun.

- After Allan graduates in 2028, he hopes to have his voice heard on on a National Sports talk show of some kind.

And we here at, "You Ought to Know," wish Allan lots of luck.

Dr. Mark McLaughlin is using wrestling to empower Trenton's youth and make a difference in young people's lives.

(indistinct chatter) - When he turns you, you have to fall down and let him do the move.

We're not wrestling now.

He's learning a move.

Drive, drive, drive.

That is perfect!

That was perfect!

- People say you're a brain surgeon and you coach wrestling.

That doesn't go together and my answer is, "Goes together beautifully."

Go this way, go this way.

I work on people's brains and I perform brain surgery.

Are you having fun?

Day in and day out.

But when I'm in the wrestling room, I'm working on kids' brains.

I'm passing on those same lessons.

You know, who holds you down?

Nobody.

- [Group] Number 1!

- What are we on our feet?

Relentless.

- [Group] Relentless!

- Who owns the third period?

We do.

- [Group] We do!

- Those are lessons and those nerves that fire together, wire together.

So kids learn that.

And that's brain surgery.

I'm doing brain surgery on the wrestling mats and planting ideas, words of empowerment and teaching responsibility.

It's the same on the wrestling mat as it is in the OR.

I land like this.

Okay?

Because I wanna pin him, right?

I say up, you count.

Ready?

Up, up.

- We met Dr. McLaughlin at Princeton's Youth Wrestling program when I was about eight years old and I know him most as Coach Mark.

I wrestled in Princeton all the way from about third grade through eighth grade and then after Princeton Youth Program, I wrestled at Church High for four years and then went on to wrestle in college at the University of Pennsylvania.

I wrestled one year in grad school at the University of Virginia.

- I began coaching in Princeton and coached the Youth Wrestling program for about 15, 20 years and I was blessed to have a family, the Bethea family, come to our practice room in Princeton because there weren't opportunities for them to wrestle in Trenton.

And so they went through our Princeton program and I saw them go on in life and lead these amazing lives going to Ivy League schools, getting graduate degrees, being scholar athletes at the highest level.

And so I partnered with them because I knew we wanted to bring this product that we had in Princeton to Trenton.

- Good job!

We formed a nonprofit called Trenton Youth Wrestling and Learning Center and we decided we would bring wrestling to the elementary schools, to the middle schools.

We now have six programs, three middle schools and three elementary schools and our goal is to get in all the schools so that every kid has a wrestling and learning opportunity when they're in school.

- Trenton's home.

This place is really, really special to me.

It's where I grew up and then just seeing the adversity that youth face in our city.

Just having a love for the sport, knowing what it has done for me in my life and the places that it has taken me.

I wanted to come home and share that with other kids and there's just no better place for me to do that than right at home with Trent Youth Wrestling and Learning Center.

- I began wrestling in sixth grade.

Outside my parents and my grandparents, my youth wrestling coach really was a major influence in my life.

I knew I always wanted to go into medicine and wrestling really kept me focused.

It allowed me to get exercise.

It allowed me to really prioritize my studies as well.

And I always found that my grades were better during wrestling season than when I was in the off season.

You guys know what I do when I'm not on a wrestling mat?

I'm a doctor.

I take care of people and I happen to be a surgeon.

I operate on people, I operate on their brains and I operate on their spines.

It's tough, just like wrestling!

We leave it all on the mat, I leave it all in the operating room.

It's the same.

We really focus on our team values of character, commitment and community and we emphasize that to the kids over and over again.

Character is what you do when nobody's looking.

Community is what happens to me, happens to you.

- We wanna bring kids in, get them into wrestling, get them excited about wrestling and get them to get the skills and the benefit of participating in wrestling, but also to transfer that over to the classroom.

You have a wrestling coach who really cares about how you perform in wrestling, but they also care about how you perform in the classroom.

They also care about how you're doing as a person.

They care about your wellbeing.

The child can come after school and get wrestling, but also get a mentor, get a tutor, get a healthy meal, and really have a safe place to come and really grow and develop as a person.

Good work!

I absolutely see Coach Mark as a good soul.

He really cares about the people that he coaches.

- Both of you guys, good first time.

- You see him have compassion on people that he serves and then you see that in everything that he does.

On three, Trenton Youth Wrestling.

1, 2, 3.

- [Group] Trenton Youth Wrestling!

- Hey.

Good job.

Good practice.

Good job!

- As we celebrate Earth Day this month, we caught up with musicians: April Mae & the June Bugs, whose eco-friendly tour bus is helping to preserve the earth one mile at a time.

- (sing) April Mae & the June Bugs, roost baby, roost!

♪ Better get your luggage packed ♪ ♪ I'll meet you by the railroad track ♪ ♪ Jumping jive and swing ♪ ♪ Everybody's jumping down to Palm Spring ♪ - We were inspired to get the bus and convert it to run-on waste vegetable oil by Pete Seeger.

We learned about this technology at his Clearwater Festival.

(band plays, crowd cheers) And at this festival they have a sustainable living area and we saw Mercedes-Benz coming in on diesel and then leaving at the end of the weekend running on fry oil from the vendors.

And we were so inspired by that.

- I was thinking this is definitely something that we could do and we like to be a part of helping out in the environment.

(banjo plays joyfully) The first step is to get the kit.

These kits are exclusive for diesel engines.

We have a 7.3 power stroke, E-350 Ford short bus.

The engine starts on diesel.

We run the engine however long it takes for the temperature to rise to 250 degrees.

When that happens, a green light goes on and then you run on vegetable oil.

We have to find places that will give us oil.

- We were really blessed that a friend of ours, Lacretia Sulimay had the diner in Fishtown.

Sulimay's has become our favorite place to pick up oil because they cook amazing food and they cook really clean.

So the oil we pick up is very clean, which is important.

It takes less processing from us.

(banjo continues) - These oil containers are usually four to five gallon little containers.

But how I process them when I take them back is I just go through a screen, take out any of the frying debris, nice clean oil, and pour it through.

Also, there's filtration systems that's in the bus, that's fuel filters and as well as filters that are collecting the oil through our transfer pump.

That's the process.

(banjo continues happily) - The most recent southern tour we did with the vegetable oil required us to go to New Orleans to play the New Orleans Cigar Box Guitar Festival.

(upbeat music) Depending on the oil that you're burning and what was cooked in the oil, the people behind you are gonna have the benefit of smelling food.

If you picked up funnel cake oil, they're gonna get funnel cake aromatherapy.

If you picked up french fry oil, they're gonna have a craving for french fries, perhaps.

So it's gonna smell like whatever they were cooking the food in, which is kind of fun.

This next tune is a bit of a hybrid.

We have a song that we perform called "Grease It Up and Go."

It pays homage to our little bus outside that runs on waste vegetable oil.

She's a hybrid too.

♪ We got a bus outside when it's time to cruise ♪ ♪ We don't want no gas pump ♪ ♪ Give us the blues ♪ ♪ This little thing goes ♪ Some of the verses are from early jug bands in the 1930s and then we wrote some verses of our specific to the Boogie Bus and running on waste vegetable oil so that we get to also share with people that we're running on vegetable oil during the musical performance through song, which is fun.

(bugle plays merrily) - It feels fabulous, it feels empowering.

It feels like you're giving back to the earth and to society as well.

(band plays joyfully) - In 2010, an oil rig explosion spilled millions of gallons of oil into the gulf.

This incident inspired a local artist and a retired psychologist to educate the community about protecting the habitat we all live in.

(dark music) - 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico, an entire summer of oil spilling.

Platform blew up, killed a bunch of people and then just continued to poison the Gulf of Mexico.

Killed all kinds of creatures and people so I had to do something different.

I've been a visual artist basically my entire life.

I loved painting, I loved having gallery shows, but I had to do something different.

And I ended up doing a graphic novel and it's "The Big Belch" and it's a very silly graphic novel.

I did all the drawings and writing.

It's about a corporation's PR stunt almost blowing up the planet.

The graphic novel directly led to me having this radio show.

(birds chirping) - You're listening to Germantown Community Radio, 92.9 FM WGGT, LP Philadelphia and online, gtownradio.com.

- Hi, this is Planet Philadelphia here on Germantown Community Radio.

Linda Rosenwein, our assistant producer reporter, is here with me and Linda... - I grew up in a family where we bird watched, we went all over the world looking for birds and my family was very interested in the natural world.

So after I retired I didn't wanna do psychology anymore, but I felt that the environment was the moral issue of our time.

We heard about pollution from runoff, from nitrogen fertilizer and in fact... And I knew from activist things I've done in the past that I wanted to do something that made a difference.

- The first show was in September, 2015.

- We spent a lot of time thinking about the topic, reading about it and preparing questions.

- [Inquirer] Where does rainwater go?

- We don't wanna just do what everybody is covering.

We wanna do something where we think we have something new to say and can go in more depth.

- [DJ] Instead of saying, we're going to send the rainwater out of here, we talk about sites drinking their own rainbow.

- We try to make the, at least a little bit, delve into the relationships of what's happening globally and what's happening locally, but also across topics, I guess, like social justice and environmental justice.

Trying to make, to explain some of the connections between what's happening here in our backyards and how it's affected by everything that's happening around us.

Do you remember the smoke this summer?

That was from fires 3,000 miles away and our skies were orange.

- [Informant] Space was doing ecological services for the park and for a wider community that are now like... - [Linda] It's a show about our environment which is everything around us.

Hopefully we're educating people to think much more deeply about the environment.

We try to make everything hopeful.

We try to give hopeful things or what you can do.

- For the last 10 years, the Penn Museum has been unpacking the past to help Philly students learn more about history.

- When unpacking the past started in 2014, it was only supposed to be a three year program.

It was such an important program that the Penn Museum committed to keeping it going.

We are reaching people that would not come otherwise and it is directly related to what they're learning.

- For a lot of students, museums can be intimidating.

So being here at the Penn Museum, I'm able to use my teacher skills, but in an impactful way.

- The Penn Museum started the program because they noticed the Philadelphia public school classes were not visiting as much as suburban classes and the curriculum in middle school is directly aligned with what we see at the Penn Museum: Ancient civilizations, human history.

It seemed like such a waste to have all of these students in the city of Philadelphia right near this world class museum not getting to see it.

There's a lot of barriers to schools going on field trips and also money that kids don't have and schools don't have.

So this program takes a lot of that off the table.

We pay for the buses and the programs here at the museum.

Program actually starts with a pre-visit lesson.

We come into the class and we get to meet the students and we get to prepare them for their trip in a way that will help them be successful while they're here.

Usually the kids come the next day or two days later.

The museum educator that went to the school will go out and greet the buses.

We'll do a quick orientation and then they will start on their programs.

Most of the students do our paint making workshop, so we teach them how ancient people made paint from resources in their environment.

And then they get to paint a wooden magnet that they can keep.

Another part of the trip is going on a gallery tour and there's so much to look at, but they're really impressed.

- I try to make sure that it connects to their lives right now.

A lot of times when you're studying ancient people, students are like, "What does this have to do with me and why does it matter?"

So I'll always try to start with some type of everyday scenario.

You ever walk down the streets of Philly and you've seen a mural, you like the colors?

That's paint.

Most colors come from a natural source.

Some are easier to get, some are harder to get.

But once you make that life connection and it shows why it matters to them, they're pretty hooked.

- Before they leave, at the end of the day we present them with cinch bags and inside we give them a pencil and a sticker with an object from the collection.

But the main thing is that we give them a family pass with a coupon code so that they can come back for a whole year with their entire family.

And they can come more than once.

There's a lot of impact that we see over the last 10 years.

Having a field trip that's really easy for teachers to plan and free and engaging, we try to reach about 6,000 students per year.

More than half of the students in sixth and seventh grade in Philadelphia getting to come to the Penn Museum is pretty incredible.

Part of our mission is to share the story of humanity and we don't wanna share the story of humanity with just a sliver of the population.

- The students have a good time, they learn and they're gonna remember when they came here and someone may just feel like a star.

That makes me feel good.

- We live to see the students excited about learning.

It does feel very rewarding that the work that we're doing here is making a difference.

- Turning now to a story that takes us to a Fishtown sneaker store that specializes in kicks and coffee.

- This just came to me.

That's pretty much all there is to, I just woke up with the idea of a sneaker coffee shop.

My name is Lewis, I'm owner of Encanto.

I'm formally from your school, the Linc High School.

So in the ninth grade, me and my friends Eric and Brian, we used to sell sneakers.

Like any sneakers that was coming out, we would charge $50 extra and we would find sneakers for the person.

And then that led into like us really finding a passion for selling sneakers and eventually this is where we led.

The thought process behind it was, like a lot of sneaker stores, like the one that I had are not sustainable because there's a sneaker market and if you have to make your rent, you have to pay your employees.

You can't charge what someone who doesn't have an overhead is charging for sneakers so you have to overcharge and that would throw customers off.

But since I have a different source of income, with the coffee, I don't have to overcharge for my sneakers.

I sell 'em at market value, which keeps the customers happy.

The one thing that brings me joy is like when I make the coffee for the people and like unprovoked, they just go up to me and be like, "Oh, your coffee was really good.

I really like it."

And then they come back.

I visit a lot of coffee shops and me personally, I'm not the biggest fan of coffee shops 'cause when you go to them, they're like all dark and gloomy and that's just not the vibes that I like.

So I wanted mine to be like very vibrant and bright.

You're having a bad day, you walk in here and the bright colors might make you feel better.

What I've tried to do is just be different.

Our coffee's imported directly from Puerto Rico, so if you like the taste of our coffee beans then you can't get it nowhere else but here.

- Is there anything like cool about the snacks that you got here?

- Yeah, so they're all traditional Puerto Rican pastries.

We have cacitos, (speaks foreign language), Besitos de Coco.

I'm just proud to be Puerto Rican.

I really like where I'm from and I like to show that off to the world.

So I was just telling him it was those right there, they just came out, the Military Blues.

I could still remember the day I got 'em, it was from my seventh grade back to school.

My mom usually doesn't let us get white pair of sneakers for schools 'cause she says we'll get 'em dirty.

But that day she let me in.

I was able to get those right there.

I know it's just something about 'em.

Like you put on a fresh pair of kicks, everybody looking at you is like, I don't know.

It's something that I've always been into.

- [Host] Our education department helped produce this story with media students from Phillies Link High School.

To learn more about how WHYY's youth media programs are preparing the next generation, check out our website.

This week's flick may send a chill down your spine.

Patrick Stoner talks with Dennis Quaid about his emotionless serial killer character in "Happy Face."

- [Observer] Earlier today, the person called into this show, the Happy Face killer.

- The trucker serial killer from around here?

- Mm-hmm.

And he made it clear there were only two people here that he would talk to: myself and Melissa here.

Why?

- He's my father.

- [Host] Dennis Quaid stars in a series about the real life happy face killer, a man with very little conscience or even an understanding of how bad he was.

I've interviewed Dennis for many years through bad times at the beginning and then good times as he got his act together.

It was a pleasure to talk to him again.

Hey Dennis.

What a pleasure.

You're looking good.

- What is this?

Our 400th interview?

- (laughs) Well I tell you, we haven't done one about this kind of a character before.

This is quite a nice stretch, nice range.

- Hey man, you look great.

You look fantastic.

- Well that's nice of you to say.

I'm 78 today, Dennis.

It's my birthday and it's a pleasure to be doing this on my birthday 'cause we do have a long history and one that I respect.

But enough of that right now.

The question is, when you play a character so, so intense, do you have a tendency to take it home with you?

- The last time that happened was Jerry Lee Lewis.

So- - I remember that... - Back in the eighties.

Yeah.

Since then I have learned to drop it like a hot potato.

- (laughs) You know I was talking with your costar and she had interesting things to say.

Of course it was scary in the moment.

You were also playing this character as vulnerable which she found interesting, sort of reflecting on before he became a monster kind of a thing.

- He was remarkably easy to play because he doesn't have emotions.

People who do these kinds of things, they are separated from their emotions.

They rationalize what they do.

I mean, "Alice, do you live?"

He's still trying to pretend that it's just the same relationship as what she was growing up, but that at 15 he got caught.

He killed eight women in five years.

How do you reconcile that?

This sweet relationship that you had with your dad and now he's this monster?

Makes you question yourself?

- [Host] And he has no inner conflict, so you're not gonna get anything from him that's real.

- [Dennis] No.

He just wants it to be just the way it was, and tries to put it on her and he separated from his emotions, like I said, and that's the psychology of it to me.

- Dennis, thank you very much and especially for all of these years of getting a chance to explore your craft with you.

- Let's do another 30 to 40, Stoner!

- Okay, buddy.

- Alright, that is our show.

Have a great night everyone.

(upbeat music)