This week on Arizona Illustrated, meet a beloved Tucson character, Rio Finnegan, The world is often not exactly set up for us.

The long way sometimes is the best way.

An important fossil collection is restored.

Paleo humans hunting giant animals like the mammoths.

Many of those sites are from the southwest, an educational extravaganza into the world of science, technology, engineering and math.

Another big goal of Arizona STEM Adventure is that every child will be able to see themselves in a STEM professional.

And a story about how a loaf of bread can change a person.

You're starving.

We're going to feed you.

So they give flour to the bakers.

But right away, they say there'll be no food for the Jewish people.

Hello and welcome to another all new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We're coming to you from Catalina Park.

A beautiful little quadrant right off of Fourth Avenue, sporting its winter look right now, the grass a bit yellow, the trees a little bare.

But spring is not far away.

And soon this park will once again be green and thriving.

You know, if you've been in Tucson any length of time, you know that this community is full of colorful characters.

And one of those who we're proud to know is Rio Finnegan.

He's very active in the arts and music scene, even though he's confined to a wheelchair.

And on his podcast, he's very forthright about his disability.

And he uses humor to try to get all of us to talk honestly about the issues affecting the disabled community.

(Rio) Real invisibility, the one that's so complicated and one that's, in my opinion, so tragic is not being understood.

I always think about it, maybe it's a compulsion of mine to be as vulnerable as I can so I can be seen.

I have spina bifida, which means that the nerve endings below my waist basically fell out of my body when I was born, so I can't feel anything below there.

In high school, I was like, I'm so tired of hating my body.

So I wrote down a list of all the things I hated about my body, and it was a long list, but I worked on each one every day.

You know, this is interesting the way it moves and the way it's shaped and everything like that.

Like.

That's.

That can be beautiful.

And once you do that, there's something that just kind of just.

Shoots out, it just shines.

I mean, anybody could do it.

That's the thing.

But we are kind of forced to work on that at an accelerated rate.

[upbeat music] The first movie I ever watched was The Jungle Book.

And Mowgli was so fascinating to me because he was raised by wolves.

He realizes that he can't exactly run or hunt exactly like these wolves.

He's shaped differently.

And I felt like that very heavily.

There's lots of can'ts out there For instance, I can't play guitar.

I tried.

That's fine.

I play keyboards instead.

Play harmonica instead.

Okay.

I really wanted to surf, so I invented a whole new way of surfing, which is tandem surfing.

I got a buddy in the back who helps me paddle out.

He pops up.

You find different ways to do different things.

And feel like existentialism plays a lot into this because I had 27 surgeries and came to the brink of death many times.

And having that mortality realism, you kind of understand certain fears in a different way.

You know, when I'm surfing, you can be flown off your board at any moment.

You know, you have a little more control instead of infection hitting you.

You just pass.

Mowgli goes to the village of the humans.

For me, that moment was my mom was like, You should really start engaging with your community of disabled people.

So I went to a camp with all people with spina bifida.

There was like a pop question.

If you could do anything you wanted without any limits, what would that be?

And at the time, I really wanted to like travel in India, you know, I wanted to go to the ruins.

I wanted to run through the jungle.

I wanted to I wanted to be Mowgli.

So at that time, I remember looking into the technology of robotics and prosthetics.

And I learned that day that that's a big no no in the disabled community, mainly because there's a long negativity to prosthetics going like, Oh, well, you're giving up your disabled card because you hate yourself.

And that wasn't me.

I just wanted to run through the woods.

The world is often not exactly set up for us.

The long way sometimes is the best way.

Optimism for me is a kind of survival technique.

So I'll go from like downtown to midtown, 45 minute ride, and people are like, Rio!

That's insane.

Why would you do that?

Like, just go on the bus, like, no, it's really nice outside.

I got my tunes.

That's all I need.

I got this thing called autopilot.

It's pretty simple.

[upbeat music] Mowgli is in the human village.

He's like all these people like me, but they think differently.

So there was a difference there.

He was a boy trapped between two worlds.

Since I was a kid, I always wanted to be a storyteller.

I started writing screenplays.

Film school was wild and I just did everything I could.

I learned what not to do is exactly what everybody needs to learn.

And next February, I'm filming this proof of concept for this show that I'm doing.

And I really wanted to write this show about disabled people that instead of someone overcoming obstacles, becoming completely cured, I don't want to see that.

I want to see someone that is working on their things and their issues, their fears, honestly.

Also, I just want to see a show where there's a disabled guy just doing his laundry and that the obstacles that come with that like that that isn't shot.

And mainly disabled media film especially is written by abled people.

So I really fight for disabled writers in the writers room.

Thanks, man.

Appreciate you.

I use the podcast in 2020, started telling my stories and it felt good being very honest about my life, you know, my body, like disabled sex, which is completely different.

How we go to the bathroom, you know, and just like being open about that and finding love in that, you know, through that vulnerability.

(recorded voice) To me we can not separate our upbringing, our life experience in general from our sexuality and what we're into.

Like these are two very ingrained experiences.

(Rio) We accept the biases that society has.

We're molded by that.

Hey, how's it going?

IDs on you?

My job is to break that by talking to people.

(Man) How you doing?

(Rio) Pretty good.

You?

(Man) Not bad at all.

(Rio) Helping them realize that, first of all, I'm awesome, you're awesome.

And this is what I go through and it's beautiful.

Thank you, enoy yourselves.

The Desert Laboratories Vertebrate Paleontology Collection houses over 20,000 fossils, many of them from right here in southern Arizona.

Now, the collection focuses on a time period when humans co-existed with now extinct megafauna like mammoths and mastodons.

The collections in great shape now, but that wasn't always the case.

We'd like you to meet the people whose passion for fossils helped to restore this collection to its glory.

What were the critters... [Jessica] Pack rats.

[Jeff] Pack rats!

Little bitty turds.

[Jessica] Actually good sized.

[Jeff] And a lot of urine.

[Jessica]A lot of urine.

And this was on top of the specimens that were in the little boxes.

So who are you going to call?

Jessica and Jeff.

Crud Busters.

Crud Busters.

The vertebrate paleontology collection had been neglected for about 23 years.

The program from the ground up was built by Professor John Lance and the person who replaced him was Dr. Everett Lindsay.

And I got my master's under him, but when he retired, that was when the university did not replace him.

So the entire vertebrate paleontology program just simply came to a screaming halt.

Jeff had moved here from Illinois and was already starting on the incredible undertaking of cleaning and reorganizing the vertebrate paleontology collection, which had been neglected.

What Jeff started then I came on board a year after you were still breathing packrat poops.

Were fossils curating fossils.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm Lynne Shepartz and I'm the newly appointed collections manager for this, which is the paleontological collection of the University of Arizona, which is now part of the Desert Laboratory.

We're the repository of, I would say, about 20,000 fossils.

And these range from some very early materials that are dinosaurs.

Examples of dinosaur skin, the impressions left.

We have a lot of particularly mammoths in our collection.

This is the pelvis of a young male mammoth.

Most of our collection, and the biggest emphasis in terms of research, has been on some of the later time periods.

And this is sort of the times of the megafauna where you have large elephant like creatures, the mastodons and the mammoths, and you have large camels that were living right here in the southwest.

So this is part of the skull of a camel.

There's a rich history of camel forms that originated in the Americas.

We also have something that some people might shy away from studying and that is, to put it bluntly, fossil turds or coprolites and people were quite fascinated with these.

We can learn a lot from their contents about what the animal was eating.

The sites where there is evidence of paleo humans hunting giant animals like mammoths.

Many of those sites are from the southwest.

This lab has this great collection of faunal material from the Pleistocene, which is really useful if you're studying a site and you want to make identifications and figure out what animals are present at your site.

Some of them look like from extinct animals, and I need to make identifications to figure out what animal they're from.

So I've spent a lot of time just comparing what I have with what's here.

I've identified camel teeth.

There's a mammoth tooth recovered from the site as well, and there's plenty of mammoth material here to compare it with.

I've learned a lot from Jeff and Jessica about what it is to manage collections, and I realized there's a lot more to it than just looking at bones and so forth.

This this isn't a very fancy room.

You can tell, but it was so lively when Jeff and I were graduate students.

I am confident, not just hoping, confident that we're going to get a new crop of graduate students up here to study all this wonderful material that was left to molder for 20 odd years.

And now it's having its own renaissance.

Every fall, over a thousand fourth through eighth graders descend on Pima Community College for the Arizona STEM Adventure.

It's an educational extravaganza into the worlds of science and engineering, technology and math.

It's sponsored by the southern Arizona Regional Science and Engineering Foundation, and the aim is to get the kids excited about pursuing careers in these fields.

I was thinking about those those days.

Being a student and knowing it was field trip day and that excitement is just you can feel it.

There are kids arriving, busses coming in.

As we got here earlier, one of the escorts said, okay, what do you want to see first here?

What do you want to see first?

And the kids were just like 'science!'

My name is Dani Wright, and I'm the director of events and volunteers at SARSEF and I'm an event coordinator here with Arizona STEM Adventure.

SARSEF is the Southern Arizona Research Science and Engineering Foundation, and the Arizona STEM Adventure is an event held at Pima Community College for fourth through eighth grade students and their teachers.

So it's it's part field trip and part professional development for teachers.

This is a super exciting day for me.

I love just walking around and feeling the energy and the excitement and listening to the kids just getting filled with wonder.

[Voice] Yes, shake shake shake!

[Man] We have magnets and bookmarks and magnifying glasses [Dani] This year, we are excited that we have 40 exhibitors.

We have a number of campus clubs.

We have science centers and children's museums here.

We're talking about robots.

We're talking about different ways that computer science can be applied [Man] Click on the red piece, and then you're going to rotate around for the next one.

You're going to click on the next one to build components [Emily] We have a really nice shop that has 3D printers and laser cutter and woodworking equipment.

We have a geology sandbox.

[Kid] We should make a whole big lake.

[chatter] We have people making nitrogen ice cream.

We have Raytheon Technologies is here making the nitrogen ice cream.

[Man] We're here from Raytheon we're going to talk about liquid nitrogen today.

You pour liquid nitrogen over here to get it really cold, really fast.

We also have women's chemistry group doing Silly Putty.

That is a very popular attraction.

[Woman] When we add the glue to the bag that's when the chemistry happens.

Rub it between your hands like trying to warm your hands.

[Dani] Another big goal of Arizona STEM adventure is that every child will be able to see themselves in the STEM professional.

And so part of our plan and part of our hope is to take those preconceived notions.

And really we have a group coming up and they are very excited to be here at STEM Adventure.

I love it.

They're chanting VR because, you know, any virtual reality exhibit will be very popular.

So they must just be coming from that.

[chatter] [Girl] Whoa!

This is amazing!

Oh my god, this is so...

So cool!

[Man] Thank you so much for coming here today.

I hope that you're excited about virtual reality technology.

[Dani] As humans, as we notice things as we wonder things, that curiosity, that playfulness is so important in everything that we do.

Our hope here with an event like this is to help them to realize that science is everything and science is everywhere.

[Emily] And watching them play and just being able to walk around and know that you are a part of that and that positive impact that you're making on these students.... That it is fun, it is engaging.

It's something that "I can maybe do one day."

And knowing that I've made a lasting imprint on that is just super, super rewarding for me.

Inspired by Ken Burns, U.S. and the Holocaust documentary series 8 p.m. Enlisted Contributing producer Laura Markowitz and videographer Martin Rubio to conduct interviews with 18 of southern Arizona's Holocaust survivors to preserve them and make them available to everyone is a community resource.

Here is one story from that collection the first thing, what they decided to do you starving.

We're going to feed you so they give flour to the bakers and they told them, bake the bread.

But rather way they say there'd be no food for the Jewish people.

And, you know, some of the Jewish people, they dress differently.

They look differently.

If a person like that would stay in line he would get pulled, beaten up and say there's no food for you.

My mother was standing in line, holding me in her arms when I would turn came the German that was watching the line, give me a loaf of bread and my mother a loaf of bread, which was unbelievable.

Because nobody got to loaf of bread.

So as we walk at the end of the line was thank a woman that she was living in our building.

And every time that she saw my mother, she would say, hey, look at that Jew woman.

And that was not an exception.

Say, look at the Jew woman.

She has to a loaf of bread.

By the time it's going to be my turn, there'll be no bread left over.

So my mother gave a loaf of bread knowing that I'm starving, and the woman was sitting with her mouth open.

She didn't know what to say, but some time a loaf of bread change a person so he took me.

I slept in his house.

They slaughter epic and the fate on this stomach, which is really and you know, with this skin, they wrap around my body, I mean, so tight that I felt like I am in a cocoon.

We go to the gate the Germans say, be prepared.

Looks the papers are in order.

Everything OK?

And he put his hand on my shoulder and he say, Are you called my child?

And I was sweating with every pore in my body because if that head would go a little bit lower, it wouldn't be my child.

I would be bullet always.

But we started walking the streets, sleep in basement, sleep under the steps.

And one day as we were walking the woman that my mother give the bread sliced and you never knew, knew who was your friend and who was your enemy?

Because they would tell you to come with them.

You didn't have no choice your needed to.

That would take you to a police station.

You got shot.

They got paid.

So she said what you're doing here.

And my mother said, I'm looking for a place to stay.

So she said, OK, come with me.

She used to have a building in a cemetery when she was taking orders for a headstone.

She took us over there to that building every morning.

She would come from her house with food to eat with us and share the foods.

But you see how a loaf of bread can change a person completely.

Please stay tuned to Arizona Public Media as this ambitious project continues to take shape.

We will be adding interviews and more to the page.

AZPM.ORG/ CHILDRENOFTHE HOLOCAUST as they are completed Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week for another all new episode.