A few, like retired millwright Roy Treder, have turned these skills to artistic pursuits. When a retirement gift is needed for a fellow worker at Milwaukee's Harley-Davidson motorcycle factory, Roy welds together an elaborate base for a clock or lamp from tools and machinery parts symbolic of the worker's career. Roy has created more than 200 retirement gift sculptures for his fellow employees. Wisconsin's industrial towns and cities are a patchwork of urban ethnic villages neighborhoods comprised of blocks of well-kept, modest frame houses with churches and taverns on the street corners. The church basement and the corner bar, much like the churches and crossroads taverns in Wisconsin's rural areas, have served their communities as twin hubs of social life.
Many religious communities have an ethnic aspect to their congregation's makeup.
One Lutheran church might attract primarily Norwegian parishioners, while another appeals to Germans. Catholic churches may be predominantly Polish, German, Irish, Mexican, Italian, Croatian, or Slovak. Services may be offered in the language of the old homeland as well as in English. Ethnic crafts and foodways may be practiced in women's clubs and altar societies associated with the church. Not necessarily conflicting with church life, taverns in Wisconsin serve as another venue for expressing ethnic and regional traditions.