Tom Every spent decades turning salvaged machinery into Wisconsin’s 300-ton Forevertron; the 50-foot scrap-metal giant still stands at his family’s art park

Somewhere along Highway 12 in Sauk County, Wisconsin, there's a spaceship made from scrap metal in a grove of cottonwood trees. Its copper egg glows above a gathering of metal birds, some of them carrying guitars and trumpets. No one at NASA gave the green light, and no one at a studio bankrolled it, but a retired demolition man decided that the machinery he had been hauling away deserved a second act.

Wisconsin Life, a feature from Wisconsin Public Radio and PBS Wisconsin, profiles artist Tom Every, known to visitors as Dr. Evermor, who turned discarded industrial parts into some of the most unusual art in the Midwest. The story behind the salvage worker turned myth in his own time has some valuable lessons to offer regarding what people discard, and what they may want to keep.