In November 2026, Tim was featured in “Muskego Neighbors.” The article there is a condensed form of the story I have here. Here is “the rest of the story.”

Kretschmann retires but keeps active with podcasting

Tim Kretschmann can’t remember Muskego not being a part of his life. Despite the family home he was born into was down by the airport, his memories are all of Muskego. He is the son of Elmar (82) and Marta (77) Kretschmann, both immigrants from Germany. Elmar and Marta met at the German language church service after my father returned from the service as an MP in Italy during the Vietnam War. 

Family Starts in Muskego

They married in 1968 and had two boys: Tim in 1969 and Stefan in 1971. By 1976, they built their “forever home” in the Willow Wood subdivision of Muskego after a couple years at a home in Fountainwood’s Addition convincing them Muskego was the city for them to settle in. Marta often relates the story of remembering the roof being worked on during the Bicentennial by the building crews…on July 4th itself! She always admired their work ethic in getting their home ready for the family. The boys mostly remember visits to the jobsite by their father handing them a pail to collect any nails lying around the jobsite to keep it clean and safe. When they moved out in 2021 to a condo in New Berlin, more than 45 years later, we found that same 5 gallon bucket with some fairly rusty nails!

Elmar was a Senior Power Plant Mechanic with what was then called Wisconsin Electric Power Company with the bulk of his career working at the Oak Creek Power Plant. Elmar was very active in the German-American community in Milwaukee, as a past director of German Fest, president of the Milwaukee Donauschwaben, and president of the Milwaukee German-American Societies. More on that later. Marta was an office worker her entire career with the bulk of her career at Wisconsin Electric as well. Tim would later have his career with We Energies (more on that later), so they often refer to our local utility as “the family business.” Some recognize Marta as “That Snowflake Lady” because she crochets snowflakes all year long and in the Christmas season, if she catches a little boy or girl behaving well at a store or restaurant, she will award them with a snowflake ornament!

Tim and Stefan both started their education at Hales Corners Lutheran School, shifting to Tess Corners Elementary in fifth and third grades, respectively. They continued with their studies at Bay Lane Middle School and later, Muskego High School, where Tim graduated in 1987. He continued with a two year stint at UWC-Waukesha County and completed his BA at UW-Parkside. Stefan completed his studies at Marquette University.

Stefan, the Statistical marvel

His brother, Stefan Kretschmann, was quite good at Mathematics. He competed in high school as a math-lete and when he wasn’t studying, he was organizing a fantasy baseball league with his friends. During his college years, he worked at the K-Mart in Hales Corners but upon graduation from Marquette, he had a degree to become an actuary. An actuary, generally, uses statistics to analyze calculus-based probabilities. Most actuaries are employed in the insurance business, so Stefan applied at a number of insurance companies. It became obvious to him, though, that his love of statistics was immutably linked to his love of sports so he applied to the two major sports statistics companies in the country at the time: Elias in New York…and STATS, Inc. in Skokie, IL.

To his excitement, he ended up landing a programming job in Skokie but ended up commuting from home in Muskego for over a year until finally moving to Chicago. He is still very engaged in Major League Baseball and has been involved in exciting activities such as providing special statistics to national baseball telecasts (i.e. this batter hits .425 off left handed pitchers with one eye when the wind is over 24 mph coming from left field), providing assistance in arbitration cases in contract disputes, and gathering data for video games that use real world athletes and their statistics to perform in the game.

He has also worked on setting up statistics for leagues like the National Hockey League, National Football League…but his greatest contribution came with NASCAR. NASCAR was growing in popularity, particularly on television. They had lots of data with special transponders in their vehicles telling computers where they were on the track when they pass over special sensors…but they really hadn’t figured out how to translate that into statistics yet. Stefan stepped forward and organized the “Loop Data” into statistics you see today, including Average Running Position, Green Flag Passes, and his greatest achievement, the Driver’s Rating. Upon accomplishing this, he was featured in an article in Newsweek.

After a career in Chicago, upon the 2020 lockdown, remote work was becoming a norm particularly among computer coders, so he found the opportunity to return to Muskego to be closer to his family. He has returned to the Glen at Muskego Lakes condos near the Muskego Country Club while working remotely at Stats Perform.

Tim’s career

Tim never had the focus of his brother in one field of study. He appreciated English and Literature, so while attending college he started at UWC-WC to figure out where he wanted to go. He received an Associate degree of Science–with an English concentration, which he knew instinctively was an odd combination. He decided to follow the passion he had for literature and went to UW-Parkside for a BA with a journalism concentration, which is the degree they offered to complement the shiny new license he earned to teach secondary English in high school.

After two years as a substitute teacher in Franklin, he came to a stunning revelation: he didn’t like kids nearly as much as he thought. They were fine, but they were just a bit much. So he reached back. At Muskego High, he had participated in their CO-OP program in office work. He had worked at Weather-Tek Building Products as a result of that CO-OP work for much of his college career along with temporary work in data entry and other office based work. So after a few years of substitute teaching, Tim found a full time job with Publishing Perfection, a local mail order computer supply company.

This was at the dawn of the Internet. Instead of popping on Amazon to buy your latest computer gear, everyone in the hobby frequented a periodical called “Computer Shopper,” a monthly magazine that sometimes had 1000 pages. The bulk of the magazine featured page after page of ads for scanners, burnable CD’s, and color printers. Tim ran customer service for the company during his two years there and cemented a curiosity and interest in computers.

While there, he learned that Wisconsin Electric, which was not hiring for most of his college years, was starting to have some openings. He applied until landing a job in the Supply Chain. He worked there from July 1999 to March 2025, ending his career as a Principal Commodity Specialist at WEC Energy Group. That job was to purchase labor that constructed our electrical and gas utility distribution infrastructure in a total of four states, but primarily in Wisconsin. He enjoyed his work, but it didn’t utilize that creative side he had developed with his studies of literature in school. Throughout Tim’s professional life, he had always filled that gap with many volunteer and extra-curricular hobbies.

During Tim’s early career, he left Muskego for a starter home in West Allis. Once he was financially capable, he moved back to Muskego in the Plum Creek neighborhood in October 2006…just in time for their annual Halloween blow out. He loves the neighborhood and frequently can be seen around town on his Aventon Pace e-bike touring the local sights and visiting his family nearby.

German-American Community

Tim had been involved with the Milwaukee Donauschwaben for most of his young life. For those that don’t want to look it up, Donauschwaben is an ethnic group of Germans that migrated outside of Germany but retained their cultures. They settled along the Danube river (“Donau” is German for Danube) and continued their customs primarily having migrated in the 1800’s. His parents migrated after WWII to settle in Milwaukee which had a huge German-American community already established. A quick drive around Milwaukee will reveal our German-American influence in the area from the Germania building, Usinger brats, and a major music festival (Summerfest) conceived when the former Milwaukee mayor visited Germany to experience Oktoberfest.

Tim began with the Donauschwaben as a folk dancer and performed at various events held around the country at “Treffen” events (meets). Locally, he performed annually at German Fest and the International Institute’s Holiday Folk Fair, which both still feature performances by the Donauschwaben and other German dancers each year. His performances were not the Schuhplattler that is often pictured with traditional Bavarian style dancing (the “slap” dancing) but more of a schottische style while wearing a black vest and white shirt. The vest was often adorned with many pins representing various trips and events participated in. Tim’s collection of pins is impressive with nearly 100 that he would rotate into use and some would later end up on his lanyard ribbons when working at the utility.

Later during high school, Tim and his family travelled to Germany to visit relatives and see the Fatherland. He enjoyed seeing the very different world of Europe that mixed the old and new so effortlessly, but he really loved seeing the Alps and the various castles they visited. His favorite was Schloss Neuschwanstein: the fairy tale Bavarian castle that Walt Disney used to base the Sleeping Beauty castle on. Adding to his love of that location, his family hiked to the top of Tegelberg, a neighboring mountain. In Germany, many mountains are accessible to non-mountaineers with paths that require little more than a good walking stick and stamina. Back then, he had both.

Tim’s father, Elmar, would go on to become the president of the Milwaukee Donauschwaben for many years. During that period, Tim became a Vice President of the same organization. His role was to interface with the media and write the monthly newsletter, the Monats Blatt. In this role, Tim was on television occasionally advertising events like the Oktoberfest and Traubenfest, an event with grapes tied to the ceiling over a dance floor in celebration of the annual harvest. He appeared as a Great TV Auction table host for a few years on Channel 10/36. In one case, his father Elmar was going to go into a television station to show how to play Sheepshead…and couldn’t come in due to a schedule change and work obligation. So Tim, who has never played Sheepshead, got a crash course and pinch hit in front of all Milwaukee. Anyway, we had a lot of people coming to the Sheepshead event we were discussing to learn Sheepshead…but they wanted Elmar for the teacher then!

He also emceed many events including Germanfest and literally countless raffle ticket draws (every dance had a raffle contest and those numbers weren’t going to read themselves!). This led to an aspect of his life that he never planned on but shaped much of his adult life.

Broadcasting in Milwaukee and beyond

While in high school, Tom Weber and Tim Kretschmann joined the Muskego Public Access channel. At that time, recording public school board meetings and local parades was done with an expensive camera connected to an unwieldy VCR. After a year in the club, they actually got a battery run camcorder that improved some of the mobile event tapings, but the real excitement came in with the arrival of a linear videocassette editing machine. Tim quickly went about learning the device and taking his Germany vacation videos and editing it from 12 hours…down to 6. Still, it was a start!

When local “Donauschwaben Radio Hour” host Hans Windischmann passed away in 1990, Tim was selected as the successor to host the program. Despite his limited German vocabulary, he quickly picked up the broadcasting skills to read the ad copy and discuss the local events in the German-American community. He ran German Fest ticket contests, selected all the music, sold the ad time and invoiced the sponsors. The program was something called broker radio where he purchased the hour of air time and in turn found his own sponsors to keep the show on the air. He performed that function from 1990 to 2007. In that time, he had broadcast locally on WYLO, WEMP, and WJYI and had changed the name of the program to the “Stimmung Stunde” which roughly means “Happy Hour” or “Social Hour.”

Near the end of his on-air days, he started interviewing local beauty pageant contestants on the program. He had met one at German Fest and realized they competed in interview technique so they were really good at it. He learned a lot about how to interview through that experience. When the radio show closed in 2007, he had already started experimenting with a new technological hobby: podcasting.

Starting in 2005, he began “PageantCast,” a program devoted to the interviewing of beauty pageant participants. The PageantCast has interviewed five past Miss USAs, two Miss Universes and many other pageant titleholders: local, state and national. In fact, at recent count Tim has conducted over 975 pageant titleholder interviews and released over 340 audio episodes and over 200 video episodes. In that time, Tim also judged a number of local preliminaries to the Miss America competition and even judged one national beauty pageant.

Never one to stay busy with one thing, Tim founded a new podcast program with Joel Dhein named “Police on the Scene with a Crime Prevention Lean.” That program featured short episodes with crime prevention hints and safety alerts. Tim had met Joel while doing his radio show with Joel’s radio program following Tim’s show on the station. Joel is the president of the Wisconsin Crime Prevention Practitioner’s Association and later Tim would help them design and host their website for which Tim has won a number of awards from that organization.

The international reach of PageantCast in particular was exciting in the early years. Prior to the slick productions and well financed programs in podcasting today, early podcasting was much more a hobbyist sport with niche listeners from across the world. For a brief time, Tim even did a German program on the podcast feeds to supplement his local radio program.

Movie loving podcast launches

Tim has been a lifelong movie fan. In his college years, he started to subscribe to “Fangoria” magazine which started him on his love of horror films. His favorite film is Spielberg’s “Jaws” and this has led to his current podcast network: OtherWorldly Culture (www.otherworldlyculture.com).

Prior to 2016, Tim had guested on a number of other podcasts until he and the members of the East Coast Horror Group merged into OtherWorldly Culture. By 2018, they had established the website that continues to this day. There is one program called “Dead On Movie Reviews” that is a panel discussion of four horror films and a program called “Now Streaming” where a panel views a movie on a FAST (Free Ad-Supported Television streaming service like Tubi) and they discuss the movie.

One of the shows has a very strong Muskego connection. In high school, Tim was friends with Jeff Miller who was also in FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America). After high school, they lost track of each other. During the COVID shutdowns of 2020, Tim was trying to reconnect with some past acquaintances and he always wondered about his old friend Jeff Miller. The problem? Type “Jeff Miller” into Facebook once and see what happens. There are about 90 million of them out there! So Tim reached out to his old video partner and local Muskego historian and fellow MHS Alum, Tom Weber, who (not-surprisingly) knew exactly which Jeff Miller was THEE Jeff Miller.

After a reunion at the Lodge, they started talking and Tim realized Jeff was still involved in local sports broadcasting. That gave him an idea. How about a podcast where he, the consummate horror movie fan, would assign a horror film to Jeff to review. In turn, Jeff, the big sports fan, would inflict a sports film on him to review? That was the birth of “Dead On the Bases,” which is a play on their other program “Dead On Movie Reviews” and the baseball term for players left on base at the end of an inning.  They are now in their tenth season of the program.

As part of the program, Jeff and Tim annually attend the “Horror Realm” horror convention in Pittsburgh, PA. There Tim and Jeff have been asked to interview celebrities in the horror movie world. Jeff has interviewed Tony Moran (the original Michael Myers face from “Halloween”) and the lead actresses from “The Evil Dead,” and actors from the recent horror hit “Thanksgiving.” Tim has had the opportunity to interview many members of the “Terrifier” franchise including the director and “Art the Clown”, the lead actors of “Fright Night”,  David Naughton (“American Werewolf in London,” and many female scream queens like Dee Wallace, “Frankenhooker” Patty Mullen, “Re-Animator” Barbra Crampton, “Darcy the Mail Girl” and Lynn Lowry.

Travel and Retirement

Tim’s recent retirement seems like trading a well paid job for his volunteer work running numerous websites for people, his podcasts and more. He has taken to taking many day trips around town (he loves the experience passes available at the library!) and planning for bigger trips. He has travelled the country quite a bit with beauty pageants. His favorite convention or pageant destination was Atlanta where he enjoyed the Georgia Aquarium, the Coca-Cola museum, and the Puppetry museum where he got to see a number of the original Muppets. He has frequently visited Branson, MO and Pigeon Forge, TN with his family. His favorite place to visit is Orlando, FL.

He became a Disney kid early on with his parents’ access to some great deals through WEC’s travel agency connections back in the day. He’ll never forget seeing EPCOT in its first year of operation and discovering there the futuristic technology of a touch sensitive screen. What was this magic? Was he Buck Rogers all of a sudden? 

Later in life, Stefan and Tim bought season passes to Universal Orlando for a number of years. At that time, they did the math and even with the flight and rental cars, it was less expensive than a trip to the Wisconsin Dells, so they went two or three times a year for a while in the early 2000’s. In particular, the brothers love Islands of Adventure. Both are true roller coaster fans and Tim has achieved 189 “coaster credits.”

In 2020, the brothers had planned a California trip to Disneyland, Universal Hollywood, Magic Mountain, and Knott’s Berry Farm. Tim had just returned from “Horror Realm” where some of the celebrities had to cancel due to this illness that was starting to make the headlines. Well, the brothers got out to California and were squeezed in huge spaces, shoulder to shoulder, to visit California Adventure and all the big theme parks out there, but by the time they got to the airport to return home, sanitizer stations had been set up all over LAX. Two weeks after returning, Tim had been told to stay home and work off the laptop…WEC was moving to remote working for the immediate future. No more than two weeks that stretched pretty well to the end of his career with the utility.

When not planning trips, Tim is e-biking between his brother on one side of Muskego and his parents’ condo in New Berlin. They get together nearly daily for lunch and appreciate the local restaurants in the area. Tim also gets together quite a bit with his friends and colleagues from work and his parents meet with their Donauschwaben pals (at an Italian restaurant! That’s Amore in Hales Corners) once a month.

Tim really appreciates the lack of crime and the wonderful biking infrastructure in Muskego. He likes, in particular, to bike out to Idle Isle and look at the sun sparkle on Little Muskego Lake. He is very proud to call Muskego his home.