5 files on the desk from Appleton, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Appleton, Wisconsin
Escape artist and magician; born Budapest March 24, 1874; Appleton childhood about 1878–1882 (father rabbi at Zion Reform); later Milwaukee boyhood
$69,955
Harry Houdini, born Erik Weisz in Budapest on March 24, 1874, told the world for decades that he was an Appleton native. He was not. The family crossed to America in 1878, when he was four, and his father, Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss, took the pulpit at Zion Reform Jewish Congregation in Appleton. Four years on the Fox River followed. In 1882 the congregation let the rabbi go, and Milwaukee received the rest of the boyhood. That Appleton stretch is the whole Wisconsin childhood claim the city can make without rewriting the birth certificate.
He later took a stage name from the French magician Robert-Houdin, added an i, and built a career getting out of handcuffs, boxes, and straitjackets other people could not. Publicity and even some legal paper listed Appleton as his birthplace. A letter to his brother still dreams of the town: hunting a camera that was not there, pausing to watch their parents drink and chat. In 1904, on his first return in twenty years, Edna Ferber, then a three-dollar-a-week Crescent reporter, cornered him on College Avenue and got the interview.
Appleton did not fully claim the brand until the 1980s, with Houdini Plaza, Houdini Elementary, birthday escapes downtown, and a research center. The History Museum at the Castle now holds his cuffs, picks, a straitjacket, and the paper trail. He died in Detroit on Halloween 1926. Write Budapest first; then let Appleton keep the childhood years and the relics. The hometown he invented is the one that still curates him.
Profile · Appleton, Wisconsin
Appleton mill and Edison-light pioneer; built Hearthstone (not Standard Oil’s Henry Huttleston Rogers)
~$0 at death; peak ~$250,000 (c.1890)
Henry James Rogers—known as H.J.—was the Appleton paper-mill and gas-company executive who organized the Appleton Edison Light Company in 1882 and lit Hearthstone, his house at 625 West Prospect Avenue, from the Fox River. Twenty-six days after Edison’s Pearl Street steam plant in New York, Appleton had hydroelectric light.
Rogers ran Appleton Paper and Pulp and Appleton Gas Light. On a fishing trip he heard about Edison from H.E. Jacobs of Western Edison, formed Appleton Edison Light Company on May 25, 1882, ordered two Edison K dynamos, and bolted the first to the same water wheel that beat the pulp. When mill load made the expensive bulbs surge and die, he gave the utility its own wheel and a building on Vulcan Street. On September 30, 1882, Hearthstone, the mills, and then the neighbors had electric light; the Appleton Crescent called it “bright as day.” Architect William Waters designed the house for Cremora, who missed Baltimore—nine fireplaces, gas pipes in the walls as a hedge if Edison proved a fad. Original switches and some wiring remain.
The family left for Chicago in 1893 after the Panic. Rogers died in 1896. Hearthstone is the only building left from that first winter of central hydroelectric light, and the IEEE, ASME, and ASCE treat the Vulcan Street plant as the world’s first hydroelectric central station—with Pearl Street’s steam plant as the twenty-six-day asterisk.
Profile · Appleton, Wisconsin
Born Grand Chute Township, Outagamie County, Nov. 14, 1908; Outagamie circuit judge; U.S. senator 1947–57; buried St. Mary’s Parish Cemetery, Appleton
$172,623.18
Joseph Raymond McCarthy was the Wisconsin Republican whose anti-Communist crusade made his name a lasting word in American politics. Born on a Grand Chute Township farm in Outagamie County on November 14, 1908—the fourth of seven children of Timothy and Bridget Tierney McCarthy, by the Wisconsin Historical Society count—he quit school at fourteen, raised chickens until flu and a market crash ended the flock, and clerked at Appleton’s Cash-Way grocery until the chain made him manager of the Manawa store. At twenty he talked his way into Little Wolf High School, finished four years’ work in nine months with principal A.D. Hershberger’s certification so Marquette would take him, and earned a law degree while still managing the store.
He served as Outagamie circuit judge, then as a Marine, before beating Robert M. La Follette Jr. in the 1946 Republican primary and taking a U.S. Senate seat. On February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed to hold a list of Communists in the State Department; the number moved from speech to speech, but the hearings that followed did not. The Army–McCarthy spectacle of 1954 ended with the Senate’s censure that December.
He died on May 2, 1957, at Bethesda Naval Hospital at forty-eight. The death certificate cited acute hepatitis; biographers have long written about alcohol. More than 17,000 people filed through St. Mary’s in Appleton before burial at St. Mary’s Parish Cemetery. Grand Chute is the township that wraps the city; Appleton is the grocery, the judgeship, and the grave.
Profile · Appleton, Wisconsin
Four-time Super Bowl running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers; born and raised in Appleton; Xavier High class of 1964
$1.3 million
Robert Patrick “Rocky” Bleier is the Appleton running back who returned from Vietnam with a shattered foot and still helped the Pittsburgh Steelers win four Super Bowls. Xavier Catholic Schools later put his name on the football field and retired his number 23—the only jersey on the wall.
He was born in Appleton on March 5, 1946, and raised upstairs from Bleier’s Bar at Lawrence and Walnut, where his parents, Bob and Ellen, worked the mill-town tavern and his grandfather had worked the paper mill. Bob told patrons the newborn looked like a little rock; the nickname stuck. Rocky had a paper route and captained football, basketball, and track at Xavier High, which had opened the year before he arrived. A Parade All-American, he went to Notre Dame, won a national title, and landed as a sixteenth-round afterthought in Pittsburgh. After his rookie year the Army took him; he volunteered for Vietnam. On August 20, 1969, in a rice paddy near Hiệp Đức, a rifle round hit his left thigh and a grenade he tried to jump shattered the right foot. Tokyo surgeons pulled more than a hundred pieces of shrapnel and told him to think about walking. Art Rooney sent a postcard: “Rock — the team’s not doing well. We need you.”
He came back on a rebuilt foot, blocked for Franco Harris, ran for 1,036 yards beside him in 1976, and played Super Bowls IX, X, XIII, and XIV. His memoir Fighting Back became a 1980 television movie. Appleton dedicated Rocky Bleier Field at Xavier in 2007. The tavern childhood and the high-school wall are the city’s claim.
Profile · Appleton, Wisconsin
Oscar-nominated actor; born and raised in Appleton; Appleton East and Attic Theatre beginnings
$2.875 million
Willem Dafoe is the Appleton-born actor who went from Attic Theatre children’s roles to four Academy Award nominations and a Hollywood Walk of Fame star. He was Bill when the Post-Crescent put him in the paper dissecting a dead perch with his father’s surgical kit, and Billy when the Attic needed a thirteen-year-old for A Thousand Clowns.
He was born in Appleton on July 22, 1955, the seventh of eight children in a surgeon’s house near Lawrence University. Father William was the surgeon; mother Muriel the nurse; they worked together, so the five older sisters did much of the raising. A friend got lazy with “William,” and he became Willem. It stuck harder than the birth certificate. Appleton East ended abruptly after he left a communications-class tape on the machine over lunch—a satanist, a nudist, a kid who wanted pot legal. He meant to cut the wild parts. The teacher watched first. He came back from lunch to locked doors and parents already in the principal’s office.
He finished diploma requirements with a Lawrence class, studied drama at UW–Milwaukee for about eighteen months, joined Theatre X, then left for New York and the Wooster Group. Four Oscar nominations followed—Platoon, Shadow of the Vampire, The Florida Project, and At Eternity’s Gate—along with the Green Goblin, van Gogh, and a Walk of Fame star in 2024. The boy in the Attic still photographs better than the goblin.