5 files on the desk from Beloit, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Beloit, Wisconsin
ABC Supply co-founder and chair; Beloit business base, lives in Afton (raised Osseo)
$21.7 billion
Diane Marie Hendricks co-founded ABC Supply in Beloit in 1982, has chaired the company since 2007, and is the city’s living fortune—Forbes listing her among America’s richest self-made women. She lives in Afton, between Beloit and Janesville.
She was not born in Beloit. One of nine sisters on a dairy farm in Osseo, she decided at ten she would not marry a farmer. Pregnant at seventeen, she finished Osseo-Fairchild at home, assembled pens at Parker Pen in Janesville, sold custom houses, and in 1975 married Ken Hendricks—a Janesville roofer’s son and high-school dropout already running a five-hundred-man crew. In 1982 they liquidated that firm and bought three failing Bird & Sons yards in Muskegon, Belleville, and Springfield. Headquarters: Beloit. First-year sales were $4.5 million; ABC topped the Inc. 500 in 1986. She ran the books and the bank. He climbed the jobs.
On the night of December 20, 2007, Ken fell through a tarp covering an opening in a subfloor over their Afton garage and died the next morning on a Rockford operating table. Forbes had just listed him at $3.5 billion. Diane kept ABC, bought Bradco in 2010 and L&W Supply in 2016, and grew the firm past nine hundred branches and $20.2 billion in 2025 revenue. She poured millions into the old Fairbanks-Morse floors, put her name on a ballpark, and filmed Betting on Beloit with her daughter. Forbes put her personal fortune at $21.7 billion as of June 3, 2026. The farm was Osseo; the death was Afton; the fortune is Beloit.
Profile · Beloit, Wisconsin
SNL and Broadway set designer; born Beloit, died Providence
$12 million+ (estate)
Eugene Edward Lee was the set designer who shaped Saturday Night Live from its first episode and won three Tony Awards for Broadway—Candide, Sweeney Todd, and Wicked. He liked to say that everything he was doing later, he had already done in the two theaters at Beloit Memorial High School.
Born in Beloit on March 9, 1939, he grew up in a house where his father acted in community plays and his mother worked backstage. His identical twin ran audiovisual at the new Beloit Memorial; Eugene lived in the theaters. He took BFAs from the Goodman School and Carnegie Mellon, left Yale Drama in 1967 without finishing, and that same year became resident designer at Trinity Repertory in Providence—more than a hundred shows until he died. Lorne Michaels hired him for the new NBC sketch show in 1975. Except for seasons six through ten (1980–85), when Michaels himself was gone, Lee designed SNL for decades, collecting six Emmys, building as many as a dozen sets in seven days, commuting from Rhode Island and sleeping at the Yale Club.
Broadway paid in Tonys: Candide (1974), Sweeney Todd (1979), and the green clockwork Oz of Wicked (2004), with its dragon over the proscenium. Yale mailed him the real MFA in 1986, after the first Tony, because a classmate wrote the letter. He died in Providence on February 6, 2023. Studio 8H was the job; the Memorial theaters were the start.
Profile · Beloit, Wisconsin
Born Beloit, January 16, 1955
$15 million+
James "Jim" Caldwell is the Beloit-born football coach who became the first Black head coach in the Atlantic Coast Conference and later led the Indianapolis Colts to a Super Bowl. He was born in Beloit on January 16, 1955, and came through Beloit Memorial High School as a nine-letter athlete: undefeated Big Eight football as a senior, a starter on the 1972–73 state-championship basketball team, and a member of a 4×400 relay that took second in the state. Class of 1973, he entered Memorial's hall of fame in 2011.
Iowa gave him a scholarship. He started four years in the defensive backfield, blocked kicks as a freshman, captained the 1976 Hawkeyes, and stayed on to coach. Wake Forest hired him in 1993 as the ACC's first Black head coach. Tony Dungy took him to Tampa Bay and then Indianapolis; Caldwell was on the staff that won Super Bowl XLI, then got the Colts job himself. As a rookie NFL head coach in 2009 he started 14–0 before resting starters, finished 14–2, and lost Super Bowl XLIV to the Saints. He later called plays for the Baltimore Ravens' Super Bowl XLVII title and coached the Detroit Lions from 2014 to 2017.
The NFL is the résumé. Beloit Memorial is the hometown.
Profile · Beloit, Wisconsin
Born Beloit, 1957
$182,500
Marcia Carol Martin Anderson is the Beloit-born Army Reserve officer who became the first African American woman promoted to major general in the U.S. Army, Army Reserve, or National Guard, and later sponsored the Navy ship that carries her hometown's name. Born Marcia Mahan in Beloit in 1957, she lived with her maternal grandparents after her parents divorced when she was one. Her mother worked hospital billing; her father, a Korean War veteran, worked at the Beloit Corporation. She flunked kindergarten at Merrill Grade School—"the only general they ever met who flunked kindergarten," she likes to tell students—then finished first grade at Our Lady of the Assumption before moving with her mother to East St. Louis at age eight.
Catholic schools in St. Louis finished her schooling. At Creighton she landed in ROTC by accident when astronomy was full and took military science instead. She chose the Army Reserve, earned a law degree at Rutgers, and built a civilian career as clerk of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Wisconsin in Madison. In 2011, at Fort Knox, she received her second star. Service as Pentagon deputy chief of the Army Reserve followed; she retired in 2016.
On November 23, 2024, in Milwaukee snow, she sponsored the USS Beloit, the first Navy ship of that name, and gave the order to man the ship and bring her to life. Her Beloit childhood ended at eight; the city's name is on the hull.
Profile · Beloit, Wisconsin
Explorer and naturalist; born Beloit 1884, Central Asiatic expeditions
$480
Roy Chapman Andrews led the American Museum of Natural History’s Central Asiatic expeditions into Mongolia and brought back the first dinosaur-egg nests modern science accepted. Popular writers still liken him to Indiana Jones; George Lucas never confirmed the link.
He was born in Beloit on January 26, 1884, at 419 St. Lawrence Avenue, then at the city’s edge, the second child of wholesale druggist Charles Ezra Andrews and Cora Chapman Andrews. He hunted and collected in the woods west of the house, taught himself taxidermy at fourteen, and sold mounts to pay for Beloit College. On March 31, 1905, a canoe tipped in spring melt on the Rock River; his friend and instructor Montague White drowned, and Andrews crawled through a flooded meadow to survive. He took an English degree in 1906, vowed not to waste another day, and talked his way onto the museum floor in New York as a taxidermy janitor.
From 1922 to 1930 he led five expeditions—cars and camels—into Mongolia. At the Flaming Cliffs his teams found scientifically recognized nests of dinosaur eggs, new dinosaurs, and mammals that had lived beside them. He later became the museum’s director. He died in Carmel, California, on March 11, 1960, and was buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Beloit. The St. Lawrence house still stands; an explorer award is still given in his name in the city.