5 files on the desk from De Pere, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · De Pere, Wisconsin
University of Michigan mycologist; West De Pere High 1923 (born Crandon)
$300,000
Alexander Hanchett Smith was the University of Michigan mycologist who made agarics his life’s work and sold more than one hundred thousand copies of The Mushroom Hunter’s Field Guide. West De Pere High School, class of 1923, is the city lock after a family move from Crandon.
Born in Crandon on December 12, 1904 (some tables print the 13th), he was the second child of Ruth and Edward Schmidt, who later made the name Smith. After his mother died in his teens, the family moved to West De Pere to live with paternal grandparents. A year off after the 1923 diploma, then Lawrence College in Appleton (B.A. 1928), then Michigan for mycology under Calvin Kauffman—who died before the dissertation—and Edwin Mains. He took an M.A. in 1929 and a Ph.D. in 1933 on two-spored Mycena.
He never left the University of Michigan Herbarium: assistant curator in 1934, director from 1959 to 1972. Something over one hundred thousand collections across fifty-seven field seasons sit in the herbarium he ran. The field guide appeared in 1958 and 1963. Wife Helen Vandervort Smith earned a Michigan botany Ph.D. and drew plates; daughter Nancy Smith Weber became a mycologist on the same forays. Amanita smithiana carries his name. He was president of the Mycological Society of America, edited Mycologia from 1945 to 1950, and was named Distinguished Mycologist in 1982. He died in Ann Arbor on December 12, 1986.
Profile · De Pere, Wisconsin
Born De Pere; Wisconsin Industrial Commission; Social Security Board chairman and first Commissioner of Social Security; FDR's "Mr. Social Security"
$10,000
Arthur Joseph Altmeyer was the De Pere native Franklin Roosevelt called "Mr. Social Security," the Wisconsin labor official who helped write the federal safety net and then ran it. He was born in De Pere on May 8, 1891. His parents divorced. At fourteen he was office boy in an uncle's law office at $10 a week, sending eighty percent to his grandmother for board. He stayed in high school until nineteen, worked a year to save tuition, and entered the University of Wisconsin at twenty-one, finishing Phi Beta Kappa in three years. At De Pere High he had met Ethel Thomas, his history teacher and four years older; she later became his wife and supported his graduate years while he sat at John R. Commons's elbow and wrote the pamphlet math of workmen's compensation.
He served as secretary of the Wisconsin Industrial Commission from 1922 to 1933 and helped build the nation's first unemployment-insurance system. Frances Perkins pulled him to Washington. He drafted the June 8, 1934, presidential message that promised an economic-security bill, then the executive order creating the Committee on Economic Security. He joined the Social Security Board in 1935, became chairman in 1937, and served as the first Commissioner of Social Security from 1946 to 1953. He told clerks they were a social agency, not a claims desk, and fought an 1835 statute that said no federal officer should "encourage a claim." The 1939 Amendments he pushed turned a worker's retirement plan into family insurance covering survivors and dependents. In 1938 he offered to switch jobs with executive director Frank Bane, a demotion, if Bane would stay.
Eisenhower's administration abolished his job by changing a preposition from Commissioner for to Commissioner of, twenty-seven days before he could retire. He refused a thirty-day consultant's make-work. He died in Madison on October 16, 1972. The Baltimore Social Security headquarters building still carries his name. He dedicated The Formative Years of Social Security (1966) to Ethel, writing in her copy that her love, wisdom, and concern for people had guided him throughout the years.
Profile · De Pere, Wisconsin
Former ConocoPhillips chairman and CEO; born Oshkosh, raised in De Pere; Mulva Cultural Center philanthropist
$260 million
James Joseph Mulva led ConocoPhillips as chairman and chief executive through the years when the combined oil major became one of the world’s largest independent producers, then retired when the company split in 2012. The hometown mark is De Pere: a $100 million cultural center on Broadway and another multimillion-dollar gift to a local school and parish hall, given with his wife, Miriam.
He was born in Oshkosh on June 19, 1946, and moved to De Pere as a boy. He graduated from De Pere High School, then studied at the University of Texas on a Navy ROTC scholarship, earning a bachelor’s degree and an MBA in finance at the McCombs School. After serving as a Navy officer, he and Miriam—who had grown up in West De Pere—married at St. Mary’s in De Pere in 1969 and spent early married years on his commission in Bahrain and Cleveland. His father, James Sr., a De Pere banker and flight instructor who had once washed planes for Steve Wittman in Oshkosh, put him in airplanes at eleven and died testing a plane at Nicolet Airport on December 4, 1976.
Mulva joined Phillips Petroleum in 1973, rose to chief financial officer and president, and helped steer the 2002 merger with Conoco. He chaired and ran ConocoPhillips until 2012. USA Today reported more than $260 million in 2012 compensation, retirement, and deferred pay—a paycheck figure, not a published personal fortune. With Miriam he funded the Mulva Cultural Center, a 75,000-square-foot limestone-and-glass complex that opened in December 2023 with Beatles material in the first gallery, and about $27 million for a Notre Dame school and parish hall in De Pere. They still call the Fox River city home.
Profile · De Pere, Wisconsin
Born De Pere, May 25, 1971; Abbot Pennings High School class of 1989; Seattle Seahawks general manager
$15 million
John Schneider is the De Pere–born personnel executive who built the Seattle Seahawks’ Super Bowl rosters and later won a second title with an entirely different coaching staff. Born in De Pere on May 25, 1971, the youngest of William and Sandra’s six children, he was a 5-foot-6 running back for the Abbot Pennings Squires—class of 1989—and punishment at home meant taking away the football cards. He spent a year at the University of St. Thomas studying history and secondary education until a shoulder injury ended his playing days. He wrote Packers general manager Ron Wolf more than once asking for a scouting chance, landed a 1992 internship, and worked as a Packers scout from 1993 to 1996.
Stops in Kansas City, a year in Seattle under Ted Thompson, and Washington followed before he returned to Green Bay as a personnel aide to Wolf and Thompson. Seattle hired him as general manager in January 2010, a week after Pete Carroll. Super Bowl XLVIII’s roster that beat Denver had only four players who predated Schneider; he drafted Russell Wilson, Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, and Bobby Wagner, and he signed Marshawn Lynch. In early 2010 alone he made 284 roster moves, including the Lynch trade.
Super Bowl LX in 2026, with a different coach and a different roster, made him the first general manager to win two titles that way in the same franchise. Sporting News named him Executive of the Year in 2025 after the second championship. With his wife he founded Ben’s Fund in 2012, named for a son diagnosed with autism at three. Abbot Pennings merged into Notre Dame Academy a year after he left; hometown stories still dateline De Pere.
Profile · De Pere, Wisconsin
Miss America 1973 (first Miss Wisconsin to win); De Pere High homecoming queen; longtime 700 Club co-host
$10,000
Terry Anne Meeuwsen Friedrich was Miss America 1973—the first Miss Wisconsin to take the crown—and later a longtime co-host of The 700 Club. Papers of the day called her a De Pere girl as she put on the crown; De Pere High School, where she was homecoming queen and a three-year cheerleader, is the clearest local lock.
She was the eldest of four, with a father at Wisconsin Public Service and a mother at the telephone company and later the superintendent’s office. Infoboxes often list a De Pere birth on March 2, 1949; some accounts say Green Bay, the usual Fox Valley hospital shorthand. She attended St. Norbert College for music and drama without taking a degree, then left to sing with the New Christy Minstrels from 1969 to 1971. Back home she won Miss Appleton and Miss Wisconsin in 1972 and Atlantic City in 1973, taking both talent and swimsuit. Fellow contestants that year included Cynthia Sikes (Miss Kansas, later of St. Elsewhere) and Jane Badler (later of V).
From 1978 to 1986 she co-hosted WTMJ’s A New Day with Pete Wilson in Milwaukee. Then came Virginia Beach and, from 1993, the chair next to Pat Robertson on The 700 Club. With husband Andy Friedrich she adopted three girls from Ukraine and launched Orphan’s Promise in 2006; the ministry later claimed work in dozens of countries. Andy died of Parkinson’s on July 29, 2023. She has seven children, most adopted, and published several books beginning with Christmas Memories (Thomas Nelson, 1996). St. Norbert kept her in the same town for a college stretch; coming-of-age and the 1973 walk belong to De Pere High.