5 files on the desk from Franklin, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Franklin, Wisconsin
Franklin High class of 2002; Lockheed Martin Orion engineer; STEM outreach and FIRST Robotics judge
$1.5 million+
Amber S. Gell is the Franklin High graduate who went from hating freshman English to engineering work on NASA's Orion spacecraft. She was born in Milwaukee in 1984 and graduated from Franklin High School in 2002. As a freshman she wanted to be a rocket scientist and did not see the point of literature. Teacher Kevin Nettesheim kept at her. She left for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, stacked bachelor's degrees in aerospace engineering and aerospace studies, and added master's work in space systems, physiology, finance, and an MBA before joining Lockheed Martin on Orion: docking, landing and recovery, and propulsion-test papers, including docking-integration work in Houston.
Years later she called Nettesheim out of the blue. "Do you remember me?" "You're the rocket scientist." She had put his name on a satellite and sent it up. WISN covered that exchange when he retired; her alumni note still lists his AP English class as a favorite memory. She received Adler Planetarium's Women in Space Science Award in 2013 and a Presidential Volunteer Service Award in 2016 for STEM outreach. She has judged FIRST Robotics at the Wisconsin Regional since 2008. Later she became director of strategy and partnerships at Kongsberg Satellite Services in Norway.
Wikipedia still says Milwaukee native. The English classroom that redirected her was in Franklin. Birth is the hospital city; the raise and the high-school chapter that produced the engineer are Franklin's.
Profile · Franklin, Wisconsin
Born Franklin, Jan. 26, 1972; raised in Franklin; Franklin High School class of 1990
$1 million+
Franklin High’s most famous graduate did not go to Hollywood on purpose. Nate Mooney was born in Franklin, Wisconsin, on January 26, 1972, graduated with the class of 1990, and earned a B.S. in aerospace engineering at Iowa State before deciding that an offbeat face might be a job. His first screen credit was a 2000 direct-to-video horror titled Vampire Vermont. Then came the working-actor circuit: Law & Order: SVU, Monk, CSI, House, Grey’s Anatomy, a Breaking Bad arms dealer, and Lurvy in the 2006 film Charlotte’s Web.
The part that stuck is Ryan McPoyle, the dim third sibling in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, offering to split money fifty-fifty-fifty because there are three of them. He has appeared in eight episodes across eighteen years. TV Guide still notes that he tinkers with machines in his off hours. The yearbook is a Saber yearbook.
Born and raised in Franklin with a locked Franklin High diploma in 1990, he remains the hometown joke’s punchline: the aerospace engineer who became McPoyle. The city claim is birth and upbringing, not a later return.
Profile · Franklin, Wisconsin
Wisconsin secretary of state (1874–1878); Franklin childhood after Irish immigration (not other Peter Doyles)
$1,200
Peter Doyle served two terms as Wisconsin secretary of state from 1874 to 1878 after a Franklin childhood that began when an Irish immigrant family put down roots on a Milwaukee County farm. The raise is the city claim; the statewide office is why he is more than a local filler.
He was born in Myshall, County Carlow, Ireland, on December 8, 1844, and moved with his parents to Franklin in 1850 at age six. First lessons came at home, then the common school in a town that was still timber and Root River. His father farmed, kept a store, and held local offices. The son clerked in Milwaukee, read law with Butler & Cottrill in 1863 and 1864, taught school, and in July 1865 took a railway-office job in Prairie du Chien that was supposed to be temporary. It stuck.
He declined Prairie du Chien’s first mayoral nomination in 1872, won an Assembly seat from Crawford County, and in 1873 the Reform convention put him up for secretary of state. He served under Governors Taylor and Ludington from January 5, 1874, to January 7, 1878. He later returned to Milwaukee to practice, took a law course at Yale, and died in Jersey City in 1900. Fifteen years in Franklin before the railroad job are the childhood stretch.
Profile · Franklin, Wisconsin
NASCAR Xfinity driver born and raised in Franklin; youngest touring champion (2019); first Xfinity win at Road America
$100,000
Sam Mayer is the Franklin-born NASCAR driver who learned to race on a backyard kart track his father paved into the family woods, then became the youngest touring champion in series history and won his first Xfinity race at Road America. The house is still in Franklin; the kart track is still there.
Born June 26, 2003, he grew up on the family’s roughly one-hundred-acre wooded Franklin property, where Scott Mayer built corners stolen from famous road courses. When Sam was four, his father put him in a kiddie kart and said go easy while following in a golf cart; the boy stood on the gas, did not spin, and left Scott and Grandma in the dust. Scott later told Dave Kallmann that was the beginning of the end. Badger Kart Club in Dousman came next, then Charlotte summers by eleven, a Young Lions title at fourteen, and the youngest win at Greenville-Pickens. He spent a first high-school semester at Wisconsin Lutheran before finishing online.
In 2019 he became the youngest NASCAR touring champion at 16 years, 3 months, and 8 days, beating Todd Gilliland’s previous mark. His first Xfinity Series win came at Road America on July 29, 2023, the Elkhart Lake road course Wisconsin kids treat as a pilgrimage. In 2024 the City of Franklin put him in the Fourth of July parade in a Camaro with his father Scott. Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s shop and Charlotte are the professional address; Franklin is the hometown claim.
Profile · Franklin, Wisconsin
Franklin-born QPS Employment Group founder and IndyCar driver; father of NASCAR driver Sam Mayer
$109,400
Scott A. Mayer is the Franklin-born founder of QPS Employment Group and the father who paved a kart track into a hundred-acre wooded lot so a four-year-old named Sam would have somewhere to go fast. The money came from staffing, not racing; the Franklin acreage is where Sam Mayer Racing still runs from home.
He was born in Franklin on August 31, 1964. After walking away from a Wisconsin basketball scholarship and a brief stint at someone else’s firm, he opened QPS in a one-room office in neighboring Hales Corners in 1985 with two employees. A non-compete limited year one to permanent placements only; then the market opened. By the early 2020s the company listed roughly fifty to fifty-seven branches across eight or nine states, with more than three hundred internal staff and headquarters in Brookfield.
He made a handful of IndyCar starts in 2003—three races from Miami to Motegi—and twice attempted the Indianapolis 500 without qualifying. The rest of the calendar went to Sam’s contracts and QPS letterhead. Franklin is both birthplace and adult stretch; the company launched in Hales Corners and is headquartered in Brookfield.