5 files on the desk from Green Bay, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Green Bay, Wisconsin
Actor (Monk, Maisel) born and raised in Green Bay (not other Shalhoub family members in entertainment)
$3.6 million
Anthony Marc “Tony” Shalhoub is the Green Bay–born actor who turned obsessive-compulsive detective Adrian Monk into Emmy gold and later won a Tony Award for The Band’s Visit. The ninth of ten children in a Lebanese Catholic house on Doty Street, he still talks about Packers Sundays as if he never quite left.
He was born October 9, 1953, and raised on the east side. His father, Joe, had come through Ellis Island in 1920 as an eight-year-old orphan from Zahle and made a living peddling Sheboygan sausage from a refrigerated truck. His mother, Helen Seroogy, a second-generation Lebanese American, kept the household chaos from tipping into mutiny. Recruited at six into a sister’s production of The King and I, Tony stood on the wrong side of the curtain at dress rehearsal and was hooked anyway. He attended Green Bay East High—where he once fell into the orchestra pit, broke a leg, and still made the year’s last play—spent a brief freshman year at UW–Green Bay (where he met Milwaukee’s Jane Kaczmarek), earned a drama degree from the University of Southern Maine, and finished Yale School of Drama in 1980.
Then came Wings, Monk (three Emmys as lead), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and the stage Tony. When he graduated from Yale, Joe and Helen drove from Wisconsin; Joe wept that his own parents had been illiterate and his son now held a Yale diploma. Summers in Door County and a childhood that smelled like German sausage remain part of how he tells the story.
Profile · Green Bay, Wisconsin
Schneider National trucking executive raised in Green Bay (not father Al Schneider or later public-company executives)
$2.5 billion
Donald J. Schneider took his father’s Green Bay trucking firm and turned Schneider National into a national truckload carrier, betting early on deregulation and satellite tracking when most rivals still hunted for pay phones. He also sat on the Packers’ executive committee for more than twenty years.
He was born in Fond du Lac on October 19, 1935—the same year his father, Al, sold the family car to buy a truck—and grew up in Green Bay on Stewart Street and then Quincy Street, attending Cathedral Grade School and Central Catholic High. He started in the shop as a mechanic’s helper, drove, paid his way through St. Norbert College, married Patricia O’Brien in 1957, served thirteen months in Korea, earned a Wharton MBA, and came home in 1961 as a manager.
Named president in 1976 of an eighty-two-million-dollar regional carrier, he embraced deregulation instead of fighting it, then in 1988 signed a twenty-million-dollar-plus Qualcomm OmniTRACS contract that put two-way satellite tracking on the fleet. Schneider Logistics followed in 1993. He chaired United Way of Brown County and put the lead gift into St. Norbert’s outdoor athletic complex. He died in De Pere on January 13, 2012, after Alzheimer’s, at seventy-six, and was entombed at Allouez. The headquarters remains at 3101 South Packerland Drive in Green Bay. College and death were in De Pere; the life and company were Green Bay.
Profile · Green Bay, Wisconsin
Green Bay Packers founder and longtime coach (stadium namesake); not later Packers coaches or Lambeau Field alone
$500
Earl Louis “Curly” Lambeau founded the Green Bay Packers in 1919, coached them for twenty-nine seasons, and won six NFL championships in a town that had no business keeping a big-league franchise. Green Bay did not inherit a football team; a shipping clerk invented one.
He was born in Green Bay on April 9, 1898, and starred for four years at Green Bay East High before playing halfback on Knute Rockne’s first Notre Dame team in 1918. Tonsillitis sent him home for good. At twenty-one, as a shipping clerk at the Indian Packing Company, he talked president Frank Peck into five hundred dollars for uniforms, borrowed a practice lot next to the plant, and—with Press-Gazette city editor George Whitney Calhoun—launched the Packers. His father, Marcel, a contractor of Belgian descent, later helped supervise the volunteer fence around Hagemeister Park so the club could charge admission.
Lambeau was the team’s first star passer, then its coach through 1949, winning titles in 1929–31, 1936, 1939, and 1944. He pioneered the forward pass in the professional game when most teams still treated it as a trick. A board fight pushed him out after 1949; he later coached the Chicago Cardinals and Washington. He entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a charter member in 1963 and died in Sturgeon Bay on June 1, 1965. Later that year the city renamed its stadium Lambeau Field.
Profile · Green Bay, Wisconsin
Illinois chemist and Chemistry: The Central Science co-author; Green Bay childhood (not the Minnesota Vikings running back Ted Brown)
$108,455
Theodore Lawrence “Ted” Brown was the University of Illinois chemist whose general-chemistry textbook taught a generation of American undergraduates and who, as founding director of the Beckman Institute, helped invent the interdisciplinary-lab model other universities copied. Green Bay is the childhood claim: a Depression kid who asked for a chemistry set at Christmas and can still picture the little basement bench where he put it.
He was born in Green Bay on October 15, 1928, and raised there through the Depression. That curiosity took him to the Illinois Institute of Technology (B.S. 1950), the Navy (1950–53), a Michigan State Ph.D. (1956), and then the University of Illinois, where a supposedly temporary teaching job became thirty-seven years. He was a physical inorganic chemist—intermolecular exchange in main-group organometallics, the unglamorous mechanics that later fed pharmaceutical work—and, more famously, co-author with H. Eugene LeMay of Chemistry: The Central Science, first published in 1977 and still a bestseller many editions later.
As vice chancellor for research he helped land Arnold and Mabel Beckman’s forty-million-dollar gift, then served as founding director of the Beckman Institute from 1987 to 1993. He supervised sixty-one Ph.D. students and twenty-eight postdocs before retiring from teaching in 1993. Late in life he published historical fiction and kept a climate-science blog, Science Oracle. The Beckman-Brown Lecture at Illinois is named for him; he and Audrey endowed undergraduate scholarships there. He died on March 24, 2026, at ninety-seven.
Profile · Green Bay, Wisconsin
Pulitzer-winning sportswriter from Green Bay (not the baseball executive or other Red Smiths)
$1,000
Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith was the sportswriter David Halberstam later called the greatest of two eras—a Green Bay kid who wrote literate columns in a trade that loved jargon and won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Green Bay East High in those years doubled as the Packers’ home field; the city later put his name on a K–8 school, and Aqueduct put it on a horse race.
He was born in Green Bay on September 25, 1905, the red-headed son of produce salesman Walter P. Smith, whose wholesale firm was the third generation of a business that went under in the Depression. He hiked, hunted, and fished, worked a year as a hardware clerk to afford Notre Dame, and graduated in 1927. At East he won his first writing prize: a free copy of the three-dollar yearbook, for a humorous essay on the debating team. He never set out to cover games.
Milwaukee Sentinel general assignment came first; St. Louis made him a sportswriter; then the Philadelphia Record, the New York Herald Tribune’s “Views of Sport,” and from 1971 the Times. He covered last-place Athletics for a decade without self-pity. Asked if a daily column was a chore, he told Walter Winchell in 1949 that you sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed. He died in Stamford, Connecticut, on January 15, 1982.