5 files on the desk from Greenfield, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Greenfield, Wisconsin
Greenfield-born NASCAR owner-driver; 1992 Winston Cup champion; died in a 1993 plane crash
$3 million
Alan Dennis Kulwicki was the Greenfield engineer who won NASCAR’s Winston Cup as an owner-driver—the last to do so for nearly two decades—and the first Cup champion with a college degree. He did not come out of a North Carolina shop. He came out of Greenfield’s Polish-American neighborhoods near the Milwaukee Mile with a mechanical-engineering degree and a habit of doing the work himself.
He was born in Greenfield on December 14, 1954. His mother died; the family moved in with his grandmother, who died when he was in seventh grade. A year later his only brother, Kenneth, died of a hemophilia-related illness. Father Gerry Kulwicki built engines for USAC racers. The son started karts at thirteen, raced late models at Hales Corners, and won at Slinger in 1977 with a stiffer engineered chassis. He graduated from Pius XI High School and earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from UW–Milwaukee in 1977.
He sold the short-track gear, borrowed a pickup after an electrical fire, and showed up unannounced at a Charlotte shop in 1985 as an owner-driver. Rookie of the Year followed in 1986; his first Cup win came at Phoenix in 1988, capped by the “Polish victory lap,” clockwise with the driver’s window to the crowd. He turned down Junior Johnson twice. In 1992 he took the Winston Cup by ten points over Bill Elliott at Atlanta in the “Underbird,” then the closest margin in Cup history, after leading 103 laps and nursing a half-can fuel stop when a broken gearbox forced fourth-gear pit exits. He always raced with a St. Christopher medal in the car. On April 1, 1993, a Hooters flight iced up near Blountville, Tennessee; he was thirty-eight. That January four to five thousand people packed Greenfield High’s gym for Alan Kulwicki Day. The park at Cold Spring and 108th still carries his name.
Profile · Greenfield, Wisconsin
Greenfield High four-sport letterman; Vietnam combat medic and double amputee; walked across America on his fists; Packers strength coach 1990–91
$500,000+
Bob Wieland turned a combat wound into a public life as Mr. Inspiration, walking across America on his fists after losing both legs in Vietnam. A Greenfield High School southpaw in the class of 1964 who lettered in four sports, he was being looked at by the Philadelphia Phillies when the draft board intervened. He went briefly to Wisconsin, then into the Army as a medic with the 25th Infantry Division. On June 14, 1969, in Vietnam, he stepped on an 82-millimeter mortar rigged as a mine while trying to reach another soldier. He has said he was declared dead and zipped into a body bag until someone saw it move. Both legs were gone above the knee.
He rebuilt strength with a personal-best bench press of 507 pounds, then set out to walk across the country on his hands. According to the Los Angeles Times the day he finished, the journey covered 2,784 miles from Knott's Berry Farm on September 8, 1982, to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on May 14, 1986, lasting three years, eight months, and six days. He met Ronald Reagan that morning; the president called him Mr. Inspiration. People magazine later named him one of the six most amazing Americans of twenty years.
He served as a Packers strength and motivation coach in 1990–91, finished Ironman Kona as a double amputee, and came back so Greenfield could put his name on a baseball field. He now lives at the Wisconsin Veterans Home at King.
Profile · Greenfield, Wisconsin
Jazz pianist; raised in Greenfield, Greenfield High class of 2000; Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis Quintet since 2005
$1 million+
Dan Nimmer has held the piano chair in Wynton Marsalis’s quintet and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra since 2005—the Greenfield kid who started on a hundred-year-old family upright and ended up the band’s homecoming pianist when Marsalis plays Milwaukee. The suburb is not in the solos. It is in the first instrument.
Most bios put his 1982 birth in Milwaukee; he has said plainly that he grew up in Greenfield and graduated from Greenfield High School in 2000. The piano at home was a Hofner inherited from an aunt, out of tune, “kinda like thunder” a couple of octaves below middle C. He started by ear around age ten, took classical lessons with Barbara Bunge, then, at fifteen, jazz with Mark Davis at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. His parents drove him to Milwaukee clubs until he was sitting in; saxophonist Berkley Fudge became a mentor. He lasted two years at Northern Illinois, got busy on the Chicago scene, quit school, and moved to New York in January 2004.
A year later Wess Anderson—subbing at a Brooklyn jam—recommended him to Marsalis. Nimmer played at Marsalis’s apartment around New Year 2005, joined the quintet in March, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in August, and has been the piano chair ever since. Father Jeff Nimmer, a hobby drummer, has said Dan heard his calling sitting on that honky-tonk bench. When the Journal Sentinel covered a Marsalis Milwaukee date in 2014, it still called him a Greenfield grad. The raise is the tie.
Profile · Greenfield, Wisconsin
NBA guard; raised in Greenfield, Whitnall High School star; 2021–22 Sixth Man of the Year
$104 million
Tyler Christopher Herro is the Greenfield-raised shooting guard whose jump shot was built before dawn. He was born on January 20, 2000 (Milwaukee on league records; Greenfield in local bios), and raised in Greenfield. His father, Chris, a garbage and snow-plow operator whose own high-school career ended on a torn ACL, coached the YMCA teams from first grade and pushed hard until Jennifer Herro texted him to ease up. When Whitnall High School's gym opened at six, father and son were there; when they wanted earlier, they drove to the Princeton Club in New Berlin for 5:30 a.m. sessions. As a Whitnall senior he averaged 32.9 points and 7.4 rebounds, topped 2,000 career points, and earned first-team all-state honors.
He committed to Wisconsin, then de-committed after John Calipari walked into the Whitnall gym in 2017. One Kentucky season followed. Miami selected him thirteenth overall in 2019. He won NBA Sixth Man of the Year in 2021–22 and kept hosting camps back home. Whitnall retired his number 14 on February 3, 2023. In June 2026 the Milwaukee Bucks acquired him in the trade that sent Giannis Antetokounmpo to the Heat, a hometown return that opens a new chapter rather than rewriting the childhood.
The Greenfield claim is raise and Whitnall. The childhood is a plow-truck dad and a high-school gym that never opened early enough.
Profile · Greenfield, Wisconsin
Landscape architect and rose hybridizer who created the Knock Out rose in his Greenfield basement; longtime director of Boerner Botanical Gardens
$1 million
William J. Radler is the landscape architect who germinated America’s best-selling landscape rose under fluorescent lights on a ping-pong table in a Greenfield basement, with milk jugs catching the runoff. The Knock Out rose turned a parks career into a breeding empire without ever leaving the two-acre yard he called the Radler Rosarium.
He earned a B.S. in landscape architecture from UW–Madison, then spent twenty-six years with Milwaukee County Parks, including thirteen as director of Boerner Botanical Gardens. He retired early in 1994 to breed full time from the Greenfield house he had built in 1983. Each year he made 500 to 1,000 crosses, grew 300 to 500 seedlings, and culled ruthlessly for disease, winter, and neglect in what he called rose boot camp.
The survivor, ‘Radrazz,’ won the All-America Rose Selections award for 2000 as The Knock Out Rose: self-cleaning, black-spot stubborn, and blooming from frost to frost. Garden-club and botanic-garden copy puts worldwide sales above 90 million. His first royalty check, $60,000, was more than he had ever earned on salary. He patented dozens of varieties, formed Rose Innovations, LLC in 2002, and in 2013 pledged $1 million to the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin. Tours still run with the Greenfield Beautification Committee. He did not move to a rose capital; the roses moved out of Greenfield.