5 files on the desk from Kenosha, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Kenosha, Wisconsin
Heisman-winning fullback from Kenosha (cousin of actor Don Ameche; birthplace sometimes disputed as Italy vs. Kenosha)
$20 million
Alan Dante Ameche—“the Horse”—was Wisconsin’s first Heisman Trophy winner and the Baltimore Colts fullback who scored the overtime touchdown in the 1958 NFL Championship, the sudden-death game still called the greatest ever played. Kenosha raised the name; Madison and Baltimore made the legend.
Standard references place his birth in Kenosha on June 1, 1933, as Lino Dante Amici in an Italian immigrant factory household that spent a stretch of his early childhood back in Italy. At sixteen he decided the name was not tough enough and became Alan. In 1950 at Bradford High he scored 108 points for an undefeated Kenosha team that put up more touchdowns than its opponents scored points. He also set city records in the 100, relays, and shot put. At Wisconsin he played both ways in the single-platoon era, ran for 133 yards in the Badgers’ first Rose Bowl (1953), and in 1954 won the Heisman as a fullback—almost never the position that takes that trophy. Teammates called him the Horse because he worked practice the way a draft animal works a field.
Baltimore drafted him third overall. He was NFL rushing champion and Rookie of the Year in 1955, then the overtime hero of 1958. An Achilles injury in 1960 ended the playing career at twenty-seven. With Gino Marchetti and two friends he opened a hamburger stand that became Gino’s, hundreds of shops, later sold to Marriott. He handed his Heisman to Wisconsin at a 1984 halftime and died in Houston on August 8, 1988, of a heart attack, at fifty-five. He was a cousin of Kenosha actor Don Ameche—different famous Ameche, same town.
Profile · Kenosha, Wisconsin
Nash Motors founder and Kenosha industrialist (not born in Kenosha; Cortland, Illinois origin)
$43 million
Charles Williams Nash was the orphan who rose to president of General Motors, walked away from a million-dollar salary, and then bought Kenosha’s Jeffery plant to put his own name on the hubcaps. He is a Kenosha industrialist by adult life, not by birth.
He was born in Cortland, Illinois, on January 28, 1864. Indentured to a Michigan farmer after his parents split, he ran away at twelve, learned carpentry, and later stuffed cushions for a dollar a day at Billy Durant’s carriage works in Flint. He rose to the GM presidency, then quit when Durant recaptured the company, saying a million dollars a year was “more than a man’s worth.” In August 1916 he put five hundred thousand dollars down for the Thomas B. Jeffery Company of Kenosha—Ramblers, a lakefront plant, and a house at 6221 Third Avenue thrown in with the deal—and in 1917 the first Nash rolled out of the old Rambler works.
He kept the books tight and the slogan simpler: “Give the customer more than he has paid for.” World War I briefly made him the world’s largest truck builder, with 11,490 four-wheel-drive Quads for the Army in 1918. By the late 1920s Nash was a top-selling independent employing thousands in a city that would remain an AMC town long after he was gone. He lived on Third Avenue until about 1935, merged with Kelvinator in 1937, handed the wheel to George Mason, deeded the house toward Kemper Hall in 1938, and died in Beverly Hills on June 6, 1948. The jobs stayed until Chrysler wound the Kenosha plant down decades later.
Profile · Kenosha, Wisconsin
Typewriter pioneer whose Kenosha claim is the anti-hanging editorial years (typewriter/QWERTY are Milwaukee)
$12,000
Christopher Latham Sholes is remembered nationwide for the typewriter and QWERTY, work he did later in Milwaukee. Kenosha’s claim is earlier and sharper: as editor of the Telegraph he helped abolish capital punishment in Wisconsin after witnessing a botched hanging.
He was born in Pennsylvania on February 14, 1819, came west as a printer, ran his brothers’ Green Bay paper, and then, at a brother’s bidding, founded the Southport Telegraph when the lakeshore town was still called Southport (renamed Kenosha in 1850). He lived there with Mary Jane McKinney until about 1857, served as a state senator and Free Soiler, and was among the rare 1856 legislators who refused a railroad bribe.
On August 21, 1851, two to three thousand people watched John McCaffary, who had drowned his wife in a cistern, hang a mile south of downtown. The drop failed; McCaffary strangled for something like twenty minutes. Sholes wrote that the crowd had been “indulged in its insane passion for the sight of a judicially murdered man,” and hoped it was Wisconsin’s last such disgrace. He won a State Assembly seat. On July 12, 1853, the governor signed abolition. McCaffary remains the first and last person executed under Wisconsin law. The typewriter years (1867–73) and QWERTY belong to Milwaukee. He died in Milwaukee on February 17, 1890.
Profile · Kenosha, Wisconsin
Actor, director, and broadcaster; born in Kenosha on May 6, 1915
$400,000
George Orson Welles was Kenosha's most famous son and spent almost no childhood being a son of Kenosha, a joke he never tired of telling. He was born on May 6, 1915, in an upstairs flat at 6116 Seventh Avenue, across from Library Park, and named for Kenosha lawyers in the family tree, including great-grandfather Orson S. Head. His father, Richard Head Welles, made bicycle-lamp money and worked at American Brass; his mother, Beatrice Ives, was a concert pianist. The marriage cracked, and the family moved to Chicago around 1919. He returned at nine for his mother's funeral, a bleak visit that later colored every rude thing he said about the town.
Todd School, the Mercury Theatre, The War of the Worlds in 1938, and Citizen Kane in 1941 at age twenty-five followed. The career that ate studios for breakfast still could not finish The Other Side of the Wind in his lifetime. In a 1937 letter to a Kenosha congressman he called the city "vital and charming" and himself "almost belligerently Midwestern, and always a confirmed badger." Decades later he told Milwaukee-born scholar Joseph McBride he was not ashamed of Wisconsin, "just of being from Kenosha. It's a terrible place."
He died in Los Angeles on October 10, 1985. The Seventh Avenue duplex remains a private house; the historical marker stands on the park side. Kenosha keeps the birth certificate and the quarrel.
Profile · Kenosha, Wisconsin
RNC chair and Trump White House chief of staff; raised in Kenosha County / Pleasant Prairie (born Dover, N.J.)
$1.16 million
Reinhold Richard “Reince” Priebus rose from a Kenosha County childhood to Wisconsin Republican Party chair, Republican National Committee chairman, and White House chief of staff. The Wisconsin Legislature’s 2011 joint resolution congratulating him as RNC chair stated as fact that he was raised in Kenosha.
He was born in Dover, New Jersey, on March 18, 1972, lived briefly in Netcong, and left for Wisconsin at seven. Pleasant Prairie elementary, Lance Junior High with a briefcase, and Tremper High in Kenosha (class of 1990) framed the raise: a white brick ranch at the end of a long Pleasant Prairie driveway, a father who was a union electrician for Racine schools, and a mother, Dimitra, Greek by way of Sudan, selling real estate. He revived the Young Republicans at Tremper in a union town that still built cars, then went to UW–Whitewater (student-body president, 1994) and the University of Miami Law School (1998).
After a Milwaukee firm he ran the only race of his career: the 2004 Kenosha state Senate seat, spending some $300,000 and losing 52–48 to Democrat Bob Wirch. He became the youngest Wisconsin GOP chair in 2007, RNC chairman from 2011 to 2017, and White House chief of staff for 192 days in 2017—January 20 to July 31—the shortest modern tenure in the permanent job. Pronounce it like “pints freebus.”