5 files on the desk from La Crosse, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin
Norwegian surgeon; founded Gundersen Clinic in La Crosse (1891–1938 career)
$250,000+ (1938$)
Adolf Gundersen was the Norwegian surgeon who came to La Crosse in 1891 for a one-year job and stayed the rest of his working life. He became Lutheran Hospital’s first medical director in 1902 and opened Gundersen Clinic next to the hospital in 1930—the seed of a health system that now runs hospitals across four states.
Born in Solor, Norway, on October 8, 1865, he held an Oslo medical degree (1890) and answered a newspaper ad that La Crosse needed doctors, joining friend Christian Christensen. The year went well. He returned to Asnes anyway, married Helga Sara Isaksaetre on September 16, 1893, and brought her to the river city for good. They raised eight children; four of the sons walked into the clinic. King Haakon made him a Knight of St. Olaf, first rank, in 1926. He was a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a University of Wisconsin regent. In 1923 he wrote that the finest patient care “requires continuous effort and study.”
In 1930 he left the downtown office for a new clinic—period accounts called it a $100,000 building—next to the hospital so he could be closer to the beds. He died on a visit home to Norway on September 15, 1938, at the family place, Rosen, with Helga and a son who had stayed to keep the farm. That is a medical-fortune story without a Forbes line on the founder.
Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin
First African American Olympic medalist; raised in La Crosse; University of Wisconsin track pioneer
under $50,000
George Coleman Poage was the La Crosse-raised hurdler who became the first African American to medal at the modern Olympics. He was born in Hannibal, Missouri, on November 6, 1880, and arrived in La Crosse with his family in 1884. His father, James, drove for local employers; his mother, Anna, cooked. After James died in 1888, Anna, Nellie, and George moved into Lucian Easton's house on Cass Street. Nellie graduated from La Crosse High School in 1897. George followed as salutatorian in 1899, the school's third Black graduate after Florence Birney and Nellie, and as its best athlete.
At Wisconsin he became the first Black man on the track team and, in 1904, the first Black individual Big Ten champion, winning the 440-yard dash and the 220-yard hurdles. His senior thesis examined the economic condition of Black Georgians from 1860 to 1900. The Milwaukee Athletic Club sent him to the St. Louis Games. Black leaders had asked athletes to stay home because the Olympics and the World's Fair were segregated; Poage went anyway, ran four events, and took bronze in the 200- and 400-meter hurdles. Teaching at Sumner High in St. Louis, a farm interlude, and nearly thirty years as a Chicago postal clerk followed. He never married.
He died in Chicago on April 11, 1962. La Crosse largely forgot him until Hood Park became George C. Poage Park in 2013; a statue went up in 2016.
Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin
Born La Crosse, Jan. 14, 1909; raised at 1612 Ferry Street; left Central High in 1925 after his father’s death; died London, June 22, 1984
$28,000
Joseph Walton Losey III was the La Crosse-born filmmaker whose Hollywood career ended in the blacklist and whose European exile produced some of the sharpest British art-house cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Born in La Crosse on January 14, 1909, and raised in money at 1612 Ferry Street—a house Edward J. Roth had built in 1887 for $3,500—he grew up with an aunt, Mary, who had married into the Easton family and taught him what culture was supposed to look like. He made the Central High honor roll with his sister Mary. In February 1925 his father died; he left school that year, went to Dartmouth, began medicine at Harvard, and finished in the theater. The boulevard and the 1901 Memorial Arch still carry his grandfather’s name.
Hollywood hired him, then hunted him. After The Boy with Green Hair and years in New York political theater, the House Un-American Activities Committee came for his Communist Party card. He spent two weeks dodging a subpoena in 1951 and was settled in London for good by 1953. That exile became the career: The Servant, Accident, and The Go-Between with Harold Pinter—the last of them winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1971—plus Monsieur Klein, which took the César. Tennessee Williams once called Boom! (1968), a flop with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the best screen version of one of his plays; Losey sometimes named it his own favorite.
He never really came home. He died in London on June 22, 1984. La Crosse still knows the surname because of the boulevard; the films are what he did after he stopped being the rich kid on Ferry Street.
Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin
Co-founder of The Trane Company in La Crosse; inventor of the convector Heat Cabinet; company president 1916–1951
$1.3 million
Reuben Nicholas Trane co-founded The Trane Company in La Crosse in 1913 and turned a plumber’s radiator shop into a global heating-and-cooling manufacturer whose headquarters and main plant stayed on the river for his lifetime. Sales ran about fifty thousand dollars the year of incorporation and more than forty-five million by 1953.
He was born in La Crosse on September 13, 1886, to James Trane, a Norwegian plumber who had opened on Pearl Street in 1885 and invented a low-pressure vapor heating system. After Central High, Reuben spent a year hauling his father’s cast-iron radiators up local stairwells and decided that was a stupid way to heat a building. He worked as a plumber’s helper, then paid for a Wisconsin mechanical-engineering degree by waiting tables and tending furnaces; he captained the crew. In 1913 he incorporated The Trane Company with James and his sister Stella. In a corner of Plant 1 he built copper tubes, fins, and a cabinet that behaved like a chimney: the Heat Cabinet, announced in a six-page 1926 trade-magazine ad, replaced the radiator with a convector (U.S. Patent 1,764,187). By 1930 there was a second factory and offices in England, Canada, Belgium, China, and Japan. Refrigerant cooling, the hermetic Turbovac, and the CenTraVac chiller followed; wartime work put Trane gear in aircraft and ships.
He was president from 1916 to 1951, then chairman, and told people that if the choice were his he would rather lose the business than the engineers. He raised money for the La Crosse Home for Children and died in the city on September 5, 1954, at sixty-seven. A century after the Heat Cabinet ad he was named a 2026 National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee. Birth, company, and death were all La Crosse.
Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin
Franciscan Sister and evangelist; first Black FSPA at St. Rose Convent in La Crosse; Viterbo faculty
$0
Sister Thea Bowman (born Bertha Elizabeth Bowman) was the Mississippi-born Franciscan who formed in La Crosse, taught on the bluff at Blessed Sacrament and Viterbo, and later told the U.S. bishops what it meant for Black Catholics to come to church fully functioning. She was the first African American member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration at St. Rose Convent, and the convent and college remain the La Crosse stretch of a life Mississippi claims for sainthood.
Born in Yazoo City, Mississippi, on December 29, 1937, and raised in Canton as a doctor’s only child, she converted to Catholicism at nine after Franciscan sisters from La Crosse opened a school for Black children. At fifteen she told her Methodist parents she was going north to join the order; they refused until a hunger strike changed their minds. In 1953 she entered St. Rose as the only Black sister in the house and took the name Thea, for the Blessed Mother and for her father, Theon. La Crosse trained her: she taught at Blessed Sacrament, earned an English-speech-drama degree at Viterbo in 1965, took a Ph.D. from Catholic University in 1972, and returned to teach at Viterbo into the late 1970s.
Mississippi got her later as a preacher and as a builder of an African American Catholic hymnal. Mike Wallace put her on 60 Minutes in 1987. On June 17, 1989, already in a wheelchair with cancer in the bones, she addressed the U.S. bishops; they stood. Boston College gave her an honorary Doctor of Religion that year, the first African American woman so honored there. She died in Canton on March 30, 1990. The Diocese of Jackson opened her cause for canonization in 2018.