5 files on the desk from Manitowoc, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Manitowoc, Wisconsin
Cornell-trained engineer who bought the Burger yard in 1902; longtime president of The Manitowoc Company; WWII submarine builder
$410,000
Charles Cameron West turned a Manitowoc wooden-ship yard into the company whose cranes still carry the city's name. Born in Mendota, Illinois, on September 22, 1877, he earned a mechanical-engineering degree from Cornell in 1900, spent two years in a Chicago yard, then in 1902 joined Elias Gunnell and L.E. Geer in buying the Burger & Burger works on the Manitowoc River, where clippers had come off the ways since 1847. He launched one wooden steamer for tradition, then switched to steel. After World War I the ship orders died. The machine shops that already cut boilers, engines, and every plate in-house turned to industrial cranes, dredges, and cement and paper-mill gear. That diversification, he later told Time, is what saved the bacon.
When the next war came he negotiated with the Navy, took a contract for ten submarines, and built them indoors through Wisconsin winters: fifteen sections, thirty-eight to sixty-eight tons each, launched sideways. The first boat went eight months early. Time, in November 1942, put the contract at $32.8 million and employment at about 6,200 people on three eight-hour shifts, seven days a week; the Navy called his former dairymen and cherry pickers custom-tailor shipbuilders. The Herald-Times obituary later credited twenty-eight submarines plus a farmed-out fleet of invasion barges, a civilian Certificate of Merit in 1943, two terms on the school board from 1925 to 1931, and honorary Boy Scout county presidency from 1933.
West built 1404 Michigan Avenue in 1905 and died there on October 3, 1957, still president of the closed corporation. The yard later moved to Sturgeon Bay; the crane works kept Manitowoc's name. The Wisconsin Historical Society notes the Michigan Avenue house for its association with nearly his entire Manitowoc career. The city's claim is the fifty-five years on this river, not the Illinois birth certificate.
Profile · Manitowoc, Wisconsin
Manitowoc Lincoln High class of 2002; Northern Illinois tackle; Dallas Cowboys offensive tackle, 2007–2016
$36 million
Doug Free is the Manitowoc tackle who spent ten NFL seasons entirely with the Dallas Cowboys after leaving Lincoln High School as a lanky tight end unsure anyone would recruit him for college football. Born in Manitowoc on January 16, 1984, he finished Lincoln in 2002 as a first-team all-conference player as a junior and senior, the FRCC Defensive Player of the Year, and a first-team all-state selection as a senior. Parents David and Lois raised him in the Ships program that would later put him on the wall of fame.
Northern Illinois coach Joe Novak saw a tackle, not a tight end. Free grew from about 6-foot-5 and 240 pounds into 6-6 and more than 320, started forty-nine straight Huskie games, and earned the locker-room nickname "Doug Freak" for footwork that survived the weight. Dallas took him 122nd overall in 2007. A knee sprain buried the rookie year; from 2010 he started every game he played, first on the left side and then on the right when Tyron Smith moved over, anchoring the quiet end of an All-Pro line. Career totals run to 124 games and 114 starts. He retired in 2017 rather than play out a final year scheduled at $5 million.
In 2019 Lincoln named him honorary captain for a Notre Dame Academy game the Ships won 37–0; his message to the players was not to look back in twenty years wishing they had left more on the field. He and Dorothy, an NIU classmate, raise beef cattle in Walworth County. Lincoln inducted him onto its wall of fame in January 2026. The Manitowoc tie is birth, Lincoln High, and a hometown that still claims the Cowboys decade.
Profile · Manitowoc, Wisconsin
Concert violinist; born Manitowoc Feb. 25, 1916; family to Milwaukee around age two; wartime Axis concerts; died Birmingham, Ala., April 27, 2002
peak: Guarneri-era concert wealth; estate at death under $50,000
Guila Bustabo was a Manitowoc-born concert violinist whose early brilliance took her from a cigar-box fiddle to Carnegie Hall, then whose wartime bookings in occupied Europe left an American career she never fully recovered. She was born Teressina Bustabo in Manitowoc on February 25, 1916, to Alexander and Blanche Kaderabek Bustabo, Italian-Bohemian parents who both played violin. Around age two the family moved to Milwaukee. At three she played privately for Chicago Symphony conductor Frederick Stock. Juilliard followed, with Yehudi Menuhin in the next studio. On November 2, 1929, at ten, she appeared in a New York Philharmonic children’s concert at Carnegie Hall in the first movement of Wieniawski’s Concerto No. 1. The hometown stop came later: Lincoln High School in Milwaukee on January 17, 1938, Guarnerius and all.
During World War II she and her mother settled in occupied Paris and continued booking halls under Axis control. She later said Adolf Hitler sat in one audience. Patton’s men arrested mother and daughter in 1945; the Army then hired her to play for the Seventh Army. The American public was slower to forgive. A planned 1948 New York Philharmonic date drew a letter from Gen. Robert McClure noting she remained blacklisted for concerts with “special permission of [the] Nazi Propaganda Ministry.” She married American military musician Edison Stieg in 1948; they divorced in 1976.
She ended her working life in the Alabama Symphony section and later at a Birmingham YWCA, sometimes pushing a grocery cart. “Menuhin got away from his parents. He was lucky. I never got away from mine,” she said. She died in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 27, 2002. Manitowoc is the birthplace; Milwaukee held the childhood after about age two. The thin hometown stretch is declared, not padded.
Profile · Manitowoc, Wisconsin
World War II B-17 pilot of the 100th Bomb Group; born in Manitowoc; portrayed in Masters of the Air
under $100,000 (1961$)
John Clarence "Bucky" Egan was the Manitowoc-born B-17 pilot whose fleece jacket and hard luck with the 100th Bomb Group later reached a new audience through Masters of the Air. He was born on September 9, 1915, at 415 14th Street. His father, John Sr., was a state game warden and assemblyman who died of a heart attack in office in 1942 while the son was already overseas. Manitowoc schools and St. Thomas College in St. Paul came first; Air Corps cadet training began in March 1940. He bought the famous fleece jacket at San Angelo while the style was being discontinued, and it looked dirty even to his roommate Gale Cleven.
At Thorpe Abbotts he commanded the 418th Bomb Squadron, flew a string of B-17s usually from the right seat, and, an hour after an Emden raid, paid a Norfolk farmer twenty bob because the crew husky Meatball had killed a pullet. Two days after Cleven went down, Egan led the Münster mission in M'lle Zig Zag. Flak, four days free, the Gestapo, and Stalag Luft III followed. After the war he married Josephine Pitz, Manitowoc's first licensed woman pilot and a WASP who had ferried B-17s, at St. Boniface on December 26, 1946. He made colonel, took a Georgetown degree, and worked in Air Force personnel planning.
He died of a heart attack in McLean, Virginia, on April 16, 1961, at forty-five, the same way his father had, and was buried at Arlington. The USAF funeral notice credited him with eighteen combat missions across two wars. Masters of the Air put the jacket back on the lake.
Profile · Manitowoc, Wisconsin
Electron-microscopy pioneer and National Academy member; born Manitowoc 1911, childhood there until family left in 1923
$750,000+ (1991$)
Thomas Foxen Anderson was the biophysicist who turned the electron microscope into a tool for seeing how viruses attack bacteria and how bacteria exchange genes. Born in Manitowoc on February 7, 1911, to Anton Oliver Anderson and Mabel Foxen, he spent his first twelve years in a house wired early for radio and electricity. His father, a Navy electrician off the USS Texas, organized the Oslo Power and Light Company to bring power to Manitowoc County farms and ran an appliance shop besides. Mother Mabel, a pianist trained at a Red Wing seminary, died of tuberculosis when Tom was nine. Brother Norman’s chronic mastoiditis pushed Anton to sell the Manitowoc holdings in 1923 and chase a healthier climate through Tampa, Amherst, Rockford, and Glendale.
The boy who had electrical toys on the lake learned cells under a compound microscope in a Rockford botany class. Caltech and an RCA fellowship put him on the first commercial electron microscopes. He photographed bacteriophages attaching to and bursting their hosts, invented critical-point drying—replacing water with liquid carbon dioxide through a miscible-liquid series so specimens did not collapse into pancakes—and at the Pasteur Institute made the textbook images of bacteria conjugating. Paris Match once ran a conjugation micrograph under the caption “Un Accouplement de Bacterie.” His first paper, with Don Yost and Folke Skoog in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1933, measured the free energy of formation of iodine monobromide.
Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1964, he died in the Fox Chase area of Philadelphia on August 11, 1991. Manitowoc’s claim is the childhood and the shop floor that taught him machines; the phage and conjugation pictures are the scientific rest.