5 files on the desk from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin
Born and raised Menomonee Falls; Fall Out Boy drummer since 2003; UW–Milwaukee anthropology and history
$8 million+
Andrew John Hurley is the Menomonee Falls drummer who became the quiet redhead on the riser at Fall Out Boy shows. He was born in Menomonee Falls on May 31, 1980, and raised there by his mother, a nurse, after his father died when Andy was five. He started on saxophone as a percussion kid at Menomonee Falls High School. His sister handed him Metallica's Ride the Lightning and a Van Halen record; he switched to drums, cited Dave Lombardo as the god, and spent the rest of adolescence in death metal, then Earth Crisis, then Milwaukee and Chicago hardcore.
Before the pop-punk payday he drummed for Racetraitor, Killtheslavemaster, Project Rocket, and a stack of straight-edge and vegan-hardcore bands. He joined Fall Out Boy as the full-time drummer in 2003. From Under the Cork Tree (2005) put the band on Rolling Stone and on the Bradley Center stage. Between tours he double-majored in anthropology and history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He stayed vegan and straight-edge and kept playing heavier bands, including The Damned Things and SECT, on the side. In a 2007 Alternative Press interview he described himself as an anarcho-primitivist and admitted that a touring rock career contradicted the creed; he still had to make a living.
English teacher James Kuse remembered running into the freshman in a hallway and, later, a kid who fit the profile; OnMilwaukee covered that local stretch around a 2007 Bradley Center date. Birth and childhood belong to Menomonee Falls, not a generic Milwaukee music-bio shorthand. The Falls still sends teenagers to the shows.
Profile · Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin
Founder of Conrad Schmitt Studios (1889); born Fussville (annexed by Menomonee Falls 1958); died Dec. 28, 1940
peak ~$200,000+ (1940$); estate passed via sons
Conrad Schmitt founded the Milwaukee decorative-arts firm that still bears his name, taking church interiors, theaters, and civic buildings from a German-Catholic hamlet apprenticeship to national commissions. The calling began locally: at twelve he watched painters and stencilers transform his family’s parish church in Fussville and decided that was the work he wanted.
He was born in Fussville on April 20, 1867. The hamlet’s church was St. Anthony the Hermit; Menomonee Falls annexed Fussville in 1958, and the Lannon-stone parish walls of 1867 still stand on the hill. At fourteen his Bavarian-immigrant parents apprenticed him to Milwaukee church decorator Louis (also called Adolph) Loeffler, then made him sit through two years of business school—the piece that later let a studio compete with Tiffany on large interiors. He studied murals with Jan Sukaczynski and, in Rome, fresco and catacomb painting with Joseph Wilpert. In 1889 he founded Conrad Schmitt Studios in Milwaukee, with an early shop at 223 2nd Street. By twenty he was taking bishops, bankers, and big houses; he recruited European artisans and, in studio lore, once walked twelve miles through a snowstorm from his father’s home to keep a promise on the Milwaukee courthouse. The firm decorated St. Mary’s Cathedral in Winnipeg, the Milwaukee Public Library, and theaters and churches across the country, with later branches in New York and Washington in the 1930s.
Sons took over at his death on December 28, 1940. Artist Bernard O. Gruenke bought the firm in 1953. It still operates, now in New Berlin. The place claim is birth in Fussville—today’s Menomonee Falls—and a career that started in the Falls church that is still on the hill.
Profile · Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin
Longtime Wisconsin congressman from Menomonee Falls / WOW suburbs; Kimberly-Clark heir who never sat on the company board
$22 million
Frank James Sensenbrenner Jr. spent forty-two years in the U.S. House as the Republican from Wisconsin’s western Milwaukee suburbs, chairing Science and then Judiciary, introducing the USA PATRIOT Act, and serving as a House impeachment manager more times than anyone in American history. Menomonee Falls was the career address: when he was not in Washington he lived there, ran from there, and treated the Falls and WOW suburbs as the safest Republican seat in the state.
He was born in Chicago on June 14, 1943. At four the family moved to Milwaukee’s North Shore; he grew up in Shorewood and graduated from Milwaukee Country Day School in Whitefish Bay in 1961. Stanford and Wisconsin Law followed. Kimberly-Clark money—the Kotex fortune of great-grandfather Frank J. Sensenbrenner—put him in the room, though the congressman never sat on the company board and by 2010 no longer held the stock.
He entered the state Assembly the year he finished law school, then the Senate, then Bob Kasten’s House seat in 1978, winning twenty-one reelections and never dipping under 61 percent. He introduced the PATRIOT Act to the House on October 23, 2001; a decade later he said the NSA’s metadata dragnet was not what he wrote and co-sponsored the USA Freedom Act to claw it back. He authored REAL ID. His wife, Cheryl Warren Sensenbrenner, a disability-rights advocate from Green Bay, died in 2020. He retired from the House in 2021.
Profile · Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin
Billboard chart historian and Record Research founder; born Wauwatosa; lived and worked in Menomonee Falls until 2022
$3 million+
Joel Whitburn turned a teenage habit of copying Billboard chart positions onto index cards into Record Research, Inc., the Menomonee Falls company whose nearly 300 books became scripture for DJs, collectors, and label people. Every radio argument about a number one was, in some sense, an argument with a man working from a Falls basement vault.
Born in Wauwatosa on November 29, 1939, he graduated from Menomonee Falls High School in 1957. At six-foot-six he played basketball for the Falls and for Elmhurst College, though he never took a degree. He subscribed to Billboard in 1953 and, when the Hot 100 launched in 1958, began the card system. In the 1960s he sold records for RCA; in 1970 he licensed Billboard’s charts and founded Record Research in the Falls. Top Pop Singles was the flagship.
He kept a climate-controlled vault under the house that by 2013 held more than 200,000 singles, plus albums, country, R&B, and digital files, built to hold a copy of nearly every 78, 45, LP, and CD that made a Billboard chart. With friend Mike Curb he also created Warner/Rhino’s long “Billboard Top Hits” CD series. He did not move to New York. He shopped vinyl in Thiensville, went to Brewers and Bucks games, and died at home in Menomonee Falls on June 14, 2022, at 82, of complications from congestive heart failure, still working. Frances Mudgett Whitburn, his wife of 58 years, died five months later. The charts outlived them both.
Profile · Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin
Born Menomonee Falls, Oct. 31, 1974; Wisconsin Lutheran High School (WISAA state champion 1989 and 1992); five-time PGA Tour winner
$15 million
Before he was a five-time PGA Tour winner, Mark Wilson was the seventeen-year-old from Menomonee Falls who took Tiger Woods to the eighteenth hole. Born in Menomonee Falls on October 31, 1974, he starred at Wisconsin Lutheran High School, where he won WISAA titles in 1989 and 1992. At Wollaston Golf Club in Milton, Massachusetts, in the 1992 U.S. Junior Amateur final, Wilson went two-up with five holes to play. Woods birdied the sixteenth, won the eighteenth with a bogey, and became the first male to repeat as junior champion. Wilson was the first player all week who had led him. That same summer he also won the Wisconsin State Junior Boys championship.
He took the 1996 ACC championship at North Carolina and the Ben Hogan Award as the nation’s top collegian that same year. On Tour the wins came in bunches once they started: the Honda Classic (2007), Mayakoba (2009), the Sony Open in Hawaii and the Phoenix Open (both 2011), and the Humana Challenge (2012). He peaked at No. 24 in the world in February 2012. His first PGA Tour appearances came in 1998 at the U.S. Open in San Francisco and the Greater Milwaukee Open at Brown Deer Park. In 2009 he and Woods were paired in the third round of the BMW Championship—the first time together since Wollaston.
He still comes home for the State Open. The junior loss is the story Wisconsin golf people tell first. Menomonee Falls owns the birth and the high-school years; the Tour résumé is national.