5 files on the desk from Mequon, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Mequon, Wisconsin
Former Target CEO and chairman; raised in Mequon
$61 million
Gregg W. Steinhafel rose from a family furniture dock to the top of Target Corporation, serving as president of Target Stores and then as CEO and chairman from May 2008 until the board forced him out on May 5, 2014. The Star Tribune’s hometown line when he got the big job was simply Mequon, Wisconsin.
Born in Milwaukee in 1954, he grew up one of six children in Mequon. His grandfather founded Steinhafels furniture in Milwaukee in 1934; grade-school odd jobs in the store and dinner-table stories from his father pointed him toward retail. He earned a business degree at Carroll College (class of 1977), an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School, and joined Target in 1979 as a merchandising trainee. He became president of Target Stores in 1999 and CEO and chairman in May 2008, shaping the upscale-discounter niche, private labels, and the grocery build-out.
The end was public: a 2013 data breach that hit between seventy and 110 million people, and Target Canada’s roughly $2 billion loss in two years. Fortune tallied his walk-away package—severance, deferred compensation, pension, and options—at about $61 million, a compensation figure rather than a published personal net worth. Steinhafels remains a Milwaukee-area name; the childhood that shaped him was Mequon.
Profile · Mequon, Wisconsin
Oscar-winning screenwriter (12 Years a Slave); raised in Mequon from age seven
$8 million
John Ridley IV won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 12 Years a Slave in 2014—the second Black writer to take that Oscar, after Geoffrey Fletcher. Before Hollywood, he was a Mequon kid on a bike.
Born on 18th Street in Milwaukee on October 1, 1964, the middle of three children, he moved with his family to a Mequon subdivision at age seven. His father, John, practiced ophthalmology in Milwaukee for more than thirty years; his mother, Terry, taught special education for Milwaukee Public Schools. At Homestead High School, class of 1982, Ridley ran cross-country and performed in school musicals. He attended Indiana University, then earned an NYU degree in East Asian languages he never used for a job, tried stand-up (Letterman, Carson), and moved to Los Angeles in 1990.
Television writing on Martin, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and The John Larroquette Show led to fiction. Spoils of War sold in eighteen days and became the story credit on Three Kings. After the Oscar he created the anthology series American Crime. The California visits continue, but the Mequon subdivision remains the hometown he cites.
Sportscaster, actor, and former MLB catcher · Mequon, Wisconsin
Milwaukee-born catcher and longtime Brewers broadcaster; Menomonee Falls resident; Lakeshore Chinooks minority owner at Kapco Park in Mequon, 2012–2021
$25 million+
Robert George "Bob" Uecker was Milwaukee's own voice of baseball, a catcher turned broadcaster whose deadpan humor made him a national figure while he stayed rooted in the city's north suburbs. Born in Milwaukee on January 26, 1934, he grew up near Borchert Field. His father, Gus, had come from Switzerland. He attended Milwaukee Technical High School, and the city's sandlots and radio booths shaped the persona that later filled County Stadium, Miller Park, and national television.
After his marriage to Judy in 1976, Uecker settled in Menomonee Falls on Country Club Court beside North Hills Country Club, in a modest house of about 1,650 square feet on three acres. Club pro Eddie Terasa used to watch him mow his own lawn from the course. A 1985 home-tour tape catches the carpet, the stone fireplace, and Uecker's deadpan about a marble-tournament trophy. He died in that house on January 16, 2025, ten days short of his ninety-first birthday, of small-cell lung cancer.
From 2012 to 2021 he was a minority owner of the Lakeshore Chinooks, who play at Kapco Park on Concordia University Wisconsin's Lake Michigan campus in Mequon, alongside Robin Yount and Jim Kacmarcik. The Chinooks stake is the Mequon civic tie; the house that held him until the end was always Menomonee Falls. Milwaukee remains the birthplace and the radio town that never stopped hearing him.
Profile · Mequon, Wisconsin
U.S. diplomat and NATO-enlargement advocate; Homestead High / Mequon raise
$800,000
Ronald Dietrich Asmus was the diplomat who helped open NATO’s door to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary at the 1999 Washington summit. A Homestead High kid from Milwaukee and Mequon, he argued for enlargement before the job existed and later wrote the books that chronicled it.
He was born in Milwaukee on June 29, 1957, to German parents he later described as fleeing the aftermath of war and destruction. Childhood spanned Milwaukee and Mequon; Homestead High is the lock. At Wisconsin he started in engineering, went to Berlin to look for his grandmother’s 1930s house, found a city still split, and came home to political science. Johns Hopkins SAIS gave him a master’s in Soviet and East European studies and a Ph.D. in European studies. Radio Free Europe, RAND, and the Council on Foreign Relations followed.
President Clinton made him deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs from 1997 to 2000. Opening NATO’s Door (2002) covers the enlargement fight; A Little War that Shook the World (2010) covers Georgia. He was decorated by the State Department and by Estonia, Georgia, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden. He died in Brussels on April 30, 2011, of a lung-cancer-related illness, at fifty-three.
Profile · Mequon, Wisconsin
Molecular biologist; 16th president of Haverford College; native of Mequon
$599,428
Wendy E. Raymond is a molecular biologist and the sixteenth president of Haverford College, a post she has held since July 1, 2019. Haverford’s own biography identifies her as a native of Mequon, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee—the hometown line she still tells.
She left Mequon for Cornell intending to become a lawyer and major in government. A required first-year chemistry class, and a teaching assistant who told her she had promise in a room with few women, changed the plan. She majored in chemistry, graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, earned a Harvard Ph.D. in biochemistry, and completed an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship in genetics at the University of Washington.
Williams College hired her in 1994 as a molecular geneticist with an NSF- and NIH-funded lab that put undergraduates at the bench. She directed Williams’s Howard Hughes undergraduate science program (2004–08), became the college’s first associate dean for institutional diversity, then spent six years as Davidson College’s vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty. From 2014 to 2016 she chaired the National Science Foundation’s Congressionally mandated Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering. Mequon is the origin she claims; the science career and the Haverford presidency are the public record.