5 files on the desk from Middleton, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Middleton, Wisconsin
Co-founder of Electronic Theatre Controls; Madison-born, Middleton plant (not the Nashville record producer)
$45 million
Fred Foster was the Madison professor’s son who put a world-class theatre-lighting factory on Pleasant View Road in Middleton and kept the jobs there. He is not the Nashville record producer of the same name who also died in 2019. Memorial High and two years at Wisconsin under Gilbert Hemsley launched him; the adult stretch that puts Middleton on the lighting map is the plant.
On Christmas Eve 1975, at Hemsley’s party, Foster and three other UW kids — brother Bill, Gary Bewick, and James Bradley — decided to build a digital lighting console. Parents’ basement, then a garage. Mega Cue followed. Disney’s Epcot bought credibility. By 1983 the company sold consoles under its own name. The Source Four ellipsoidals that began shipping in 1992 eventually numbered about three million. In 2004 he consolidated headquarters and manufacturing on Pleasant View Road: more than seven acres, a lobby dressed as 1940s Manhattan, and some three hundred of his own fixtures in the ceiling. He refused to ship the work to China so a twenty-five-unit order could still be painted and leave the same afternoon. An ESOP later parked about a third of the company with employees.
Cancer arrived in 2015. He died on February 8, 2019, at sixty-one. Wife Susan, daughter Kate, and son James all worked on the payroll. A memorial was held at Madison’s Overture Center. Birth and raise are Madison; Middleton is the factory and the career address.
Profile · Middleton, Wisconsin
Born Middleton; Wisconsin Supreme Court justice since 2020; chief justice as of July 1, 2025
$196,082
Jill Judith Karofsky is a Middleton-raised lawyer who reached the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2020 and became its chief justice on July 1, 2025. She was born in Middleton on July 15, 1966. Her mother, Judy, served as mayor from 1975 to 1977; her father, Peter, was a pediatrician. At Middleton High School, class of 1984, she won the WIAA girls doubles tennis title in 1982 with Kristin Moe. She ran the 5,000 and 10,000 meters at Duke in the first year the Blue Devils fielded a women’s track team, then earned her law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1992.
Her legal career ran through the Dane County District Attorney’s office, a stint as the state’s first Violence Against Women resource prosecutor, and service as a circuit judge. In 2020 she won a Supreme Court race that spent more than $10 million combined—then a record—taking about 55.21 percent of the vote. She was sworn in on August 1, 2020, by Justice Rebecca Dallet at mile 35 of a planned 100-mile run, a detail covered by the Wisconsin Examiner and the Journal Sentinel and later retold in Runner’s World.
She lives in Madison as a sitting justice. The raise that puts her on Middleton’s page is childhood: mayor’s daughter, Cardinal tennis champion, Middleton High class of 1984. Her mother’s two years as mayor are civic background, not a substitute for her own résumé.
Profile · Middleton, Wisconsin
Born Middleton, Nov. 4, 1988
$1.81 million
Nicholas "Nick" Toon is a former Wisconsin Badgers and NFL wide receiver whose Middleton roots run from birth certificate to high-school yearbook. He was born in Middleton on November 4, 1988, the son of Al and Jane Toon, and starred at Middleton High School, where the Cardinals named him captain.
As a junior he caught 26 passes for 425 yards and six touchdowns. As a senior he finished with 51 catches, 799 yards, seventeen kick returns for 430 yards, and thirteen touchdowns, earning first-team all-state honors in 2006; he also lettered in track. At the University of Wisconsin he broke his father Al's school receiving records in 2011. The New Orleans Saints selected him in the fourth round of the 2012 NFL Draft, 122nd overall. His NFL line was modest: twenty-one catches, 283 yards, and one touchdown, with a later stop in St. Louis.
The career reads as journeyman football. The Middleton claim does not: he was born and raised there, and the city still owns the high-school captain and Badger receiver.
Profile · Middleton, Wisconsin
Punch Brothers bassist; raised in Middleton (often called Madison native in press)
$1,200,000
Paul Kowert is the Punch Brothers bassist who grew up in Middleton even when the clips call him a Madison native. Born July 18, 1986, he started violin at three. At nine, to get into the school strings program, he switched to a bass that dwarfed him. A bluegrass band came through his high school; someone handed him a mandolin and a Nickel Creek record. Edgar Meyer albums filled in the rest.
He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, class of 2009, with Meyer as his teacher. While he was still a student, in 2008, Chris Thile called: Punch Brothers needed a bass. Thile later said that was when the band became a band. Kowert has been the group’s low end ever since, and he also plays in the chamber-bluegrass project Hawktail.
Punch Brothers’ 2018 album All Ashore won the Grammy for Best Folk Album. He still tells interviewers that Madison is a great town to grow up in, and metro press often files him that way; the childhood itself was Middleton, the Dane County suburb next door. That suburb is the Wisconsin claim.
Profile · Middleton, Wisconsin
Wisconsin U.S. senator (1993–2011); Janesville-born, longtime Middleton resident (not a Madison native)
$441,737
Russell Dana Feingold held a Wisconsin U.S. Senate seat for eighteen years as the co-author of McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law and the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. Middleton was the political home: after law school he bought on Donna Drive, raised his children in the local schools, and still lists the city as his residence.
He was born in Janesville on March 2, 1953, graduated from Craig High in 1971, and went on to Wisconsin, Oxford, and Harvard Law. After Foley & Lardner he settled west of Madison’s Beltline. In the 1992 underdog Senate primary against two millionaires he painted five promises on the Donna Drive garage door: Wisconsin money, live in Middleton, no pay raise, a listening session in every county every year, and hire Wisconsin. Promise two was the city.
He held the seat until Ron Johnson defeated him, then taught, ran again, and lost again. Janesville is the birth certificate; he left as a teenager. The garage-door contract and the long adult residence are why Middleton claims him.