10 files on the desk from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 10 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Milwaukee-born jazz/pop/R&B vocalist; seven-time Grammy winner; Lincoln High and Reservoir Avenue
$1.065 million
Al Jarreau was the Milwaukee singer who became the only vocalist to win Grammy Awards in jazz, pop, and R&B. He liked to remind interviewers that there was a guy named Al Jarreau who came from Milwaukee, from the other side of the tracks—Reservoir Avenue in Bronzeville on the north side, and Lincoln High.
He was born in Milwaukee on March 12, 1940, the fifth of six children. Mother Pearl played church piano; father Emile, a Seventh-day Adventist minister, sang. Al never learned an instrument properly—he joked he could not get the baseball glove off his left hand long enough for piano lessons—so he learned harmony walking to school. A doo-wop quartet sang at Lapham Park and on the way to class. At Lincoln he was student-council president and later governor of Badger Boys State; choir director Bob Badune and band teacher Ron Davillers brought Broadway shows such as West Side Story and South Pacific into a north-side public school. He took a psychology degree at Ripon, a master’s in vocational rehabilitation at Iowa, and still came home on breaks to work the Pfister’s Columns with Hungarian pianist Les (Laszlo) Czimber, after earlier rooms at the Driftwood Lounge.
In San Francisco he counseled rehab clients by day and sang with George Duke by night until the night job won. Career tallies put him at seven Grammy wins and twenty-three nominations. He kept returning for Summerfest, Potawatomi, and a scholarship named for Lincoln teacher Tom Cheeks, with grade-school classmates in the front row. He died in Los Angeles on February 12, 2017, the morning of the Grammy telecast, days after announcing he was done touring.
President, landscaping, lawn, and tree services company · Milwaukee, Wisconsin
David J. Whaley of All Care / All-Care Service Corp Milwaukee. Barb Whaley office manager. Not other Whaley professionals outside this firm.
$950,000
David J. Whaley is president of All-Care Service Corp—doing business as All Care Landscaping—the Milwaukee landscape, lawn, and tree contractor founded in 1987. The firm sells maintenance, retaining walls, paver patios, plantings, and emergency tree work across the north-shore and metro Milwaukee map, with bilingual English/Spanish service called out on the company site.
Barb Whaley serves as office manager alongside Whaley’s presidency, keeping the yard a family-run Milwaukee operation. Marketing claims more than 130 years of combined staff experience and long-term crews rather than day-labor turnover.
Customer reviews describe multi-acre estate packages with paver patios, tree pruning and removal, retaining walls, bark mulching, and full lawn programs. That mix positions All Care as a full-service Milwaukee yard rather than a thin mow-only route chasing weekly tickets.
Profile · Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Actor and comedian born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee; Washington High School class of 1951
$2.7 million
Gene Wilder was born Jerome "Jerry" Silberman in Milwaukee on June 11, 1933, and grew up on the city's west side in Sherman Park and along North 51st Boulevard. A Milwaukee doctor told eight-year-old Jerry never to argue with his mother, Jeanne, who had rheumatic heart disease, then added that he could make her laugh. The boy took the assignment personally. That is the origin story he later told himself, and it is almost too neat, except he told it himself.
He lived on the same 51st Boulevard stretch as Herb Kohl and Bud Selig, served as vice president of the Washington High Players, cafeteria monitor, and forensics club member, and graduated with the class of 1951. His first paying role was Balthasar in Romeo and Juliet with the Milwaukee Players on April 7, 1949, at Wisconsin Avenue School. After a miserable stint at a Hollywood military academy, where he was the only Jewish boy and was bullied, he came home and got serious. He followed his sister Corinne to Iowa, then served in the Army, reached Broadway, and found Mel Brooks. Washington High's hall of fame later put him on the wall next to Kohl, Selig, and Governor Lee Dreyfus.
He died in Stamford, Connecticut, on August 29, 2016. Milwaukee still knows him as Jerry. The yearbook has the proof.
Profile · Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Raised Milwaukee 1906–1921 (arrived at eight from the Russian Empire); Fourth Street School, North Division High, Milwaukee Normal; last hometown visit as Israeli PM Oct. 3, 1969; died Jerusalem, Dec. 8, 1978
$250,000
Golda Meir was the Milwaukee-raised Zionist who signed Israel’s declaration of independence and later became the country’s prime minister. Born Goldie Mabovitch in Kyiv in the Russian Empire, she arrived in Milwaukee in 1906 at eight and grew up on Walnut Street, already minding her mother’s grocery while English was still new. When the city required children to buy brand-new schoolbooks, the ten-year-old rented a hall with classmate Regina Hamburger, recited Yiddish poems for the American Young Sisters Society, and later called the Packen Hall fundraiser her first “public work.” She was Fourth Street School valedictorian, fought her parents’ marriage plans to attend North Division High, fled briefly to Denver for Zionist parlor debates, then came home to clerk at Schuster’s, teach Yiddish at the Abraham Lincoln House, and punch a Milwaukee Public Library clock for twenty cents an hour.
She married Morris Meyerson on Christmas Eve 1917 on the condition they would go to Palestine, and they sailed on March 28, 1921. Milwaukee kept the receipts: the Fourth Street School and the UWM library both carry her name. City Librarian Charles McLenegan had hired her as a substitute library assistant on March 15, 1917; she resigned, worked six weeks at the Chicago Public Library, returned at a higher rate, and left the system for good on May 13, 1918. The 1920 city directory still listed her at Gridley Dairy. Every house she, her parents, and Morris lived in was later razed for urban renewal and what became I-43.
On October 3, 1969, as Israeli prime minister, she slipped a four-hour hometown stop into a White House itinerary, hugged children in her old classroom, and told the city it was where she learned what freedom felt like. She died in Jerusalem on December 8, 1978. The Milwaukee years are the raise, not a birth certificate: the grocery, the school, the library, and the 1969 return are the claim.
Profile · Milwaukee, Wisconsin
U.S. senator from Wisconsin (1989–2013) and longtime Milwaukee Bucks owner; born and lifelong Milwaukee; died Dec. 27, 2023
$630 million
Herb Kohl was the Milwaukee grocery heir who bought the Bucks to keep them in town, served four terms in the U.S. Senate under the slogan “Nobody’s Senator but Yours,” and spent a fortune on the city that made him. Born in Milwaukee on February 7, 1935, and raised in Sherman Park on North 51st Boulevard, he graduated from Washington High School. His father, Max Kohl, a Polish immigrant who had worked the Schlitz bottle-cap line, opened a grocery at Lincoln and Kinnickinnic. Herb bagged groceries, then ran the expanding family stores until a British tobacco firm bought most of the chain in the 1970s. Selling, he later said, felt like a death.
In 1985 he paid about $18 million for the Milwaukee Bucks so the franchise would not leave. In 2014 he sold the team for $550 million and put $100 million toward the downtown arena that now sits on Herb Kohl Way. As Kohl’s president he had visited thirty to forty stores a week and personally interviewed every full-time hire. He ate at George Webb, swam before dawn, and once wrote a $25,000 check when a United Way campaign he chaired came up short. He and Bud Selig were Sherman Park kids who later roomed together at the University of Wisconsin; Washington High’s early-1950s window produced Gene Wilder, then Kohl and Selig, three classmates from the same west-side Jewish neighborhood.
He lived in Milwaukee his whole life and died at home there on December 27, 2023. Forbes put his fortune at about $630 million in a 2016 city ranking after the Bucks sale and arena pledge. He had turned down a chance to buy the expansion Bucks for $2 million in 1968, saying Milwaukee did not need him then; seventeen years later he paid a then-record NBA price to keep them. The place claim is birth, lifelong residence, and the arena street that still carries his name.
Serial entrepreneur; founder of Wantable and Fluency; former BuySeasons CEO · Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Milwaukee e-commerce founder (GMI, BuySeasons/Liberty Media sale, Wantable).
$20 million+
Jalem Getz is one of Milwaukee's best-known e-commerce builders. He co-founded seasonal retailer GMI in 1995 at age 22, then launched BuySeasons in 1999 and grew the New Berlin–based costume and party supplier to hundreds of employees and roughly $175 million in sales before selling to Liberty Media for more than $55 million in 2006 and staying on as CEO into 2010–2011.
In 2012 he founded Wantable, a try-before-you-buy personal styling retailer headquartered in Milwaukee's Walker's Point. Wantable cracked the Inc. 500 (No. 223 in 2017), raised venture capital including Cream City Venture Capital / Northwestern Mutual's fund, and expanded into a large Walker's Point campus with a public café that became a local founder hangout. BizTimes later put him on its Wisconsin 275 list of influential business leaders.
More recently he has founded Fluency, focused on influencer–follower relationship tools, while remaining a Milwaukee-based operator and investor through vehicles such as Republic Holdings.
Profile · Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Lifelong Milwaukee philanthropist; Allen-Bradley heiress; Bradley Center and Milwaukee Art Museum major donor; died River Hills, 2001
$250 million
Jane Bradley Pettit was the Milwaukee philanthropist whose gifts reshaped the city’s skyline of civic buildings. Born Margaret Jane Sullivan in 1918, she was adopted by Allen-Bradley co-founder Harry Lynde Bradley after he married her mother, Margaret “Peg” Blakney Sullivan, in 1926, and her name became Jane Bradley. She was educated at Milwaukee girls’ schools including the Lake School, Milwaukee-Downer Seminary, and Milwaukee University School. When Rockwell bought Allen-Bradley in 1985, the fortune that followed funded a foundation she started the same year and a string of gifts Milwaukeeans can still walk into.
She put roughly $90 million toward the Bradley Center, about $20 million into a new public trade school then called the largest private gift to an American public school, and $13 million toward Santiago Calatrava’s addition at the Milwaukee Art Museum. She and sportscaster Lloyd Pettit bought the Milwaukee Admirals; she also took a stake in the Brewers. Worth magazine ranked her among America’s most generous people, and obituaries put lifetime giving above $250 million. In 2000 alone her foundation made more than 160 grants, and she helped buy Georgia O’Keeffe paintings for the museum. She credited her father’s way with factory workers, not a social calendar. The Common Council called her the city’s greatest benefactor.
A first marriage to Grant Hart Messinger in December 1941 lasted seventeen months; she later married Schlitz heir David Vogel Uihlein Sr., and afterward Lloyd Pettit. She died at her River Hills home on September 9, 2001. Her foundation and schools, arena, museum wing, and trade-school gift remain the Milwaukee story of a lifelong resident who treated the city as family business.
President, tree care and landscaping company · Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Jeff Giese of Giese's Tree & Landscaping Milwaukee. Site spelling variant Geise on arborist line—same person.
$1,000,000
Jeff Giese is president of Giese’s Tree & Landscaping Service, the Milwaukee arborist shop that prunes, plants, and removes trees while also designing landscape and grading work for drainage. Jeff is an ISA Certified Arborist (WI-0389A) with more than thirty-six years of tree care behind the north Milwaukee yard.
The LLC dates to 1980 under Giese’s presidency, matching the long-running north Milwaukee tree-and-landscape footprint. The public site is a spare template—stock layout, a few spelling quirks—typical of an owner-led crew that sells certifications and saw time more than brand polish.
Homeowners who want an ISA-credentialed principal for hazard trees, stump grinding, and careful plantings are the natural client for this shop. Door-knocking storm chasers after the next derecho are not the model Giese’s long-running north Milwaukee radius is built on.
Owner, lawn sprinkler and drip irrigation company · Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Juan Perea of JNP Irrigation Milwaukee. Confirm not unrelated Perea tradespeople; first-party owner language is strong.
$550,000
Juan Perea owns JNP Irrigation Services, the Milwaukee sprinkler and drip specialist who still answers the phone and shows up on every install. Across Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington, Racine, and Kenosha counties he designs in-ground lawn systems, drip beds, seasonal startups, summer tune-ups, and fall blowouts—plus winter plowing when the irrigation season ends.
Marketing copy puts roughly twenty-four years of Southeast Wisconsin irrigation experience behind the family-owned LLC, with licensed-and-insured language and Google reviews that repeatedly name Juan on repairs and backyard rebuilds. The operating promise is no call center and no rotating subcontractors.
For homeowners tired of dragging garden hoses—or inheriting a dead zone from a prior installer—JNP Irrigation sells owner-direct craft every time. That approach beats a national franchise truck rolling through the driveway with a scripted pitch and a subcontracted crew.
Entrepreneur; founder of Ranku and Cluster · Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Wisconsin-raised entrepreneur (Madison-born, Milwaukee roots); former Milwaukee Bucks dancer; co-founded Ranku (Mark Cuban–backed, sold to Wiley) and founded Cluster. Not Kimberly Taylor, Pathways High school director in Milwaukee.
$5 million+
Kim Taylor is a Wisconsin-raised entrepreneur who turned Milwaukee roots and a Bucks dance season into a national startup career. Born in Madison and schooled in part at Marquette before finishing a journalism degree at Arizona State, she appeared on Bravo's Start-Ups: Silicon Valley, then co-founded Ranku—an online-degree marketplace backed by Mark Cuban—and sold it to John Wiley & Sons in 2016 for a reported $25 million.
She later founded Cluster, a labor marketplace matching hardware and manufacturing companies with engineers, raising a Mark Cuban–backed seed round and operating from the Los Angeles area. Public profiles emphasize growing up around Wisconsin manufacturing and returning to that industrial skills-gap story with Cluster.
Milwaukee remains the origin city on her Wisconsin page: early career, Bucks season, and the manufacturing culture that shaped Cluster, even as her recent operating base has been California.