5 files on the desk from Neenah, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Neenah, Wisconsin
Neenah mill founder; U.S. House 1887–91; father of Theda Clark, namesake of the city's hospital
$7,500
Charles Benjamin Clark was the Neenah mill founder who served two terms in Congress and whose daughter's will built the city's hospital. Born in Theresa, New York, on August 24, 1844, to Luther O. Clark and Theda Tamblin Clark, he came to Neenah with his widowed mother about 1855 and worked as a hardware clerk. In August 1862 he enlisted as a private in Company I of the 21st Wisconsin Infantry and came home a first lieutenant. In 1872 he put $7,500 into the Globe Mill with Kimberly, Babcock, and Shattuck. He was mayor of Neenah from 1880 to 1883, sat in the state Assembly, and held two Republican terms in the U.S. House from 1887 to 1891.
He lost the 1890 race, went east to visit, and died of Bright's disease in Watertown, New York, on September 10, 1891, at forty-seven. He is buried at Oak Hill. His daughter Theda, born in 1871 and named for her grandmother, married a Goshen newspaperman, watched people die for want of a hospital, and left her brother instructions: if childbirth killed her, build one. She died on October 20, 1903, three days after delivering a daughter also named Theda.
C.B. Clark Jr. put $96,000 toward Theda Clark Memorial Hospital, which opened on the child's sixth birthday, October 18, 1909, with twenty-five beds; ThedaCare's legacy page also notes another $50,000 for patients who could not pay. The building remains the city's hospital under a later name. The mill made the fortune. The hospital is what Neenah still points to when it tells the Clark story.
Profile · Neenah, Wisconsin
Kimberly-Clark chemist in Neenah; commercialized Cellucotton leading to Kotex and Kleenex
$5 million
Ernst Mahler was the Kimberly-Clark chemist in Neenah who turned creped wadding into Cellucotton and led the company effort that commercialized Kotex and Kleenex. He spent thirty-eight years with the firm, rose to executive vice president, and became one of Neenah’s defining civic donors.
Born in Vienna on October 17, 1887, he trained in cellulose chemistry at Darmstadt, finishing with distinction in 1912, and arrived in the United States the same year. Kimberly-Clark hired him in Neenah in 1914 to build a research department when American paper mills still ran largely on habit. During World War I he took Cellucotton—about five times as absorbent as cotton surgical dressings and roughly half the cost—to the Surgeon General. After the Armistice, surplus stock and army nurses’ experience with the pads led to Kotex in 1920, first assembled by hand in a wooden shed in Neenah; Kleenex followed in 1924.
Mahler became executive vice president in 1937 and retired in 1952. A founding member of TAPPI (1915) and of the Institute of Paper Chemistry (1929), he won TAPPI’s gold medal in 1932 and received the Medal of Freedom in 1946 for wartime purchase-policy work and for helping restart mills in Belgium, Holland, France, and Germany. He and his wife, Carol, gave the city more than twenty-six acres for Mahler Park, and in 1954 he chaired the committee that became the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass. He died on July 30, 1967, and is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Neenah.
Profile · Neenah, Wisconsin
Hollywood director of Scarface, His Girl Friday, Red River; born Goshen, Indiana; Neenah paper-family childhood 1898–1910
$110,000
Howard Winchester Hawks directed some of the most durable American movies of the studio era—Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, Red River, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Rio Bravo—yet his Wisconsin claim is a paper-mill childhood, not a birth certificate. Jean-Luc Godard called him the greatest American artist; Leonard Maltin called him the greatest American director who is not a household name. One competitive Oscar nomination (Sergeant York) and an honorary Academy Award in 1974 bookend a career built on clean craft. He liked to say a good picture needed “three good scenes, and no bad ones.”
He was born in Goshen, Indiana, on May 30, 1896. Mother Helen Howard was a Neenah native; grandfather Charles W. Howard had homesteaded there in 1862 at seventeen and built the Howard Paper fortune. Father Frank Hawks brought Goshen furniture money north in 1898, went to work for his father-in-law at the mill, and raised the boy among houses that look out on Lake Winnebago. In 1904 Frank built a rare Wisconsin Shingle-style house at 433 East Wisconsin Avenue in the neighborhood where Helen had grown up. Her health pulled the family west: winters in Pasadena from about 1906, permanent California by 1910. After they left, the house was rented to C.B. Clark Jr. and sold in 1912 to H.K. Babcock; it reached the National Register in 1997.
Neenah is the mill-family childhood between Goshen and Hollywood. Write the Indiana birth first; keep the East Wisconsin Avenue years as the local tie that puts him on the city’s page.
Profile · Neenah, Wisconsin
Co-founder and longtime president of Kimberly-Clark; settled in Neenah at age nine; namesake of the village of Kimberly
$29,000
John Alfred Kimberly co-founded Kimberly-Clark in Neenah in 1872 and remained the company’s president into his ninetieth year. The Fox Cities village that carries his name, and Kimberly Point on Lake Winnebago, both trace to the family that built Wisconsin’s first newsprint mill.
Born in Troy, New York, on July 18, 1838, he was nine when the family settled in Neenah. Pioneer schools and a short, unfinished stretch at Lawrence University in Appleton preceded dry goods, flour, and lumber work. In 1872 he and store partner Havilah Babcock sat down with Charles B. Clark and Franklyn C. Shattuck. Each put in $7,500. They built the Globe Mill and made newsprint, the first mill of its kind in Wisconsin. That is Kimberly-Clark: four Neenah men and a river.
In the first twenty-five years the firm grew from one mill at two tons a day to fourteen mills at 150 tons a day. He was still president when he died in Redlands, California, on January 21, 1928; he was buried at Oak Hill in Neenah. Seven children survived him. Daughter Helen Kimberly Stuart, learning that F.J. Sensenbrenner was quietly buying the tip of Lake Winnebago for a mansion, bought it herself and on June 21, 1929, deeded Kimberly Point to the city “permanently, continuously and forever” as a park. Another daughter, Nancy, married Neenah-born architect George Edwin Bergstrom, who later designed the Pentagon. The mill town kept the surname.
Profile · Neenah, Wisconsin
Born Neenah, February 4, 1954; Neenah High class of 1972; four WIAA singles titles and a 109-match streak; lives in Appleton
$1,500,000
John Whitlinger is the Neenah tennis standout who completed the rare NCAA triple crown at Stanford and later coached there for nearly three decades. Born in Neenah on February 4, 1954, and a Neenah High School graduate with the class of 1972, the 5-foot-9 right-hander was the first boy to win four WIAA state singles championships and ran a 109-match winning streak for the Rockets from 1969 to 1972. He collected eleven national junior titles, including Orange Bowl crowns in 1969 and 1970, and played for the U.S. Junior Davis Cup. Father Warren had played professional basketball; nieces Teri and Tami later reached the WTA tour. The town still calls the Whitlingers the first family of tennis.
At Stanford in 1974 he won NCAA singles, doubles, and the team title in the same season—the Cardinal list him as only the fourth player to take singles and doubles together. Six years on the ATP tour brought a career-high singles ranking of No. 75 on June 2, 1975, and a Bermuda doubles title with Mike Cahill in 1976.
He stayed at Stanford as associate coach from 1987 to 2004 and head coach from 2005 to 2014, finishing 160–85 with nine NCAA tournament trips and a share of nine national-championship staffs. The ITA Collegiate Hall of Fame inducted him in 1999. He later settled in Appleton; the 109–0 streak remains the Neenah chapter, and the triple crown the rest.