5 files on the desk from Oak Creek, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Oak Creek, Wisconsin
Raised in Oak Creek; Milwaukee High School of the Arts and DePaul; Annie Spadaro on Caroline in the City
$1.9 million
Amy Kathleen Pietz is the Oak Creek actress best known as Annie Spadaro on Caroline in the City. She was born in Milwaukee on March 6, 1969, and adopted by Arnold, a truck driver, and Nancy, a nurse. She grew up in a three-bedroom, one-bath house in Oak Creek when the suburb still had cows, walking past livestock on the way to school. She trained for ballet until the money ran out. Seventh-grade social studies put her in Oliver!. At Oak Creek High a girl in the next row said she was leaving for the new Milwaukee High School of the Arts; Amy went with her and finished in the school's first graduating class, then earned a BFA from DePaul's Theatre School in 1991.
Four seasons as Annie Spadaro on Caroline in the City (1995–1999) made her a network regular. Later she played a northern Wisconsin wife on Aliens in America, okey-doke accent and all, so she could impersonate both mothers. DePaul later gave her an Award for Excellence in the Arts. She has said that finding her birth family, which includes a singer, helped explain why performing made sense. Milwaukee Magazine compared the household to You Can't Take It With You and carried her first-person account of the rural walk to school and the Arts-school transfer.
"I felt like an outsider in my own hometown, to be frank," she told Milwaukee Magazine. The birth certificate city is Milwaukee; the raise and the transfer are Oak Creek. The hometown, as she tells it, is the cows and the girl who pointed her toward the arts high school.
Profile · Oak Creek, Wisconsin
Atlanta-born, Oak Creek-raised running back; Wisconsin Badgers star; Detroit Lions draft pick; Oak Creek High head football coach
$2 million
Brian Calhoun remains the name written deepest in Oak Creek's football record book, and he has come home to coach the same halls he walked as a teenager. Born in Atlanta on May 8, 1984, and raised in Oak Creek, he finished the class of 2002 with 4,790 career rushing yards and 82 touchdowns, including a 295-yard, seven-touchdown afternoon and a senior year of 40 scores and 2,095 yards. He was Gatorade Wisconsin Player of the Year. Away from the field he edited the high-school sports page, won drum competitions over six years, and placed seventh in the long jump at the 2001 World Youth Championships in Budapest.
Two seasons at Colorado and a transfer sit-out led to a 2005 Wisconsin Badgers year of 1,636 rushing yards and 22 rushing touchdowns, then a school record, plus 571 receiving yards. The Detroit Lions took him seventy-fourth overall in 2006. An ACL injury limited him to eleven NFL games. He returned to Oak Creek as running-backs coach in 2018 and was named head football coach in 2024.
"I grew up in this community," he told CBS 58 when the school hired him. "I walked the halls." Atlanta is on the birth certificate; the hometown claim is the Oak Creek program that still owns his records and now employs him.
Profile · Oak Creek, Wisconsin
NFL first overall pick (1973), Raiders defensive lineman and actor; born Milwaukee, raised Oak Creek; died 1989
$450,000
John Daniel “Tooz” Matuszak was the first overall pick of the 1973 NFL draft, a two-time Super Bowl champion with the Oakland and Los Angeles Raiders, and later Hollywood’s Sloth in The Goonies. Oak Creek claimed him after an elementary-school move south from downtown Milwaukee.
Born in Milwaukee on October 25, 1950, to Audrey and Marvin Matuszak, he grew up in Oak Creek after the family left downtown. Classmates called the gawky kid a beanpole; two brothers had already died of cystic fibrosis. He packed on muscle, threw the shot 58 feet 11 inches for a Wisconsin Class A state title, and played defensive line for the Knights. Grades kept him out of Wisconsin and Iowa. He went to Fort Dodge junior college, spent a year at Missouri under Dan Devine, then Tampa, then the top of the 1973 draft.
With the Raiders he won Super Bowls XI and XV. Hollywood wanted the size: North Dallas Forty, then about five hours of makeup as Sloth in The Goonies, where he wore a Raiders shirt under the latex. His 1987 autobiography with Steve Delsohn was Cruisin’ with the Tooz. He died at 38 in Burbank on June 17, 1989, of an accidental Darvocet (propoxyphene) overdose, with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, bronchopneumonia, and traces of cocaine. Mother Audrey was still in Oak Creek when the NFL later sent the high school two gold Super Bowl footballs.
Profile · Oak Creek, Wisconsin
Wisconsin state senator; raised in Oak Creek from age three; Oak Creek High School class of 1987
$60,924
John Jagler spent sixteen years co-hosting Wisconsin's Morning News on WTMJ before a cold call landed him in Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald's office and, soon after, in elective office. He has served in the Wisconsin Legislature since 2013 and in the Senate since 2021, representing Dodge and Jefferson County country around Watertown.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, on November 4, 1969, he was three when the family moved to Oak Creek. He graduated from Oak Creek High School in 1987, left UW–Parkside for broadcast school in Madison, and woke at 1 a.m. for years to co-host with Gene Mueller. When the radio format shifted, he offered himself to Fitzgerald's office and was hired on the same phone call, just in time for the Act 10 winter of 2011, when staffers were yelled at, threatened, and followed to cars. Jagler learned protesters by name.
Redistricting opened a seat in Watertown country. He knocked on about 10,000 doors, survived a five-way primary, and reached the Assembly in 2013, joking that he was a "redshirt freshman." He moved to the Senate in 2021. He lives in Watertown with his wife Heidi and their three children. The political career is not an Oak Creek aldermanic seat; the childhood and the Knights yearbook are.
Profile · Oak Creek, Wisconsin
Founder of The Academy of Performing Arts; raised in Oak Creek; 2019 Wisconsin Small Business Person of the Year
$5 million+
Stacy Tuschl built The Academy of Performing Arts from a free backyard pom class into a seven-figure dance school and, in 2019, Wisconsin’s Small Business Person of the Year. The origin is not a ZIP code on a studio lease; it is a south-suburb lawn in Oak Creek and seventeen middle-schoolers who showed up the first summer.
After high school, in the summer of 2002, she taught poms for free in the backyard of her Oak Creek childhood home to whoever came. Three years later a hundred kids were enrolled and parents were asking why she was not charging. She incorporated while still at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, opened a studio in 2005, built a custom Oak Creek facility, and in 2013 used an SBA-backed U.S. Bank loan to open a Franklin location. Another SBA 7(a) loan expanded Oak Creek in 2018. By the SBA honor week in 2019 the business was in seven-figure revenue territory, with roughly fifty employees and more than a thousand students a week. She told Spectrum News the backyard was the childhood house.
She later wrote business books and ran a coaching practice on the side, including the Foot Traffic Formula brand—a second act after the studio. Employee and student counts wander across profiles; the 2019 SBA-week range is the clean public snapshot. Oak Creek’s claim is the childhood home and the lawn where the academy began, not inventing a high-school diploma year the clips do not confirm.