5 files on the desk from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin
Oshkosh clothier (c. 1894–1906) who founded Universal Pictures; Laupheim-born immigrant; 1930s affidavit rescuer
$5.5 million
Carl Laemmle founded Universal Pictures after a dozen years as an Oshkosh clothier, and that Midwestern stretch is still the city's claim on Hollywood's early studio era. Born January 17, 1867, in Laupheim, Württemberg, he landed in New York in 1884 with fifty dollars and almost no English, was naturalized in 1889, and shocked wheat in South Dakota at $2.75 a day before the clothing job. By 1894 he was bookkeeper for Sam Stern's Continental Clothing Company on Main Street. He learned window dressing, catalogs, and the advertising that made a Midwestern clothier feel like a show. In 1898 he married Stern's niece, Recha. Oshkosh voted him one of the fifteen most eminent local businessmen in 1905. He quit anyway.
In 1906 he walked into a Chicago nickelodeon and changed his life. White Front Theatre came next, then a film exchange, then a war with Thomas Edison's Patents Company, and in 1912 Universal. He built a studio-city on a San Fernando Valley chicken farm, opened it to tourists, and put The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, and All Quiet on the Western Front on the screen. He is widely credited with helping invent the movie-star system by billing Florence Lawrence and Mary Pickford by name against Edison's anonymous-player policy. In 1912 he sent a camera crew back to film Oshkosh in Motion. "Uncle Carl" nepotism at Universal was a Hollywood joke, and also how William Wyler got in the door.
In the 1930s, locked out of Germany, he signed affidavits that pulled more than 300 Jews out of the Reich, many from Laupheim, until the U.S. government would not take more from him. He sold Universal in 1936 and died in Los Angeles on September 24, 1939. Chicago and Los Angeles bookend the career. The clothing-store decade on Main Street is why Oshkosh still claims him.
Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin
Progressive Era photographer of child labor and Empire State steelworkers; born and raised in Oshkosh; Oshkosh Normal School 1899
$0
Lewis Wickes Hine was the Progressive Era photographer whose pictures of working children helped build the public case for the Children’s Bureau and, later, the Fair Labor Standards Act. For the National Child Labor Committee he posed as a fire inspector, Bible salesman, or postcard vendor—whatever got him past the mill gate—and made images the country could not look away from. He also swung out over Fifth Avenue in a basket to photograph Empire State Building steelworkers.
He was born in Oshkosh on September 26, 1874, and grew up above Hines’ Coffeehouse and Restaurant, the Main Street rooms his parents opened after moving from Ohio in 1871. He drew, read poetry, and watched the lumber town work. When his father died of an apparently accidental gunshot at an ironworks, the teenager left school and spent years as factory hand, woodcutter, salesman, janitor, and bank clerk. The 1898 Oshkosh woodworkers’ strike taught him what a mill did to a body. Frank Manny at Oshkosh Normal School pulled him toward teaching; after Hine finished there in 1899, Manny hired him at New York’s Ethical Culture School, put a camera in his hands, and sent the class to Ellis Island.
He married Sara Rich, an 1897 Oshkosh Normal graduate, back home in August 1904. He died broke in Dobbs Ferry, New York, on November 3, 1940, after an operation; he had applied for welfare in the 1930s and lost his house. The Museum of Modern Art declined his archive; the George Eastman collection took it. Oshkosh was the birthplace, the coffeehouse childhood, and the Normal School that steered him toward the camera.
Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin
Founder of the Experimental Aircraft Association; moved AirVenture to Oshkosh in 1970; died there in 2013
$108,115
Paul Howard Poberezny founded the Experimental Aircraft Association and moved its annual fly-in to Oshkosh in 1970, turning a Wisconsin city into the name the aviation world still says every July. He was born on September 14, 1921, in Leavenworth County, Kansas, not North Dakota, a mix-up that still turns up. He grew up poor in a Milwaukee tar-paper shack and taught himself to fly a rebuilt WACO glider at sixteen; his first solo was a car-towed launch that released around a hundred feet and settled into alfalfa.
In 1953, from a basement in Hales Corners, he started a homebuilders’ club that became the EAA. The fly-in outgrew Milwaukee, then Rockford, and in 1970 landed at Wittman Field. EAA AirVenture is now the world’s largest gathering of its kind: hundreds of thousands of people, thousands of airplanes, a city that appears and vanishes in a week. A 1955 Mechanix Illustrated series on the Baby Ace helped sell America on building airplanes at home; he also designed the Acro Sport and the Pober Pixie.
He flew more than five hundred types, logged some thirty thousand hours, and collected all seven U.S. military pilot ratings across thirty years in the Wisconsin Air National Guard and Air Force. Flying magazine ranked him No. 4 among its 51 Heroes of Aviation in 2013. His 1944 F-51D Mustang, Paul I, is at the EAA Aviation Museum. He died of cancer in Oshkosh on August 22, 2013, at ninety-one. The convention stayed.
Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin
Founder and longtime CEO of Cypress Semiconductor; born and raised in Oshkosh
$108 million
Thurman John "T.J." Rodgers is the Oshkosh-born engineer who founded Cypress Semiconductor and ran it for thirty-four years. He was born on March 15, 1948, to a General Motors car salesman and a schoolteacher who had taught radio electronics in World War II, and he grew up on Lake Winnebago playing cards for money and wiring experiments at home. At Oshkosh High School, class of 1966, he loved math, chemistry, and physics; one 1980s profile recalled a homemade "Thurm-O-Flare" that put him in the hospital. Dartmouth recruited him for football. He graduated salutatorian in 1970 with majors in chemistry and physics, then earned a Stanford Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1975 and licensed a VMOS patent on the way out.
He turned down Intel because he did not want to work for Andy Grove. In 1982 he founded Cypress Semiconductor. Cypress silicon later sat behind the iPod click wheel. When the board would not rescue solar firm SunPower, he wrote a $750,000 personal check and then talked directors into buying in; SunPower later went public. Fortune once called him America's toughest boss. Away from the fab he stomped Pinot grapes at Clos de la Tech in the Santa Cruz Mountains and donated a $3.5 million wireless fermentation network to UC Davis.
He still owns familiar Oshkosh names, including Ardy and Ed's, the Country Club, and T.J.'s Harbor Restaurant, and still flies home for Packers games. The chip empire was California; the origin story is Lake Winnebago.
Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin
NBA point guard for the Indiana Pacers; born in Oshkosh; Oshkosh North class of 2018
$106 million
Tyrese John Haliburton is Oshkosh’s most recognizable living export, the point guard who still talks about the teachers who made him do his homework. Born on Leap Day 2000, he led Oshkosh North to a 26–1 season and the program’s first WIAA Division I state title in 2018—31 points in the final, 18-for-18 from the line after halftime against Brookfield East.
Recruiting services tagged him a three-star. Iowa State took the bet. Sacramento drafted him twelfth overall in 2020, then shipped him to Indiana in 2022 in a trade that now reads as a franchise-defining steal. With the Pacers he became a two-time All-Star, the 2024 assists champion, and the point guard who took Indiana to the 2025 NBA Finals. Game 1 ended on his jumper with three-tenths of a second left. Game 7 ended with a torn Achilles. The club announced he would miss all of 2025–26.
He still comes home. He has hosted ProCamps at North, put Hali 1 sneakers on the boys’ team, and sponsored about $3 million in athletic-facility work at his high school. On February 5, 2026, the mayor declared Tyrese Haliburton Day. A Paris gold medal from the 2024 Olympics sits next to the Spartan banner.