5 files on the desk from Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin
Joe Palooka cartoonist; adult home in Carol Beach / Pleasant Prairie (born Wilkes-Barre, Pa.)
$2.5 million
Hammond Edward “Ham” Fisher created the boxing comic strip Joe Palooka, which at its peak ran in some nine hundred newspapers and spun into B-pictures and comic books. His Wisconsin tie was an adult second home: a Spanish-style mansion on South Lake Shore Drive in Edithton Beach / Carol Beach—now Pleasant Prairie—where he drew the strip until a 1954 northeaster put the house into Lake Michigan.
Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on September 24, 1900, he quit school at sixteen, peddled brushes, drove a truck, sold ads at the Wilkes-Barre Record, and then sold other people’s strips for the McNaught Syndicate while carrying his own unsold boxing strip in the sample case. In 1928 he sold Joe Palooka to more than twenty papers, including the New York Daily Mirror, forcing his bosses to take it. By the 1940s it was a top-five strip; the dumb palooka on the page was heavyweight champion of the world. Fisher helped found the National Cartoonists Society and became the only member it ever expelled, for “conduct unbecoming a cartoonist,” after a twenty-year feud with Al Capp—the former Palooka ghost who had drawn Li’l Abner. Fisher accused Capp of hiding pornography in the panels; the Society believed Capp.
Around the same season, the Carol Beach house came down in the storm. On December 27, 1955, in Moe Leff’s New York studio, Fisher killed himself. A will drawn weeks earlier left about $2.5 million to his wife Marilyn and daughter Wendy.
Profile · Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin
Kenosha-born state senator and Wisconsin VA secretary; Pleasant Prairie town chairman; died at home there March 31, 2019
$22,632
John Joseph Maurer Jr. flew B-24s for the Fifteenth Air Force in World War II, then spent decades in commercial cockpits and Wisconsin public office. He chaired the town of Pleasant Prairie, served three terms in the state Senate, and ran the Department of Veterans Affairs under two governors.
Born in Kenosha on July 11, 1922, he graduated from Bradford High School (then Kenosha High) in 1940, the same building that later produced Alan Ameche. After the war he studied at Marquette and flew for Capital Airlines and United, retiring as a DC-10 captain. Local politics began on the Pleasant Prairie town board in 1961; he was town chairman from 1969 to 1975, while the place was still a town, before the 1989 village incorporation.
He lost a 1972 Senate primary to Doug La Follette, then won the 1975 special election after La Follette left for secretary of state. Three Senate terms followed, including majority caucus chair from 1981 to 1985. A run for the new Kenosha County executive post in 1982 failed. Tony Earl appointed him secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs in 1985; Republican Tommy Thompson kept him until January 1992. The Wisconsin Veterans Museum on Capitol Square grew during that tour, and the department later named Maurer Hall in Union Grove for him. He married Arlene Kulin on Christmas 1977. He died at 96 in his Pleasant Prairie home on March 31, 2019. Kenosha was the childhood; Pleasant Prairie was the adult stretch.
Profile · Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin
AAGPBL player 1945–1952; born and raised on the Clausen-Hill farm in Pleasant Prairie (now Lake Andrea); Bradford High 1943
$55 a week
Joyce Elaine Hill Westerman played eight seasons in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and grew up on the Clausen-Hill farm in Pleasant Prairie, ground that is now Lake Andrea. The village later put a memorial bench between diamonds 2 and 3 at Prairie Springs Park, on the same land.
Born December 29, 1925, to Cecil Ludlow Hill and Lillian Victoria Clausen, she cleaned the barn, picked vegetables, helped her father cut trees, and at twelve joined her aunt's adult softball team. She graduated from Mary D. Bradford High School in 1943, then worked at the Nash factory in Kenosha and pitched and played shortstop on the company softball team. P.K. Wrigley's wartime women's league came calling, and she made it.
From 1945 to 1952 she played catcher, then outfield and first base, for Grand Rapids, Fort Wayne, South Bend, Peoria, and the Racine Belles. Across 531 games she recorded 345 hits, 191 runs, 81 stolen bases, 292 walks, and 167 RBI with a .228 average; South Bend won the championship in her last season. Off-season she went back to Nash. She married Raymond Westerman in 1950, led 4-H for fourteen years, coached Carthage softball, and worked the post office and American Motors. In 1988 the league entered Cooperstown as a body; in 1991 she was one of forty-eight original players in A League of Their Own. She died at home on January 18, 2021, at ninety-five. Later honors include the Milwaukee Brewers Wall of Fame, the Grand Rapids Sports Hall of Fame (2003), and Bob Kann's 2012 Wisconsin Historical Society Press biography Joyce Westerman: Baseball Hero.
Profile · Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin
Pleasant Prairie dairy farmer; Wisconsin Assembly 1874 and 1891; town board chairman
$500
Robert Samuel Houston was a Pleasant Prairie dairy farmer who twice reached the Wisconsin Assembly and spent his adult life on land he settled in September 1857. Massachusetts-born, he made butter, cheese, hay, corn, and oats; the butter and cheese took medals. He chaired the town board and kept the school-district books until his death in Milwaukee on January 5, 1902.
He was born in Charlemont, Massachusetts, on August 7, 1820, worked six years as a stonecutter in Meriden, Connecticut, then came west. In 1873 the Liberal Reform coalition—Democrats, Grangers, and Liberal Republicans—sent him to Madison with 1,005 Kenosha County votes to 777 for former state senator Francis Paddock. He sat on railroads the year the Potter Law capped freight rates and created a railroad commissioner, the session that first put Democrats in charge of the Assembly since before the Civil War. He declined a 1874 run, lost in 1876, then won again in 1890 as a Democrat (1,597 to 1,453 over Republican J. Cavanaugh) and sat on agriculture.
In 1895 state testers condemned thirty-eight of his cows for tuberculosis; he learned the carcasses had been sold for beef, sued, lost in circuit court and at the Wisconsin Supreme Court, lobbied Governor Scofield, and spent most of what remained of the money on the fight. He had married widow Lucy Smith in 1849; after her death in 1894 he married her niece Isabella. Two adopted daughters survived him. He died of edema in Milwaukee and is buried at Green Ridge Cemetery in Kenosha. Pleasant Prairie claims the farm stretch, not the birth.
Profile · Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin
Kenosha County electronics entrepreneur; born Somers, of Pleasant Prairie at death; first LakeView Corporate Park tenant
$42.3 million
Roger R. Mayer built Manu-tronics from a 2,600-square-foot garage into a printed-circuit assembly house that employed about eight hundred people and put the first private building into Pleasant Prairie’s LakeView Corporate Park. The park, a greenfield off Interstate 94, is still the village’s adult industrial brand; Mayer’s plant opened there in 1988.
He was born at home in Somers on September 6, 1938, to Raymond and Annetta (Talmadge) Mayer, studied industrial engineering at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, and worked at Warwick Industries in Zion, Illinois, before betting on a small assembly shop with partners in 1969. Manu-tronics ran garage-door transmitters and receivers around the clock. Local chambers named him Businessman of the Year in 1988 and Entrepreneur of the Year in 1989. In 1999 he sold the company to Sanmina—SEC filings list him as president and CEO—and that same year broke ground on Colerget, a conference house of modern art, Asian architecture, and gardens meant to teach others how to start a shop.
He chaired the Pleasant Prairie Police and Fire Commission for more than thirty years, sat on Edgewood Bank’s board, led the Kenosha Area Business Alliance, and founded an IPC trade group for printed-circuit assembly. The contractor who raised the LakeView plant also built his Pleasant Prairie estate. He died on November 8, 2019, at eighty-one, at Advocate Condell Medical Center in Libertyville, Illinois. Birth was Somers; the long adult residence and the corporate-park first were Pleasant Prairie.