5 files on the desk from Racine, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Racine, Wisconsin
Two-time Academy Award-winning actor; born Fred Bickel in Racine
$2 million
Before he was Fredric March he was Fred Bickel, a hardware man's kid from Racine who became a two-time Academy Award winner and a Tony-winning stage actor. He was born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel in Racine on August 31, 1897, attended Winslow Elementary and Racine High School (class of 1915), and lived at 1635 College Avenue. He was class president at Winslow, at Racine High, and later as a senior at Wisconsin. After a bank-teller job at Manufacturers National on the northwest corner of Fifth and Main, meant to cover tuition after his father John's setback, he made Wisconsin, served as an artillery lieutenant, and tried to be the banker his family understood. An emergency appendectomy in New York ended the experiment. On New Year's Day 1924 he took a shortened form of his mother Cora Brown Marcher's maiden name and became March, one d, on purpose.
Hollywood got a freelancer who would not stay under contract long enough to be owned. He won Best Actor for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931 film, awarded in 1932), still the only Best Actor Oscar for playing a monster, in a tie with Wallace Beery, and again for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946 film, awarded in 1947). He won the first Tony for Best Actor in a Play for Years Ago in 1947, the same season as the second Oscar, then another Tony as James Tyrone in the original Long Day's Journey into Night. He singled out Best Years as his favorite film role and O'Neill's Tyrone as his favorite stage part.
The July 14, 1934, Racine Journal Times advertised Death Takes a Holiday as if the boy from College Avenue might still buy a ticket. He died in Los Angeles on April 14, 1975. Racine kept the directory listing and the house on College Avenue.
Profile · Racine, Wisconsin
Fifth-generation chairman and CEO of S.C. Johnson & Son; born Racine; Forbes lists residence as Racine
$4.5 billion
Herbert Fisk Johnson III, known as Fisk, is the fifth-generation chairman and chief executive of S.C. Johnson & Son, the privately held consumer-products company still based in Racine. Born in Racine on May 19, 1958, he grew up inside a family firm that began when Samuel Curtis Johnson, a parquet-flooring salesman for Racine Hardware Manufacturing, bought the flooring line in 1886 and found that customers wanted paste wax more than floors. When his son Herbert Fisk Sr. joined as partner in 1906, the letterhead became S.C. Johnson & Son. The company remains private, still on Howe Street, and is not to be confused with Johnsonville sausage or Johnson Controls.
Fisk earned four degrees at Cornell University and returned to Racine to run the business. The headquarters campus he inherited is the one his grandfather H.F. Johnson Jr. commissioned from Frank Lloyd Wright: the 1939 Administration Building and the 1950 Research Tower, now a National Historic Landmark that employees still use. In 2006 Fisk dove Manokwari Bay in Indonesia and located the wreck of the Sikorsky S-38 that had carried H.F. Jr. to Brazil in 1935 in search of carnauba palm; a replica of that flying boat hangs in Fortaleza Hall. Brands including Windex, Raid, Off!, Pledge, and Ziploc made the company global while the letterhead stayed Racine.
In January 2017 he and his siblings pledged $150 million to Cornell to name the SC Johnson College of Business. Forbes lists Fisk and three siblings as shareholders who together own a majority of the company, with mid-2020s revenue estimated around $11.4 billion, and has placed his fortune near $4.5 billion with residence in Racine. The city claim is birth, lifelong company base, and the Wright campus that still defines Howe Street.
Profile · Racine, Wisconsin
Founder of J.I. Case Company; three-term mayor of Racine and Wisconsin state senator
$5 million
Jerome Increase Case was the New York-born manufacturer who made Racine synonymous with farm machinery and put an eagle on the company letterhead. He was born in Williamstown, New York, on December 11, 1819, came west with a threshing machine in 1842, founded the works in Rochester, Wisconsin, and moved the plant to Racine in 1844. By the Civil War, with farms short of men and the Union hungry, he was selling more threshers than anyone. In 1863 he organized J.I. Case Company with Massena Erskine, Robert Baker, and brother-in-law Stephen Bull. The town later called itself the Machine Shop of the World; Case was why the phrase did not sound like a joke.
Voters made him mayor in 1856, 1858, and 1860, then sent him to the Wisconsin Senate for 1865–66. In 1865 he watched the 8th Wisconsin come home with Old Abe, the bald eagle of thirty-eight battles, and put the bird on the company trademark. He later bred trotters at Hickory Grove Farm. His favorite, a black gelding named Jay-Eye-See, a pun on the initials, became the first 2:10 miler at Narragansett Park in 1884 after Case bought the youngster from Col. Richard West near Lexington, Kentucky. When the horse died in 1909, the New York Times ran an obituary from Racine.
Case died in Racine on December 22, 1891. There is still a Jay-Eye-See Avenue off Jerome Boulevard, and the lakefront historical marker still calls him inventor, manufacturer, mayor, senator, and a founder of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.
Profile · Racine, Wisconsin
NASA astronaut killed on Columbia STS-107; Iowa-born, considered Racine her hometown; William Horlick High class of 1979
$72,000
Laurel Blair Salton Clark was the Navy physician and NASA astronaut who died when Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry on February 1, 2003. NASA’s own biography opens with an Ames, Iowa, birth certificate and then the sentence that mattered to her: she considered Racine home. She logged fifteen days, twenty-two hours, and twenty minutes on STS-107, a science flight that carried moths, roses, two University of Wisconsin experiments, and a zoology teddy bear in the gear.
Born on March 10, 1961, the oldest of four, she was a nearly straight-A student at William Horlick High School, class of 1979, who joked that she was boring and then joined the Navy to test the claim. She studied zoology and medicine at the University of Wisconsin, served as a diving medical officer and as a submarine-squadron doctor in Holy Loch, Scotland, and became flight surgeon to a Marine Harrier squadron in Yuma. NASA selected her on the second try, while she was pregnant. Her husband, Jonathan, was also Navy and also NASA; their son, Iain, was eight when Columbia was lost.
From orbit she mailed home lightning over the Pacific, the Aurora Australis, and—the detail Racine kept—Wind Point sticking into Lake Michigan. Foam damage to the left wing at launch, unknown to the crew, doomed the ship sixteen minutes from landing over Texas. She had been filming shipmates, smiling, minutes before. She received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor posthumously. Horlick still says her name in the same breath as the golden football in the trophy case. Birth was Iowa; hometown, by her own word, was Racine.
Profile · Racine, Wisconsin
Racine Belles stolen-base star of the AAGPBL; Flint-born, Racine-made at Horlick Field
$50 a week
Sophie Mary Kurys—the “Flint Flash”—was the Racine Belles star who stole bases the way other players hit singles, and whose 1946 season still reads like fiction. Allocated to Racine at seventeen from Flint, Michigan, she asked “God, where’s Racine?” on assignment day at Wrigley Field, then spent eight seasons making Horlick Field the place to watch a runner in a skirt.
Born in Flint on May 14, 1925, she was scouted by John Gottselig in an April gym while snow flurries fell outside; she showed up in a skirt and sweater with a glove. At 5-foot-5 and about 120 pounds she led the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in stolen bases seven straight seasons. In 1946 she stole 201 bases in 203 tries, scored 117 runs, drew 93 walks, won Player of the Year, and in the fourteenth inning of Game Six of the Shaughnessy final against the Rockford Peaches slid home in a dress to win Racine the championship before 5,630 at Horlick Field. Her career total of 1,114 steals stood as a professional record until Rickey Henderson passed it.
When the franchise left for Battle Creek she stayed. She had already been working winters at Apex Machine Products making auto and airplane parts, became vice president, and retired in 1972 before moving to Scottsdale to play golf. In July 1950 the Belles held Sophie Kurys Night at Horlick while she sat on 1,033 career steals and was not finished. She liked A League of Their Own and said the actresses did an adequate job, then added that the real Belles had been super good ballplayers. She died in Scottsdale on February 17, 2013. Flint gave her the nickname; Racine kept her.