5 files on the desk from Sheboygan, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Sheboygan-born Chordettes baritone; Central High 1945; returned 1968; died in the city Sept. 30, 2023
$750,000+
Carol Hagedorn Buschmann was the Sheboygan baritone of the Chordettes, the hometown quartet that put "Mr. Sandman" and "Lollipop" on the national charts. Born in Sheboygan on May 13, 1927, to Otto and Helen Hagedorn, she used to crawl into the cavity behind the family radio, sing, and pretend the box was doing it. She graduated from Central High in 1945, studied at a CBS broadcasting school in Chicago, and typed for World Book on the side. On a train home she ran into Dottie Hummitzsch, who needed a baritone for a Sheboygan quartet that had started as folk songs in a Superior Avenue living room. Carol said yes.
Jinny Osborn founded the group; Carol replaced Alice Mae Buschmann Spielvogel as baritone in 1947 and outlasted the lineup changes. The Chordettes won Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, moved to New York, and recorded the hits. She sang on every major recording and missed only one tour, to have her daughter Janet, which she called the actual accomplishment. A good baritone, she told her daughter, should never be pickable in the blend; the job was to make the others sound expensive. She married Bob Buschmann in 1952, ran the White Rooster on Long Island, where the Jets drank, and in 1968 brought the family back to run Toro's sporting goods downtown, then the trophy shop.
She made the Sheboygan Softball Hall of Fame for writing checks, not hitting. The Vocal Group Hall of Fame inducted the Chordettes in 2001. Fan mail still arrived after dementia set in. She died in Sheboygan on September 30, 2023, at ninety-six, the last Sheboyganite Chordette. The memorial was at Ballhorn Chapels on North 8th. Born, schooled, and buried in the city, she came home in 1968 and never left again.
Profile · Sheboygan, Wisconsin
NBC Breakfast Club host raised in Sheboygan (not the tennis champion Donald McNeill)
$100,000
Don McNeill hosted NBC’s The Breakfast Club for thirty-five years and made morning radio a national living room. Sheboygan raised him; Chicago kept him. From June 23, 1933, to December 27, 1968, he aired nearly 7,500 shows on some four hundred stations, drawing a million letters a year at the peak.
He was born in Galena, Illinois, on December 23, 1907. The family moved to Sheboygan in 1909, when his father left mining engineering to join grandfather Thomas McNeill’s furniture plant. Don went through grade school and Sheboygan High—where classmates called him Daddy Long Legs—until the plant failed and the Marquette student had to find a paycheck. Milwaukee radio hired him at fifteen dollars a week and fired him with a verdict: no future in the medium.
In 1933 NBC handed him Chicago’s Pepper Pot at fifty dollars a week and a free hand. He renamed it The Breakfast Club, marched the audience around the table every fifteen minutes, and filled the air with Prayer Time in the war years, Aunt Fanny, and deliberate corn. He asked to drop the script after two months; the network said yes because they thought nobody was listening. His papers are at Marquette. He died in Evanston, Illinois, on May 7, 1996. On his mother’s Weinberger side he was a first cousin of Caspar Weinberger.
Profile · Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Sheboygan-born food chemist and space-opera pioneer (Skylark, Lensman); raised in Idaho after leaving Wisconsin as an infant
$850
Edward Elmer Smith was born in Sheboygan on May 2, 1890, to a sailor and a teacher, and left Wisconsin that same winter for Spokane before he could walk. Idaho farms and logging camps did the raising. Sheboygan keeps the birth certificate of the food chemist who helped invent space opera.
He took chemical engineering at the University of Idaho, earned a Ph.D. at George Washington University on what nitrogen oxides do to wheat flour (the dissertation appeared in 1919), and spent his working years in cereal chemistry at Dawn Doughnut in Jackson, Michigan, and related pastry-mix labs, the unglamorous science of making batter behave. At night, with neighbor Lee Hawkins Garby coaching the dialogue, he wrote The Skylark of Space, serialized in Amazing Stories in 1928. Hugo Gernsback stuck "Ph.D." on the byline; readers shortened it to Doc. The Lensman novels built a universe of Lenses, Galactic Patrols, and villains named Boskone.
He died in Seaside, Oregon, on August 31, 1965, while the magazine If was still serializing the last Skylark (June through October). First Fandom inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1963; the Science Fiction Hall of Fame followed posthumously in 2004. The Wisconsin tie is the Sheboygan birth; the story is the cereal lab and the galactic patrols.
Profile · Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Rhineland-born founder of Sheboygan’s Vollrath enamelware company; settled in the city in 1853; died there in 1898
$300,000+ (1898$)
Jacob Johann Vollrath built the enamelware company that still anchors Sheboygan’s industrial map. The firm’s headquarters remain at 1236 North 18th Street, generations after a Rhineland iron molder decided kitchenware, not plumbing, would be his second act in Wisconsin.
He learned to cast iron in Dörrebach in the Rhineland, crossed the Atlantic in the 1840s, and settled in Sheboygan in 1853. In 1873 he transferred the Union Steel and Iron Foundry at Ninth and St. Clair to son-in-law John Michael Kohler, who had married his daughter Lillie—sale or gift, the surviving paper trail never settles. Then he started over. The Sheboygan Cast Steel Company, founded in 1874, poured railroad frogs, furniture castings, and ranges before enamel became the bet. Son Andrew traveled to Germany twice to learn the process, failed at home, returned abroad, and came back again. Limited enamelware production began in 1876. By 1881 the works employed about forty men, did roughly $50,000 a year, and occupied a new plant on North 18th Street that is still Vollrath’s front door. He claimed gray enameling—a method, not a color—as his contribution.
Family ties tangled the city’s two hardware fortunes. After Lillie died in 1883, Kohler married her sister Minnie, making Vollrath father-in-law twice. Kohler’s plumbing empire grew into a company town west of Sheboygan; Vollrath’s pots and pans stayed in the city. He died in Sheboygan on May 15, 1898. The company he restarted still lists a global footprint of facilities on three continents from that same North 18th Street address.
Profile · Sheboygan, Wisconsin
1971 high-jump world-record holder; born in Sheboygan; Sheboygan North and University of Wisconsin
$2 million
Patrick Clifford “Pat” Matzdorf is the Sheboygan high jumper who broke the world record on a third try he did not think he could clear. Born in Sheboygan on December 26, 1949, and a 1968 graduate of Sheboygan North, he was a University of Wisconsin junior when the United States met the Soviet Union in Berkeley on July 3, 1971. His personal best walking in was 7 feet 3 inches. He matched it, then set the American record at 7-4½ on the second attempt.
On the third try, at 7 feet 6¼ inches, something in the takeoff felt wrong. He carried it anyway, cleared on the straddle (the old style, already fading after Fosbury’s flop), hit the pad, bounced, and put both hands over his head. He had taken Valery Brumel’s world record at the same meet where Brumel had set it. Sheboygan threw a parade; city crews hung cardboard banners on the streetlights at the exact height. He married Peggy that fall and rode in the parade with her. He also won Pan American Games gold in Cali in 1971 and remains the only Badger athlete with a world record.
Dwight Stones took the mark about two years later. Matzdorf, an introvert, was relieved. He switched to the flop in 1974 to spare his knees, managing 7-4¼ in 1975 after a ragged first session at 6-10. The second act was quieter: a mathematics degree, a computer-science master’s, and twenty-five years at Bell Labs writing software for the first commercial cellular system, rolled out in Chicago in 1983. The poles had already made the point.