5 files on the desk from South Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Medal of Honor recipient from the Vietnam War; born and lives in South Milwaukee
$69,360
Gary George Wetzel is South Milwaukee’s Medal of Honor recipient, the door gunner who crawled back to his gun with most of his left arm gone and kept the landing zone alive. He was born there on September 29, 1947, the second of nine in a factory-father house: a dad who had already been to war, a mother on nursing-assistant shifts, Boy Scouts, baseball, and John Wayne.
School was not the point. He joined the Army at eighteen. On January 8, 1968, near Ap Dong An with the 173d Assault Helicopter Company, two rockets threw him into a rice paddy and took most of his left arm. He crawled back to the gun-well anyway, the only effective fire on the landing zone, then passed out dragging the aircraft commander toward a dike. Lyndon Johnson hung the Medal of Honor on him at the White House on November 19, 1968. The arm came off. He came home to run heavy equipment and founded Wisconsin Vietnam Vets Chapter 1 in 1984.
He waited almost fifty years for a parade. In 2017 the Gary Sinise Foundation gutted his 1950s ranch so a man with a cane could cook in his own kitchen. “When I came home from Vietnam I didn’t get a welcome home,” he told the Journal Sentinel. “This is nice.” The city called May 18, 2017, Gary G. Wetzel Day. A stretch of Mason Street at Lincoln Memorial Drive in Milwaukee carries his name. He still lives in South Milwaukee.
Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Conceptual artist and Les Petites Bon-Bons co-founder; born in South Milwaukee
$75,000
Jerry Dreva was the South Milwaukee conceptual artist who co-founded Les Petites Bon-Bons, a glitter band that never played a note and still made People, Newsweek, and Interview. He grew up across the street from the old library on Michigan Avenue, a kid who spray-painted Vietcong flags on mailboxes and got invited to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.
He was born on January 8, 1945 — the same birthday as David Bowie, to whom he later mailed packages until the word “Bon Bon” turned up on the Ashes to Ashes sleeve, by Dreva and partner Bobby Lambert’s own account. He attended St. Mary’s, then seminary prep until they expelled him for radical views. “All he got out of seminary school was four years of Latin and no driver’s ed.” Hollywood, he wrote home, was “no different than Bucyrus Erie where my father spent his life working.” Back at the Voice-Journal he covered the “Art Gangster” who painted Day-Glo hearts on the Grant Park beach house between 1 and 4 a.m. He was the Art Gangster.
The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art took his papers. He came home in the 1990s to care for his mother and died of a heart attack on March 26, 1997, at fifty-two. He is buried at Holy Sepulcher in Cudahy. South Milwaukee is birth, childhood, the newspaper beat, and the last years.
Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Founder and longtime CEO of USA Network; raised in South Milwaukee
$174,960
Kay Koplovitz founded and ran USA Network, becoming the first woman to head a U.S. television network. She held the CEO job from the channel’s 1977 launch until a $4.5 billion sale in 1998, and under her watch the Sci-Fi Channel went on air in 1992.
Born Kay Smith in Milwaukee on April 11, 1945, she spent kindergarten in Cudahy, then grew up at 510 Elm Street in South Milwaukee from age five through high school, where she was valedictorian for the Rockets. Her father sold for Ladish; her mother kept house. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1967 with degrees in communications and biology, earned Phi Beta Kappa, and wrote a Michigan State thesis on satellites after hearing Arthur C. Clarke lecture between her junior and senior years.
She never owned USA Network, and she resigned in 1998 after Barry Diller took control. The Elm Street house and the South Milwaukee Rockets remain the hometown story she tells—the same grit she traces to a childhood fight to finish Cudahy kindergarten after the family moved.
Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin
South Milwaukee AWA wrestler Reginald Lisowski (not other performers billed as Crusher)
$5 a night
Reginald Lisowski—The Crusher, or Da Crusher—was the beer-barrel brawler who made Milwaukee famous and never left South Milwaukee. Three AWA world heavyweight titles, five AWA tag titles with Dick the Bruiser, and a Billboard hit that told turkeynecks to do the hammerlock turned a Polish fullback from the Rockets into a lakefront folk hero who still lived in the city while neighborhood kids camped the lawn.
He was born in South Milwaukee on July 11, 1926, played fullback for South Milwaukee High (class of 1944), and at thirteen already weighed two hundred pounds bouncing drunks from his father’s saloon. The Army sent him to Germany, where he learned to wrestle. Back home he packed meat at Cudahy, laid brick, and worked nights for five dollars a shot at a Chicago armory until promoters bleached his hair and named him The Crusher. Baron Von Raschke later said the gimmick was a lie: Lisowski did not drink beer; he preferred wine.
He won his first AWA world heavyweight title by beating Verne Gagne on July 9, 1963. Sons Larry and David wrestled for South Milwaukee High while Dad yelled from the stands. His wife Faye died in 2003 after fifty-five years. He died of a brain tumor on October 22, 2005, at seventy-nine, at Bradford Terrace Convalescent Center in Milwaukee. In 2019 the city poured him in bronze at 1101 Milwaukee Avenue and threw Crusherfest.
Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Bucyrus attorney and pulp author Ralph Milne Farley of South Milwaukee (great-great-grandson of Declaration signer Roger Sherman)
$750
Roger Sherman Hoar was Bucyrus’s corporate attorney in South Milwaukee by day and, as Ralph Milne Farley, the pulp writer who sent earthmen to Venus by night. He arrived in 1921, built the Georgian Colonial “The Milestone” at 1503 Fairview Avenue, and stayed forty-two years—the improbable resident inside the mining-shovel factory town.
A Harvard lawyer and great-great-grandson of Declaration signer Roger Sherman, he put Myles Cabot on Venus in Argosy’s The Radio Man in June 1924. He taught engineering at Marquette, patented a method for aiming big guns by the stars, and from a South Milwaukee imprint—Stuart Press—published Wisconsin Unemployment Insurance after Washington pulled him onto New Deal unemployment work. He sat with Robert Bloch and Stanley Weinbaum in the Milwaukee Fictioneers; when Ziff-Davis offered him Amazing Stories in 1938 he turned it down and recommended Ray Palmer. City historian Nels Monson writes that he once dated Rose Fitzgerald.
He died of a heart attack in The Milestone on October 10, 1963, at seventy-six. The house still stands. The shovels paid the mortgage; the pulps are what lasted.