5 files on the desk from Stevens Point, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin
Born Stevens Point, Nov. 30, 1907; UW–Madison pediatric graduate program 1963–70; died 1983, buried Forest Cemetery, Stevens Point
$200,000
Florence Guinness Blake was the Stevens Point–born nurse who helped turn pediatric nursing into a parent-centered academic discipline. Born there on November 30, 1907, she was the daughter of Baptist minister James Blake and musician Thelma Dunlap Blake, and the family steered her toward nursing. She earned her diploma at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago in 1928, studied at Teachers College, Columbia, and spent roughly 1936 to 1939 teaching pediatric nursing at Union Medical College in Peiping on Rockefeller funding while war closed in. A master’s at Michigan followed. In 1946 she built the graduate program in advanced pediatric nursing at the University of Chicago around keeping parents in the room, not merely running procedures. The Child, His Parents and the Nurse (1954) was the first textbook to write that approach down as a field; a Yale reviewer called it patient-oriented care instead of disease-oriented care, which was the whole argument. She later co-authored, then served as senior author of, Essentials of Pediatric Nursing and Nursing Care of Children.
Wisconsin brought her back in 1963 to run the pediatric graduate program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She retired in 1970 and stayed in Madison. The American Nurses Association inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 1996.
She died in 1983 and was buried at Forest Cemetery on Patch Street in Stevens Point, in the family plot, the stone marked Daughter. Birth certificate and grave are the same city: the childhood is the manse, and the science is what she built after she left.
Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin
Actress best known as Mimi Bobeck on The Drew Carey Show; born and raised Stevens Point (SPASH 1972)
$6 million
Kathy Kinney is the Stevens Point native whose painted Mimi Bobeck face became one of the most recognizable comic characters of 1990s network television. On The Drew Carey Show she lasted nine seasons and 233 episodes after what was meant to be a one-shot cosmetics-counter bit in the pilot: an applicant whose makeup looked applied with a trowel. The audience refused to let her leave, and Mimi became Drew’s on-screen nemesis, complete with muumuus and war paint.
She was born in Stevens Point on November 3, 1954, to Harold Kinney, an automobile dealer, and Marian Kinney, and grew up on the south side a block and a half from the Point Brewery. The plant whistle at seven, noon, and five ran the household; she still calls that neighborhood the wrong side of the tracks. After her father died of emphysema when she was fifteen, she became the family’s handyman in coveralls. A cemetery a block away supplied headstones as pretend horses and mausoleums as dance halls. She graduated from Stevens Point Area Senior High in 1972, spent time with the California Conservation Corps including a Kings Canyon backcountry season, and later worked a secretary’s desk at WCBS in New York. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point in the 1970s and finally finished the degree in 2016.
She still comes home for United Way events, antique stores, and the brewery. Marian’s rule still holds: be home when the whistle blows. The city tie is the south-side childhood and SPASH, not the campus degree that came decades later.
Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin
Hardware dealer who moved Hardware Dealers Mutual (later Sentry) to Stevens Point in 1912
$250,000
Peter J. “P.J.” Jacobs was the Stevens Point hardware dealer who packed a mutual-insurance office out of Berlin, Wisconsin, in 1912 and made Hardware Dealers Mutual—later Sentry Insurance—a Point company. The junior high on Main Street still carries his name.
Born and raised in Stevens Point (1869–1936), he ran Gross & Jacobs Hardware with Nick Gross in the old post-office building on Main and served as secretary of the state hardware dealers association. The mutual had been writing small fire policies out of Berlin since 1904; Jacobs moved the typewriters, desks, files, and roughly ninety thousand dollars in assets home to Stevens Point and anchored the company there. In the 1920s he traveled to Indiana more than once to hire stone carvers and choose stone for the Strongs Avenue door frames. He was a Rotary charter member and a St. Stephen’s parishioner.
He died in April 1936. His son Carl took the chair, and for a stretch grandson James sat in it too; the family ran the firm through 1966. Two years after the funeral the city put his name on a new high school, dedicated June 1, 1938; when SPASH took the seniors in 1972, the Main Street building remained P.J. Jacobs Junior High. Sentry is still headquartered in Stevens Point, and the restaurant at SentryWorld is called PJ’s because a granddaughter remembered that he liked a family table.
Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin
Olympic middle-distance runner; Stevens Point / SPASH
$100,000
Suzy Favor Hamilton was one of Wisconsin’s greatest prep and collegiate runners before representing the United States in three Olympic Games. The Stevens Point story begins on the Plover River, where she gathered branches for forts and galloped for hours pretending she was a horse.
Born in Stevens Point on August 8, 1968, to Conrad and Rachel Favor, she ran her first real race—a fifth-grade 400—under her father’s coaching, passing the girls and then the boys. At Stevens Point Area Senior High, class of 1986, she won eleven WIAA titles, including four in cross country and four straight 1,600s. Scholastic ranked her among the century’s top hundred high-school athletes. At the University of Wisconsin she collected nine NCAA titles and the Honda Cup. Personal bests included 3:57.40 in the 1,500 (2000) and 4:22.93 in the mile (1998).
She competed in Barcelona, Atlanta, and Sydney. In the 2000 Olympic 1,500 final she led into the last lap and fell; she later said she had tripped herself rather than finish off the podium, running in the shadow of her brother Dan’s suicide the year before. Later struggles—including a bipolar misdiagnosis and a public Las Vegas escort scandal that cost her sponsors—closed the competitive chapter. In 2010 she became the first Wisconsin female athlete inducted into the National High School Hall of Fame. The Point memory remains the river and the freshman who already owned the state meet.
Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin
Wisconsin Supreme Court justice (1983–2003) and former state Senate majority leader; born in Stevens Point
$122,418
William Albert “Bill” Bablitch was the Stevens Point–raised lawyer who remade Wisconsin’s sexual-assault laws as Senate majority leader and then sat twenty years on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Colleagues remembered the cook as much as the justice: after his mother died when he was thirteen, he fed six kids and a working father, and anyone who disliked the plate could eat cornflakes.
He graduated from Pacelli High School in 1959, studied at the college in town, finished at Madison in 1963, and joined the Peace Corps in Liberia as an early volunteer teaching elementary school and coaching soccer. Law school followed during the Dow riots; he helped the injured and later appeared in the documentary The War at Home. Home meant Portage County district attorney from 1969 to 1972, then the state Senate, where he led the 1970s rewrite that stopped courts from dragging a victim’s whole sexual history through trial. He was also proud of the 1978 court reorganization that created the Court of Appeals.
On the Supreme Court from 1983 to 2003 he once recused himself from a campaign-finance case because his own Senate memo was in the file, and he filed a complaint against himself over a closed meeting and paid a fifty-dollar forfeiture. In 1988 he landed a 38¾-pound musky in Vilas County—“the scales of justice,” the headline said. He died of cancer in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on February 16, 2011, Parkinson’s already in his hands. Memorials were held in Madison and Stevens Point. The city claim is childhood plus the district-attorney years.