5 files on the desk from Superior, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Superior, Wisconsin
Documentary photographer; born Phillips, raised Superior (not born in Superior)
$750,000
Esther Fern Bubley was a documentary photographer whose wartime bus series, Standard Oil assignments, Life magazine stories, and Museum of Modern Art prints made her one of the defining camera voices of mid-century America. Phillips, Wisconsin, is the birthplace; Superior is where she found the camera.
Fourth of five children of Louis and Ida Bubley, Russian Jewish immigrants, she was born in Phillips on February 16, 1921, then settled with the family in Superior. At Central High she was yearbook editor and tried to make the book look like Life, which had hit the stands in 1936. She spent two years at Superior State Teachers College (now UW–Superior), then took the Minneapolis School of Art’s one-year photography course. In Washington in 1941 she found no job, disliked a Christmas season at Vogue, worked as a National Archives microfilmer, and was hired by Roy Stryker as a darkroom assistant at the Office of War Information before he let her shoot. The hard assignment was buses—Midwest and South, wartime, people sleeping sitting up.
When Stryker went to Standard Oil she followed: Tomball, Texas, and another bus story that won Pictures of the Year in 1948. She shot for Ladies’ Home Journal’s “How America Lives,” about forty stories for Life, and thirteen Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital prints in MoMA’s Diogenes with a Camera; Edward Steichen hung her contact sheets to show she used every frame. She was the first woman to win Photography magazine’s international contest in 1954 and appeared in The Family of Man. She died in New York of cancer on March 16, 1998.
Profile · Superior, Wisconsin
Superior-born athlete and coach; NBA champion with the Minneapolis Lakers; CFL Grey Cups; Minnesota Vikings head coach; Pro Football Hall of Fame 1994
$10,000
Harry Peter "Bud" Grant Jr. was the stone-faced coach of the Minnesota Vikings and one of the few athletes who won championships in both the NBA and the CFL before remaking an NFL sideline. Born in Superior, Wisconsin, on May 20, 1927, he grew up as Buddy Boy to his mother Bernice. A doctor found polio in the boy and told him to play sports so the legs would hold. He started with baseball, then basketball, then football. When the schools did not field teams, he organized games between neighborhoods and called kids from other schools. Weekends he hunted rabbits alone. On November 11, 1940, he and two friends were duck hunting on Yellow Lake when the Armistice Day Blizzard came down; he heard a train horn, found the tracks, and waited it out in a gas station.
After Navy service at Great Lakes on Paul Brown's service team, he used a Wisconsin acceptance letter to get discharged and went to Minnesota instead, earning nine letters in football, basketball, and baseball. He won an NBA title with the Minneapolis Lakers in 1950 and was drafted that same year in the NFL's first round, fourteenth overall, by the Philadelphia Eagles and in the NBA's fourth round by the Lakers. With Winnipeg he intercepted five passes in one 1953 playoff game, a record in any league, and as the youngest head coach in the CFL won four Grey Cups. He coached the Vikings from 1967 to 1983 and again in 1985, reaching four Super Bowls with no heaters on the sideline and the team standing in a straight line through the anthem.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame inducted him in 1994. He kept later outdoor life and a cabin at Gordon in Douglas County, south of the city, and never stopped saying he was from Superior, Wis. He died in Bloomington, Minnesota, on March 11, 2023.
Profile · Superior, Wisconsin
Superior-born Progressive Republican; Wisconsin Assembly speaker, U.S. House and Senate; nearly Harding’s 1920 running mate
$12,500
Irvine Luther Lenroot was the Superior Progressive who rose from logging camps and a Douglas County courtroom to the United States Senate, and who came within a convention roll call of the vice presidency that would have made him president when Warren G. Harding died. Associated Press obituaries in January 1949 opened on that near miss: “the man who might have been the 30th President of the United States.”
He was born in Superior on January 31, 1869, to Swedish immigrant Lars Lönnrot (later Lenroot) and Fredrica. He attended common schools in Superior, studied at Parsons Business College across the bay in Duluth in 1889, worked as a logger, and served as a court reporter in the Douglas County courthouse. He read law, passed the bar in 1898, and practiced in Superior. In the Wisconsin Assembly from 1901 to 1907 he spent the last four years as Speaker, then won a House seat from the 11th District. After Senator Paul Husting died he moved to the Senate, serving from 1918 to 1927. He married Clara Clough of Superior, later the author of the girlhood memoir Long, Long Ago (1929).
In Chicago on June 12, 1920, after Harding locked the presidential nomination, party bosses wanted a progressive running mate. Hiram Johnson refused; Lenroot accepted; Senator Medill McCormick nominated him. Before the roll could start, Wallace McCamant of Oregon placed Calvin Coolidge in nomination. Delegates—many of the bosses already gone—gave Coolidge 674 votes and Lenroot 146. Harding died in 1923; Coolidge became the thirtieth president. Lenroot lost the 1926 Senate renomination to John J. Blaine. Herbert Hoover later appointed him to the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals. Daughter Katherine lobbied for the Fair Labor Standards Act. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Superior, the city that raised him.
Profile · Superior, Wisconsin
Settled in Superior, 1879
$3 million
Martin Pattison was the Superior lumberman and iron investor who built Fairlawn Mansion on the harbor, served three terms as mayor, and quietly saved Big Manitou Falls for the public. He arrived in Superior in 1879 with a younger brother and his new wife, Grace Frink, the lighthouse keeper's daughter, and built a fortune first on Black River pine, then on Minnesota's Vermilion Range, where he located the Chandler and Pioneer mines and became one of the largest individual holders of Minnesota iron land.
He bought a city block on the harbor and finished Fairlawn in 1891: forty-two rooms at a cost of more than $150,000. He served once as sheriff and three times as mayor. In July 1890 the Sunday Morning Call disclosed another life: he had been born Simeon Martin Thayer in Ontario on January 17, 1841, left Port Huron on business in 1872, and never returned to Isabelle Murdock and their two children. The divorce made the papers; Superior elected him anyway.
In 1917, when a power dam threatened to drown Big Manitou Falls, he bought 660 acres and gave the land to Wisconsin. He died in December 1918, before the sixth state park was dedicated on January 20, 1920. Grace later moved to California and donated Fairlawn to a children's home; Babe Ruth visited the children there in 1926. The house is a museum, and the falls still run in the park that bears his name.
Profile · Superior, Wisconsin
2009 Nobel laureate in economics; born and raised in Superior; Superior Central class of 1950
$700,000
Oliver Eaton Williamson built transaction-cost economics into a field and shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in economic sciences with Elinor Ostrom. He was born in Superior on September 27, 1932, grew up on the corner of North 23rd Street and Hammond Avenue, and graduated from Superior Central in 1950. Summers meant Lake Nebagamon. He was the second child of two teachers: Scott left the classroom after marrying Lucille and joined grandfather Oliver Dunn’s real-estate office, later serving nine years as president of the Superior City Council; Lucille had been a Minnesota high-school principal and was required to quit when she married.
He called Superior the most democratic place he ever lived, a town where talent came in many forms and was respected in all. He was a good student and a mediocre athlete who played Friday-night poker, went to Saturday dances, and bowled and shot pool with friends. He thought he would be a lawyer until math pulled him toward engineering. His mother said M.I.T.; he went to Ripon on the combined plan, then General Electric, Stanford’s business school, and Carnegie Mellon, where seven later Nobels sat in the same small program.
Markets and Hierarchies (1975) and The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (1985) asked why firms exist, why they stop growing, and why a contract is not just a price. As Special Economic Assistant in the Antitrust Division in 1966–67, the Schwinn case taught him that organization was not automatically a crime. He bought the family summer place at Lake Nebagamon in 1972 and worked there in the summers. He died in 2020. A plaque hangs in the Douglas County Government Center.