5 files on the desk from Wausau, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin
BMW Group design chief 1992–2009 (first American in the role); born Ravenna, Ohio; raised in Wausau; Wausau West class of 1975
$5 million+
Chris Bangle was the Wausau West drafting-class kid who became BMW’s first American design chief, then spent seventeen years reshaping how the German premium brands looked—and arguing with everyone who hated the results. Bob Zuleger’s drafting room heard it early: freshman or sophomore, the kid said he was going to be a car designer. “Yeah, sure kid.”
He was born in Ravenna, Ohio, on October 14, 1956, and raised in Wausau. At Wausau West from 1972 to 1975 he went to midget races at the Wisconsin Valley Fair, ruined a 1960s Karmann Ghia into what he later called a horrific dune buggy, lettered communion Bibles in old Germanic script for the church, and took a summer job as a technical draughtsman at seventeen. He also thought he might become a Methodist minister. After Wisconsin he went to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Opel interiors and Fiat design work—the Coupé, the Alfa 145—led to Munich on October 1, 1992: the first American to run BMW Group design across BMW, MINI, and Rolls-Royce. The E65 7 Series rear end started petitions; Time later put that car on a “50 worst” list, yet it became the best-selling 7 Series to that point, and BMW passed Mercedes in premium volume on his watch. He called the surfaces a revolutionary generation after an evolutionary one and told critics to see the cars in person. He did not coin “flame surfacing”—a journalist did—and has pointed to Frank Gehry as an influence. GINA, a fabric-skinned BMW concept in 2008, closed the Munich decade.
He left in 2009 for a studio in Clavesana near Turin, designed a Hennessy bottle and an electric oddity called REDS, and never really stopped being the West kid who had already picked a life. His favorite boyhood book, he told the Wausau Daily Herald, was Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay; he likened designing a car to a Lombardi season. Ohio is the birthplace; Wausau is the raising and the high-school claim.
Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin
Wausau-raised Democrat; U.S. House 7th District 1969–2011; House Appropriations chairman; memoir Raising Hell for Justice
$214,503
David Ross Obey was the Wausau Democrat who held Wisconsin's 7th Congressional District for forty-two years and ran House Appropriations when the chamber's money bills still defined a career. Born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, on October 3, 1938, he moved back to Wausau with his family in 1941, graduated from Wausau East, saved money at the UW Marathon County campus, worked as a busboy at Rennebohm's on State Street, laid tile for a landlord, and earned a political-science degree and a Soviet-politics master's at Madison. As a kid he delivered Joe McCarthy literature, then watched McCarthy people brand one of his teachers a communist and walked; La Follette progressivism made more sense. Identified as a Republican into his teens, he joined the Young Democrats on a professor's advice and won a hometown Assembly race that cost $1,100 by about 1,100 votes.
When Melvin Laird left Congress for Nixon's Pentagon, Obey won the 1969 special election at age thirty, the youngest member of the House and the first Democrat in that seat in the century. He stayed until 2011: ethics-code chair, Labor appropriations workhorse, and House Appropriations chairman briefly in 1994–95 and again from 2007 to 2011. He swung the same gavel that had passed Medicare in 1965 to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2010. His closest later scare came in 1972, when redistricting paired him with fifteen-term Republican Alvin O'Konski; Obey kept about sixty percent of his old territory.
He could be cranky on the floor and fiercely protective of the northwoods district that includes Wausau. He retired rather than become a mascot, lobbied for a time afterward, and the health-sciences building at Northcentral Technical College wears his name. Sean Duffy succeeded him in the seat. He married Joan in 1962; she died in 2023; they had two children. His 2008 memoir is Raising Hell for Justice. The childhood is Wausau, and the accent never left.
Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin
Born Wausau, June 17, 1923; Wausau High 1939–40; Wisconsin AD 1969–87; died Madison 2004, buried Pine Grove Cemetery, Wausau
$20,000
Elroy Leon “Crazylegs” Hirsch was the Wausau halfback who became a Pro Football Hall of Fame receiver, a Hollywood title character, and the athletic director who filled Camp Randall. Born in Wausau on June 17, 1923, and adopted by Otto Hirsch, an iron-works foreman, and Mayme, he grew up German-Norwegian with a left foot that pointed out. He ran the two miles to school skipping and crisscrossing the sidewalk squares so he would be shifty. Wausau High got the halfback in 1939 and 1940. A Chicago writer watching him against Great Lakes in 1942 wrote that “his crazy legs were gyrating in six different directions, all at the same time.” Hirsch was glad to be called anything but Elroy.
Wisconsin’s 1942 Badgers went 8–1–1 and beat Ohio State. The Marines parked him at Michigan, where he lettered in football, basketball, baseball, and track in a single academic year—the first Michigan athlete to do so—including a broad jump and a one-hit shutout of Ohio State on the same May afternoon. The AAFC Chicago Rockets were, he said later, the worst decision he ever made, and they cost him a fractured skull. The Los Angeles Rams made him the deep threat of the 1951 championship team: 1,495 receiving yards and 17 touchdown catches. After a second head injury, coach Clark Shaughnessy had an eleven-ounce plastic helmet made for him from fighter-plane material, among the NFL’s first plastic shells. He played himself in the picture Crazylegs; Unchained gave the world “Unchained Melody.” He later ran the Rams, then Wisconsin athletics from 1969 to 1987 until Camp Randall was full, and sued S.C. Johnson over a women’s shaving gel named Crazylegs.
He married Wausau High sweetheart Ruth Stahmer in June 1946; they had fifty-eight years. He died in Madison in 2004, and they brought him home to Pine Grove Cemetery in Wausau. The Crazylegs Classic, an 8K from the Capitol to Camp Randall, still funds Badger athletics. Wausau claims the birth, the high school, and the grave; Madison claims the final years.
Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin
Born Wausau, May 30, 1975
$1.4 billion
Marissa Ann Mayer is the Wausau-born technologist who became Google's twentieth employee and first female engineer, then chief executive of Yahoo. She was born in Wausau on May 30, 1975, grew up with an art-teacher mother and a father who designed water plants, and graduated from Wausau West High School in 1993 after a crowded résumé: grocery clerk, debate captain on a state-championship team, pom-pom captain, Spanish club president, and a Governor Tommy Thompson pick for National Youth Science Camp.
Stanford was supposed to lead to brain surgery. She switched to symbolic systems—linguistics, psychology, and computer science—earned a master's in computer science, and joined Google in Mountain View. Over thirteen years she worked on Search, Maps, Gmail, and Images, the products that defined the company. Yahoo named her CEO in 2012; Verizon bought Yahoo's operating business in 2017 for $4.5 billion. Her later ventures include Sunshine and Dazzle.
The Wausau tie is birth, childhood, and Wausau West. The over-scheduled high-school captain who bagged groceries is still the clearest origin story for a career that remade Silicon Valley's public face.
Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin
Wausau-born pharmaceutical chemist; longtime University of Kansas professor and chair; died Lawrence, Kansas, 2025
$2 million
Ronald Terrance Borchardt was the Wausau-born pharmaceutical chemist who spent nearly fifty years at the University of Kansas figuring out how drugs cross gut and brain barriers, how peptides survive a bottle, and how to block an enzyme viruses need. Colleagues called him a giant in the pharmaceutical sciences; he liked to say, Sinatra-style, that he did it his way.
Born in Wausau on February 18, 1944, he grew up in a working-class house where Helen worked the lunchroom at a middle school and Martin worked in a factory. Both parents had stopped at grade school and still pushed education on Ron and his sister Judi. He was a B–C student who preferred the ice rink and baseball and failed to make the basketball team; Coach Marshall Taylor, who took Wausau to the 1960 state title, made him manager instead and taught him how to run a room. After graduation he loaded bags of roofing granules onto rail cars. That factory summer, not a guidance counselor, decided college.
Organic chemistry at Wisconsin turned a future pharmacist into a scientist. He earned a Ph.D. at Kansas in 1970 on the stereochemistry of the adrenergic system, completed an NIH postdoc, and returned to KU for nearly five decades as Solon E. Summerfield Distinguished Professor, fifteen years as chair of pharmaceutical chemistry, and two as acting dean. About 170 graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scientists passed through his lab. He died in Lawrence, Kansas, on July 15, 2025. The Wausau boy who was never the prospect became the reason other people’s drugs actually work.