5 files on the desk from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Born Milwaukee; Wauwatosa East class of 2001 (jersey No. 20 retired); Wisconsin Badgers and 15-year NBA guard; 2009 All-Star
$74 million
Devin Lamar Harris is the Wauwatosa East point guard whose No. 20 came down in the school gym in 2007 with Dallas Mavericks coach Avery Johnson in the building and students yelling from the bleachers. Born in Milwaukee on February 27, 1983, to Terry and Julie Harris, he grew up as the klutz his mother remembered, collecting black eyes and busted lips, then as the kid who put 47 points on the board, went undefeated in the regular season as a senior, and beat Fond du Lac's Travis Diener for Wisconsin Mr. Basketball in 2001. He played one season of volleyball, made all-conference, and dropped it to live in the gym.
Bo Ryan recruited him to Wisconsin after Dick Bennett retired. School records still cited by Tosa East include those 47 points in a game, 162 free throws in a season, three conference titles, and All-Conference honors three years running. Injuries after his sophomore year kept him off the summer-camp circuit that makes recruiting reputations, so the senior explosion had to do the work. The Washington Wizards took him fifth overall in 2004 and flipped him to Dallas.
Fifteen NBA seasons followed, including an All-Star trip with the New Jersey Nets in 2009. On February 12, 2007, Tosa East retired his jersey the same night Tony Smith's No. 34 came down: two NBA guards on one suburban wall. Harris told the crowd he was happy to represent the school and would keep making them proud. Milwaukee is on the birth certificate; the gym that kept the jersey is the hometown argument.
Profile · Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Raised on Stickney Avenue, Wauwatosa; Wauwatosa High class of 1951; longtime Cisco CEO/chairman; TOSA Foundation
$1 billion
John P. Morgridge is the Wauwatosa-raised executive who took Cisco Systems public and later put the suburb’s nickname on a major philanthropic foundation. Raised in a Stickney Avenue duplex, he graduated from Wauwatosa High School with the class of 1951 after winning state swimming titles in 1950 and 1951. His parents, L. D. and Ruth Gordon Morgridge, were both teachers. Teenage and college jobs, in his own telling, ran from a Lannon quarry and washing walls at Pabst to Highway 64 road work, a railroad brakeman’s post, and a Milwaukee Sentinel bicycle route. Before the corporate climb he washed pea-plant equipment sixteen hours a day at seventy-five cents an hour at Oconomowoc’s Teeny Weenie factory, then fell asleep on Tashia Frankfurth’s couch at Okauchee Lake. He married her; she was also class of 1951.
Stops at Honeywell, Stratus, and GRiD preceded the 1988 move to a four-year-old networking company with thirty-four employees. He took Cisco public in 1990, handed the CEO job to John Chambers in 1995, and stayed chairman until 2006, when the head count had reached about 50,000 people in seventy-seven countries.
He and Tashia named their foundation TOSA. Lead gifts rebuilt Hoyt Park’s pool—he went first down the slide at the 2011 preview, in fifty-degree weather—and the East High auditorium and natatorium, dedicated to the 1951 swim team. A $100 million gift to the University of Wisconsin in 2014 was then the largest individual donation in the school’s history. The fortune was made in California; the name on the buildings is the suburb.
Profile · Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Raised in Wauwatosa; local high school; born Nancy Conners Hanschman, Jan. 19, 1927; died New York, Oct. 18, 1997
$4.25 million
Before she was the first woman CBS hired as a network television correspondent, Nancy Hanschman was an architect’s daughter from Wauwatosa who took an education degree at Wisconsin, taught Milwaukee elementary school, and decided Washington looked more like the job. Born Nancy Conners Hanschman on January 19, 1927, she was the daughter of architect Frederick R. Hanschman and Florence Conners. She spent two years at Clarke College in Dubuque, then finished a B.A. in education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1948. By 1954 she was producing Capitol Cloakroom. In 1960 she won the correspondent’s title the men had kept, and that fall in Los Angeles she became the first woman to report from a national-convention floor. Lyndon Johnson’s decision to run with Kennedy went out through her interview.
She covered the March on Washington, Kennedy’s funeral, and three inaugurals, then left the network to syndicate Inside Washington and produce 784 Days That Changed America—Watergate to resignation—which won a Peabody. Variety named her one of the top ten television reporters in 1964, the only woman on the list. She threw the parties the capital came to. Son John inherited the trade.
She married C. Wyatt Dickerson Jr. on February 24, 1962; they had three children, including John Dickerson. She later married former Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead. She died in New York on October 18, 1997, after a stroke, at age seventy, and is buried at Arlington. The Wauwatosa piece is the origin, not a long adult residency: a suburb that sent a schoolteacher into a boys’ club and watched her take the floor.
Profile · Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Longtime Time and Life film critic and documentary maker; grew up in Wauwatosa; Wauwatosa High (now East)
$1.67 million
Richard Warren Schickel was the film critic who spent roughly four decades telling America how to watch movies—first at Life magazine, then at Time—and who traced that vocation to a Wauwatosa childhood within walking distance of two neighborhood theaters. He wrote thirty-seven books, directed more than thirty documentaries, and never stopped sounding like someone who had fallen hard for cinema before he was ten.
He was born in Milwaukee on February 10, 1933, to Edward John Schickel, who worked in advertising, and Helen (née Hendricks), and grew up at 1721 North 68th Street from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s. About age nine, watching James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy with his parents at the Tosa or the Times, he stopped treating movies as afternoon filler and started noticing directors’ names, then walking to the library for books on how films were made. He graduated from Wauwatosa High (now East), wrote for the Daily Cardinal at the University of Wisconsin—he said anti-McCarthyism cost him the editorship—and later told Tosa East students, when the school put him on its Wall of Inspiration in 2003, that he had been a total failure, proof that goof-offs can succeed.
He was Life’s film critic from 1965 to 1972, then Time’s until 2010. The Disney Version (1968) refused to genuflect, reading Walt as a Midwest product of clean moral stories and gag humor without self-satire. Documentaries included The Men Who Made the Movies (1973) and the Emmy-nominated Life Goes to the Movies (1977); DVD commentaries ran from On the Waterfront to Titanic. He died in Los Angeles on February 18, 2017, after a series of strokes. His memoir title, Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip, is a Wauwatosa childhood talking. Birth was Milwaukee; the formative stretch was Tosa.
Profile · Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Nobel Prize–winning structural biologist; born Milwaukee, raised Wauwatosa from mid-third grade through high school
$500,000
Thomas A. Steitz shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping, atom by atom, the ribosome—the cellular machine that turns genetic code into protein. Long associated with Yale and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he traced the pivot in his own life to a childhood move from downtown Milwaukee into Wauwatosa.
He was born in Milwaukee on August 23, 1940. After a nearly failing second-grade report card in an apartment above a paint store on 27th Street, his family bought a house on 75th Street in Wauwatosa midway through third grade, in 1949. Roosevelt Elementary’s winter rink, Longfellow junior-high shop class—where he wound an electric motor from scratch—and a school alto saxophone (after the band director rejected his father’s C-melody) reshaped a bored kid. He bunched radishes on his grandfather’s Waukesha County truck farm at five cents a dozen, a hundred dozen on a good day, and bought a better saxophone. At Wauwatosa High he finished eighth in a class of more than three hundred and nearly chose music over science; brother Dick’s straight A’s at Longfellow had already been a wake-up call.
Lawrence College led to Harvard and then to the ribosome work that won the Nobel. His wife, Joan, became a molecular-biology eminence in her own right; a son pitched in the Brewers system. Steitz practiced saxophone one to two hours a day and later credited shop-class skills with building protein models in the lab. He died at home in Stony Creek, a Branford, Connecticut, village, on October 9, 2018. Birth was Milwaukee; the beloved stretch—rink, sax, and teachers who would not let him stay bored—was Wauwatosa from about age eight or nine through high school.