5 files on the desk from West Allis, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · West Allis, Wisconsin
Olympic speed-skating gold medalist; born West Allis, grew up a block from the State Fair Park oval; West Allis Central
$5 million
Dan Jansen gave West Allis its defining Olympic story: falls in Calgary on the morning his sister Jane died, then a world-record gold in the 1,000 meters at Lillehammer with his infant daughter—also Jane—in his arms on the victory lap. He learned to skate because his sister handed him the assignment.
He was born in West Allis on June 17, 1965, the youngest of nine. Father Harry was a police lieutenant-detective, mother Gerry a nurse; the house sat a block from the outdoor speed-skating oval at State Fair Park. He attended West Allis Central High School. By sixteen he held a junior world record. On February 14, 1988, in Calgary, he told Jane he loved her over the phone. She was twenty-seven and dying of leukemia in West Allis. Hours later she was gone, and he fell in the 500 meters, then in the 1,000. He had won the world sprint title on that same West Allis ice a week earlier.
He kept going. He became the first man to break 36 seconds in the 500 meters and did it four times, yet still had no Olympic medal heading into Lillehammer. The 500 there fell on the sixth anniversary of Jane’s death; he slipped and finished eighth. One race left: he won the 1,000 in a world-record 1:12.43. West Allis later built the country’s indoor oval—the Pettit National Ice Center, where the national team still trains—on the same grounds. Childhood ice was the older outdoor oval a block from home. The city that raised him got the gold and the story.
Profile · West Allis, Wisconsin
Madison mayor 2003–2011; born and raised in a Polish neighborhood in West Allis; UW–Madison
$113,000
David J. Cieslewicz—Mayor Dave to Madison—won the capital’s top job in 2003, lost it in 2011, and spent eight years trying to make a university city behave like a neighborhood. Allies still call him the bike mayor. He did not become famous by running the city that named him; the West Allis Polish block that raised him is the part most Madison profiles skip.
He was born in West Allis on February 17, 1959, and grew up in a Polish neighborhood there—name pronounced chess-LEV-ich—before leaving for the University of Wisconsin–Madison and staying. The résumé is land-use nerd, not factory floor: he staffed the Legislature, lobbied for the Nature Conservancy, sat on the Dane County Board, and co-founded 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, the group that pushed the state’s Smart Growth planning law. In 1992 he lost an Assembly race to Tammy Baldwin. In 2003 he beat Paul Soglin for mayor; in 2011 Soglin beat him back.
As mayor he was among the first U.S. mayors to sign the Climate Protection Agreement, bought hybrid buses, opened Goodman Pool after roughly sixty years of civic argument, and kept an Aaa bond rating. His sustainability plan was titled “Building a Green Capital City.” After the 2011 loss he ran the Wisconsin Bicycle Federation. He lives in Madison’s Regent neighborhood; twice a month, he has said, you can find him playing Sheepshead at the Memorial Union. Birth and childhood belong to West Allis; public life belongs to Madison.
Profile · West Allis, Wisconsin
Minnesota-born Allis-Chalmers engineer and West Allis amateur astronomer; first Astronomical League president
$500
Ed Halbach punched a factory clock by day and counted stars by night. Born April 5, 1909, in Canby, Minnesota, he came to Milwaukee, earned a Marquette engineering degree, taught math and electrical engineering at the college, then worked missile-guidance problems at AC-Delco on the Titan and Apollo programs before landing at Allis-Chalmers on the West Allis factory grounds. There he designed electro-mechanical gear for diesel locomotives. When the electrical division became Siemens-Allis, he stayed. He retired in 1978.
The science that outlived the plant started at 2046 South 59th Street. In 1932 Luverne Armfield invited amateurs into his West Allis backyard; Halbach was in the first wave of what became the Milwaukee Astronomical Society. He directed the society's observatory for thirty-five years, became the first official president of the Astronomical League in 1947, and logged more than 98,000 variable-star observations for the AAVSO. In 1946 he turned down a job at McDonald Observatory. In 1981 he was the first living winner of the League's Leslie C. Peltier Award. Award citations also note that he built office furniture for AAVSO headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
NBC's Today show noted his 100th birthday. He died March 20, 2011, at 101. He was Minnesota-born; West Allis is where the Allis-Chalmers career and the backyard observatory that launched a lifetime of amateur astronomy belong.
Profile · West Allis, Wisconsin
Longtime Allis-Chalmers executive and company president (1942–1951); inventor of the Texrope multiple-V-belt drive; career centered on the West Allis works
$1 million+ (1951$)
Walter Geist is the person inside the factory that named West Allis. Born in Milwaukee in 1894 and self-educated, he went to work at Allis-Chalmers as a messenger in the blueprint department at fifteen and spent his working life at the West Allis works. He did not inherit the company. He invented his way up.
In the 1920s he looked at old multi-groove rope drives and replaced the rope with several V-belts running in parallel. He filed in 1925. The patent (U.S. 1,662,511, 1928) was broad enough that Allis-Chalmers sold the idea as Texrope and collected royalties from everybody else. Geist rose from milling-machine assistant manager to sales manager to vice president, then became president in 1942. TIME called him the “up-from-office-boy” boss.
During the 1946–47 Local 248 strike he sat in the West Allis front office and played for time until the union broke. He was still president when he died on January 29, 1951, at fifty-six. The New York Times obituary led on the office-boy-at-fifteen detail, not the title. The orange tractors are what people remember. The belts are what paid for them. The lock for West Allis is a lifetime at the plant that gave the city its name, not a claim that he was born there.
Profile · West Allis, Wisconsin
Pianist and showman; born West Allis (bungalow at Six Points); West Milwaukee High; died Palm Springs, 1987
$18 million
Władziu Valentino Liberace became one of the twentieth century’s most famous showmen, known for the candelabra, the sequins, two Hollywood Walk of Fame stars, and nights at Radio City, but he entered the world in a West Allis bungalow. He was born there on May 16, 1919, at 635 51st Street (now 1649 South 60th Street, in the Six Points neighborhood), the surviving twin of an identical brother who was stillborn. Family lore later put his birth weight at thirteen pounds. His mother, Frances Zuchowska, came from Menasha; his father, Salvatore Liberace, was a French-horn player from Formia, Italy, whom the 1925 city directory had already reclassified from musician to grocer as the family ran a store from a second house a block south.
The family lived in West Allis at least five years before moving a few blocks into West Milwaukee. Liberace outgrew parlor lessons; Florence Bettray-Kelly took him on a Wisconsin College of Music scholarship in 1933 and kept coaching him after the sequins arrived. At West Milwaukee High he played boogie-woogie at lunch and birthday parties at night. The gimmick that stuck landed downstate in 1939: an encore of “Three Little Fishies,” done in the styles of Mozart and Chopin. He left Milwaukee in 1941, saying the city was too small, and built the glittering career that made him a household name.
He died in Palm Springs on February 4, 1987, of AIDS-related illness. He liked to call himself a simple boy from Milwaukee; the birth certificate and the bungalow say West Allis, and the high school that later put his name on an auditorium sits in the village next door. In 2019 the city declared May 16 Liberace Appreciation Day, yet West Allis still has no statue—only, as of recent reporting, a basement binder of clippings at the historical society and a house two doors north of the Buzzard’s Nest.