5 files on the desk from West Bend, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · West Bend, Wisconsin
West Bend–born physician; UW professor and Ladies’ Hall principal; first woman UW Regent and first woman on the State Board of Control
$2,000
Almah Jane Frisby was a West Bend–born physician who became one of Wisconsin’s early women in public authority: professor of hygiene at the University of Wisconsin, principal of Ladies’ Hall, the first woman on the Board of Regents, and the first woman on the State Board of Control that oversaw prisons, reformatories, and hospitals. She argued that women’s judgment belonged in the rooms where women and girls were confined.
She was born in West Bend on July 8, 1857, the daughter of lawyer Leander F. Frisby—later Wisconsin’s attorney general—and Frances E. Rooker Frisby. At the University of Wisconsin commencement in 1878 she and her sister Alice both spoke, a shared milestone that marked the family’s push into higher education. She earned a medical degree from Boston University in 1883, opened a Milwaukee practice, ran the Women’s Homeopathic Hospital in Philadelphia for a winter, and in 1887 read a paper on uterine disease to the state homeopathic association. From 1889 to 1895 Wisconsin hired her as professor of hygiene and sanitary science and as principal of Ladies’ Hall.
Governor Robert M. La Follette put her on the Board of Regents from 1901 to 1906, then on the State Board of Control from 1905 to 1912. An 1897 USDA bulletin on losses in boiling vegetables and the composition and digestibility of potatoes and eggs carries her name with Harry Snyder and Arthur Peyton Bryant. Her cousin was Judge Franklin L. Gilson; a railroad station at Marshfield was named Frisby. She died in Santa Barbara, California, on November 12, 1931, and is buried at Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee. Practice and later life took her through Milwaukee, Madison, and California; the start was West Bend, where her father’s law practice rooted the family.
Profile · West Bend, Wisconsin
Town of Trenton–born West Bend industrialist; cofounder of West Bend Aluminum (1911); B.C. Ziegler and Company; died 1946 still company president
$6,500
Bernhard Carl "Ben" Ziegler built West Bend Aluminum from a rented button factory into a national cookware name and kept the town employed through the Depression. Born in the Town of Trenton, Washington County, on January 25, 1884, he attended West Bend Lutheran and public schools and finished high school in 1902. At eighteen he sold fire insurance from a room in his father's hotel, worked as bookkeeper to a county treasurer, and rode a bicycle and then a horse-and-buggy to farm clients. During the 1907 Roosevelt panic he pulled cash from the banks and lent it to those farmers at 4 to 4.5 percent, later saying he did more business in two months than in the prior four years.
On September 27, 1911, after a pocketbook-factory fire put townspeople out of work, he and six investors put up $1,000 each and rented a former button factory on the Milwaukee River for $8.50 a month. West Bend Aluminum's first run was saucepans, a frying pan, a pie pan, and a water dipper. Sears took 40 to 50 percent of sales through 1919. The Waterless Cooker made the company national. Ziegler also incorporated B.C. Ziegler and Company, opened First National Bank of West Bend in 1917, ran Gehl Brothers, and chaired the county parks.
He died of coronary thrombosis on May 6, 1946, at sixty-two, still president of the cookware works. Ripley's later claimed West Bend skipped the Depression; the payroll is why. The town's industrial story still starts with his name.
Profile · West Bend, Wisconsin
Poet and Carroll College professor; raised in West Bend, taught in Waukesha
under $100,000 (1986$)
Viola Sophia Wendt was a poet and longtime English professor at Carroll College in Waukesha whose work won a Borestone Mountain award and still funds a campus writing scholarship. West Bend raised her; Waukesha kept the classroom; West Bend took her back for burial.
Born on an Idaho farm in Boise on March 31, 1907, she moved to West Bend in 1914 when her father, Carl, left potatoes for a business. She graduated from West Bend High School in 1924, then earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where professors told her she had a talent for the bizarre—a judgment she took as a compliment. She never married.
Carroll hired her in 1942, when wartime emptied classrooms of men. She became a full professor and, after retiring in 1975, stayed on as poet-in-residence. “On Reading Marianne Moore” took a 1955 Borestone Mountain Poetry Award. Her collections—You Keep Waiting for Geese (1975), The Wind is Rising (1979), and In Any Available Light (1983)—came from Carroll College Press and Bittern Press. She died in Waukesha on March 23, 1986, and is buried at Washington County Memorial Park in West Bend.
Profile · West Bend, Wisconsin
Computer pioneer who co-created the first dial-up bulletin board system (CBBS) and wrote XMODEM; born in West Bend
$1.5 million+
Ward Leon Christensen was the West Bend–born IBM engineer who, snowed in one Chicago winter, wrote the software that let hobbyists leave messages without driving across town. The computerized bulletin board and the XMODEM file-transfer protocol became foundations of the online age, and he gave the code away.
He was born in West Bend on October 23, 1945, to Roy Christensen, safety director at the West Bend Company, and Florence Hohmann Christensen, who sold World Book encyclopedias. At West Bend High he built a computer that took first at the 1963 science fair. He drifted through Madison, finished physics and chemistry at Milton College, and joined IBM in 1968. He stayed until 2012; the last title was field technical sales specialist.
Snowed in with Randy Suess in January 1978, he wrote the software for CBBS so the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange could post messages. They went live February 16 and later pretended the build had taken four weeks so nobody would think it was rushed. A year earlier he had written MODEM, later XMODEM: break a file into packets, check each one, retry the noise. Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1983 that maybe half the really good CP/M public-domain programs were Christensen’s. He received Dvorak Awards in 1992 and an Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1993. He died in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, on October 11, 2024. The internet is downstream of a West Bend kid who never asked to be called the inventor of online community.
Profile · West Bend, Wisconsin
NFL linebacker; raised in West Bend with high-school stardom at Brown Deer; Super Bowl LIX with the Philadelphia Eagles
$26 million
Zack Baun is the West Bend kid who cut a path through the woods to the Kettle Moraine YMCA, then became an All-Pro linebacker and Super Bowl champion with the Philadelphia Eagles. On a fourth-grade YMCA card he wrote that he wanted to be a football player. He stayed until close.
Birthplace reporting splits between West Bend and Milwaukee; the raise is West Bend either way. He attended Silverbrook Intermediate and played receiver at West Bend East through his sophomore year. After the family moved to Brown Deer he almost quit football until coach Rob Green talked him into quarterback. In two seasons he piled up 94 touchdowns and more than 7,000 yards, started on Brown Deer’s 2013 Division II basketball title team, and ran the 100 and 200 at the state track meet.
Wisconsin drafted him into college football, and the New Orleans Saints took him 74th overall in 2020. Four quiet years followed. Philadelphia signed him in 2024 on a one-year flyer, moved him inside, and he became All-Pro with 151 tackles and a Super Bowl LIX interception against Kansas City. He flew home the day after the parade and led “E-A-G-L-E-S” chants in a West Bend insurance-company hall, telling the room he had never been a Packers fan. In March 2025 the Eagles re-signed him to a three-year, $51 million deal. The hometown is the Y and the path in the woods; the box score runs through Brown Deer and Philadelphia.