Herb Kohl

Senate under the slogan “Nobody’s Senator but Yours,” and spent a fortune on the city that made him. Born in Milwaukee on February 7, 1935, and raised in Sherman Park on North 51st Boulevard, he graduated from Washington High School. His father, Max Kohl, a Polish immigrant who had worked the Schlitz bottle-cap line, opened a grocery at Lincoln and Kinnickinnic. Herb bagged groceries, then ran the expanding family stores until a British tobacco firm bought most of the chain in the 1970s. Selling, he later said, felt like a death.

In 1985 he paid about $18 million for the Milwaukee Bucks so the franchise would not leave. In 2014 he sold the team for $550 million and put $100 million toward the downtown arena that now sits on Herb Kohl Way. As Kohl’s president he had visited thirty to forty stores a week and personally interviewed every full-time hire. He ate at George Webb, swam before dawn, and once wrote a $25,000 check when a United Way campaign he chaired came up short. He and Bud Selig were Sherman Park kids who later roomed together at the University of Wisconsin; Washington High’s early-1950s window produced Gene Wilder, then Kohl and Selig, three classmates from the same west-side Jewish neighborhood.

He lived in Milwaukee his whole life and died at home there on December 27, 2023. Forbes put his fortune at about $630 million in a 2016 city ranking after the Bucks sale and arena pledge. He had turned down a chance to buy the expansion Bucks for $2 million in 1968, saying Milwaukee did not need him then; seventeen years later he paid a then-record NBA price to keep them. The place claim is birth, lifelong residence, and the arena street that still carries his name.