John P. Morgridge

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.