Władziu Valentino Liberace

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.