Margaret Farrow

When Governor Tommy Thompson resigned for a federal cabinet post in 2001 and Scott McCallum moved up, McCallum appointed her lieutenant governor. She chaired work-based learning and women’s council efforts, co-chaired invasive-species work, and lost the 2002 ticket race to Jim Doyle and Barbara Lawton.

Born Margaret Ann Nemitz in Kenosha on November 28, 1934, to a Snap-on finance executive and a corporate assistant, she finished St. Catherine’s High School in Racine, sampled Rosary College, and earned degrees in political science and education at Marquette University. She taught, sold real estate, and raised five sons with her engineer husband, John, before Elm Grove politics pulled her in. Service on the village appeals board, plan commission, board of trustees, and as village president preceded election to the state Assembly in 1986 and twelve years in the state Senate from a Waukesha County district.

In later years she chaired WisconsinEye’s board, helped build Waukesha County’s business alliance, and served on the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents from 2013 to 2017. Her son Paul followed her into the Assembly, the Senate, and the Waukesha County executive’s office. She died at eighty-seven at her home in Pewaukee on March 8, 2022, remembered as a fiscal conservative who treated other people’s money as other people’s money. Pewaukee was the final address after the Elm Grove years that launched her career.