Ody J. Fish

Fish made Pewaukee a statewide Republican address. Born Odilon Fish in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, on June 16, 1925, he built a Waukesha County business and party career that put the lake town on Madison and Washington call sheets. He chaired and vice-chaired the Waukesha County GOP, managed Warren P. Knowles’s successful 1964 gubernatorial campaign, then ran the Republican Party of Wisconsin as state chairman from 1965 to 1970. Contemporary press routinely identified him as “of Pewaukee.”

From 1971 to 1984 he served as Wisconsin’s Republican National Committeeman and managed the 1976 Republican National Convention. A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel remembrance noted that he turned down a call from President Nixon rather than leave the independent lane he preferred. Parallel to party work, he sat on the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents from 1970 to 1997, spanning the system merger era, and later pressed campaign-finance and open-meeting reforms through Common Cause in Wisconsin.

He married Mary Ellen Koebke; they had two children. Fish died of esophageal cancer at his Pewaukee home on February 6, 2007, remembered as a party boss who called parties a “kinder mistress” than candidate-centered money politics.