Every public record

Fintech founder; former MayStreet CEO; energy-tech founder · Waukesha, Wisconsin

Patrick Flannery

MayStreet co-founder and former CEO (market-data / low-latency trading tech), later LSEG head of low latency and direct feeds, now Ground Floor Energy founder. Not Patrick S. Flannery (ex-AMSC Pewaukee / UW–Madison ECE). Not Kentucky Rep. Patrick Flannery.

$20 million+

Patrick Flannery built MayStreet into a specialist market-data and low-latency trading-technology firm that banks, hedge funds, and regulators came to rely on. He co-founded the New York company in 2012 with Michael Lehr after engineering roles at proprietary shops including Volant Trading and Sumo Capital, expanding from feed-handler libraries into pristine packet-capture historical data. London Stock Exchange Group agreed to buy MayStreet in 2022. Flannery stayed on as global head of LSEG's low-latency and direct-feed business, then launched Ground Floor Energy, a climate-tech and project-finance venture combining batteries, renewables, and software. He studied computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder and long worked from the greater New York markets orbit. Waukesha is the Wisconsin city on his page. Public professional footprints put him in New York markets and later London rather than a published Waukesha residence.

Managing Director, litigation finance (patent underwriting) · Brookfield, Wisconsin

Christopher Freeman

Christopher (Chris) Freeman, Managing Director in Burford Capital's Chicago patent group; former Blackbird Technologies co-founder/VP Head of Litigation; ex-Kirkland & Ellis IP partner. Not Prentice L. Freeman Jr. (P.L. Freeman Co., Brookfield HVAC).

$3 million+

Christopher Freeman underwrites patent and intellectual-property legal risk as a managing director in Burford Capital's Chicago office. Chambers ranks him in U.S. litigation funding for IP, and IAM has listed him among the world's leading IP strategists for several consecutive years. Before Burford he co-founded Blackbird Technologies and ran its litigation function, after an IP partnership at Kirkland & Ellis and associate roles at Quinn Emanuel and Latham & Watkins. He holds a Northwestern engineering degree and a Boston University J.D. Public bios also note pre-law work at Epic Systems in Wisconsin. Brookfield is the Wisconsin city on his page. The documented Wisconsin chapter is Epic Systems before law school, with Chicago as his recent Burford base.

Entrepreneur; founder of Ranku and Cluster · Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Kim Taylor

Wisconsin-raised entrepreneur (Madison-born, Milwaukee roots); former Milwaukee Bucks dancer; co-founded Ranku (Mark Cuban–backed, sold to Wiley) and founded Cluster. Not Kimberly Taylor, Pathways High school director in Milwaukee.

$5 million+

Kim Taylor is a Wisconsin-raised entrepreneur who turned Milwaukee roots and a Bucks dance season into a national startup career. Born in Madison and schooled in part at Marquette before finishing a journalism degree at Arizona State, she appeared on Bravo's Start-Ups: Silicon Valley, then co-founded Ranku—an online-degree marketplace backed by Mark Cuban—and sold it to John Wiley & Sons in 2016 for a reported $25 million. She later founded Cluster, a labor marketplace matching hardware and manufacturing companies with engineers, raising a Mark Cuban–backed seed round and operating from the Los Angeles area. Public profiles emphasize growing up around Wisconsin manufacturing and returning to that industrial skills-gap story with Cluster. Milwaukee remains the origin city on her Wisconsin page: early career, Bucks season, and the manufacturing culture that shaped Cluster, even as her recent operating base has been California.

Former President/CEO of The Onion; media executive and investor · Waukesha, Wisconsin

Mike McAvoy

Former Onion/Gizmodo-group president; hometown Waukesha. Not Brendan Lee McAvoy (Waukesha attorney), not Michael J. McAvoy DO (Appleton ENT), not Eau Claire/McDonough sales Mike McAvoy.

$3 million+

Mike McAvoy grew up in Waukesha and went on to run one of America's best-known satire brands. After early finance work at TCF Bank and Capella Education in Minneapolis, he joined The Onion as controller in the mid-2000s, rose to CFO and COO, and became president—and later CEO—of Onion, Inc. Under his watch the company leaned hard into digital products and video as print advertising faded, culminating in the decision to end the print edition. When Univision sold Gizmodo Media Group and The Onion into what became G/O Media, McAvoy continued leading commercial and Onion operations until he departed in July 2019. Since then he has worked as a Chicago-area self-employed executive and investor, including involvement in comedy and entertainment assets such as the 2022 UCB Theatre acquisition and a 2023 stake in Abso Lutely Productions. Waukesha remains the Wisconsin hometown he has publicly claimed.

Chief Growth Officer and Partner, insurance brokerage · Pewaukee, Wisconsin

Nezih Hasanoglu Jr.

M3 Insurance CGO/partner; husband of country singer Katrina Elam; Pewaukee resident. Not Dr. Nezih Z. Hasanoglu, DO (family medicine, New Berlin).

$5 million+

Nezih Hasanoglu Jr. is the chief growth officer and a partner at Wisconsin insurance brokerage M3 Insurance, where he steers business development, marketing, and mergers and acquisitions. He joined M3 in 2004 after earning a bachelor's degree at Vanderbilt University, where he also played football, and later completed an MBA at the Wisconsin School of Business. Named a partner in 2013, he rose to executive vice president of business development in 2020 and to chief growth officer in 2022. He sits on M3's executive leadership team and holds Wisconsin life/health and property/casualty licenses. Beyond the firm he serves on the Zoological Society of Milwaukee board—receiving its 2026 Emu Egg Award—and on boards including First Business Bank's Milwaukee advisory board and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. He and his wife, Katrina, have co-chaired Milwaukee's Zoo Ball; their family is tied to Pewaukee, where a son has played high school baseball.

Criminal defense attorney; partner · Waukesha, Wisconsin

Anthony (Tony) Cotton

Waukesha-raised criminal defense partner at Kuchler & Cotton; Super Lawyers.

$2 million+

Tony Cotton is a Waukesha-raised criminal defense lawyer whose high-profile Wisconsin cases keep him on local news. A partner at Kuchler & Cotton S.C.—the firm his mother, Donna Kuchler, leads—he practices from Wauwatosa and Waukesha offices and takes appointments statewide and in federal court. Born and raised in Waukesha, he attended Catholic Memorial High School, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Marquette University Law School (J.D. 2005). While in law school he investigated Eritrean war claims for a Yale professor, clerked for the Federal Defender's Office, and helped prepare arguments connected to United States v. Booker. He has represented Morgan Geyser in the Slender Man stabbing case and later Maxwell Anderson in the Sade Robinson homicide case, among many other felony and federal matters. A past president of the Wisconsin Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and a National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers board member, he has been named a Super Lawyer every year since 2014 after Rising Star honors from 2008–2013.

Title insurance executive (VP); former college baseball pitcher · Watertown, Wisconsin

Mike Oiler

Watertown HS / UW–Milwaukee baseball alum (Brewers draft); VP of EnTrust Title Group alongside Jeff Oiler.

$1 million+

Mike Oiler is part of a Watertown baseball family that later built a multi-state title business. A right-handed pitcher out of Watertown High School and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, he was drafted twice by the Milwaukee Brewers—in the 52nd round in 1997 and the 35th round in 2000. Corporate records list Michael Oiler as a vice president of EnTrust Title Group, Inc., the independent title and closing company founded by Jeff Oiler. The firm runs Wisconsin offices including Watertown and a Brookfield corporate headquarters, and markets itself among the larger independent title agencies nationally. Watertown is the family hometown and the site of EnTrust's local chamber presence, even as corporate filings point to Brookfield.

Founder and President, title insurance / settlement services · Watertown, Wisconsin

Jeff Oiler

Founder/president of EnTrust Title Group; Watertown HS Class of 1995.

$2 million+

Jeff Oiler founded EnTrust Title Group and built it into a nationwide independent title and closing shop with a dense Wisconsin footprint. Watertown Daily Times covered a chamber ribbon-cutting that identified him as owner when EnTrust joined the Watertown Area Chamber of Commerce. A Watertown High School Class of 1995 graduate, he is listed as founder and president on business directories and as president/secretary on Florida corporate filings that also name Michael Oiler as vice president. EnTrust, founded in 2013, runs a Brookfield corporate office and local closing sites including Watertown, Milwaukee, Kenosha, Madison, and West Bend, plus Florida locations. The company pitches local retail solutions alongside national lender services and markets itself among the larger independent title agencies in the country. Watertown remains the family's hometown and EnTrust's local storefront, even though corporate HQ sits in Brookfield.

Serial entrepreneur; founder of Wantable and Fluency; former BuySeasons CEO · Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Jalem Getz

Milwaukee e-commerce founder (GMI, BuySeasons/Liberty Media sale, Wantable).

$20 million+

Jalem Getz is one of Milwaukee's best-known e-commerce builders. He co-founded seasonal retailer GMI in 1995 at age 22, then launched BuySeasons in 1999 and grew the New Berlin–based costume and party supplier to hundreds of employees and roughly $175 million in sales before selling to Liberty Media for more than $55 million in 2006 and staying on as CEO into 2010–2011. In 2012 he founded Wantable, a try-before-you-buy personal styling retailer headquartered in Milwaukee's Walker's Point. Wantable cracked the Inc. 500 (No. 223 in 2017), raised venture capital including Cream City Venture Capital / Northwestern Mutual's fund, and expanded into a large Walker's Point campus with a public café that became a local founder hangout. BizTimes later put him on its Wisconsin 275 list of influential business leaders. More recently he has founded Fluency, focused on influencer–follower relationship tools, while remaining a Milwaukee-based operator and investor through vehicles such as Republic Holdings.

Founder/Director, football kicking camps; NFL kicking consultant · Waukesha, Wisconsin

Jamie Kohl

Founder/director of Kohl's Professional / Kohl's Kicking Camps; former Waukesha Catholic Memorial and Iowa State kicker. Not Herb Kohl.

$3 million+

Jamie Kohl turned a Waukesha kicking career into the country's best-known specialist camps. A first-team all-state kicker from Wisconsin and a four-year starter at Iowa State—44 straight games, 217 points, still among Cyclones scoring leaders—he signed with the Seattle Seahawks in 1999 and appeared in three NFL preseason games. In 2000 he founded Kohl's Professional Camps with his father John and brother Andy. The Waukesha-headquartered business now runs roughly 150 events nationwide, ranks high school specialists for ESPN, and says 75 of 96 starting NFL specialists in the 2025 season had been coached by Kohl's staff. Kohl has consulted for the Chicago Bears and Carolina Panthers and was hired as Miami Dolphins kicking consultant for the 2026 season. Company materials put headquarters in Waukesha. FOX6 has profiled him as a former Waukesha Catholic Memorial standout. He and his wife Charlene have four children.

Screenwriter and film director · Pewaukee, Wisconsin

David Koepp

Born Pewaukee, June 9, 1963; UCLA film BFA 1990; screenwriter of Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man; novelist and director

$4,000,000

David Koepp left Pewaukee with a Midwestern movie habit and became one of Hollywood's highest-grossing screenwriters. Born there on June 9, 1963, the youngest of four, he grew up watching Hitchcock with his therapist mother and Godzilla on late-night television while his father ran a billboard company. He tried acting at the University of Minnesota and at Wisconsin–Madison, then transferred to UCLA's film school in 1984 and took a BFA in 1990. His scripts powered the modern studio-blockbuster era: Jurassic Park and The Lost World for Steven Spielberg, Mission: Impossible for Brian De Palma, Spider-Man for Sam Raimi, War of the Worlds, and two later Indiana Jones entries. As a director he has delivered Stir of Echoes, Secret Window, Premium Rush, and You Should Have Left. Domestic box-office tallies place him among the top handful of writers in studio history, and he returned to dinosaurs with Jurassic World Rebirth after more than two decades away from the franchise. In The Lost World: Jurassic Park he also appears on screen as the unlucky San Diego man eaten by a T. rex, a cameo while he served as second-unit director. Columbia paid him about $4 million in February 2000 for the Panic Room package, among the richest single-script deals of its era. Writers Guild East gave him the Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Career Achievement in 2013. He has published thrillers including Cold Storage and Aurora and keeps threading Wisconsin into the work through parent names, Midwestern settings, and the sense that ordinary places can hold extraordinary plots. Pewaukee remains the origin story he cites when asked how a kid from lake country ended up inventing Mr. DNA.

Politician; former Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin · Pewaukee, Wisconsin

Margaret Farrow

Wisconsin’s first woman lieutenant governor; born Kenosha, longtime Waukesha County politician; died at home in Pewaukee

$2 million

Margaret Farrow was Wisconsin’s first woman lieutenant governor, a long Waukesha County Republican who rose from Elm Grove village halls to Madison and never quite left public life. 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.

College athletics administrator; former NFL offensive tackle · Pewaukee, Wisconsin

Chris McIntosh

Pewaukee High; Wisconsin Badgers captain and unanimous All-American (1999); Seahawks first-round pick; UW athletic director 2021–2026; Big Ten deputy commissioner

$1,450,000

Chris McIntosh is Pewaukee’s other first-round football product—the 6-foot-7 Pirate who became a Badgers captain, Seahawks draft pick, Wisconsin athletic director, and Big Ten deputy commissioner. Raised in the village, he still frames the job the way Pewaukee framed the kid: develop people who can win Saturdays and the decades after. He was born in Pewaukee on February 20, 1977, and played at Pewaukee High School. Late in high school, after a wrestling state title, he tore knee ligaments, redshirted at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, then anchored the offensive line for back-to-back Rose Bowl champions. In 1999 he was a unanimous All-American and Big Ten Offensive Lineman of the Year. Seattle took him twenty-second overall in 2000. He started ten games as a rookie before a neck injury limited him and forced retirement before the 2003 season. After health-and-wellness startups, Barry Alvarez recruited him back in 2014 as business-development lead; as associate athletic director he helped land Wisconsin’s ten-year Under Armour apparel deal valued at more than $100 million. He rose to deputy AD, entered the UW Athletic Hall of Fame in 2014—the same year he rejoined the department—and succeeded Alvarez in 2021, just the third Wisconsin athletic director since 1989. His tenure covered the Luke Fickell and Mike Hastings hires, a major football practice-facility project, and the NIL and transfer upheaval. A July 2024 five-year extension set 2024–25 compensation at $1.45 million. In April 2026 he resigned to become the Big Ten’s first Deputy Commissioner for Strategy. A first-generation college graduate with UW degrees in agricultural economics and educational leadership, he belongs on the Pewaukee page by birth and high school, with Madison as the career arc that followed.

NFL general manager · Pewaukee, Wisconsin

John Spytek

NFL general manager of the Las Vegas Raiders; raised in Pewaukee; Catholic Memorial High School

$6 million

John Spytek grew up in Pewaukee and turned a Michigan linebacker's résumé into the general manager's chair for the Las Vegas Raiders. Born in August 1980, the son of Wisconsin alumni whose father played Badger baseball, he starred as a two-way end at Catholic Memorial High School in Waukesha under Bill Young. As a senior he earned first-team all-league honors on defense and second-team on offense; across his three starting seasons Memorial went 30–4 with a state title and two runner-up finishes. He chose Ann Arbor over other Big Ten offers because he never wanted to wonder what if Michigan. He played outside linebacker for the Wolverines from 1999 to 2002, overlapping one season with Tom Brady, earned a general-studies degree and a sports-management master's, and entered the league as a Detroit Lions operations intern in 2004. Philadelphia scouting, Cleveland's director of college scouting at age twenty-nine, a Denver area and national scout role that produced a Super Bowl 50 ring, and nine Tampa Bay seasons as director of player personnel, vice president, and assistant general manager followed, capped by Super Bowl LV beside Brady again. Tampa Bay under his personnel tenure returned all twenty-two Super Bowl LV starters in 2021, the first salary-cap-era team to do so. Owner Mark Davis named him the Raiders' sixth general manager on January 24, 2025, on a five-year deal. Off the field, he and his wife, Kristen, co-founded the National CMV Foundation after their daughter Evelyn died of congenital cytomegalovirus. Pewaukee still lists him as hometown; the league now lists him as the architect of a Silver and Black rebuild.

Physician; tobacco litigation lead plaintiff · Pewaukee, Wisconsin

Howard Engle

Pediatrician and lead plaintiff in Florida's landmark Engle tobacco class action; born on a Pewaukee farm

$2,500,000

Howard Aaron Engle was born on a Pewaukee farm to Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the area's only Jewish family, and became the pediatrician whose name still defines American tobacco litigation. He earned undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, served in Army public health in occupied Germany after World War II, then built a nearly fifty-year pediatric neurology practice in Miami Beach, including an integrated Liberty City office and a turn as chief of pediatrics at Mount Sinai Medical Center. A two-pack-a-day smoker since medical school, he joined a 1994 Florida class action as lead plaintiff for attorneys Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt, whose children he had treated, hoping the case would warn others off nicotine. In July 2000 a Miami jury hit cigarette makers with roughly $145 billion in punitive damages, then one of the largest awards in U.S. history. Appeals courts later decertified the class as too sprawling, but the Florida Supreme Court preserved individual Engle progeny suits that still populate Florida dockets. A May 2001 ruling let the companies post a $2 billion appeal bond, of which about $709 million was guaranteed to plaintiffs; Engle's personal cut was reported in the hundreds of thousands. He died in Miami Beach on July 22, 2009, of COPD and lymphoma at eighty-nine, still smoking until shortly before hospice. The Pewaukee farm kid who warned patients not to smoke never fully quit himself; the docket that bears his name outlived him.

Political leader; businessman · Pewaukee, Wisconsin

Ody J. Fish

Born Odilon Fish, June 16, 1925, Sauk Centre, Minnesota; longtime Pewaukee resident; died Feb. 6, 2007, at home in Pewaukee

$1,500,000

Ody J. 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.

Professional basketball player · Pewaukee, Wisconsin

Jack Gohlke

Pewaukee-born shooting guard; Oakland University March Madness hero vs. Kentucky; G League / overseas pro

$400,000

Jack Gohlke is the Pewaukee shooting specialist who made March Madness look like a three-point clinic. A 6-foot-3 guard out of Pewaukee High School, he turned a Division II résumé and one Horizon League season at Oakland University into a national highlight reel, then kept playing for pay from summer league to overseas clubs and the G League. Born in Pewaukee on December 3, 1999, he spent four seasons at Hillsdale College, reaching the Division II Elite Eight as a junior and earning first-team All-G-MAC honors as a senior before using COVID eligibility to transfer to Oakland for 2023–24. That year he was Horizon League Sixth Man of the Year in a season when 97 percent of his field-goal attempts were threes—364 of 372 tries from beyond the arc. In the NCAA Tournament’s first round he hit ten three-pointers for 32 points as 14-seed Oakland beat 3-seed Kentucky 80–76, a single-game three total among the highest in tournament history and the spark for a wave of NIL deals. Undrafted in 2024, he moved from Oklahoma City’s Summer League to Montenegro’s KK Podgorica, the Wisconsin Herd, the Motor City Cruise, Mexico’s Ángeles, Brazil’s Fortaleza, and, in February 2026, the Dallas Mavericks’ G League affiliate, the Texas Legends. Between flights he still hosts shooting camps in Pewaukee classrooms he once walked. The hometown claim is straightforward: born, raised, and still teaching the shot that put Pewaukee on the bracket map.

Former NFL fullback · Pewaukee, Wisconsin

Derek John Watt

Middle Watt brother; Pewaukee High class of 2011; Wisconsin Badgers fullback; Chargers and Steelers, 2016–2023

$12.2 million

Derek John Watt is the middle Watt brother who made his name as a fullback and lead blocker rather than a sack artist. Born in Waukesha on November 7, 1992, he starred at Pewaukee High School, class of 2011, and was named the Associated Press Wisconsin Player of the Year in 2010 as a two-way back and linebacker. He and younger brother T.J. were already teammates in maroon and gold before either reached the NFL; older brother J.J., five years ahead, never got that high-school or college reunion. At Wisconsin he stayed a Badger fullback, and the San Diego Chargers took him in the sixth round of the 2016 draft. Four seasons in San Diego and Los Angeles as a lead blocker and special-teamer set up a three-year, $9.75 million deal with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2020, the contract that finally put him on the same NFL roster as T.J. In Week 2 of that first Steelers season he blocked a punt for a safety against Denver. He retired from the NFL in March 2024 after seven seasons; Spotrac career cash through retirement ran to about $12.2 million. Pewaukee retired his No. 16 alongside T.J.'s No. 20 in May 2023; J.J.'s No. 9 had already come down in 2013. The place claim is Waukesha birth and a Pewaukee upbringing that produced three NFL brothers from one high-school program. Derek's lane was the fullback's: short yardage, kick coverage, and the quiet work that keeps a skill group honest.

NFL outside linebacker · Pewaukee, Wisconsin

Trent Jordan “T.J.” Watt

NFL edge rusher for the Pittsburgh Steelers; youngest of the Watt brothers; born and raised in Pewaukee

$155 million

Trent Jordan “T.J.” Watt is the youngest of the Pewaukee Watt brothers and the Pittsburgh Steelers’ career sack leader. Where older brother J.J. became the face of Houston’s defense, T.J. built his own path as an edge rusher in black and gold, tying a single-season sack record and winning Defensive Player of the Year. He was born in Pewaukee on October 11, 1994, and graduated from Pewaukee High School in 2013. That same year he won the Wisconsin state shot-put title, the third Watt to push the family mark their father John set in 1980. He followed J.J. and Derek to Wisconsin, missed most of his first two college seasons to injury, then erupted as a redshirt junior in 2016 with 11½ sacks and All-Big Ten honors. He played only twenty-two games as a Badger; fourteen of them came in that 2016 season, enough to make him a first-round pick. Pittsburgh selected him in the first round in 2017. In 2021 he tied Michael Strahan’s single-season sack record at 22½ and won Defensive Player of the Year. He holds the Steelers’ career sack mark. Spotrac puts career cash at about $155 million through 2025. In May 2023 Pewaukee retired his No. 20 alongside Derek’s No. 16. The geography is the same Pewaukee raise as his brothers; the résumé is distinctly Pittsburgh.

Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin

Kathy Kinney

Actress best known as Mimi Bobeck on The Drew Carey Show; born and raised Stevens Point (SPASH 1972)

$6 million

Kathy Kinney is the Stevens Point native whose painted Mimi Bobeck face became one of the most recognizable comic characters of 1990s network television. On The Drew Carey Show she lasted nine seasons and 233 episodes after what was meant to be a one-shot cosmetics-counter bit in the pilot: an applicant whose makeup looked applied with a trowel. The audience refused to let her leave, and Mimi became Drew’s on-screen nemesis, complete with muumuus and war paint. She was born in Stevens Point on November 3, 1954, to Harold Kinney, an automobile dealer, and Marian Kinney, and grew up on the south side a block and a half from the Point Brewery. The plant whistle at seven, noon, and five ran the household; she still calls that neighborhood the wrong side of the tracks. After her father died of emphysema when she was fifteen, she became the family’s handyman in coveralls. A cemetery a block away supplied headstones as pretend horses and mausoleums as dance halls. She graduated from Stevens Point Area Senior High in 1972, spent time with the California Conservation Corps including a Kings Canyon backcountry season, and later worked a secretary’s desk at WCBS in New York. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point in the 1970s and finally finished the degree in 2016. She still comes home for United Way events, antique stores, and the brewery. Marian’s rule still holds: be home when the whistle blows. The city tie is the south-side childhood and SPASH, not the campus degree that came decades later.

Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin

Peter J. “P.J.” Jacobs

Hardware dealer who moved Hardware Dealers Mutual (later Sentry) to Stevens Point in 1912

$250,000

Peter J. “P.J.” Jacobs was the Stevens Point hardware dealer who packed a mutual-insurance office out of Berlin, Wisconsin, in 1912 and made Hardware Dealers Mutual—later Sentry Insurance—a Point company. The junior high on Main Street still carries his name. Born and raised in Stevens Point (1869–1936), he ran Gross & Jacobs Hardware with Nick Gross in the old post-office building on Main and served as secretary of the state hardware dealers association. The mutual had been writing small fire policies out of Berlin since 1904; Jacobs moved the typewriters, desks, files, and roughly ninety thousand dollars in assets home to Stevens Point and anchored the company there. In the 1920s he traveled to Indiana more than once to hire stone carvers and choose stone for the Strongs Avenue door frames. He was a Rotary charter member and a St. Stephen’s parishioner. He died in April 1936. His son Carl took the chair, and for a stretch grandson James sat in it too; the family ran the firm through 1966. Two years after the funeral the city put his name on a new high school, dedicated June 1, 1938; when SPASH took the seniors in 1972, the Main Street building remained P.J. Jacobs Junior High. Sentry is still headquartered in Stevens Point, and the restaurant at SentryWorld is called PJ’s because a granddaughter remembered that he liked a family table.

Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin

Suzy Favor Hamilton

Olympic middle-distance runner; Stevens Point / SPASH

$100,000

Suzy Favor Hamilton was one of Wisconsin’s greatest prep and collegiate runners before representing the United States in three Olympic Games. The Stevens Point story begins on the Plover River, where she gathered branches for forts and galloped for hours pretending she was a horse. Born in Stevens Point on August 8, 1968, to Conrad and Rachel Favor, she ran her first real race—a fifth-grade 400—under her father’s coaching, passing the girls and then the boys. At Stevens Point Area Senior High, class of 1986, she won eleven WIAA titles, including four in cross country and four straight 1,600s. Scholastic ranked her among the century’s top hundred high-school athletes. At the University of Wisconsin she collected nine NCAA titles and the Honda Cup. Personal bests included 3:57.40 in the 1,500 (2000) and 4:22.93 in the mile (1998). She competed in Barcelona, Atlanta, and Sydney. In the 2000 Olympic 1,500 final she led into the last lap and fell; she later said she had tripped herself rather than finish off the podium, running in the shadow of her brother Dan’s suicide the year before. Later struggles—including a bipolar misdiagnosis and a public Las Vegas escort scandal that cost her sponsors—closed the competitive chapter. In 2010 she became the first Wisconsin female athlete inducted into the National High School Hall of Fame. The Point memory remains the river and the freshman who already owned the state meet.

Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin

Florence Guinness Blake

Born Stevens Point, Nov. 30, 1907; UW–Madison pediatric graduate program 1963–70; died 1983, buried Forest Cemetery, Stevens Point

$200,000

Florence Guinness Blake was the Stevens Point–born nurse who helped turn pediatric nursing into a parent-centered academic discipline. Born there on November 30, 1907, she was the daughter of Baptist minister James Blake and musician Thelma Dunlap Blake, and the family steered her toward nursing. She earned her diploma at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago in 1928, studied at Teachers College, Columbia, and spent roughly 1936 to 1939 teaching pediatric nursing at Union Medical College in Peiping on Rockefeller funding while war closed in. A master’s at Michigan followed. In 1946 she built the graduate program in advanced pediatric nursing at the University of Chicago around keeping parents in the room, not merely running procedures. The Child, His Parents and the Nurse (1954) was the first textbook to write that approach down as a field; a Yale reviewer called it patient-oriented care instead of disease-oriented care, which was the whole argument. She later co-authored, then served as senior author of, Essentials of Pediatric Nursing and Nursing Care of Children. Wisconsin brought her back in 1963 to run the pediatric graduate program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She retired in 1970 and stayed in Madison. The American Nurses Association inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 1996. She died in 1983 and was buried at Forest Cemetery on Patch Street in Stevens Point, in the family plot, the stone marked Daughter. Birth certificate and grave are the same city: the childhood is the manse, and the science is what she built after she left.

Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin

William Albert Bablitch

Wisconsin Supreme Court justice (1983–2003) and former state Senate majority leader; born in Stevens Point

$122,418

William Albert “Bill” Bablitch was the Stevens Point–raised lawyer who remade Wisconsin’s sexual-assault laws as Senate majority leader and then sat twenty years on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Colleagues remembered the cook as much as the justice: after his mother died when he was thirteen, he fed six kids and a working father, and anyone who disliked the plate could eat cornflakes. He graduated from Pacelli High School in 1959, studied at the college in town, finished at Madison in 1963, and joined the Peace Corps in Liberia as an early volunteer teaching elementary school and coaching soccer. Law school followed during the Dow riots; he helped the injured and later appeared in the documentary The War at Home. Home meant Portage County district attorney from 1969 to 1972, then the state Senate, where he led the 1970s rewrite that stopped courts from dragging a victim’s whole sexual history through trial. He was also proud of the 1978 court reorganization that created the Court of Appeals. On the Supreme Court from 1983 to 2003 he once recused himself from a campaign-finance case because his own Senate memo was in the file, and he filed a complaint against himself over a closed meeting and paid a fifty-dollar forfeiture. In 1988 he landed a 38¾-pound musky in Vilas County—“the scales of justice,” the headline said. He died of cancer in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on February 16, 2011, Parkinson’s already in his hands. Memorials were held in Madison and Stevens Point. The city claim is childhood plus the district-attorney years.

Profile · Caledonia, Wisconsin

Timothy D. Morris

Early Caledonia settler and Racine County sheriff central to the 1854 Joshua Glover rescue; later Wisconsin state senator

$2.50 a day

Timothy D. Morris was the Racine County sheriff who treated the 1854 seizure of Joshua Glover as a kidnapping and helped set in motion the jailbreak that sent the escaped enslaved man to Canada. Born in De Peyster, New York, on July 4, 1818, he came west in the fall of 1838, staked a claim in the town of Caledonia with his brother, and cleared what local memory calls the first farm in that corner of Racine County. He married Ellen Emerson, whose Vermont family had paused in New York, in 1843. They raised at least eight children. He farmed the western Caledonia land until lung inflammation killed him in that house on April 26, 1876; he is buried in Racine’s Mound Cemetery. The night that made him famous began when Glover, living freely in Racine, was seized by his former captor and a U.S. marshal and locked in the Milwaukee jail under the Fugitive Slave Act. Morris, then sheriff on a Whig ticket, tried to arrest Benammi Garland and the federal men, then loaded about a hundred Racinians onto a boat for Milwaukee. Abolitionists took the jail with pickaxes. Morris arrested Garland on the spot. Glover was already on a boat to Canada before federal court could remand him south. Garland later sued; in United States ex rel. Garland v. Morris the district court ordered Garland released—after the rescue had already succeeded. Morris declined a 1854 re-election run after that year, then won the sheriff’s office again in 1856 as a Republican and the state Senate in 1862 over Philo Belden, serving 1863–65 before Jerome Case took the seat. Caledonia’s claim is the pioneer farm and the death at home; Racine County’s is the badge and the Glover night.

Profile · Caledonia, Wisconsin

Elmer Addison Morse

U.S. Representative (WI-10); born Franksville / Caledonia, career in Antigo

$7,500

Elmer Addison Morse was a Racine County farm kid who became a three-term Republican congressman from Wisconsin’s cutover north. Franksville—inside today’s village of Caledonia—was the childhood and the superintendent’s office; Antigo was the House career. Born in Franksville on May 11, 1870, he attended the common schools of Racine County, graduated from Ripon College in 1893, and served two terms as county superintendent of schools (1893 and 1895) while reading law at the University of Wisconsin. Admitted to the bar in 1900, he did not stay. Antigo made him city attorney from 1900 to 1906 and, in 1906, sent him to Congress from the Tenth District. He married Myra Tradewell in Mount Pleasant on March 31, 1897; they had one daughter, Catherine. He served three House terms, March 4, 1907, to March 3, 1913, talking like a Progressive about trusts, monopoly, and natural resources. A Democratic wave and a redrawn district ended it in 1912. He went home to Antigo and stayed in law, insurance, and real estate under the Morse-Tradewell name until an operation in Rochester, Minnesota, killed him on October 4, 1945. He is buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Antigo. The Caledonia stretch is childhood and the superintendent’s office, not the Capitol years.

Profile · Caledonia, Wisconsin

Peter Christian Lutkin

Composer and first dean of Northwestern’s School of Music; born in Thompsonville (Caledonia), Racine County

$75,000

Peter Christian Lutkin wrote the benediction still sung at American commencements, The Lord Bless You and Keep You, with its sevenfold amen. He was born on March 27, 1858, in Thompsonville, a Racine County hamlet inside what is now the village of Caledonia. His parents, Peter Christian and Hannah Olivarius Lutkin, had left Denmark in 1844. The family moved to Racine when he was one and to Chicago when he was five. He sang in the choir of St. Peter and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church by nine and was its chief organist by fourteen, after both parents died when he was thirteen. Chicago public schools and early church work carried him to a piano instructorship at Northwestern at twenty-one, then to Berlin’s Royal Academy of Arts, where he was the only foreigner admitted that year. He returned to Chicago posts at St. Clement’s and St. James and to the American Conservatory before Northwestern brought him back in 1891. He became the first dean of the School of Music in 1895 and held the post through 1928. In 1906 he founded Northwestern’s A Cappella Choir and spent decades arguing to the Music Teachers National Association that unaccompanied singing was the point. The national music honor society Pi Kappa Lambda took its letters from his name. Library of Congress counts put him at more than thirty hymn tunes and sixty-five anthems; he also co-edited a Methodist hymnal. He married Nancy Lelah Carmen on October 27, 1885. He died of a heart attack at his son’s house in Evanston on December 27, 1931, and was buried at Rosehill in Chicago. Thompsonville is the birth claim; Chicago raised him after age five.

Profile · Caledonia, Wisconsin

Marcel A. Dandeneau

Caledonia town chairman and two-term Assembly Democrat; Racine-born teacher; died at his Caledonia home

$15,861

Marcel A. Dandeneau was the Racine-born teacher and Democrat who made Caledonia his adult political address—town board, Assembly seat, and the house where he died. He sat on the Caledonia town board from 1971 to 1977, returned in 1990, and chaired the town from 1992 to 1995. Parallel to local office he represented the 63rd Assembly District for two terms (1975–1979), then stayed in the Capitol as chief clerk of the Assembly from 1979 to 1981. He was born in Racine on June 28, 1931, the eldest of six children of French-Canadian parents, and graduated from St. Catherine’s High School. He served as a rifle sergeant in Korea from 1951 to 1955, then earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Dominican College of Racine. From 1960 to 1989 he taught—first at Sturtevant Grade School, later English, history, and science at Mitchell Junior High—and after retiring at fifty-seven he kept substitute-teaching full days. A 1975 campaign-finance misdemeanor cost him a five-hundred-dollar fine; a 1976 felony misconduct charge was dismissed. He had beaten incumbent Republican Henry Rohner for the Assembly in 1974 and lost the seat to E. James Ladwig in 1978. For more than twenty-seven years he held an informal Saturday breakfast at DeRango’s on Douglas Avenue, a standing date for politicians and businessmen with no agenda but the county. In 1982 he took 75,258 votes (9.24 percent) in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary against William Proxmire. An Honor Flight in 2016 carried him from the Korean War Memorial to Arlington. He died of cancer at his Caledonia home on February 9, 2017; Shirley Leach and six children survived him. Birth and schooling were Racine; the board, the chairmanship, and the deathbed were Caledonia.

Profile · Caledonia, Wisconsin

Henry Stevens

Caledonia farmer and town board chair; Wisconsin Assembly 1864; Racine County state senator 1867–1870; died July 10, 1875

$350

Henry Stevens was a New Hampshire farmer who gave Caledonia two decades of civic leadership and two terms in the Wisconsin Senate. Born in Wilton, New Hampshire, on January 26, 1818, and raised there, he moved to the town of Caledonia in 1855, put in a farm, and became chairman of the town board. In the middle of the Civil War the National Union ticket sent him to the Wisconsin Assembly for the 1864 session. Voters then elected him to the state Senate in 1866 and again in 1868 for Racine County’s seat; he succeeded Jerome I. Case in the Seventh District and declined a third term in 1870, after which Philo Belden took the seat. His public life was local and legislative rather than urban: the farm, the town chairmanship, one Assembly session, and the two Senate terms. Caledonia was still a town, not a village, and the cabbage country and Bohemian settlement were already the district’s facts. Stevens was the Yankee farmer the voters sent to Madison. Exact farm acreage and street address do not survive in the standard obituaries, but the stretch is residence and office in Caledonia, not a Racine-city career and not a Wisconsin birth. On July 10, 1875, at fifty-seven, he hanged himself from a tree near his Caledonia home. Contemporary papers reported that he had been depressed for some time. The Wisconsin State Journal of July 12 ran the news under the plain heading “Death of Hon. Henry Stevens.” Burial is at Mound Cemetery in Racine; some later summaries list the death place as Racine, but the obituaries place the act near the Caledonia house. The civic record is the farm and the Senate years; the death closes the page without becoming the opening.

Profile · De Pere, Wisconsin

Arthur Joseph Altmeyer

Born De Pere; Wisconsin Industrial Commission; Social Security Board chairman and first Commissioner of Social Security; FDR's "Mr. Social Security"

$10,000

Arthur Joseph Altmeyer was the De Pere native Franklin Roosevelt called "Mr. Social Security," the Wisconsin labor official who helped write the federal safety net and then ran it. He was born in De Pere on May 8, 1891. His parents divorced. At fourteen he was office boy in an uncle's law office at $10 a week, sending eighty percent to his grandmother for board. He stayed in high school until nineteen, worked a year to save tuition, and entered the University of Wisconsin at twenty-one, finishing Phi Beta Kappa in three years. At De Pere High he had met Ethel Thomas, his history teacher and four years older; she later became his wife and supported his graduate years while he sat at John R. Commons's elbow and wrote the pamphlet math of workmen's compensation. He served as secretary of the Wisconsin Industrial Commission from 1922 to 1933 and helped build the nation's first unemployment-insurance system. Frances Perkins pulled him to Washington. He drafted the June 8, 1934, presidential message that promised an economic-security bill, then the executive order creating the Committee on Economic Security. He joined the Social Security Board in 1935, became chairman in 1937, and served as the first Commissioner of Social Security from 1946 to 1953. He told clerks they were a social agency, not a claims desk, and fought an 1835 statute that said no federal officer should "encourage a claim." The 1939 Amendments he pushed turned a worker's retirement plan into family insurance covering survivors and dependents. In 1938 he offered to switch jobs with executive director Frank Bane, a demotion, if Bane would stay. Eisenhower's administration abolished his job by changing a preposition from Commissioner for to Commissioner of, twenty-seven days before he could retire. He refused a thirty-day consultant's make-work. He died in Madison on October 16, 1972. The Baltimore Social Security headquarters building still carries his name. He dedicated The Formative Years of Social Security (1966) to Ethel, writing in her copy that her love, wisdom, and concern for people had guided him throughout the years.

Profile · De Pere, Wisconsin

James Joseph Mulva

Former ConocoPhillips chairman and CEO; born Oshkosh, raised in De Pere; Mulva Cultural Center philanthropist

$260 million

James Joseph Mulva led ConocoPhillips as chairman and chief executive through the years when the combined oil major became one of the world’s largest independent producers, then retired when the company split in 2012. The hometown mark is De Pere: a $100 million cultural center on Broadway and another multimillion-dollar gift to a local school and parish hall, given with his wife, Miriam. He was born in Oshkosh on June 19, 1946, and moved to De Pere as a boy. He graduated from De Pere High School, then studied at the University of Texas on a Navy ROTC scholarship, earning a bachelor’s degree and an MBA in finance at the McCombs School. After serving as a Navy officer, he and Miriam—who had grown up in West De Pere—married at St. Mary’s in De Pere in 1969 and spent early married years on his commission in Bahrain and Cleveland. His father, James Sr., a De Pere banker and flight instructor who had once washed planes for Steve Wittman in Oshkosh, put him in airplanes at eleven and died testing a plane at Nicolet Airport on December 4, 1976. Mulva joined Phillips Petroleum in 1973, rose to chief financial officer and president, and helped steer the 2002 merger with Conoco. He chaired and ran ConocoPhillips until 2012. USA Today reported more than $260 million in 2012 compensation, retirement, and deferred pay—a paycheck figure, not a published personal fortune. With Miriam he funded the Mulva Cultural Center, a 75,000-square-foot limestone-and-glass complex that opened in December 2023 with Beatles material in the first gallery, and about $27 million for a Notre Dame school and parish hall in De Pere. They still call the Fox River city home.

Profile · De Pere, Wisconsin

John Schneider

Born De Pere, May 25, 1971; Abbot Pennings High School class of 1989; Seattle Seahawks general manager

$15 million

John Schneider is the De Pere–born personnel executive who built the Seattle Seahawks’ Super Bowl rosters and later won a second title with an entirely different coaching staff. Born in De Pere on May 25, 1971, the youngest of William and Sandra’s six children, he was a 5-foot-6 running back for the Abbot Pennings Squires—class of 1989—and punishment at home meant taking away the football cards. He spent a year at the University of St. Thomas studying history and secondary education until a shoulder injury ended his playing days. He wrote Packers general manager Ron Wolf more than once asking for a scouting chance, landed a 1992 internship, and worked as a Packers scout from 1993 to 1996. Stops in Kansas City, a year in Seattle under Ted Thompson, and Washington followed before he returned to Green Bay as a personnel aide to Wolf and Thompson. Seattle hired him as general manager in January 2010, a week after Pete Carroll. Super Bowl XLVIII’s roster that beat Denver had only four players who predated Schneider; he drafted Russell Wilson, Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, and Bobby Wagner, and he signed Marshawn Lynch. In early 2010 alone he made 284 roster moves, including the Lynch trade. Super Bowl LX in 2026, with a different coach and a different roster, made him the first general manager to win two titles that way in the same franchise. Sporting News named him Executive of the Year in 2025 after the second championship. With his wife he founded Ben’s Fund in 2012, named for a son diagnosed with autism at three. Abbot Pennings merged into Notre Dame Academy a year after he left; hometown stories still dateline De Pere.

Profile · De Pere, Wisconsin

Terry Anne Meeuwsen Friedrich

Miss America 1973 (first Miss Wisconsin to win); De Pere High homecoming queen; longtime 700 Club co-host

$10,000

Terry Anne Meeuwsen Friedrich was Miss America 1973—the first Miss Wisconsin to take the crown—and later a longtime co-host of The 700 Club. Papers of the day called her a De Pere girl as she put on the crown; De Pere High School, where she was homecoming queen and a three-year cheerleader, is the clearest local lock. She was the eldest of four, with a father at Wisconsin Public Service and a mother at the telephone company and later the superintendent’s office. Infoboxes often list a De Pere birth on March 2, 1949; some accounts say Green Bay, the usual Fox Valley hospital shorthand. She attended St. Norbert College for music and drama without taking a degree, then left to sing with the New Christy Minstrels from 1969 to 1971. Back home she won Miss Appleton and Miss Wisconsin in 1972 and Atlantic City in 1973, taking both talent and swimsuit. Fellow contestants that year included Cynthia Sikes (Miss Kansas, later of St. Elsewhere) and Jane Badler (later of V). From 1978 to 1986 she co-hosted WTMJ’s A New Day with Pete Wilson in Milwaukee. Then came Virginia Beach and, from 1993, the chair next to Pat Robertson on The 700 Club. With husband Andy Friedrich she adopted three girls from Ukraine and launched Orphan’s Promise in 2006; the ministry later claimed work in dozens of countries. Andy died of Parkinson’s on July 29, 2023. She has seven children, most adopted, and published several books beginning with Christmas Memories (Thomas Nelson, 1996). St. Norbert kept her in the same town for a college stretch; coming-of-age and the 1973 walk belong to De Pere High.

Profile · De Pere, Wisconsin

Alexander Hanchett Smith

University of Michigan mycologist; West De Pere High 1923 (born Crandon)

$300,000

Alexander Hanchett Smith was the University of Michigan mycologist who made agarics his life’s work and sold more than one hundred thousand copies of The Mushroom Hunter’s Field Guide. West De Pere High School, class of 1923, is the city lock after a family move from Crandon. Born in Crandon on December 12, 1904 (some tables print the 13th), he was the second child of Ruth and Edward Schmidt, who later made the name Smith. After his mother died in his teens, the family moved to West De Pere to live with paternal grandparents. A year off after the 1923 diploma, then Lawrence College in Appleton (B.A. 1928), then Michigan for mycology under Calvin Kauffman—who died before the dissertation—and Edwin Mains. He took an M.A. in 1929 and a Ph.D. in 1933 on two-spored Mycena. He never left the University of Michigan Herbarium: assistant curator in 1934, director from 1959 to 1972. Something over one hundred thousand collections across fifty-seven field seasons sit in the herbarium he ran. The field guide appeared in 1958 and 1963. Wife Helen Vandervort Smith earned a Michigan botany Ph.D. and drew plates; daughter Nancy Smith Weber became a mycologist on the same forays. Amanita smithiana carries his name. He was president of the Mycological Society of America, edited Mycologia from 1945 to 1950, and was named Distinguished Mycologist in 1982. He died in Ann Arbor on December 12, 1986.

Profile · Muskego, Wisconsin

Hunter Wohler

Muskego High and Wisconsin safety; NFL draft pick (Indianapolis, 2025)

$624,610

Hunter Wohler is the Muskego High safety who stacked three WIAA state titles, won Gatorade Wisconsin Football Player of the Year, captained Wisconsin, and reached the NFL with Indianapolis. The house that made him is still on Little Muskego Lake. Born in Muskego on January 12, 2003, he was raised there after his family moved for water skiing, not football. He attended St. Joseph Catholic School—about 120 students in the whole building, eight in his eighth-grade class—then Muskego High, where the Warriors won three straight state championships. As a sophomore he recorded 155 tackles; his senior tape showed 78 tackles, two interceptions, and a 9-0 regular season cut short by the pandemic. Career high-school totals under the Gatorade release were 355 tackles and 11 interceptions. He was a two-time Associated Press state player of the year and signed with Wisconsin carrying a 4.29 weighted GPA. At Wisconsin he became a captain and led all Big Ten defensive backs with 120 tackles in 2023, while still driving I-94 home for a library literacy program and a youth camp. Indianapolis drafted him in the seventh round in 2025 (232nd overall). Muskego remains the address; the lake is why the Wohlers came.

Profile · Muskego, Wisconsin

Trenni Casey (née Kusnierek)

Sportscaster and NBC Sports Boston host; Muskego High class of 1995, childhood in Wind Lake / Muskego-Norway

$1,200,000

Trenni Casey is the Milwaukee-area sportscaster who has anchored weeknights at NBC Sports Boston since 2012 and covered six Olympics for NBC, including curling at Sochi and PyeongChang, tennis at Rio and Tokyo, and the CNBC desk for Milan-Cortina 2026. She wanted television by age eight and grew up on Milwaukee sports—the 1982 Brewers, Robin Yount, Rollie Fingers, Paul Molitor—before leaving Muskego High School in 1995 for a probationary internship at WISN Channel 12. Born Trenni Kusnierek in 1977, she spent her childhood in Wind Lake in the Town of Norway, with a Muskego yearbook that still ties her to the Warriors. She started at UW-Oshkosh, then transferred to Marquette after the station told her she needed that campus for the desk; she graduated in journalism in 1999 and stayed five years on the assignment desk and in the field. Her first on-camera job was at WXOW in Eau Claire in February 2000. She mailed a tape to Channel 58 “on a wing and a prayer” and came home. The embarrassing local story is County Stadium in summer 1998: practicing a stand-up while José Valentín was hitting, a photographer’s light in a Phillies pitcher’s eyes, the umpire stopping play, Matt Vasgersian on the air, and the park booing her. From 2002 to 2007 she worked at Fox Sports Pittsburgh, then returned for the Brewers and MLB Network before the Boston chair. The dual-suburb claim is honest: Wind Lake for childhood, Muskego High for the diploma. The Olympics and the weeknight host seat are the national résumé.

Profile · Muskego, Wisconsin

Howard Anthony Schmidt

White House cybersecurity coordinator; died at home in Muskego (not raised there)

$3,500,000

Howard Anthony Schmidt was a White House cybersecurity coordinator under Barack Obama, former chief security officer at Microsoft and eBay, and an early builder of government computer forensics. He died at his home in Muskego, the Wisconsin address that closes the story rather than opens it. Born in Philadelphia on October 5, 1949, he learned munitions in the Air Force, flew three Vietnam tours, and spent his working decades largely in Arizona and Washington. He served on Chandler police SWAT and drug units, did FBI computer-exploitation work, and at the Air Force Office of Special Investigations in 1996 stood up the first dedicated computer-forensic laboratory in the U.S. government—the seed of what became the Defense Computer Forensic Laboratory. Amateur radio (first licensed WB7NUV, later W7HAS) was the origin story he told: Heathkits, a Sinclair ZX80 for moonbounce math, OSCAR satellite passes over Arizona. Microsoft made him CISO; eBay made him chief security officer. After September 11, George W. Bush appointed him to the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board. Obama named him White House Cybersecurity Coordinator in December 2009; he left in May 2012 to teach and partner with Tom Ridge. He died of brain cancer at sixty-seven on March 2, 2017, at home in Muskego. The New York Times put that house in the lead; the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called him a Muskego resident.

Profile · Muskego, Wisconsin

Luther Parker

First permanent white settler of the Town of Muskego, 1836

$5,000

Luther Parker was the New Hampshire schoolteacher and justice of the peace who became the first permanent white settler of the Town of Muskego and later sat in Wisconsin's territorial assembly. He was born in Temple, New Hampshire, on December 18, 1800, taught school, made shoes, and helped draft the 1832 constitution of the short-lived Republic of Indian Stream on the unsettled New Hampshire–Canada border. Canadians arrested him in 1835. The next year he brought his wife, Alletta, and their children to Wisconsin Territory. Giles French and Asa Parker were already in temporary quarters; in January 1837 Luther moved the family into a log cabin on the wooded south shore of the lake. County historians still call him the township's first permanent white settler. The 1845 election sent him to the territorial assembly that met in January 1846, where he served on the schools and engrossed-bills committees and chaired agriculture and manufactures. He was in the room when Waukesha County separated from Milwaukee County, and he sat on the county board in 1851. He died in Muskego on June 16, 1853, at age fifty-two. Alletta was already buried in the Durham Hill ground; the cemetery later took the Parker name. His son Charles, raised on that farm from age nine, later served two terms as Wisconsin's lieutenant governor from St. Croix County. Muskego kept the father.

Profile · Muskego, Wisconsin

Thomas Peter “Tom” Clark

PBA commissioner; Muskego resident since 2005

$1 million

Tom Clark is the commissioner of the Professional Bowlers Association and a Muskego resident since 2005, when a United States Bowling Congress job brought him to Wisconsin. Syracuse made the bowler; the suburb kept the executive. Born in Syracuse, New York, on April 29, 1969, he grew up watching Saturday PBA telecasts with a father who kept a 200-plus average and chose Buffalo State for journalism because the school fielded a bowling team. He still throws. In Muskego he settled with his wife, Kelli, and their children, Rory and Quinn; Rory later bowled at UW–Whitewater and Marian, and the family has bowled parent-child leagues locally. Clark joined the USBC in 2005 as director of communications, rose to marketing vice president—helping launch BowlTV, revive the U.S. Women’s Open, and stage the Clash of Champions—and became PBA deputy commissioner in 2008. He took over as commissioner on November 1, 2011, later serving a stretch as CEO, and oversaw the World Series of Bowling, PBA League, Playoffs, and Tour Finals. In 2025 the USBC Hall of Fame inducted him for meritorious service, listing his city as Muskego.

Sportscaster, actor, and former MLB catcher · Mequon, Wisconsin

Robert George “Bob” Uecker

Milwaukee-born catcher and longtime Brewers broadcaster; Menomonee Falls resident; Lakeshore Chinooks minority owner at Kapco Park in Mequon, 2012–2021

$25 million+

Robert George "Bob" Uecker was Milwaukee's own voice of baseball, a catcher turned broadcaster whose deadpan humor made him a national figure while he stayed rooted in the city's north suburbs. Born in Milwaukee on January 26, 1934, he grew up near Borchert Field. His father, Gus, had come from Switzerland. He attended Milwaukee Technical High School, and the city's sandlots and radio booths shaped the persona that later filled County Stadium, Miller Park, and national television. After his marriage to Judy in 1976, Uecker settled in Menomonee Falls on Country Club Court beside North Hills Country Club, in a modest house of about 1,650 square feet on three acres. Club pro Eddie Terasa used to watch him mow his own lawn from the course. A 1985 home-tour tape catches the carpet, the stone fireplace, and Uecker's deadpan about a marble-tournament trophy. He died in that house on January 16, 2025, ten days short of his ninety-first birthday, of small-cell lung cancer. From 2012 to 2021 he was a minority owner of the Lakeshore Chinooks, who play at Kapco Park on Concordia University Wisconsin's Lake Michigan campus in Mequon, alongside Robin Yount and Jim Kacmarcik. The Chinooks stake is the Mequon civic tie; the house that held him until the end was always Menomonee Falls. Milwaukee remains the birthplace and the radio town that never stopped hearing him.

Profile · Mequon, Wisconsin

John Ridley IV

Oscar-winning screenwriter (12 Years a Slave); raised in Mequon from age seven

$8 million

John Ridley IV won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 12 Years a Slave in 2014—the second Black writer to take that Oscar, after Geoffrey Fletcher. Before Hollywood, he was a Mequon kid on a bike. Born on 18th Street in Milwaukee on October 1, 1964, the middle of three children, he moved with his family to a Mequon subdivision at age seven. His father, John, practiced ophthalmology in Milwaukee for more than thirty years; his mother, Terry, taught special education for Milwaukee Public Schools. At Homestead High School, class of 1982, Ridley ran cross-country and performed in school musicals. He attended Indiana University, then earned an NYU degree in East Asian languages he never used for a job, tried stand-up (Letterman, Carson), and moved to Los Angeles in 1990. Television writing on Martin, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and The John Larroquette Show led to fiction. Spoils of War sold in eighteen days and became the story credit on Three Kings. After the Oscar he created the anthology series American Crime. The California visits continue, but the Mequon subdivision remains the hometown he cites.

Profile · Mequon, Wisconsin

Wendy E. Raymond

Molecular biologist; 16th president of Haverford College; native of Mequon

$599,428

Wendy E. Raymond is a molecular biologist and the sixteenth president of Haverford College, a post she has held since July 1, 2019. Haverford’s own biography identifies her as a native of Mequon, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee—the hometown line she still tells. She left Mequon for Cornell intending to become a lawyer and major in government. A required first-year chemistry class, and a teaching assistant who told her she had promise in a room with few women, changed the plan. She majored in chemistry, graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, earned a Harvard Ph.D. in biochemistry, and completed an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship in genetics at the University of Washington. Williams College hired her in 1994 as a molecular geneticist with an NSF- and NIH-funded lab that put undergraduates at the bench. She directed Williams’s Howard Hughes undergraduate science program (2004–08), became the college’s first associate dean for institutional diversity, then spent six years as Davidson College’s vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty. From 2014 to 2016 she chaired the National Science Foundation’s Congressionally mandated Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering. Mequon is the origin she claims; the science career and the Haverford presidency are the public record.

Profile · Mequon, Wisconsin

Ronald Dietrich Asmus

U.S. diplomat and NATO-enlargement advocate; Homestead High / Mequon raise

$800,000

Ronald Dietrich Asmus was the diplomat who helped open NATO’s door to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary at the 1999 Washington summit. A Homestead High kid from Milwaukee and Mequon, he argued for enlargement before the job existed and later wrote the books that chronicled it. He was born in Milwaukee on June 29, 1957, to German parents he later described as fleeing the aftermath of war and destruction. Childhood spanned Milwaukee and Mequon; Homestead High is the lock. At Wisconsin he started in engineering, went to Berlin to look for his grandmother’s 1930s house, found a city still split, and came home to political science. Johns Hopkins SAIS gave him a master’s in Soviet and East European studies and a Ph.D. in European studies. Radio Free Europe, RAND, and the Council on Foreign Relations followed. President Clinton made him deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs from 1997 to 2000. Opening NATO’s Door (2002) covers the enlargement fight; A Little War that Shook the World (2010) covers Georgia. He was decorated by the State Department and by Estonia, Georgia, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden. He died in Brussels on April 30, 2011, of a lung-cancer-related illness, at fifty-three.

Profile · Mequon, Wisconsin

Gregg W. Steinhafel

Former Target CEO and chairman; raised in Mequon

$61 million

Gregg W. Steinhafel rose from a family furniture dock to the top of Target Corporation, serving as president of Target Stores and then as CEO and chairman from May 2008 until the board forced him out on May 5, 2014. The Star Tribune’s hometown line when he got the big job was simply Mequon, Wisconsin. Born in Milwaukee in 1954, he grew up one of six children in Mequon. His grandfather founded Steinhafels furniture in Milwaukee in 1934; grade-school odd jobs in the store and dinner-table stories from his father pointed him toward retail. He earned a business degree at Carroll College (class of 1977), an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School, and joined Target in 1979 as a merchandising trainee. He became president of Target Stores in 1999 and CEO and chairman in May 2008, shaping the upscale-discounter niche, private labels, and the grocery build-out. The end was public: a 2013 data breach that hit between seventy and 110 million people, and Target Canada’s roughly $2 billion loss in two years. Fortune tallied his walk-away package—severance, deferred compensation, pension, and options—at about $61 million, a compensation figure rather than a published personal net worth. Steinhafels remains a Milwaukee-area name; the childhood that shaped him was Mequon.

Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin

Carl Christian Schurz

Forty-Eighter and U.S. statesman; Watertown farm years 1850s (not the Octagon House / John Richards)

$8,000

Carl Christian Schurz was the German Forty-Eighter whose American rise began on a Watertown hill farm before Lincoln sent him abroad. Union general, Missouri senator, and Hayes’s secretary of the interior, he is not a Watertown native and he did not live in the Octagon House. He was born March 2, 1829, in Liblar, Rhenish Prussia. He had already sprung Gottfried Kinkel from Spandau, taught German in London, and married Margarethe Meyer when the couple crossed in 1852. Wisconsin’s German boom pulled them west. In 1855 he bought eighty-nine acres from John Jackson for an eighty-five-hundred-dollar mortgage and built a gingerbread villa on Karlshuegel—Carl’s Hill—overlooking the Rock River off North Church Street. He meant to plat lots; the Panic of 1857 ate the speculation. Neighbors still called him the country gentleman from Watertown: prairie-chicken hunts, billiards at the Buena Vista House, dinner-party charades. Daughter Marianne was born on the farm in 1857, a birth that nearly killed Margarethe. That same year he lost the lieutenant governor’s race. He kept a Milwaukee law office with Halbert Paine, spoke for Lincoln in German, served as a Wisconsin delegate to the 1860 Republican convention, and left as minister to Spain in 1861. The house is gone; a bed-and-breakfast sits on the hill at what is now 749 North Church Street. Margarethe’s kindergarten, begun in 1856 at North Second and Jones, was moved to the Octagon House grounds in 1956. That brick house belongs to John Richards, not to Schurz.

Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin

Joseph Edward Davies

U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and first FTC chairman; born and first practiced law in Watertown

$17,500

Joseph Edward Davies was the Watertown valedictorian who became the first chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Soviet Union. He was born in Watertown on November 29, 1876, to Welsh wagon-maker Edward Davies, whose shop sat at 311 South First, and evangelist Rachel Davies, known in Wales as Rahel o Fôn. He learned his letters from his mother at home, then attended the public schools and carted Globe Mill flour for her kitchen. Senior year he caught typhoid and lost every hair on his head; classmates voted to wear mortarboards at commencement so he would not stand out. He was valedictorian of the class of 1894. At the University of Wisconsin he was freshman-class president, law-class president, and commencement orator in 1901. He opened rooms over the post office, spent four years as Jefferson County district attorney, and planted flower beds on South Second before leaving for Madison and Washington. Woodrow Wilson made him first FTC chairman in 1915–16. Roosevelt sent him to Moscow from 1936 to 1938; Mission to Moscow sold widely. He married Marjorie Merriweather Post in 1935, sat at Potsdam at Truman’s elbow, and kept sending money home, including five hundred dollars for the Octagon House porches in 1941 and the Joe Davies scholarships that still walk out of Watertown High. He died in Washington on May 9, 1958. Birth, raise, and first practice are Watertown; the diplomatic career was national.

Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin

John Richards

Watertown mill owner who designed and built the Octagon House at 919 Charles Street

$687.50

John Richards was the pioneer mill owner who promised Eliza Forbes the finest house in the best town in Wisconsin Territory and then spent three years proving it. The Octagon House at 919 Charles Street, finished in 1854, and the mills on the Rock River are why Watertown still knows his name. He was born in Hinsdale, Massachusetts, in 1806, attended Williams College, and joined the Massachusetts bar before reaching the Rock River in 1837. He fetched Eliza from Albany in 1840 and put her in a cabin while mill hands stacked brick. With Luther Cole and Heber Smith he opened the Rough and Ready flour mill in 1847, then a sawmill and linseed-oil mill on the east bank. The Octagon rose five floors with thirteen-inch brick walls, seventeen-inch stone foundations, a hanging cherry staircase from trees on his land, a rainwater cistern, and furnace heat without chimney breasts. Architect Rexford Newcomb later called it probably the best-planned octagon in the country. He was Jefferson County’s first district attorney and, briefly, mayor. He died in Fond du Lac on February 18, 1874. Eliza died in the house on June 19, 1902. The family stayed until grandson William Thomas died in 1935; the Watertown Historical Society opened the house as a museum in 1938. The kindergarten building on the lawn is Margarethe Schurz’s, moved there in 1956. Richards never lived in Schurz’s villa, and Schurz never lived here. The mills and the house are the city claim.

Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin

Mary Woodard Lasker

Medical-research philanthropist and Lasker Foundation co-founder; born in Watertown

$10 million

Mary Woodard Lasker was the Watertown banker’s daughter who became one of the most consequential medical-research philanthropists in American history. She co-founded the Lasker Foundation, helped remake the American Cancer Society, and spent decades pushing Congress to fund the National Institutes of Health on a scale that reshaped postwar medicine. She was born on November 30, 1900, at 400 North Washington Street. Her father, Frank, ran the Bank of Watertown; her mother, Sara, helped found two of the city’s three parks, which is why the girl grew up treating flowers as a civic duty. The childhood left scars. Recurrent ear infections arrived before antibiotics. At four she was taken to see the family’s cleaning woman after a double mastectomy and never forgot the helplessness of that room. She graduated from Radcliffe in art history in 1923, worked at Reinhardt Galleries, and built Hollywood Patterns before marrying advertising titan Albert Lasker. Together they founded the Lasker Foundation in 1942, turned a sleepy cancer society into the American Cancer Society, and helped shove the NIH budget from about $2.4 million in 1945 toward $5.5 billion by 1985. She backed the National Cancer Act of 1971 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. On May 15, 2009, the first-day ceremony for her 78-cent stamp was held on the front lawn of the Woodard house. She left more than $10 million to the foundation. Watertown is the raise; the science and the lobbying were national.

Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin

Nathanael Justin “Nate” Oats

Alabama men’s basketball coach; born and raised in Watertown, Wisconsin, at Maranatha Baptist

$7.25 million

Nathanael Justin “Nate” Oats is the Watertown-raised coach who took Alabama men’s basketball to its first Final Four in 2024. He was not a Watertown High Gosling. He was a Maranatha kid whose whole childhood and first adult job sat on one Baptist campus: church, classroom, and gym. He was born in Watertown on October 13, 1974, the son of Larry Oats, a Maranatha Bible professor and seminary dean who never left the school, and Colleen. At Maranatha Baptist Academy he started three seasons and went 24–0 as a senior. He stayed for college as a math-education major, team captain, and all-conference player, then earned a master’s in kinesiology from Wisconsin in 1999 while still on the Maranatha staff. Weeknights meant youth-prison Bible study at Ethan Allen; summers meant roofing and more gym time. He assisted at Maranatha from 1997 to 2000, coached at Wisconsin–Whitewater, taught math for eleven years in Michigan, and won a Class A state title at Romulus in 2013 at 27–1. Buffalo and then Alabama followed. The Watertown claim is birth, raise, and that first adult coaching job, not a later mailing address from Tuscaloosa.

Profile · Middleton, Wisconsin

Russell Dana Feingold

Wisconsin U.S. senator (1993–2011); Janesville-born, longtime Middleton resident (not a Madison native)

$441,737

Russell Dana Feingold held a Wisconsin U.S. Senate seat for eighteen years as the co-author of McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law and the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. Middleton was the political home: after law school he bought on Donna Drive, raised his children in the local schools, and still lists the city as his residence. He was born in Janesville on March 2, 1953, graduated from Craig High in 1971, and went on to Wisconsin, Oxford, and Harvard Law. After Foley & Lardner he settled west of Madison’s Beltline. In the 1992 underdog Senate primary against two millionaires he painted five promises on the Donna Drive garage door: Wisconsin money, live in Middleton, no pay raise, a listening session in every county every year, and hire Wisconsin. Promise two was the city. He held the seat until Ron Johnson defeated him, then taught, ran again, and lost again. Janesville is the birth certificate; he left as a teenager. The garage-door contract and the long adult residence are why Middleton claims him.

Profile · Middleton, Wisconsin

Jill Judith Karofsky

Born Middleton; Wisconsin Supreme Court justice since 2020; chief justice as of July 1, 2025

$196,082

Jill Judith Karofsky is a Middleton-raised lawyer who reached the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2020 and became its chief justice on July 1, 2025. She was born in Middleton on July 15, 1966. Her mother, Judy, served as mayor from 1975 to 1977; her father, Peter, was a pediatrician. At Middleton High School, class of 1984, she won the WIAA girls doubles tennis title in 1982 with Kristin Moe. She ran the 5,000 and 10,000 meters at Duke in the first year the Blue Devils fielded a women’s track team, then earned her law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1992. Her legal career ran through the Dane County District Attorney’s office, a stint as the state’s first Violence Against Women resource prosecutor, and service as a circuit judge. In 2020 she won a Supreme Court race that spent more than $10 million combined—then a record—taking about 55.21 percent of the vote. She was sworn in on August 1, 2020, by Justice Rebecca Dallet at mile 35 of a planned 100-mile run, a detail covered by the Wisconsin Examiner and the Journal Sentinel and later retold in Runner’s World. She lives in Madison as a sitting justice. The raise that puts her on Middleton’s page is childhood: mayor’s daughter, Cardinal tennis champion, Middleton High class of 1984. Her mother’s two years as mayor are civic background, not a substitute for her own résumé.

Profile · Middleton, Wisconsin

Fred Foster

Co-founder of Electronic Theatre Controls; Madison-born, Middleton plant (not the Nashville record producer)

$45 million

Fred Foster was the Madison professor’s son who put a world-class theatre-lighting factory on Pleasant View Road in Middleton and kept the jobs there. He is not the Nashville record producer of the same name who also died in 2019. Memorial High and two years at Wisconsin under Gilbert Hemsley launched him; the adult stretch that puts Middleton on the lighting map is the plant. On Christmas Eve 1975, at Hemsley’s party, Foster and three other UW kids — brother Bill, Gary Bewick, and James Bradley — decided to build a digital lighting console. Parents’ basement, then a garage. Mega Cue followed. Disney’s Epcot bought credibility. By 1983 the company sold consoles under its own name. The Source Four ellipsoidals that began shipping in 1992 eventually numbered about three million. In 2004 he consolidated headquarters and manufacturing on Pleasant View Road: more than seven acres, a lobby dressed as 1940s Manhattan, and some three hundred of his own fixtures in the ceiling. He refused to ship the work to China so a twenty-five-unit order could still be painted and leave the same afternoon. An ESOP later parked about a third of the company with employees. Cancer arrived in 2015. He died on February 8, 2019, at sixty-one. Wife Susan, daughter Kate, and son James all worked on the payroll. A memorial was held at Madison’s Overture Center. Birth and raise are Madison; Middleton is the factory and the career address.

Profile · Middleton, Wisconsin

Paul Kowert

Punch Brothers bassist; raised in Middleton (often called Madison native in press)

$1,200,000

Paul Kowert is the Punch Brothers bassist who grew up in Middleton even when the clips call him a Madison native. Born July 18, 1986, he started violin at three. At nine, to get into the school strings program, he switched to a bass that dwarfed him. A bluegrass band came through his high school; someone handed him a mandolin and a Nickel Creek record. Edgar Meyer albums filled in the rest. He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, class of 2009, with Meyer as his teacher. While he was still a student, in 2008, Chris Thile called: Punch Brothers needed a bass. Thile later said that was when the band became a band. Kowert has been the group’s low end ever since, and he also plays in the chamber-bluegrass project Hawktail. Punch Brothers’ 2018 album All Ashore won the Grammy for Best Folk Album. He still tells interviewers that Madison is a great town to grow up in, and metro press often files him that way; the childhood itself was Middleton, the Dane County suburb next door. That suburb is the Wisconsin claim.

Profile · Middleton, Wisconsin

Nicholas Adam "Nick" Toon

Born Middleton, Nov. 4, 1988

$1.81 million

Nicholas "Nick" Toon is a former Wisconsin Badgers and NFL wide receiver whose Middleton roots run from birth certificate to high-school yearbook. He was born in Middleton on November 4, 1988, the son of Al and Jane Toon, and starred at Middleton High School, where the Cardinals named him captain. As a junior he caught 26 passes for 425 yards and six touchdowns. As a senior he finished with 51 catches, 799 yards, seventeen kick returns for 430 yards, and thirteen touchdowns, earning first-team all-state honors in 2006; he also lettered in track. At the University of Wisconsin he broke his father Al's school receiving records in 2011. The New Orleans Saints selected him in the fourth round of the 2012 NFL Draft, 122nd overall. His NFL line was modest: twenty-one catches, 283 yards, and one touchdown, with a later stop in St. Louis. The career reads as journeyman football. The Middleton claim does not: he was born and raised there, and the city still owns the high-school captain and Badger receiver.

Profile · Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin

Joyce Elaine Hill Westerman

AAGPBL player 1945–1952; born and raised on the Clausen-Hill farm in Pleasant Prairie (now Lake Andrea); Bradford High 1943

$55 a week

Joyce Elaine Hill Westerman played eight seasons in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and grew up on the Clausen-Hill farm in Pleasant Prairie, ground that is now Lake Andrea. The village later put a memorial bench between diamonds 2 and 3 at Prairie Springs Park, on the same land. Born December 29, 1925, to Cecil Ludlow Hill and Lillian Victoria Clausen, she cleaned the barn, picked vegetables, helped her father cut trees, and at twelve joined her aunt's adult softball team. She graduated from Mary D. Bradford High School in 1943, then worked at the Nash factory in Kenosha and pitched and played shortstop on the company softball team. P.K. Wrigley's wartime women's league came calling, and she made it. From 1945 to 1952 she played catcher, then outfield and first base, for Grand Rapids, Fort Wayne, South Bend, Peoria, and the Racine Belles. Across 531 games she recorded 345 hits, 191 runs, 81 stolen bases, 292 walks, and 167 RBI with a .228 average; South Bend won the championship in her last season. Off-season she went back to Nash. She married Raymond Westerman in 1950, led 4-H for fourteen years, coached Carthage softball, and worked the post office and American Motors. In 1988 the league entered Cooperstown as a body; in 1991 she was one of forty-eight original players in A League of Their Own. She died at home on January 18, 2021, at ninety-five. Later honors include the Milwaukee Brewers Wall of Fame, the Grand Rapids Sports Hall of Fame (2003), and Bob Kann's 2012 Wisconsin Historical Society Press biography Joyce Westerman: Baseball Hero.

Profile · Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin

Roger R. Mayer

Kenosha County electronics entrepreneur; born Somers, of Pleasant Prairie at death; first LakeView Corporate Park tenant

$42.3 million

Roger R. Mayer built Manu-tronics from a 2,600-square-foot garage into a printed-circuit assembly house that employed about eight hundred people and put the first private building into Pleasant Prairie’s LakeView Corporate Park. The park, a greenfield off Interstate 94, is still the village’s adult industrial brand; Mayer’s plant opened there in 1988. He was born at home in Somers on September 6, 1938, to Raymond and Annetta (Talmadge) Mayer, studied industrial engineering at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, and worked at Warwick Industries in Zion, Illinois, before betting on a small assembly shop with partners in 1969. Manu-tronics ran garage-door transmitters and receivers around the clock. Local chambers named him Businessman of the Year in 1988 and Entrepreneur of the Year in 1989. In 1999 he sold the company to Sanmina—SEC filings list him as president and CEO—and that same year broke ground on Colerget, a conference house of modern art, Asian architecture, and gardens meant to teach others how to start a shop. He chaired the Pleasant Prairie Police and Fire Commission for more than thirty years, sat on Edgewood Bank’s board, led the Kenosha Area Business Alliance, and founded an IPC trade group for printed-circuit assembly. The contractor who raised the LakeView plant also built his Pleasant Prairie estate. He died on November 8, 2019, at eighty-one, at Advocate Condell Medical Center in Libertyville, Illinois. Birth was Somers; the long adult residence and the corporate-park first were Pleasant Prairie.

Profile · Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin

John Joseph Maurer Jr.

Kenosha-born state senator and Wisconsin VA secretary; Pleasant Prairie town chairman; died at home there March 31, 2019

$22,632

John Joseph Maurer Jr. flew B-24s for the Fifteenth Air Force in World War II, then spent decades in commercial cockpits and Wisconsin public office. He chaired the town of Pleasant Prairie, served three terms in the state Senate, and ran the Department of Veterans Affairs under two governors. Born in Kenosha on July 11, 1922, he graduated from Bradford High School (then Kenosha High) in 1940, the same building that later produced Alan Ameche. After the war he studied at Marquette and flew for Capital Airlines and United, retiring as a DC-10 captain. Local politics began on the Pleasant Prairie town board in 1961; he was town chairman from 1969 to 1975, while the place was still a town, before the 1989 village incorporation. He lost a 1972 Senate primary to Doug La Follette, then won the 1975 special election after La Follette left for secretary of state. Three Senate terms followed, including majority caucus chair from 1981 to 1985. A run for the new Kenosha County executive post in 1982 failed. Tony Earl appointed him secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs in 1985; Republican Tommy Thompson kept him until January 1992. The Wisconsin Veterans Museum on Capitol Square grew during that tour, and the department later named Maurer Hall in Union Grove for him. He married Arlene Kulin on Christmas 1977. He died at 96 in his Pleasant Prairie home on March 31, 2019. Kenosha was the childhood; Pleasant Prairie was the adult stretch.

Profile · Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin

Hammond Edward “Ham” Fisher

Joe Palooka cartoonist; adult home in Carol Beach / Pleasant Prairie (born Wilkes-Barre, Pa.)

$2.5 million

Hammond Edward “Ham” Fisher created the boxing comic strip Joe Palooka, which at its peak ran in some nine hundred newspapers and spun into B-pictures and comic books. His Wisconsin tie was an adult second home: a Spanish-style mansion on South Lake Shore Drive in Edithton Beach / Carol Beach—now Pleasant Prairie—where he drew the strip until a 1954 northeaster put the house into Lake Michigan. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on September 24, 1900, he quit school at sixteen, peddled brushes, drove a truck, sold ads at the Wilkes-Barre Record, and then sold other people’s strips for the McNaught Syndicate while carrying his own unsold boxing strip in the sample case. In 1928 he sold Joe Palooka to more than twenty papers, including the New York Daily Mirror, forcing his bosses to take it. By the 1940s it was a top-five strip; the dumb palooka on the page was heavyweight champion of the world. Fisher helped found the National Cartoonists Society and became the only member it ever expelled, for “conduct unbecoming a cartoonist,” after a twenty-year feud with Al Capp—the former Palooka ghost who had drawn Li’l Abner. Fisher accused Capp of hiding pornography in the panels; the Society believed Capp. Around the same season, the Carol Beach house came down in the storm. On December 27, 1955, in Moe Leff’s New York studio, Fisher killed himself. A will drawn weeks earlier left about $2.5 million to his wife Marilyn and daughter Wendy.

Profile · Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin

Robert Samuel Houston

Pleasant Prairie dairy farmer; Wisconsin Assembly 1874 and 1891; town board chairman

$500

Robert Samuel Houston was a Pleasant Prairie dairy farmer who twice reached the Wisconsin Assembly and spent his adult life on land he settled in September 1857. Massachusetts-born, he made butter, cheese, hay, corn, and oats; the butter and cheese took medals. He chaired the town board and kept the school-district books until his death in Milwaukee on January 5, 1902. He was born in Charlemont, Massachusetts, on August 7, 1820, worked six years as a stonecutter in Meriden, Connecticut, then came west. In 1873 the Liberal Reform coalition—Democrats, Grangers, and Liberal Republicans—sent him to Madison with 1,005 Kenosha County votes to 777 for former state senator Francis Paddock. He sat on railroads the year the Potter Law capped freight rates and created a railroad commissioner, the session that first put Democrats in charge of the Assembly since before the Civil War. He declined a 1874 run, lost in 1876, then won again in 1890 as a Democrat (1,597 to 1,453 over Republican J. Cavanaugh) and sat on agriculture. In 1895 state testers condemned thirty-eight of his cows for tuberculosis; he learned the carcasses had been sold for beef, sued, lost in circuit court and at the Wisconsin Supreme Court, lobbied Governor Scofield, and spent most of what remained of the money on the fight. He had married widow Lucy Smith in 1849; after her death in 1894 he married her niece Isabella. Two adopted daughters survived him. He died of edema in Milwaukee and is buried at Green Ridge Cemetery in Kenosha. Pleasant Prairie claims the farm stretch, not the birth.

Profile · Germantown, Wisconsin

Wenner Dudley Johnson

Pioneering coronary-bypass surgeon known as W. Dudley Johnson; Madison-born; longtime Germantown farm residence while practicing in Milwaukee

$10 million

Wenner Dudley Johnson was the heart surgeon Milwaukee called when other doctors told patients to get their affairs in order. While his operating table at St. Luke’s became a court of last resort, he lived on a Germantown farm growing organic apples and asparagus. He was born in Madison on April 3, 1930, and moved to Rockford, Illinois, at thirteen. His mother taught him to crochet; he took a sewing class in seventh grade. He went to Illinois intending to become a family doctor because he disliked the arrogance of surgeons, then met a decent senior resident on the Cook County night shift and changed his mind. Drafted and seasick, he chose the Public Health Service over the Navy. In Milwaukee, under Derward Lepley, he learned veins and the aorta. In January 1968 he helped perform Milwaukee’s first coronary bypass at St. Luke’s. The same year he and Lepley transplanted a heart; the patient lived nine years, then the longest on the books. He put patients on the pump, cooled them, stopped the heart, and stacked vein grafts—two or three cases a day, sometimes finishing at 3 a.m. Classical music played in the room. Obituaries credited him with more than 8,000 bypasses. He passed on California offers and stayed on the Germantown farm, certified organic in 1993; he left farming around 2000, and Apple Works Winery still names him as the man who planted the orchard. He died in hospice on October 24, 2016, at eighty-six, after a stroke following a Milwaukee Academy of Medicine meeting. The farm is the Germantown part. The chest was Milwaukee’s.

Profile · Germantown, Wisconsin

Rebecca Marie “Becca” Murray

Paralympic wheelchair basketball player; raised in Germantown

$22,500

Rebecca Marie “Becca” Murray is a four-time Paralympic wheelchair-basketball player who brought gold medals home to Germantown and captained the U.S. team to silver in Paris. Born with spina bifida, she has used a wheelchair her whole life and has said she would be a different person without the sport. Raised in Germantown, she started street hockey through IndependenceFirst at age six, asked her mother for more sports, and stuck with basketball—Milwaukee Wizards at twelve, Whitewater camps from eleven. She graduated from Germantown High School in 2008. That September in Beijing, at eighteen, she won Paralympic gold. She studied special education at UW–Whitewater, helped start the women’s wheelchair basketball team, and won three national titles from 2012 to 2014. London 2012 brought a fourth-place finish; Rio 2016 brought another gold as leading scorer (31 points in the semifinal against Britain, 33 in the final against Germany), and Germantown police and fire ran her through the neighborhood in a convertible. She received the 2021 ESPY for Best Athlete with a Disability, stepped away before Tokyo, then returned to captain the U.S. team to silver against the Netherlands in Paris 2024. By day she works in clinic support at Rogers Behavioral Health in Brown Deer.

Profile · Germantown, Wisconsin

James Alfred Schwalbach

Born South Germantown, 1912

$250,000

James Alfred Schwalbach was the South Germantown-born art educator who brought drawing lessons into Wisconsin classrooms over the radio for decades. Born in South Germantown in 1912, he was already writing, producing, and narrating his own educational safety spots while still in high school. He earned a B.S. in art education at UW–Madison in 1934, continued with a master's and supervision coursework, and in 1936—when Wayne Claxton left—WHA asked him for a program or two. He came back with a year's outline. Harold McCarty hired him. Let's Draw, part of the Wisconsin School of the Air, ran from 1936 into the 1970s: music, sound, narration, a teacher's manual on the desk, and children drawing at theirs. By 1946–47 he was opening some 41,000 pieces of student art a year; by the late 1950s an estimated 120,000 classrooms were tuned in. Ohio State awarded the series educational-radio prizes, including for "The Wild Ride of Ichabod Crane." He chaired art at Whitewater from 1940 to 1945 and ran the training high school, then joined rural sociology at Madison and directed the Wisconsin Rural Art Program from 1945 to 1964, the circuit of shows that put farm painters in the same conversation as John Steuart Curry and Aaron Bohrod. Wisconsin children who never met an art teacher met him on the radio. He died in Three Lakes in 1984. The raise is Germantown; the broadcast career is Madison's WHA.

Profile · Germantown, Wisconsin

John Paul Gehl

Son of Michael N. and Mary Anna (Fohl) Gehl of Nenno

$1 million

John Paul Gehl turned a three-room South Germantown creamery into the condensed-milk business that still carries the family name in the village. The son of Michael N. and Mary Anna (Fohl) Gehl of Nenno, he was running his brother Nicholas's plant on the north side of Main Street, just east of Western, by 1896. On April 29, 1897, he married Theresa Neubauer, who had been Nicholas's secretary in a Milwaukee brokerage; Nicholas owed him money, and the creamery became both the debt payment and the wedding present. The couple lived in the house next to the plant. They made butter and cheese until 1909, then installed a vacuum pan and sold condensed milk to candy makers and ice-cream plants. Five horse teams worked a fifteen-mile radius—a pickup system Gehl borrowed from his father's Nenno creamery so farmers did not have to haul milk in. In 1915 he built a condensary on the old Nass lime-kiln land two blocks east, with a railroad siding and drawings by a Purdue engineer named Huntziger. Twins Paul and Irene looked out from a heart on the evaporated-milk label. When Milwaukee passed a 1932 ordinance requiring milk sold in the city to be bottled there, the company opened a plant at 35th and Capitol that drew twenty-five to thirty thousand visitors. Later generations extended the brand; the founding stretch is the house beside the Main Street creamery, and Gehl Foods remains in Germantown.

Profile · Germantown, Wisconsin

Jesse David Thielke

Hometown and high school: Germantown. Birthplace is variously listed as Kiel or West Bend.

$250,000

Jesse David Thielke is the Germantown wrestler who went 186–1 in high school, won four Wisconsin state titles, and reached the Rio Olympics in Greco-Roman. Raised in Germantown, he starred at Germantown High School, where the record that still gets read locally includes a win over Alex Dieringer, who later took the Hodge Trophy. As a schoolboy he told a USA Wrestling questionnaire that he wanted the Olympics and that the person who inspired him was his uncle Paul. He wrestled two seasons for the Wisconsin Badgers, then took an Olympic redshirt. At the April 2016 Trials he beat Spenser Mango in the semifinal and Ildar Hafizov in the final, a come-from-behind last-chance qualifier that sealed the final Olympic spot at 59 kilograms. In Rio he won 8–0 over Morocco's Mehdi Messaoudi in the round of 16, then fell 0–8 to Rovshan Bayramov, a former world champion and two-time Olympic silver medalist. Earlier he had taken junior world bronze in Pattaya in 2012 and cadet Pan American gold in Managua in 2009. He later trained with the Army World Class Athlete Program and the New York Athletic Club. Birthplace listings split between Kiel and West Bend; the hometown, high school, and yearbook are Germantown.

Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Reginald Lisowski (“The Crusher,” “Da Crusher”)

South Milwaukee AWA wrestler Reginald Lisowski (not other performers billed as Crusher)

$5 a night

Reginald Lisowski—The Crusher, or Da Crusher—was the beer-barrel brawler who made Milwaukee famous and never left South Milwaukee. Three AWA world heavyweight titles, five AWA tag titles with Dick the Bruiser, and a Billboard hit that told turkeynecks to do the hammerlock turned a Polish fullback from the Rockets into a lakefront folk hero who still lived in the city while neighborhood kids camped the lawn. He was born in South Milwaukee on July 11, 1926, played fullback for South Milwaukee High (class of 1944), and at thirteen already weighed two hundred pounds bouncing drunks from his father’s saloon. The Army sent him to Germany, where he learned to wrestle. Back home he packed meat at Cudahy, laid brick, and worked nights for five dollars a shot at a Chicago armory until promoters bleached his hair and named him The Crusher. Baron Von Raschke later said the gimmick was a lie: Lisowski did not drink beer; he preferred wine. He won his first AWA world heavyweight title by beating Verne Gagne on July 9, 1963. Sons Larry and David wrestled for South Milwaukee High while Dad yelled from the stands. His wife Faye died in 2003 after fifty-five years. He died of a brain tumor on October 22, 2005, at seventy-nine, at Bradford Terrace Convalescent Center in Milwaukee. In 2019 the city poured him in bronze at 1101 Milwaukee Avenue and threw Crusherfest.

Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Kay Koplovitz (née Smith)

Founder and longtime CEO of USA Network; raised in South Milwaukee

$174,960

Kay Koplovitz founded and ran USA Network, becoming the first woman to head a U.S. television network. She held the CEO job from the channel’s 1977 launch until a $4.5 billion sale in 1998, and under her watch the Sci-Fi Channel went on air in 1992. Born Kay Smith in Milwaukee on April 11, 1945, she spent kindergarten in Cudahy, then grew up at 510 Elm Street in South Milwaukee from age five through high school, where she was valedictorian for the Rockets. Her father sold for Ladish; her mother kept house. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1967 with degrees in communications and biology, earned Phi Beta Kappa, and wrote a Michigan State thesis on satellites after hearing Arthur C. Clarke lecture between her junior and senior years. She never owned USA Network, and she resigned in 1998 after Barry Diller took control. The Elm Street house and the South Milwaukee Rockets remain the hometown story she tells—the same grit she traces to a childhood fight to finish Cudahy kindergarten after the family moved.

Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Roger Sherman Hoar (pen name Ralph Milne Farley)

Bucyrus attorney and pulp author Ralph Milne Farley of South Milwaukee (great-great-grandson of Declaration signer Roger Sherman)

$750

Roger Sherman Hoar was Bucyrus’s corporate attorney in South Milwaukee by day and, as Ralph Milne Farley, the pulp writer who sent earthmen to Venus by night. He arrived in 1921, built the Georgian Colonial “The Milestone” at 1503 Fairview Avenue, and stayed forty-two years—the improbable resident inside the mining-shovel factory town. A Harvard lawyer and great-great-grandson of Declaration signer Roger Sherman, he put Myles Cabot on Venus in Argosy’s The Radio Man in June 1924. He taught engineering at Marquette, patented a method for aiming big guns by the stars, and from a South Milwaukee imprint—Stuart Press—published Wisconsin Unemployment Insurance after Washington pulled him onto New Deal unemployment work. He sat with Robert Bloch and Stanley Weinbaum in the Milwaukee Fictioneers; when Ziff-Davis offered him Amazing Stories in 1938 he turned it down and recommended Ray Palmer. City historian Nels Monson writes that he once dated Rose Fitzgerald. He died of a heart attack in The Milestone on October 10, 1963, at seventy-six. The house still stands. The shovels paid the mortgage; the pulps are what lasted.

Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Jerry Dreva

Conceptual artist and Les Petites Bon-Bons co-founder; born in South Milwaukee

$75,000

Jerry Dreva was the South Milwaukee conceptual artist who co-founded Les Petites Bon-Bons, a glitter band that never played a note and still made People, Newsweek, and Interview. He grew up across the street from the old library on Michigan Avenue, a kid who spray-painted Vietcong flags on mailboxes and got invited to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. He was born on January 8, 1945 — the same birthday as David Bowie, to whom he later mailed packages until the word “Bon Bon” turned up on the Ashes to Ashes sleeve, by Dreva and partner Bobby Lambert’s own account. He attended St. Mary’s, then seminary prep until they expelled him for radical views. “All he got out of seminary school was four years of Latin and no driver’s ed.” Hollywood, he wrote home, was “no different than Bucyrus Erie where my father spent his life working.” Back at the Voice-Journal he covered the “Art Gangster” who painted Day-Glo hearts on the Grant Park beach house between 1 and 4 a.m. He was the Art Gangster. The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art took his papers. He came home in the 1990s to care for his mother and died of a heart attack on March 26, 1997, at fifty-two. He is buried at Holy Sepulcher in Cudahy. South Milwaukee is birth, childhood, the newspaper beat, and the last years.

Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Gary George Wetzel

Medal of Honor recipient from the Vietnam War; born and lives in South Milwaukee

$69,360

Gary George Wetzel is South Milwaukee’s Medal of Honor recipient, the door gunner who crawled back to his gun with most of his left arm gone and kept the landing zone alive. He was born there on September 29, 1947, the second of nine in a factory-father house: a dad who had already been to war, a mother on nursing-assistant shifts, Boy Scouts, baseball, and John Wayne. School was not the point. He joined the Army at eighteen. On January 8, 1968, near Ap Dong An with the 173d Assault Helicopter Company, two rockets threw him into a rice paddy and took most of his left arm. He crawled back to the gun-well anyway, the only effective fire on the landing zone, then passed out dragging the aircraft commander toward a dike. Lyndon Johnson hung the Medal of Honor on him at the White House on November 19, 1968. The arm came off. He came home to run heavy equipment and founded Wisconsin Vietnam Vets Chapter 1 in 1984. He waited almost fifty years for a parade. In 2017 the Gary Sinise Foundation gutted his 1950s ranch so a man with a cane could cook in his own kitchen. “When I came home from Vietnam I didn’t get a welcome home,” he told the Journal Sentinel. “This is nice.” The city called May 18, 2017, Gary G. Wetzel Day. A stretch of Mason Street at Lincoln Memorial Drive in Milwaukee carries his name. He still lives in South Milwaukee.

Profile · Franklin, Wisconsin

Samuel Adam “Sam” Mayer

NASCAR Xfinity driver born and raised in Franklin; youngest touring champion (2019); first Xfinity win at Road America

$100,000

Sam Mayer is the Franklin-born NASCAR driver who learned to race on a backyard kart track his father paved into the family woods, then became the youngest touring champion in series history and won his first Xfinity race at Road America. The house is still in Franklin; the kart track is still there. Born June 26, 2003, he grew up on the family’s roughly one-hundred-acre wooded Franklin property, where Scott Mayer built corners stolen from famous road courses. When Sam was four, his father put him in a kiddie kart and said go easy while following in a golf cart; the boy stood on the gas, did not spin, and left Scott and Grandma in the dust. Scott later told Dave Kallmann that was the beginning of the end. Badger Kart Club in Dousman came next, then Charlotte summers by eleven, a Young Lions title at fourteen, and the youngest win at Greenville-Pickens. He spent a first high-school semester at Wisconsin Lutheran before finishing online. In 2019 he became the youngest NASCAR touring champion at 16 years, 3 months, and 8 days, beating Todd Gilliland’s previous mark. His first Xfinity Series win came at Road America on July 29, 2023, the Elkhart Lake road course Wisconsin kids treat as a pilgrimage. In 2024 the City of Franklin put him in the Fourth of July parade in a Camaro with his father Scott. Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s shop and Charlotte are the professional address; Franklin is the hometown claim.

Profile · Franklin, Wisconsin

Scott A. Mayer

Franklin-born QPS Employment Group founder and IndyCar driver; father of NASCAR driver Sam Mayer

$109,400

Scott A. Mayer is the Franklin-born founder of QPS Employment Group and the father who paved a kart track into a hundred-acre wooded lot so a four-year-old named Sam would have somewhere to go fast. The money came from staffing, not racing; the Franklin acreage is where Sam Mayer Racing still runs from home. He was born in Franklin on August 31, 1964. After walking away from a Wisconsin basketball scholarship and a brief stint at someone else’s firm, he opened QPS in a one-room office in neighboring Hales Corners in 1985 with two employees. A non-compete limited year one to permanent placements only; then the market opened. By the early 2020s the company listed roughly fifty to fifty-seven branches across eight or nine states, with more than three hundred internal staff and headquarters in Brookfield. He made a handful of IndyCar starts in 2003—three races from Miami to Motegi—and twice attempted the Indianapolis 500 without qualifying. The rest of the calendar went to Sam’s contracts and QPS letterhead. Franklin is both birthplace and adult stretch; the company launched in Hales Corners and is headquartered in Brookfield.

Profile · Franklin, Wisconsin

Nate Mooney

Born Franklin, Jan. 26, 1972; raised in Franklin; Franklin High School class of 1990

$1 million+

Franklin High’s most famous graduate did not go to Hollywood on purpose. Nate Mooney was born in Franklin, Wisconsin, on January 26, 1972, graduated with the class of 1990, and earned a B.S. in aerospace engineering at Iowa State before deciding that an offbeat face might be a job. His first screen credit was a 2000 direct-to-video horror titled Vampire Vermont. Then came the working-actor circuit: Law & Order: SVU, Monk, CSI, House, Grey’s Anatomy, a Breaking Bad arms dealer, and Lurvy in the 2006 film Charlotte’s Web. The part that stuck is Ryan McPoyle, the dim third sibling in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, offering to split money fifty-fifty-fifty because there are three of them. He has appeared in eight episodes across eighteen years. TV Guide still notes that he tinkers with machines in his off hours. The yearbook is a Saber yearbook. Born and raised in Franklin with a locked Franklin High diploma in 1990, he remains the hometown joke’s punchline: the aerospace engineer who became McPoyle. The city claim is birth and upbringing, not a later return.

Profile · Franklin, Wisconsin

Amber S. Gell

Franklin High class of 2002; Lockheed Martin Orion engineer; STEM outreach and FIRST Robotics judge

$1.5 million+

Amber S. Gell is the Franklin High graduate who went from hating freshman English to engineering work on NASA's Orion spacecraft. She was born in Milwaukee in 1984 and graduated from Franklin High School in 2002. As a freshman she wanted to be a rocket scientist and did not see the point of literature. Teacher Kevin Nettesheim kept at her. She left for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, stacked bachelor's degrees in aerospace engineering and aerospace studies, and added master's work in space systems, physiology, finance, and an MBA before joining Lockheed Martin on Orion: docking, landing and recovery, and propulsion-test papers, including docking-integration work in Houston. Years later she called Nettesheim out of the blue. "Do you remember me?" "You're the rocket scientist." She had put his name on a satellite and sent it up. WISN covered that exchange when he retired; her alumni note still lists his AP English class as a favorite memory. She received Adler Planetarium's Women in Space Science Award in 2013 and a Presidential Volunteer Service Award in 2016 for STEM outreach. She has judged FIRST Robotics at the Wisconsin Regional since 2008. Later she became director of strategy and partnerships at Kongsberg Satellite Services in Norway. Wikipedia still says Milwaukee native. The English classroom that redirected her was in Franklin. Birth is the hospital city; the raise and the high-school chapter that produced the engineer are Franklin's.

Profile · Franklin, Wisconsin

Peter Doyle

Wisconsin secretary of state (1874–1878); Franklin childhood after Irish immigration (not other Peter Doyles)

$1,200

Peter Doyle served two terms as Wisconsin secretary of state from 1874 to 1878 after a Franklin childhood that began when an Irish immigrant family put down roots on a Milwaukee County farm. The raise is the city claim; the statewide office is why he is more than a local filler. He was born in Myshall, County Carlow, Ireland, on December 8, 1844, and moved with his parents to Franklin in 1850 at age six. First lessons came at home, then the common school in a town that was still timber and Root River. His father farmed, kept a store, and held local offices. The son clerked in Milwaukee, read law with Butler & Cottrill in 1863 and 1864, taught school, and in July 1865 took a railway-office job in Prairie du Chien that was supposed to be temporary. It stuck. He declined Prairie du Chien’s first mayoral nomination in 1872, won an Assembly seat from Crawford County, and in 1873 the Reform convention put him up for secretary of state. He served under Governors Taylor and Ludington from January 5, 1874, to January 7, 1878. He later returned to Milwaukee to practice, took a law course at Yale, and died in Jersey City in 1900. Fifteen years in Franklin before the railroad job are the childhood stretch.

Profile · Oak Creek, Wisconsin

John Daniel “Tooz” Matuszak

NFL first overall pick (1973), Raiders defensive lineman and actor; born Milwaukee, raised Oak Creek; died 1989

$450,000

John Daniel “Tooz” Matuszak was the first overall pick of the 1973 NFL draft, a two-time Super Bowl champion with the Oakland and Los Angeles Raiders, and later Hollywood’s Sloth in The Goonies. Oak Creek claimed him after an elementary-school move south from downtown Milwaukee. Born in Milwaukee on October 25, 1950, to Audrey and Marvin Matuszak, he grew up in Oak Creek after the family left downtown. Classmates called the gawky kid a beanpole; two brothers had already died of cystic fibrosis. He packed on muscle, threw the shot 58 feet 11 inches for a Wisconsin Class A state title, and played defensive line for the Knights. Grades kept him out of Wisconsin and Iowa. He went to Fort Dodge junior college, spent a year at Missouri under Dan Devine, then Tampa, then the top of the 1973 draft. With the Raiders he won Super Bowls XI and XV. Hollywood wanted the size: North Dallas Forty, then about five hours of makeup as Sloth in The Goonies, where he wore a Raiders shirt under the latex. His 1987 autobiography with Steve Delsohn was Cruisin’ with the Tooz. He died at 38 in Burbank on June 17, 1989, of an accidental Darvocet (propoxyphene) overdose, with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, bronchopneumonia, and traces of cocaine. Mother Audrey was still in Oak Creek when the NFL later sent the high school two gold Super Bowl footballs.

Profile · Oak Creek, Wisconsin

Amy Kathleen Pietz

Raised in Oak Creek; Milwaukee High School of the Arts and DePaul; Annie Spadaro on Caroline in the City

$1.9 million

Amy Kathleen Pietz is the Oak Creek actress best known as Annie Spadaro on Caroline in the City. She was born in Milwaukee on March 6, 1969, and adopted by Arnold, a truck driver, and Nancy, a nurse. She grew up in a three-bedroom, one-bath house in Oak Creek when the suburb still had cows, walking past livestock on the way to school. She trained for ballet until the money ran out. Seventh-grade social studies put her in Oliver!. At Oak Creek High a girl in the next row said she was leaving for the new Milwaukee High School of the Arts; Amy went with her and finished in the school's first graduating class, then earned a BFA from DePaul's Theatre School in 1991. Four seasons as Annie Spadaro on Caroline in the City (1995–1999) made her a network regular. Later she played a northern Wisconsin wife on Aliens in America, okey-doke accent and all, so she could impersonate both mothers. DePaul later gave her an Award for Excellence in the Arts. She has said that finding her birth family, which includes a singer, helped explain why performing made sense. Milwaukee Magazine compared the household to You Can't Take It With You and carried her first-person account of the rural walk to school and the Arts-school transfer. "I felt like an outsider in my own hometown, to be frank," she told Milwaukee Magazine. The birth certificate city is Milwaukee; the raise and the transfer are Oak Creek. The hometown, as she tells it, is the cows and the girl who pointed her toward the arts high school.

Profile · Oak Creek, Wisconsin

Brian Calhoun

Atlanta-born, Oak Creek-raised running back; Wisconsin Badgers star; Detroit Lions draft pick; Oak Creek High head football coach

$2 million

Brian Calhoun remains the name written deepest in Oak Creek's football record book, and he has come home to coach the same halls he walked as a teenager. Born in Atlanta on May 8, 1984, and raised in Oak Creek, he finished the class of 2002 with 4,790 career rushing yards and 82 touchdowns, including a 295-yard, seven-touchdown afternoon and a senior year of 40 scores and 2,095 yards. He was Gatorade Wisconsin Player of the Year. Away from the field he edited the high-school sports page, won drum competitions over six years, and placed seventh in the long jump at the 2001 World Youth Championships in Budapest. Two seasons at Colorado and a transfer sit-out led to a 2005 Wisconsin Badgers year of 1,636 rushing yards and 22 rushing touchdowns, then a school record, plus 571 receiving yards. The Detroit Lions took him seventy-fourth overall in 2006. An ACL injury limited him to eleven NFL games. He returned to Oak Creek as running-backs coach in 2018 and was named head football coach in 2024. "I grew up in this community," he told CBS 58 when the school hired him. "I walked the halls." Atlanta is on the birth certificate; the hometown claim is the Oak Creek program that still owns his records and now employs him.

Profile · Oak Creek, Wisconsin

Stacy Tuschl

Founder of The Academy of Performing Arts; raised in Oak Creek; 2019 Wisconsin Small Business Person of the Year

$5 million+

Stacy Tuschl built The Academy of Performing Arts from a free backyard pom class into a seven-figure dance school and, in 2019, Wisconsin’s Small Business Person of the Year. The origin is not a ZIP code on a studio lease; it is a south-suburb lawn in Oak Creek and seventeen middle-schoolers who showed up the first summer. After high school, in the summer of 2002, she taught poms for free in the backyard of her Oak Creek childhood home to whoever came. Three years later a hundred kids were enrolled and parents were asking why she was not charging. She incorporated while still at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, opened a studio in 2005, built a custom Oak Creek facility, and in 2013 used an SBA-backed U.S. Bank loan to open a Franklin location. Another SBA 7(a) loan expanded Oak Creek in 2018. By the SBA honor week in 2019 the business was in seven-figure revenue territory, with roughly fifty employees and more than a thousand students a week. She told Spectrum News the backyard was the childhood house. She later wrote business books and ran a coaching practice on the side, including the Foot Traffic Formula brand—a second act after the studio. Employee and student counts wander across profiles; the 2019 SBA-week range is the clean public snapshot. Oak Creek’s claim is the childhood home and the lawn where the academy began, not inventing a high-school diploma year the clips do not confirm.

Profile · Oak Creek, Wisconsin

John Jagler

Wisconsin state senator; raised in Oak Creek from age three; Oak Creek High School class of 1987

$60,924

John Jagler spent sixteen years co-hosting Wisconsin's Morning News on WTMJ before a cold call landed him in Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald's office and, soon after, in elective office. He has served in the Wisconsin Legislature since 2013 and in the Senate since 2021, representing Dodge and Jefferson County country around Watertown. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, on November 4, 1969, he was three when the family moved to Oak Creek. He graduated from Oak Creek High School in 1987, left UW–Parkside for broadcast school in Madison, and woke at 1 a.m. for years to co-host with Gene Mueller. When the radio format shifted, he offered himself to Fitzgerald's office and was hired on the same phone call, just in time for the Act 10 winter of 2011, when staffers were yelled at, threatened, and followed to cars. Jagler learned protesters by name. Redistricting opened a seat in Watertown country. He knocked on about 10,000 doors, survived a five-way primary, and reached the Assembly in 2013, joking that he was a "redshirt freshman." He moved to the Senate in 2021. He lives in Watertown with his wife Heidi and their three children. The political career is not an Oak Creek aldermanic seat; the childhood and the Knights yearbook are.

Profile · Beloit, Wisconsin

Diane Marie Hendricks (née Smith)

ABC Supply co-founder and chair; Beloit business base, lives in Afton (raised Osseo)

$21.7 billion

Diane Marie Hendricks co-founded ABC Supply in Beloit in 1982, has chaired the company since 2007, and is the city’s living fortune—Forbes listing her among America’s richest self-made women. She lives in Afton, between Beloit and Janesville. She was not born in Beloit. One of nine sisters on a dairy farm in Osseo, she decided at ten she would not marry a farmer. Pregnant at seventeen, she finished Osseo-Fairchild at home, assembled pens at Parker Pen in Janesville, sold custom houses, and in 1975 married Ken Hendricks—a Janesville roofer’s son and high-school dropout already running a five-hundred-man crew. In 1982 they liquidated that firm and bought three failing Bird & Sons yards in Muskegon, Belleville, and Springfield. Headquarters: Beloit. First-year sales were $4.5 million; ABC topped the Inc. 500 in 1986. She ran the books and the bank. He climbed the jobs. On the night of December 20, 2007, Ken fell through a tarp covering an opening in a subfloor over their Afton garage and died the next morning on a Rockford operating table. Forbes had just listed him at $3.5 billion. Diane kept ABC, bought Bradco in 2010 and L&W Supply in 2016, and grew the firm past nine hundred branches and $20.2 billion in 2025 revenue. She poured millions into the old Fairbanks-Morse floors, put her name on a ballpark, and filmed Betting on Beloit with her daughter. Forbes put her personal fortune at $21.7 billion as of June 3, 2026. The farm was Osseo; the death was Afton; the fortune is Beloit.

Profile · Beloit, Wisconsin

Roy Chapman Andrews

Explorer and naturalist; born Beloit 1884, Central Asiatic expeditions

$480

Roy Chapman Andrews led the American Museum of Natural History’s Central Asiatic expeditions into Mongolia and brought back the first dinosaur-egg nests modern science accepted. Popular writers still liken him to Indiana Jones; George Lucas never confirmed the link. He was born in Beloit on January 26, 1884, at 419 St. Lawrence Avenue, then at the city’s edge, the second child of wholesale druggist Charles Ezra Andrews and Cora Chapman Andrews. He hunted and collected in the woods west of the house, taught himself taxidermy at fourteen, and sold mounts to pay for Beloit College. On March 31, 1905, a canoe tipped in spring melt on the Rock River; his friend and instructor Montague White drowned, and Andrews crawled through a flooded meadow to survive. He took an English degree in 1906, vowed not to waste another day, and talked his way onto the museum floor in New York as a taxidermy janitor. From 1922 to 1930 he led five expeditions—cars and camels—into Mongolia. At the Flaming Cliffs his teams found scientifically recognized nests of dinosaur eggs, new dinosaurs, and mammals that had lived beside them. He later became the museum’s director. He died in Carmel, California, on March 11, 1960, and was buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Beloit. The St. Lawrence house still stands; an explorer award is still given in his name in the city.

Profile · Beloit, Wisconsin

James Caldwell

Born Beloit, January 16, 1955

$15 million+

James "Jim" Caldwell is the Beloit-born football coach who became the first Black head coach in the Atlantic Coast Conference and later led the Indianapolis Colts to a Super Bowl. He was born in Beloit on January 16, 1955, and came through Beloit Memorial High School as a nine-letter athlete: undefeated Big Eight football as a senior, a starter on the 1972–73 state-championship basketball team, and a member of a 4×400 relay that took second in the state. Class of 1973, he entered Memorial's hall of fame in 2011. Iowa gave him a scholarship. He started four years in the defensive backfield, blocked kicks as a freshman, captained the 1976 Hawkeyes, and stayed on to coach. Wake Forest hired him in 1993 as the ACC's first Black head coach. Tony Dungy took him to Tampa Bay and then Indianapolis; Caldwell was on the staff that won Super Bowl XLI, then got the Colts job himself. As a rookie NFL head coach in 2009 he started 14–0 before resting starters, finished 14–2, and lost Super Bowl XLIV to the Saints. He later called plays for the Baltimore Ravens' Super Bowl XLVII title and coached the Detroit Lions from 2014 to 2017. The NFL is the résumé. Beloit Memorial is the hometown.

Profile · Beloit, Wisconsin

Eugene Edward Lee

SNL and Broadway set designer; born Beloit, died Providence

$12 million+ (estate)

Eugene Edward Lee was the set designer who shaped Saturday Night Live from its first episode and won three Tony Awards for Broadway—Candide, Sweeney Todd, and Wicked. He liked to say that everything he was doing later, he had already done in the two theaters at Beloit Memorial High School. Born in Beloit on March 9, 1939, he grew up in a house where his father acted in community plays and his mother worked backstage. His identical twin ran audiovisual at the new Beloit Memorial; Eugene lived in the theaters. He took BFAs from the Goodman School and Carnegie Mellon, left Yale Drama in 1967 without finishing, and that same year became resident designer at Trinity Repertory in Providence—more than a hundred shows until he died. Lorne Michaels hired him for the new NBC sketch show in 1975. Except for seasons six through ten (1980–85), when Michaels himself was gone, Lee designed SNL for decades, collecting six Emmys, building as many as a dozen sets in seven days, commuting from Rhode Island and sleeping at the Yale Club. Broadway paid in Tonys: Candide (1974), Sweeney Todd (1979), and the green clockwork Oz of Wicked (2004), with its dragon over the proscenium. Yale mailed him the real MFA in 1986, after the first Tony, because a classmate wrote the letter. He died in Providence on February 6, 2023. Studio 8H was the job; the Memorial theaters were the start.

Profile · Beloit, Wisconsin

Marcia Carol Martin Anderson (née Mahan)

Born Beloit, 1957

$182,500

Marcia Carol Martin Anderson is the Beloit-born Army Reserve officer who became the first African American woman promoted to major general in the U.S. Army, Army Reserve, or National Guard, and later sponsored the Navy ship that carries her hometown's name. Born Marcia Mahan in Beloit in 1957, she lived with her maternal grandparents after her parents divorced when she was one. Her mother worked hospital billing; her father, a Korean War veteran, worked at the Beloit Corporation. She flunked kindergarten at Merrill Grade School—"the only general they ever met who flunked kindergarten," she likes to tell students—then finished first grade at Our Lady of the Assumption before moving with her mother to East St. Louis at age eight. Catholic schools in St. Louis finished her schooling. At Creighton she landed in ROTC by accident when astronomy was full and took military science instead. She chose the Army Reserve, earned a law degree at Rutgers, and built a civilian career as clerk of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Wisconsin in Madison. In 2011, at Fort Knox, she received her second star. Service as Pentagon deputy chief of the Army Reserve followed; she retired in 2016. On November 23, 2024, in Milwaukee snow, she sponsored the USS Beloit, the first Navy ship of that name, and gave the order to man the ship and bring her to life. Her Beloit childhood ended at eight; the city's name is on the hull.

Profile · Sun Prairie, Wisconsin

Georgia Totto O’Keeffe

Modernist painter; born and raised on a Town of Sun Prairie farm until about age 15

$65 million

Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was a Sun Prairie farm child before she became the painter of New Mexico deserts and flowers. She was born on a Town of Sun Prairie dairy farm on November 15, 1887, at what is now 2407 County Road T at Town Hall Drive, and left Wisconsin in her mid-teens. Second of seven children, she was named for a Hungarian grandfather who arrived in 1848 and later went home. The frame birthplace house burned in 1976. Town Hall School sat across the road. By age ten she had decided to be an artist; once a week she and sisters Ida and Anita took a wagon into town for watercolor lessons from Sarah Mann on North Street. Sacred Heart Academy in Madison boarded her for one high-school year, 1901–02. In the fall of 1902 the family left for Williamsburg, Virginia; she stayed with Aunt Lola Totto, finished a sophomore year at Madison High, and followed them south in June 1903. That is the Wisconsin stretch: a farm, a one-room school, Mann’s studio. Sun Prairie later named a park for her, then renamed it for two local coaches; a marker now sits at the municipal building, and Highway 19 carries her name. The farm is a private house. She died in Santa Fe on March 6, 1986.

Profile · Sun Prairie, Wisconsin

William “Will” Butcher

NHL defenseman and first Wisconsin-born Hobey Baker Award winner; born in Sun Prairie

$14 million

William “Will” Butcher is the first Wisconsin-born player to win the Hobey Baker Award, college hockey’s top individual honor. The win started on Sun Prairie ice and ran through Denver before a memorable NHL debut with the New Jersey Devils. He was born in Sun Prairie on January 6, 1995, to Joe and Julie Butcher. He played youth hockey in town and for the Madison Capitols, coached by his father, a two-time NCAA champion at UW–Stevens Point. After the U.S. National Team Development Program—gold at the 2012 under-18 worlds, later Team USA captain and top defenseman at the 2015 world juniors—he spent four seasons at the University of Denver. Each year his point total climbed. As a senior in 2016–17 he put up 37 points, finished plus-27, won NCHC player of the year, and helped Denver to a national championship. The Hobey followed. He tried to give the trophy to his teammates. Colorado had drafted him in the fifth round in 2013 and let him walk. The Devils signed the free agent, and on October 7, 2017, he became the first Devil with three points in a debut, then finished with 44 points in 81 games and an All-Rookie nod. Four seasons in New Jersey, a year in Buffalo, and later stops in the AHL and Europe followed. He remains an avid muskie fisherman. Sun Prairie is the pond he learned on; the NHL line is the afterlife.

Profile · Sun Prairie, Wisconsin

Thomas Adolph Loftus

Former Wisconsin Assembly speaker and U.S. ambassador to Norway; longtime Sun Prairie resident

$22,632

Thomas Adolph Loftus spent most of a public life inside Sun Prairie city limits—Assembly speaker, losing gubernatorial candidate, and Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Norway. Local papers still call him a Sun Prairie native; the precise version is that he moved there at five and never really left. He was born April 24, 1945, in a small Stoughton hospital. After a good tobacco crop his father bought into Brooks Implement, a farm-machinery dealership on the Sun Prairie side of the county; the Loftus people had been Norwegian dairy farmers near Brooklyn, Wisconsin. Tom graduated from Sun Prairie High School in 1963, served two Army years in the Vietnam era, then earned a degree at UW–Whitewater and a master’s at Madison’s La Follette School. He sat in the Wisconsin State Assembly from 1977 to 1991, served as majority leader, and from 1983 to 1991 was the longest-serving Democratic speaker in state history. He lost the 1990 governor’s race to Tommy Thompson, 58 percent to 42 percent. After chairing Clinton’s Wisconsin campaign, he served as U.S. ambassador to Norway from November 1993 to December 1997—NATO expansion years, with the Oslo Accords negotiated nearby—and received a Grand Cross from King Harald. Later posts included WHO adviser and UW System regent. He still lives in Sun Prairie; his 2024 memoir is Mission to Oslo.

Profile · Sun Prairie, Wisconsin

John August List

Born in Madison; raised in Sun Prairie.

$5 million+

John August List is the experimental economist who learned markets at baseball-card shows in Sun Prairie and later made field experiments a standard tool in economics. He was born in Madison on September 25, 1968, and raised in Sun Prairie, the son of a truck driver and a secretary. He cut grass and shoveled snow for a dollar or two, walked to the PDQ for gum and cards, and by the mid-1980s was buying, selling, and testing pitches at weekend card shows. He graduated from Sun Prairie High School in 1987, went to UW–Stevens Point on a partial golf scholarship, discovered he would not make the Tour, and discovered economics instead. A University of Wyoming Ph.D. in 1996 led to posts at Central Florida, Arizona, and Maryland, and, since 2005, the University of Chicago. He pioneered randomized trials in actual markets—work George Akerlof and others have called revolutionary—served as a senior economist on President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers in 2002–03, and later became the first chief economist at Uber, then held the same role at Lyft and Walmart, turning millions of real trips into data. He still tells the card-table story. Textbooks in 1987 said you could not run a clean experiment in the messy world; the Sun Prairie kid kept doing it anyway. Madison is the birthplace; Sun Prairie is the raise and the high school.

Profile · Sun Prairie, Wisconsin

Ellen Clara Sabin

Sun Prairie-born educator; Portland schools superintendent; president of Milwaukee-Downer College, 1895–1921

under $50,000 (1949$)

Ellen Clara Sabin was Sun Prairie's first educator of national standing, and she began by teaching her own town. Born there on November 29, 1850, to Samuel and Adelia Sabin, she was carried west as an infant during the California gold rush and brought back to Wisconsin in 1854. The family settled at Windsor, just north of Sun Prairie. Oldest of eleven children, she taught the younger ones at home, then at fifteen or sixteen enrolled at the University of Wisconsin among the first women in the regular course. She taught Sun Prairie's grade school while still a student, left without a degree, and by nineteen was principal of Madison's Fourth Ward School. Oregon made her famous first. She worked as a teacher and principal there, then in 1887 became superintendent of Portland's schools, the first woman to hold that post in a large American city. Wisconsin pulled her home in 1890 to rescue struggling Downer College at Fox Lake. She mediated the 1895 merger with Milwaukee Female College, built the new Milwaukee-Downer campus, and served as president until 1921. Occupational therapy entered the college curriculum on her watch, and she helped organize the Wisconsin Federation of Women's Clubs. She died in Madison on February 3, 1949, at ninety-eight. Lawrence University still keeps a Sabin House. Sun Prairie holds the birth, the grade-school classroom she ran as a teenager, and the hometown claim for a career that remade Milwaukee-Downer.

Profile · Manitowoc, Wisconsin

Charles Cameron West

Cornell-trained engineer who bought the Burger yard in 1902; longtime president of The Manitowoc Company; WWII submarine builder

$410,000

Charles Cameron West turned a Manitowoc wooden-ship yard into the company whose cranes still carry the city's name. Born in Mendota, Illinois, on September 22, 1877, he earned a mechanical-engineering degree from Cornell in 1900, spent two years in a Chicago yard, then in 1902 joined Elias Gunnell and L.E. Geer in buying the Burger & Burger works on the Manitowoc River, where clippers had come off the ways since 1847. He launched one wooden steamer for tradition, then switched to steel. After World War I the ship orders died. The machine shops that already cut boilers, engines, and every plate in-house turned to industrial cranes, dredges, and cement and paper-mill gear. That diversification, he later told Time, is what saved the bacon. When the next war came he negotiated with the Navy, took a contract for ten submarines, and built them indoors through Wisconsin winters: fifteen sections, thirty-eight to sixty-eight tons each, launched sideways. The first boat went eight months early. Time, in November 1942, put the contract at $32.8 million and employment at about 6,200 people on three eight-hour shifts, seven days a week; the Navy called his former dairymen and cherry pickers custom-tailor shipbuilders. The Herald-Times obituary later credited twenty-eight submarines plus a farmed-out fleet of invasion barges, a civilian Certificate of Merit in 1943, two terms on the school board from 1925 to 1931, and honorary Boy Scout county presidency from 1933. West built 1404 Michigan Avenue in 1905 and died there on October 3, 1957, still president of the closed corporation. The yard later moved to Sturgeon Bay; the crane works kept Manitowoc's name. The Wisconsin Historical Society notes the Michigan Avenue house for its association with nearly his entire Manitowoc career. The city's claim is the fifty-five years on this river, not the Illinois birth certificate.

Profile · Manitowoc, Wisconsin

John Clarence “Bucky” Egan

World War II B-17 pilot of the 100th Bomb Group; born in Manitowoc; portrayed in Masters of the Air

under $100,000 (1961$)

John Clarence "Bucky" Egan was the Manitowoc-born B-17 pilot whose fleece jacket and hard luck with the 100th Bomb Group later reached a new audience through Masters of the Air. He was born on September 9, 1915, at 415 14th Street. His father, John Sr., was a state game warden and assemblyman who died of a heart attack in office in 1942 while the son was already overseas. Manitowoc schools and St. Thomas College in St. Paul came first; Air Corps cadet training began in March 1940. He bought the famous fleece jacket at San Angelo while the style was being discontinued, and it looked dirty even to his roommate Gale Cleven. At Thorpe Abbotts he commanded the 418th Bomb Squadron, flew a string of B-17s usually from the right seat, and, an hour after an Emden raid, paid a Norfolk farmer twenty bob because the crew husky Meatball had killed a pullet. Two days after Cleven went down, Egan led the Münster mission in M'lle Zig Zag. Flak, four days free, the Gestapo, and Stalag Luft III followed. After the war he married Josephine Pitz, Manitowoc's first licensed woman pilot and a WASP who had ferried B-17s, at St. Boniface on December 26, 1946. He made colonel, took a Georgetown degree, and worked in Air Force personnel planning. He died of a heart attack in McLean, Virginia, on April 16, 1961, at forty-five, the same way his father had, and was buried at Arlington. The USAF funeral notice credited him with eighteen combat missions across two wars. Masters of the Air put the jacket back on the lake.

Profile · Manitowoc, Wisconsin

Guila Bustabo (Teressina Bustabo)

Concert violinist; born Manitowoc Feb. 25, 1916; family to Milwaukee around age two; wartime Axis concerts; died Birmingham, Ala., April 27, 2002

peak: Guarneri-era concert wealth; estate at death under $50,000

Guila Bustabo was a Manitowoc-born concert violinist whose early brilliance took her from a cigar-box fiddle to Carnegie Hall, then whose wartime bookings in occupied Europe left an American career she never fully recovered. She was born Teressina Bustabo in Manitowoc on February 25, 1916, to Alexander and Blanche Kaderabek Bustabo, Italian-Bohemian parents who both played violin. Around age two the family moved to Milwaukee. At three she played privately for Chicago Symphony conductor Frederick Stock. Juilliard followed, with Yehudi Menuhin in the next studio. On November 2, 1929, at ten, she appeared in a New York Philharmonic children’s concert at Carnegie Hall in the first movement of Wieniawski’s Concerto No. 1. The hometown stop came later: Lincoln High School in Milwaukee on January 17, 1938, Guarnerius and all. During World War II she and her mother settled in occupied Paris and continued booking halls under Axis control. She later said Adolf Hitler sat in one audience. Patton’s men arrested mother and daughter in 1945; the Army then hired her to play for the Seventh Army. The American public was slower to forgive. A planned 1948 New York Philharmonic date drew a letter from Gen. Robert McClure noting she remained blacklisted for concerts with “special permission of [the] Nazi Propaganda Ministry.” She married American military musician Edison Stieg in 1948; they divorced in 1976. She ended her working life in the Alabama Symphony section and later at a Birmingham YWCA, sometimes pushing a grocery cart. “Menuhin got away from his parents. He was lucky. I never got away from mine,” she said. She died in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 27, 2002. Manitowoc is the birthplace; Milwaukee held the childhood after about age two. The thin hometown stretch is declared, not padded.

Profile · Manitowoc, Wisconsin

Doug Free

Manitowoc Lincoln High class of 2002; Northern Illinois tackle; Dallas Cowboys offensive tackle, 2007–2016

$36 million

Doug Free is the Manitowoc tackle who spent ten NFL seasons entirely with the Dallas Cowboys after leaving Lincoln High School as a lanky tight end unsure anyone would recruit him for college football. Born in Manitowoc on January 16, 1984, he finished Lincoln in 2002 as a first-team all-conference player as a junior and senior, the FRCC Defensive Player of the Year, and a first-team all-state selection as a senior. Parents David and Lois raised him in the Ships program that would later put him on the wall of fame. Northern Illinois coach Joe Novak saw a tackle, not a tight end. Free grew from about 6-foot-5 and 240 pounds into 6-6 and more than 320, started forty-nine straight Huskie games, and earned the locker-room nickname "Doug Freak" for footwork that survived the weight. Dallas took him 122nd overall in 2007. A knee sprain buried the rookie year; from 2010 he started every game he played, first on the left side and then on the right when Tyron Smith moved over, anchoring the quiet end of an All-Pro line. Career totals run to 124 games and 114 starts. He retired in 2017 rather than play out a final year scheduled at $5 million. In 2019 Lincoln named him honorary captain for a Notre Dame Academy game the Ships won 37–0; his message to the players was not to look back in twenty years wishing they had left more on the field. He and Dorothy, an NIU classmate, raise beef cattle in Walworth County. Lincoln inducted him onto its wall of fame in January 2026. The Manitowoc tie is birth, Lincoln High, and a hometown that still claims the Cowboys decade.

Profile · Manitowoc, Wisconsin

Thomas Foxen Anderson

Electron-microscopy pioneer and National Academy member; born Manitowoc 1911, childhood there until family left in 1923

$750,000+ (1991$)

Thomas Foxen Anderson was the biophysicist who turned the electron microscope into a tool for seeing how viruses attack bacteria and how bacteria exchange genes. Born in Manitowoc on February 7, 1911, to Anton Oliver Anderson and Mabel Foxen, he spent his first twelve years in a house wired early for radio and electricity. His father, a Navy electrician off the USS Texas, organized the Oslo Power and Light Company to bring power to Manitowoc County farms and ran an appliance shop besides. Mother Mabel, a pianist trained at a Red Wing seminary, died of tuberculosis when Tom was nine. Brother Norman’s chronic mastoiditis pushed Anton to sell the Manitowoc holdings in 1923 and chase a healthier climate through Tampa, Amherst, Rockford, and Glendale. The boy who had electrical toys on the lake learned cells under a compound microscope in a Rockford botany class. Caltech and an RCA fellowship put him on the first commercial electron microscopes. He photographed bacteriophages attaching to and bursting their hosts, invented critical-point drying—replacing water with liquid carbon dioxide through a miscible-liquid series so specimens did not collapse into pancakes—and at the Pasteur Institute made the textbook images of bacteria conjugating. Paris Match once ran a conjugation micrograph under the caption “Un Accouplement de Bacterie.” His first paper, with Don Yost and Folke Skoog in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1933, measured the free energy of formation of iodine monobromide. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1964, he died in the Fox Chase area of Philadelphia on August 11, 1991. Manitowoc’s claim is the childhood and the shop floor that taught him machines; the phage and conjugation pictures are the scientific rest.

Profile · West Bend, Wisconsin

Bernhard Carl “Ben” Ziegler

Town of Trenton–born West Bend industrialist; cofounder of West Bend Aluminum (1911); B.C. Ziegler and Company; died 1946 still company president

$6,500

Bernhard Carl "Ben" Ziegler built West Bend Aluminum from a rented button factory into a national cookware name and kept the town employed through the Depression. Born in the Town of Trenton, Washington County, on January 25, 1884, he attended West Bend Lutheran and public schools and finished high school in 1902. At eighteen he sold fire insurance from a room in his father's hotel, worked as bookkeeper to a county treasurer, and rode a bicycle and then a horse-and-buggy to farm clients. During the 1907 Roosevelt panic he pulled cash from the banks and lent it to those farmers at 4 to 4.5 percent, later saying he did more business in two months than in the prior four years. On September 27, 1911, after a pocketbook-factory fire put townspeople out of work, he and six investors put up $1,000 each and rented a former button factory on the Milwaukee River for $8.50 a month. West Bend Aluminum's first run was saucepans, a frying pan, a pie pan, and a water dipper. Sears took 40 to 50 percent of sales through 1919. The Waterless Cooker made the company national. Ziegler also incorporated B.C. Ziegler and Company, opened First National Bank of West Bend in 1917, ran Gehl Brothers, and chaired the county parks. He died of coronary thrombosis on May 6, 1946, at sixty-two, still president of the cookware works. Ripley's later claimed West Bend skipped the Depression; the payroll is why. The town's industrial story still starts with his name.

Profile · West Bend, Wisconsin

Ward Leon Christensen

Computer pioneer who co-created the first dial-up bulletin board system (CBBS) and wrote XMODEM; born in West Bend

$1.5 million+

Ward Leon Christensen was the West Bend–born IBM engineer who, snowed in one Chicago winter, wrote the software that let hobbyists leave messages without driving across town. The computerized bulletin board and the XMODEM file-transfer protocol became foundations of the online age, and he gave the code away. He was born in West Bend on October 23, 1945, to Roy Christensen, safety director at the West Bend Company, and Florence Hohmann Christensen, who sold World Book encyclopedias. At West Bend High he built a computer that took first at the 1963 science fair. He drifted through Madison, finished physics and chemistry at Milton College, and joined IBM in 1968. He stayed until 2012; the last title was field technical sales specialist. Snowed in with Randy Suess in January 1978, he wrote the software for CBBS so the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange could post messages. They went live February 16 and later pretended the build had taken four weeks so nobody would think it was rushed. A year earlier he had written MODEM, later XMODEM: break a file into packets, check each one, retry the noise. Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1983 that maybe half the really good CP/M public-domain programs were Christensen’s. He received Dvorak Awards in 1992 and an Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1993. He died in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, on October 11, 2024. The internet is downstream of a West Bend kid who never asked to be called the inventor of online community.

Profile · West Bend, Wisconsin

Zack Baun

NFL linebacker; raised in West Bend with high-school stardom at Brown Deer; Super Bowl LIX with the Philadelphia Eagles

$26 million

Zack Baun is the West Bend kid who cut a path through the woods to the Kettle Moraine YMCA, then became an All-Pro linebacker and Super Bowl champion with the Philadelphia Eagles. On a fourth-grade YMCA card he wrote that he wanted to be a football player. He stayed until close. Birthplace reporting splits between West Bend and Milwaukee; the raise is West Bend either way. He attended Silverbrook Intermediate and played receiver at West Bend East through his sophomore year. After the family moved to Brown Deer he almost quit football until coach Rob Green talked him into quarterback. In two seasons he piled up 94 touchdowns and more than 7,000 yards, started on Brown Deer’s 2013 Division II basketball title team, and ran the 100 and 200 at the state track meet. Wisconsin drafted him into college football, and the New Orleans Saints took him 74th overall in 2020. Four quiet years followed. Philadelphia signed him in 2024 on a one-year flyer, moved him inside, and he became All-Pro with 151 tackles and a Super Bowl LIX interception against Kansas City. He flew home the day after the parade and led “E-A-G-L-E-S” chants in a West Bend insurance-company hall, telling the room he had never been a Packers fan. In March 2025 the Eagles re-signed him to a three-year, $51 million deal. The hometown is the Y and the path in the woods; the box score runs through Brown Deer and Philadelphia.

Profile · West Bend, Wisconsin

Viola Sophia Wendt

Poet and Carroll College professor; raised in West Bend, taught in Waukesha

under $100,000 (1986$)

Viola Sophia Wendt was a poet and longtime English professor at Carroll College in Waukesha whose work won a Borestone Mountain award and still funds a campus writing scholarship. West Bend raised her; Waukesha kept the classroom; West Bend took her back for burial. Born on an Idaho farm in Boise on March 31, 1907, she moved to West Bend in 1914 when her father, Carl, left potatoes for a business. She graduated from West Bend High School in 1924, then earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where professors told her she had a talent for the bizarre—a judgment she took as a compliment. She never married. Carroll hired her in 1942, when wartime emptied classrooms of men. She became a full professor and, after retiring in 1975, stayed on as poet-in-residence. “On Reading Marianne Moore” took a 1955 Borestone Mountain Poetry Award. Her collections—You Keep Waiting for Geese (1975), The Wind is Rising (1979), and In Any Available Light (1983)—came from Carroll College Press and Bittern Press. She died in Waukesha on March 23, 1986, and is buried at Washington County Memorial Park in West Bend.

Profile · West Bend, Wisconsin

Almah Jane Frisby

West Bend–born physician; UW professor and Ladies’ Hall principal; first woman UW Regent and first woman on the State Board of Control

$2,000

Almah Jane Frisby was a West Bend–born physician who became one of Wisconsin’s early women in public authority: professor of hygiene at the University of Wisconsin, principal of Ladies’ Hall, the first woman on the Board of Regents, and the first woman on the State Board of Control that oversaw prisons, reformatories, and hospitals. She argued that women’s judgment belonged in the rooms where women and girls were confined. She was born in West Bend on July 8, 1857, the daughter of lawyer Leander F. Frisby—later Wisconsin’s attorney general—and Frances E. Rooker Frisby. At the University of Wisconsin commencement in 1878 she and her sister Alice both spoke, a shared milestone that marked the family’s push into higher education. She earned a medical degree from Boston University in 1883, opened a Milwaukee practice, ran the Women’s Homeopathic Hospital in Philadelphia for a winter, and in 1887 read a paper on uterine disease to the state homeopathic association. From 1889 to 1895 Wisconsin hired her as professor of hygiene and sanitary science and as principal of Ladies’ Hall. Governor Robert M. La Follette put her on the Board of Regents from 1901 to 1906, then on the State Board of Control from 1905 to 1912. An 1897 USDA bulletin on losses in boiling vegetables and the composition and digestibility of potatoes and eggs carries her name with Harry Snyder and Arthur Peyton Bryant. Her cousin was Judge Franklin L. Gilson; a railroad station at Marshfield was named Frisby. She died in Santa Barbara, California, on November 12, 1931, and is buried at Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee. Practice and later life took her through Milwaukee, Madison, and California; the start was West Bend, where her father’s law practice rooted the family.

Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin

Elizabeth McCoy

Madison-born, Fitchburg-raised industrial microbiologist; UW full professor; Syene Road farmhouse on the National Register

$250,000

Elizabeth McCoy turned a Fitchburg farm childhood into industrial microbiology. Born in Madison on February 1, 1903, she grew up just south of the city on the family farm in the Town of Fitchburg. Her mother, Esther, had been a professor and a nurse and taught canning and household hygiene; her father, Cassius, talked pasteurization and bovine tuberculosis after health forced him off a professorship. A septic pony bite, scarlet fever, pneumonia, and the 1918 flu left their mark. She studied agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin, turned down a USDA offer in 1925 to stay with E.B. Fred, and wrote the taxonomy of the acetone-butanol clostridia that wartime industry needed for rubber and munitions. She earned her Ph.D. in 1929 and became a full professor in 1942, one of the first women to hold that rank on the campus. During the Second World War she isolated a Penicillium mutant that industrial labs scaled; descendants of that line still make penicillin. She also found oligomycin, too toxic for the clinic but later a tool for studying mitochondria. She trained 47 Ph.D.s and 110 master's students. With Fred and Ira Baldwin she published the long "root nodule bible" on nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the early 1930s, and she patented phage-resistant Clostridium madisonii after serving as an expert witness in the fight over Chaim Weizmann's acetone-butanol process. In 1949 she bought the cream-brick Italianate house at 2925 Syene Road because her grandfather James had owned it. The house is on the National Register. She left it to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Covering a 1946 patent, the New York Times called her a "Wisconsin University Girl"; she was already a full professor. She died in that Syene Road house on March 24, 1978. Madison was the birth; Fitchburg was the farm and the adult home that ties her here.

Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin

William A. “Bill” Linton

Founder and longtime leader of Promega Corporation; Fitchburg headquarters and principal residence

$4 million

William A. “Bill” Linton is the biotech founder who put Fitchburg on the map with a private company that sells the picks and shovels of genetic research. He did not inherit the city. He built the part of it that has a skyline along Woods Hollow Road. He studied biochemistry and biology at Berkeley, then pharmaceutical chemistry in Madison, shaped by a father who took car engines apart on the floor and grandparents who had been missionaries in the Far East. In 1978 he started a garage company—then Biotec, later Promega—that sold restriction enzymes to scientists splicing DNA. The firm never went public. Fitchburg became home: hundreds of jobs at 2800 Woods Hollow Road, a subsidized childcare center he put on his land in 1991 so Promega parents would stop worrying, and a $1 million library pledge with his wife, Mary, before the referendum even passed. His separately owned 400-acre Fitchburg Center still holds the Promega campus and City Hall. He fought Roche for thirteen years over a DNA-replication patent and did not settle until the Swiss giant came to him. The DNA IQ kit helped identify victims of September 11. He still runs Promega and the neighboring Usona Institute and talks about a hundred-year plan for a private company. A former Fitchburg mayor said he put the city on the map. The downtown he once sketched on those 400 acres never quite arrived. The campus did.

Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin

Ada Elizabeth Deer

Menominee leader who won tribal restoration; first woman to head the BIA; late-life Fitchburg resident

$116,000

Ada Elizabeth Deer led the fight that restored the Menominee Nation after federal termination, then became the first woman to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Late in life she lived in Fitchburg, served on the city’s Commission on Aging and pushed its rename to Commission on Aging Well, and died there on August 15, 2023, at eighty-eight—eight days after the governor proclaimed Ada Deer Day on her birthday. She grew up the oldest of five surviving children—four other Deer children died in infancy—in a one-room log cabin on the Wolf River at Keshena, with no running water and no electricity. Mother Constance Wood Deer, a Philadelphia Quaker nurse from a well-to-do family, had worked in Appalachia and at Rosebud before marrying Joseph Deer, a Menominee mill worker. Constance took Ada to tribal council meetings at four. Ada attended Shawano High School and Badger Girls State. In 1957 she became the first Menominee to graduate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison; in 1961 she was the first Native American to earn a social-work master’s at Columbia. Peace Corps training in Puerto Rico followed. Then came DRUMS and the Menominee Restoration Act, signed by Richard Nixon on December 22, 1973, after a House vote she later recalled as 404–3. She became the first woman to chair the tribe. President Clinton put her in Interior from 1993 to 1997 as the first woman to run the BIA. She had already run for Wisconsin secretary of state and for Congress, sat on Common Cause and Girl Scouts national boards, and later taught social work and American Indian studies at Wisconsin. Fitchburg’s mayor wrote that she “called Fitchburg home,” and an alder said she stayed keyed into the city’s legislative fights. She grew up on the Menominee reservation at Keshena; Fitchburg was where she spent her final years and did local civic work.

Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin

Roscoe Mitchell

AACM co-founder and Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist; 2020 NEA Jazz Master with a longtime Fitchburg house

$25,000

Roscoe Mitchell is the Chicago-born saxophonist, composer, and painter who co-founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago and keeps a Fitchburg house where mornings start at four with news, then the sunroom, then paint until the windows stop being black. The NEA named him a Jazz Master in 2020 and listed Fitchburg; he is not Fitchburg-raised, but the Wisconsin residence is real and long. Born in Chicago on August 3, 1940, he grew up on brother Norman’s 78s of Parker and Miles, took clarinet at twelve because they would not hand him a saxophone yet, and found his professional decision in an Army band in Heidelberg, where he met Albert Ayler in parades and sessions and jammed at Cave 54. Back home he played Monday nights with Muhal Richard Abrams’s Experimental Band at the C&C Lounge. In 1965 he was an original AACM member; his sextet cut the first AACM record, Sound, and became the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Paris in 1969 brought face paint, toy percussion, and the motto “Great Black Music: Ancient to Future.” He taught a 500-student survey at Wisconsin, held the Darius Milhaud Chair at Mills College for twelve years while keeping the Fitchburg house the whole time, and was back in the sunroom by 2018. More than 85 recordings and more than 250 compositions sit beside circular breathing that took a year to learn and a first solo painting show at 82. Uncle Charles Commodore Carter used to draw neighborhood kids as people from outer space; Mitchell’s canvases pursue the same interruption of silence. The horn and the paint are one project.

Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin

Beata Nelson

Raised in Fitchburg; Verona Area High and Wisconsin swimming star; NCAA champion; Badgers assistant coach

$152,000

Beata Nelson is the Fitchburg-raised swimmer who rewrote the collegiate backstroke record book at Wisconsin and later returned to the Badger deck as a coach. She learned to swim at a neighborhood pool in Fitchburg and never stopped: club teams, Verona Area High School (the public school Fitchburg kids attend), class of 2016, and national public-high-school butterfly marks. Her father, Andrew, class of 1990 and JD 1993, had lasted one season on the Badger team before law school; she came home to eat dinner and talk her sister through freshman year. She labeled her own freshman college season disappointing. As a sophomore she split 49.78 on a medley-relay backstroke leg and went under Natalie Coughlin's 49.97, the mark that first broke a minute. She became the only woman with three NCAA swims under 50 seconds in the 100-yard backstroke, then the record-holder at 49.18, plus the collegiate 200-back record of 1:47.24 (later surpassed by Claire Curzan). Three NCAA titles in 2019, CSCAA Swimmer of the Year, and thirteen-time All-American followed. She swam for the Cali Condors in the International Swimming League. On the 2023 World Cup circuit she collected a haul the Verona Press put at nine gold and three silver and $152,200. Three U.S. Olympic trials ended without a team berth; in Indianapolis in 2024 she was 0.72 seconds from Paris in the 100 butterfly. Verona papers call her a Verona native. The UW alumni magazine, when she was still driving south for dinner, called her a kid from Fitchburg. Both are true. She returned to the Badger deck as a volunteer, then as an assistant coach in 2025. The pool came first.

Profile · Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin

Duane Eugene Kuiper

Mount Pleasant dairy-farm raise and Case High alum; MLB infielder and Giants broadcaster (Kruk and Kuip)

$67,500

Before he was half of Kruk and Kuip, Duane Kuiper was a dairy kid whose father painted a strike zone on the barn wall. Born in Racine on June 19, 1950, he was raised on the 100-acre Mount Pleasant farm Henry and Annette Kuiper bought in 1952 for $35,000, just east of Interstate 94 on Highway 20. Henry, an accomplished softball pitcher, threw tennis balls until the chores were done. Jerome I. Case High School played a fifteen-game baseball schedule. The Yankees drafted him out of that gym. He turned them down, then the Pilots, White Sox, Reds, and Red Sox through junior college and a Southern Illinois team that lost the 1971 College World Series final. Cleveland offered $8,000, half of New York's number. His father said take it, or word might get around that he did not want to play. Twelve major-league seasons produced a .271 average and one home run in 3,379 at-bats: a Steve Stone slider on August 29, 1977, two rows into the right-field seats on Monday Night Baseball, beamed back to Racine. Teammates ran to the plate to meet him; his line was "Me and Sadaharu Oh." He hit two bases-loaded triples in one game at Yankee Stadium and caught two balls that helped Len Barker's 1981 perfect game. Gaylord Perry, going for twenty wins, told the kid on his first start that an error meant he would never play behind him again. Traded to the Giants for Ed Whitson, he later became Mike Krukow's broadcast partner in San Francisco. The Mount Pleasant farm sold in 2018 for an Advocate Aurora hospital. Kuiper walked the ruins and said a warehouse would have been fine; a hospital made his dad feel great. Younger brother Glen broadcasts for the Athletics. Birth was in Racine; the raising, and the hometown story, is the dairy farm in Mount Pleasant.

Profile · Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin

Jesse Alan Marsch

Jerome I. Case High (Mount Pleasant) soccer star; MLS player and coach; Canada men’s national-team manager from 2024

$174,375

Jesse Alan Marsch is the Racine-area soccer product who went from Jerome I. Case High School in Mount Pleasant to Princeton, Major League Soccer, and top European benches. Born November 8, 1973, he grew up watching his father, Larry, work the third shift making tractor parts and decided early that the factory was not the plan. He played for Dynamo and Racine Soccer Club, joined the U.S. under-18 team at sixteen, and earned all-state honors in 1990 and 1991 plus county player of the year. Case High, in the western suburbs of Racine, was the gym. Princeton took him because soccer got him in the door—he has said he would not have made it on grades alone—and he scored sixteen goals, earning All-America recognition in 1995. Bob Bradley drafted him to D.C. United and later brought him to the expansion Chicago Fire. Marsch won three MLS Cups in three seasons, multiple U.S. Open Cups, and earned two caps for the United States; he was an MLS All-Star in 2001. Coaching followed at New York Red Bulls, Red Bull Salzburg, RB Leipzig, Leeds United, and, in 2024, the Canada men’s national team. He learned German at forty-four. He told The Athletic that to grow up as he did, where he did, and to reach the Premier League felt almost impossible. Papers uniformly call him a Racine native, and the industrial city in that interview is Racine. The high school that produced him sits in Mount Pleasant, which is the place tie for this page. The Racine County Sports Hall of Fame inducted him in 2014 and calls him the finest soccer player the county has produced.

Profile · Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin

Kim Merritt

Marathoner who won New York and Boston in the mid-1970s; born Racine; Jerome I. Case High (Mount Pleasant) and UW–Parkside

$200,000

Kim Merritt was a mid-1970s American marathon star who won New York and Boston before the Olympics even fielded a women’s race. Born in Racine on May 22, 1955, she ran for Jerome I. Case High School in Mount Pleasant (class of 1973, then Kim Piper-Merritt) and for the University of Wisconsin–Parkside. As a freshman she took the state cross-country title and finished fifth at the nationals; AIAW honors in track and cross country, plus Academic All-America recognition, followed at Parkside, which inducted her into its hall of fame in the first class of 1980. In September 1975, at twenty, she debuted at the New York City Marathon and beat Michiko Gorman in 2:46:15. The next April she won the Boston Marathon in 2:47:10 and left the course under police escort for blisters, not a collapse. Honolulu that December produced 2:44:44 and the year’s fastest American women’s mark. At the 1977 Nike Oregon Track Club Marathon she ran 2:37:57, an American record and the fourth-fastest time in the world that year. She won the inaugural Bix 7 and retained that title and the Charleston Distance Run in 1976. When the Games finally opened a women’s marathon, she finished fifty-third at the 1984 Olympic trials in 2:43:31. Racine County later put her in its sports hall of fame. The Case campus that produced her sits in Mount Pleasant; the birth certificate and the county fame are Racine. Her peak was the twelve months when a Parkside kid from the Case attendance area could still win New York and Boston in the same season.

Profile · Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin

Thomas Michael “Tom” Sorensen

U.S. Olympic volleyball player (Atlanta 1996); Case High School star in Mount Pleasant / Racine; Pepperdine All-American

$500,000

Tom Sorensen is the Case High School volleyball star who became a U.S. national-team mainstay and the starting right side for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Born in Racine on April 6, 1971, the 6-foot-6 outside hitter graduated from Jerome I. Case High School in 1989 after two Racine County player-of-the-year awards, two Wisconsin volleyball MVP trophies, and a state championship. Mount Pleasant is where that gym sits; every national bio still lists hometown Racine. Pepperdine and coach Marv Dunphy—the 1988 Olympic coach—recruited him. He left Malibu with 2,207 career kills, still second in program history, and once put up 53 in a single night against UCLA. He was NCAA Freshman of the Year in 1990 and an All-American from 1991 through 1993, leading the Waves in kills and aces all four seasons. Championship point of the 1992 NCAA final was his service ace after 33 kills in a three-set sweep of Stanford; across the two tournament matches he totaled 57 kills. The national team kept him from 1991 through 2000. He wore No. 6 as Atlanta’s starting right side, won World Championship bronze in Greece in 1994 and Pan American silver in 1995, and was named U.S. Olympic Committee Volleyball Player of the Year in 1997. He played professionally in Italy and Spain and some AVP, was an alternate for the 2000 Games, entered the Racine County Sports Hall of Fame in 2011 and Pepperdine’s in 2015, and came home for clinics. The Case building is the Mount Pleasant tie.

Profile · Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin

Charles Herrick

Mount Pleasant farmer and town supervisor (1870, 1872); Wisconsin Senate special election 1873; Racine businessman; died Nov. 14, 1886

$350

Charles Herrick was Mount Pleasant’s nineteenth-century business-civic name—a Massachusetts transplant who farmed the town for nearly three decades, sat on its board, and briefly held a Wisconsin Senate seat before dying a Racine banker. He is what the village actually had before Case High started minting athletes, not a modern founder myth. He left Westford, Massachusetts, in 1836, logged the Muskegon and White Rivers, and in 1841 set up in Racine selling produce and cattle. He married Ann Ball of Virgil, New York, on December 14, 1846; they had three sons. From 1849 to 1854 he manufactured fanning mills—the machine that cleaned grain so a wheat county could sell it—and served as village trustee, city alderman, original school-board member, and director of the new Racine Gas-light and Coke Company. In 1857 he moved to the neighboring Town of Mount Pleasant and farmed. He sat on the Mount Pleasant board in 1870 and 1872. In 1873 he won a Senate special election as a Liberal Republican, 2,423 to 1,519 over Philo Belden, then lost the seat back to Robert Hall Baker a year later (Baker 2,706, Herrick 2,130 on the short-lived Liberal Reform ticket). The Madison stretch was one Senate session, not a long legislative career. He died of heart failure in a Racine house on November 14, 1886, vice-president of Union National Bank; the Bankers’ Magazine ran the obituary. He is buried at Mound Cemetery in the city of Racine, not Mount Pleasant. The place claim is the 1857–1886 farm-and-board stretch in Mount Pleasant, with Racine as the earlier business base and the place of death.

Profile · Neenah, Wisconsin

Howard Winchester Hawks

Hollywood director of Scarface, His Girl Friday, Red River; born Goshen, Indiana; Neenah paper-family childhood 1898–1910

$110,000

Howard Winchester Hawks directed some of the most durable American movies of the studio era—Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, Red River, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Rio Bravo—yet his Wisconsin claim is a paper-mill childhood, not a birth certificate. Jean-Luc Godard called him the greatest American artist; Leonard Maltin called him the greatest American director who is not a household name. One competitive Oscar nomination (Sergeant York) and an honorary Academy Award in 1974 bookend a career built on clean craft. He liked to say a good picture needed “three good scenes, and no bad ones.” He was born in Goshen, Indiana, on May 30, 1896. Mother Helen Howard was a Neenah native; grandfather Charles W. Howard had homesteaded there in 1862 at seventeen and built the Howard Paper fortune. Father Frank Hawks brought Goshen furniture money north in 1898, went to work for his father-in-law at the mill, and raised the boy among houses that look out on Lake Winnebago. In 1904 Frank built a rare Wisconsin Shingle-style house at 433 East Wisconsin Avenue in the neighborhood where Helen had grown up. Her health pulled the family west: winters in Pasadena from about 1906, permanent California by 1910. After they left, the house was rented to C.B. Clark Jr. and sold in 1912 to H.K. Babcock; it reached the National Register in 1997. Neenah is the mill-family childhood between Goshen and Hollywood. Write the Indiana birth first; keep the East Wisconsin Avenue years as the local tie that puts him on the city’s page.

Profile · Neenah, Wisconsin

John Alfred Kimberly

Co-founder and longtime president of Kimberly-Clark; settled in Neenah at age nine; namesake of the village of Kimberly

$29,000

John Alfred Kimberly co-founded Kimberly-Clark in Neenah in 1872 and remained the company’s president into his ninetieth year. The Fox Cities village that carries his name, and Kimberly Point on Lake Winnebago, both trace to the family that built Wisconsin’s first newsprint mill. Born in Troy, New York, on July 18, 1838, he was nine when the family settled in Neenah. Pioneer schools and a short, unfinished stretch at Lawrence University in Appleton preceded dry goods, flour, and lumber work. In 1872 he and store partner Havilah Babcock sat down with Charles B. Clark and Franklyn C. Shattuck. Each put in $7,500. They built the Globe Mill and made newsprint, the first mill of its kind in Wisconsin. That is Kimberly-Clark: four Neenah men and a river. In the first twenty-five years the firm grew from one mill at two tons a day to fourteen mills at 150 tons a day. He was still president when he died in Redlands, California, on January 21, 1928; he was buried at Oak Hill in Neenah. Seven children survived him. Daughter Helen Kimberly Stuart, learning that F.J. Sensenbrenner was quietly buying the tip of Lake Winnebago for a mansion, bought it herself and on June 21, 1929, deeded Kimberly Point to the city “permanently, continuously and forever” as a park. Another daughter, Nancy, married Neenah-born architect George Edwin Bergstrom, who later designed the Pentagon. The mill town kept the surname.

Profile · Neenah, Wisconsin

Ernst Mahler

Kimberly-Clark chemist in Neenah; commercialized Cellucotton leading to Kotex and Kleenex

$5 million

Ernst Mahler was the Kimberly-Clark chemist in Neenah who turned creped wadding into Cellucotton and led the company effort that commercialized Kotex and Kleenex. He spent thirty-eight years with the firm, rose to executive vice president, and became one of Neenah’s defining civic donors. Born in Vienna on October 17, 1887, he trained in cellulose chemistry at Darmstadt, finishing with distinction in 1912, and arrived in the United States the same year. Kimberly-Clark hired him in Neenah in 1914 to build a research department when American paper mills still ran largely on habit. During World War I he took Cellucotton—about five times as absorbent as cotton surgical dressings and roughly half the cost—to the Surgeon General. After the Armistice, surplus stock and army nurses’ experience with the pads led to Kotex in 1920, first assembled by hand in a wooden shed in Neenah; Kleenex followed in 1924. Mahler became executive vice president in 1937 and retired in 1952. A founding member of TAPPI (1915) and of the Institute of Paper Chemistry (1929), he won TAPPI’s gold medal in 1932 and received the Medal of Freedom in 1946 for wartime purchase-policy work and for helping restart mills in Belgium, Holland, France, and Germany. He and his wife, Carol, gave the city more than twenty-six acres for Mahler Park, and in 1954 he chaired the committee that became the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass. He died on July 30, 1967, and is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Neenah.

Profile · Neenah, Wisconsin

John Whitlinger

Born Neenah, February 4, 1954; Neenah High class of 1972; four WIAA singles titles and a 109-match streak; lives in Appleton

$1,500,000

John Whitlinger is the Neenah tennis standout who completed the rare NCAA triple crown at Stanford and later coached there for nearly three decades. Born in Neenah on February 4, 1954, and a Neenah High School graduate with the class of 1972, the 5-foot-9 right-hander was the first boy to win four WIAA state singles championships and ran a 109-match winning streak for the Rockets from 1969 to 1972. He collected eleven national junior titles, including Orange Bowl crowns in 1969 and 1970, and played for the U.S. Junior Davis Cup. Father Warren had played professional basketball; nieces Teri and Tami later reached the WTA tour. The town still calls the Whitlingers the first family of tennis. At Stanford in 1974 he won NCAA singles, doubles, and the team title in the same season—the Cardinal list him as only the fourth player to take singles and doubles together. Six years on the ATP tour brought a career-high singles ranking of No. 75 on June 2, 1975, and a Bermuda doubles title with Mike Cahill in 1976. He stayed at Stanford as associate coach from 1987 to 2004 and head coach from 2005 to 2014, finishing 160–85 with nine NCAA tournament trips and a share of nine national-championship staffs. The ITA Collegiate Hall of Fame inducted him in 1999. He later settled in Appleton; the 109–0 streak remains the Neenah chapter, and the triple crown the rest.

Profile · Neenah, Wisconsin

Charles Benjamin Clark

Neenah mill founder; U.S. House 1887–91; father of Theda Clark, namesake of the city's hospital

$7,500

Charles Benjamin Clark was the Neenah mill founder who served two terms in Congress and whose daughter's will built the city's hospital. Born in Theresa, New York, on August 24, 1844, to Luther O. Clark and Theda Tamblin Clark, he came to Neenah with his widowed mother about 1855 and worked as a hardware clerk. In August 1862 he enlisted as a private in Company I of the 21st Wisconsin Infantry and came home a first lieutenant. In 1872 he put $7,500 into the Globe Mill with Kimberly, Babcock, and Shattuck. He was mayor of Neenah from 1880 to 1883, sat in the state Assembly, and held two Republican terms in the U.S. House from 1887 to 1891. He lost the 1890 race, went east to visit, and died of Bright's disease in Watertown, New York, on September 10, 1891, at forty-seven. He is buried at Oak Hill. His daughter Theda, born in 1871 and named for her grandmother, married a Goshen newspaperman, watched people die for want of a hospital, and left her brother instructions: if childbirth killed her, build one. She died on October 20, 1903, three days after delivering a daughter also named Theda. C.B. Clark Jr. put $96,000 toward Theda Clark Memorial Hospital, which opened on the child's sixth birthday, October 18, 1909, with twenty-five beds; ThedaCare's legacy page also notes another $50,000 for patients who could not pay. The building remains the city's hospital under a later name. The mill made the fortune. The hospital is what Neenah still points to when it tells the Clark story.

Profile · Superior, Wisconsin

Harry Peter "Bud" Grant Jr.

Superior-born athlete and coach; NBA champion with the Minneapolis Lakers; CFL Grey Cups; Minnesota Vikings head coach; Pro Football Hall of Fame 1994

$10,000

Harry Peter "Bud" Grant Jr. was the stone-faced coach of the Minnesota Vikings and one of the few athletes who won championships in both the NBA and the CFL before remaking an NFL sideline. Born in Superior, Wisconsin, on May 20, 1927, he grew up as Buddy Boy to his mother Bernice. A doctor found polio in the boy and told him to play sports so the legs would hold. He started with baseball, then basketball, then football. When the schools did not field teams, he organized games between neighborhoods and called kids from other schools. Weekends he hunted rabbits alone. On November 11, 1940, he and two friends were duck hunting on Yellow Lake when the Armistice Day Blizzard came down; he heard a train horn, found the tracks, and waited it out in a gas station. After Navy service at Great Lakes on Paul Brown's service team, he used a Wisconsin acceptance letter to get discharged and went to Minnesota instead, earning nine letters in football, basketball, and baseball. He won an NBA title with the Minneapolis Lakers in 1950 and was drafted that same year in the NFL's first round, fourteenth overall, by the Philadelphia Eagles and in the NBA's fourth round by the Lakers. With Winnipeg he intercepted five passes in one 1953 playoff game, a record in any league, and as the youngest head coach in the CFL won four Grey Cups. He coached the Vikings from 1967 to 1983 and again in 1985, reaching four Super Bowls with no heaters on the sideline and the team standing in a straight line through the anthem. The Pro Football Hall of Fame inducted him in 1994. He kept later outdoor life and a cabin at Gordon in Douglas County, south of the city, and never stopped saying he was from Superior, Wis. He died in Bloomington, Minnesota, on March 11, 2023.

Profile · Superior, Wisconsin

Oliver Eaton Williamson

2009 Nobel laureate in economics; born and raised in Superior; Superior Central class of 1950

$700,000

Oliver Eaton Williamson built transaction-cost economics into a field and shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in economic sciences with Elinor Ostrom. He was born in Superior on September 27, 1932, grew up on the corner of North 23rd Street and Hammond Avenue, and graduated from Superior Central in 1950. Summers meant Lake Nebagamon. He was the second child of two teachers: Scott left the classroom after marrying Lucille and joined grandfather Oliver Dunn’s real-estate office, later serving nine years as president of the Superior City Council; Lucille had been a Minnesota high-school principal and was required to quit when she married. He called Superior the most democratic place he ever lived, a town where talent came in many forms and was respected in all. He was a good student and a mediocre athlete who played Friday-night poker, went to Saturday dances, and bowled and shot pool with friends. He thought he would be a lawyer until math pulled him toward engineering. His mother said M.I.T.; he went to Ripon on the combined plan, then General Electric, Stanford’s business school, and Carnegie Mellon, where seven later Nobels sat in the same small program. Markets and Hierarchies (1975) and The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (1985) asked why firms exist, why they stop growing, and why a contract is not just a price. As Special Economic Assistant in the Antitrust Division in 1966–67, the Schwinn case taught him that organization was not automatically a crime. He bought the family summer place at Lake Nebagamon in 1972 and worked there in the summers. He died in 2020. A plaque hangs in the Douglas County Government Center.

Profile · Superior, Wisconsin

Martin Pattison (born Simeon Martin Thayer)

Settled in Superior, 1879

$3 million

Martin Pattison was the Superior lumberman and iron investor who built Fairlawn Mansion on the harbor, served three terms as mayor, and quietly saved Big Manitou Falls for the public. He arrived in Superior in 1879 with a younger brother and his new wife, Grace Frink, the lighthouse keeper's daughter, and built a fortune first on Black River pine, then on Minnesota's Vermilion Range, where he located the Chandler and Pioneer mines and became one of the largest individual holders of Minnesota iron land. He bought a city block on the harbor and finished Fairlawn in 1891: forty-two rooms at a cost of more than $150,000. He served once as sheriff and three times as mayor. In July 1890 the Sunday Morning Call disclosed another life: he had been born Simeon Martin Thayer in Ontario on January 17, 1841, left Port Huron on business in 1872, and never returned to Isabelle Murdock and their two children. The divorce made the papers; Superior elected him anyway. In 1917, when a power dam threatened to drown Big Manitou Falls, he bought 660 acres and gave the land to Wisconsin. He died in December 1918, before the sixth state park was dedicated on January 20, 1920. Grace later moved to California and donated Fairlawn to a children's home; Babe Ruth visited the children there in 1926. The house is a museum, and the falls still run in the park that bears his name.

Profile · Superior, Wisconsin

Irvine Luther Lenroot

Superior-born Progressive Republican; Wisconsin Assembly speaker, U.S. House and Senate; nearly Harding’s 1920 running mate

$12,500

Irvine Luther Lenroot was the Superior Progressive who rose from logging camps and a Douglas County courtroom to the United States Senate, and who came within a convention roll call of the vice presidency that would have made him president when Warren G. Harding died. Associated Press obituaries in January 1949 opened on that near miss: “the man who might have been the 30th President of the United States.” He was born in Superior on January 31, 1869, to Swedish immigrant Lars Lönnrot (later Lenroot) and Fredrica. He attended common schools in Superior, studied at Parsons Business College across the bay in Duluth in 1889, worked as a logger, and served as a court reporter in the Douglas County courthouse. He read law, passed the bar in 1898, and practiced in Superior. In the Wisconsin Assembly from 1901 to 1907 he spent the last four years as Speaker, then won a House seat from the 11th District. After Senator Paul Husting died he moved to the Senate, serving from 1918 to 1927. He married Clara Clough of Superior, later the author of the girlhood memoir Long, Long Ago (1929). In Chicago on June 12, 1920, after Harding locked the presidential nomination, party bosses wanted a progressive running mate. Hiram Johnson refused; Lenroot accepted; Senator Medill McCormick nominated him. Before the roll could start, Wallace McCamant of Oregon placed Calvin Coolidge in nomination. Delegates—many of the bosses already gone—gave Coolidge 674 votes and Lenroot 146. Harding died in 1923; Coolidge became the thirtieth president. Lenroot lost the 1926 Senate renomination to John J. Blaine. Herbert Hoover later appointed him to the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals. Daughter Katherine lobbied for the Fair Labor Standards Act. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Superior, the city that raised him.

Profile · Superior, Wisconsin

Esther Fern Bubley

Documentary photographer; born Phillips, raised Superior (not born in Superior)

$750,000

Esther Fern Bubley was a documentary photographer whose wartime bus series, Standard Oil assignments, Life magazine stories, and Museum of Modern Art prints made her one of the defining camera voices of mid-century America. Phillips, Wisconsin, is the birthplace; Superior is where she found the camera. Fourth of five children of Louis and Ida Bubley, Russian Jewish immigrants, she was born in Phillips on February 16, 1921, then settled with the family in Superior. At Central High she was yearbook editor and tried to make the book look like Life, which had hit the stands in 1936. She spent two years at Superior State Teachers College (now UW–Superior), then took the Minneapolis School of Art’s one-year photography course. In Washington in 1941 she found no job, disliked a Christmas season at Vogue, worked as a National Archives microfilmer, and was hired by Roy Stryker as a darkroom assistant at the Office of War Information before he let her shoot. The hard assignment was buses—Midwest and South, wartime, people sleeping sitting up. When Stryker went to Standard Oil she followed: Tomball, Texas, and another bus story that won Pictures of the Year in 1948. She shot for Ladies’ Home Journal’s “How America Lives,” about forty stories for Life, and thirteen Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital prints in MoMA’s Diogenes with a Camera; Edward Steichen hung her contact sheets to show she used every frame. She was the first woman to win Photography magazine’s international contest in 1954 and appeared in The Family of Man. She died in New York of cancer on March 16, 1998.

Profile · West Allis, Wisconsin

Władziu Valentino Liberace

Pianist and showman; born West Allis (bungalow at Six Points); West Milwaukee High; died Palm Springs, 1987

$18 million

Władziu Valentino Liberace became one of the twentieth century’s most famous showmen, known for the candelabra, the sequins, two Hollywood Walk of Fame stars, and nights at Radio City, but he entered the world in a West Allis bungalow. 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.

Profile · West Allis, Wisconsin

Daniel Erwin Jansen

Olympic speed-skating gold medalist; born West Allis, grew up a block from the State Fair Park oval; West Allis Central

$5 million

Dan Jansen gave West Allis its defining Olympic story: falls in Calgary on the morning his sister Jane died, then a world-record gold in the 1,000 meters at Lillehammer with his infant daughter—also Jane—in his arms on the victory lap. He learned to skate because his sister handed him the assignment. He was born in West Allis on June 17, 1965, the youngest of nine. Father Harry was a police lieutenant-detective, mother Gerry a nurse; the house sat a block from the outdoor speed-skating oval at State Fair Park. He attended West Allis Central High School. By sixteen he held a junior world record. On February 14, 1988, in Calgary, he told Jane he loved her over the phone. She was twenty-seven and dying of leukemia in West Allis. Hours later she was gone, and he fell in the 500 meters, then in the 1,000. He had won the world sprint title on that same West Allis ice a week earlier. He kept going. He became the first man to break 36 seconds in the 500 meters and did it four times, yet still had no Olympic medal heading into Lillehammer. The 500 there fell on the sixth anniversary of Jane’s death; he slipped and finished eighth. One race left: he won the 1,000 in a world-record 1:12.43. West Allis later built the country’s indoor oval—the Pettit National Ice Center, where the national team still trains—on the same grounds. Childhood ice was the older outdoor oval a block from home. The city that raised him got the gold and the story.

Profile · West Allis, Wisconsin

Walter Geist

Longtime Allis-Chalmers executive and company president (1942–1951); inventor of the Texrope multiple-V-belt drive; career centered on the West Allis works

$1 million+ (1951$)

Walter Geist is the person inside the factory that named West Allis. Born in Milwaukee in 1894 and self-educated, he went to work at Allis-Chalmers as a messenger in the blueprint department at fifteen and spent his working life at the West Allis works. He did not inherit the company. He invented his way up. In the 1920s he looked at old multi-groove rope drives and replaced the rope with several V-belts running in parallel. He filed in 1925. The patent (U.S. 1,662,511, 1928) was broad enough that Allis-Chalmers sold the idea as Texrope and collected royalties from everybody else. Geist rose from milling-machine assistant manager to sales manager to vice president, then became president in 1942. TIME called him the “up-from-office-boy” boss. During the 1946–47 Local 248 strike he sat in the West Allis front office and played for time until the union broke. He was still president when he died on January 29, 1951, at fifty-six. The New York Times obituary led on the office-boy-at-fifteen detail, not the title. The orange tractors are what people remember. The belts are what paid for them. The lock for West Allis is a lifetime at the plant that gave the city its name, not a claim that he was born there.

Profile · West Allis, Wisconsin

Edward A. Halbach

Minnesota-born Allis-Chalmers engineer and West Allis amateur astronomer; first Astronomical League president

$500

Ed Halbach punched a factory clock by day and counted stars by night. Born April 5, 1909, in Canby, Minnesota, he came to Milwaukee, earned a Marquette engineering degree, taught math and electrical engineering at the college, then worked missile-guidance problems at AC-Delco on the Titan and Apollo programs before landing at Allis-Chalmers on the West Allis factory grounds. There he designed electro-mechanical gear for diesel locomotives. When the electrical division became Siemens-Allis, he stayed. He retired in 1978. The science that outlived the plant started at 2046 South 59th Street. In 1932 Luverne Armfield invited amateurs into his West Allis backyard; Halbach was in the first wave of what became the Milwaukee Astronomical Society. He directed the society's observatory for thirty-five years, became the first official president of the Astronomical League in 1947, and logged more than 98,000 variable-star observations for the AAVSO. In 1946 he turned down a job at McDonald Observatory. In 1981 he was the first living winner of the League's Leslie C. Peltier Award. Award citations also note that he built office furniture for AAVSO headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. NBC's Today show noted his 100th birthday. He died March 20, 2011, at 101. He was Minnesota-born; West Allis is where the Allis-Chalmers career and the backyard observatory that launched a lifetime of amateur astronomy belong.

Profile · West Allis, Wisconsin

David J. Cieslewicz

Madison mayor 2003–2011; born and raised in a Polish neighborhood in West Allis; UW–Madison

$113,000

David J. Cieslewicz—Mayor Dave to Madison—won the capital’s top job in 2003, lost it in 2011, and spent eight years trying to make a university city behave like a neighborhood. Allies still call him the bike mayor. He did not become famous by running the city that named him; the West Allis Polish block that raised him is the part most Madison profiles skip. He was born in West Allis on February 17, 1959, and grew up in a Polish neighborhood there—name pronounced chess-LEV-ich—before leaving for the University of Wisconsin–Madison and staying. The résumé is land-use nerd, not factory floor: he staffed the Legislature, lobbied for the Nature Conservancy, sat on the Dane County Board, and co-founded 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, the group that pushed the state’s Smart Growth planning law. In 1992 he lost an Assembly race to Tammy Baldwin. In 2003 he beat Paul Soglin for mayor; in 2011 Soglin beat him back. As mayor he was among the first U.S. mayors to sign the Climate Protection Agreement, bought hybrid buses, opened Goodman Pool after roughly sixty years of civic argument, and kept an Aaa bond rating. His sustainability plan was titled “Building a Green Capital City.” After the 2011 loss he ran the Wisconsin Bicycle Federation. He lives in Madison’s Regent neighborhood; twice a month, he has said, you can find him playing Sheepshead at the Memorial Union. Birth and childhood belong to West Allis; public life belongs to Madison.

Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin

George Coleman Poage

First African American Olympic medalist; raised in La Crosse; University of Wisconsin track pioneer

under $50,000

George Coleman Poage was the La Crosse-raised hurdler who became the first African American to medal at the modern Olympics. He was born in Hannibal, Missouri, on November 6, 1880, and arrived in La Crosse with his family in 1884. His father, James, drove for local employers; his mother, Anna, cooked. After James died in 1888, Anna, Nellie, and George moved into Lucian Easton's house on Cass Street. Nellie graduated from La Crosse High School in 1897. George followed as salutatorian in 1899, the school's third Black graduate after Florence Birney and Nellie, and as its best athlete. At Wisconsin he became the first Black man on the track team and, in 1904, the first Black individual Big Ten champion, winning the 440-yard dash and the 220-yard hurdles. His senior thesis examined the economic condition of Black Georgians from 1860 to 1900. The Milwaukee Athletic Club sent him to the St. Louis Games. Black leaders had asked athletes to stay home because the Olympics and the World's Fair were segregated; Poage went anyway, ran four events, and took bronze in the 200- and 400-meter hurdles. Teaching at Sumner High in St. Louis, a farm interlude, and nearly thirty years as a Chicago postal clerk followed. He never married. He died in Chicago on April 11, 1962. La Crosse largely forgot him until Hood Park became George C. Poage Park in 2013; a statue went up in 2016.

Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin

Reuben Nicholas Trane

Co-founder of The Trane Company in La Crosse; inventor of the convector Heat Cabinet; company president 1916–1951

$1.3 million

Reuben Nicholas Trane co-founded The Trane Company in La Crosse in 1913 and turned a plumber’s radiator shop into a global heating-and-cooling manufacturer whose headquarters and main plant stayed on the river for his lifetime. Sales ran about fifty thousand dollars the year of incorporation and more than forty-five million by 1953. He was born in La Crosse on September 13, 1886, to James Trane, a Norwegian plumber who had opened on Pearl Street in 1885 and invented a low-pressure vapor heating system. After Central High, Reuben spent a year hauling his father’s cast-iron radiators up local stairwells and decided that was a stupid way to heat a building. He worked as a plumber’s helper, then paid for a Wisconsin mechanical-engineering degree by waiting tables and tending furnaces; he captained the crew. In 1913 he incorporated The Trane Company with James and his sister Stella. In a corner of Plant 1 he built copper tubes, fins, and a cabinet that behaved like a chimney: the Heat Cabinet, announced in a six-page 1926 trade-magazine ad, replaced the radiator with a convector (U.S. Patent 1,764,187). By 1930 there was a second factory and offices in England, Canada, Belgium, China, and Japan. Refrigerant cooling, the hermetic Turbovac, and the CenTraVac chiller followed; wartime work put Trane gear in aircraft and ships. He was president from 1916 to 1951, then chairman, and told people that if the choice were his he would rather lose the business than the engineers. He raised money for the La Crosse Home for Children and died in the city on September 5, 1954, at sixty-seven. A century after the Heat Cabinet ad he was named a 2026 National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee. Birth, company, and death were all La Crosse.

Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin

Joseph Walton Losey III

Born La Crosse, Jan. 14, 1909; raised at 1612 Ferry Street; left Central High in 1925 after his father’s death; died London, June 22, 1984

$28,000

Joseph Walton Losey III was the La Crosse-born filmmaker whose Hollywood career ended in the blacklist and whose European exile produced some of the sharpest British art-house cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Born in La Crosse on January 14, 1909, and raised in money at 1612 Ferry Street—a house Edward J. Roth had built in 1887 for $3,500—he grew up with an aunt, Mary, who had married into the Easton family and taught him what culture was supposed to look like. He made the Central High honor roll with his sister Mary. In February 1925 his father died; he left school that year, went to Dartmouth, began medicine at Harvard, and finished in the theater. The boulevard and the 1901 Memorial Arch still carry his grandfather’s name. Hollywood hired him, then hunted him. After The Boy with Green Hair and years in New York political theater, the House Un-American Activities Committee came for his Communist Party card. He spent two weeks dodging a subpoena in 1951 and was settled in London for good by 1953. That exile became the career: The Servant, Accident, and The Go-Between with Harold Pinter—the last of them winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1971—plus Monsieur Klein, which took the César. Tennessee Williams once called Boom! (1968), a flop with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the best screen version of one of his plays; Losey sometimes named it his own favorite. He never really came home. He died in London on June 22, 1984. La Crosse still knows the surname because of the boulevard; the films are what he did after he stopped being the rich kid on Ferry Street.

Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin

Sister Thea Bowman (Bertha Elizabeth Bowman)

Franciscan Sister and evangelist; first Black FSPA at St. Rose Convent in La Crosse; Viterbo faculty

$0

Sister Thea Bowman (born Bertha Elizabeth Bowman) was the Mississippi-born Franciscan who formed in La Crosse, taught on the bluff at Blessed Sacrament and Viterbo, and later told the U.S. bishops what it meant for Black Catholics to come to church fully functioning. She was the first African American member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration at St. Rose Convent, and the convent and college remain the La Crosse stretch of a life Mississippi claims for sainthood. Born in Yazoo City, Mississippi, on December 29, 1937, and raised in Canton as a doctor’s only child, she converted to Catholicism at nine after Franciscan sisters from La Crosse opened a school for Black children. At fifteen she told her Methodist parents she was going north to join the order; they refused until a hunger strike changed their minds. In 1953 she entered St. Rose as the only Black sister in the house and took the name Thea, for the Blessed Mother and for her father, Theon. La Crosse trained her: she taught at Blessed Sacrament, earned an English-speech-drama degree at Viterbo in 1965, took a Ph.D. from Catholic University in 1972, and returned to teach at Viterbo into the late 1970s. Mississippi got her later as a preacher and as a builder of an African American Catholic hymnal. Mike Wallace put her on 60 Minutes in 1987. On June 17, 1989, already in a wheelchair with cancer in the bones, she addressed the U.S. bishops; they stood. Boston College gave her an honorary Doctor of Religion that year, the first African American woman so honored there. She died in Canton on March 30, 1990. The Diocese of Jackson opened her cause for canonization in 2018.

Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin

Adolf Gundersen

Norwegian surgeon; founded Gundersen Clinic in La Crosse (1891–1938 career)

$250,000+ (1938$)

Adolf Gundersen was the Norwegian surgeon who came to La Crosse in 1891 for a one-year job and stayed the rest of his working life. He became Lutheran Hospital’s first medical director in 1902 and opened Gundersen Clinic next to the hospital in 1930—the seed of a health system that now runs hospitals across four states. Born in Solor, Norway, on October 8, 1865, he held an Oslo medical degree (1890) and answered a newspaper ad that La Crosse needed doctors, joining friend Christian Christensen. The year went well. He returned to Asnes anyway, married Helga Sara Isaksaetre on September 16, 1893, and brought her to the river city for good. They raised eight children; four of the sons walked into the clinic. King Haakon made him a Knight of St. Olaf, first rank, in 1926. He was a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a University of Wisconsin regent. In 1923 he wrote that the finest patient care “requires continuous effort and study.” In 1930 he left the downtown office for a new clinic—period accounts called it a $100,000 building—next to the hospital so he could be closer to the beds. He died on a visit home to Norway on September 15, 1938, at the family place, Rosen, with Helga and a son who had stayed to keep the farm. That is a medical-fortune story without a Forbes line on the founder.

Profile · Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Jacob Johann Vollrath

Rhineland-born founder of Sheboygan’s Vollrath enamelware company; settled in the city in 1853; died there in 1898

$300,000+ (1898$)

Jacob Johann Vollrath built the enamelware company that still anchors Sheboygan’s industrial map. The firm’s headquarters remain at 1236 North 18th Street, generations after a Rhineland iron molder decided kitchenware, not plumbing, would be his second act in Wisconsin. He learned to cast iron in Dörrebach in the Rhineland, crossed the Atlantic in the 1840s, and settled in Sheboygan in 1853. In 1873 he transferred the Union Steel and Iron Foundry at Ninth and St. Clair to son-in-law John Michael Kohler, who had married his daughter Lillie—sale or gift, the surviving paper trail never settles. Then he started over. The Sheboygan Cast Steel Company, founded in 1874, poured railroad frogs, furniture castings, and ranges before enamel became the bet. Son Andrew traveled to Germany twice to learn the process, failed at home, returned abroad, and came back again. Limited enamelware production began in 1876. By 1881 the works employed about forty men, did roughly $50,000 a year, and occupied a new plant on North 18th Street that is still Vollrath’s front door. He claimed gray enameling—a method, not a color—as his contribution. Family ties tangled the city’s two hardware fortunes. After Lillie died in 1883, Kohler married her sister Minnie, making Vollrath father-in-law twice. Kohler’s plumbing empire grew into a company town west of Sheboygan; Vollrath’s pots and pans stayed in the city. He died in Sheboygan on May 15, 1898. The company he restarted still lists a global footprint of facilities on three continents from that same North 18th Street address.

Profile · Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Carol Hagedorn Buschmann

Sheboygan-born Chordettes baritone; Central High 1945; returned 1968; died in the city Sept. 30, 2023

$750,000+

Carol Hagedorn Buschmann was the Sheboygan baritone of the Chordettes, the hometown quartet that put "Mr. Sandman" and "Lollipop" on the national charts. Born in Sheboygan on May 13, 1927, to Otto and Helen Hagedorn, she used to crawl into the cavity behind the family radio, sing, and pretend the box was doing it. She graduated from Central High in 1945, studied at a CBS broadcasting school in Chicago, and typed for World Book on the side. On a train home she ran into Dottie Hummitzsch, who needed a baritone for a Sheboygan quartet that had started as folk songs in a Superior Avenue living room. Carol said yes. Jinny Osborn founded the group; Carol replaced Alice Mae Buschmann Spielvogel as baritone in 1947 and outlasted the lineup changes. The Chordettes won Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, moved to New York, and recorded the hits. She sang on every major recording and missed only one tour, to have her daughter Janet, which she called the actual accomplishment. A good baritone, she told her daughter, should never be pickable in the blend; the job was to make the others sound expensive. She married Bob Buschmann in 1952, ran the White Rooster on Long Island, where the Jets drank, and in 1968 brought the family back to run Toro's sporting goods downtown, then the trophy shop. She made the Sheboygan Softball Hall of Fame for writing checks, not hitting. The Vocal Group Hall of Fame inducted the Chordettes in 2001. Fan mail still arrived after dementia set in. She died in Sheboygan on September 30, 2023, at ninety-six, the last Sheboyganite Chordette. The memorial was at Ballhorn Chapels on North 8th. Born, schooled, and buried in the city, she came home in 1968 and never left again.

Profile · Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Patrick Clifford “Pat” Matzdorf

1971 high-jump world-record holder; born in Sheboygan; Sheboygan North and University of Wisconsin

$2 million

Patrick Clifford “Pat” Matzdorf is the Sheboygan high jumper who broke the world record on a third try he did not think he could clear. Born in Sheboygan on December 26, 1949, and a 1968 graduate of Sheboygan North, he was a University of Wisconsin junior when the United States met the Soviet Union in Berkeley on July 3, 1971. His personal best walking in was 7 feet 3 inches. He matched it, then set the American record at 7-4½ on the second attempt. On the third try, at 7 feet 6¼ inches, something in the takeoff felt wrong. He carried it anyway, cleared on the straddle (the old style, already fading after Fosbury’s flop), hit the pad, bounced, and put both hands over his head. He had taken Valery Brumel’s world record at the same meet where Brumel had set it. Sheboygan threw a parade; city crews hung cardboard banners on the streetlights at the exact height. He married Peggy that fall and rode in the parade with her. He also won Pan American Games gold in Cali in 1971 and remains the only Badger athlete with a world record. Dwight Stones took the mark about two years later. Matzdorf, an introvert, was relieved. He switched to the flop in 1974 to spare his knees, managing 7-4¼ in 1975 after a ragged first session at 6-10. The second act was quieter: a mathematics degree, a computer-science master’s, and twenty-five years at Bell Labs writing software for the first commercial cellular system, rolled out in Chicago in 1983. The poles had already made the point.

Profile · Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith

Sheboygan-born food chemist and space-opera pioneer (Skylark, Lensman); raised in Idaho after leaving Wisconsin as an infant

$850

Edward Elmer Smith was born in Sheboygan on May 2, 1890, to a sailor and a teacher, and left Wisconsin that same winter for Spokane before he could walk. Idaho farms and logging camps did the raising. Sheboygan keeps the birth certificate of the food chemist who helped invent space opera. He took chemical engineering at the University of Idaho, earned a Ph.D. at George Washington University on what nitrogen oxides do to wheat flour (the dissertation appeared in 1919), and spent his working years in cereal chemistry at Dawn Doughnut in Jackson, Michigan, and related pastry-mix labs, the unglamorous science of making batter behave. At night, with neighbor Lee Hawkins Garby coaching the dialogue, he wrote The Skylark of Space, serialized in Amazing Stories in 1928. Hugo Gernsback stuck "Ph.D." on the byline; readers shortened it to Doc. The Lensman novels built a universe of Lenses, Galactic Patrols, and villains named Boskone. He died in Seaside, Oregon, on August 31, 1965, while the magazine If was still serializing the last Skylark (June through October). First Fandom inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1963; the Science Fiction Hall of Fame followed posthumously in 2004. The Wisconsin tie is the Sheboygan birth; the story is the cereal lab and the galactic patrols.

Profile · Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Don McNeill

NBC Breakfast Club host raised in Sheboygan (not the tennis champion Donald McNeill)

$100,000

Don McNeill hosted NBC’s The Breakfast Club for thirty-five years and made morning radio a national living room. Sheboygan raised him; Chicago kept him. From June 23, 1933, to December 27, 1968, he aired nearly 7,500 shows on some four hundred stations, drawing a million letters a year at the peak. He was born in Galena, Illinois, on December 23, 1907. The family moved to Sheboygan in 1909, when his father left mining engineering to join grandfather Thomas McNeill’s furniture plant. Don went through grade school and Sheboygan High—where classmates called him Daddy Long Legs—until the plant failed and the Marquette student had to find a paycheck. Milwaukee radio hired him at fifteen dollars a week and fired him with a verdict: no future in the medium. In 1933 NBC handed him Chicago’s Pepper Pot at fifty dollars a week and a free hand. He renamed it The Breakfast Club, marched the audience around the table every fifteen minutes, and filled the air with Prayer Time in the war years, Aunt Fanny, and deliberate corn. He asked to drop the script after two months; the network said yes because they thought nobody was listening. His papers are at Marquette. He died in Evanston, Illinois, on May 7, 1996. On his mother’s Weinberger side he was a first cousin of Caspar Weinberger.

Profile · Wauwatosa, Wisconsin

Thomas A. Steitz

Nobel Prize–winning structural biologist; born Milwaukee, raised Wauwatosa from mid-third grade through high school

$500,000

Thomas A. Steitz shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping, atom by atom, the ribosome—the cellular machine that turns genetic code into protein. Long associated with Yale and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he traced the pivot in his own life to a childhood move from downtown Milwaukee into Wauwatosa. He was born in Milwaukee on August 23, 1940. After a nearly failing second-grade report card in an apartment above a paint store on 27th Street, his family bought a house on 75th Street in Wauwatosa midway through third grade, in 1949. Roosevelt Elementary’s winter rink, Longfellow junior-high shop class—where he wound an electric motor from scratch—and a school alto saxophone (after the band director rejected his father’s C-melody) reshaped a bored kid. He bunched radishes on his grandfather’s Waukesha County truck farm at five cents a dozen, a hundred dozen on a good day, and bought a better saxophone. At Wauwatosa High he finished eighth in a class of more than three hundred and nearly chose music over science; brother Dick’s straight A’s at Longfellow had already been a wake-up call. Lawrence College led to Harvard and then to the ribosome work that won the Nobel. His wife, Joan, became a molecular-biology eminence in her own right; a son pitched in the Brewers system. Steitz practiced saxophone one to two hours a day and later credited shop-class skills with building protein models in the lab. He died at home in Stony Creek, a Branford, Connecticut, village, on October 9, 2018. Birth was Milwaukee; the beloved stretch—rink, sax, and teachers who would not let him stay bored—was Wauwatosa from about age eight or nine through high school.

Profile · Wauwatosa, Wisconsin

John P. Morgridge

Raised on Stickney Avenue, Wauwatosa; Wauwatosa High class of 1951; longtime Cisco CEO/chairman; TOSA Foundation

$1 billion

John P. 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.

Profile · Wauwatosa, Wisconsin

Devin Lamar Harris

Born Milwaukee; Wauwatosa East class of 2001 (jersey No. 20 retired); Wisconsin Badgers and 15-year NBA guard; 2009 All-Star

$74 million

Devin Lamar Harris is the Wauwatosa East point guard whose No. 20 came down in the school gym in 2007 with Dallas Mavericks coach Avery Johnson in the building and students yelling from the bleachers. Born in Milwaukee on February 27, 1983, to Terry and Julie Harris, he grew up as the klutz his mother remembered, collecting black eyes and busted lips, then as the kid who put 47 points on the board, went undefeated in the regular season as a senior, and beat Fond du Lac's Travis Diener for Wisconsin Mr. Basketball in 2001. He played one season of volleyball, made all-conference, and dropped it to live in the gym. Bo Ryan recruited him to Wisconsin after Dick Bennett retired. School records still cited by Tosa East include those 47 points in a game, 162 free throws in a season, three conference titles, and All-Conference honors three years running. Injuries after his sophomore year kept him off the summer-camp circuit that makes recruiting reputations, so the senior explosion had to do the work. The Washington Wizards took him fifth overall in 2004 and flipped him to Dallas. Fifteen NBA seasons followed, including an All-Star trip with the New Jersey Nets in 2009. On February 12, 2007, Tosa East retired his jersey the same night Tony Smith's No. 34 came down: two NBA guards on one suburban wall. Harris told the crowd he was happy to represent the school and would keep making them proud. Milwaukee is on the birth certificate; the gym that kept the jersey is the hometown argument.

Profile · Wauwatosa, Wisconsin

Richard Warren Schickel

Longtime Time and Life film critic and documentary maker; grew up in Wauwatosa; Wauwatosa High (now East)

$1.67 million

Richard Warren Schickel was the film critic who spent roughly four decades telling America how to watch movies—first at Life magazine, then at Time—and who traced that vocation to a Wauwatosa childhood within walking distance of two neighborhood theaters. He wrote thirty-seven books, directed more than thirty documentaries, and never stopped sounding like someone who had fallen hard for cinema before he was ten. He was born in Milwaukee on February 10, 1933, to Edward John Schickel, who worked in advertising, and Helen (née Hendricks), and grew up at 1721 North 68th Street from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s. About age nine, watching James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy with his parents at the Tosa or the Times, he stopped treating movies as afternoon filler and started noticing directors’ names, then walking to the library for books on how films were made. He graduated from Wauwatosa High (now East), wrote for the Daily Cardinal at the University of Wisconsin—he said anti-McCarthyism cost him the editorship—and later told Tosa East students, when the school put him on its Wall of Inspiration in 2003, that he had been a total failure, proof that goof-offs can succeed. He was Life’s film critic from 1965 to 1972, then Time’s until 2010. The Disney Version (1968) refused to genuflect, reading Walt as a Midwest product of clean moral stories and gag humor without self-satire. Documentaries included The Men Who Made the Movies (1973) and the Emmy-nominated Life Goes to the Movies (1977); DVD commentaries ran from On the Waterfront to Titanic. He died in Los Angeles on February 18, 2017, after a series of strokes. His memoir title, Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip, is a Wauwatosa childhood talking. Birth was Milwaukee; the formative stretch was Tosa.

Profile · Wauwatosa, Wisconsin

Nancy Hanschman Dickerson

Raised in Wauwatosa; local high school; born Nancy Conners Hanschman, Jan. 19, 1927; died New York, Oct. 18, 1997

$4.25 million

Before she was the first woman CBS hired as a network television correspondent, Nancy Hanschman was an architect’s daughter from Wauwatosa who took an education degree at Wisconsin, taught Milwaukee elementary school, and decided Washington looked more like the job. Born Nancy Conners Hanschman on January 19, 1927, she was the daughter of architect Frederick R. Hanschman and Florence Conners. She spent two years at Clarke College in Dubuque, then finished a B.A. in education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1948. By 1954 she was producing Capitol Cloakroom. In 1960 she won the correspondent’s title the men had kept, and that fall in Los Angeles she became the first woman to report from a national-convention floor. Lyndon Johnson’s decision to run with Kennedy went out through her interview. She covered the March on Washington, Kennedy’s funeral, and three inaugurals, then left the network to syndicate Inside Washington and produce 784 Days That Changed America—Watergate to resignation—which won a Peabody. Variety named her one of the top ten television reporters in 1964, the only woman on the list. She threw the parties the capital came to. Son John inherited the trade. She married C. Wyatt Dickerson Jr. on February 24, 1962; they had three children, including John Dickerson. She later married former Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead. She died in New York on October 18, 1997, after a stroke, at age seventy, and is buried at Arlington. The Wauwatosa piece is the origin, not a long adult residency: a suburb that sent a schoolteacher into a boys’ club and watched her take the floor.

Profile · Fond du Lac, Wisconsin

Elmer Carl Kiekhaefer

Born Mequon, June 4, 1906; Cedarburg High; moved Mercury works to Fond du Lac Feb. 1946; died Fond du Lac, Oct. 5, 1983

$34 million

Elmer Carl Kiekhaefer was the Mequon-born engineer who dragged Mercury outboards to Fond du Lac and made the city live on them. Born in Mequon on June 4, 1906, and a Cedarburg High graduate, he was fired by Evinrude for arguing about design, then bought a bankrupt Cedarburg outboard plant in 1939 for $25,000 plus a pile of Thor motors a mail-order house had rejected. He rebuilt them, named the good ones Mercury, and spent the war stuffing drone engines into a plant with no room left for boats. When aluminum restrictions lifted, Western Auto doubled an order to 33,000 civilian motors; that backlog, not a civic love letter, is why he left Cedarburg. In February 1946 Fond du Lac offered the old Corium Dairy Farm for $25,000: thirty-eight acres, a five-story barn, four silos, and ninety tons of hay. He pitched the hay himself. Silos became paint booths. Local businessmen tried to keep him out, fearing he would steal the labor pool. He stayed. Chrysler 300s won him NASCAR owner titles in 1955 and 1956; he folded the team when crowds started to hate how often he won. A 1957 endurance run put two Mark 75 six-cylinder sixty-horsepower motors through thirty-four days, eleven hours, and forty-seven minutes nonstop—more than 25,000 miles, refueled on the fly, at a 30.3 mph average. Brunswick bought the company in 1961 for a stock deal the New York Times put near $34 million. He fought the new owners, quit in 1969, and started Aeromarine down the road. He died in Fond du Lac on October 5, 1983, at seventy-seven. Mercury Marine is still there and remains the city’s largest private payroll. Birth is Mequon, high school is Cedarburg, and the industrial life from 1946 to 1983 is Fond du Lac: a real stretch, not a suburban mailing address.

Profile · Fond du Lac, Wisconsin

Travis Lyle Diener

Basketball player; Fond du Lac native, Marquette and NBA guard

$6 million

Travis Lyle Diener is the Fond du Lac guard who carried a family basketball name from Goodrich High to Marquette, the NBA, and a retired jersey in Italy. The hometown clip is still the kid in a Cardinals uniform. Born in Fond du Lac on March 1, 1982, he played for his uncle Dick Diener at Goodrich High School (now Fond du Lac High), class of 2001. Over four seasons the Cardinals went 78–14 and won three Fox Valley Association titles; Diener left as Gatorade Wisconsin Player of the Year, with 1,515 career points plus school assists and three-point records. He also pitched a perfect game against Appleton East in 2001 and helped win a state baseball title in 2000, earning seven letters in basketball and baseball. The school inducted him into its hall of fame in 2011. At Marquette the six-foot-one guard was a sophomore on the 2003 Final Four team with Dwyane Wade and finished near the top of the school’s scoring, three-point, and assist lists. Orlando drafted him thirty-eighth overall in 2005. After five NBA seasons he starred in Italy, where Dinamo Sassari retired his No. 12; he took Italian citizenship and played EuroBasket. In 2014 he returned to Marquette as director of player personnel.

Profile · Fond du Lac, Wisconsin

Darold A. Treffert, M.D.

Psychiatrist and savant-syndrome researcher; lifelong Fond du Lac

$2 million

Darold A. Treffert, M.D., was the Fond du Lac psychiatrist who spent fifty years studying savant syndrome and served as a script consultant on Rain Man. He liked to say he was born at St. Agnes Hospital—the same campus that later put his name on the Treffert Center. Born at St. Agnes on March 12, 1933, he took a University of Wisconsin medical degree in 1958 and in 1962 built the child-adolescent unit at Winnebago Mental Health Institute, just up the lake. He was superintendent there from 1964 to 1979. That is where he met his first savants—islands of genius beside severe disability—and did not let go. He returned home to private practice, the county health-care center, and the alcoholism unit at St. Agnes, and he ran the State Medical Society and then its board. In 1988 he consulted on Rain Man; Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond Babbitt is the popular memory, Kim Peek the friend Treffert actually studied. Extraordinary People (1989) went into ten languages; Islands of Genius (2010) took up acquired savant syndrome. Agnesian opened the Treffert Center on the St. Agnes campus in 2016. He died unexpectedly at eighty-seven on December 14, 2020, at home in Fond du Lac—the town he never really left.

Profile · Fond du Lac, Wisconsin

James “Maggie” Megellas

Fond du Lac–born 82nd Airborne officer; Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Stars; city council president; died Colleyville, Texas, 2020, at 103

$2,000

James “Maggie” Megellas was a Fond du Lac–born officer of the 82nd Airborne Division, widely remembered as that division’s most decorated officer, who later led his hometown city council and saw the local post office named for him. Born March 11, 1917, to Greek immigrant parents in a house of seven children, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression to put money in the family. Pearl Harbor fell in the middle of his senior year at Ripon College. He took a commission through ROTC in May 1942, volunteered for the new airborne, and spent twenty-nine months in Europe with H Company, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment—Anzio, the Waal crossing, and the Battle of the Bulge. On January 28, 1945, after a ten-mile march through two-foot snow, a Mark V Panther tank swung on his platoon outside Herresbach, Belgium. Megellas ran at it, jammed one grenade to stop the tank, climbed on, and dropped a second inside. None of his men died. His commander recommended him for the Medal of Honor but omitted the tank action; he received a Silver Star instead, adding to a Distinguished Service Cross, another Silver Star, two Bronze Stars with V device, and two Purple Hearts. General James Gavin later chose him to accept the Netherlands’ Military Order of William Orange Lanyard for the whole division. In a letter to his sister after Herresbach he wrote that he had killed twenty-eight Germans that night—his own voice, later printed in the Journal Sentinel. He came home, served as president of the Fond du Lac city council, lost two races for Congress, befriended John F. Kennedy, and spent State Department years as a USAID mission director. He married Carole Laehn of Fond du Lac, Miss Ripon 1960, on May 9, 1962. Congress named the Fond du Lac post office for him. A Bridge Too Far killed a character based on him; he outlived the scene by seventy-five years. He died in Colleyville, Texas, on April 2, 2020, at 103.

Profile · Fond du Lac, Wisconsin

Jonathon “Johnny B” Brandmeier

Born John Francis Brandmeier in Fond du Lac, July 15, 1956

$1 million

Jonathon "Johnny B" Brandmeier is the Fond du Lac-born radio host who became Chicago's morning-drive king and entered the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2018. He was born John Francis Brandmeier in Fond du Lac on July 15, 1956, to a German father and a Lebanese mother, and was on the air at hometown WFON-FM at fifteen after asking the boss what to do and being told to "just keep it on the air." Every morning his mother left Reader's Digest jokes beside the cereal with a note that said "Have fun, John"—a line he quoted in his Hall of Fame speech. At eighteen he moved through Oshkosh, Appleton, San Jose, Rockford, and Milwaukee's WOKY, where a Los Angeles talent hunt put him in a top-five group that also included Howard Stern. At Phoenix's KZZP he tripled the morning numbers in six months. In 1983 Chicago's The Loop won a national bidding war and made him the city's morning star, complete with a bar band called the Leisure Suits and parody singles that still turn up at weddings. He won a Marconi Award in 1995; Illinois declared a Johnny B Day in 2013. Later stops included WGN and national syndication. The professional peak belongs to Phoenix and Chicago. The origin story is a Fond du Lac FM stick and a kitchen table.

Profile · Brookfield, Wisconsin

Joseph Hayden “Joe” Thomas

Brookfield Central star; Wisconsin Badgers and Cleveland Browns left tackle; Pro Football Hall of Fame; Harrison-Thomas Stadium namesake

$123 million

Joseph Hayden “Joe” Thomas is the Brookfield kid who became one of the NFL’s most durable offensive tackles and a Pro Football Hall of Famer. Born in Brookfield on December 4, 1984, he grew up in the Elmbrook schools—Hillside Elementary, Wisconsin Hills Middle, and Brookfield Central, class of 2003—where classmates and coaches already called the oversized lineman Big Foot. His mother, Sally, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that opposing grade-school soccer coaches once shouted to get her son off the field because he looked too big to belong. He did belong: honor roll all four years, football, basketball, and track, and co-Defensive Player of the Year for the Wisconsin Football Coaches Association in 2002 while also playing tackle, tight end, fullback, kicker, and punter. As a senior he won Division 1 state titles in the shot put (62 feet 1½ inches) and the discus (185-6), and he closed four years of Lancer basketball with twenty points in a state-quarterfinal loss to Fond du Lac. At Wisconsin he became an All-American left tackle. On draft weekend in 2007 he skipped New York and went fishing with his father, Eric, a banker who had not missed a day of work in thirty-nine years; the Cleveland Browns called the boat and made him their first-round pick. He played his entire NFL career in Cleveland, starting every game and setting a franchise ironman mark of 10,363 consecutive snaps before retirement and induction into the Hall of Fame in Canton. Brookfield still claims the hometown chapter. In 2020 Brookfield Central named its stadium Harrison-Thomas Stadium for Thomas and 1996 Olympic champion Kenny Harrison. He has credited coaches Bruce Follo, Scott Nelson, Mark Pulkownik, and Mark Adams by name. He lives in Madison now; the field named for him remains in Brookfield.

Profile · Brookfield, Wisconsin

Jenny Just

Brookfield native

$480 million

Jenny Just is the Brookfield-raised fintech founder who co-built PEAK6 and Apex Fintech Solutions, the brokerage plumbing behind firms such as SoFi, Ally, and Webull. A Brookfield Central High School graduate in the class of 1986, she grew up with two working parents and four brothers—experience she later credited for making a trading floor feel like home—and a crew of girlfriends she still calls the Gidgets, thirteen friends who started before grade school and still reunite as Packers fans. After Michigan's Ross School of Business in 1990 she headed to Chicago because it was the big city, taking a job at O'Connor & Associates because there was beer in the fridge. They sat her on a step at the Board of Trade the day Drexel filed for bankruptcy; there was no women's restroom. She stayed. By her mid-twenties she and Matt Hulsizer had built an over-the-counter equity-derivatives desk. When a merger wanted them in Connecticut, they stayed in Chicago, put up about $1.5 million, and in 1997 founded PEAK6—she was twenty-nine and a single mother. They later married. Apex became the clearing and brokerage infrastructure under major retail trading apps. The fortune is Chicago finance; the origin is a Brookfield Lancer childhood, not a imported executive myth.

Profile · Brookfield, Wisconsin

Martin Patrick Robinson

Born Dearborn, Michigan, March 9, 1954; raised in Brookfield; Brookfield East class of 1972

$125

Halloween was the doorway. A shy Brookfield kid used a monster-makeup handbook as a bible, then took any local production that would have him—Brookfield East, Waukesha Civic Theatre, whoever else was putting on a show. Martin Patrick Robinson was born in Dearborn, Michigan, on March 9, 1954, raised in Brookfield, and graduated from Brookfield East in 1972 before leaving for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His father was a hydraulics engineer and his mother a teacher; a marionette souvenir from Mexico, when he was five, was mostly for messing with the family cat. A touring Jack and the Beanstalk company hired him at $125 a week; two years under Bil Baird followed. In 1980 he mailed a picture and a resume to Sesame Street. A year later, at the Ansonia Hotel, about 300 people shrank to five. The only opening was Mr. Snuffleupagus: six feet tall, a strong back, a voice to match Jerry Nelson. He tried the costume on the seventh or eighth attempt. They never phoned. A season schedule showed up in the mail. He has been Snuffy since 1981 and Telly since 1984; Telly is the favorite. New performers usually start as a right-hand helper on characters with working mouths; Robinson got the classic character first and learned the helper work afterward—he called it backwards. In 1982 he designed, built, and performed Audrey II in the original Off-Broadway Little Shop of Horrors, and again on Broadway in 2003. He married Sesame writer Annie Evans on the 123 Sesame Street stoop at Kaufman Astoria in 2008; twin daughters arrived in 2009. The shy kid from East is still doing the big woolly character. Brookfield’s claim is the upbringing and the East diploma, not the Dearborn birth certificate.

Profile · Brookfield, Wisconsin

Susan Jane Shannon Engeleiter

Youngest woman elected to the Wisconsin Legislature; first woman to head the U.S. Small Business Administration; born and schooled in Brookfield

$82,500

Susan Jane Shannon Engeleiter was the youngest woman ever elected to the Wisconsin Legislature and later the first woman to run the U.S. Small Business Administration. She grew up in Brookfield—Brookfield Elementary, Pilgrim Park, Brookfield Central class of 1970—and has often described a small-business household as the ground that shaped her politics. The clerk at the Wisconsin State Senate would not hire her at first: there were no page uniforms cut for women. She kept showing up until he relented, and she and a friend became the first female pages in the building. Through UW–Madison (class of 1974) she worked twenty to thirty hours a week, then spent a summer knocking on some twelve thousand Waukesha County doors. At twenty-two she won an eight-way primary and beat a nineteen-year-old in the general by joking that she had more experience. She left the Assembly to chase Bob Kasten’s House seat and lost the 1978 primary to Jim Sensenbrenner by 589 votes. A 1980 special election put her in the state Senate, where she became the first woman minority leader; she finished a UW law degree in 1981 while sitting in the chamber. In 1988 she ran for the U.S. Senate and lost to Herb Kohl. George H. W. Bush named her SBA administrator in 1989—the first woman in the job. When she was sworn in she had a five-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son and had backed six weeks of maternity leave for Wisconsin workers. Honeywell later took her to Minneapolis. Since 1998 she has been with Data Recognition Corporation, an educational-testing firm, serving as CEO since 2006. The page who did not fit the uniform ended up running the agency that writes the rules for people who start without a uniform.

Profile · Brookfield, Wisconsin

David A. Giljohann, Ph.D.

Brookfield East class of 1999; spherical-nucleic-acid chemist; Exicure co-founder/CEO; CEO of EVOQ Therapeutics since 2023

$2 million

David A. Giljohann turned a Brookfield science-club childhood into spherical nucleic acids—DNA and RNA wrapped around a gold core, built to enter a cell and shut off a bad gene—and a Chicago-area biotech career. Brookfield’s science name is not a visiting professor who retired to a cul-de-sac; he swam, ran Science Club, and left East for Northwestern. He attended Tonawanda Elementary and Pilgrim Park before Brookfield East, class of 1999. At Northwestern he earned a biology degree, a Spanish minor, and a chemistry Ph.D. in Chad Mirkin’s lab in 2009. He licensed the spherical-nucleic-acid work with his advisor, founded AuraSense in 2009, then Exicure in 2011, and ran Exicure as CEO from 2013 while the constructs moved toward clinical trials. Crain’s Chicago put him on its 40 Under 40 list in 2019; Endpoints had already listed him among biopharma executives under 40. Exicure’s later public-company years were rough. In January 2023 he became CEO of EVOQ Therapeutics in Ann Arbor, an autoimmunity company. His family still lives in Elm Grove, next door to the district that let a science kid stay late. The Elmbrook schools that taught him—teachers including Sue Miller, Marina Kane, Dick Wood, Kathy Drucke, and Mike Rose—remain the place tie; the lab towns are where the papers and the companies live.

Profile · New Berlin, Wisconsin

Julius Peter Heil

30th governor of Wisconsin (1939–1943); childhood farm at Prospect Hill, New Berlin; Milwaukee manufacturer (Heil Company)

$5 million+ (1949$)

Julius Peter Heil was Wisconsin’s thirtieth governor and the industrialist behind the Heil Company, a Milwaukee maker of dump bodies, tanks, and road machines whose name outlived his two terms in Madison. He came as a boy from Düssmund on the Mosel around 1881–82 to a farm at the bottom of Prospect Hill in what is now New Berlin. He attended Mill Valley School, clerked at Winton’s general store on Prospect Hill, and helped gather the fieldstone that still forms the core of the childhood house later marked at 19890 West Julius Heil Drive. Orphaned on Milwaukee streets by fourteen, he worked as a newsboy, streetcar conductor, and Falk shop hand. In 1899 he was in Buenos Aires installing welded streetcar rail. In 1901 he opened the Heil Rail Joint Welding Company, which grew into a major dump-truck and tank manufacturer that still trades under the Heil name. In 1938 the Republican who had already run Roosevelt’s state NRA board beat Progressive incumbent Philip La Follette. Time put him on its January 16, 1939 cover under the headline “Heil Heil.” In his first week he banned smoking at his first press conference, puzzled reporters who wanted a legislative message, and hand-signed thousands of certificates in green ink. Two terms from 1939 to 1943 brought an employment peace act, a securities department, and a dairy-promotion tour long credited with popularizing “America’s Dairyland.” He lost a bid for a third term, returned as Heil Company chairman, and died in Milwaukee in 1949. Milwaukee got the factory; New Berlin kept the boyhood farm, the street name, and the industrial surname.

Profile · New Berlin, Wisconsin

Theodora Winton Youmans

Suffrage leader and Waukesha Freeman editor; childhood at Prospect Hill (now New Berlin); adult career and death in Waukesha

$5,000

Theodora Winton Youmans was the Wisconsin suffrage organizer and newspaperwoman who helped push the Nineteenth Amendment across the finish line in 1919, then became the first president of the state League of Women Voters. Career geography was Waukesha; childhood belonged to Prospect Hill—the crossroads New Berlin later annexed. She was born in Ashippun, in Dodge County, and grew up at her father’s store and post office in Prospect Hill. Her mother had been a schoolteacher; Theodora and her brothers walked to District No. 3 Prospect School. At seventeen she was valedictorian of Carroll Academy—still remembered locally as the only New Berlinite known to have finished there in the nineteenth century—then joined the Waukesha Freeman as a reporter who traveled the Northwoods alone and invented a “Women’s World” column. She married the paper’s editor, Henry Mott Youmans, in 1889 and became assistant editor. In 1886 the Freeman had already run her series on traveling the Northwoods alone, a credential for a woman reporter of the era. She founded the Wisconsin Anti-Tuberculosis Association in 1908, years before taking the suffrage presidency in 1913. As president of the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association she followed Carrie Chapman Catt’s advice and pressed a federal amendment after state referenda failed in 1912 and 1917. When Wisconsin’s ratification papers reached Washington first on June 10, 1919, she announced the “first honors” in her column. She later ran for the state senate as a Republican and lost, and died at home in Waukesha in 1932. The girlhood house sits on New Berlin Historical Society grounds; Youmans Park is in Waukesha. New Berlin keeps the store and the school story.

Profile · New Berlin, Wisconsin

Charlie Berens

Comedian behind the Manitowoc Minute; born Oconomowoc April 27, 1987; raised in New Berlin and Elm Grove; Marquette University High and UW–Madison journalism

$5 million+

Charlie Berens is the Manitowoc Minute guy who is not from Manitowoc—a New Berlin and Elm Grove kid who turned Grandpa Bob’s “Cripes Alfrighty,” a fishing-buddy accent, and a fake newscast in camo over a tie into Wisconsin’s loudest comedy export. The character hunts and says ope because the childhood did; the bit is performance built on a real dual-suburb upbringing. He was born in Oconomowoc on April 27, 1987, the second of twelve Catholic kids, a mimic who used to clap half a foam donut over his head and jog behind his anesthesiologist father. New Berlin and Elm Grove share the childhood; Elm Grove often gets the caption because that is where the parents later lived. Marquette University High gave him the paper—he inherited the editor’s chair from an older brother—and garage bands. UW–Madison gave him a journalism degree he spent on performance. He was an MTV Street Team ’08 correspondent and spent a night in jail after an arrest with protesters outside the St. Paul RNC. A Dallas CW comedy-news gig earned a local Emmy in 2013 for a segment on drought water prices; co-anchor Zuri Hall later joined Access Hollywood. Los Angeles almost ate him: he bought out his own standup rooms and still played to empty seats, slept in a car outside a Sleep Inn while producing for CCTV America, which killed his voiceovers for being too Wisconsin. A 2016 Funny or Die Titanic dub—“If Jack Dawson Was Really From Wisconsin”—went huge. In June 2017 a Manitowoc heckler at The Comedy Store handed him the bit; the next day’s ninety-five-second fake newscast became the job. He moved the operation home and sold out rooms he once could not give away. As of a Milwaukee Magazine profile he was living in Milwaukee’s Washington Heights. Birth is Oconomowoc; the place claim for this page is the New Berlin–Elm Grove childhood that actually shaped the accent.

Profile · New Berlin, Wisconsin

Thomas Joseph “T. J.” Bray

Princeton point guard and European pro; born and raised New Berlin; Wisconsin Mr. Basketball 2010 at Catholic Memorial

$1 million

T. J. Bray is the New Berlin point guard who skipped the scholarship power conferences for Princeton, then spent seven seasons in Europe before retiring at twenty-nine. Born in New Berlin on June 14, 1992, he grew up in the suburb and starred at Catholic Memorial in neighboring Waukesha. As a senior he averaged 17.9 points, 8.4 rebounds, and 6.6 assists, won Wisconsin Mr. Basketball in 2010, and posted a 20-12-5-6 line in the Division 2 state-title game. Princeton beat out North Dakota and Florida Gulf Coast. He left as first-team All-Ivy with 374 career assists—third in program history since the school began counting them—and a still-standing 13-assist game against Penn State. He is the only Princeton player with three seasons of 100-plus assists since tracking began in 1974–75. Undrafted in 2014, he played in Italy, Belgium, Greece, Germany, and Spain. Bayern Munich put him in the EuroLeague; after missing the first three months of that season with a foot-tendon injury he made the 2019 All-Bundesliga First Team and led the German league in assists. Panathinaikos gave him a Greek League title and a Greek Cup in 2021. Then he walked away for personal reasons, with reporting of a roughly $100,000 clause if he returned to play in Europe that season, and a public thank-you to his fiancée and the FaceTimes from home. The New Berlin claim is childhood and the Mr. Basketball year; Catholic Memorial supplied the high-school stage next door.

Profile · New Berlin, Wisconsin

Julie Marie Goskowicz Koons

Short-track speed skater; 2002 Salt Lake City Olympian (3,000m relay); New Berlin family with brother Tony (Eisenhower / 1994 Olympian)

$1 million

Julie Marie Goskowicz Koons raced short-track speed skating for the United States at the highest level, including a Winter Olympics berth and World Championship bronze while still a teenager. She nearly made the 1994 Olympic team at thirteen, qualified as a relay alternate for Nagano in 1998, and raced the women’s 3,000-meter relay at Salt Lake City in 2002, where the U.S. finished seventh. In 1996 she took World Championship bronze in the relay and the team event; she also earned bronze at the 1997 World Junior Championships. Her Olympic affiliation was Midway Speedskating Club in Saint Paul, the training base many Wisconsin short-track athletes have long needed once local timing runs out. Olympedia lists her birth as March 2, 1980, in Aurora, Illinois, while Wikipedia and New Berlin’s notable-people list call her New Berlin-born—the familiar hospital-versus-hometown split. Her brother Tony, a New Berlin Eisenhower graduate, was the 1995 World Junior 500-meter champion and a 1994 Lillehammer teammate who did not get into a race. Two Olympic berths from one Waukesha County household is the suburb’s rare short-track story. She later completed a part-time MBA, highlighted in a 2006 student-spotlight profile. New Berlin claims the family on its notable list; Saint Paul was where the Olympic clock ran.

Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin

Marissa Ann Mayer

Born Wausau, May 30, 1975

$1.4 billion

Marissa Ann Mayer is the Wausau-born technologist who became Google's twentieth employee and first female engineer, then chief executive of Yahoo. She was born in Wausau on May 30, 1975, grew up with an art-teacher mother and a father who designed water plants, and graduated from Wausau West High School in 1993 after a crowded résumé: grocery clerk, debate captain on a state-championship team, pom-pom captain, Spanish club president, and a Governor Tommy Thompson pick for National Youth Science Camp. Stanford was supposed to lead to brain surgery. She switched to symbolic systems—linguistics, psychology, and computer science—earned a master's in computer science, and joined Google in Mountain View. Over thirteen years she worked on Search, Maps, Gmail, and Images, the products that defined the company. Yahoo named her CEO in 2012; Verizon bought Yahoo's operating business in 2017 for $4.5 billion. Her later ventures include Sunshine and Dazzle. The Wausau tie is birth, childhood, and Wausau West. The over-scheduled high-school captain who bagged groceries is still the clearest origin story for a career that remade Silicon Valley's public face.

Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin

Elroy Leon “Crazylegs” Hirsch

Born Wausau, June 17, 1923; Wausau High 1939–40; Wisconsin AD 1969–87; died Madison 2004, buried Pine Grove Cemetery, Wausau

$20,000

Elroy Leon “Crazylegs” Hirsch was the Wausau halfback who became a Pro Football Hall of Fame receiver, a Hollywood title character, and the athletic director who filled Camp Randall. Born in Wausau on June 17, 1923, and adopted by Otto Hirsch, an iron-works foreman, and Mayme, he grew up German-Norwegian with a left foot that pointed out. He ran the two miles to school skipping and crisscrossing the sidewalk squares so he would be shifty. Wausau High got the halfback in 1939 and 1940. A Chicago writer watching him against Great Lakes in 1942 wrote that “his crazy legs were gyrating in six different directions, all at the same time.” Hirsch was glad to be called anything but Elroy. Wisconsin’s 1942 Badgers went 8–1–1 and beat Ohio State. The Marines parked him at Michigan, where he lettered in football, basketball, baseball, and track in a single academic year—the first Michigan athlete to do so—including a broad jump and a one-hit shutout of Ohio State on the same May afternoon. The AAFC Chicago Rockets were, he said later, the worst decision he ever made, and they cost him a fractured skull. The Los Angeles Rams made him the deep threat of the 1951 championship team: 1,495 receiving yards and 17 touchdown catches. After a second head injury, coach Clark Shaughnessy had an eleven-ounce plastic helmet made for him from fighter-plane material, among the NFL’s first plastic shells. He played himself in the picture Crazylegs; Unchained gave the world “Unchained Melody.” He later ran the Rams, then Wisconsin athletics from 1969 to 1987 until Camp Randall was full, and sued S.C. Johnson over a women’s shaving gel named Crazylegs. He married Wausau High sweetheart Ruth Stahmer in June 1946; they had fifty-eight years. He died in Madison in 2004, and they brought him home to Pine Grove Cemetery in Wausau. The Crazylegs Classic, an 8K from the Capitol to Camp Randall, still funds Badger athletics. Wausau claims the birth, the high school, and the grave; Madison claims the final years.

Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin

Christopher Edward Bangle

BMW Group design chief 1992–2009 (first American in the role); born Ravenna, Ohio; raised in Wausau; Wausau West class of 1975

$5 million+

Chris Bangle was the Wausau West drafting-class kid who became BMW’s first American design chief, then spent seventeen years reshaping how the German premium brands looked—and arguing with everyone who hated the results. Bob Zuleger’s drafting room heard it early: freshman or sophomore, the kid said he was going to be a car designer. “Yeah, sure kid.” He was born in Ravenna, Ohio, on October 14, 1956, and raised in Wausau. At Wausau West from 1972 to 1975 he went to midget races at the Wisconsin Valley Fair, ruined a 1960s Karmann Ghia into what he later called a horrific dune buggy, lettered communion Bibles in old Germanic script for the church, and took a summer job as a technical draughtsman at seventeen. He also thought he might become a Methodist minister. After Wisconsin he went to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Opel interiors and Fiat design work—the Coupé, the Alfa 145—led to Munich on October 1, 1992: the first American to run BMW Group design across BMW, MINI, and Rolls-Royce. The E65 7 Series rear end started petitions; Time later put that car on a “50 worst” list, yet it became the best-selling 7 Series to that point, and BMW passed Mercedes in premium volume on his watch. He called the surfaces a revolutionary generation after an evolutionary one and told critics to see the cars in person. He did not coin “flame surfacing”—a journalist did—and has pointed to Frank Gehry as an influence. GINA, a fabric-skinned BMW concept in 2008, closed the Munich decade. He left in 2009 for a studio in Clavesana near Turin, designed a Hennessy bottle and an electric oddity called REDS, and never really stopped being the West kid who had already picked a life. His favorite boyhood book, he told the Wausau Daily Herald, was Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay; he likened designing a car to a Lombardi season. Ohio is the birthplace; Wausau is the raising and the high-school claim.

Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin

David Ross Obey

Wausau-raised Democrat; U.S. House 7th District 1969–2011; House Appropriations chairman; memoir Raising Hell for Justice

$214,503

David Ross Obey was the Wausau Democrat who held Wisconsin's 7th Congressional District for forty-two years and ran House Appropriations when the chamber's money bills still defined a career. Born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, on October 3, 1938, he moved back to Wausau with his family in 1941, graduated from Wausau East, saved money at the UW Marathon County campus, worked as a busboy at Rennebohm's on State Street, laid tile for a landlord, and earned a political-science degree and a Soviet-politics master's at Madison. As a kid he delivered Joe McCarthy literature, then watched McCarthy people brand one of his teachers a communist and walked; La Follette progressivism made more sense. Identified as a Republican into his teens, he joined the Young Democrats on a professor's advice and won a hometown Assembly race that cost $1,100 by about 1,100 votes. When Melvin Laird left Congress for Nixon's Pentagon, Obey won the 1969 special election at age thirty, the youngest member of the House and the first Democrat in that seat in the century. He stayed until 2011: ethics-code chair, Labor appropriations workhorse, and House Appropriations chairman briefly in 1994–95 and again from 2007 to 2011. He swung the same gavel that had passed Medicare in 1965 to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2010. His closest later scare came in 1972, when redistricting paired him with fifteen-term Republican Alvin O'Konski; Obey kept about sixty percent of his old territory. He could be cranky on the floor and fiercely protective of the northwoods district that includes Wausau. He retired rather than become a mascot, lobbied for a time afterward, and the health-sciences building at Northcentral Technical College wears his name. Sean Duffy succeeded him in the seat. He married Joan in 1962; she died in 2023; they had two children. His 2008 memoir is Raising Hell for Justice. The childhood is Wausau, and the accent never left.

Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin

Ronald Terrance Borchardt

Wausau-born pharmaceutical chemist; longtime University of Kansas professor and chair; died Lawrence, Kansas, 2025

$2 million

Ronald Terrance Borchardt was the Wausau-born pharmaceutical chemist who spent nearly fifty years at the University of Kansas figuring out how drugs cross gut and brain barriers, how peptides survive a bottle, and how to block an enzyme viruses need. Colleagues called him a giant in the pharmaceutical sciences; he liked to say, Sinatra-style, that he did it his way. Born in Wausau on February 18, 1944, he grew up in a working-class house where Helen worked the lunchroom at a middle school and Martin worked in a factory. Both parents had stopped at grade school and still pushed education on Ron and his sister Judi. He was a B–C student who preferred the ice rink and baseball and failed to make the basketball team; Coach Marshall Taylor, who took Wausau to the 1960 state title, made him manager instead and taught him how to run a room. After graduation he loaded bags of roofing granules onto rail cars. That factory summer, not a guidance counselor, decided college. Organic chemistry at Wisconsin turned a future pharmacist into a scientist. He earned a Ph.D. at Kansas in 1970 on the stereochemistry of the adrenergic system, completed an NIH postdoc, and returned to KU for nearly five decades as Solon E. Summerfield Distinguished Professor, fifteen years as chair of pharmaceutical chemistry, and two as acting dean. About 170 graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scientists passed through his lab. He died in Lawrence, Kansas, on July 15, 2025. The Wausau boy who was never the prospect became the reason other people’s drugs actually work.

Profile · Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin

Frank James Sensenbrenner Jr.

Longtime Wisconsin congressman from Menomonee Falls / WOW suburbs; Kimberly-Clark heir who never sat on the company board

$22 million

Frank James Sensenbrenner Jr. spent forty-two years in the U.S. House as the Republican from Wisconsin’s western Milwaukee suburbs, chairing Science and then Judiciary, introducing the USA PATRIOT Act, and serving as a House impeachment manager more times than anyone in American history. Menomonee Falls was the career address: when he was not in Washington he lived there, ran from there, and treated the Falls and WOW suburbs as the safest Republican seat in the state. He was born in Chicago on June 14, 1943. At four the family moved to Milwaukee’s North Shore; he grew up in Shorewood and graduated from Milwaukee Country Day School in Whitefish Bay in 1961. Stanford and Wisconsin Law followed. Kimberly-Clark money—the Kotex fortune of great-grandfather Frank J. Sensenbrenner—put him in the room, though the congressman never sat on the company board and by 2010 no longer held the stock. He entered the state Assembly the year he finished law school, then the Senate, then Bob Kasten’s House seat in 1978, winning twenty-one reelections and never dipping under 61 percent. He introduced the PATRIOT Act to the House on October 23, 2001; a decade later he said the NSA’s metadata dragnet was not what he wrote and co-sponsored the USA Freedom Act to claw it back. He authored REAL ID. His wife, Cheryl Warren Sensenbrenner, a disability-rights advocate from Green Bay, died in 2020. He retired from the House in 2021.

Profile · Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin

Joel Carver Whitburn

Billboard chart historian and Record Research founder; born Wauwatosa; lived and worked in Menomonee Falls until 2022

$3 million+

Joel Whitburn turned a teenage habit of copying Billboard chart positions onto index cards into Record Research, Inc., the Menomonee Falls company whose nearly 300 books became scripture for DJs, collectors, and label people. Every radio argument about a number one was, in some sense, an argument with a man working from a Falls basement vault. Born in Wauwatosa on November 29, 1939, he graduated from Menomonee Falls High School in 1957. At six-foot-six he played basketball for the Falls and for Elmhurst College, though he never took a degree. He subscribed to Billboard in 1953 and, when the Hot 100 launched in 1958, began the card system. In the 1960s he sold records for RCA; in 1970 he licensed Billboard’s charts and founded Record Research in the Falls. Top Pop Singles was the flagship. He kept a climate-controlled vault under the house that by 2013 held more than 200,000 singles, plus albums, country, R&B, and digital files, built to hold a copy of nearly every 78, 45, LP, and CD that made a Billboard chart. With friend Mike Curb he also created Warner/Rhino’s long “Billboard Top Hits” CD series. He did not move to New York. He shopped vinyl in Thiensville, went to Brewers and Bucks games, and died at home in Menomonee Falls on June 14, 2022, at 82, of complications from congestive heart failure, still working. Frances Mudgett Whitburn, his wife of 58 years, died five months later. The charts outlived them both.

Profile · Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin

Andrew John Hurley

Born and raised Menomonee Falls; Fall Out Boy drummer since 2003; UW–Milwaukee anthropology and history

$8 million+

Andrew John Hurley is the Menomonee Falls drummer who became the quiet redhead on the riser at Fall Out Boy shows. He was born in Menomonee Falls on May 31, 1980, and raised there by his mother, a nurse, after his father died when Andy was five. He started on saxophone as a percussion kid at Menomonee Falls High School. His sister handed him Metallica's Ride the Lightning and a Van Halen record; he switched to drums, cited Dave Lombardo as the god, and spent the rest of adolescence in death metal, then Earth Crisis, then Milwaukee and Chicago hardcore. Before the pop-punk payday he drummed for Racetraitor, Killtheslavemaster, Project Rocket, and a stack of straight-edge and vegan-hardcore bands. He joined Fall Out Boy as the full-time drummer in 2003. From Under the Cork Tree (2005) put the band on Rolling Stone and on the Bradley Center stage. Between tours he double-majored in anthropology and history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He stayed vegan and straight-edge and kept playing heavier bands, including The Damned Things and SECT, on the side. In a 2007 Alternative Press interview he described himself as an anarcho-primitivist and admitted that a touring rock career contradicted the creed; he still had to make a living. English teacher James Kuse remembered running into the freshman in a hallway and, later, a kid who fit the profile; OnMilwaukee covered that local stretch around a 2007 Bradley Center date. Birth and childhood belong to Menomonee Falls, not a generic Milwaukee music-bio shorthand. The Falls still sends teenagers to the shows.

Profile · Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin

Mark Joseph Wilson

Born Menomonee Falls, Oct. 31, 1974; Wisconsin Lutheran High School (WISAA state champion 1989 and 1992); five-time PGA Tour winner

$15 million

Before he was a five-time PGA Tour winner, Mark Wilson was the seventeen-year-old from Menomonee Falls who took Tiger Woods to the eighteenth hole. Born in Menomonee Falls on October 31, 1974, he starred at Wisconsin Lutheran High School, where he won WISAA titles in 1989 and 1992. At Wollaston Golf Club in Milton, Massachusetts, in the 1992 U.S. Junior Amateur final, Wilson went two-up with five holes to play. Woods birdied the sixteenth, won the eighteenth with a bogey, and became the first male to repeat as junior champion. Wilson was the first player all week who had led him. That same summer he also won the Wisconsin State Junior Boys championship. He took the 1996 ACC championship at North Carolina and the Ben Hogan Award as the nation’s top collegian that same year. On Tour the wins came in bunches once they started: the Honda Classic (2007), Mayakoba (2009), the Sony Open in Hawaii and the Phoenix Open (both 2011), and the Humana Challenge (2012). He peaked at No. 24 in the world in February 2012. His first PGA Tour appearances came in 1998 at the U.S. Open in San Francisco and the Greater Milwaukee Open at Brown Deer Park. In 2009 he and Woods were paired in the third round of the BMW Championship—the first time together since Wollaston. He still comes home for the State Open. The junior loss is the story Wisconsin golf people tell first. Menomonee Falls owns the birth and the high-school years; the Tour résumé is national.

Profile · Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin

Conrad Schmitt

Founder of Conrad Schmitt Studios (1889); born Fussville (annexed by Menomonee Falls 1958); died Dec. 28, 1940

peak ~$200,000+ (1940$); estate passed via sons

Conrad Schmitt founded the Milwaukee decorative-arts firm that still bears his name, taking church interiors, theaters, and civic buildings from a German-Catholic hamlet apprenticeship to national commissions. The calling began locally: at twelve he watched painters and stencilers transform his family’s parish church in Fussville and decided that was the work he wanted. He was born in Fussville on April 20, 1867. The hamlet’s church was St. Anthony the Hermit; Menomonee Falls annexed Fussville in 1958, and the Lannon-stone parish walls of 1867 still stand on the hill. At fourteen his Bavarian-immigrant parents apprenticed him to Milwaukee church decorator Louis (also called Adolph) Loeffler, then made him sit through two years of business school—the piece that later let a studio compete with Tiffany on large interiors. He studied murals with Jan Sukaczynski and, in Rome, fresco and catacomb painting with Joseph Wilpert. In 1889 he founded Conrad Schmitt Studios in Milwaukee, with an early shop at 223 2nd Street. By twenty he was taking bishops, bankers, and big houses; he recruited European artisans and, in studio lore, once walked twelve miles through a snowstorm from his father’s home to keep a promise on the Milwaukee courthouse. The firm decorated St. Mary’s Cathedral in Winnipeg, the Milwaukee Public Library, and theaters and churches across the country, with later branches in New York and Washington in the 1930s. Sons took over at his death on December 28, 1940. Artist Bernard O. Gruenke bought the firm in 1953. It still operates, now in New Berlin. The place claim is birth in Fussville—today’s Menomonee Falls—and a career that started in the Falls church that is still on the hill.

Profile · Greenfield, Wisconsin

Alan Dennis Kulwicki

Greenfield-born NASCAR owner-driver; 1992 Winston Cup champion; died in a 1993 plane crash

$3 million

Alan Dennis Kulwicki was the Greenfield engineer who won NASCAR’s Winston Cup as an owner-driver—the last to do so for nearly two decades—and the first Cup champion with a college degree. He did not come out of a North Carolina shop. He came out of Greenfield’s Polish-American neighborhoods near the Milwaukee Mile with a mechanical-engineering degree and a habit of doing the work himself. He was born in Greenfield on December 14, 1954. His mother died; the family moved in with his grandmother, who died when he was in seventh grade. A year later his only brother, Kenneth, died of a hemophilia-related illness. Father Gerry Kulwicki built engines for USAC racers. The son started karts at thirteen, raced late models at Hales Corners, and won at Slinger in 1977 with a stiffer engineered chassis. He graduated from Pius XI High School and earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from UW–Milwaukee in 1977. He sold the short-track gear, borrowed a pickup after an electrical fire, and showed up unannounced at a Charlotte shop in 1985 as an owner-driver. Rookie of the Year followed in 1986; his first Cup win came at Phoenix in 1988, capped by the “Polish victory lap,” clockwise with the driver’s window to the crowd. He turned down Junior Johnson twice. In 1992 he took the Winston Cup by ten points over Bill Elliott at Atlanta in the “Underbird,” then the closest margin in Cup history, after leading 103 laps and nursing a half-can fuel stop when a broken gearbox forced fourth-gear pit exits. He always raced with a St. Christopher medal in the car. On April 1, 1993, a Hooters flight iced up near Blountville, Tennessee; he was thirty-eight. That January four to five thousand people packed Greenfield High’s gym for Alan Kulwicki Day. The park at Cold Spring and 108th still carries his name.

Profile · Greenfield, Wisconsin

William J. Radler

Landscape architect and rose hybridizer who created the Knock Out rose in his Greenfield basement; longtime director of Boerner Botanical Gardens

$1 million

William J. Radler is the landscape architect who germinated America’s best-selling landscape rose under fluorescent lights on a ping-pong table in a Greenfield basement, with milk jugs catching the runoff. The Knock Out rose turned a parks career into a breeding empire without ever leaving the two-acre yard he called the Radler Rosarium. He earned a B.S. in landscape architecture from UW–Madison, then spent twenty-six years with Milwaukee County Parks, including thirteen as director of Boerner Botanical Gardens. He retired early in 1994 to breed full time from the Greenfield house he had built in 1983. Each year he made 500 to 1,000 crosses, grew 300 to 500 seedlings, and culled ruthlessly for disease, winter, and neglect in what he called rose boot camp. The survivor, ‘Radrazz,’ won the All-America Rose Selections award for 2000 as The Knock Out Rose: self-cleaning, black-spot stubborn, and blooming from frost to frost. Garden-club and botanic-garden copy puts worldwide sales above 90 million. His first royalty check, $60,000, was more than he had ever earned on salary. He patented dozens of varieties, formed Rose Innovations, LLC in 2002, and in 2013 pledged $1 million to the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin. Tours still run with the Greenfield Beautification Committee. He did not move to a rose capital; the roses moved out of Greenfield.

Profile · Greenfield, Wisconsin

Dan Nimmer

Jazz pianist; raised in Greenfield, Greenfield High class of 2000; Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis Quintet since 2005

$1 million+

Dan Nimmer has held the piano chair in Wynton Marsalis’s quintet and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra since 2005—the Greenfield kid who started on a hundred-year-old family upright and ended up the band’s homecoming pianist when Marsalis plays Milwaukee. The suburb is not in the solos. It is in the first instrument. Most bios put his 1982 birth in Milwaukee; he has said plainly that he grew up in Greenfield and graduated from Greenfield High School in 2000. The piano at home was a Hofner inherited from an aunt, out of tune, “kinda like thunder” a couple of octaves below middle C. He started by ear around age ten, took classical lessons with Barbara Bunge, then, at fifteen, jazz with Mark Davis at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. His parents drove him to Milwaukee clubs until he was sitting in; saxophonist Berkley Fudge became a mentor. He lasted two years at Northern Illinois, got busy on the Chicago scene, quit school, and moved to New York in January 2004. A year later Wess Anderson—subbing at a Brooklyn jam—recommended him to Marsalis. Nimmer played at Marsalis’s apartment around New Year 2005, joined the quintet in March, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in August, and has been the piano chair ever since. Father Jeff Nimmer, a hobby drummer, has said Dan heard his calling sitting on that honky-tonk bench. When the Journal Sentinel covered a Marsalis Milwaukee date in 2014, it still called him a Greenfield grad. The raise is the tie.

Profile · Greenfield, Wisconsin

Bob Wieland

Greenfield High four-sport letterman; Vietnam combat medic and double amputee; walked across America on his fists; Packers strength coach 1990–91

$500,000+

Bob Wieland turned a combat wound into a public life as Mr. Inspiration, walking across America on his fists after losing both legs in Vietnam. A Greenfield High School southpaw in the class of 1964 who lettered in four sports, he was being looked at by the Philadelphia Phillies when the draft board intervened. He went briefly to Wisconsin, then into the Army as a medic with the 25th Infantry Division. On June 14, 1969, in Vietnam, he stepped on an 82-millimeter mortar rigged as a mine while trying to reach another soldier. He has said he was declared dead and zipped into a body bag until someone saw it move. Both legs were gone above the knee. He rebuilt strength with a personal-best bench press of 507 pounds, then set out to walk across the country on his hands. According to the Los Angeles Times the day he finished, the journey covered 2,784 miles from Knott's Berry Farm on September 8, 1982, to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on May 14, 1986, lasting three years, eight months, and six days. He met Ronald Reagan that morning; the president called him Mr. Inspiration. People magazine later named him one of the six most amazing Americans of twenty years. He served as a Packers strength and motivation coach in 1990–91, finished Ironman Kona as a double amputee, and came back so Greenfield could put his name on a baseball field. He now lives at the Wisconsin Veterans Home at King.

Profile · Greenfield, Wisconsin

Tyler Christopher Herro

NBA guard; raised in Greenfield, Whitnall High School star; 2021–22 Sixth Man of the Year

$104 million

Tyler Christopher Herro is the Greenfield-raised shooting guard whose jump shot was built before dawn. He was born on January 20, 2000 (Milwaukee on league records; Greenfield in local bios), and raised in Greenfield. His father, Chris, a garbage and snow-plow operator whose own high-school career ended on a torn ACL, coached the YMCA teams from first grade and pushed hard until Jennifer Herro texted him to ease up. When Whitnall High School's gym opened at six, father and son were there; when they wanted earlier, they drove to the Princeton Club in New Berlin for 5:30 a.m. sessions. As a Whitnall senior he averaged 32.9 points and 7.4 rebounds, topped 2,000 career points, and earned first-team all-state honors. He committed to Wisconsin, then de-committed after John Calipari walked into the Whitnall gym in 2017. One Kentucky season followed. Miami selected him thirteenth overall in 2019. He won NBA Sixth Man of the Year in 2021–22 and kept hosting camps back home. Whitnall retired his number 14 on February 3, 2023. In June 2026 the Milwaukee Bucks acquired him in the trade that sent Giannis Antetokounmpo to the Heat, a hometown return that opens a new chapter rather than rewriting the childhood. The Greenfield claim is raise and Whitnall. The childhood is a plow-truck dad and a high-school gym that never opened early enough.

Profile · Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Golda Meir

Raised Milwaukee 1906–1921 (arrived at eight from the Russian Empire); Fourth Street School, North Division High, Milwaukee Normal; last hometown visit as Israeli PM Oct. 3, 1969; died Jerusalem, Dec. 8, 1978

$250,000

Golda Meir was the Milwaukee-raised Zionist who signed Israel’s declaration of independence and later became the country’s prime minister. Born Goldie Mabovitch in Kyiv in the Russian Empire, she arrived in Milwaukee in 1906 at eight and grew up on Walnut Street, already minding her mother’s grocery while English was still new. When the city required children to buy brand-new schoolbooks, the ten-year-old rented a hall with classmate Regina Hamburger, recited Yiddish poems for the American Young Sisters Society, and later called the Packen Hall fundraiser her first “public work.” She was Fourth Street School valedictorian, fought her parents’ marriage plans to attend North Division High, fled briefly to Denver for Zionist parlor debates, then came home to clerk at Schuster’s, teach Yiddish at the Abraham Lincoln House, and punch a Milwaukee Public Library clock for twenty cents an hour. She married Morris Meyerson on Christmas Eve 1917 on the condition they would go to Palestine, and they sailed on March 28, 1921. Milwaukee kept the receipts: the Fourth Street School and the UWM library both carry her name. City Librarian Charles McLenegan had hired her as a substitute library assistant on March 15, 1917; she resigned, worked six weeks at the Chicago Public Library, returned at a higher rate, and left the system for good on May 13, 1918. The 1920 city directory still listed her at Gridley Dairy. Every house she, her parents, and Morris lived in was later razed for urban renewal and what became I-43. On October 3, 1969, as Israeli prime minister, she slipped a four-hour hometown stop into a White House itinerary, hugged children in her old classroom, and told the city it was where she learned what freedom felt like. She died in Jerusalem on December 8, 1978. The Milwaukee years are the raise, not a birth certificate: the grocery, the school, the library, and the 1969 return are the claim.

Profile · Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Herb Kohl

U.S. senator from Wisconsin (1989–2013) and longtime Milwaukee Bucks owner; born and lifelong Milwaukee; died Dec. 27, 2023

$630 million

Herb Kohl was the Milwaukee grocery heir who bought the Bucks to keep them in town, served four terms in the U.S. 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.

Profile · Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Gene Wilder

Actor and comedian born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee; Washington High School class of 1951

$2.7 million

Gene Wilder was born Jerome "Jerry" Silberman in Milwaukee on June 11, 1933, and grew up on the city's west side in Sherman Park and along North 51st Boulevard. A Milwaukee doctor told eight-year-old Jerry never to argue with his mother, Jeanne, who had rheumatic heart disease, then added that he could make her laugh. The boy took the assignment personally. That is the origin story he later told himself, and it is almost too neat, except he told it himself. He lived on the same 51st Boulevard stretch as Herb Kohl and Bud Selig, served as vice president of the Washington High Players, cafeteria monitor, and forensics club member, and graduated with the class of 1951. His first paying role was Balthasar in Romeo and Juliet with the Milwaukee Players on April 7, 1949, at Wisconsin Avenue School. After a miserable stint at a Hollywood military academy, where he was the only Jewish boy and was bullied, he came home and got serious. He followed his sister Corinne to Iowa, then served in the Army, reached Broadway, and found Mel Brooks. Washington High's hall of fame later put him on the wall next to Kohl, Selig, and Governor Lee Dreyfus. He died in Stamford, Connecticut, on August 29, 2016. Milwaukee still knows him as Jerry. The yearbook has the proof.

Profile · Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Al Jarreau

Milwaukee-born jazz/pop/R&B vocalist; seven-time Grammy winner; Lincoln High and Reservoir Avenue

$1.065 million

Al Jarreau was the Milwaukee singer who became the only vocalist to win Grammy Awards in jazz, pop, and R&B. He liked to remind interviewers that there was a guy named Al Jarreau who came from Milwaukee, from the other side of the tracks—Reservoir Avenue in Bronzeville on the north side, and Lincoln High. He was born in Milwaukee on March 12, 1940, the fifth of six children. Mother Pearl played church piano; father Emile, a Seventh-day Adventist minister, sang. Al never learned an instrument properly—he joked he could not get the baseball glove off his left hand long enough for piano lessons—so he learned harmony walking to school. A doo-wop quartet sang at Lapham Park and on the way to class. At Lincoln he was student-council president and later governor of Badger Boys State; choir director Bob Badune and band teacher Ron Davillers brought Broadway shows such as West Side Story and South Pacific into a north-side public school. He took a psychology degree at Ripon, a master’s in vocational rehabilitation at Iowa, and still came home on breaks to work the Pfister’s Columns with Hungarian pianist Les (Laszlo) Czimber, after earlier rooms at the Driftwood Lounge. In San Francisco he counseled rehab clients by day and sang with George Duke by night until the night job won. Career tallies put him at seven Grammy wins and twenty-three nominations. He kept returning for Summerfest, Potawatomi, and a scholarship named for Lincoln teacher Tom Cheeks, with grade-school classmates in the front row. He died in Los Angeles on February 12, 2017, the morning of the Grammy telecast, days after announcing he was done touring.

Profile · Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Jane Bradley Pettit

Lifelong Milwaukee philanthropist; Allen-Bradley heiress; Bradley Center and Milwaukee Art Museum major donor; died River Hills, 2001

$250 million

Jane Bradley Pettit was the Milwaukee philanthropist whose gifts reshaped the city’s skyline of civic buildings. Born Margaret Jane Sullivan in 1918, she was adopted by Allen-Bradley co-founder Harry Lynde Bradley after he married her mother, Margaret “Peg” Blakney Sullivan, in 1926, and her name became Jane Bradley. She was educated at Milwaukee girls’ schools including the Lake School, Milwaukee-Downer Seminary, and Milwaukee University School. When Rockwell bought Allen-Bradley in 1985, the fortune that followed funded a foundation she started the same year and a string of gifts Milwaukeeans can still walk into. She put roughly $90 million toward the Bradley Center, about $20 million into a new public trade school then called the largest private gift to an American public school, and $13 million toward Santiago Calatrava’s addition at the Milwaukee Art Museum. She and sportscaster Lloyd Pettit bought the Milwaukee Admirals; she also took a stake in the Brewers. Worth magazine ranked her among America’s most generous people, and obituaries put lifetime giving above $250 million. In 2000 alone her foundation made more than 160 grants, and she helped buy Georgia O’Keeffe paintings for the museum. She credited her father’s way with factory workers, not a social calendar. The Common Council called her the city’s greatest benefactor. A first marriage to Grant Hart Messinger in December 1941 lasted seventeen months; she later married Schlitz heir David Vogel Uihlein Sr., and afterward Lloyd Pettit. She died at her River Hills home on September 9, 2001. Her foundation and schools, arena, museum wing, and trade-school gift remain the Milwaukee story of a lifelong resident who treated the city as family business.

Profile · Madison, Wisconsin

Christopher Crosby Farley

SNL/film comedian from Madison / Maple Bluff (not cousin Jim Farley, Ford CEO)

$6 million

Christopher Crosby Farley was the Madison-raised Saturday Night Live and film comic whose physical abandon made Matt Foley a national catchphrase. He was dead at thirty-three; Madison buried him a few miles from the church where the real Matt Foley said the Mass. He was born in Madison on February 15, 1964, the third of five children in an Irish Catholic house across from Lake Mendota in Maple Bluff. He wore No. 59 for the Edgewood Crusaders in 1981; teammates remembered the coach impressions on the bus more than the tackles. After Marquette he came home to work for his father at Scotch Oil, the family paving company. He could not spell asphalt. Clients loved him anyway. He did not love the work. Stand-up at the Comedy Cellar in 1985 froze him so completely he stopped going. Then he stumbled into the Ark, a ninety-nine-seat theater carved from a Brinks garage on North Bassett Street, and found the thing he was built for: other people. Within months he was inventing a motivational speaker who had not yet moved into a van down by the river, handing out two-for-one coupons on State Street, and flashing plumber’s butt when a scene went cold. Chicago, Second City, and Saturday Night Live arrived so fast that Lorne Michaels hired him without an audition. An early Matt Foley voice was already on the Ark stage in 1987; the squat came from Edgewood football coaches and from his father when angry. At Our Lady Queen of Peace, the funeral priest was Rev. Matt Foley, a Marquette rugby friend whose name Farley had borrowed. He is buried at Resurrection Cemetery.

Profile · Madison, Wisconsin

Pleasant Williams Thiele Rowland

American Girl founder; Madison origin story (later HQ in Middleton); not to be confused as a Middleton-only name

$410 million

Pleasant Williams Thiele Rowland founded American Girl in a broken-down downtown Madison warehouse in 1986 and sold it to Mattel for $700 million in 1998. She called the mix of play and history chocolate cake with vitamins. Madison is the origin story; later headquarters sat ten minutes west in Middleton. She was forty-five, a former second-grade teacher with textbook royalties in the bank, hunting Christmas dolls for two nieces and finding only Barbie and Cabbage Patch. A year earlier she had sat on a bench in Colonial Williamsburg and wondered whether history could be mailed to kids who would never get there. She bet nearly all of the $1.2 million she had earned writing reading programs, printed half a million catalogs against advice to print 100,000, and waited for the phones while packers wore mittens because the heat failed. Between September and December they sold $1.7 million; year two brought $7.6 million. Lands’ End had told her customers would not pay more than forty dollars for a doll; she priced them at eighty and sold them only by catalog. She said she had been the company’s steward, never its owner. The money rebuilt downtown Madison with her husband, printer-turned-philanthropist Jerry Frautschi—including the $205 million that built Overture Center, a gift he refused to put his name on. He died in January 2026. She remains in Madison.

Profile · Madison, Wisconsin

Eric Arthur Heiden

1980 Olympic speedskating champion from Madison / Shorewood Hills (not sister Beth Heiden)

$20,000

Eric Arthur Heiden is the Madison-born speedskater who, in nine days at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, won every men’s long-track event on the program—five individual golds—and then walked away from the endorsement machine to become an orthopedic surgeon. He was born in Madison on June 14, 1958, and raised in Shorewood Hills, the village wrapped by the isthmus. His father was a surgeon; his sister Beth could also skate past anyone. They trained on Vilas Park and Shorewood rinks, and he graduated from Madison West High School in 1976. The village later put his name on a warming hut, the Heiden Haus, at the elementary-school rink so kids could come in from the ice the way he and Beth had. At Lake Placid he set Olympic records in all five distances and a world record in the 10,000 meters (14:28.13), after a bad night’s sleep following the Miracle on Ice and a breakfast of grabbed bread. He blacked out the Descente logo when the company would not sponsor him, rode the Tour de France with 7-Eleven until a concussion ended that chapter, and became an orthopedic surgeon like his father. Park City has him now. Madison still has the warming house.

Profile · Madison, Wisconsin

Aldo Leopold

Conservationist and Almanac author; Madison residence 1924–1948 (Shack is near Baraboo, not the home address)

$640

Aldo Leopold was the Madison professor whose land ethic, distilled in A Sand County Almanac, taught Americans to judge a thing by whether it preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. The Shack near Baraboo was the weekend lab; Madison was the life. He transferred to Madison in 1924 to help run the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory, the federal wood-research center, and settled into a Craftsman on Van Hise Avenue. That same year he helped designate the Gila as the first Forest Service wilderness. In 1933 the University of Wisconsin created the country’s first chair of game management and gave it to him; he had already written the textbook. In 1934 he pushed Coon Valley as the first U.S. soil-conservation demonstration area. In 1935 the family bought a worn-out farm on the Wisconsin River—usually cited as eighty acres at purchase, later expanded—and converted a chicken coop into “the Shack.” Weekends, they planted pines. As a young Burlington, Iowa, boy he had appropriated the family opera glasses for birding; as a Forest Service man in the Southwest he had once pumped lead into wolves and lived long enough to watch the green fire die in a she-wolf’s eyes and to regret it. Oxford University Press accepted the Almanac manuscript on April 14, 1948. A week later, on April 21, he died of a heart attack while helping a neighbor beat back a grass fire. The book appeared in 1949 and has sold some two million copies. The house on Van Hise is still a house. The Shack is a National Historic Landmark.

Profile · Madison, Wisconsin

Robert Marion La Follette Sr.

Fighting Bob, Wisconsin Progressive governor and senator; born Primrose, Dane County (not Madison); father of Robert M. La Follette Jr.

$7,500

Robert Marion La Follette Sr.—Fighting Bob—was Wisconsin’s Progressive governor and U.S. senator, the force behind direct primaries, railroad taxes, and the Wisconsin Idea of professors writing the laws. Madison was not his birthplace; it was the adult political stage, the Maple Bluff house, and the Forest Hill grave. He was born on a Primrose farm in Dane County on June 14, 1855, lost his father before he could remember him, and arrived in Madison as a teenager with a gift for talking. At the University of Wisconsin he was a mediocre student, a vegetarian, the owner of the campus paper, and the winner of a statewide oratory contest with a speech on Iago. He financed college in part by buying and running the student newspaper, the University Press. The conversion came in 1891, when lumber-and-railroad boss Philetus Sawyer allegedly offered him money to lean on a judge who happened to be his brother-in-law. He said no, told the state, and spent a decade as a Republican heretic. He served as Dane County district attorney, then governor, then senator. In 1905 he moved to a then-sixty-acre Maple Bluff farm at 733 Lakewood Boulevard—the same year the legislature sent him to the Senate; he delayed taking the seat to finish the governorship. In 1924 he ran for president as a Progressive, took Wisconsin, and pulled nearly five million votes. He died in Washington the next June and came home to Forest Hill. The Maple Bluff house is a National Historic Landmark. In 1957 the U.S. Senate voted him one of its five most outstanding members; Wisconsin’s statue in the National Statuary Hall is his.

Profile · Green Bay, Wisconsin

Earl Louis "Curly" Lambeau

Green Bay Packers founder and longtime coach (stadium namesake); not later Packers coaches or Lambeau Field alone

$500

Earl Louis “Curly” Lambeau founded the Green Bay Packers in 1919, coached them for twenty-nine seasons, and won six NFL championships in a town that had no business keeping a big-league franchise. Green Bay did not inherit a football team; a shipping clerk invented one. He was born in Green Bay on April 9, 1898, and starred for four years at Green Bay East High before playing halfback on Knute Rockne’s first Notre Dame team in 1918. Tonsillitis sent him home for good. At twenty-one, as a shipping clerk at the Indian Packing Company, he talked president Frank Peck into five hundred dollars for uniforms, borrowed a practice lot next to the plant, and—with Press-Gazette city editor George Whitney Calhoun—launched the Packers. His father, Marcel, a contractor of Belgian descent, later helped supervise the volunteer fence around Hagemeister Park so the club could charge admission. Lambeau was the team’s first star passer, then its coach through 1949, winning titles in 1929–31, 1936, 1939, and 1944. He pioneered the forward pass in the professional game when most teams still treated it as a trick. A board fight pushed him out after 1949; he later coached the Chicago Cardinals and Washington. He entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a charter member in 1963 and died in Sturgeon Bay on June 1, 1965. Later that year the city renamed its stadium Lambeau Field.

Profile · Green Bay, Wisconsin

Anthony Marc "Tony" Shalhoub

Actor (Monk, Maisel) born and raised in Green Bay (not other Shalhoub family members in entertainment)

$3.6 million

Anthony Marc “Tony” Shalhoub is the Green Bay–born actor who turned obsessive-compulsive detective Adrian Monk into Emmy gold and later won a Tony Award for The Band’s Visit. The ninth of ten children in a Lebanese Catholic house on Doty Street, he still talks about Packers Sundays as if he never quite left. He was born October 9, 1953, and raised on the east side. His father, Joe, had come through Ellis Island in 1920 as an eight-year-old orphan from Zahle and made a living peddling Sheboygan sausage from a refrigerated truck. His mother, Helen Seroogy, a second-generation Lebanese American, kept the household chaos from tipping into mutiny. Recruited at six into a sister’s production of The King and I, Tony stood on the wrong side of the curtain at dress rehearsal and was hooked anyway. He attended Green Bay East High—where he once fell into the orchestra pit, broke a leg, and still made the year’s last play—spent a brief freshman year at UW–Green Bay (where he met Milwaukee’s Jane Kaczmarek), earned a drama degree from the University of Southern Maine, and finished Yale School of Drama in 1980. Then came Wings, Monk (three Emmys as lead), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and the stage Tony. When he graduated from Yale, Joe and Helen drove from Wisconsin; Joe wept that his own parents had been illiterate and his son now held a Yale diploma. Summers in Door County and a childhood that smelled like German sausage remain part of how he tells the story.

Profile · Green Bay, Wisconsin

Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith

Pulitzer-winning sportswriter from Green Bay (not the baseball executive or other Red Smiths)

$1,000

Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith was the sportswriter David Halberstam later called the greatest of two eras—a Green Bay kid who wrote literate columns in a trade that loved jargon and won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Green Bay East High in those years doubled as the Packers’ home field; the city later put his name on a K–8 school, and Aqueduct put it on a horse race. He was born in Green Bay on September 25, 1905, the red-headed son of produce salesman Walter P. Smith, whose wholesale firm was the third generation of a business that went under in the Depression. He hiked, hunted, and fished, worked a year as a hardware clerk to afford Notre Dame, and graduated in 1927. At East he won his first writing prize: a free copy of the three-dollar yearbook, for a humorous essay on the debating team. He never set out to cover games. Milwaukee Sentinel general assignment came first; St. Louis made him a sportswriter; then the Philadelphia Record, the New York Herald Tribune’s “Views of Sport,” and from 1971 the Times. He covered last-place Athletics for a decade without self-pity. Asked if a daily column was a chore, he told Walter Winchell in 1949 that you sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed. He died in Stamford, Connecticut, on January 15, 1982.

Profile · Green Bay, Wisconsin

Donald J. Schneider

Schneider National trucking executive raised in Green Bay (not father Al Schneider or later public-company executives)

$2.5 billion

Donald J. Schneider took his father’s Green Bay trucking firm and turned Schneider National into a national truckload carrier, betting early on deregulation and satellite tracking when most rivals still hunted for pay phones. He also sat on the Packers’ executive committee for more than twenty years. He was born in Fond du Lac on October 19, 1935—the same year his father, Al, sold the family car to buy a truck—and grew up in Green Bay on Stewart Street and then Quincy Street, attending Cathedral Grade School and Central Catholic High. He started in the shop as a mechanic’s helper, drove, paid his way through St. Norbert College, married Patricia O’Brien in 1957, served thirteen months in Korea, earned a Wharton MBA, and came home in 1961 as a manager. Named president in 1976 of an eighty-two-million-dollar regional carrier, he embraced deregulation instead of fighting it, then in 1988 signed a twenty-million-dollar-plus Qualcomm OmniTRACS contract that put two-way satellite tracking on the fleet. Schneider Logistics followed in 1993. He chaired United Way of Brown County and put the lead gift into St. Norbert’s outdoor athletic complex. He died in De Pere on January 13, 2012, after Alzheimer’s, at seventy-six, and was entombed at Allouez. The headquarters remains at 3101 South Packerland Drive in Green Bay. College and death were in De Pere; the life and company were Green Bay.

Profile · Green Bay, Wisconsin

Theodore Lawrence "Ted" Brown

Illinois chemist and Chemistry: The Central Science co-author; Green Bay childhood (not the Minnesota Vikings running back Ted Brown)

$108,455

Theodore Lawrence “Ted” Brown was the University of Illinois chemist whose general-chemistry textbook taught a generation of American undergraduates and who, as founding director of the Beckman Institute, helped invent the interdisciplinary-lab model other universities copied. Green Bay is the childhood claim: a Depression kid who asked for a chemistry set at Christmas and can still picture the little basement bench where he put it. He was born in Green Bay on October 15, 1928, and raised there through the Depression. That curiosity took him to the Illinois Institute of Technology (B.S. 1950), the Navy (1950–53), a Michigan State Ph.D. (1956), and then the University of Illinois, where a supposedly temporary teaching job became thirty-seven years. He was a physical inorganic chemist—intermolecular exchange in main-group organometallics, the unglamorous mechanics that later fed pharmaceutical work—and, more famously, co-author with H. Eugene LeMay of Chemistry: The Central Science, first published in 1977 and still a bestseller many editions later. As vice chancellor for research he helped land Arnold and Mabel Beckman’s forty-million-dollar gift, then served as founding director of the Beckman Institute from 1987 to 1993. He supervised sixty-one Ph.D. students and twenty-eight postdocs before retiring from teaching in 1993. Late in life he published historical fiction and kept a climate-science blog, Science Oracle. The Beckman-Brown Lecture at Illinois is named for him; he and Audrey endowed undergraduate scholarships there. He died on March 24, 2026, at ninety-seven.

Profile · Kenosha, Wisconsin

George Orson Welles

Actor, director, and broadcaster; born in Kenosha on May 6, 1915

$400,000

George Orson Welles was Kenosha's most famous son and spent almost no childhood being a son of Kenosha, a joke he never tired of telling. He was born on May 6, 1915, in an upstairs flat at 6116 Seventh Avenue, across from Library Park, and named for Kenosha lawyers in the family tree, including great-grandfather Orson S. Head. His father, Richard Head Welles, made bicycle-lamp money and worked at American Brass; his mother, Beatrice Ives, was a concert pianist. The marriage cracked, and the family moved to Chicago around 1919. He returned at nine for his mother's funeral, a bleak visit that later colored every rude thing he said about the town. Todd School, the Mercury Theatre, The War of the Worlds in 1938, and Citizen Kane in 1941 at age twenty-five followed. The career that ate studios for breakfast still could not finish The Other Side of the Wind in his lifetime. In a 1937 letter to a Kenosha congressman he called the city "vital and charming" and himself "almost belligerently Midwestern, and always a confirmed badger." Decades later he told Milwaukee-born scholar Joseph McBride he was not ashamed of Wisconsin, "just of being from Kenosha. It's a terrible place." He died in Los Angeles on October 10, 1985. The Seventh Avenue duplex remains a private house; the historical marker stands on the park side. Kenosha keeps the birth certificate and the quarrel.

Profile · Kenosha, Wisconsin

Charles Williams Nash

Nash Motors founder and Kenosha industrialist (not born in Kenosha; Cortland, Illinois origin)

$43 million

Charles Williams Nash was the orphan who rose to president of General Motors, walked away from a million-dollar salary, and then bought Kenosha’s Jeffery plant to put his own name on the hubcaps. He is a Kenosha industrialist by adult life, not by birth. He was born in Cortland, Illinois, on January 28, 1864. Indentured to a Michigan farmer after his parents split, he ran away at twelve, learned carpentry, and later stuffed cushions for a dollar a day at Billy Durant’s carriage works in Flint. He rose to the GM presidency, then quit when Durant recaptured the company, saying a million dollars a year was “more than a man’s worth.” In August 1916 he put five hundred thousand dollars down for the Thomas B. Jeffery Company of Kenosha—Ramblers, a lakefront plant, and a house at 6221 Third Avenue thrown in with the deal—and in 1917 the first Nash rolled out of the old Rambler works. He kept the books tight and the slogan simpler: “Give the customer more than he has paid for.” World War I briefly made him the world’s largest truck builder, with 11,490 four-wheel-drive Quads for the Army in 1918. By the late 1920s Nash was a top-selling independent employing thousands in a city that would remain an AMC town long after he was gone. He lived on Third Avenue until about 1935, merged with Kelvinator in 1937, handed the wheel to George Mason, deeded the house toward Kemper Hall in 1938, and died in Beverly Hills on June 6, 1948. The jobs stayed until Chrysler wound the Kenosha plant down decades later.

Profile · Kenosha, Wisconsin

Christopher Latham Sholes

Typewriter pioneer whose Kenosha claim is the anti-hanging editorial years (typewriter/QWERTY are Milwaukee)

$12,000

Christopher Latham Sholes is remembered nationwide for the typewriter and QWERTY, work he did later in Milwaukee. Kenosha’s claim is earlier and sharper: as editor of the Telegraph he helped abolish capital punishment in Wisconsin after witnessing a botched hanging. He was born in Pennsylvania on February 14, 1819, came west as a printer, ran his brothers’ Green Bay paper, and then, at a brother’s bidding, founded the Southport Telegraph when the lakeshore town was still called Southport (renamed Kenosha in 1850). He lived there with Mary Jane McKinney until about 1857, served as a state senator and Free Soiler, and was among the rare 1856 legislators who refused a railroad bribe. On August 21, 1851, two to three thousand people watched John McCaffary, who had drowned his wife in a cistern, hang a mile south of downtown. The drop failed; McCaffary strangled for something like twenty minutes. Sholes wrote that the crowd had been “indulged in its insane passion for the sight of a judicially murdered man,” and hoped it was Wisconsin’s last such disgrace. He won a State Assembly seat. On July 12, 1853, the governor signed abolition. McCaffary remains the first and last person executed under Wisconsin law. The typewriter years (1867–73) and QWERTY belong to Milwaukee. He died in Milwaukee on February 17, 1890.

Profile · Kenosha, Wisconsin

Reinhold Richard "Reince" Priebus

RNC chair and Trump White House chief of staff; raised in Kenosha County / Pleasant Prairie (born Dover, N.J.)

$1.16 million

Reinhold Richard “Reince” Priebus rose from a Kenosha County childhood to Wisconsin Republican Party chair, Republican National Committee chairman, and White House chief of staff. The Wisconsin Legislature’s 2011 joint resolution congratulating him as RNC chair stated as fact that he was raised in Kenosha. He was born in Dover, New Jersey, on March 18, 1972, lived briefly in Netcong, and left for Wisconsin at seven. Pleasant Prairie elementary, Lance Junior High with a briefcase, and Tremper High in Kenosha (class of 1990) framed the raise: a white brick ranch at the end of a long Pleasant Prairie driveway, a father who was a union electrician for Racine schools, and a mother, Dimitra, Greek by way of Sudan, selling real estate. He revived the Young Republicans at Tremper in a union town that still built cars, then went to UW–Whitewater (student-body president, 1994) and the University of Miami Law School (1998). After a Milwaukee firm he ran the only race of his career: the 2004 Kenosha state Senate seat, spending some $300,000 and losing 52–48 to Democrat Bob Wirch. He became the youngest Wisconsin GOP chair in 2007, RNC chairman from 2011 to 2017, and White House chief of staff for 192 days in 2017—January 20 to July 31—the shortest modern tenure in the permanent job. Pronounce it like “pints freebus.”

Profile · Kenosha, Wisconsin

Alan Dante Ameche ("The Horse")

Heisman-winning fullback from Kenosha (cousin of actor Don Ameche; birthplace sometimes disputed as Italy vs. Kenosha)

$20 million

Alan Dante Ameche—“the Horse”—was Wisconsin’s first Heisman Trophy winner and the Baltimore Colts fullback who scored the overtime touchdown in the 1958 NFL Championship, the sudden-death game still called the greatest ever played. Kenosha raised the name; Madison and Baltimore made the legend. Standard references place his birth in Kenosha on June 1, 1933, as Lino Dante Amici in an Italian immigrant factory household that spent a stretch of his early childhood back in Italy. At sixteen he decided the name was not tough enough and became Alan. In 1950 at Bradford High he scored 108 points for an undefeated Kenosha team that put up more touchdowns than its opponents scored points. He also set city records in the 100, relays, and shot put. At Wisconsin he played both ways in the single-platoon era, ran for 133 yards in the Badgers’ first Rose Bowl (1953), and in 1954 won the Heisman as a fullback—almost never the position that takes that trophy. Teammates called him the Horse because he worked practice the way a draft animal works a field. Baltimore drafted him third overall. He was NFL rushing champion and Rookie of the Year in 1955, then the overtime hero of 1958. An Achilles injury in 1960 ended the playing career at twenty-seven. With Gino Marchetti and two friends he opened a hamburger stand that became Gino’s, hundreds of shops, later sold to Marriott. He handed his Heisman to Wisconsin at a 1984 halftime and died in Houston on August 8, 1988, of a heart attack, at fifty-five. He was a cousin of Kenosha actor Don Ameche—different famous Ameche, same town.

Profile · Racine, Wisconsin

Herbert Fisk Johnson III ("Fisk")

Fifth-generation chairman and CEO of S.C. Johnson & Son; born Racine; Forbes lists residence as Racine

$4.5 billion

Herbert Fisk Johnson III, known as Fisk, is the fifth-generation chairman and chief executive of S.C. Johnson & Son, the privately held consumer-products company still based in Racine. Born in Racine on May 19, 1958, he grew up inside a family firm that began when Samuel Curtis Johnson, a parquet-flooring salesman for Racine Hardware Manufacturing, bought the flooring line in 1886 and found that customers wanted paste wax more than floors. When his son Herbert Fisk Sr. joined as partner in 1906, the letterhead became S.C. Johnson & Son. The company remains private, still on Howe Street, and is not to be confused with Johnsonville sausage or Johnson Controls. Fisk earned four degrees at Cornell University and returned to Racine to run the business. The headquarters campus he inherited is the one his grandfather H.F. Johnson Jr. commissioned from Frank Lloyd Wright: the 1939 Administration Building and the 1950 Research Tower, now a National Historic Landmark that employees still use. In 2006 Fisk dove Manokwari Bay in Indonesia and located the wreck of the Sikorsky S-38 that had carried H.F. Jr. to Brazil in 1935 in search of carnauba palm; a replica of that flying boat hangs in Fortaleza Hall. Brands including Windex, Raid, Off!, Pledge, and Ziploc made the company global while the letterhead stayed Racine. In January 2017 he and his siblings pledged $150 million to Cornell to name the SC Johnson College of Business. Forbes lists Fisk and three siblings as shareholders who together own a majority of the company, with mid-2020s revenue estimated around $11.4 billion, and has placed his fortune near $4.5 billion with residence in Racine. The city claim is birth, lifelong company base, and the Wright campus that still defines Howe Street.

Profile · Racine, Wisconsin

Jerome Increase Case

Founder of J.I. Case Company; three-term mayor of Racine and Wisconsin state senator

$5 million

Jerome Increase Case was the New York-born manufacturer who made Racine synonymous with farm machinery and put an eagle on the company letterhead. He was born in Williamstown, New York, on December 11, 1819, came west with a threshing machine in 1842, founded the works in Rochester, Wisconsin, and moved the plant to Racine in 1844. By the Civil War, with farms short of men and the Union hungry, he was selling more threshers than anyone. In 1863 he organized J.I. Case Company with Massena Erskine, Robert Baker, and brother-in-law Stephen Bull. The town later called itself the Machine Shop of the World; Case was why the phrase did not sound like a joke. Voters made him mayor in 1856, 1858, and 1860, then sent him to the Wisconsin Senate for 1865–66. In 1865 he watched the 8th Wisconsin come home with Old Abe, the bald eagle of thirty-eight battles, and put the bird on the company trademark. He later bred trotters at Hickory Grove Farm. His favorite, a black gelding named Jay-Eye-See, a pun on the initials, became the first 2:10 miler at Narragansett Park in 1884 after Case bought the youngster from Col. Richard West near Lexington, Kentucky. When the horse died in 1909, the New York Times ran an obituary from Racine. Case died in Racine on December 22, 1891. There is still a Jay-Eye-See Avenue off Jerome Boulevard, and the lakefront historical marker still calls him inventor, manufacturer, mayor, senator, and a founder of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

Profile · Racine, Wisconsin

Fredric March (Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel)

Two-time Academy Award-winning actor; born Fred Bickel in Racine

$2 million

Before he was Fredric March he was Fred Bickel, a hardware man's kid from Racine who became a two-time Academy Award winner and a Tony-winning stage actor. He was born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel in Racine on August 31, 1897, attended Winslow Elementary and Racine High School (class of 1915), and lived at 1635 College Avenue. He was class president at Winslow, at Racine High, and later as a senior at Wisconsin. After a bank-teller job at Manufacturers National on the northwest corner of Fifth and Main, meant to cover tuition after his father John's setback, he made Wisconsin, served as an artillery lieutenant, and tried to be the banker his family understood. An emergency appendectomy in New York ended the experiment. On New Year's Day 1924 he took a shortened form of his mother Cora Brown Marcher's maiden name and became March, one d, on purpose. Hollywood got a freelancer who would not stay under contract long enough to be owned. He won Best Actor for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931 film, awarded in 1932), still the only Best Actor Oscar for playing a monster, in a tie with Wallace Beery, and again for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946 film, awarded in 1947). He won the first Tony for Best Actor in a Play for Years Ago in 1947, the same season as the second Oscar, then another Tony as James Tyrone in the original Long Day's Journey into Night. He singled out Best Years as his favorite film role and O'Neill's Tyrone as his favorite stage part. The July 14, 1934, Racine Journal Times advertised Death Takes a Holiday as if the boy from College Avenue might still buy a ticket. He died in Los Angeles on April 14, 1975. Racine kept the directory listing and the house on College Avenue.

Profile · Racine, Wisconsin

Sophie Mary Kurys ("Flint Flash," "Tina Cobb")

Racine Belles stolen-base star of the AAGPBL; Flint-born, Racine-made at Horlick Field

$50 a week

Sophie Mary Kurys—the “Flint Flash”—was the Racine Belles star who stole bases the way other players hit singles, and whose 1946 season still reads like fiction. Allocated to Racine at seventeen from Flint, Michigan, she asked “God, where’s Racine?” on assignment day at Wrigley Field, then spent eight seasons making Horlick Field the place to watch a runner in a skirt. Born in Flint on May 14, 1925, she was scouted by John Gottselig in an April gym while snow flurries fell outside; she showed up in a skirt and sweater with a glove. At 5-foot-5 and about 120 pounds she led the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in stolen bases seven straight seasons. In 1946 she stole 201 bases in 203 tries, scored 117 runs, drew 93 walks, won Player of the Year, and in the fourteenth inning of Game Six of the Shaughnessy final against the Rockford Peaches slid home in a dress to win Racine the championship before 5,630 at Horlick Field. Her career total of 1,114 steals stood as a professional record until Rickey Henderson passed it. When the franchise left for Battle Creek she stayed. She had already been working winters at Apex Machine Products making auto and airplane parts, became vice president, and retired in 1972 before moving to Scottsdale to play golf. In July 1950 the Belles held Sophie Kurys Night at Horlick while she sat on 1,033 career steals and was not finished. She liked A League of Their Own and said the actresses did an adequate job, then added that the real Belles had been super good ballplayers. She died in Scottsdale on February 17, 2013. Flint gave her the nickname; Racine kept her.

Profile · Racine, Wisconsin

Laurel Blair Salton Clark, M.D.

NASA astronaut killed on Columbia STS-107; Iowa-born, considered Racine her hometown; William Horlick High class of 1979

$72,000

Laurel Blair Salton Clark was the Navy physician and NASA astronaut who died when Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry on February 1, 2003. NASA’s own biography opens with an Ames, Iowa, birth certificate and then the sentence that mattered to her: she considered Racine home. She logged fifteen days, twenty-two hours, and twenty minutes on STS-107, a science flight that carried moths, roses, two University of Wisconsin experiments, and a zoology teddy bear in the gear. Born on March 10, 1961, the oldest of four, she was a nearly straight-A student at William Horlick High School, class of 1979, who joked that she was boring and then joined the Navy to test the claim. She studied zoology and medicine at the University of Wisconsin, served as a diving medical officer and as a submarine-squadron doctor in Holy Loch, Scotland, and became flight surgeon to a Marine Harrier squadron in Yuma. NASA selected her on the second try, while she was pregnant. Her husband, Jonathan, was also Navy and also NASA; their son, Iain, was eight when Columbia was lost. From orbit she mailed home lightning over the Pacific, the Aurora Australis, and—the detail Racine kept—Wind Point sticking into Lake Michigan. Foam damage to the left wing at launch, unknown to the crew, doomed the ship sixteen minutes from landing over Texas. She had been filming shipmates, smiling, minutes before. She received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor posthumously. Horlick still says her name in the same breath as the golden football in the trophy case. Birth was Iowa; hometown, by her own word, was Racine.

Profile · Appleton, Wisconsin

Harry Houdini (Erik Weisz / Ehrich Weiss)

Escape artist and magician; born Budapest March 24, 1874; Appleton childhood about 1878–1882 (father rabbi at Zion Reform); later Milwaukee boyhood

$69,955

Harry Houdini, born Erik Weisz in Budapest on March 24, 1874, told the world for decades that he was an Appleton native. He was not. The family crossed to America in 1878, when he was four, and his father, Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss, took the pulpit at Zion Reform Jewish Congregation in Appleton. Four years on the Fox River followed. In 1882 the congregation let the rabbi go, and Milwaukee received the rest of the boyhood. That Appleton stretch is the whole Wisconsin childhood claim the city can make without rewriting the birth certificate. He later took a stage name from the French magician Robert-Houdin, added an i, and built a career getting out of handcuffs, boxes, and straitjackets other people could not. Publicity and even some legal paper listed Appleton as his birthplace. A letter to his brother still dreams of the town: hunting a camera that was not there, pausing to watch their parents drink and chat. In 1904, on his first return in twenty years, Edna Ferber, then a three-dollar-a-week Crescent reporter, cornered him on College Avenue and got the interview. Appleton did not fully claim the brand until the 1980s, with Houdini Plaza, Houdini Elementary, birthday escapes downtown, and a research center. The History Museum at the Castle now holds his cuffs, picks, a straitjacket, and the paper trail. He died in Detroit on Halloween 1926. Write Budapest first; then let Appleton keep the childhood years and the relics. The hometown he invented is the one that still curates him.

Profile · Appleton, Wisconsin

Willem Dafoe (William James Dafoe)

Oscar-nominated actor; born and raised in Appleton; Appleton East and Attic Theatre beginnings

$2.875 million

Willem Dafoe is the Appleton-born actor who went from Attic Theatre children’s roles to four Academy Award nominations and a Hollywood Walk of Fame star. He was Bill when the Post-Crescent put him in the paper dissecting a dead perch with his father’s surgical kit, and Billy when the Attic needed a thirteen-year-old for A Thousand Clowns. He was born in Appleton on July 22, 1955, the seventh of eight children in a surgeon’s house near Lawrence University. Father William was the surgeon; mother Muriel the nurse; they worked together, so the five older sisters did much of the raising. A friend got lazy with “William,” and he became Willem. It stuck harder than the birth certificate. Appleton East ended abruptly after he left a communications-class tape on the machine over lunch—a satanist, a nudist, a kid who wanted pot legal. He meant to cut the wild parts. The teacher watched first. He came back from lunch to locked doors and parents already in the principal’s office. He finished diploma requirements with a Lawrence class, studied drama at UW–Milwaukee for about eighteen months, joined Theatre X, then left for New York and the Wooster Group. Four Oscar nominations followed—Platoon, Shadow of the Vampire, The Florida Project, and At Eternity’s Gate—along with the Green Goblin, van Gogh, and a Walk of Fame star in 2024. The boy in the Attic still photographs better than the goblin.

Profile · Appleton, Wisconsin

Joseph Raymond McCarthy

Born Grand Chute Township, Outagamie County, Nov. 14, 1908; Outagamie circuit judge; U.S. senator 1947–57; buried St. Mary’s Parish Cemetery, Appleton

$172,623.18

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was the Wisconsin Republican whose anti-Communist crusade made his name a lasting word in American politics. Born on a Grand Chute Township farm in Outagamie County on November 14, 1908—the fourth of seven children of Timothy and Bridget Tierney McCarthy, by the Wisconsin Historical Society count—he quit school at fourteen, raised chickens until flu and a market crash ended the flock, and clerked at Appleton’s Cash-Way grocery until the chain made him manager of the Manawa store. At twenty he talked his way into Little Wolf High School, finished four years’ work in nine months with principal A.D. Hershberger’s certification so Marquette would take him, and earned a law degree while still managing the store. He served as Outagamie circuit judge, then as a Marine, before beating Robert M. La Follette Jr. in the 1946 Republican primary and taking a U.S. Senate seat. On February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed to hold a list of Communists in the State Department; the number moved from speech to speech, but the hearings that followed did not. The Army–McCarthy spectacle of 1954 ended with the Senate’s censure that December. He died on May 2, 1957, at Bethesda Naval Hospital at forty-eight. The death certificate cited acute hepatitis; biographers have long written about alcohol. More than 17,000 people filed through St. Mary’s in Appleton before burial at St. Mary’s Parish Cemetery. Grand Chute is the township that wraps the city; Appleton is the grocery, the judgeship, and the grave.

Profile · Appleton, Wisconsin

Henry James Rogers ("H.J.")

Appleton mill and Edison-light pioneer; built Hearthstone (not Standard Oil’s Henry Huttleston Rogers)

~$0 at death; peak ~$250,000 (c.1890)

Henry James Rogers—known as H.J.—was the Appleton paper-mill and gas-company executive who organized the Appleton Edison Light Company in 1882 and lit Hearthstone, his house at 625 West Prospect Avenue, from the Fox River. Twenty-six days after Edison’s Pearl Street steam plant in New York, Appleton had hydroelectric light. Rogers ran Appleton Paper and Pulp and Appleton Gas Light. On a fishing trip he heard about Edison from H.E. Jacobs of Western Edison, formed Appleton Edison Light Company on May 25, 1882, ordered two Edison K dynamos, and bolted the first to the same water wheel that beat the pulp. When mill load made the expensive bulbs surge and die, he gave the utility its own wheel and a building on Vulcan Street. On September 30, 1882, Hearthstone, the mills, and then the neighbors had electric light; the Appleton Crescent called it “bright as day.” Architect William Waters designed the house for Cremora, who missed Baltimore—nine fireplaces, gas pipes in the walls as a hedge if Edison proved a fad. Original switches and some wiring remain. The family left for Chicago in 1893 after the Panic. Rogers died in 1896. Hearthstone is the only building left from that first winter of central hydroelectric light, and the IEEE, ASME, and ASCE treat the Vulcan Street plant as the world’s first hydroelectric central station—with Pearl Street’s steam plant as the twenty-six-day asterisk.

Profile · Appleton, Wisconsin

Robert Patrick "Rocky" Bleier

Four-time Super Bowl running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers; born and raised in Appleton; Xavier High class of 1964

$1.3 million

Robert Patrick “Rocky” Bleier is the Appleton running back who returned from Vietnam with a shattered foot and still helped the Pittsburgh Steelers win four Super Bowls. Xavier Catholic Schools later put his name on the football field and retired his number 23—the only jersey on the wall. He was born in Appleton on March 5, 1946, and raised upstairs from Bleier’s Bar at Lawrence and Walnut, where his parents, Bob and Ellen, worked the mill-town tavern and his grandfather had worked the paper mill. Bob told patrons the newborn looked like a little rock; the nickname stuck. Rocky had a paper route and captained football, basketball, and track at Xavier High, which had opened the year before he arrived. A Parade All-American, he went to Notre Dame, won a national title, and landed as a sixteenth-round afterthought in Pittsburgh. After his rookie year the Army took him; he volunteered for Vietnam. On August 20, 1969, in a rice paddy near Hiệp Đức, a rifle round hit his left thigh and a grenade he tried to jump shattered the right foot. Tokyo surgeons pulled more than a hundred pieces of shrapnel and told him to think about walking. Art Rooney sent a postcard: “Rock — the team’s not doing well. We need you.” He came back on a rebuilt foot, blocked for Franco Harris, ran for 1,036 yards beside him in 1976, and played Super Bowls IX, X, XIII, and XIV. His memoir Fighting Back became a 1980 television movie. Appleton dedicated Rocky Bleier Field at Xavier in 2007. The tavern childhood and the high-school wall are the city’s claim.

Profile · Waukesha, Wisconsin

Lester William “Les” Paul (Polsfuss)

Guitarist, inventor, and solid-body electric pioneer; born in Waukesha on June 9, 1915

$5 million

Lester William “Les” Paul was the Waukesha kid who rewired popular music. Before the Gibson that bears his name, and before the Capitol hits with Mary Ford, he was a redhead wiring phonograph needles to guitars so the crowds at Beekman’s Bar-B-Q could hear him over the clatter. He was born in Waukesha on June 9, 1915, as Lester Polsfuss. He never legally changed the Prussian family name; the stage names Red Hot Red, Rhubarb Red, and finally Les Paul were enough. As a teenager he built a disc-cutting lathe from a Cadillac flywheel, a dentist’s rubber belt, and aluminum disks so his mother could capture his radio shows. The solid-body “Log,” multitrack overdubbing, and the eight-track “Octopus” followed. After a near-fatal 1948 car crash on Route 66, surgeons set his shattered right elbow permanently at roughly a right angle so he could still cradle and pick a guitar. When pneumonia took him in White Plains in 2009, they brought him home to Prairie Home Cemetery. The county museum keeps a permanent Les Paul Experience, GuitarTown still puts public art on the streets, and the band shell in Cutler Park wears his name. For a town that once sold spring water as medicine, he is the other miracle: a hometown kid who taught the world to stack sound.

Former NFL defensive end · Pewaukee, Wisconsin

Justin James “J.J.” Watt

NFL defensive end and three-time Defensive Player of the Year; raised in Pewaukee, often listed as born in Waukesha

$130 million

Justin James “J.J.” Watt is the Pewaukee-raised defensive end who became a three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year, a Walter Payton Man of the Year, and the face of a Texans defense that made Houston care about stop-the-run football. Birth records and older bios often place his birth in Waukesha and his raise next door in Pewaukee; the high-school banners say Pewaukee either way. Hockey came first. He played travel teams that took him to Canada and Germany until money and scheduling pushed him toward football. At Pewaukee High he was a four-sport letterman and Woodland Conference Player of the Year. After leaving Central Michigan he mopped floors and delivered pizza at a Pewaukee Pizza Hut, then walked on at Wisconsin and became a first-round draft pick. His middle name honors paternal grandfather James; the family mantra from firefighter dad John was “Act like somebody.” A 2014 six-year, $100 million extension briefly made him the NFL’s highest-paid non-quarterback. Off the field he raised tens of millions after Hurricane Harvey and, after the 2021 Waukesha Christmas parade tragedy, publicly offered funeral help for victims. Brothers Derek and T.J. also reached the NFL; this page is J.J. alone. The Wisconsin claim is Pewaukee raise and schooling, with Waukesha often listed on the birth certificate.

Profile · Waukesha, Wisconsin

Donald Edward Goerke

Campbell’s SpaghettiOs creator from Waukesha (not other Goerkes tied to historic Goerke’s Corners)

$1.5 million+

Donald Edward Goerke was the Campbell Soup Company product developer later nicknamed the Daddy-O of SpaghettiOs, the canned pasta that put O’s in American pantries for generations. Waukesha raised him; New Jersey is where he died. He was born in Waukesha on August 8, 1926. At Waukesha High he played on the 1944 Wisconsin state championship basketball team, then served in the Army Air Force in World War II. At Carroll College (now Carroll University) in Waukesha he majored in mathematics, met June Marie Uthus (music), and later earned a Wisconsin MBA with a statistics focus. A Blatz market-research job came next before Campbell’s Franco-American division. In the early 1960s he was told to invent a canned pasta kids would eat without turning the kitchen into a mess. The team tried baseballs, cowboys, spacemen, and stars, then settled on the O because it survived canning, reheated cleanly, and was spoonable. They skipped a test market and shipped national with Jimmie Rodgers singing about “the neat, round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon.” Over a long career he helped create roughly a hundred Campbell products and spent decades as the company’s goodwill ambassador, signing cans, appearing on What’s My Line?, and meeting Ronald Reagan and Martha Stewart. He died of heart failure in Delran, New Jersey, in 2010.

Profile · Waukesha, Wisconsin

Michelle Lynn Thaller

NASA astrophysicist and science communicator; born and raised in Waukesha

$183,500

Michelle Lynn Thaller is the Waukesha-raised NASA astrophysicist who became one of the country's most familiar explainers of deep space. Some kids wanted ponies; she wanted the sky. Her mother says there was never a time she was not pointing at stars. Carl Sagan's Cosmos arrived when she was about ten and never left her Waukesha South High School locker. Her father taught geography at the local college and drove her to Yerkes Observatory, home to the world's largest refracting telescope, and she haunted the Milwaukee Public Museum until it felt like a second house; her tenth birthday party was held there. She graduated from Waukesha South in 1988, studied astrophysics at Harvard, and earned a Ph.D. at Georgia State on colliding winds in massive binary stars. Spitzer education and outreach work at Caltech and JPL followed. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center she served as assistant director for science communication, tasked with helping four science divisions speak clearly to the public and to one another. She became a patient, funny presence on How the Universe Works, the rare NASA scientist who can make dark matter feel like a dinner-table story. The Waukesha claim is birth, childhood, and high school. She has told Milwaukee television crews that she still feels deep gratitude for growing up there, and she continues to call the town home in interviews.

Profile · Waukesha, Wisconsin

Daniel Webster Hoan Jr.

Longtime Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, born Waukesha (not later Wisconsin politicians sharing similar names)

$12,300

Daniel Webster Hoan Jr. was Milwaukee’s Socialist mayor from 1916 to 1940—twenty-four years and ten citywide wins, the longest continuous Socialist mayoralty in American history. Waukesha produced him; Milwaukee got the sewers. He was born in Waukesha on March 12, 1881, the son of the town blacksmith and resident radical. When his father died, teenage Dan quit school, cooked in resort and fraternity kitchens, and entered the University of Wisconsin in 1901 as an adult special student who had never finished high school. He tested whether his father’s socialism was a mistake, decided it was not, and helped found a four-person Socialist Club. As counsel to the State Federation of Labor he drafted Wisconsin’s first successful workmen’s compensation law in 1909, then rode the 1910 Socialist sweep into the city attorney’s office. As mayor he practiced what came to be called sewer socialism: Garden Homes, a modern sewage plant that sold Milorganite, harbor improvements, and graft scrubbing, often without a Socialist council majority. During World War I he broke with the national Socialist anti-war line, ran draft registration, and co-chaired the Milwaukee County Council of Defense. Time put him on the cover in 1936; a 1993 Melvin Holli survey of scholars ranked him among the ten best American big-city mayors from 1820 to 1993. The Hoan Bridge still spans the harbor he championed.

Profile · Eau Claire, Wisconsin

John Robert Menard Jr.

Founder of Menards home-improvement stores; born and based in Eau Claire

$19.4 billion

John Robert Menard Jr. is Wisconsin’s hardware billionaire who never moved the headquarters out of Eau Claire. Born there on January 22, 1940, the oldest of eight in a Catholic family of teachers, he attended Regis High and UW–Eau Claire, put up pole buildings to pay for college, turned down IBM in 1963, and built a cash-and-carry lumber and hardware shop into Menards. His father, John Sr., was a university professor; his mother, Rosemary, taught grade school. First construction work came in 1958, years before Home Depot launched. The chain grew to more than 340 stores from Wyoming to West Virginia, with estimated sales around $13 billion, still privately held and still headquartered in Eau Claire. Inside the company he is famous for making even senior people punch a time clock. The white-haired “Save big money at Menards” pitchman was Milwaukee actor Ray Szmanda, not Menard himself. Racing is the other empire: decades of IndyCar, a 2019 Indianapolis 500 winner after nearly forty years of trying, son Paul in NASCAR, and fluorescent-yellow cars visible from the grandstand. Local gifts include $15 million to Luther Midelfort Hospital in 2008 and $10 million toward the John and Fay Menard YMCA tennis center. He has also been a polarizing employer, with union hostility and older environmental and labor cases on the public record. Forbes listed him at $19.4 billion on its March 10, 2026 World’s Billionaires ranking. The Eau Claire claim is birth, schooling, residence, and the plant that never left.

Profile · Eau Claire, Wisconsin

Justin DeYarmond Edison Vernon (Bon Iver)

Musician and Bon Iver founder; born in Eau Claire and still based in the Chippewa Valley

$4.3 million

Justin DeYarmond Edison Vernon is the Eau Claire musician who turned a Dunn County hunting-cabin winter into Bon Iver and then refused to let the tour bus relocate the scene. He was born in Eau Claire on April 30, 1981, graduated from Memorial High in 1999, and studied at UW–Eau Claire as a religious-studies major who was not yet ready to major in music. At Memorial he was football captain, a jazz-band kid, and a student-council type. His first band, Mount Vernon, formed after a high-school jazz camp in 1997. After DeYarmond Edison split in North Carolina amid illness, a poker wipeout, and a breakup, he spent the winter of 2006–07 at his father Gil’s hunting cabin in Dunn County, chopping wood, hunting, and stacking falsetto. For Emma, Forever Ago began as homemade CDs, caught a Pitchfork rave, and put Eau Claire on the indie map. He stayed. April Base studio in Fall Creek hosted everyone from Sufjan Stevens to Bruce Hornsby. He co-owns downtown’s Oxbow Hotel and The Lakely with local partners and, with The National’s Aaron Dessner, founded the Eaux Claires festival (2015–18; returning 2026 at Carson Park). Grammys and high-profile collaborations followed, along with a Wisconsin outline tattooed on his chest. The city did not lose him to Brooklyn; he built a scene and pointed the bus home.

Profile · Eau Claire, Wisconsin

Jake McCabe

NHL defenseman for the Toronto Maple Leafs; born in Eau Claire, Memorial High

$33 million

Jake McCabe is the Eau Claire defenseman who skated on ice his father poured in the yard and carried that backyard rink all the way to the NHL. He was born in Eau Claire on October 12, 1993, played one varsity season at Memorial High, then left for USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program and finished high school in three years. At Memorial he put up 22 points in 23 games as a freshman. Wisconsin Badgers hockey came next: a severed finger tendon as a freshman, All-Big Ten as a junior. Buffalo selected him forty-fourth overall in 2012. He captained the United States to World Junior gold in 2013, scoring three goals and three assists with a plus-nine and making the all-tournament team. His father, David, had played college hockey at Alaska Fairbanks and built the backyard rink; family construction and landscaping work helped pay the youth-hockey bills. NHL stops followed with the Sabres and Blackhawks before a 2023 deadline trade to the Toronto Maple Leafs, where he has been a top-four, stay-at-home defenseman and posted a career-high eight goals and twenty-eight points in 2023–24. Brother Andrew later won a Division III national title at UW–Eau Claire; cousin Eric Decker caught NFL passes. McCabe is the clean current-athlete hometown claim: born here, Memorial, still the name local rinks use when they tell kids it can be done.

Profile · Eau Claire, Wisconsin

Joua Bee “Joe Bee” Xiong

First Hmong American elected to U.S. municipal office; Eau Claire city council member and qeej master

$3,000

Joua Bee "Joe Bee" Xiong was the Eau Claire civic leader who became the first Hmong American elected to municipal government in the United States. He was born on August 10, 1961, in Muong Cha, Laos, served as a child soldier in the CIA-backed Secret War, crossed the Mekong, lived in a Thai refugee camp, and arrived in Eau Claire in 1980 with no English. He entered Memorial High School as a teenager who spoke none of the language and graduated at twenty-one. He studied computer science at Chippewa Valley Technical College and criminal justice at Mount Senario, later earning a master's degree. He worked as a reserve police officer, a county social worker, and director of the Eau Claire Hmong Mutual Assistance Association, and he was a clan leader. He was also a qeej master who played funerals and ceremonies and took the bamboo pipes to the 1998 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. In 1996 he won a seat on the Eau Claire City Council, the first Hmong American elected to municipal office in the country, and served two terms. A 2004 run for the Wisconsin Assembly fell short. He died of heart complications on March 31, 2007, while visiting Laos. Thousands attended a three-day traditional funeral. The legislature passed a joint resolution in his honor, and Eau Claire renamed the street he had lived on Xiong Boulevard.

Profile · Eau Claire, Wisconsin

Esther Pauline “Eppie” Friedman Lederer (Ann Landers)

Advice columnist Ann Landers; Eau Claire adult residence (not Dear Abby / Pauline Phillips, her twin)

$3.75 million

Esther Pauline “Eppie” Friedman Lederer became Ann Landers, the syndicated advice columnist whose one-liners reached tens of millions of readers. Before Chicago fame she spent roughly a decade of adult life in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, as a Presto company wife who chaired the county Democrats and worked against Joe McCarthy. She was born July 4, 1918, in Sioux City, Iowa, seventeen minutes ahead of her identical twin Pauline (“Popo,” later Dear Abby). The sisters married in a double wedding in identical dresses in 1938. After World War II both husbands worked at National Presto in Eau Claire; the twins lived about a mile apart, led parades in a Cadillac convertible, watched the Eau Claire Bears at Carson Park, volunteered for the Red Cross, and threw costume parties that local editor Marshall Atkinson later remembered as “the ten years of twins.” Pauline’s house was the bigger one. Eppie chaired the Eau Claire County Democratic Party. They left in the mid-1950s. In Chicago she won the Sun-Times contest to replace the original Ann Landers, Ruth Crowley, by sending sample copy that quoted experts, including a Supreme Court justice. Three months later her twin launched Dear Abby in San Francisco. The sisters stopped speaking. American advice culture was born, in part, in a Presto company town. She died in 2002. The Eau Claire claim is the adult stretch, not a birthplace.

Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin

Tyrese John Haliburton

NBA point guard for the Indiana Pacers; born in Oshkosh; Oshkosh North class of 2018

$106 million

Tyrese John Haliburton is Oshkosh’s most recognizable living export, the point guard who still talks about the teachers who made him do his homework. Born on Leap Day 2000, he led Oshkosh North to a 26–1 season and the program’s first WIAA Division I state title in 2018—31 points in the final, 18-for-18 from the line after halftime against Brookfield East. Recruiting services tagged him a three-star. Iowa State took the bet. Sacramento drafted him twelfth overall in 2020, then shipped him to Indiana in 2022 in a trade that now reads as a franchise-defining steal. With the Pacers he became a two-time All-Star, the 2024 assists champion, and the point guard who took Indiana to the 2025 NBA Finals. Game 1 ended on his jumper with three-tenths of a second left. Game 7 ended with a torn Achilles. The club announced he would miss all of 2025–26. He still comes home. He has hosted ProCamps at North, put Hali 1 sneakers on the boys’ team, and sponsored about $3 million in athletic-facility work at his high school. On February 5, 2026, the mayor declared Tyrese Haliburton Day. A Paris gold medal from the 2024 Olympics sits next to the Spartan banner.

Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin

Paul Howard Poberezny

Founder of the Experimental Aircraft Association; moved AirVenture to Oshkosh in 1970; died there in 2013

$108,115

Paul Howard Poberezny founded the Experimental Aircraft Association and moved its annual fly-in to Oshkosh in 1970, turning a Wisconsin city into the name the aviation world still says every July. He was born on September 14, 1921, in Leavenworth County, Kansas, not North Dakota, a mix-up that still turns up. He grew up poor in a Milwaukee tar-paper shack and taught himself to fly a rebuilt WACO glider at sixteen; his first solo was a car-towed launch that released around a hundred feet and settled into alfalfa. In 1953, from a basement in Hales Corners, he started a homebuilders’ club that became the EAA. The fly-in outgrew Milwaukee, then Rockford, and in 1970 landed at Wittman Field. EAA AirVenture is now the world’s largest gathering of its kind: hundreds of thousands of people, thousands of airplanes, a city that appears and vanishes in a week. A 1955 Mechanix Illustrated series on the Baby Ace helped sell America on building airplanes at home; he also designed the Acro Sport and the Pober Pixie. He flew more than five hundred types, logged some thirty thousand hours, and collected all seven U.S. military pilot ratings across thirty years in the Wisconsin Air National Guard and Air Force. Flying magazine ranked him No. 4 among its 51 Heroes of Aviation in 2013. His 1944 F-51D Mustang, Paul I, is at the EAA Aviation Museum. He died of cancer in Oshkosh on August 22, 2013, at ninety-one. The convention stayed.

Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin

Carl Laemmle

Oshkosh clothier (c. 1894–1906) who founded Universal Pictures; Laupheim-born immigrant; 1930s affidavit rescuer

$5.5 million

Carl Laemmle founded Universal Pictures after a dozen years as an Oshkosh clothier, and that Midwestern stretch is still the city's claim on Hollywood's early studio era. Born January 17, 1867, in Laupheim, Württemberg, he landed in New York in 1884 with fifty dollars and almost no English, was naturalized in 1889, and shocked wheat in South Dakota at $2.75 a day before the clothing job. By 1894 he was bookkeeper for Sam Stern's Continental Clothing Company on Main Street. He learned window dressing, catalogs, and the advertising that made a Midwestern clothier feel like a show. In 1898 he married Stern's niece, Recha. Oshkosh voted him one of the fifteen most eminent local businessmen in 1905. He quit anyway. In 1906 he walked into a Chicago nickelodeon and changed his life. White Front Theatre came next, then a film exchange, then a war with Thomas Edison's Patents Company, and in 1912 Universal. He built a studio-city on a San Fernando Valley chicken farm, opened it to tourists, and put The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, and All Quiet on the Western Front on the screen. He is widely credited with helping invent the movie-star system by billing Florence Lawrence and Mary Pickford by name against Edison's anonymous-player policy. In 1912 he sent a camera crew back to film Oshkosh in Motion. "Uncle Carl" nepotism at Universal was a Hollywood joke, and also how William Wyler got in the door. In the 1930s, locked out of Germany, he signed affidavits that pulled more than 300 Jews out of the Reich, many from Laupheim, until the U.S. government would not take more from him. He sold Universal in 1936 and died in Los Angeles on September 24, 1939. Chicago and Los Angeles bookend the career. The clothing-store decade on Main Street is why Oshkosh still claims him.

Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin

Lewis Wickes Hine

Progressive Era photographer of child labor and Empire State steelworkers; born and raised in Oshkosh; Oshkosh Normal School 1899

$0

Lewis Wickes Hine was the Progressive Era photographer whose pictures of working children helped build the public case for the Children’s Bureau and, later, the Fair Labor Standards Act. For the National Child Labor Committee he posed as a fire inspector, Bible salesman, or postcard vendor—whatever got him past the mill gate—and made images the country could not look away from. He also swung out over Fifth Avenue in a basket to photograph Empire State Building steelworkers. He was born in Oshkosh on September 26, 1874, and grew up above Hines’ Coffeehouse and Restaurant, the Main Street rooms his parents opened after moving from Ohio in 1871. He drew, read poetry, and watched the lumber town work. When his father died of an apparently accidental gunshot at an ironworks, the teenager left school and spent years as factory hand, woodcutter, salesman, janitor, and bank clerk. The 1898 Oshkosh woodworkers’ strike taught him what a mill did to a body. Frank Manny at Oshkosh Normal School pulled him toward teaching; after Hine finished there in 1899, Manny hired him at New York’s Ethical Culture School, put a camera in his hands, and sent the class to Ellis Island. He married Sara Rich, an 1897 Oshkosh Normal graduate, back home in August 1904. He died broke in Dobbs Ferry, New York, on November 3, 1940, after an operation; he had applied for welfare in the 1930s and lost his house. The Museum of Modern Art declined his archive; the George Eastman collection took it. Oshkosh was the birthplace, the coffeehouse childhood, and the Normal School that steered him toward the camera.

Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin

Thurman John “T.J.” Rodgers

Founder and longtime CEO of Cypress Semiconductor; born and raised in Oshkosh

$108 million

Thurman John "T.J." Rodgers is the Oshkosh-born engineer who founded Cypress Semiconductor and ran it for thirty-four years. He was born on March 15, 1948, to a General Motors car salesman and a schoolteacher who had taught radio electronics in World War II, and he grew up on Lake Winnebago playing cards for money and wiring experiments at home. At Oshkosh High School, class of 1966, he loved math, chemistry, and physics; one 1980s profile recalled a homemade "Thurm-O-Flare" that put him in the hospital. Dartmouth recruited him for football. He graduated salutatorian in 1970 with majors in chemistry and physics, then earned a Stanford Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1975 and licensed a VMOS patent on the way out. He turned down Intel because he did not want to work for Andy Grove. In 1982 he founded Cypress Semiconductor. Cypress silicon later sat behind the iPod click wheel. When the board would not rescue solar firm SunPower, he wrote a $750,000 personal check and then talked directors into buying in; SunPower later went public. Fortune once called him America's toughest boss. Away from the fab he stomped Pinot grapes at Clos de la Tech in the Santa Cruz Mountains and donated a $3.5 million wireless fermentation network to UC Davis. He still owns familiar Oshkosh names, including Ardy and Ed's, the Country Club, and T.J.'s Harbor Restaurant, and still flies home for Packers games. The chip empire was California; the origin story is Lake Winnebago.

Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard

Born Churchville, N.Y., 1839; raised on Rock River farm outside Janesville 1846–1858; taught in family one-room schoolhouse; died New York, Feb. 17, 1898

$17,000

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was the Wisconsin-raised reformer who turned the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union into a national political force and became the first woman honored in National Statuary Hall for Illinois. Born in Churchville, New York, in 1839, she was six when the family left for a Rock River farm outside Janesville, where they stayed from 1846 until 1858. She hunted, carpentered, kept the journal her mother required, and, when father Josiah went south for his health, took over his volunteer weather readings for the Smithsonian. In 1853 she talked him into building a one-room schoolhouse; she studied there and taught a term in 1858. The building still stands at the Rock County 4-H Fairgrounds and is on the National Register. Josiah sat in the Wisconsin legislature and helped put the first State Fair in Janesville. Evanston made her famous. She became the first dean of women at Northwestern, then the long-running president of the WCTU, telling the membership to “Do Everything”: the ballot, the eight-hour day, the age of consent, the global union. She logged tens of thousands of miles a year and learned to ride a bicycle in her fifties so she could write A Wheel Within a Wheel. The 1890s clash with Ida B. Wells over lynching and WCTU rhetoric in the South belongs to that same public record. She died in New York on February 17, 1898, after visiting the little brown schoolhouse shortly before the end. Rock County WCTU bought the building in 1920 to keep it from disappearing. Illinois sent her statue to National Statuary Hall in 1905; the sculptor was Helen Farnsworth Mears of Oshkosh. Janesville kept the school. That is the Wisconsin claim, and it is real: she was raised here, not born here.

Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin

George Safford Parker

Founder of Parker Pen Company in Janesville; born Shullsburg

$1 million

George Safford Parker founded the Parker Pen Company in Janesville in 1888 and turned a telegraphy teacher’s side hustle into the city’s signature manufacturer. The Lucky Curve feed made the name travel; the Main Street factory became, in period boosterism, the largest pen works in the world. Born November 1, 1863, in Shullsburg, Wisconsin, he came to Janesville to teach telegraphy, sold and repaired fountain pens on the side, and hated how they ruined shirts. He started the company in 1888, took a patent in 1889, and introduced the Lucky Curve in 1894. The first factory floor was the upper story of the Myers Grand Opera House at Milwaukee and Bluff in 1891; the firm incorporated in 1892 with W.F. Palmer as president and Parker as secretary-treasurer. He was still teaching while the first pens shipped. By 1908 a Main Street plant was drawing national notice. Janesville kept him when other towns offered deals. The plant moved to East Court and Division in 1920; at the peak Parker employed some two thousand people, second in town only to General Motors. The Duofold (1921) was his era’s flashy seller. The Parker 51—the pen Eisenhower used on the German surrender and MacArthur on the Japanese—came after his death. He resigned the presidency in 1933, stayed chairman, and died in a Chicago hospital on July 19, 1937, at seventy-three. He is buried at Oak Hill in Janesville. The high school on the city’s southwest side carries his name. European buyers took the company in the 1980s; Janesville production ended in 1999.

Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin

Carrie Minetta Jacobs-Bond

Janesville-born songwriter of "I Love You Truly" and "A Perfect Day"; first woman credited with a million-selling song

$1 million

Carrie Jacobs-Bond is the Janesville-born songwriter who put "I Love You Truly" and "A Perfect Day" into a century of American weddings and living rooms. Born on August 11, 1862, in her grandparents' house at Pleasant (now West Court) and Oakhill, she could pick out piano tunes at four and, as a girl, sat down after Blind Tom Wiggins and played his piece back to a stunned crowd. Her father died; a first marriage ended; her second husband, Dr. Frank Bond, fell on the ice in Iron River, Michigan, after a child's snowball and died in 1895. She came home in debt, sold the furniture, ate once a day, painted china, and ran a rooming house. In a Janesville apartment she and her son opened the Bond Shop, and after returning to 402 East Milwaukee Street she wrote "I Love You Truly." Publishers would not take a woman seriously, so she published herself. Opera star Jessie Bartlett Davis paid to print Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose (1901); Jacobs-Bond drew her own cover art, and the wild rose became the trademark. "I Love You Truly" made her the first woman credited with selling a million copies of a song. "A Perfect Day" (1910) sold some twenty-five million copies of sheet music. She sang for Theodore Roosevelt and later at a Harding White House dinner; Herbert Hoover called her "America's gallant lady of song." Period reports put her royalties above $1 million before the end of 1910, an earnings claim in 1910 dollars rather than a sourced estate figure. Her son, Frederick Jacobs Smith, killed himself in 1932 while "A Perfect Day" played on the phonograph; she largely stopped composing afterward. She died in Hollywood on December 28, 1946. Bond Park marks the Janesville birthplace. The songs still get requested.

Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin

Daniel Hale Williams

Surgeon who founded Provident Hospital; raised and apprenticed in Janesville as a teenager before Chicago Medical College

$8,000

Daniel Hale Williams is remembered for founding Chicago’s interracial Provident Hospital and for a celebrated 1893 pericardium repair—popularly called the first successful heart surgery—after teenage years in Janesville that turned a barber into a surgeon’s apprentice. Rock County still claims the shop-and-academy stretch, and it should. He was born January 18, 1858—some files say 1856—in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. After his father died he was apprenticed to a Baltimore shoemaker, ran, and worked west. In Janesville he took a chair at Charles Henry “Harry” Anderson’s Tonsorial Parlor and Bathing Rooms, finished school at Haire’s Classical Academy, sang tenor, and played the bass fiddle in Anderson’s orchestra. A customer, Orrin Guernsey, opened his library. Dr. Henry Palmer, Wisconsin’s former surgeon general, took him as apprentice from about 1878 to 1880. Northwestern’s Chicago Medical College gave him an M.D. in 1883. In 1891 he founded Provident Hospital in Chicago, interracial on purpose, with a nursing school that would admit Black women—Emma Reynolds, turned away from white nursing schools, was in the first class. On July 9–10, 1893, he opened the chest of James Cornish, stabbed in a fight, sutured the pericardium without transfusion or penicillin, and watched the man walk out weeks later; Cornish lived for decades. Henry Dalton in St. Louis had sutured a pericardium in 1891, unpublished; Williams published in the Medical Record in 1897. He later ran Freedmen’s Hospital under Cleveland, helped found the National Medical Association, and died at Idlewild, Michigan, on August 4, 1931. The Janesville tie is teenage years and training, not birth.

Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin

Tucker Daniel Fredricks

American long-track speedskater and three-time Olympian in the 500 meters; born and raised in Janesville

$14,000

Tucker Daniel Fredricks is the small kid from the Janesville Ice Arena who became the American 500-meter man. At 5-foot-6 he stacked World Cup medals, set a U.S. record, and made three Olympic teams without ever treating the Pettit National Ice Center as a hometown story. The ice was Janesville’s first. He was born in Janesville on April 16, 1984, and learned to skate at the city ice arena. He started on hockey skates, undersized and faster than the roster, then switched to speedskating around age eight or nine because a friend of his father’s took him. He graduated from Craig High School in 2002. In 2003 he won World Junior gold in the 500. In Calgary in 2007 he took the U.S. record down to 34.31 seconds. He collected thirty World Cup 500-meter medals and was overall World Cup 500 champion twice. Turin 2006, Vancouver 2010—where a twelfth-place finish was his best Games—and Sochi 2014 gave him three Olympics and no podium. He remains one of only two people born and raised in Janesville to make an Olympic team; the other is rower Larry Hough. He married Japanese skater Erika Seo, coached at the Utah Olympic Oval, and came home to the Janesville Sports Hall of Fame. The Gazette told the origin the way the town tells it: Saturday public skate, no grand plan, just a boy who was fast.

Computer scientist · United Kingdom

Tim Berners-Lee

Inventor of the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989 and put it in the public domain. HTML, URLs, and HTTP are his. He has spent the years since fighting to keep the web a commons.

Mathematician · London, United Kingdom

Ada Lovelace

English mathematician and writer, 1815–1852

Ada Lovelace wrote the first published algorithm meant for a machine. Working from Charles Babbage's plans for the Analytical Engine, she argued that a computer could compose music and manipulate symbols — not merely crunch numbers. She died in 1852, at thirty-six.