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.