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.