WIWisconsin Famous People

One Senate seat, the La Follettes and Joe McCarthy

Robert M. La Follette was born in a log cabin at Primrose in Dane County in 1855, was governor from 1901, went to the Senate in 1906, and in 1924 ran for president on the Progressive ticket. He took about one vote in six nationally and carried exactly one state, his own, with its 13 electoral votes, still the best third party showing of the last century. His son Robert Jr. inherited the seat and held it until 1946, when he lost a Republican primary to a circuit judge from Grand Chute named Joseph McCarthy. That same seat then belonged to the man the Senate censured in December 1954. No Wisconsin native has ever been president. The state's other national figures came through appointment or the Capitol: William Rehnquist, born in Milwaukee in 1924, was Chief Justice from 1986 to 2005; Gaylord Nelson of Clear Lake proposed the environmental teach in that became the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970; Paul Ryan of Janesville was the 2012 vice presidential nominee and Speaker from 2015 to 2018.

Golda Meir taught school in Milwaukee

A future prime minister of Israel spent fifteen years in Wisconsin. Golda Mabovitch reached Milwaukee from the Russian empire in 1906, aged eight, organised a fundraiser at eleven to buy textbooks for classmates who could not afford them, ran off to Denver at seventeen rather than marry, came back to finish at the Milwaukee Normal School, taught in the city, and sailed for Palestine in 1921. She led Israel from 1969 to 1974, and her old Fourth Street School now carries her name. Harry Houdini told audiences he had been born in Appleton, where his father served as rabbi, though the certificate says Budapest, 1874. Laura Ingalls Wilder really was born where she said, in a log house in the woods near Pepin in 1867. John Muir arrived from Scotland in 1849 to a farm at Fountain Lake near Portage and studied at Madison before he ever saw the Sierra. Deke Slayton of Sparta became one of the Mercury Seven, and Jim Lovell, raised in Milwaukee, commanded Apollo 13.

Richland Center, Sun Prairie, Baraboo, Waukesha

Frank Lloyd Wright was born at Richland Center in 1867 and built Taliesin on his mother's family land near Spring Green in 1911, rebuilding it after two fires. Georgia O'Keeffe was born on a dairy farm outside Sun Prairie in 1887 and painted her first oils in Wisconsin light before New Mexico claimed her. The five Ringling brothers staged their first circus at Baraboo in 1884 and wintered the show there for three decades. Les Paul, born Lester Polsfuss in Waukesha in 1915, bolted a guitar neck and pickups to a length of four by four he called The Log, and the solid body electric followed. William Harley and Arthur Davidson finished their first motorcycle in a Milwaukee backyard shed in 1903. Christopher Latham Sholes worked out the first practical typewriter in the same city in 1868, keyboard layout included.

Kenosha turns out film stars

Orson Welles was born in Kenosha in 1915 and had made Citizen Kane by twenty five. Mark Ruffalo was born in the same lakefront city in 1967, which is a strong record for a place of 100,000 people. Spencer Tracy, born in Milwaukee in 1900, won the Best Actor Oscar twice in a row in 1937 and 1938. Gene Wilder was born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee in 1933. Willem Dafoe grew up in Appleton, Tony Shalhoub in Green Bay, Chris Farley in Madison, and Liberace in West Allis, where he was playing concert piano before he was a teenager. In print, Thornton Wilder was born in Madison in 1897 and is the only writer to win Pulitzers for both a novel and a play, and Edna Ferber, raised in Appleton, took the fiction prize in 1925 for So Big.

A meat packer paid for the jerseys

Curly Lambeau was born in Green Bay in 1898 and talked his employer, the Indian Packing Company, into 500 dollars for jerseys and the use of a field in 1919. He coached the team named after that firm for 29 seasons. Vince Lombardi arrived from Brooklyn in 1959 and won five championships in seven years. Eric Heiden of Madison won all five speed skating golds at Lake Placid in 1980, from 500 metres to 10,000, which no one has done before or since. Dan Jansen of West Allis fell in 1988 on the morning his sister died and finally won in 1994 at his last chance. J. J. Watt grew up in Pewaukee, and Bud Selig of Milwaukee brought the Brewers to town and then ran baseball from 1992 to 2015.

Notable people from bordering states

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