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Biography/History
The Founding Industries of Wisconsin Project was started in 1987 by three Milwaukee
businessmen: Theodore Friedlander, marketing consultant and former Vice President of the
Phoenix Hosiery Company; John C. Geilfuss, former Chairman of the Marine National Exchange
Bank & Marine Corporation; and Edward Van Housen, Executive Vice President of the
Marshall & Isley Bank. The three were concerned that a great deal of historical
information about Wisconsin companies was in danger of being lost or destroyed. They
established an organization, the Founding Industries of Wisconsin, to perform five
functions:
- to identify firms founded in Wisconsin--whether defunct, currently in operation, or
now the division of a larger corporate entity--that employed 100 or more people at some
point in their existence;
- to query those firms and/or surviving stakeholders with a prepared questionnaire and
to solicit documents and artifacts for preservation in an organized archive;
- to gather detailed financial and other information from financial reporting sources
and materials in various archives;
- to make this information available in an organized form for researchers;
- to indicate the location of materials about companies in specific repositories and
provide a current statewide inventory.
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