John D. Fitschen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1936. He graduated from Bryant College, Providence, Rhode Island, in 1958, with a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing and Business Administration. Upon graduation he joined the staff of the Wisco Hardware Company, a wholesale company whose stockholders were the retailers the company served. At the time John joined Wisco on a full-time basis, his father, John A. Fitschen, had been general manager of the company for some thirty years. John D. worked in Claims and Adjustments for three years at Wisco before taking a leave of absence to become Program Director for the American Management Association in New York. He returned to Wisco in 1963 as Sales Manager. In 1967 he worked for the International Division of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and spent the following year working in the Public Relations Division of the J.C. Penney Company in New York. In 1969 he rejoined Wisco this time as Assistant General Manager. When his father retired in August 1972, John was named General Manager. Fitschen took over the struggling company, though he did not know it at the time. His efforts to instill new life into the business were stymied by several factors, both internal and external, as described in these tapes. By the spring of 1975 it was determined that Wisco should be liquidated before it was bankrupt; the company was officially dissolved in November 1976. In 1975, Fitschen was working part-time as a collection agent for the Wisconsin Higher Education Aids Board, was teaching one course at the Madison Area Technical College, and was contemplating graduate study in his longtime avocation, communications.
