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| Charles McNeer. |
How the mighty have fallen. The news that Charles McNeer, 85, was accused of trying to murder his wife was stunning for anyone who remembers McNeer from his days as a top corporate and civic leader in the 1980s. Few private sector leaders had as much impact on Milwaukee.
McNeer was not a stranger to tragedy. As a November 1987 profile in Milwaukee Magazine written by Mary Van de Kamp Nohl revealed, McNeer had a hardscrabble childhood, growing up in a small coal-mining town in West Virginia. His father’s store went out of business during the Great Depression, and McNeer had a visceral feel for what poverty can do to people.
McNeer rose to become chief executive of Wisconsin Energy Corp. (the electric utility, which would later merge with the gas company to become We Energies) in 1975. But in 1978, McNeer’s 24-year-old daughter committed suicide, which devastated him. He broke down crying discussing this with Nohl.
“You expect your parents to die; you might even expect your spouse to die, but you never expect your child to die and certainly not to take his own life,” he told the magazine. “To lose a child—someone you don’t expect to lose—is like an amputation. You don’t get over it and once you accept that… that’s the first step in learning to live with it.”
McNeer said the loss of his daughter put things in perspective and made him more willing to take chances as both a corporate and civic leader. He was involved in many community projects. His image is on the ceiling of the Skylight Opera Theater, which wryly celebrates the major figures who helped create the building. His support was crucial to the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, when it built its new theater complex: McNeer gave the Rep. its Wells St. Power Station for nothing.
But while McNeer worked on the kind of “bricks and mortar” projects you often find corporate leaders favoring, he also was greatly concerned with social issues and helped push the Greater Milwaukee Committee to move toward taking on these kinds of softer but more intractable issues.
The outstanding example of this was McNeer’s leadership in helping to create the Greater Milwaukee Trust, a partnership between Milwaukee Public Schools and business leaders. (A November 1994 feature story by the magazine, which I co-wrote, tells the behind-the-scenes story.) McNeer felt the schools were crucial not just to educating future workers but also to assuring that central city youth had productive lives. The Trust oversaw a Teacher Awards Program and a One on One mentoring program, through which many business people did individual mentoring of MPS students. The latter cost some $400,000 a year to implement.
But business leaders were not happy about the costs. So McNeer, who had just stepped down from GMC board chair to a parallel position with the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, found a solution. He proposed a hike in the membership dues for MMAC dues. But some MMAC board members resisted. So he then hit on the idea of selling the MMAC’s credit bureau, which generated a huge windfall, enough to create a $13.5 million college scholarship fund for graduates of MPS.
But as soon as McNeer finished his term as MMAC chairman, support for the Trust and its mission waned. Many business leaders moved toward supporting school choice, abandoning the idea of supporting public schools. In retrospect, the early years of the Greater Milwaukee Trust were the high point in business support of MPS, and this was largely due to McNeer.
McNeer was not a glad hander and not adept at small talk. He had a kind of melancholy reserve – even before the horrifying death of his daughter. Now comes more tragedy. The criminal complaint indicates McNeer said he tried to kill his wife, Ann, and then commit suicide because his health was failing and he didn’t think she could live without him. The couple has been married for 62 years. What a heartbreaking story.
Bad News for GOP?
The ongoing recall elections of nine state senators are uncharted territory, politically speaking. Only 19 states allow the recall of legislators, and no state has ever had so many legislative recalls at once, much less in the middle of the summer, when elections are typically not held. So it’s difficult for anyone to make predictions.
Perhaps the only certainty is that the elections will be about turnout. Democrats were motivated in the 2008 presidential election, so Barack Obama won big in Wisconsin. Republicans were motivated in the 2010 gubernatorial election, so Scott Walker and Republican legislators won big.
The Tuesday Democratic primaries, as a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story reports, had a high turnout of Democrats. That verifies what might have been suspected, that anger over the Republican’s anti-union law will motivate Democrats to turn out at the polls.
It remains to be seen if Republicans will be just as energized about supporting their legislators. But those defending the status quo are typically not as motivated as those demanding change. That could be bad news for all nine senators facing a recall. But because six of the nine are Republicans, you can bet the GOP is very worried.
The Buzz
-McNeer, by the way, earned $351,000 a year as CEO and board chair of Wisconsin Energy Corp. in the mid-1980s. The current CEO of We Energies, Gale Klappa, earns $13.9 million – 39 times more than McNeer did. Meanwhile, average salaries at the company have probably risen, at best, at the rate of inflation since the mid-1980s. Yet no one would ever argue that McNeer was a poor CEO or that the salaries of that day weren’t high enough to attract top-rate talent.
