Former United States Senator Herb Kohl passed away on Wednesday. He was 88.
During his lifetime, the Wisconsin native founded his own investment firm, supervised the exponential growth of his family's retail business, saved a professional basketball team from leaving Milwaukee and served four terms in the U.S. Senate.
Born and raised in Milwaukee, Kohl gained recognition for advocating on behalf of his home state. Along with his business prowess, he's equally remembered for his philanthropy, economic revitalization and his ultimate passion, basketball.
By his own account, Milwaukee meant everything to Mr. Kohl. His parents had immigrated to the city from Poland and Russia early in the 20th century, and his father, Maxwell Kohl, had opened a corner grocery store there in 1927. Herbert and his three siblings were born and raised in the city, scions of a family that in one generation had built an empire of Kohl's stores across the Upper Midwest.
In Wisconsin and surrounding states, the Kohl name became almost as familiar as Schlitz, which called itself “the beer that made Milwaukee famous.” By 1972, when the British American Tobacco Company bought a controlling interest in Kohl's, the company, still managed by the Kohl family, had 50 grocery stores, six department stores and several networks of pharmacies and liquor stores.
By 2012, Kohl's became the largest department store chain in the United States, surpassing JCPenney.
According to The Times, Kohl left the family's business empire after a nine-year stint as the president of the Kohl Corporation to pursue new endeavors:
He found two: the Milwaukee Bucks, which he bought in 1985 for $18 million and owned for 29 years of mostly losing seasons; and a seat in the Senate, which he held from 1989 to 2013, and where he became a popular advocate of working families, small-business owners and the elderly.
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He believed that government, like a family, ought to live within its means, and he supported a constitutional amendment to require Congress to pass balanced budgets. It was never adopted. But he tracked deficits that soared for most of his tenure, and he voted consistently to restrain spending.
During his time in office, Kohl adopted the mantra “Nobody's Senator But Yours” to emphasize his commitment to serving his constituents. He also made the decision to refuse money from special interest groups. Looking back on this decision in later years, Kohl said, “I stopped taking money from people because it detracted from my ability to do my job well. We need a system that gets the ugly money out of it.”
News of Kohl's death prompted heartfelt condolences from both sides of the aisle on social media, evoking memories of a more bipartisan era in Congress.
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