Herb Kohl

Origins and early life

Herbert Hiken Kohl was born in Milwaukee on 7 February 1935, the third of four children of Max Kohl, who had come from Poland, and of Mary Hiken, who had come from Russia.

Work and career

He was the child of Jewish immigrants and said he was brought up in a traditionally Jewish home; he gave his bar mitzvah speech in Hebrew at Congregation Anshai Lebowitz, and in 1948 handed all his gift money to the Milwaukee Jewish Welfare Fund. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1956, where his roommate was his neighbourhood friend Bud Selig, and took a business degree at Harvard in 1958. His father had opened a corner grocery in 1927 and built from it Kohl's Food Stores and, in 1962, the first Kohl's department store; Herb started in the family chain as a bag boy and at thirty-one was put in charge of its food retailing.

He was president of the Kohl Corporation from 1970 to 1979, through the years in which British American Tobacco bought first a controlling interest and then the rest, and he left its management once the sale was complete. In 1968, at thirty-two, he chaired the annual campaign of the Milwaukee Jewish Welfare Fund, and for many years he made the largest gift to the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. In March 1985 he bought the Milwaukee Bucks to keep the team in the city, owned them for twenty-nine years, and when he sold them in 2014 he put money toward the new arena that opened in 2018.

Recognition

Elected to the United States Senate in 1988, he served four terms as a Democrat from Wisconsin until 2013, and he gave the university the money for the Kohl Center, opened on the Madison campus in 1998. He lived to see the Bucks win the championship in 2021, rode in the lead car of the parade, and died at his home in Milwaukee on 27 December 2023, at eighty-eight.