The Milwaukee Butcher Who Left $13 Million to His Old High School

He wore neat clothes but nothing flashy. He drove the same car for fifteen years. He worked behind the meat counter at Roundy's grocery store in Milwaukee, and on his days off he checked on the rental properties he quietly owned around the Merrill Park neighborhood. His friends thought he was a regular guy getting by. When Leonard Gigowski died in 2015 at the age of 90, he became the biggest single benefactor in the history of his old high school.

The Butcher Who Owned Stock

Gigowski grew up in Milwaukee and graduated from St. Francis Minor Seminary in 1943. After a stint in the military, he went to work for Roundy's grocery store as a butcher. He did something unusual for a meat cutter: he kept buying company stock and holding it for decades.

Over the years he also picked up a corner meat store, a small nightclub, a dance studio, and a handful of residential properties in Merrill Park. He never married and had no children. He rarely took a vacation, and he lived in the same modest home for most of his adult life.

What His Friends Actually Knew

Friends described him as reserved and tight with a dollar. He would jump at a bargain. He dressed decently but not expensively. Jeff Korpal, a longtime friend, said Gigowski quietly told him years earlier what he wanted to happen with the money. "He wanted to save money and give it to people more needy than he was," Korpal recalled.

Attorney Larry Haskin helped him set it up. The plan was simple: everything Leonard had saved in a lifetime of butchering, investing, and renting would go to the school that had educated him as a teenager.

The $13 Million Reveal

When the estate was settled, the numbers stunned the school. The Leonard Gigowski Catholic Education Foundation was funded with roughly $13 million, making it the largest gift St. Thomas More High School had ever received. By 2024, the foundation had grown to about $16 million in assets and had distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in scholarships. In the 2017-2018 school year alone it sent $489,000 to 131 students, covering between a third and a half of the roughly $10,800 annual tuition for each of them.

The foundation is based in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. It has no paid staff. Its officers are volunteers, and about 97 percent of its expenses go directly to scholarships. Most of the students who benefit have never heard of the quiet butcher who made it possible.

The Part Nobody Expected

When Korpal once suggested Gigowski spend a little more on himself, the old butcher waved him off. He stayed in his small home, kept his old car, kept clipping coupons. Decades of small savings, reinvested dividends, and rental cheques built up into a fortune that would outlive him by generations.

His name is now on a scholarship wall at a high school he last attended as a 17-year-old boy in 1943. He never saw that wall. He planned it that way.