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'With The Wind At His Back' Highlights Milwaukee Businessman & Philanthropist Donald Baumgartner

The last time Milwaukee businessman and philanthropist Donald Baumgartner was featured on Lake Effect was when he had just turned over his company, Paper Machinery Corporation, to his employees. However, it was far from the first time the business leader was accused of being generous.

Credit Image courtesy of Kurt Chandler/Donald Baumgartner
Donald Baumgartner at the Paper Machinery Corporation.

"I think it really started with a need to find good, qualified help in building machinery. I wanted the best, and the only way I figured I could get the best was to pay the best wage. It wasn’t so much generosity as it was selfishness," recalls Baumgartner.

READ: Milwaukee's Paper Machinery Corp. Turns Company Over to Employees

The story was inspiring to many in the area, and literally inspiring to one person in particular, Milwaukee writer Kurt Chandler. Flash forward to 2018 and Chandler has finished chronicling that story — and many others in the remarkable life of Baumgartner in a new biography, called With the Wind at His Back: The Charmed and Charitable Life of Donald Baumgartner

The book details Baumgarter's business and life adventures — from his support of many Milwaukee cultural institutions, to accepting a business award from President Ronald Reagan in the White House Rose Garden, to yachting adventures in the Atlantic Ocean.

"That's why the wind was at my back," Baumgartner laughs. "I truly had a very interesting and a very fun-filled life. I was successful early in business and I had money to give away, I had money to spend on myself, I was comfortable to say the least from a very early age. And as one door closed, another one opened for me."

Baumgartner, Chandler, and Lake Effect's Mitch Teich will talk more about the book next Monday evening at Boswell Book Company. But they first came to the studio, also joined by his wife Donna, to discuss Baumgartner's life of charm and charity: