About Us

WisconsinNative.com is co-founded by two proud Cheeseheads – David Stoeffler and Susan Lampert Smith.

David is a native of Mount Hope in Grant County in the southwestern part of the state. As far as he can recall, his first appearance in a newspaper was as the King of the Mount Hope Dairy Days Parade.

Susan hails from Fort Atkinson in Jefferson County, just southeast of Madison. She made the newspaper for the first time while in kindergarten, in a picture from the St. Joseph Church Friday Night Fish Fry, in which she appears to be stabbing Father Zander with a piece of perch.

You can’t get more Wisconsin than that.

David and Susan first met as reporters at the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, jobs that allowed them travel across the state in search of news and interesting people, places and things.

David went on to be city editor of the paper, then editor of the La Crosse Tribune, before his career took him to Nebraska, Iowa, Arizona and Missouri (plus short stints in Wyoming and New York). A strong desire to get home led him to leave his career with Lee Enterprises after 29 years and he now lives in the Coulee Region south of La Crosse, running a newspaper consulting business out of his home near Ferryville.

Susan became famous as author of the On Wisconsin column for the State Journal. She’s been to the state’s biggest fish fry, at Serb Hall in Milwaukee, and the state’s weirdest sporting event, the wood tick races held each year at a tavern on the Flambeau River deep in the northern forest. She’s regaled readers with the “blessing of the bock” beer in Milwaukee and the counting of sandhill cranes in Jefferson County and the dropping of the carp on New Years in the Mississippi River town of Prairie du Chien. You’ll notice consistent themes in her work – food, fish, beer and interesting people. Susan now works for the University of Wisconsin, having left the State Journal in the spring of 2008. She and her family live on an organic vegetable farm near Blue Mounds.

Both David and Susan treasure Wisconsin, its hometowns, hidden gems, roadside attractions and people that make it a unique place to live and work.

WisconsinNative.com is about sharing the love.

Susan’s Wisconsin Native columns are also appearing in these partner newspapers: