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Kreitlow, Pat

CANDIDATE DETAILS

Affiliation

Democratic

Name

Pat Kreitlow

Address

15854 93rd Avenue
Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin 54729, United States

None

Website

None

Born

July 03, 1964 (59 years)

Contributor

Last Modifed

RBH
Oct 02, 2020 08:52pm

Tags

Caucasian - Married - Lutheran -

Info

Sharry and I came from families that struggled financially. Sharry grew up on a dairy farm near Manitowoc. I grew up with a single mom on welfare. Neither of our families could set aside cash for college. But with hard work in high school, we both earned spots at UW-Eau Claire where we met in 1983.

My parents divorced when I was seven years old. My dad, Jerry, first moved to Eau Claire in the early 1970’s while working for the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad as a union switchman, brakeman and conductor. He lived for 30 years in a home near Sacred Heart Hospital.

During the 1960’s, he was a sergeant in the U.S. Army. He worked a border patrol stint in West Germany with a nuclear-capable howitzer battalion. Later, he spent 12 years with the National Guard and ten years with the Army Reserve where he trained soldiers at Fort McCoy, at the armory in Eau Claire, and at posts in Arizona where he now lives. My stepmom, Cheryl (Plank), grew up on a farm near Gilmanton and worked as a nurse in the Luther Hospital Neurology unit until the Arizona move. She now works for a V.A. Hospital there. I have a half-brother living in Sun Prairie and a half-sister living in La Crosse.

My mom, Joan, lived in St. Paul. I was the oldest of her four kids. Mom raised us with help from AFDC welfare checks, child support payments, food stamps and other programs that assured her kids would have opportunities to break out of a cycle of poverty. It worked. I was the first kid in our extended family to graduate from college thanks to public schools, financial aid and a reciprocity agreement that allowed me to attend UW-Eau Claire and become a proud Wisconsin graduate, taxpayer and homeowner.

Health care concerns were a high priority in our family from our earliest days. My little brother Bobby was born with a heart defect that contributed to the development of cerebral palsy. Bobby had numerous health problems and he died in 1978 at the age of 9. I was 14. I’m thankful for the advances in health care that would prevent such tragic losses for families today, and I’m also grateful that –as a nation—we care for the most vulnerable among us so that families like mine weren’t traumatized even further by financial ruin. To this day, I cannot fathom that we live in a country where half of all bankruptcies stem from high medical debt. We deserve better.

After college, Sharry and I lived in Rice Lake for a year where I worked at WAQE Radio as news director. Then, after Sharry’s graduation from UW-Eau Claire, we moved to Milwaukee for four years where she attended the Medical College of Wisconsin. During that time we had our two children, Samantha and Chelsea. Talk about student debt: we used a credit card to cover the deductibles for both of their births! We used to wonder if Master Card would want possession our babies if we couldn’t make the monthly minimum payments! I worked for the first two years at WBKV Radio in West Bend, but the hours weren’t compatible with parenthood and medical school. So I worked a series of office jobs by day and waited tables by night to make ends meet.

When Sharry graduated med school, she was accepted into the ob-gyn residency program at the University of Minnesota. So we packed up our 2-year-old, our nine-month-old, and $50,000 in debt and headed to the Cities. Sharry put in 100-hour workweeks and I worked for my aunt and uncle’s electrical contracting business during those four years.

With residency completed, the opportunity finally came for us to choose where we wanted to settle down and establish our home. We’d actually made that choice years earlier. We knew we would be coming home to the Chippewa Valley. Sharry accepted an offer from the Marshfield Clinic and began her practice in Chippewa Falls. After six years away from broadcasting, I got a job at WAXX Radio. And we purchased a home on the Chippewa River near the opening to Lake Wissota.

As I said before, we wouldn’t have enjoyed this kind of success without all of those earlier jobs, the long hours, the ability to further our education, the support of family and friends, and the opportunities provided by people who recognized that a little help now can lead to big rewards later.

Now, some 25 years after being a legislative page and seeing the people who paved the way for my success, I’m hoping to become a legislator myself and ensure a new generation of students will have opportunities to become a Wisconsin success story. It’s what every kid deserves.

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