When Peter Friedrich arrived at UW–Madison, his path was clear in his mind.
“I came to UW to be Walter Cronkite or Dick Butkus,” quips Friedrich, who grew up an hour or so away from Madison in Lake Geneva.
The latter went by the wayside in his freshman year, when he discovered Big Ten football moved a little too quickly for his skillset. The former path proved a much better fit: Friedrich quickly landed a gig stringing for the Janesville Gazette, covering high school football, baseball and basketball games. It was a precursor to the lengthy career Friedrich would eventually enjoy in journalism and direct mail marketing.
As part of Day of the Badger 2024, UW–Madison’s annual day of giving, Friedrich and his wife, Glenda, are making a generous donation toward a $16,000 matching gift opportunity for the College of Letters & Science’s Annual Fund. Their gift will support key student programs and create student experiences within the College.
“I thought it was it was important to give back because UW had meant so much to me,” Friedrich says. “I think STEM education is incredibly important for this country. But so are a lot of the other disciplines within Letters & Science. And we can't lose that part of us. We can't just be concerned only with how the numbers add up. We need to be concerned with the concepts of humanity that that we convey with words and be able to study those things, and really understand them.”
After graduating in 1973 with his journalism degree, Friedrich spent the front part of his career scaling the newsroom ladder, starting as a copy editor with the Palm Beach Post and eventually becoming the managing editor of the Mesa Tribune in Arizona.
“The great thing about being a newspaper reporter is that your life is 95% boredom and 5% sheer panic,” Friedrich says.
Soon afterward, Friedrich pulled a career pivot, shifting to the direct mail wing of Cox Enterprises, the media chain that owned his newspaper. He spent the next three decades managing in the direct mail space, working for companies like Valpak and Pitney Bowes.
“People sometimes look down on direct mail but it's a very effective marketing tool and it still is today,” says Friedrich. “Even with the Internet and all the wonderful things that it can do.”
Friedrich retired in 2017, but he still thinks often about the experiences he had at UW as an undergraduate, as well as the things he learned at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and how they have helped him navigate his career. In particular, he appreciates the sense of skepticism he acquired as a student journalist.
“Skepticism can be very, very healthy for business managers of all kinds,” he says.
These days, Friedrich is enjoying his retirement years back in Mesa, Arizona, sporting a University of Wisconsin hoodie to ward off the chill that hits the desert on early spring days and trying to keep up with Ilsa, the couple’s 17-month-old German shorthair pup.
Peter and Glenda return to Madison for Badger football games almost every year, and they have been at most of Bucky’s bowl game appearances. A few years ago, the couple took some California friends on a Wisconsin weekend getaway, hitting Homecoming and a downtown Madison fish fry before zipping up to Green Bay to catch a Packers game.
“It was tiring, but we had a lot had a lot of fun,” he says. “We definitely hit some highlights.”