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Most of the people listed below where born in Michigan and may have moved elsewhere. There are some people listed who where born elsewhere, but grew up or spent time in Michigan. If there is someone you know of that lived in Michigan and would like to see added or if you have more information regarding these famous people, please contact us.
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| Chris Kaman basketball player, Grand Rapids - born April 28, 1982. Chris currently plays with the LA Lakers. Kaman stands seven feet tall and weighs 265 pounds. Kaman played college basketball for Central Michigan University. Kaman attended Tri-unity Christian School in Wyoming, where he led his high school varsity to the state Class D quarterfinals in 2000. He was only recruited by two schools: Hope College Central Michigan University. He played three seasons at Central Michigan, leading them to an NCAA tournament appearance in 2003 and garnering Associated Press Honorable Mention All-America honors before declaring for the 2003 NBA Draft, where the Clippers selected him sixth overall. Kaman played in 145 games in his first two NBA seasons, averaging 7.4 points per game, 6.1 rebounds per game and 1.1 assists per game. In his third season, he averaged 11.9 points and 9.6 rebounds per game in which the Clippers made the playoffs. |
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Casey Kasem disk jockey, Detroit - Born April 27, 1932.
Kasem is best known by name as a music historian and disc jockey, most notably as host of the weekly American Top 40 radio program from 1970 to 1988, and again from March 1998 until January 10, 2004, when Ryan Seacrest succeeded him. He hosted a spin-off television show called A for a time in the 1980s. |
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| Will Kellogg founder of the Kellogg Company Battle Creek - Born April 7, 1860 – Died October 6, 1951. He helped his brother John Harvey Kellogg run the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Together they pioneered the process of making flaked cereal. Because of the commercial potential of the discovery, Will wanted it kept a secret. John, however, allowed anyone in the sanitarium to observe the flaking process and one sanitarium guest, C. W. Post, copied the process to start his own company. This upset Kellogg to the extent that he left the sanitarium to create his own company. He died in Battle Creek, at 3:00pm on October 6 1951 by heart failure. |
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| Stanley Ketchel, born as Stanislaw Kiecal, boxer, Grand Rapids - Born September 14, 1886 died October 15, 1910. He was nicknamed the Michigan Assassin. He started boxing professionally in 1904 in Butte, Montana. Ketchel began 1909 by fighting reigning light heavyweight champion "Philadelphia Jack O' Brien" with a no-decision in 10. A few weeks later, Ketchel had a rematch with O' Brien, knocking out Philadelphia Jack in three rounds. He beat Papke in their fourth bout by a decision in 20 rounds to retain the title, and then challenged Jack Johnson for the world's Heavyweight crown. In the 12th round Ketchel floored Johnson with a right hand. Johnson got up and knocked out Ketchel with a right uppercut. After being upbraided by the "Michigan Assassin" for beating a horse on October 14th, Dipley decided to get even with Ketchel by robbing him. The following morning Smith seated Ketchel at the breakfast table with his back to the door and Dipley, armed with a .22 caliber rifle, came up behind him and shouted, "Get your hands up!" Ketchel stood up and as he turned around, Dipley shot him. The bullet traveled from his shoulder into his lung and Ketchel fell to the floor mortally wounded. Dipley then took Ketchel's handgun and smashed Ketchel in the face with it. At the same time, Smith rifled Ketchel's pockets for his money. Ketchel was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery at Grand Rapids, Michigan. His funeral was reportedly one of the most well-attended events in Grand Rapids history. |
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Kid Rock rapper/singer, Romeo - Born January 17, 1971. Also known as
Robert James Ritchie. He later moved to New York City, where he was said to have lived just below Queen Latifah. He got to know a lot of the area's rappers and landed a tour deal with Ice Cube and Too $hort when he was only 18 years old. Songs include Cowboy, Only God Knows Why and Picture featuring Sheryl Crow. On January 12,2008 Kid Rock performed a 30 minute mini concert at the GM Style Car and Fashion Show, in Detroit,while is clothing line 'Made In Detroit', was put on display. The set opened with "Son Of Detroit", followed by "All Summer Long" and "King Of Rock", with Rev Run before he closed up with the "Detroit Medley" and "Bawitdaba". |
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| Anthony Kiedis singer/songwriter, Grand Rapids - Born November 1, 1962. Anthony is the lead singer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Kiedis lived with his mother in Grand Rapids until he was eleven years old, then moved to Los Angeles with his father. Red Hot Chili Peppers is best known for songs such as Under the Bridge, Breaking the Girl and Scar Tissue. |
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| Matthew Lyn Lillard, actor, Lansing - Born January 8, 1970. He is best known as Shaggy in Scooby Doo. Matthew was born in Lansing but soon moved to Tustin, CA. Lillard married Heather Helm in 2000 and they have two daughters, Addison Grace and Macey Lyn. They live in the Los Angeles area. |
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Charles A. Lindbergh aviator, Detroit - Born February 4, 1902, Died August 26, 1974. The first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris which took 33 and a half hours. Born in Detroit but grew up in Minnesota. He is also known for his son being kidnapped from his home in 1932.
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| Malcolm Little (Malcolm X) civil rights leader - Omaha, Nebraska - Born May 19, 1925, Died February 21, 1965.
After Malcolm was born, the family relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1926, and then to Lansing, shortly thereafter. In 1931 his father was found dead having been run over by a streetcar in Michigan. Authorities ruled his death suicide. In 1958 Malcolm married Betty X (née Sanders) in Lansing. They had six daughters together, all of whom carried the surname of Shabazz. Their names were Attallah, born in 1958; Qubilah, born in 1960; Ilyasah, born in 1962; Gamilah, born in 1964; and twins, Malaak and Malikah, born after Malcolm's death in 1965. On February 21 in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm had just begun delivering a speech when a disturbance broke out in the crowd of 400. A man yelled, "Get your hand outta my pocket! Don't be messin' with my pockets!" As Malcolm's bodyguards rushed forward to attend to the disturbance, a man rushed forward and shot Malcolm in the chest with a sawn-off shotgun. Two other men quickly charged towards the stage and fired handguns at Malcolm, who was shot 16 times. |
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| Jamie Hyneman show host, Marshall - Born September 25, 1956. He was raised in Indiana. best known for being the co-host of the television series MythBusters. He is also the founder of M5 Industries, a special effects workshop where MythBusters is filmed. |
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Madonna singer/actress, Bay City - Born August 16, 1958 also known as Louise Veronica Ciccone with hit singles Material Girl, and Vogue. She has also acted in such movies as A League of Their Own, and Evita. Madonna attended St. Frederick's Elementary School and St. Andrew's Elementary School (present day Holy Family Regional) and West Middle School. She attended Rochester Adams High School, becoming a straight-A student and a member of the cheerleading squad. Madonna received a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan after graduating from high school. She is married to director Guy Ritchie. Since the late 1990s, Madonna has been a devotee of the Kabbalah Centre. On March 10, 2008, Madonna was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. |
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| Lee Majors actor, Wyandotte - Born April 23, 1939. He is best known for playing the part of Steve Austin , a former astronaut with bionic limbs, in the television series The Six Million Dollar Man of the 1970s. Majors has been married four times, but his most famous marriage was to actress Farrah Fawcett. |
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Dick Martin, comedian, Battle Creek - Born January 30, 1922, Died May 24, 2008. He is a graduate of Michigan State University. Martin had worked in a Ford auto assembly plant after high school. Martin lost the use of his right lung when he was 17, something that never bothered him until his final years, when he required oxygen 18 hours a day. He created Laugh-In with Dan Rowan in 1968. He also was a frequent guest on gameshows such as Match Game and Password Plus. Martin died on May 24, 2008 of breathing complications in Santa Monica, California.
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| Judge Greg Mathis television judge, Detroit - Born April 5, 1960.
He is a retired Michigan 36th District Court judge and now syndicated television show judge. Raised in the Herman Gardens housing project, Mathis was on the road to a criminal life as a teenager. His father was estranged from him, but associated closely with the Errol Flynns, a notorious Detroit street gang , that Mathis would eventually join while a teenager. In the 70s , he was arrested numerous times. Yet when incarcerated in Wayne County Jail, as a seventeen year old juvenile, his mother visited him and broke the tragic news that she was diagnosed with colon cancer . This event changed Mathis, and he was given the benefit of a considerate judge, who offered probation if he enrolled and passed a G.E.D. course in six months.
in 1995, he was elected a superior court judge for Michigan's 36th District, making him the youngest man in the state to hold the post. During the five years he was on the bench, he was rated in the top five of all judges in the 36th District. |
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| Ed McMahon tv personality, Detroit - Born March 6 , 1923. Ed is most famous for his work on television as Johnny Carson's announcer on the Tonight Show and also hosted the popular TV show Star Search. |
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| Tim Meadows comedian Highland Park - Born February 5, 1961. Tim is best known for his character as
Leon Phelps, The Ladies' Man, an eternally horny talk show host on Saturday Night Live which was eventually made into a movie. Other movies include Conehead and Mean Girls. |
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| Tom Monaghan founder of Domino's Pizza Ann Arbor - Born March 25, 1937. He enrolled in the University of Michigan, intending to become an architect. While still a student, he and his brother James borrowed $500 to purchase a small pizza store called DomiNick's in Ypsilanti. This business would grow into Domino's Pizza. Tom later traded his brother James a Volkswagen Beetle for his half of the business. In 1983, Monaghan bought the Detroit Tigers. Monaghan sold the Tigers to his competitor Mike Ilitch of Little Caesar's Pizza in 1992. |
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| Michael Moore director Flint - Born April 23, 1954. Moore was born at St. Joseph Hospital in Flint and grew up in Davison.
After dropping out of the University of Michigan-Flint (where he wrote for the student newspaper titled The Michigan Times ), at 22 he founded the alternative weekly magazine The Flint Voice, which soon changed its name to The Michigan Voice . He is known for his movies such as Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko. |
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| Harry Morgan actor, Detroit - Born April 10, 1915.
He graduated from Muskegon High School where he was the statewide debate champion.
He is best known as Colonel Sherman T. Potter on M*A*S*H and Detective Bill Gannon on Dragnet. Movies include The Glen Miller Story and How the West Was Won. In 2006, Harry Morgan was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum . |
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| Jason Newsted, guitarist, Battle Creek, Born March 4, 1963. Jason is the former bass player for Metallica and is currently in Voivod and Rockstar Supernova. Jason went to Gull Lake High School in Richland, Michigan, joining Arizona thrashers Flotsam and Jetsam in 1983. Jason left them to join Metallica in 1986 after the tragic death of bassist Cliff Burton. |
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| Denise Nicholas actress, Detroit - Born July 12, 1944. She spent her early years in Detroit and then moved to Milan, a small town south of Ann Arbor, graduating from Milan High School in 1961. Nicholas began her television acting career in 1968, with an episode of It Takes a Thief. She has since appeared in many popular movies and television shows. She is probably best known for her role as Liz McIntyre on the show Room 222, as well as her role as Harriet DeLong on In the Heat of the Night. Nicholas wrote six episodes of the dramatic show, "In the Heat of the Night" and thus began her second career as a writer. |
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| Ted Nugent singer, Detroit - Born December 13, 1948. Started career with Amboy Dukes until 1975 when he began a solo career. Some hit songs are Free for All and Cat Scratch Fever. He is also known for hunting and conservative political views. Ted is deaf in his left ear, but has hearing in his right. Ted moved to Texas in 2005, but still has property in Concord. He has made appearances on shows such as 'That 70's Show', 'Simpsons' and 'Jimmy Kimmel'. On July 4, 2008 at the DTE Energy Music Theater in Clarkston, Michigan, Ted played his 6,000th concert. |
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| Terry O'Quinn actor, Newberry - Born July 15, 1952. He attended CMU in Mt. Pleasant. Terry is best known for his current work as John Locke on the ABC hit Lost in which he won an Emmy in 2007. He has also starred in shows such as Alias, West Wing and Millennium. |
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| Larry Page Google co-founder Lansing - Born born March 26, 1973. Larry Page is the son of the late Dr. Carl Victor Page, a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University and one of the University of Michigan's first computer science Ph.D. graduates, and Gloria Page, a computer programming teacher at Michigan State University. He is also the brother of Carl Victor Page, Jr., a co-founder of eGroups, later sold to Yahoo! for approximately half a billion dollars. Page attended a Montessori school in Lansing and graduated from East Lansing High School. In 1998 he confounded Google. |
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| Rosa Parks civil rights activist Tuskegee, Alabama - Born February 4, 1913, Died October 24, 2005. On December 1, 1955 after a long day at work, Parks got on a bus and sat in a seat reserved for whites only. She was arrested and charged for disorderly conduct.
The trial lasted 30 minutes. Parks was found guilty and fined $10, plus $4 in court costs. The day of Parks' trial, Monday, December 5 , 1955 , the WPC distributed 35,000 leaflets. The handbill read, "We are. asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial.. You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday." It rained that day, but the black community persevered in their boycott. Some rode in carpools, while others traveled in black-operated cabs that charged the same fare as the bus, 10 cents. Most of the remainder of the 40,000 black commuters walked, some as far as 20 miles. In the end, the boycott lasted for 382 days. Dozens of public buses stood idle for months, severely damaging the bus transit company's finances, until the law requiring segregation on public buses was lifted. In 1957, she moved to Detroit, where she died October 24, 2005. |
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| George Peppard Jr, actor, Detroit Born October 1, 1928, died May 8, 1994 due to complications from lung cancer.
George had graduated from Dearborn High School and later served in the Marine Corp. In the mid-'80s he was known on television for his role as Col. John "Hannibal" Smith in the cult 1980s television show The A-Team , where he is the cigar -smoking leader of a renegade commando squadron. |
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Iggy Pop singer, Muskegon - Born April 21, 1947. Also known as James Newell Osterberg, Jr. Pop is considered one of the most important innovators of punk rock and related styles. Born in Muskegon, Michigan, he began his musical career as a drummer in different high school bands in Ypsilanti, Michigan. One band was the Iguanas, where he acquired the name Iggy. After exploring local blues-style bands he eventually dropped out of the University of Michigan and moved to Chicago to learn more about blues. Inspired by Chicago blues as well as bands like The Doors, he formed the Psychedelic Stooges and called himself Iggy Pop. He got the name Pop because he once shaved his eyebrows for a show, after which he looked like a friend with the last name Pop who had recently undergone chemotherapy and was eyebrowless himself. Songs include Lust for Life. |
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| C.W. Post founder Post Cereal, Springfield - Born October 26, 1854 - Died May 9, 1914. Plagued by chronic health problems in his 30s and financially destitute, C.W. convalesced at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, run by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg whose family later developed Kellogg Corn Flakes. At the sanitarium, C.W. was introduced to caramel coffee and flaked wheat cereal, among other products created by the Kellogg's for the patients. On January 1, 1895 in his barn in Battle Creek, he created a caffeine-free coffee substitute called Postum. In 1897, he created his first cold cereal, Grape-Nuts. In 1899, he created Post Toasties which is like Corn Flakes. |
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