Lester Turilli, Jr. MERAMEC CAVERNS, STANTON

Not many businesses operate in a facility that dates back to the Paleozoic era, but the infrastructure at Meramec Caverns seems to be holding up nicely, considering it’s 400 million years old. The cave is the livelihood of the Turilli family of Stanton, Mo., offspring of Lester Dill, who opened the first level of the cave to sightseers nearly 80 years ago. Lester Turilli Jr., his great-grandson and namesake, is general manager at the cavern, which has since been expanded to seven levels and runs unfathomable miles beneath the Missouri landscape an hour southeast of St. Louis. A former professional body-builder who used the setting for the Caveman Classic—once the nation’s biggest amateur body-building competition—Turilli is Baylor-educated in management and entrepreneurship. In his quarter-century working for his father, he’s helped expand the cave’s attractions, which now include zipline tours, a campground, restaurant, gift shop, canoe and boat rides on the Meramec, and more. “That diversity kind of keeps it interesting,” Turilli says.

Turilli and his wife, Erica, have been married for 18 years and have three children—the oldest of whom has started working at the cave, representing a fifth generation.

Bob Bingham MISSOURI MULE CO., SPRINGFIELD

Never tell Bob Bingham you know anyone as stubborn as a Missouri mule—it’s an insult to the mule. Bingham has turned a fascination and appreciation for these living links to Missouri history into a thriving niche business, selling gaited mules and gear for them from his spread near Springfield. As owner of Missouri Mule Co., he is a tireless advocate for animals that are hooves-down a better bargain than any horse.

The internal-combustion engine rendered these animals irrelevant, for a while. Bingham is giving them new relevance as a better breed of animal more suited to Baby Boomers who will use them on everything from Appalachian Trail rides to tours of the Grand Canyon. “Our core customer is 50 to 65,” says Bingham, who falls squarely within that range at 61. “We can’t take the shock of trotting or short-loping. So the Fox Trotting Gait gets us down the trail in comfort.”

Training mules to gait was something novel. “We did not invent the wheel,” Bingham says. “We reinvented it,” with a mix of horse and donkey that he says “is three times as strong and twice as surefooted. Smarter than a horse. And the reasoning power of a mule is also something to marvel at.”

Mamie Hughes KANSAS CITY

Long before there was a Martin Luther King Jr., Mamie Hughes learned the fundamentals of race relations from her grandmother: “She would tell us, ‘All white people are not your enemies, and all colored people are not your friends,’” Hughes recalls. “What I have learned over the years,” she says, “is that I can’t stop you from hating me, but if we get close enough to talk, maybe there’s no more hating.”

That sensibility has defined the life’s work of this 83-year-old Kansas City icon, who remains active in mind and body. Transplanted here from Florida when she was 20—her new husband came to attend law school at Washburn University in Topeka—she has embraced Missouri’s motto and mentality.

“I am a part of this Show-Me State, and show-me seems to have been my life,” she says. That life, she says, can be summed up thusly: “Somebody asked me if there’s one word to describe myself or what I’ve believed in, and I use the word ‘advocacy.’

“If I advocate, I’m going to show you, and you’re going to show me that it can be done.” That’s what defines Hughes—a sense of achieving the possible. “There’s a Chinese proverb,” she says, setting you up for her own brand of wit, “and it says, ‘The man who says something cannot be done should not interrupt the woman who’s doing it.”

A founding member of the Central Exchange, Hughes also served in the Jackson County Legislature.

Sam Fox THE HARBOUR GROUP, ST. LOUIS

Sam Fox sees a little bit of Mark Twain in those who populate Missouri a century after the author’s death. “He embodied the candor and humor at the heart of the Missouri character,” says Fox, who describes his fellow Show-Me residents as “direct and straightforward, hard-working, with a sense of humor—including about one’s self.”

Fox is the founder of St. Louis-based Harbour Group, a private investment and operating company that has acquired 167 companies in 34 industries since its inception in 1976. He’s a linchpin of business life in St. Louis, as well as in civic and philanthropic affairs. And, in 2007, he ventured into international diplomacy when President George W. Bush named him U.S. Ambassador to Belgium. A native of Desloge, Mo., Fox earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration from Washington University in 1951, and his alma mater is a personal cause; the Sam Fox Arts Center on campus is home to four academic halls and the Kemper Art Museum. He and wife Marilyn have also been supporters of WU’s Olin School of Business, its departments of art, and arts and sciences, the Kidney Center in the School of Medicine and other programs. That benevolence flowed from successes he attributes to a mix of tenacity and hard work. It helped, he said, that Missouri doesn’t wield a heavy regulatory hand. “Missouri,” Fox says, “is one of the best-kept secrets in the country. We need to do a better job of getting the word out about what we have here.”