Catherine Hanaway THE ASHCROFT GROUP, ST. LOUIS

A lawyer by training, Catherine Hanaway has reached the pinnacle in two key endeavors—more recently, when President George W. Bush named her U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. That came on the heels of another crowning achievement, serving as the Speaker of the House in the Missouri General Assembly.

She’s the only woman to have held that position—“so far!” Hanaway optimistically notes. Today, her legal skills are put to work at the Ashcroft Group in St. Louis, founded by former Missouri governor, U.S. Senator and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Looking back on her time in Jefferson City, Hanaway cites three achievements that stand out: “First, of course, is taking a Republican majority for the first time in 48 years,” she says, along with her speakership. “Second, we stopped repeated efforts to raise taxes and still balanced the budget,” which she says has kept Missouri out of the fiscal ruin of states like California and Illinois. And the third? “I was very pleased to lead the effort to modernize Missouri’s foster care and adoption laws, so that the interests of children were placed ahead of the bureaucracy.”

As prosecutor, she also acted on behalf of young victims by focusing on prosecutions of child pornographers. But abusive nursing-home operators, felons who broke gun laws and white-collar criminals were also priority targets. “We tried more cases and forfeited more money than ever before,” Hanaway notes.

She and her husband of 17 years, Chris Hanaway, have one daughter and a son.

Linda Godwin UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI, COLUMBIA

Linda Godwin recalls the dawn of the space race, when every American foray into the skies during the Cold War had an existential urgency about it, given the Soviet Union’s head-start. She also had a keen interest in science and math, courses that didn’t hold the attention of many girls in the early 1960s.

Those interests proved to be a powerful combination. She didn’t know it then, but she would become what she admired. “I grew up watching a lot of the coverage of the early U.S. space program, all the way back starting with Mercury and then through Gemini and Apollo, and of course going to the moon,” she said in a pre-flight interview NASA conducted before her flight on space shuttle Mission 108.

That was the last of four flights that Godwin would make aboard the shuttles, spending an aggregate 38 days in space—including a combined 10 hours spent in two spacewalks. She was a mission specialist on her first flight in 1991, then flew again in 1994, and was on a 1996 mission that docked with the Russian Mir space station. Her final flight took her to the International Space Station.

The shuttles have been retired, but Godwin isn’t quite ready to join them. The native of Jackson, Mo., now 60, returned to her home state last year to begin teaching in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where she earned her masters and doctoral degrees.

She’s married to Steven Nagel, another former astronaut also teaching at MU, and they have raised two children.

Richard Mendenhall BOONE REALTY, COLUMBIA

Four generations of the family business were enough for young Richard Mendenhall. He stayed in his native Columbia long enough to get his two degrees in art education, then headed out to teach at the Philadelphia College of Art. Life caught up with Mendenhall and his wife there, and they named the baby Elizabeth. “I decided I wanted to come back to Columbia” to raise her, Mendenhall said. “I never thought I wanted to be in the real-estate business, so without telling my parents, I took real estate courses at both Villanova and Drexel.”

Much to the delight of his parents, Generation Five has produced the owner or co-owner of five real estate and commercial property management firms that stretch from Columbia to Jefferson City to Fulton. That’s a lot of property to keep tabs on, but some of the load is being absorbed by Generation Six: “My daughter is now the CEO of our company and my son does the IT work and manages the property that we own,” Mendenhall beams.

A former Green Beret, he has seen his appreciation for home ownership evolve over the years, noting that worldwide, where there is little home ownership, violence flourishes. Realty professionals help address that very human need, he said: “They help people find and realize their needs and their dreams.”

Scott Schnuck SCHNUCKS MARKETS, ST. LOUIS

For a lot of reasons, you don’t find many family businesses with 15,000 employees or nearly $3 billion in revenues. But the Schnuck family of St. Louis isn’t your routine family business, and hasn’t been for going on 75 years now. The man at the helm of the market-leading grocery chain in the St. Louis region today is Scott Schnuck, who assumed the duties of CEO six years ago, when his older brother Craig dialed back on his role with the company.

They’re among six siblings in the third generation of the family that still carries on a tradition started by their grandfather, Edwin H. Schnuck.

In addition to serving as the CEO of a chain with more than 100 grocery stores spanning a five-state region, and 100 pharmacies with a footprint across seven states, Scott Schnuck is a past chairman of the highly influential Regional Chamber and Growth Association (RCGA), an advisory group of leading executives from St Louis. He also has served on the board of trustees for the Missouri Botanical Garden, the St. Louis Sports Commission and St. Louis Children’s Hospital.