Charlie Walden MISSOURI OLD-TIME FIDDLERS ASSN., HALLSVILLE

He was 11 years old when he caught a fiddler’s contest at the Boone County Fair, and Charlie Walden was officially hooked. He’d had little formal music instruction on the tuba, but learned to play the fiddle by ear during his teen years. Today, he’s not only an accomplished fiddler, but an advocate for retaining this instrument’s role in Missouri’s musical history and culture.

He does it with a flair as a performer, and with a typical Missouri sense of understated humor. Check out the Web site he maintains to promote the cause, for example: It solicits donations of $5, explaining that “this will help defray the cost of Web hosting, software, hardware and beer needed to maintain this service.”

A resident of Hallsville, near Columbia, Walden is recognized as one of the best of Missouri’s old-time fiddlers; he’s a former Grammy nominee who has won dozens of local fiddling contests as well as major championships in Missouri, Illinois and West Virginia.

His passion for the instrument has led him to instructing the next generation of players, both in fiddle, and guitar, and his goal of preserving and passing on the unique Missouri style of play prompted him to organize the Bethel Youth Fiddle Camp in Bethel, Mo., where he directed camp operations and funding for a decade.

David Steward WORLD WIDE TECHNOLOGY, ST. LOUIS

Among the entrepreneurial successes in St. Louis—and there are many—you’ll have to look long and hard to find one who’s more enthusiastic about his community than Dave Steward. The founder and CEO of World Wide Technology—the largest minority-owned company in the state—Steward is a mile-a-minute proponent of his city and its attributes.

Businesses, schools, quality-of life-amenities—he cites them all like he’s reading the Yellow Pages. “Name me another city with assets like those,” he says in but half a challenge.

Steward’s high energy and grasp of fundamentals helped build World Wide Technoogy into a national player in IT services, but he also relied on a healthy dose of focus. The company’s core values, distilled into the acronym EPATH, are never farther away than the nearest screen-saver: Embrace change. Passion. Attitude. Team player. Honesty and integrity. They aren’t mere words to Steward; they are markers for success.

Those values, and what comes naturally to Missourians, helped make the company, steward said. A native of Clinton, Mo., he’s been married to a St. Louis girl, Thelma, for 36 years, and they have two children.

Charles Parker PARKER & JONES FARM, SENATH

Nothing against Mizzou, Charles Parker says, but he’s a fan of the Memphis Tigers, based 90 miles away. Columbia? More than 300 miles—via St. Louis. The distances explain a lot about why his neck of Missouri is more Southern than Midwestern, in its culture and its economy. Parker’s home of Dunklin County is one of five that make up Missouri’s cotton-growing region. He’s co-owner, with his son-in-law, of the Parker & Jones Farm near Senath, Mo., and has a hand in other cotton-growing and ginning operations in the bootheel. Parker is also vice president of Farmers Union Gin in Senath, director for a cotton-oil mill in Arkansas, and chairman of a farm-credit organization in Sikeston. He and his wife of 48 years, Phyllis, are the grandchildren of Tennesseeans who moved into the bootheel in the 1890s, and their two daughters depend on the business, as well—one is the wife of his partner, one is married to a Memphis cotton merchant. “We’re all connected with cotton some way or other,” he says, a reference that applies to the region as well as his family.

Gary Gene Fuenfhausen HISTORIAN, ARROW ROCK

A native of Liberty who came home after working as a museum curator in Savannah, Ga., Gary Gene Fuenfhausen is a walking encyclopedia on Missouri’s cultural, social, political and economic life in the years leading up the Civil War, and the region known as “Little Dixie.”

The South, he said, “made me appreciate what we have here in the Little Dixie region.” It also motivated him to preserve that cultural heritage and educate others about it. His Web site, LittleDixie.net, is loaded with information about that area and that time, and he’s the founder of the Little Dixie Heritage Foundation.

To understand Missouri’s conflicted history, he says, you have to put yourself in the shoes of people living in that world. Why, for example, would a hemp planter in Saline County support the South? “The answer is, hemp bagging and rope was used in binding the millions of cotton bales in the Deep South,” he says. Thousands of warehouses, riverboats, and plantations relied on Missouri hemp, and Little Dixie produced 18 percent of the nation’s total crop before the war, making support for the North “economic suicide.”

He and his partner of 22 years, David Lerch, live in Arrow Rock, where he’s restoring a home built in 1858 and landscaping it with winter-resistant strains of—what else?—Southern foliage.