Charles Weiss
Bryan Cave, St. Louis
A legal career spanning 46 years will be packed with memorable cases. For Charles Weiss, two stand out: One that saved a multi-billion-dollar company, and one that gave a wronged man his life back.
An MU journalism graduate who earned his law degree at Notre Dame, Weiss was one of only 30 lawyers at Bryan Cave when he started in 1969. Traits he valued as a lawyer—providing informed advice, knowledge of the law, experience and common sense—would come into play during the firm’s 30-year relationship with aircraft builder McDonnell Douglas. He was one of 30 lawyers in a long-running court case that secured MD’s rights to build the F/18 fighter “a bet-the-company-type case,” he remembers.
His dedication to equal justice before the law steered him to the Midwest Innocence Project, which serves people wrongly convicted of crimes. His work there led to the 2010 release of 33-year-old Josh Kezer, who had served nearly half his life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
Owen Buckley
LANE4 Property Group, Kansas City
Thirty years ago, Owen Buckley collected his MBA from the University of Kansas, a complement to his business degree. He has put both to good use. The Sioux City, Iowa, native worked for two decades at commercial realty companies before founding his own firm in 2006. Since then, LANE4 has been involved in a series of projects to rebuild the face of Kansas City’s inner-ring suburbs. “We believe in infill areas—first- and second-tier suburbs—that have been overlooked for years and years,” he said. The outer rings, where new residential and retail development take place, will continue to grow, but a lot of factors are combining to slow that trend and creating opportunities closer to the core of Kansas City. “We think the infill areas deserve quality projects and they will help them stay strong going forward.” To that end, LANE4 has aligned with the deep-pocketed Kroenke Group to purchase two corners at 95th and Metcalf in Overland Park, including the site of the region’s first indoor mall, Metcalf South. No formal plan is set for the site, but if Buckley’s successes are an indication—with projects like 39Rainbow, near the KU Med Center, or the Corinth Square remodeling in Prairie Village—the Metcalf site will bring new vigor to a high-profile location. “It’s terribly exciting and satisfying to see a building and vision emerge from the ground and evolve into the project that started from an idea, a meeting and a drawing,” Buckley said. “Properties that will endure and have a useful and positive impact in the community are what inspires us.”
Barbara Garrett
William Woods University, Fulton
Some people fall in love with places they visit, says Barbara Garrett, but culture and people we meet touch us at the soul level. When she was inspired to learn sign language while working as a volunteer meeting at a state school for the deaf, her soul had found its path in life. Garrett is a professor of American Sign Language interpreting at William Woods University in Fulton, where in two separate stints she’s elevated the program from associate’s degree to full baccalaureate status, then into an on-line program aimed at meeting new national certification standards, one of only about two dozen such programs nationwide.
A native Californian, she grew up in eastern Washington and majored in deaf ministry at a small bible college in Louisiana, then earned a graduate degree in deaf education at Missouri State. She worked in Fulton for five years before leaving to earn her Ph.D. in California, worked in several states, and came back to William Woods in 2010.
“When WWU offered me the opportunity to return, I was thrilled,” Garrett says. She’s doing what she loves to do in a place where she can have an outsized impact, and is one of fewer than 50 people nationwide with her certifications. “I love the “land of the deaf” and am ever so thankful that deaf people have allowed me to be a part of the community,” Garrett says. My closest friends are deaf people and family members of deaf people.”
Dave Hilliard
Wyman Center, Eureka
Dave Hilliard found a high school summer job—and a career—when he started as a cabin counselor at the Wyman Center in 1965, serving youths ages 11–18 from economically disadvantaged settings in the St. Louis area. He stayed on while earning his degree in psychology from Saint Louis University, and moved up the ranks to camp director, general manager and eventually president/CEO. The magnet that kept him there? Giving “the gifts of hope, horizon-broadening opportunities, and critical social emotional and life skills” to kids who want to pursue their dreams, he says. During his tenure, the center has evolved and formed alliances with other organizations to reach not only the 1,000 students it serves each year, but more than 42,000 teens in 33 states. The key, he says, is an organizational mindset that places its focus “on outcomes, not activities.” A St. Louis native, Hilliard met Tina Shay, the girl he would marry, while working at the center, and they now have three grown sons.
Rep. Keith English
Missouri House, Florissant
In Missouri politics, he’s the closest thing you’ll find to a Man Without a Country. In May, Rep. Keith English—a union-card-carrying Democrat—was the only member of his party to help override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of a package of income-tax cuts that will be phased in for five years. His vote turned out to be decisive: Without it, Nixon’s veto would have stood for a second straight year. The retribution was swift—House leaders immediately stripped English of his committee assignments, and bills he’d sponsored that had made it to the Senate were removed from further consideration. But if anyone thinks English will go away without a fight, they’d best reconsider this mixed martial arts trainer, who was undefeated in a four-year cage-fighting career before hanging up the gloves in 2012. “We have to work across party lines,” says English. “That’s one of the problems in Washington, D.C.; you don’t have people working together. The 1,105 businesses I represent in the 68th District applauded my vote with tons of letters, as almost a savior for common-sense legislation.” An electrician by trade, English is also a single father of three who balances family needs with a call to public service. Before unseating an incumbent Democrat in the 2012 primary, he served six years on the Florrisant City Council.
A pro-labor, pro-gun, pro-life Democrat, he says he was an independent, but couldn’t run as an independent in 2012. But as a businessman, he felt compelled to run: “I look at all my constituents, those 1,105 businesses struggling to stay open. They’re taxed to death.”
Scott Herndon
Herndon Products, O’Fallon
Like a lot of young adults, Scott Herndon drifted before his dad helped him find a life rudder. “At the age of 22, my father sat down with me and offered me a chance to work with him in his manufacturers-representative company,” says the founder of Herndon Products. “The only caveat was the requirement for me to attend an intense motivation class, which I did. The class changed my path in life and taught me that ‘anything the mind can conceive, the body must achieve.’”
He spent two years learning the business, then with his brother convinced their father to go into distribution. They launched that operation, grew it into a $20 million concern, then sold to Allied Signal (now Honeywell). Scott stayed on as a vice president and started working on his business degree in organizational studies at St. Louis University, where his studies included entrepreneurship. That’s when “I conceived the idea to launch my new company,” he said, and drew up a business plan for distribution of aerospace hardware to both the Defense Department and the commercial repair and overhaul marketplace. Five months after earning his degree, Herndon Products launched, and now has four distribution centers in Missouri and Pennsylvania, 90 employees, and annual sales of $80 million. The keys? “Quality, Service and Focus,” Herndon says, and a custom information system developed in house, which still requires six full-time programmers to constantly upgrade programs and meet changing needs of customers. And he succeeded, in part, by letting go: “I moved the business acumen in my head to the system and SOPs that enable employees the tools to drive their success.”
Cecilia Thomson
Mallard Point Resort, Lake Ozark
Cecilia Thomson loves the lake life, but not just the summer season so many know. She and her husband of 20 years, Bruce, operate Mallard Point Resort on a 2,400-foot Lake of the Ozarks waterfront. When the summer ranks thin out, she says, “the Lake of the Ozarks is our own little community; everyone knows everyone. This is one of the most giving generous communities I’ve ever lived in.” That generosity is something she saw often in a 21-year career with Central Bank, where she retired as marketing director. There, she helped launch fund-raisers for Easter Seals and United Cerebral Palsy, co-chaired the annual HK Hospital Benefit tournament, and worked with the annual benefit gala for the Ellis Fischel Cancer Benefit. The lake, she says, “has the most caring neighbors you will find anywhere in the world.”
Jay Knudtson
First Missouri State Bank, Cape Girardeau
For Jay Knudtson, a self-described Yankee hailing from Rochester, Minn., gaining acceptance as a newcomer to Cape Girardeau in 1990 meant full immersion in to community life. “I began by getting actively involved in the Chamber of Commerce, then the Parks and Recreation Board as well as the American Red Cross,” with Cindy Cantrell, the woman he would marry. At that point, this Northerner knew where his roots would grow—and deep. In 2001, just three years after arriving to open a branch for Fleet Mortgage, then taking a role with the former Boatmen’s Bank, “I was encouraged to run for mayor,” he remembers, and won the first of two terms in 2002—the only non-native ever elected to that office in town.
At the same time, he and business partner Steve Taylor scratched an itch to get into community banking, launching First Missouri State of Cape Girardeau County. “Life is funny sometimes,” Knudston muses. “As much as we want to control opportunities, the timing of them is usually out of our control, and while I wouldn’t recommend to anyone to assume the office as mayor in the same year you start a new bank—it’s really cool if you can pull it off!” His biggest contribution as mayor, he said, was healing rifts between City Hall and local developers. “After eight years of service, we were all sitting around board rooms working together instead of fighting it out in courtrooms.”
Danny O’Neill
The Roasterie, Kansas City
His capitalist moment came amid the shambles of a Soviet economy in the early 1990s, helping Russians transition out of a socialist system. Danny O’Neill was working on both an MBA and working for Weyerhaeuser, drinking in the Russians’ passion for life, “and I thought ‘I used to feel this way.’ But in my mind, the corporate world was beating that out of me.” Result? “I came back, hell-bent on doing something different.” Thus was born The Roasterie, his concept for taking coffee-drinking to a new level, despite the odds. “Today, some people think ‘corporate dropout; that’s cool,’ but in 1992, to quit a good, high-paying corporate job, there was nothing cool about that,” he says. His determination paid off: Not long after he started roasting at home, the company moved to the Southwest Boulevard corridor, where its iconic DC-3 now marks a constantly-expanding presence.
Patt Lilly
St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce
When it comes to economic development vision, Patt Lilly has what you might call 20/20/20: A keen understanding of the way things work at a for-profit business, at a non-profit ED organization, and in the public sector. Formerly the city manager for St. Joseph, and the one-time chief administrative officer for one of the city’s largest employers, Triumph Foods, he’s now president and CEO of the city’s Chamber.
“Having a public, not-for-profit, private management background allows me to understand how each sector works internally and externally,” Lilly says. “From a Chamber and economic development perspective, the private sector background allows me to better understand the needs of business and what they value. My public sector background provides a good foundation to build relationships between the private and public sectors, something that brings real value to both.” And it offers a rare perspective on the proper roles of government and business in promoting a high-functioning regional economy, he says.
The job of promoting business in St. Joseph is made easier in that, with 78,000 people, it has enough critical mass to stand as a full-service city in its own right, yet is compact enough to boast about a small-town quality of life. And it’s closer to Kansas City International Airport than Lee’s Summit, so big-city amenities are readily available. “We try to position ourselves in the Kansas City market as the place business can be successful and where you can enjoy a great quality of life in a smaller community,” says the native Texan. “Most people’s reaction when they visit is “wow I had no idea that all of this was in St. Joseph!’ ”
