Orvin Kimbrough
United Way of Greater St. Louis
“I believe,” Orvin Kimbrough declares, “that grit is forged and revealed through challenges.” This is a man who would know. His mother died when he was eight; he didn’t know his father. School was more about a guaranteed meal than learning, and behavioral issues meant erratic academic performance, as well. So yes, he concedes, “it was a volatile and harsh environment.” But there is that grit factor. “I have always made the choice to look at my life not as a sad story, but as an opportunity to prove to others and myself that I could excel,” says the president and CEO of the United Way of Greater St. Louis. His road to that role was rocky as a young adult, as well, as an academic casualty at Mizzou. But he was sufficiently persuasive to get back into school, and decided that non-profit work was calling him. He promised himself “that I would do what it took to excel in management,” and after starting at United Way in 2007, he found the home he never had as a youth. “I really was hooked on our aspirations,” Kimbrough says. “Every child will succeed, every adult will be self-sufficient, every family will be strong, every older adult will be independent, every individual will be healthy and every neighborhood will be safe.” The United Way, he says, “is one of the best examples of democracy at a local level.”
John Briscoe
Lawyer, New London
Growing up in a farm in Ralls County, near the banks of the Mississippi River, John Briscoe saw the kind of hard work involved and decided to take a different career path. So he chose to become a lawyer—as if that didn’t entail lots of hard work. “I suppose I was reluctant to work as hard as my father and grandfather had done for many years,” he says, reflecting on that choice. “I knew I wanted to practice law in rural Missouri because I always enjoyed being around farmers and other country folks. I thought there was an excellent opportunity to practice in Ralls County. So he moved back in 1971 five years after earning his degree from MU’s School of Law. Today, his name is on the letterhead of the New London-based firm where he practices, Briscoe, Rodenbaugh & Branson, splitting time there with the office in nearby Hannibal.
For most of his career, he says, he had a general, diversified law practice. “I finally had the good sense to get out of the family practice about 15 years ago, relieving a great deal of stress.” Changes in technology allow him to get more work done in a shorter time than he could do 40 years ago, even if e-mail isn’t among the ones he’s fully embraced. The law in rural Missouri isn’t much different than the law in St. Louis or Kansas City, so while there are more state and federal regulations than there once were, he acknowledges, “I suspect that must be the price we have to pay for living in the society we live in.”
Bridget McCandless
Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City
She’s seen the positive side of medicine, treating patients who couldn’t afford health insurance. She’s seen the business side of it, an MBA holder who ran Jackson County’s free health clinic for years. Now, Bridget McCandless is tackling the broader issues of policy and prevention as president and CEO of the Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City. “My passion for the last 15 years has been poverty medicine,” says McCandless, a native of Independence who herself is the daughter of a physician. “However, it became clearer to me over time that helping one diabetic at a time was not as effective as working to affect prevention and to improve the environment that influences chronic illness.”
Health policy, she said, was the natural outgrowth of that work when she joined the foundation last year. But that door didn’t open without another one closing. “I will deeply miss direct patient care,” McCandless says. “It is instantly and deeply rewarding. Seeing patients every day puts an important face on the needs of our communities and the effects that poverty has on health and families.” Now, she’s relishing the challenge of putting together the pieces that address health care on a societal level. “The intersection of prevention, mental health and physical health,” she says, “will continue to be the focus of the foundation.”
Larry Lee
Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville
If he could be King of Missouri, Larry Lee would dip into the royal treasury to help kids like the high-school junior who drives the 42 miles from St. Joseph to Maryville most every day. That teen arrives at 5 a.m. some days and leaves at midnight some nights, nurturing a dream of business ownership at Northwest Missouri State’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “If anyone thinks this country is in trouble, they should look at him and get hope,” says Lee, director of that business incubator. Local, state and national governments have all been looking at ways to create jobs for years, Lee notes, and business incubation has been part of that debate for nearly half a century. Innovation in the administration of those incubators, he points out, is increasing their effectiveness. Such enterprises are often associated with big cities, but there’s plenty to innovate in rural areas, Lee says. The CIE is home to a company specializing in nanoparticles, as well as a biomass venture working to take sorghum out of the field and turn it into 4x8-foot sheets of material that can replace Chinese bamboo in furniture, paneling or flooring. “We’ve seen some bleeding-edge companies,” Lee says, “and they are doing things that are amazing.”
David Doctorian
Macon
Pushing 80, David Doctorian still rattles off the dates like each is a birthday: Oct. 17, 1954, when he first saw the Statue of Liberty as an young immigrant from Lebanon. July 15, 1958, when religious fighting in Beirut led to his decision to stay here. And, of course, May 27, 1963, “when I said the Pledge of Allegiance and became a citizen,” he says. “I say that was my real birthday.”
A lifetime of chance meetings, generous benefactors and influential mentors has marked Doctorian’s path not just to America, but to Missouri, to his Macon farm, to his family of four children and five grandchildren, to 12 years as an American history and civics teacher, to three terms in the state Senate and 40 years as a church minister, and most recently, to his turn as author with publication of “My Life Journey” in 2011. It took him two years to write that by hand after a health scare prompted his children to ask that he leave them his legacy in print.
For someone who came to this country with $5 in his pocket, Doctorian has indeed lived the American Dream. He and his son operate close to 800 acres on the farm outside Macon, where he built the family home 40 years ago. Patriotic and proud, he declares that “my love for our country has never wavered.”
Brad Belk
Joplin Museum Complex
Today, it’s a regional center for commerce in southwest Missouri, but 140 years ago, Joplin was all about lead and zinc. Brad Belk’s job is preserving that heritage and helping the city’s 50,000 residents understand why the past is connected to their present. “Without mining, nobody would have paid any interest in starting a community here,” says the executive director of the Joplin Museum Complex. “There’s no river, no port.”
Nearly three decades into that role, Belk is starting his ninth book and has been involved in nearly two dozen films, plus script-writing, consultations and appear-ances in other productions. “There are so many ways to tell the story when people aren’t physically coming to your door,” he says. It’s a history, he says, that changed profoundly when the May 22, 2011, tornado ravaged the city, but that deadly event has opened new opportunities for the museum complex itself. “That was a defining moment,” Belk says. “But the way I look at it now is, it’s part of a great history that is yet to be written.”
Brian Fogle
Community Foundation of the Ozarks, Springfield
Something about the South appealed to Brian Fogle, who decided on Ole Miss to earn a degree in banking and finance and an MBA. But something about the Ozarks brought him back. “I remember writing to my grandmother, saying I would probably stay down here, and she wrote back and said ‘when you came home at Christmas, you talked about how much you missed the Ozarks, the hills and the lakes—I’m surprised you’d consider staying there.” That got him thinking, Noble remembers, and when the former Boatmen’s Bank made an offer, he came home. His father’s work as a community banker in Aurora led him into that field, but the essence of those services—community development—is what gets the younger Fogle out of bed in the morning. After roles at Boatmen’s, Ozarks Technical Community College and Great Southern Bank, he became executive vice president for the Community Foundation of the Ozarks in 2008. It covers southern Missouri from Kansas to the Mississippi River, and industry surveys show that his foundation, the 63rd-largest in the nation, is No. 8 in terms of funds managed. “That reflects the Ozarks,” Fogle said. “We have a lot of generous people, but not a lot of weatlhy people. That means a lot of transactions, more staff time and administrative needs, with a bunch of smaller gifts vs. a smaller number of very large gifts.”
Mark James
Metropolitan Community College, Kansas City
Funding concerns? Enrollment challenges? Academic program updates? All in a day’s work for Mark James as chancellor of Metropolitan Community College, the five-campus system with more than 20,000 students in the Kansas City area. Unlike most of his peers, though, James has a truly unique view on those challenges—they induce nowhere near the stress of being shot at. A former state and federal law enforcement official, James says that background “does help put things in perspective. In this role, there may be shouting, but there’s no shooting.”
A native of Willow Springs and a fourth-generation Ozarkian, James says public safety “was not something I dreamed of as a kid.” After a spell at Mizzou, he shifted from a business track to criminal justice, and found a nationally recognized program at Central Missouri State in Warrensburg. That led to his first job with the Missouri Highway Patrol, and after nine years—four as a uniformed trooper—he moved to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He become the Missouri’s Director of Public Safety in 2005, and after the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, James worked on a task force exploring campus security here. The network of academic administrators he tapped into led him to MCC as director of administrative services in 2009, then as chancellor the next year.“This wasn’t a planned outcome,” he says. “Just kind of the way life has worked out.”
Terry Spieler
Missouri Senate, Jefferson City
The economics of farming in the early 1970s—when many found that working the land wasn’t enough pay the bills—made a big impression on Terry Spieler. “Both of my parents had full-time jobs in addition to farming,” she recalls of her days near Russellville. “Long days, followed by longer nights, prepared me for a career I really knew nothing about back then. I followed politics—the war in Vietnam and 18-year-olds’ receiving the right to vote—but never thought I would work in an environment where such things might be decided.”
And yet, for 32 years, she’s been the Secretary of the Senate, working behind the scenes and out of the headlines to help grease the wheels of the legislative process. “It is really sort of ironic; growing up, I wanted to either teach American history or practice law,” Spieler says. “As it turned out, I’m involved in a little of both.”
She started in the Senate’s print shop in 1975, and began full-time the next year working for the Senate Administrator. When the sitting Senate secretary died in 1982, Spieler was appointed to serve out that term and has been re-elected by members of the majority party ever since. “I’ve been very fortunate,” Spieler says. “Working for the legislature can be stressful and demanding, but at the same time very rewarding. In short, it gets in your blood.”
Brock Bukowsky
Veterans United, Columbia
In their Mizzou dorm room in 1997, Brock Bukowsky and his brother, Brant, conceived an on-line ticket sales company that grew into a $22 million business before they sold it in 2005. By then, Brock had his master’s in math from MU, but neither Bukowsky would leave Columbia, home to their current passion, Veterans United Home Loans. The company’s success is a testament to mid-Missouri’s strengths as a place to do business, Brock says. That location, and that model—focusing on VA loans to members of the military and ex-servicemen—might not have worked pre-Internet, but today, “we are able to leverage our unique expertise by connecting with veteran homebuyers primarily online, so we have the advantage of having our headquarters anywhere we wanted.” The company serves veterans in all 50 states, and to connect with those who still want a storefront presence, it set up a branch network with offices from Norfolk, Va., to Honolulu. Beyond that, a relentless commitment to service has been a foundation for growth. “It’s the little things—like just being able to get a real person on the other end if you’re stationed overseas and it’s 3 a.m. in the United States—that set us apart,” Bukowsky says.
