Deb Socia says she loved being a middle school math teacher in Boston, but with an entrepreneurial passion she soon moved into leadership roles in education to help empower her fellow teachers and the inner-city students she taught.

Growing up in a small town in northern Ohio, Bob Martino played baseball as a youth and through high school.

Jerry Summers is one of a handful of Chattanooga attorneys whose name recognition comes by reputation, not TV commercials.

When Patti Steele joined the former Marion Trust & Banking Co. in 1987 the bank had about $50 million in assets.

As a little girl growing up in Hixson in the 1980s, Cindy Monroe would buy candy at a neighborhood gas station and sell it at a profit to her older sister, Christie.

As a 12-year-old newspaper carrier in central Indiana in the 1960s, Warren Barnett would deliver a copy of the final blue streak edition of Indianapolis News every day to one of the retirees on his route and pick up a used copy of that day's Wall Street Journal from the customer.

For Sharae Moore, trucking runs in her family.

You may not know the name Lou Lentine or the company he founded, Viatek Consumer Products Group.

Nicole Koesling is the last German in the top management team at Chattanooga's Volkswagen plant - a big change from the time the factory opened in 2011.

John Woods recalls the days a generation ago when people generally didn't want to come to downtown Chattanooga.

Antonio Pinto, who oversees Chattanooga's Volkswagen plant and its 3,500-person workforce, says he sees a big difference in cultures when he compares America with Germany and some other countries where he has worked.

Jim Johnson likes to tell people he was born in the wrong place.

Kim White recalls a time not too long ago when everything from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga had to be orange.

Jeff Morgan was 23 years old when he started a construction company with a handshake loan for $120,000 from Pioneer Bank in Chattanooga.

When John Wise III decided to leave T.U. Parks Construction Co. to start his own construction company, the then 30-year-old builder began with little more than his ambition to own his own business.

When it comes to carpet and housing starts, businessman Bob Shaw likes to say there has been "a depression" over most of the past decade or so.

Alexis Willis ran track as a student at Girls Preparatory School, but she had never swam before she decided in the fall of 2013 to enter the Ironman race in Chattanooga.

Nearly 85 percent of the world's golf carts are built in Augusta, Georgia, home of The Masters golf tournament at Augusta National Golf Club.

Growing up in Oliver Springs, Tennessee, Geoff Ramsey watched his father's legal and political career as Anderson County's district attorney and thought, as a youth, he would follow a similar path.

Fletcher Bright uses the word "opportunistic" when he talks about the company that bears his name.

Atlanta-based businessman Boyd Simpson says his company has invested about $90 million in downtown Chattanooga, and he might not be finished.

Bobby Joe Adamson grew up as one of 12 kids on a 50-acre farm in Ooltewah where his sharecropper father, Charlie Barney Adamson, grew cotton, corn and sweet potatoes.

Rebecca Ashford, 44, a former Pellissippi State Community College administrator, takes the helm as president of Chattanooga State Community College on Monday.