(FORTUNE Magazine) – Hap Klopp Hikers seem to feel a secret virtue in strapping gear on their backs and tramping into the wilderness, and Klopp, 43, is the corporate embodiment of their spirit. As president of the North Face (1984 sales: $45 million) he has made the 17-year-old Berkeley, California, company king of the hill among makers of higher-priced backpacking equipment. In company catalogues he also extols life far from the madding crowd. The North Face's other products include ski wear and soft luggage as well as geodesic tents that the late Buckminster Fuller helped design. Klopp plans to bring out a new line of rugged sportswear sometime in 1986. Rupert J. Lissner Lissner, 43, has just become a best-selling author without bringing any trees to a pulpy demise. He is the creator of AppleWorks, which in December passed Lotus 1-2-3 as the top business software program in retail unit sales (though Lotus costs more and has higher dollar sales). An independent operator, Lissner sold Apple executives on a software package for the Apple IIc and IIe that would combine spreadsheet, word-processing, and database functions; the resulting AppleWorks program went out to dealers in April 1984. Lissner is now helping put together a similar package for the Macintosh and is also writing a program that will give the Apple II some of the capabilities of the more powerful Mac. Phyllis Tucker Vinson It was just an accident, she says, that brought her to NBC 12 years ago, but it was a happy one for Vinson, 36, now the vice president of children's programming at NBC Entertainment. With a 4-year-old child to support, Vinson found a secretarial job that happened to be at the network's Burbank research department, and she has worked her way up from there. NBC has moved up too, from a distant third among the networks on Saturday morning to first place since Vinson became director of children's shows in 1979. Vinson attributes NBC's success to skill in replacing animated characters who clobber each other with salutary role models that children can identify with. She's bringing a new, nonviolent, Disney-created cartoon series, the Gummi Bears, to NBC's kidvid schedule this fall.

William A. Williamson Jr. The medical supply industry has been stressful for its executives lately, yet Williamson, 49, has just led Durr-Fillauer Medical of Montgomery, Alabama (1984 sales: $339 million), to its 25th consecutive year of sales and earnings growth. With a larger than average sales force aimed at physicians, the company prospered as patients began using hospitals less and smaller outpatient centers more. Durr-Fillauer has just announced two purchases that should bring the publicly traded company's sales to the half-billion mark this year: a Tennessee medical distributor and, in its first nonmedical foray, a + distributor of movie cassettes to video shops. ''At first it scared me,'' Williamson confesses of the latter, ''but then I saw that it's the same game, just going through different channels.'' James D. Dunning Jr. Dunning's career has wended its way from counterculture to mainstream. For five years he looked for good investments as president of Straight Arrow Publishers, the parent of Rolling Stone, which became a big cash generator while he was there. Dunning, 37, left Straight Arrow when he got bored--''The job had maxed itself,'' he says. This February, after directing the corporate finance department of Thomson McKinnon Securities since 1982, he became the executive vice president of Ziff Corp., where he will seek good uses for the $715 million the company got last year from selling its consumer and business publications. He plans to start by investing in the company's remaining businesses: computer magazines and database services.