(FORTUNE Magazine) – RARELY have the accomplishments of a select group of self-made men -- and of a self-made woman -- been more diverse. Estee Lauder built a great cosmetics company, unabashedly appealing to the sin of vanity -- to her no sin, but a saving grace. H. Ross Perot picked up pocket money breaking horses, and probably never wondered what the Texas sun was doing to his skin. William Hewlett and David Packard began as inventors in a small garage in California. King Gillette was an inventor too, but hardly high tech: His razors were a stroke-of-lightning inspiration. Milton Hershey recognized that the simple candy bar could be irresistible if made his way. Benjamin Graham loved power -- the power of analysis, not riches. The unifying force that explains their success in such scattered fields is their everlasting faith in work. They took up their tools -- physical and intellectual -- at early ages and, full of determination, never put them down again. These experts in the high art of achievement have all been elected to the U.S. Business Hall of Fame. Begun in 1975, the Hall of Fame is sponsored by Junior Achievement, a nonprofit organization that seeks to educate young people about how private enterprise works. Each year, at Junior Achievement's request, FORTUNE's board of editors chooses new laureates from two broad categories: those who are alive but have left the jobs in which they made their mark and those who have died. This year's laureates will be inducted April 14 at a banquet in Atlanta.

WILLLIAM R.HEWLETT (born: 1913) DAVID PACKARD (born: 1912) TWINNED AS students at Stanford, twinned as inventors, twinned as founders of a great company, twinned as its principal officers, David Packard, 75, and William Hewlett, 74, stand now twinned in fame and fortune. The annals of business offer no other partnership so amiable -- and profitable. For a few years after they graduated from Stanford, where they studied radio engineering, Hewlett and Packard parted -- Hewlett to go to MIT, Packard to take a job in vacuum-tube technology at General Electric. Together again in 1939, they raised $538 in capital and set up shop in the one-car garage behind Packard's house in Palo Alto. Hewlett soon moved into a bungalow at the same address; visitors knew that if a car stood in the driveway, one of the two men would be in the shop. They inaugurated their venture by making an automatic foul-line indicator for bowling alleys, a product for which they could find no market. Then, following a design that Hewlett had worked out in his master's thesis, they built an audio oscillator, which measured the intensity of recorded sound -- and also tuned harmonicas. That last feature didn't do much for sales, but Walt Disney, at work on Fantasia, bought eight of the sound devices, and the company was launched. Technological breakthroughs powered Hewlett-Packard's growth. Hand-held calculators and, more recently, the LaserJet printer, helped to spread the company's fame. No single product, though, has brought the company as much distinction as its management style. Both Hewlett and Packard preached and practiced the merits of the open door. They avoided big, formal offices, insisted on the use of first names, and managed, as Hewlett says, ''by wandering around.'' In 1969, Packard left the chief executive's office to become Deputy Secretary of Defense. In an arrangement showing his respect for public service, he agreed that on the day he quit the Pentagon his Hewlett-Packard stock would be worth not a cent more than on the day he walked in. For those three years in Washington, where he was in charge of research and new weaponry, Packard gave up $22.3 million. Hewlett was CEO in Packard's absence, and he held that job, with Packard as chairman, until 1978. Then the two men began the careful process of withdrawing from active management. But ''Dave and Bill'' still own 30% of Hewlett-Packard's stock -- and still are regarded with awe in Hewlett-Packard's halls. Similar good works unite the old friends. Both have started foundations. Hewlett's has assets of over $500 million, Packard's of around $125 million. Both plan to leave to the foundations big chunks of the stock they now own. Packard has been somewhat more the businessman and outspoken on public issues, Hewlett more the inventive genius and less visible. Neither is flamboyant, but flamboyance could hardly have added to what hard work and skilled management have erected: an electronics company with 82,000 employees, revenues of $8.1 billion, and earnings of $644 million last year. Hewlett says being very rich ''isn't easy,'' but he and Packard have somehow managed to handle it. Hewlett's net worth is figured at $1.8 billion, and Packard's at $2.3 billion.

H. ROSS PEROT (born: 1930) TAKE CREATIVE genius, business acumen, entrepreneurial talent, and an accompanying fretfulness with the slow-grinding wheels of bureaucracy. Add flair, a touch of exhibitionism, and old-fashioned patriotism seasoned with an old-boy, down-home persona. Bake in the Texas heat, and out pops Ross Perot, 57, the founder of Electronic Data Systems, a company that had revenues last year of around $4.4 billion -- and that now, perversely enough, belongs to the biggest, most bureaucratic company in America. The son of a Texas cotton broker at whose knee he says he learned his first business principle (treat the customer right), Perot started to work at the age of 7, making an honest buck breaking horses at $1 each. He acquired the habit of square dealing from his father and an appreciation of charity's blessings from his mother. President of his senior class at the U.S. Naval Academy, Perot disliked the Navy's seniority system, and left to work for IBM in 1957. Five years later he quit to found EDS with $1,000 in savings. He was unable to sell stock in the shaky-looking venture, but that early blow to a salesman's pride had its salve: Perot had to keep all the stock himself, which goes a long way toward explaining his present worth of around $2.5 billion. EDS's rapid growth came from its skill at designing large computer systems for government agencies, including the Social Security Administration and the Department of Defense. That growth was interrupted in 1971 by the only business defeat of Perot's career: When Wall Street firms were swamped by back-office chaos, he stepped in to save Glore Forgan & Co., a failing brokerage firm. He lost some $50 million, Glore Forgan went broke anyway, and Perot returned to Texas to the accompaniment of jeers from lower Manhattan. Today he says he was gulled by those who told him that the securities markets would collapse unless he galloped to the rescue. That must have been one of the few times in his life when he appeared naive. In 1984, Perot sold out to General Motors, which wanted EDS primarily for its ability to integrate diverse computer systems. Perot accepted a chunk of stock in partial payment, and took his place on GM's board. The Dallas-Detroit marriage was stormy and short-lived. Last year Perot sold his GM shares back to the company for $700 million -- about twice their 1984 value -- and blazed away at his former partner. His bill of particulars against GM, recently set out for FORTUNE (February 15), included no less than 13 proposals for radical change; it was a prescribed cultural revolution for a culture-bound giant. Among his more barbed thrusts: ''Anyone who needs a chauffeur to drive him to work is probably too old to be on the payroll.'' Harking back to that old paternal lesson, Perot says that GM must learn again that ''the customer is king!'' A patriot, a populist, and a deep believer in familial values, Perot has an instinct for the dramatic. In 1969 he flew to Laos to focus attention on the plight of American prisoners of war in Vietnam. Displaying a characteristic humanitarian concern, he mounted a successful mission to get two EDS employees out of Iran during the hostage crisis. He has given away over $100 million to a wide variety of causes, principally those aimed at helping underprivileged children. The gifts have all been marked as coming from ''the dedicated men and women who built EDS.'' Perot speaks with unembarrassed pride of his God, his country, and his parents. Cynicism often greets that testament -- but the response could hardly upset him much.

ESTEE LAUDER (born: 1908) DRIVE, TENACITY, brilliant salesmanship, and love of ''the power to create beauty'' took Estee Lauder from the drab neighborhood of Corona, Queens, New York, to the environment of crowns and queens -- and to the ownership of a company now valued at around $1.9 billion. Long secretive about her humble origins, Lauder at last admits that she was born to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in a year she won't divulge, that her name was Josephine Esther Mentzer, and that her formal education began and ended at nearby P.S. 14. Lauder's first ''shining moment'' came when she watched her Uncle John, a chemist, brew up at home the ''precious velvety cream that made you sweetly scented, made your face feel like spun silk.'' After helping John Schotz pour this ''magic potion'' into jars, Lauder toted them to local beauty shops, where she gave massages and beauty treatments to operators and customers. (Rebuffed by one customer, Lauder took mild revenge: ''I didn't give her a Creme Pack or a sample of my incredible Super-Rich All Purpose Moisturizing Creme. Wherever she is, I'm sure her skin looks dreadful.'') With every purchase, Lauder gave a free sample of another product. ''Charles of the Ritz said I'd never succeed by giving things away,'' Lauder recalls with some pleasure today. In fact, her gift-with-purchase strategy marked a new era of salesmanship. A tireless believer in herself, in her wares, and in hard work, Lauder haunted a purchasing agent at Saks Fifth Avenue, New York's classy department store, until she landed a small order. From there, she staked out her ever larger, ever more laden counters in the nation's leading emporiums. Amid clouds of scent, well-heeled customers heeded the siren song of Lauder's elegant young saleswomen -- ''Let me show you how this finest of creams can make your complexion glow with youth and radiance.'' To those counters marched a bouquet of products perfect for a rapidly changing market: Youth Dew, a fragrant bath oil that has sold well for 20 years; Aramis, toiletries for men; Clinique, a line of hypoallergenic cosmetics. In the early days, Lauder never asked much help from anyone. ''I never dreamed about success,'' she says now. ''I worked for it.'' Eventually, her late husband ran the books, and with brave resignation accompanied her as she pushed her way into high society, becoming intimate with the rich and beautiful. Her two sons joined up as well: Leonard, 54, has been part of the company since he was 16, and is now president and chief executive. Ronald, 43, lately the U.S. ambassador to Austria, is credited with Estee Lauder Inc.'s expansion abroad. If the family belongs to the company, the company emphatically belongs to the family. Estee Lauder Inc. remains as private as it was when Estee poured magic into jars. She is chairman now, intervening only occasionally to sniff with her famous nose and approve a new fragrance. She lives in splendor in houses around the world, and need no longer shove her way into the company of duchesses. In a way, she has become one herself.

MILTON S. HERSHEY (1857-1945) DEFEAT SAT on the shoulders of Milton Hershey for years. Born into a poor family of Mennonite farmers in Pennsylvania, he left grade school to go to work as a printer's apprentice, and never added a day to that scanty formal education. Clearly, words were not his metier: Hershey never made a speech and seldom read a book or wrote a letter. No surprise, then, that he was soon fired from the print shop. He took a job with a local candymaker and then started making caramel candy at home. When he was trying his hand at taffy, a trolley car smashed his pushcart in Philadelphia. Milton, probably without finding the words to complain, went west -- to a string of bankruptcies, some brought on by his meddling, Micawber-like father.

The big victory came when Milton, sans pere, returned to the dairy country around Lancaster and dipped into caramels again. Soon the Lancaster Caramel Co. was exporting in bulk to England -- where, Hershey noted, buyers coated the caramel with chocolate. In 1900 he sold Lancaster Caramel Co. for $1 million to help finance Hershey Chocolate Co., started a few years before. He bought 2,000 acres of farm and pasture land, built a new factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and began turning out his chocolate bar -- a product so good that the company did not advertise it until 25 years after his death. Sweet as candy to Hershey was the desire to do good, so up went the company town, with the chocolate factory at one end, an orphanage at the other, and neat houses along streets with names like Cocoa and Chocolate. After his beloved wife died, Hershey, childless, gave his house to the community and lived in a small apartment. He left the bulk of his stock to the Milton Hershey School Trust, which remains the major shareholder in Hershey Foods.

KING C. GILLETTE (1855-1932) A GIANT corporation that would acquire all the assets of the world, have all the world's people as its shareholders, and distribute its profits so generously that no one would spend more than five years of his life working -- whatever one says about such a vision, it is hardly prosaic. Yet the preacher of that utopian scheme built his life and his fortune around a quintessentially prosaic act, the act of shaving. In his mid-30s, King Gillette, whose father was a patent agent, was making a $ respectable living as a salesman and part-time inventor of metal products. Shaving one morning on a swaying railroad car, Gillette, according to his own account, mused that ''if blades could be made cheap enough to do away with honing and stropping, and permit the user to replace dull blades with new ones, such improvements could be highly important . . .'' The ''improvement'' would be even more important if the device were safer than the straight razor, which always presented the possibility of a slit throat. As soon as Gillette's new razors went out, encomiums came in. Harry Kellar, Houdini's successor and the first great American-born magician, wrote a typical letter: ''God bless the man who invented the Gillette safety razor. I have for years suffered torture at the hands of all kinds of barbers . . .'' Late in his life Gillette, very rich, reverted to his favored role as philosopher King. Trading on his famous name and face, he persuaded Upton Sinclair to help with The People's Corporation, Gillette's final book, which one reviewer called ''quite untouched by the realities that guard the road to Utopia.'' But if, as one critic said, Gillette's political thought was ''a dizzy flight into chimerical lands,'' so, after all, was everything else that followed that shave on a swaying train.

BENJAMIN GRAHAM (1894-1976) SO THEY will buy it, and in doing so they will bid up the price and hence the P/E. As more and more 'investors' become enamored with the promised rate of return, the price lifts free from underlying value and floats freely upward, creating a bubble that expands beautifully until finally it must burst.'' The author of those words, which never sounded wiser than today, was Benjamin Graham. His book Security Analysis introduced mathematical analysis of the value of common stocks and helped found the profession of security analysis. Graham's popularity today fluctuates inversely with the stock market: Attacked as old hat when prices are soaring, his theories return to favor as prices come down. A brilliant student of philosophy at Columbia, Graham took a job on Wall Street at $12 a week. Before long he had validated his idea that common stocks could be a better buy than bonds if sound judgment were used to select them: By 25, he was earning $600,000 a year. Graham's real coup, however, came when he purchased for himself and some associates a half interest in Government Employees Insurance Co. (Geico) for $720,000 in 1948. That investment made him a small fortune, and Graham, who all his life deplored greed, spent his last 20 years living comfortably in California. While lecturing on finance at Columbia, Graham met David Dodd, a professor at the business school, and the two collaborated to produce Security Analysis. A susceptible man in some ways -- he was married three times, and leaped from blonde to blonde like an Alpine goat springing from peak to peak -- Graham was cool and skeptical in most of his assessments. He once wryly noted that he had four children and ten grandchildren -- and none ever asked his advice on the market.

BOX: ROSTER OF PAST LAUREATES

WILLIAM M. ALLEN ROBERT O. ANDERSON

LEO H. BAEKELAND WILLIAM M. BATTEN STEPHEN D. BECHTEL SR. ARNOLD O. BECKMAN OLIVE ANN BEECH WILLIAM BLACKIE WILLIAM E. BOEING

EDWARD E. CARLSON ANDREW CARNEGIE WILLIS H. CARRIER WALTER P. CHRYSLER FREDERICK C. CRAWFORD TRAMMELL CROW HARRY B. CUNNINGHAM

ARTHUR VINING DAVIS JOHN DEERE WALT DISNEY GEORGES F. DORIOT DONALD W. DOUGLAS PIERRE S. DU PONT

GEORGE EASTMAN THOMAS A. EDISON

CYRUS W. FIELD HARVEY S. FIRESTONE HENRY M. FLAGLER HENRY FORD BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

ROSWELL GARST A. P. GIANNINI LEONARD H. GOLDENSON FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE GRAHAM

WALTER A. HAAS GEORGE H. HALAS JOYCE C. HALL EDWARD H. HARRIMAN H. J. HEINZ JAMES J. HILL CONRAD N. HILTON

EDWARD C. JOHNSON II REGINALD H. JONES J. ERIK JONSSON

HENRY J. KAISER DONALD M. KENDALL CHARLES F. KETTERING BERNARD KILGORE ROBERT J. KLEBERG SR. RAY KROC

ALDEN J. LABORDE EDWIN H. LAND WILLIAM F. LAPORTE ALBERT D. LASKER ROYAL LITTLE FRANCIS CABOT LOWELL HENRY R. LUCE

IAN K. MACGREGOR JOHN J. MCCLOY CYRUS H. MCCORMICK MALCOM P. MCLEAN RENE C. MCPHERSON FORREST MARS JACK C. MASSEY GEORGE J. MECHERLE ANDREW W. MELLON CHARLES E. MERRILL J. IRWIN MILLER GEORGE S. MOORE J. PIERPONT MORGAN HOWARD J. MORGENS

ADOLPH S. OCHS DAVID M. OGILVY

WILLIAM S. PALEY JOHN H. PATTERSON WILLIAM A. PATTERSON J. C. PENNEY ABE PLOUGH WILLIAM COOPER PROCTER

SIMON RAMO M. J. RATHBONE DONALD T. REGAN JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER JAMES W. ROUSE

DAVID SARNOFF JACOB H. SCHIFF CHARLES M. SCHWAB IGOR I. SIKORSKY ALFRED P. SLOAN JR. C. R. SMITH CHARLES C. SPAULDING ALEXANDER T. STEWART JOHN E. SWEARINGEN JR.

J. EDGAR THOMSON

THEODORE N. VAIL CORNELIUS VANDERBILT

DEWITT WALLACE LILA ACHESON WALLACE GEORGE WASHINGTON THOMAS J. WATSON JR. GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE FREDERICK WEYERHAEUSER ELI WHITNEY C. KEMMONS WILSON JOSEPH C. WILSON ROBERT E. WOOD ROBERT W. WOODRUFF

OWEN D YOUNG