For most shareholders, reading a company’s annual report is involvement enough. But other investors prefer to be much more engaged. Some will attend annual shareholder meetings if they’re being held nearby. Some will travel to celebrated gatherings such as Berkshire Hathaway’s meeting, for which hordes of share owners make a quasi-religious pilgrimage to Omaha, Nebraska, to hear Warren Buffett speak. But a rare breed of investors make a point of attending 10, 20, or even 40 or more annual meetings a year. Once there, these corporate gadflies greet old friends, partake in free buffets, greet—or accost—the company C.E.O. personally, and propose changes to firms’ governance or executive-compensation bylaws. Here are a handful of attendees who have made a name for themselves on the shareholder-meeting circuit.

Evelyn Davis

The Diehard
Evelyn Davis is known for many things: her shrill voice, her attention-seeking antics, and her appearances at corporate meetings year after year. She holds stock in 80 companies and has attended 20 to 30 meetings a year for the past 40 years, and she publishes her own investor newsletter. With a notoriously nettlesome personality, the petite 77-year-old Washington, D.C., resident rails about everything from the need for greater accountability among corporate executives to companies’ reluctance to give out paper stock certificates. Such celebrity-shareholder status doesn’t come without personal slights, though. “I became a stockholder in MetLife last year,” says Davis. “The corporate secretary changed the meeting date to conflict with the New York Times Co. meeting”—another gathering she planned to attend. “These are the tricks that I’m used to,” she says, convinced that the scheduling change was designed to keep her away. “I wasn’t even interested in going.” That may have been a relief to MetLife, which held its April conference sans Davis.

The Glad-Hander
It’s possible that Maury Wexler does it for his photo collection. Although this retired computer programmer has been buying stock since 1984 (starting with shares of Atlantic Richfield, an oil company), he’s known at annual meetings for his brown leather-bound photo album, which is brimming with about 200 shots of him with company execs from any of the 900 companies he has invested in, from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to Manpower. The Roselle, Illinois, native attended 53 annual meetings last year alone. “I have a bad habit of saying hello to the chairman of the board,” says Wexler, who has since recruited fellow meeting regular Martin Glotzer to snap the photos so Wexler can be in each one. Wexler tends to hit the corporate gatherings close to home: “I do Milwaukee, Chicago, Saint Louis, Indianapolis, and Madison, Wisconsin. I like meeting new people, seeing the same ones, getting my picture taken. And they feed you and give you gifts along the way.”

The Self-Promoter
Martin Glotzer calls himself “the No. 1 shareholder activist and annual-meeting goer in the United States.” That may be a delusion of grandeur, but he does attend 40 to 45 meetings each year. The president (and sole employee) of Cincinnati Union Group, a small real estate holding company, Glotzer has been investing since 1945 and says he can’t keep track of all the companies he owns stock in. He secured his current job through connections he made at a shareholder meeting in 1955 and works the meeting circuit just as hard today.

Lucian Bebchuk

The Academic
On January 4, Home Depot said it would change its bylaws so that C.E.O. compensation packages must be approved by at least two-thirds of its independent directors. And in March, Bristol-Myers Squibb adopted a new guideline for determining C.E.O. pay that mandated compensation packages be approved by 75 percent of the board’s independent directors. Both of these decisions were the result of proposals written by Lucian Bebchuk, a professor of law, economics, and finance, and the director of the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School. He also co-authored Pay Without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation. As scary as that résumé might sound to some corporations, Bebchuk plans to make it even more frightening: This proxy season, his proposals target not only bloated C.E.O. pay packages but excessive director pay and poison pill adoption.