Bio taken from the "about" section of the Joyce Straus - Foundation for the Arts website:
"Joyce Elise Straus, (nee Lazowick), was born Oct. 1, 1935, in Philadelphia, to her parents Jacob and Frances. Joyce came to Las Vegas in 1961 with her husband of 56 years, the late Dr. Neil B. Straus, to raise their family.
May Bradford was born May 11, 1879 in Missouri. Her parents named her Cora May, but she almost always went by the name May. Growing up, she lived in mining camps in New Mexico, Colorado, and Oregon, where her father worked. She graduated from high school in Carthage, Missouri. She attended Stanford and studied art and mathematics, earning her degree in 1902. She then taught high school for one year in Seattle, Washington to earn the money to go to Paris and study art and was able to spend the next year in Paris.
Dr. Robert Skaggs was born April 2, 1932 and grew up around the St. Louis, Missouri area. His father was a teamster with a milk delivery route, tried his hand at the restaurant business, and during World War II worked for the United States Cartridge. Several members of Skaggs’s family were teachers, including his grandmother and a couple of aunts. Skaggs graduated from Normandy High School and afterwards attended the Missouri School of Mines and majored in metallurgical engineering. He graduated in 1954 and went to work for DuPont University for two years.
Richard Morgan was born in 1945 Fresno, California. His parents moved to the San Francisco Bay, California area a few months later, where Morgan grew up and attended school. His father had moved there for the express purpose of giving his children the opportunity to attend the University of California, Berkeley. Morgan did, in fact, graduate from Berkeley in 1967 with a degree in political science.
Composer Massimo "Max" Joseph DiJulio was born in 1919, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He took up the trumpet as a boy and turned professional while still in high school. During World War Two he served with a military band under the direction of Glenn Miller. After his tour of duty, he settled in Denver, Colorado where he served as the Director of the Fine Arts Department at Loretto Heights College for over thirty years. He also served as Music Director of the Denver Post Opera.
Betty Henderson was a private music teacher in Las Vegas, Nevada and dedicated member of the Nevada Music Teachers Association. She was born on January 23, 1923 in Portland, Indiana. She wanted to pursue a career in music and enrolled at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, but was forced to drop out after she started to become deaf. She married Charles B. Henderson, a civil engineer, in 1948 and moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. She had many different jobs in the city including secretary and company auditor.
Boulder City, Nevada community leader Peggy Hyde Phillips (1916-1997) was born Helen Thelma Lewis in Iowa in 1916. Her father gave her the nickname of Peggy as a child and she used the name for the rest of her life. She married Charles Hyde (1907-1956) in 1937. He served in the United States Army Air Corps and worked as a flight instructor at Condor Field in Twentynine Palms, California during World War II. After the war, the family relocated to Boulder City, Nevada. They opened Desert Trails, a sporting goods and toy store in 1946.
University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) Professor William R. Eadington joined the faculty as an economist in 1969. He was the first holder of the Philip J. Satre Chair in Gaming Studies, a professor of economics, and founding director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at UNR.