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.

Steven Parker grew up and went to school in Connecticut. His only sibling was finishing a post doctorate at Yale and had accepted a job at one of the California State schools when his life was tragically ended through suicide. Parker graduated from Assumption College in Massachusetts with a bachelor's in political science and got a scholarship to the State University of New York at Albany. About halfway through his Master of Public Administration degree, the dean encouraged him to go on for his doctorate.