Thomas Nartker was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, and most of his family, including three brothers and a sister, still live there. He attended grade school and high school there, and then attended the University of Dayton. He majored in chemical engineering, following the example of his father, who had a degree in electrical engineering. By the time he was a sophomore in college, he was six-foot nine and had spent some time on the basketball court, but when asked to play his senior year at U. of D., he declined. He had already been accepted for graduate study at the University of Tennessee. Thomas finished all course work and research on his master's in one year, everything but the thesis. He interviewed over 30 companies before he graduated, but an interview with DuPont in Delaware made him think about the value of a PhD in his line of work. He applied and was accepted at Texas A&M. He worked with Dave Billingsley, who was the resident computer expert, and Dave showed him how to process all the data he had collected for his master's thesis on the IBM 650. Tom had found a new passion. Within a year, Tom was working as an assistant in the data processing center at Texas A&M, and was also the teaching assistant for the computer programming class. After completing his PhD, which took 6 years, Thomas began interviewing again. He accepted a position at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMIMT) as assistant professor of mathematics and director of the computing center. He left NMIMT in 1981 and took a job with Shell Oil Company, which included 5 years as a visiting staff member at Los Alamos. In 1985 he met John Werth, who ultimately offered Tom a job at UNLV. Tom made the move to Las Vegas in July of 1985. Dr. Nartket and Dr. Taghva started the UNLV Information Science Research Institute and did experimental research on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for the Department of Energy (DOE). They invented many metrics never seen before, including a metric called Nonstop Word Accuracy. Today UNLV is known worldwide for being the premier center for doing research in OCR technology. Thomas is in his seventies today and continues with his research and teaching because he loves it. He has enjoyed over two decades at UNLV and finds it a rewarding and intellectual place to be. He considers this university to be one of the most exciting in the country as it grows in research and service.

Breck Wall grew up tough and honed that toughness into solid business acumen. He also grew up talented and that talent took him to movie sets in Los Angeles and allowed him to produce shows in Dallas, New York, Tahoe, and Las Vegas. Though his family became nonexistent early in his life, he formed his own broad family from a group of faithful friends around the country. One special friendship makes this interview worth reading — the one with Jack Ruby. Wall's talent though is the primary reason that this interview is good history. He did many shows and had up to five running simultaneously. The creative process was the fun part that allowed him to produce Passion , Alias, and Night Beat among many others. Bottoms Up is his signature production and has been at several venues in Las Vegas for the past 40 years. Breck Wall is living a full and interesting life. A good example is a phone call from The London Times'. "Mr. Wall?" 1 said, "Yes." He said, "Are you aware that your best friend, Jack Ruby, just shot Oswald?" I said, "What" I was in shock. I said, "No I'm not." And I talked to him very briefly,and I hung up the phone." The phone continued to ring as calls came in from the Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc, etc.