Jerry Tarkanian, legendary and formidable basketball coach, met his match the day he was called before student court at Fresno State College and had to face as one of his judges Lois Esther Huter. Lois, a no-nonsense military daughter, eventually agreed to date Tarkanian and to marry him. The City of Las Vegas got lucky when UNLV recruited Lois’s husband as basketball coach. After picking cotton in California’s Central Valley Lois earned her Master’s degree in speech pathology and holds national certifications in speech pathology, language, and audiology. In 1969 she opened California’s first private day school for the hearing impaired, Oralingua School for the Hearing Impaired in Whittier. In Las Vegas she taught hearing-impaired children in her home on an individual and pro-bono basis. In this interview Lois recalls her teaching career, debates in deaf education, her 12 years on Clark County School District School Board, and the people and the neighborhoods that make up Las Vegas’s Ward 1, the area she has represented on the Las Vegas City Council continuously since 2005.

Dr. Robert Skaggs grew up around the St. Louis area. His father was a teamster with a milk delivery route, tried his hand at the restaurant business, and during WWII worked tor U.S. Cartridge. Several members of Dr. Skaggs's family were teachers, including his grandmother and a couple of aunts. Robert graduated trom Normandy High School and afterwards attended the Missouri School of Mines and majored in metallurgical engineering. He graduated in 1954 and went to work tor DuPont tor two years. He went to graduate school at Iowa State on an Atomic Energy Commission scholarship, and afterwards was hired by Standard Oil of California. During this time he met and married Anna Pedersen (1961) and moved to Minneapolis to work for Honeywell. Around 1966, Bob started teaching at the University of Kentucky. After a couple of years, he got wind of teaching opportunities at the Southern Division of the University of Nevada (now UNLV), and interviewed with Herb Wells. He and his family moved to Boulder City (1969) and he began teaching at what is now UNLV. He was involved in the work bringing accreditation to the engineering department, establishing a chapter for Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering Honor Society, and building a master's and a PhD program. After a heart attack in 1975, Dr. Skaggs took a sabbatical from UNLV and did some team teaching at University of Arizona in Tucson with Ray Sierka. He returned to UNLV on a half time teaching basis, and also worked for the Bureau of Mines. He was again involved in accreditation preparations and stayed to graduate a PhD student in engineering. He looks upon his experiences at UNLV as very positive and delightful.